Keywords
The Music Goes Round
Memoir
Sound Recording
Gramophone
How to Cite
Abstract
A biography, autobiography, or memoir is essentially a life-centred narrative. While in the latter two, the author and the subject are the same person, a biography involves at least two, its writer and its subject. Despite the possibility of subjective bias, such forms of writing enable historians to build a creative link between the past and the present, reconstruct lived experiences, and evaluate their contemporary significance. Through corroboration and contextualisation, the historian can recover a specific historical period and milieu while reducing personal bias as much as possible. From this perspective, life writings can make significant contributions to historical research. Frederick William Gaisberg’s, The Music Goes Round (1942) stands as an exemplary instance of this potential. Spanning his fifty-year association with the gramophone industry, the memoir traces the evolution of sound recording from a documentary medium to a means of musical enjoyment, while revealing how global ‘recording expeditions’ turned symbols of conquest into acts of cultural exchange.
References
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