An overview

America, Gertrude Stein declared, was “the oldest country in the world because . . . America created the twentieth century” - not through art or literature, one infers, but through industry and invention. Thus it was Thomas Alva Edison, arguably, who inaugurated modernism in America. He electrified the country, he changed night into day - and he transformed sound for ever.

Before Edison's phonograph, sound was ephemeral: something heard could not be heard again. True, certain sounds - music - could be documented in written scores; but such artifacts merely traced experiences that truly existed only in the moment. Recordings changed all that; and by making sound permanent, they altered music's very nature. “Modern” music, then, is in large part the story of sound technology, of its consequences, and of the responses by musicians and listeners.

In the beginning, recordings were mechanical. A reverse megaphone focused sound waves onto a diaphragm to which was attached a stylus; this etched an image of the sound onto a cylinder. To hear the recording, the process was reversed. There was nothing electrical, nothing chemical: the mechanism was wholly consistent with the technology for musical instruments, which took the relatively small sounds produced by an agitated string, a reed, or buzzing lips, and rendered them audible over a substantial distance. The gramophone differed only in that the sound source was a diaphragm activated by a needle driven by grooves in wax.