Sound film changed many ideas and experiences of watching motion pictures; certain aspects that concern the use of songs, musical story lines and content of films from 1930 are evaluated here. Author O’Brian selected a corpus of roughly 500 feature films (including musical films) from France, the US, England and Hollywood’s greatest rival at that […]
You are browsing archives for
Tag: recording technology
Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940-1960 by Joh...
“One way to interpret American society in the second half of the twentieth century, for good or ill, is to see it as the triumph of rock and roll culture,” argues John C. Hajduk, professor of history at the University of Montana Western in the book at hand. This peculiar culture was a compelling force […]
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History by Ronald D. Cohen and David Bonner (2018)
This title was designed to portray the various setups, styles, collages, and the cover art of both scores, books, festival ads, piano rolls, and vinyl that was marketed and sold in packages that related to the musical content of “folk music” in the United States at a certain period. So there is not too much […]
A&R Pioneers: Architects of American Roots Music on Record by Brian Ward and Patrick Huber (2018)
Of the many record companies that existed in the 1930s, only a few big players survived; they did so by smart marketing, competitive prices and most of all by clever artist recording policies. The respective expert in such a recording company usually was the A&R person, short for artist and repertoire. He (as then with […]
Phil Spector: Sound of the Sixties by Sean MacLeod (2017)
Pop music gave birth to countless numbers of singers, bands, one-hit-wonders and music producers. Until the early 1960s, however, there were very few important producers the size of Phil Spector; who, to use author Tom Woolfe’s phrase, was the “fist tycoon of teen.” His many pop “projects” that often left a lasting impression in the […]
Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters by Paul E. Winters (2016)
Not just the die-hard fans and collectors of vinyl recordings will be interested in this new book by Paul E. Winters. Since actually the whole idea of conserving the products of popular culture (which includes recorded sound and music) is carefully examined here. This goes along with analysis of the marketing ideas and promises used […]
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music by Barry Mazor (2015)
This very musical biography is the classical blueprint for a music biopic or future TV series, although this has not yet been realized by the film industry. Mazor’s extensive research project on music marketer and Okeh Records producer Ralph Peer is the exciting story of a young clerk working both in shipping and in his […]
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology by Brian Hochman (2014)
When technology and ethnographic curiosity meet, the result often is a huge body of data – mostly consisting of recordings and data stored in all varieties of the current technical standards. In five chapters, each one quite enthralling, Brian Hochman elaborates on various researchers, field studies and vanishing cultures, with subjects as Plains Indian sign […]
Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution by Michael Denning (2015)
The history of modern music was forever altered when in a few years after 1925 talent scouts and engineers were busy recoding regional musicians and their styles, like hula, fado, beguine, calypso, marabi and many other musics. What decades later was repacked, remastered and resold as “folk,” and “roots” music, actually was local popular music; […]