Mind you, I was only listening, on a tinny bedside radio. In the Abbey it must have worked much better, soaring to fill all that space. Even watching it live, seeing the pictures to give that sense of a space to be filled, would have changed the experience for the listener.
A BBC Radio 4 programme on Thursday explored the continuing attraction of 78 rpm records. Jenny Hammerton pointed out that shellac has served as the longest lasting format for recorded music – from 1895 to 1960 (1967 in India), compared with no more than 40 years for the vinyl LP & just 15 years for CDs (that makes me even more glad that I never spent my money on building up a collection to replace my lovingly acquired albums). Who can say how long downloads & streaming will last.
It was also pointed out that the quality of 78s is much better than many suppose – one microphone in a room gives a real sense of music filling the space & you can hear some instruments inaudible even on CD. For me however these qualities were always outweighed by the sheer fag of having to change the record, or even just turn it over, sometimes right in the middle of a movement.
Yesterday came more interesting news about music & the wedding from Last FM blog :
“About 1 in every thousand listeners in Britain scrobble God Save The Queen on a typical day (not counting Last.fm radio listens), which isn’t bad going. But on the day of the Royal Wedding it hit nearly five times that, far more than on any other day in the last 12 months.”Perhaps for some people it has become a patriotic song of celebration of all things royal.
