1888<\/b>: The earliest known musical recording is made. The piece, Georg Friedrich Handel’s Israel in Egypt<\/i>, is recorded on a paraffin cylinder.<\/p>\n
Israel in Egypt<\/i>, assigned the catalog number HWV 54, is an oratorio, a form in which Handel excelled. Like his more famous Messiah<\/i>, Israel in Egypt<\/i> is composed using biblical passages, mainly from Exodus and the Psalms.<\/p>\n
Unlike the Messiah<\/i>, however, it didn’t enjoy much of a reception when it premiered in 1739. As a result, Handel shortened the work and inserted a few Italian arias to lighten the mood a bit.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, it was selected by Col. George Gourand, Thomas Edison’s foreign sales agent, for the first musical recording. Gourand made his recording in London’s Crystal Palace, using Edison’s yellow paraffin cylinder — candle wax, essentially.<\/p>\n
(Source: Stanford University, National Park Service)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lost in all the iPhone hype yesterday was this little bit of historical trivia. The first musical recording was made on the same date 119 years ago. Coincidence? I wonder? Here’s the post from Wired.com 1888: The earliest known musical recording is made. The piece, Georg Friedrich Handel’s Israel in Egypt, is recorded on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p88Hib-6Y","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1333,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions\/1333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}