Plastic: Is It Edison Wax Cylinder Or Is It Memorex?

From Plastic:
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has tackled the issues of recording music in a lengthy, but articulate piece in the magazine. Basically: Did the phonograph come to praise music or to bury it — or maybe both?

In the early years of the century, Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly, and Percy Grainger used phonographs to preserve the voices of elderly folksingers whose timeless ways were being stamped out by the advance of modern life. And what was helping to stamp them out? The phonograph, with its international hit tunes and standardized popular dances.

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