![Philadelphia Orchestra (1944).](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Untitled-design-41.png)
Wrestling with the Recording Angel
Every lover of classical music with a taste for sound recordings’ historiography should peruse two valuable books above all, both from the early 2000s. One is Performing Music in the Age of Recording (2004), by Robert Philip of Britain’s Open University; the other, from four years earlier, is A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History, by Timothy Day of Royal Holloway University in London. It is neither Philip’s fault nor Day’s that since their respective volumes’ publication, two factors have so dislocated the classical recording sector as to make some of both men’s observations retrospectively outmoded. Of these factors, one has been dramatic but for the most part morally neutral; the other has been spectacularly disruptive.
The morally neutral factor is the recording industry’s shift away from the single CD towards gigantic boxed sets, often devoted to one particular performing artist or label, and often containing up to 100 discs. Heaven knows who…
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
Sep 03 2024
1 mins
You can imagine my surprise when I recently became aware, courtesy of my cousin Paul, of the letter below, addressed to Mr J.A, Farquar, Commissioner of the South Australian Railways.
Aug 31 2024
2 mins
The history of the Jewish state, just like that of the Holocaust, is undoubtedly unknown to these deniers of Israel’s legitimacy. They are but the latest iteration of the five Arab states’ war in 1948-49, by which they expected to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. They lost, but have since used the motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejection.
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8 mins