Retro Music Review and Critique

With so much technology available for musicians, it is important to step back and look at the perspective that existed before the wide spread distribution of  recording devices, phonographs and music machines such as player pianos.  How did people approach listening to and evaluating music before one was able to capture a single performance and listen to it over and over, let alone, in the comfort of their own home, at anytime of day?  Before the turn of the century (1900) Music Publishing referred to print music.  Sheet music was the only means of preserving music and play back was dependent on a performer.  The only way to listen was to hear it live.  Back then there was always a musician in the house who played an instrument and opinion and analysis was directed at the composition rather than the performance. These posts are dedicated to music before technology allowed everyone to listen at their own convenience.  As you will see, it is fascinating how much technology changed things in music, yet other aspects of music remained untouched.  These will start to appear every-so-often and will be words, direct from the sources themselves; Author’s, composers and Editors and Publishers of music from way back! Here’s a example:

Wagner on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

“The fact that in the course of his Ninth symphony, Beet- hoven simply turns back to the formal choral-cantata with orchestra, must not mislead us in judging of that remark- able leap from instrumental over to vocal music. We have already estimated the significance of the choral part of the symphony, and recognized it as belonging to the most proper field of music ; in it, aside from that profound ennoblement of melody by him already noticed, nothing unprecedented, as to form, lies before us ; it is a cantata with verses to which the music bears no other relation than to any other vocal text. We know that text-writers’ verses, though they were those of a Goethe or Schiller, cannot exercise a determinative influence upon the music ; that the Drama alone is capable of doing, and, indeed, not the dramatic poem, but the drama which actually moves before our eyes as the counterpart of music then become visible — the drama, in which word and speech belong only to the action, and no longer to the poetic idea.”