Customer Reviews

The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography

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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.

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.

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."

A very enjoyable book on the joys of record collecting. A gift from my father. I enjoyed it and the book expanded my thoughts on my own collection. If you are not into collecting music, you still might enjoy it, but if you are a collector, you will certainly enjoy it.

"The Recording Angel" is the musing of a journalist on what he considered a quasi academic subject, "the impact of recording technology on the social experience of Music." Also, he is writing in the mid 1980s, during a time when the vocabulary for describing the social experience of music was itself limited, let alone the vocabularly for talking about the impact of recording technology on the social experience of music. Here, however, the proof is in the pudding, or rather, the proof is in the handsome revised edition that was published in 2005. Clearly, Eisenberg succeeded in writing a general interest book about music drawing upon specialist knowledge, particuarly in the disciplines of history, musicology and philosophy.

The About the Author foreword says that Eisenberg, "writes about music, culture and technology for the Nation, Saturday Review, The Village Voice... and other publications. He studied philosohy at Harvard and Princeton." He is an intellectual, writing for a general audience (book is published by Penguin Books.) In The Recording Angel, Eisenberg convicingly synthesizes the history of popular music in the 20th century with the history of "serious" music during the same time span and the ideas intellectuals have about music during a longer time frame.

What is less convincing is his ability to make a larger point about what it all means. Writing about the relationship between music and technology prior to the arrival of mp3s is a bit like writing the history of the Jews in Germany and stopping in the 1920s: It would be an interesting book, but not the complete story, and your thesis might change were you to include the next bit.

Eisenberg does do an excellent job of explaining how recording technology, specifically, the shellac record, changed the relationship between Artists and Audiences in the 20th century. The primary change appears to be the introduction of "an audience of one." Before the shellac record of the early 20th century, listening to music mostly meant listening to music WITH OTHER PEOPLE. The record replaced that prerequisite with new possibilities.

Readers of this blog might be interested to read his chapter of the Invention of the Record Producer, whom he refers to a Phonographer (as supposed to a Musician.) This is a person who simply did not exist until the Recorded Music Industry summoned him into existence. Examples existed before the Rocknroll era: John Hammond of Columbia Records is a prime non-rock example. However, Eisenberg identifies Phil Spector as the first "auteur"(in the sense of a film director auteur) and likewise tags Zappa as the first Artist/Phonographer: An artist whose entire identity is equivalent with the technology he utilizes to record his music. To his eternal credit, Eisenberg does not exclude the important development in electronic music happening mostly in Europe in "serious Art Music" circles at the same time that Spector and Zappa were doing their thing.

I'm seriously considering picking up the 2005 version to see what he has to say about Mp3 and the collapse of the Major Labels, but the original edition stands alone- worth reading.

How can I review a book that has been stolen from me, not once, but TWICE. Now it's out of print! Help . . .I need a copy