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“Why was the phonograph valued so highly as a means of musical progress? To answer this question we must recognise two perceptions widely held in early twentieth-century America: that classical music was a powerful cultural and musical force to which Americans sadly lacked exposure, and that technology, perhaps more than any other agent, could foster positive social change” – Mark Katz, “Capturing Sound”

Musical taste is a battleground populated by fanatics on all sides, and perhaps the worst flashpoint of all is the argument that things ain’t what they used to be. These days this point of view is often characterised as ‘rockism’ – perhaps best defined in a 2004 New York Times article by Kelefa Sanneh

A rockist is someone who reduces rock ‘n’ roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher. Over the past decades, these tendencies have congealed into an ugly sort of common sense… …Rockism isn’t unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices — that’s part of why it’s so powerful, and so worth arguing about.The pop star, the disco diva, the lip-syncher, the “awesomely bad” hit maker: could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world?

This is not really a new phenomenon, of course – read papers from the 1960s and you will find cultural commentators of many varieties complaining about the ubiquity of rock music, which to their ears is self-evidently inferior to jazz or classical – and this even has not entirely been consigned to history, take this characteristically pompous 2015 BBC lecture from Roger Scruton, where he whinges about popular music being popular.

The belief that there is a difference between good and bad, meaningful and meaningless, profound and vapid, exciting and banal – this belief was once fundamental to musical education. But it offends against political correctness. Today there is only my taste and yours. The suggestion that my taste is better than yours is elitist, an offence against equality. But unless we teach children to judge, to discriminate, to recognise the difference between music of lasting value and mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education. Judgment is the precondition of true enjoyment, and the prelude to understanding art in all its forms.

Scruton is naturally in favour of the more refined varieties of jazz, and presumably ragtime, but nevertheless his general attitude is exactly that of the gatekeepers of music in 1912, chief among them Thomas Edison. Up until this point, Edison had been resolutely on one side in the format wars – his cylinders against the now-open-source disc recordings. Now, however, he had been persuaded to start making discs, but entirely on his own terms.

It really is something to see these objects. Instead of the standard side-to-side movement, Edison insisted on keeping his hill-and-dale etching technique. With grooves of up to a couple of millimeters deep, the records need to be substantially thicker – 6mm compared to the 1mm you would expect from a shellac disc. That’s the thickness of two pound coins if you’re British, or three nickels for Americans. It’s a substantial, serious object, made for only the highest quality sounds – and what sounds were they? In the words of the demonstration disc sampled in this mix

In as much as this instrument is capable of a real interpretation of music, Mr Edison intends to make it the means of offering all of the world’s finest music to the American people. From