The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography [Hardcover]

Evan Eisenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1986 | ISBN-10: 0070190518 | ISBN-13: 978-0070190511

First published in 1987 and now considered a classic, The Recording Angel charts the ways in which the phonograph and its cousins have transformed our culture. In a new Afterword, Evan Eisenberg shows how digital technology, file trading, and other recent developments are accelerating—or reversing—these trends. Influential and provocative, The Recording Angel is required reading for anyone who cares about the effect recording has had—and will have—on our experience of music.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A book that looks into the psychology and philosophy of the experience of listening to music on records, rather than just reviewing phonograph history, is an intriguing idea; and Eisenberg, a philosopher by training who writes on music and technology for a number of magazines, is ideally equipped to execute it. This study is almost too full of good things: bright perceptions abound on such questions as the difference between live listening, record listening and radio listening; on the nature of recorded music as a commodity; on the record-listening experience, solitary and social, with its various absurdities; andas becomes a philosopheron Platonic, even Marxist, concepts of the cultural context of canned music. Sometimes Eisenberg has so many thoughts going at once it's difficult to follow his flow, and the book is more loosely organized than it should be. But at his best, in a series of interviews with friends and acquaintances obsessed with recorded sound (he writes like a born novelist) or in a deeply intuitive look at the late Glenn Gould, his book cannot help but fascinate anyone with an ear for recorded music.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Praise for the first edition:“Witty, perceptive, informed, and dazzlingly allusive.”—David Hamilton, The Nation

“[The Recording Angel] throws out one arresting idea after another.”—Timothy Day, author of A Century of Recorded Music

“An excellent work... Eisenberg explores so much uncharted territory... Long overdue.” —Michael Kimmelman, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A marvelous book, unlike any other.”—Garry Giddins

(Garry Giddins )

“A work of great originality and constantly stimulating argument.”—Geoffrey O’Brien

(Geoffrey O'Brien )

“Witty, perceptive, informed, and dazzlingly allusive.”—David Hamilton, Nation
 

(David Hamilton Nation ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill (October 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070190518
• ISBN-13: 978-0070190511
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,902,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Recording Angel b Evan Eisenberg, January 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Recording Angel (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is really an anthropological analysis of music in our culture, and how the documentation of music through recording has changed music's role. It also esxpresses the idea that recorded music (which Eisenberg calls "Phonography") is to live music as film is to theatre. Told from the perspective of someone who has equal admiration and recognition to Caruso, Mozart, Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and Aristiotle, this music-philosophy book is remarkabl;y readable and quite profound. written before "sampling" of music was a popular artform. Really Great Stuff.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book explores music and its meaning in peoples' lives., October 2, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Recording Angel (Mass Market Paperback)

If you ever wanted to know if someone else really loves music and atributes their life blood to it, this is the book for you. Eisenfeld portrays the role music plays in several distinctly eccentric individuals' lives throughout the chapter, giving the reader not only a beautiful portrait of the characters, but of the universality of music as well.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ruminations on recorded music, August 29, 2007

By 

Passionate About Music - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, Second Edition (Paperback)

I'm amazed to see that no one has reviewed this book, not even in its earlier edition. That edition was written in 1987. The new edition came out a couple of years ago, but it's basically the same book.

Overall it is very intelligent, thought provoking, and witty. Eisenberg wrestles with the experience of listening to recorded music. What does listening to recorded music do to us, and what does the process of recording do to music?

It's a collection of twelve essays that can be read in any order. Eisenberg is very well read. He seems to have read everything anybody has ever said about music and recorded music. So it's like a crash course in the aesthetics of music.

Eisenberg studied philosophy, and he veers between the personal and the very philosophical. From time to time he throws in a word that seems to be there solely to make you consult a dictionary. "... we can hear Vaughan William's Sixth Symphony as a peroration on the absolutely empty field of a future war." At this point I bet that most of us need to look up "peroration."