With the advent of the phonograph, people of all levels of society, all levels
of musical sophistication, began to get an opportunity to hear the great music
of the world, particularly opera. So with the phonograph in 1900 now becoming
an actual fact, that is, you could go to the store and buy one, the opera stars
began to sing. Now most of 'em at that time, in 1900, disdained the phonograph
because the phonograph to a lot of people in serious music was considered a
toy. Enrico Caruso was the first to say, "Oh, no, it's not a toy. It's
immortality." And he did it and the others followed immediately. And so we
had a great library, particularly on Columbia and Victor, to some degree
Edison, of the great singers of that period. And the great Italian and German
singers flocked now into the studios for that immortality. So that's another
kind of music that was in the stores, so you went in and you bought a lot of
the popular tunes and you bought a lot of the opera singers. Now, here again,
by the way, is an interesting sidebar. And that is, technology. The early
phonograph, clear up until 1925, did not use electricity. Phonograph records
were made and replayed by the vibrations of their stylus, set in a mica
diaphragm to repeat the vibration. That acoustic phonograph did not like the
piano. It liked the human voice, particularly the tenor and the soprano. It
liked the violin because it produced clear tone. It liked the woodwinds, but
it hated the piano because the piano scale is imperfect. And the piano, to
this day, by the way, any recording engineer will tell you it's the hardest
thing in the world to record a piano well. So the piano, which was this
dominant thing with ragtime all through the period, beginning with 1900, was
not widely record. Scott Joplin, for instance, never made a recording,
regrettably. He was known not as a performer, by the way, but as a composer.
Ben Harney made a couple of -- of phonograph records around 1900, but they're
vocal. Sure, he's playing the piano, but the focus is vocal.
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