A very interesting post on early Army Radio Signal Companies on SMH.
Shows the degree to which things have advanced in various ways. The amount of equipment and effort to achieve what today would be an easy result is impressive.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Elections and History in Wyoming
Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Elections and History in Wyoming: This is the election season, and therefore, naturally, many of the items that are showing up on this blog pertain to anniversaries of elect...
Monday, October 29, 2012
The Private Social Club: Today In Wyoming's History: October 26
The Today In Wyoming's History: October 26: featured this item, amongst others:
I don't know when the Cheyenne Club passed on, but I'm sure it was eons ago. Most modern ranchers wouldn't think of joining such a thing, the costs alone would be prohibitive. It says something about the cattle industry of the era. I suppose the most modern comparable thing would be institutions like Casper's Petroleum Club, which was founded by oilmen, but that's not really comparable really.
Here's an example of something that shows up in some movies, and which is pretty much dead as a doornail in modern history. The big men's social club.1880 The Cheyenne Club incorporated.
The Cheyenne Club was a legendary early Cheyenne institution, with many significant Wyoming figures visiting the club, depicted here in as the second building from the right in the row of significant Cheyenne buildings. It was ornately furnished and courtly conduct was expected within it. By some accounts, plans for the Johnson County War were developed there, although that is not necessarily undisputed.
I don't know when the Cheyenne Club passed on, but I'm sure it was eons ago. Most modern ranchers wouldn't think of joining such a thing, the costs alone would be prohibitive. It says something about the cattle industry of the era. I suppose the most modern comparable thing would be institutions like Casper's Petroleum Club, which was founded by oilmen, but that's not really comparable really.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Newsweek, the Casper Star Tribune, and Journalism. A rambling
This must be a tough time to be a print journalist. It would be a lot like being a wheelwright in 1920, or perhaps like a commercial saddle maker in the same era. Your services would still be needed, but you could probably see the handwriting on the wall, as the profession declined from a valuable, highly skilled, necessary profession into one with diminishing prospects. Pretty grim outlook, in some ways, and one in which you would have to sort of hope against hope that things would straighten out for you, even if it were unlikely that they would, or you'd have to move on in the profession to a diminished niche market or just some other career. A grim example, I suppose, of this is provided by the fate of the big R. T. Frazier saddle shop in Colorado, which at one time was a major commercial manufacturer of saddles. Frazier himself saw the end coming on and noted it publicly. Apparently he was unwilling to adapt to the new era, however, and ultimately he took his own life.
I was reminded of this recently by two events. One was the end of the print edition of Newsweek magazine, and the other was the semi pathetic excuse, in my view. for the Casper Star Tribune printing one of the periodic letters of Al Hamburg. Both sort of signal to me the increased slide of the print media into an ever increasing spiral of diminished importance, unfortunately.
Everyone is probably familiar with the Newsweek story by now. The weekly news magazine went into print in 1933, seemingly a bad year to go into business, but the one that it started in nonetheless. It was started by a former editorial writer for Time magazine, which itself had been in business only a decade, and which was its main competitor by design. The magazine has been published consistently as a weekly up until just now, and now its stopped, a victim of the Internet. In November 2010 it merged with the cyber Daily Beast, and its last print issue will come out on December 31, 2012.
Newsweek is trying to put a happy face on this, but my prediction is that it is doomed. I don't expect the cyber version to last long. It also isn't the first glossy magazine to suffer at the hands of the Internet. The New Republic, a magazine (with a more expensive subscription rate) that is older than Time or Newsweek, dating back to 1914, went from being a monthly journal to coming out every two months, I think, for pretty much the same reason, although I frankly think that it has suffered in part due to the ownership of Martin Peretz, which is reflected in its editorial policies. It was a better magazine in general before Peretz, but the Internet hurt it further. It's still around, but you have to wonder how long it can make it either. Time is hanging on, and seems set to, but still it isn't what it once was. Such giants as Life and Look disappeared long ago, at least in their original forms.
Not all magazines have evaporated, of course, but this is a trend that cannot be ignored and its even more pronounced in the newspaper industry, where lots of newspapers have folded or at least greatly contracted. The big giant newspapers, like the New York Times, have all been suffering in recent years and have all experimented with having an electronic presence. And, while supposedly the very small newspaper (i.e., local) has been doing fine, a person has to wonder.
As for the Tribune, the Casper Star Tribune is Wyoming's largest newspaper, and the only one which gets statewide circulation. It was, at one time, a real Wyoming powerhouse because of that. It printed two daily editions, one just for Casper and another, very similar, edition which was available everywhere else. Now, it prints just one edition, and that one seems to get smaller and smaller. The paper is not locally owned, and has not been forever, although it even fairly recently bought the locally owned Casper Journal, and continues to print that weekly. I can see why it does, frankly, as the Journal's weekly columnists frankly make the Tribune's look comparatively sad. The out of state owner has had financial troubles in recent years, a not unsurprising fact given the general state of the newspaper industry.
The Tribune, it seems to me, has been a sadder and sadder newspaper in recent years. Its gotten smaller for one thing. It still does a pretty good job of covering the statewide news, but it just isn't what it used to be (although in fairness the televised news outlets in the state aren't what they used to be either). The editorial page, however, seems to me to really be suffering.
For quite some time the main editorial features of the paper have been the daily editorial sandwiched between two national columns. I guess I like some of the national columns, such as George F. Will and Froma Harrop, but some are pretty run of the mill. I'm sure, given as they are national, that this view isn't shared by every reader. But its the local columnists that just don't hold much, and the editorial doesn't either in my view, quite often. The editorials are often on a subject that just isn't worth doing much more than scanning. Probably all of the columnists have their own followings, but most just don't seem that interesting on the editorial page. . . the Journal's are better. One in particular, Mary Billitier, is just a parade of the maudlin with over 50% of the observations of the relocated Californian being on her sad life. While I'm sorry that her life is sad, reading the column is like watching a train wreck so I just read the first paragraph and generally move on, something that I now find I'm doing with most Tribune columnists.
Add to this the once mighty letter to the editor section of the Tribune has declined enormously. The Tribune used to have an enormous number of letters almost daily, with the Sunday paper being particularly letter heavy. Probably reflecting a decline in readership, the letters have become fewer in number and, even more unfortunately, the really repetitions serial letter writers now can no longer be ignored. The Tribune has several writers who write in constantly, very often on what are essentially the same topics. At this point, for all but the most recent of readers, they have to be writing for themselves, as a person can pretty much know what they're writing about just by reading their names.
Which brings me to my final point. This past week the paper ran, boxed inside of a column on the letter, a letter by Al Hamburg attacking the character of the late Joseph Meyer, the late Treasurer of the State of Wyoming. Joe Meyer recently died due to cancer.
I don't know anything about Meyer personally. I'd frankly forgotten he was an attorney and had been the States' AG. I probably learned more about him in a recent interview in a University of Wyoming journal than I'd ever known before, which isn't to say that I now know a great deal. Hamburg, long time Wyoming residents will recall, is a perennial candidate for various offices including even the presidency. Rather obviously he has no significant support for the offices he runs for (over 20 times) and a felony conviction for forgery connected with one such race, partially reverse, apparently disqualifies him from holding office in any event. Hamburg, while far from the most frequent correspondent to the Tribune, is nonetheless a person that any Tribune letter reader would recognize.
Hamburg's letter regarding Meyer was frankly just flat out mean. The letter criticized the late Meyer for not having served in the military during the Vietnam War (Hamburg served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars) and went on to reference Meyer's death from cancer and his cigarette smoking in a rather hostile light. I've never been one who held to the maxim that a person should not speak ill of the dead, but this letter served no purpose at all and was simply mean.
The Tribune didn't need to run the letter. But run it, it did, and it actually ended up emphasizing it by the editor writing a column on why he was running it. While the editor's column noted how inappropriate the letter was, it chalked up writing it to a philosophical public forum policy.
Well, baloney. Newspapers have not always pretended to be Roman forums and at one time were quite pointed about their editorial biases. There is no reason for the Tribune to have printed a letter like Hamburg's, and there's also no reason for the paper to have allowed its letter page to descend into the sad state that it has, with so many repeat letter writers writing to themselves on the same topics again and again. The fact that the paper has reached this state says a lot about the decline of the print medium.
The Tribune, it seems to me, has been a sadder and sadder newspaper in recent years. Its gotten smaller for one thing. It still does a pretty good job of covering the statewide news, but it just isn't what it used to be (although in fairness the televised news outlets in the state aren't what they used to be either). The editorial page, however, seems to me to really be suffering.
For quite some time the main editorial features of the paper have been the daily editorial sandwiched between two national columns. I guess I like some of the national columns, such as George F. Will and Froma Harrop, but some are pretty run of the mill. I'm sure, given as they are national, that this view isn't shared by every reader. But its the local columnists that just don't hold much, and the editorial doesn't either in my view, quite often. The editorials are often on a subject that just isn't worth doing much more than scanning. Probably all of the columnists have their own followings, but most just don't seem that interesting on the editorial page. . . the Journal's are better. One in particular, Mary Billitier, is just a parade of the maudlin with over 50% of the observations of the relocated Californian being on her sad life. While I'm sorry that her life is sad, reading the column is like watching a train wreck so I just read the first paragraph and generally move on, something that I now find I'm doing with most Tribune columnists.
Add to this the once mighty letter to the editor section of the Tribune has declined enormously. The Tribune used to have an enormous number of letters almost daily, with the Sunday paper being particularly letter heavy. Probably reflecting a decline in readership, the letters have become fewer in number and, even more unfortunately, the really repetitions serial letter writers now can no longer be ignored. The Tribune has several writers who write in constantly, very often on what are essentially the same topics. At this point, for all but the most recent of readers, they have to be writing for themselves, as a person can pretty much know what they're writing about just by reading their names.
Which brings me to my final point. This past week the paper ran, boxed inside of a column on the letter, a letter by Al Hamburg attacking the character of the late Joseph Meyer, the late Treasurer of the State of Wyoming. Joe Meyer recently died due to cancer.
I don't know anything about Meyer personally. I'd frankly forgotten he was an attorney and had been the States' AG. I probably learned more about him in a recent interview in a University of Wyoming journal than I'd ever known before, which isn't to say that I now know a great deal. Hamburg, long time Wyoming residents will recall, is a perennial candidate for various offices including even the presidency. Rather obviously he has no significant support for the offices he runs for (over 20 times) and a felony conviction for forgery connected with one such race, partially reverse, apparently disqualifies him from holding office in any event. Hamburg, while far from the most frequent correspondent to the Tribune, is nonetheless a person that any Tribune letter reader would recognize.
Hamburg's letter regarding Meyer was frankly just flat out mean. The letter criticized the late Meyer for not having served in the military during the Vietnam War (Hamburg served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars) and went on to reference Meyer's death from cancer and his cigarette smoking in a rather hostile light. I've never been one who held to the maxim that a person should not speak ill of the dead, but this letter served no purpose at all and was simply mean.
The Tribune didn't need to run the letter. But run it, it did, and it actually ended up emphasizing it by the editor writing a column on why he was running it. While the editor's column noted how inappropriate the letter was, it chalked up writing it to a philosophical public forum policy.
Well, baloney. Newspapers have not always pretended to be Roman forums and at one time were quite pointed about their editorial biases. There is no reason for the Tribune to have printed a letter like Hamburg's, and there's also no reason for the paper to have allowed its letter page to descend into the sad state that it has, with so many repeat letter writers writing to themselves on the same topics again and again. The fact that the paper has reached this state says a lot about the decline of the print medium.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Proposed Wyoming Constitutional Amendment B. The Right To Hunt, Trap and Fish.
Included amongst this year's ballot
proposals for amending the Wyoming Constitution (there are three such
proposals) is a proposal to amend the constitution to provide for the
protection of the right to hunt, fish and trap.
That such an amendment would even be regarded as necessary would have been a shock a couple of decades ago, and perhaps it really isn't needed now. Participation in hunting is increasing in the United States, reversing a trend of some years, and in Wyoming hunting participation is dramatically up, grossly countering a trend of some years. Nobody knows the reasons for this, but it appears that hunting is now increasing remarkably in popularity and participation. And even on television, where we have not seen a great deal of hunting for quite some time, the reverse is now becoming true. A couple of adventure type channels have been running hunting related series, with the most recent being Yukon Men. And these shows have become pretty unapologetic about depicting what amounts to subsistence type hunting, which is the type that most American hunters actually do.
Nonetheless, in this day and age when many people live in urban settings that are so distant from nature that they have not connection with it, and often don't understand it, it serves to have an amendment that reminds us of the most basic nature of things, which we are never very far removed from in spite of what me might think. Hunters and fishermen truly engage in an activity that's so deeply connected with nature and who and what we are as humans that this shouldn't be necessary, but this "modern" age has allowed many to become deluded, debased and indeed depressed, by their lack of connection with nature in this most fundamental of senses. Therefore, this amendment serves a vital purpose now, even if some feel it is presently unneeded. And, of course, by the time a right is under attack to such an extent that it needs protection, it's difficult to provide it, which is another reason to support this amendment.
Some have also suggested that this interferes with wildlife management in a way that's not helpful, but that concern seems misplaced. Nothing in this amendment requires the Game and Fish Department to do any one thing, even if it can be argued that it does provide a mandate as to how the natural resource would be looked at in part. I'm confident that the interference, to the extent it exists, will be easy to overcome and perhaps it only really exists if its somehow perceived to.
Therefore, like Amendment C below, I feel this is a good proposal and should become law.
Wyoming Constitutional Amendment Proposed Amendment B:
That such an amendment would even be regarded as necessary would have been a shock a couple of decades ago, and perhaps it really isn't needed now. Participation in hunting is increasing in the United States, reversing a trend of some years, and in Wyoming hunting participation is dramatically up, grossly countering a trend of some years. Nobody knows the reasons for this, but it appears that hunting is now increasing remarkably in popularity and participation. And even on television, where we have not seen a great deal of hunting for quite some time, the reverse is now becoming true. A couple of adventure type channels have been running hunting related series, with the most recent being Yukon Men. And these shows have become pretty unapologetic about depicting what amounts to subsistence type hunting, which is the type that most American hunters actually do.
Nonetheless, in this day and age when many people live in urban settings that are so distant from nature that they have not connection with it, and often don't understand it, it serves to have an amendment that reminds us of the most basic nature of things, which we are never very far removed from in spite of what me might think. Hunters and fishermen truly engage in an activity that's so deeply connected with nature and who and what we are as humans that this shouldn't be necessary, but this "modern" age has allowed many to become deluded, debased and indeed depressed, by their lack of connection with nature in this most fundamental of senses. Therefore, this amendment serves a vital purpose now, even if some feel it is presently unneeded. And, of course, by the time a right is under attack to such an extent that it needs protection, it's difficult to provide it, which is another reason to support this amendment.
Some have also suggested that this interferes with wildlife management in a way that's not helpful, but that concern seems misplaced. Nothing in this amendment requires the Game and Fish Department to do any one thing, even if it can be argued that it does provide a mandate as to how the natural resource would be looked at in part. I'm confident that the interference, to the extent it exists, will be easy to overcome and perhaps it only really exists if its somehow perceived to.
Therefore, like Amendment C below, I feel this is a good proposal and should become law.
Wyoming Constitutional Amendment Proposed Amendment B:
Opportunity to hunt, fish and trap
.Article 1. Section 38. Opportunity to hunt, fish and trap. The opportunity to fish, hunt and trap wildlife is a heritage that shall forever be preserved to the individual citizens of the state, subject to regulation as prescribed by law, and does not create a right to trespass on private property, diminish other private rights or alter the duty of the state to manage wildlife.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
G.I. Pamphlet Series
G.I. Pamphlet Series Home
Interesting set of late WWII, and Immediate Post War, pamphlets aimed at solders.
Interesting set of late WWII, and Immediate Post War, pamphlets aimed at solders.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
WYOMING STATE BAR SUPPORTS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT C
WYOMING STATE BAR SUPPORTS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT CThe Wyoming State Bar would like to encourage Wyoming citizens to vote in favor of Constitutional Amendment C.The purpose of Constitutional Amendment C is to enhance the efficiency of the district court by removing two obstacles to the court’s use of court commissioners. The state constitution currently allows court commissioners appointed by the district judge to conduct “chambers business”, and it grants the court commissioner authority to act in the absence of the district judge from the county.However, much has changed in the operation of district courts since the 1890 when our constitution was adopted. The statutes impose more duties and deadlines that can be difficult to fulfill promptly when the district court is conducting trials or other business. The amendment would give the court commissioner authority to act in matters beyond “chambers business,” such as emergency hearings in mental health and juvenile cases, where the district judge is within the county, but is otherwise occupied, such as in a jury trial. This would allow the district court to more promptly act on matters of great importance to members of the public.“This is a simple, necessary and practical change that will increase public access to the court system,” said John Cotton, President of the Wyoming State Bar. “It will improve the legal system and enhance the administration of justice. I strongly encourage support of the amendment.”
I concur with the opinion of the State Bar. This would be a worthwhile amendment to the Wyoming State Constitution. The actual text of the Amendment reads as follows:
Article 5, Section 14. District courts generally; commissioners.
The legislature shall provide by law for the appointment by the several district courts of one or more district court commissioners (who shall be persons learned in the law) in each organized county in which a district court is holden, such commissioners shall have authority to perform such business as may be prescribed by law, to take depositions and perform such other duties, and receive such compensation as shall be prescribed by law.
Monday, October 8, 2012
Recorded Music
On the October 3 This Day in Wyoming's History blog the following item is noted:
October 3
1842 Sam Houston ordered Alexander Somervell to organize the militia and invade Mexico. Attribution: On This Day.
1863 President Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November would be recognized as Thanksgiving Day.
1866 The Regular Army arrives at Ft. Casper with troops from Company E, 2nd U.S. Cavalry arriving as reinforcements. Attribution: On This Day.
1895 Uinta County's Sheriff John Ward arrested Bannock Indian Race Horse for "the unlawful and wanton killing of seven elk in said county on the first day of July, 1895." Race Horse was exonerated when the United States Circuit Court held that the "provisions of the state statute were inconsistent with the treaty" of July 3, 1868. Attribution: On This Day.
1901 The Victor Talking Machine Company incorporated.
1941 The Wyoming Labor Journal advertised for skilled defense workers to work on Pacific Islands. . . probably not the best opportunity in retrospect. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
The Victor Talking Machine Company made, of course Victrola's, an example of which appears here below.
Its an odd thing to think of in this day and age, but before the Victrola, people didn't have recorded music, for the most party, in their houses. It just didn't really exist. That isn't to say that households were devoid of music, far from it. Music, however, was provided by the people themselves, with knowledge of musical instruments being very widespread.
The first "record player" to appear on the scene, of any kind, was invented in the late 1850s, but average people didn't have them, or probably even know of them. It was Edison's cylindrical record player of the late 1890s that really launched record players, with a device that both played tubular records, and which could also record them. But the really big launch of the record players came with the gramophone, which entered the market in 1901. The gramophone and the Victrola were the same thing.
None of this is news to hardly anyone, but what is interesting about this which is misses is that they were actually fairly expensive items. And they weren't always simply the box and turntable scene so often in the movies. They were nicely cased items of furniture deserving a central place in a person's home.
Victrola on dedicated stand. The stand holds records.
Starting in 1901, the Victrola became a coveted household item. A way to bring music of all kinds into the average home. Worked by a hand crank, and sounding tinny today, at the time people raved about the sound.
The front doors on the Victrola box are to open up the sound box. The doors to the stand are a record cabinet.
That's an oddity of human nature that's also rarely mentioned about record players of any kind, although it was the subject of an excellent essay in The New Republic some 30 years ago. Nobody would view the Victrola as much more than a novelty, or historic oddity, today. But in their day, running from 1901 to 1933, when the 33 1/3 record was introduced, they were the hi-fi, high tech, musical wonder of the age. To their owners, the 78 rpm records they played sounded just like being there.
Up until 1931, that was. In that year RCA, which owned Victor, introduced the 33 1/3 rpm record. These new records were designed for electric record players, not the hand cranked dinosaurs that preceded them. Not that they would replace them instantly, but certainly by 1950 the old Victrola was a dinosaur. 78s continued to be made in the 1940s, but by the time 45s were introduced in 1949, they were remnants of a bygone era, although record players were still made that played them.
Those record players were often set in "Stereos", big heavy furniture cased units that included a turntable and an AM/FM radio. As noted, stereophonic speakers came to be the rule after the war too. Stereos of this type, often in very nice furniture cases, predominated into the 1960s, along with much cheaper turntable units. At some point by the 1970s, however, really high end audio equipment had evolved into component parts, that looked electronic and were. Each piece was separately bought by serious music lovers, with the much more cheaper small portable unit also being an option. I had the latter, not being able to afford the former, in that era.
The Linn Sondek reflected the absolute pinnacle of the turntable. Sound so good that, after listening to one, a person could hardly stand to listen to the cassette tape deck in their car. The sound was absolutely unbelievable, and still is. A Linn Sondek produced sound so good, with good speakers, that it's deflating to listen to it, as whatever else you have fairs poorly in comparison.
As referred to above, however, not only had record players evolved from hand cranked machines of the 1900s, involving no electronics at all, into electrically driven and broadcast items, rival forms of recording and playing music back had come into existence as well. I suppose mention should first be made of the player piano, a piano that was mechanically able to reproduce music without the aid of a on the spot musician. Most people have probably seen an old player piano, or a pianola, at some point, and they're sort of a musical oddity today, but they've been around in one form or another darned near forever. Sales of them, however, really got rolling in 1876 after they benefited from being shown at the World's Fair. Sales peaked for them in the 1920s but by the 1930s, not surprisingly given advances in radio and record players, and the Great Depression, they started dieing in the 1930s. They certainly lacked the portability that Victrola's had, and even though I've emphasized the cabinetry associated with them above, it was very common, early on, for people to pack their Victrola to a party, along with some records. You can't do that with a player piano.
Audiotape had come into existence in the 1930s, along with electric record players. Reel to reel audiotape was a German invention of the 1930s. The technology spread into the US in the 1940s after the U.S. Army had acquired the technology after Germany's defeat in the war. As this would indicate, reel to reel audiotape wasn't the domain of the common man at first, but by the 1960s some serious audio fans were buying reel to reel tapes players for some special type of recordings. For example, one dedicated music fan I know has a reel to reel recording of Woodstock.
Audiotape had the ability to be altered such that it could be used in a small format and adapted for automobiles. I don't really understand the technology, so I won't bother to get into it, but cassette tapes first came out in 1963. Cassette tapes had low audio quality at first, however, and so 8 track tapes were the tape player for automobiles in the US. Apparently they were largely unknown in Europe. Fairly big and clunky by contemporary standards, the 8 track also had a highly annoying feature of having a very audible "click" as they changed tracks, but apparently nobody minded that much. It always irritated me, but my exposure to 8 track tapes was fairly limited. I recall them being a feature of teenagers automobiles before I was old enough to drive, but already in my early teens. They were around in the 60s and 70s but rapidly died as audio quality of cassette tapes passed them by in the 1970s.
Cassette taps were much smaller and very readily adaptable to cars. Every young person's car had a radio that included a tape player or a separate tape deck. I had both in one car or another, and actually still have two in vehicles that I bought back when they were still in use.
All this, tapes and records, were dealt a near death blow by the Compact Disk, which started to make its appearance in the 1980s. Very expensive and a specialty item at first. I think the first one I ever heard was the Nakamichi Dragon, an expensive unit that was set up to be compared to a Linn Sondek. It sounded great, much better than any record player I'd ever heard, until compared to the Linn Sondek, to which it, and everything then and now, fared poorly in comparison.
CDs, however, had advantages that records just couldn't compete with. Most people can't afford a Linn Sondek (myself included) and so the CD player, as prices dropped, was a better audio option. Also, car units could take CDs. CDs had much better sound quality than tapes and better than could be produced by most record players. Soon, record players of all types, and certainly all tape players, seemed like antiquated items from a distant past.
Well, as this story would go, this didn't stay fixed in place. CDs are now in danger of dieing themselves, replaced by a purely electronic medium. The Ipod came in, and songs could be individually purchased the way that they had been in the 78 rpm days, or the 45 rpm days. . . one at a time. 33 1/3 "long play" albums and CDs had trapped the buyer into usually buying some junk to get what they wanted, although there are certainly many LP exceptions. Now, most music buyers go to Itunes first and the record store second.
Ipods have partially yielded to Iphones, which are a revolution of their own. With the Iphone 5, a person can have a device that can hold thousands of tunes, more than they could listen to in a weeks time, played straight trough with no repeats, and which also operates as a phone, a camera, a diary. . . and everything, really, that a computer can do.
Oddly enough, for pure music fans, this has brought back in something that logic would almost hold should be dead. . . the record player. CDs made vinal record collections obsolete except amongst a rare few (indeed, the Linn Sondek has never gone out of production). The electronic medium revived them. It's now quite easy to convert records into digital music, and the quality is amazingly good. For relatively low cost the old record libraries can be converted into digital ones, much the way that they were converted into tape at one time for use in car stereos, but with much, much better quality.
The modern turntable. An Ion turntable that's jacked into a computer. Into the foreground is a CD by The Pogues. To the left, "ear buds" for an Ipod. The turntable itself plays through the computer's speakers and the computer can digitally record the records, or if jacked into the back, it can play, and the computer can record, cassette tapes. Record speed options are 33 1/3 and 45. The wooden/felt block is a record cleaner, once a common site but now an artifact.
Of course, some would regard converting music from the digital format into an electronic one is an abomination, and as also noted the Linn Sondek LP12 is still made, and after 40 years of continual manufacturer is still regarded as the best turntable that money can buy. But the age of digital, highly portable, music is obviously fully here, and is not going away.
This blog, of course, attempts to explore items of historical interest, historical periods (particularly the 1890 to 1920 period) and trends. So it may be worth it to briefly examine what the impact of this technological revolution has been. To start with, the portability of music is now at an all time high. Never before has a person been able to take hundreds, indeed thousands, of recorded pieces of music and pack it with you. That's pretty neat.
What's somewhat missed, however, is that the same revolution has essentially created the professionalization of music, the blending of it, and the categorization of it. Sounds odd, but true. Prior to records, music was extremely local and homemade, as a rule. This doesn't mean that there weren't professional musicians. There were. There have been, indeed, since at least the Middle Ages. But it was also the case that most families had members who could play musical instruments, if in fact they didn't all know how to. This is much less common today. And it was also common for people to learn certain common songs and sing them at home. This is very uncommon today. Good examples of this are presented in the the films Breaker Morant and Michael Collins, in which, in the former the central figure is shown singing at a Victorian home gathering, around a piano, and in the latter the protagonist is showing doing the somewhat related thing of reciting a poem in a gathering of friends. People might still do both today, but to have somebody stand near a piano and sing would be somewhat unusual. I've never seen that done.
The very way we even think of music is a result of records. Prior to records there were popular songs that circulated nationally, or regionally, but that's basically what they were regarded as. There were also, of course, the great works of classical music and opera, which were separately categorized. And there were regional works that tended to remain regional. After records started to sell, however, record companies started to categorize music by type, so as to be able to better sell the records. The original categories of popular music were four in number, country, western, rhythm, and blues. Country music was mostly the music of Appalachia and the white south. Western music was the music associated with the American west at the time. Rhythm and blues were two categories of "race", i.e, black, musical forms from the American south that already had an audience with some whites. As the latter categories were "race" records, overall these four categories were lumped into two bigger ones, Country & Western and Rhythm & Blues. Therefore, simply by virtue of record marking, one entire music genera, Country & Western, was manufactured and lives on. The "Western" part of the C&W music scene is all but dead today, and the "Country" part basically died in the 1950s when the last of the real "old timey" type artists disappeared. Today two other categories, Blue Grass and Folk actually are much closer to the original Country than Country & Western generally is. Rhythm, a category of black music is also gone, and I don't know if it has a modern descendant. Rhythm & Blues remains as its own category, and Blues, an extremely resilient form of music, lives on as a separate category and gave birth to Rock & Roll, which originally differed from it only slightly if at all.
Even that story, that of Rock & Roll, however, could not have occurred without the record player as the music that came from the blues would likely not have without it. Blues gave birth to Jazz, Big Band and Rock & Roll. Exposure to blues by regional players created jazz, and exposure to jazz created Big Band, but records made jazz and Big Band what they were. This is all the more the case for Rock & Roll which essentially was created when the electric small band blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s was re-flagged as Rock & Roll in order to sell records to a while audience.
So, I guess to sum it up, in the late 19th Century we had a lot of music in the country, and most if was local. Cowboys with guitars, farmers with fiddles, Yiddish laborers with violins, soldiers with harmonicas, black sharecroppers singing the blues, and so on. The record player started coming in big about 1900. It didn't change all that, but it certainly impacted it.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
My thesis, Part III « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker
My thesis, Part III « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker
The third installment on Leann's thesis on the military experiences of her great-grandfather in the teens.
The third installment on Leann's thesis on the military experiences of her great-grandfather in the teens.
My thesis « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker (Punitive Expedition Entry)
Leann, the author of the Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker blog has posted a series of entries on her Master's Thesis, which deals with a family member who was a soldier during the Punitive Expedition and World War One.. Given the focus of this blog, I"m glad to see her do that, and I've mentioned her prior blog entries before. Anyhow, she's serialized the entries, the first of which is here:
My thesis « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker
Interesting stuff.
My thesis « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker
Interesting stuff.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)