Once there was a time when recording was in flower. No longer a toy, but not old enough to be predictable and boring, the phonograph was seen as a unique repository of musical greatness, protected against the ravages of time by preservation on shellac discs. These noisy and imperfect replicas of live preformances served for countless sensitive souls as the stimulus of fantasies both aesthetic and personal. What Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain about Hans Castrop’s discovery of the phonograph summed up what a whole generation felt about-an through-this primitive technological marvel:

The carrying power of this ghostly music proved relatively small. The vibrations, so surprisingly powerful in the near neighborhood of the box, soon exhauseted themselves, grew weak and eerie with distance, like all magic. Hans Castorp was alone among four walls with his wonder-box. . . . Those singers male and female whom he heard he could not see, their corporeal part abode in America, in Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg. But let them dwell where they might, he had their better part, their voices, and might rejoice in the refining and abstracting process which did away with the disadvantages of closer personal contact, yet left enough appeal to the sense of permit of some command over their individuality.

For such magic to exist, there must always be magicians. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the phonograph’s magicians were the inventors of the proces itself; what they recorded-whistlers, maudlin ditties, dialect routines-was hardly