Customer Reviews

A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have purchased this book only lately. I read so many good reviews on it when it was released in 2000 and was hoping to find it in good bookstore in Montreal (Canada). It never showed up. As I have lost all reference to it, I was surprised when I found it 5 years later in Toronto.

What a great book on history of recorded music Mr. Day wrote!

I have read many other books on the topic and none of them can compete with this one. I've read Mark Coleman's Play Back and David Morton's Off the Record. Lots of facts in these books but few lines devoted to classical music.

Under Mr.Day's writing, one discovers that recorded music can be seen as a cultural artefact and not only as a statistical or technical matter.

Men invented way to record music and music once recorded and played back changed the way men perform music. I was surprised when I read how many editing cuts there were on 30 minutes of recorded music released in the LP era. I have learned lately that there are up to 30 cuts in a 4-5 minutes piece of classical music!

I was also surprised, as Arthur wrote, that there's not a line on Naxos label while many specialised labels (Atma, Bis, etc.) find there way in the book. Naxos was by year 2000 a leading classical label. There's nothing on Chandos or Hyperion either.

Strongly recommended!

I purchased this volume based on a generally favorable review in Gramophone, and because I have a great interest in the history of classical recording. For the most part, I found it entertaining and informative. However, I think the book suffers significantly from a rather narrow focus by the author, and a curiously incomplete view of the more recent history. After all, a century includes the final decades as well as the early ones. Incredible as it seems, the Naxos label is never mentioned in this book. Naxos emerged in the mid-1980s and became the best-selling classical label in the world. As the current issue of BBC Music Magazine points out, for example, the best-selling cellist in the world today on CD's is Maria Kliegel, one of the house artists at Naxos - not Yo Yo Ma or Mstislav Rostropovich. She's not mentioned in this book, nor are any other Naxos artists, apart from a listing of Jeno Jando (the world's best selling pianist on CD) in a list of pianists. Naxos has had an incredible impact, especially in the past few years as it has revived forgotten repertory. Another weakness of the book is its skimpy treatment of the American classical scene, and its general failure to explore in greater depth the emergence of independent labels in many countries and the consolidation of the traditional "major" labels and their subsequent retreat from classical recording. I do urge enthusiasts for classical music to buy this book for its many useful insights and wealth of interesting "inside" information about classical recording, but I wish the author had done another 100 pages and achieved a more complete coverage.

This book deals with a fascinating topic (at least to me), and seems to fill a gap in the literature, so I had high hopes. Unfortunately it was a big disappointment - I was amazed that the subject could be make so dull and dry! The author needs to learn the virtues of plain English rather than esoteric jargonese if he wants to enthuse anyone with his subject.

In reading a book entitled "A Century of Recorded Music" I was expecting to run across a cross-section of recorded music rather then a series of lists pertaining only to the recording of classical music. In this sense the title should have a disclaimer letting the reader know that there will be pratically no mention of jazz or popular music. There is some mention of oral history and ethnic music, but the brunt of the book looks at classical development as it was influenced by recording and popular demand. I gave it three stars because I felt that some of the space for lists could have been better used to compare and contrast the parallel development of other recorded genre's which would have given a perspective on classical music as well as the others - without it we have nothing to develop a perspective to.