Oh, I can sympathize - One Christmas I was listening to Nellie Melba singing Ave Maria on a Victor record, accompanied by violinist Jan Kubelik. At the same time I was reading 'A Matter of Records', the story of Fred Gasiberg by Jerrold Northrop Moore (which borrowed very heavily from Fred's own book, 'The Music goes Round'). I came upon a passage describing the recording session of the VERY RECORD I was listening to, and in Fred's words: "The accompanist strikes the first chords of the Ave Maria, and in another minute Melba is heard singing. She stands with her back to us, her hands clasped in front of her, her lips a few inches from the trumpet....Behind the frosted glass, which is clouded luminously with electric light, the shadows of the operators pass as Melba sings....One wonders who will be listening to this music a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence. In the Venice, Paris, Berlin and New York of that far day, people with a knowledge at which we cannot guess, with an outlook which we cannot comprehend, will be listening to the charm of this song even as we are now listening in a London office. Melba and Melba's life story will seem to them an ancient tale, Kubelik's toil and triumph will mean nothing to them; but the voice of the one and the violin fo the other will be as real and as gracious then as they are to us now." Is that a cosmic experience or what? I had a chill down my spine...but one of remembrance and almost deja vu. A very beautiful experience of reaching across time to another place. John Robles Andrew Baron <andy at popyrus.com> wrote: This is beautifully put, Robert. I feel exactly the same way, even after 32 years of exposure to early records. When I give my annual presentation to the high school history class I try my best to impart this very feeling. Careful selection of the records goes a long way toward reaching hibernating imaginations. The current h.s. generation grew up in the computer era; being fed information, images, sound and content without having to imagine any part of the media being presented. The imaginations are there, but may be less developed than earlier generations where the 'theatre of the mind' was given more chance to be exercised. For phonograph records, the part that happens in your mind is obvious. For radio, well, consider the following, which I read somewhere along the way (or something approximating this): A young boy was asked, around 1950, whether he liked the old Lone Ranger program on radio (which he could still tune into if desired) or the new one that had just recently been introduced to the marvelous medium of television. The boy replied that he liked the Lone Ranger on radio because the pictures were better. Andy Baron On Dec 27, 2006, at 10:10 PM, Robert Wright wrote: > (...With every record, from since I can remember, I've gotten the > sense of peeking through a window at a frozen moment in another > place and time, and cherished that like magic. I remember staring > into the grooves of any given favorite and wondering, amazed, how > this inanimate, cold piece of material, this squiggly line pulled > under a sharp rock, was capable of making me feel things so > intensely. I still feel the same way.) _______________________________________________ Phono-L mailing list Phono-L at oldcrank.org Phono-L Archive http://phono-l.oldcrank.org/archive/ Phono-L RSS Feed http://phono-l.oldcrank.org/feed/index.rss Support Phono-L http://www.cafepress.com/oldcrank