ABSTRACT
Following the incorporation of the Edison Phonograph Company in 1887, the music industry has been an ever-improving machine for capturing acoustic events, cloning them, and scattering them through the world. The concept of anticipation is not necessarily related to the excitement accompanying what comes next. Rather, it implies a kind of foreknowledge. The idea can be applied nicely to a classic view of music reception developed by Leonard Meyer. Musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued that the contemporary obsession with putatively true-to-the-work performances obscures the real facts about eighteenth-century performance. In the eyes of many current thinkers, traditional jazz scholarship – of the kind just cited – is suspect. So too is the phonographic testimony upon which it is based. In the beginning, phonography was designed to serve a fundamentally documentary role. Edison had set out to create mechanical repeater that would replace the human hand in resending failing telegraph signals; he subsequently marketed actual invention as an office dictation machine.
