Inventing the Recording

Abstract

Inventing the Recording: The Phonograph and National Culture in Spain, 1877–1914 focuses on the decades in which the recording went from technological possibility to commercial and cultural artifact, and it does so through the analysis of a specific and unique national context: Spain. It tells the stories of institutions and individuals in the country, discusses the development of discourses and ideas in close connection with national concerns and debates, and pays close attention to original recordings from this era. The book starts with the arrival in Spain of notices about Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, followed by the first demonstrations (1878–1882) at the hands of scientists and showmen. These demonstrations greatly stimulated the imagination of scientists, journalists, and playwrights, who spent the rest of the 1880s speculating about the phonograph and its potential to revolutionize society once it was properly developed and marketed. The book then moves on to analyze the “traveling phonographs” and salones fonográficos of the 1890s and early 1900s, with phonographs being paraded around Spain and exhibited in group listening sessions in theaters, private homes, and social spaces pertaining to different social classes. It finally covers the development of an indigenous recording industry dominated by the so-called gabinetes fonográficos: small businesses that sold imported phonographs, produced their own recordings, and shaped early discourses about commercial phonography and the record as a commodity between 1896 and 1905.