Scott Sandage: American Industrialization

Tues., July 15

The next day Scott Sandage, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon who teaches a class on the History of Rock’n’Roll, came in to talk to us about American Industrialization (1812-1932). It was a lively scholarly presentation filled with interesting tidbits. I was interested to learn that Alexis de Tocqueville actually coined the term “individualism” in attempting to describe the American character. He stressed the importance of the “contract society” as the key to improving one’s status.

Everyone was interested to learn that it was the recording technology of the day, the Edison phonograph, which dictated the style of artist (and instrument) that became popular. The wax of these devices, he said, only picked up loud brassy sounds and so it was that those vocal artists and twangy instruments such as the banjo defined the musical zeitgeist.

He referred us to several sites which had music we might be able to use in the classroom:

http://www.archive.org/
http://www.honkingduck.com/
Cylinder Digitalization Project (basically Edison’s Columbia recordings online)