Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Death by Gramophone

On August 12, 1877, or thereabouts, Thomas Edison shouted “Mary had a little lamb” at a cylinder wrapped in tin foil, cranked the machine up again, and heard a reproduction of his voice. There are others who can claim to have invented the gramophone — Charles Cros had already shown how it was to be done before the French Academy four months earlier, and Scott de Martinville did much the same thing as Edison before Queen Victoria in 1857 — but Edison was the fi rst to take out a patent. “Speech has become, as it were, immortal,” said Edison, who immediately foresaw many possibilities for his machine, some of which are still currently in use: the taking of dictation, the recording of books for the blind, the teaching of foreign languages, the reproduction of the last words of dying persons, and, most far-sightedly, the potential for connecting his new device to the telephone, to make the telephone an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records. Edison recorded on vertical cylinders and called his machine the phonograph; his main rival in the early days of the recording industry, Emile Berliner, used horizontal disks and called his invention the gramophone. Berliner had hopes similar to Edisonʼs, foreseeing a time when “future generations will be able to condense within the space of twenty minutes a tone picture of a single lifetime: fi ve minutes of a childʼs prattle, fi ve of the boyʼs exultations, fi ve of the manʼs refl ections, and fi ve from the feeble utterances of the death-bed.” It is immediately interesting to see that, from its infancy, the gramophone is associated by both of its progenitors with the utterances of the death-bed, and the recording of the dying. The

Muddying the Well

Abstract The author reviews a recent text of contemporary musicology, Musicology and Difference, which seeks to. explore the representation of gender in music, and, by the attribution of fanciful interpretations to notes, keys, Crescendos, cadences and other elements of music, to invalidate the phrase “the music itself.” The text is seen as representative of current work in this area, and challenged here in the polemical terms of that current work.