MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

As soon as Thomas Edison first recorded and played back the spoken word in 1877, musicians began to transcribe their sounds onto cylinders and discs. In West Orange and Camden, New Jersey, two of the first record labels, Edison and Victor, opened studios for recording music. This presentation will discuss the experience of recording music in the first studios, playing into a horn that channeled sounds onto a wax surface.

While scholars have examined extensively early recording from the perspectives of the technologies of the machines and the records themselves, few historians have looked at the process of recording as it was experienced by the participants. Early recording engineers and musicians experimented with technologies and acoustics, while the first producers created and explored a marketplace for recorded music. While Edison saw the recording of music as a series of technical problems to be solved, Victor Records pioneered technical and marketing procedures that expanded the realm of recorded music.

This presentation will explore the world of the early recording studios from the perspectives of the musical producers. Musicians of every type, from Jascha Heifetz to Enrico Caruso, Bert Williams to the Carter Family, Ada Jones to John Philip Sousa, traveled to West Orange and Camden to record for Edison and Victor in the first decades of musical recording. This presentation will examine this new culture industry, its place in the world of entertainment and the culture of the modernity, and the emergence of a new type of popular music scene centered on the recording studio.