"music" = 'recorded music'

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 10:39 AM 4/19/2001 -0400, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
>I had really assumed this would go back still
>earlier, but I've been going through some 1930s sources without
>much luck. Maybe it just seems older but isn't.
>

Perhaps an intermediate step results from the fact that "music" was used of
*mechanical* devices that played music without a human being playing the
instrument. I'm sure there are plenty of examples, but in episode 15 of
Joyce's _Ulysses_ there's a Pianola (see OED for definition and early cites)
that is mechanically playing music in the sitting room of a bordello, where
most of the episode is set. For example:

"Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played."

"murmuring singsong with the music"

"Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola?"

The relevant passages were drafted in 1920-21 and published in 1922, though
set in 1904.

It seems to me that the application of the term "music" to the recorded or
mechanically imitaied human playing of music is a perfectly natural and
perhaps largely unconscious semantic extension, and therefore will in due
course be located somewhere, perhaps with a bit of work. I just tried the
well-known closing mention of the "graphophone" at the end of Faulkner's _As
I Lay Dying_ (1929 or 1930), but the passage simply talks about listening to
a "record," and doesn't use the word "music."


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu