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One of the reasons this project started was a musical vacuum. In 2012 I was living in a place where nobody cared much for music of any sort - at best it would be tolerated as a background noise, and generally being noticeable meant being "noisy" and I would be asked to turn it off, or usually not even asked. Soon the headphones were on every day, and sounds became something entirely personal and unsharable. The act of immersion is ultimately a personal one, there is nothing communal about it, so how then to evoke the experience of a single, very traumatic year with a collection of music which most people living through it would not have heard?

The best-selling hit songs of 1940 are not in this mix, either they were recorded in 1939 or they are altogether too lugubrious to be worthy of inclusion. Even if they were all here, the figures that loom largest here - Churchill, Hitler, FDR, Mussolini - would not have cared for them either, and it wouldn't be until the 1960s that there would be a world leader who appeared to be in any way touch with popular culture (you may be surprised to hear his voice appear in this mix) - no, these people only listened to real music, that is "classical" music, and it was fitting therefore that the historical events caused by their actions (I mean, of course, The War) would be accompanied by wordless orchestral sounds. It is fortunate then that this is also the year Disney released Fantasia.

You most likely know Fantasia as a ground-breaking animated film, which is a fair description. From our point of view, however, it is more notable for its sound design, for which the word "revolutionary" seems entirely inadequate. Conductor Leopold Stokowski, already noted for his pioneering recording work, led the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music Concert Hall in Philadelphia in performing a series of pieces. Thirty three microphones were placed around the orchestra, with eight optical recording machines recording. Six channels recorded different sections of the orchestra, while the seventh recorded a mixture of the first six, and the eighth captured the overall sound from a distance. The result is not just the first properly realised stereo recording, it is music recorded with a vibrancy which would genuinely not be equaled in decades. Cinemas were, of course, not ready for this sort of sound, and the film was only initially shown on a limited number of screens which could be properly adapted for the purpose. Wider distribution was hampered also by the running time (over two hours) and the impossibility of distributing anything in Europe in 1940. The result was a financial loss, and reruns were heavily edited, with a more easily usable, but much less special, mono soundtrack. So the astonishing sound we have here was heard by surprisingly few people.

As far as a comment upon the war goes, the violence of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring fits better than any new music written in 1940, but this mix is not without contemporary musical comment on current - or at least recent - events. Most notably, this is the year Alan Lomax sat down with Woody Guthrie and had him expound at length about the horrors of the dust bowl. The resultant recordings formed the basis of his 1940 collection Dust Bowl Ballads, an evocation of a time and place of a sort we haven't really had before. This is also the year of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, Ed Murrow's London After Dark and Hitchcock's Rebecca, lending the mix an unvarnished cinéma vérité feel, from time to time. The War Effort and the artifice of propaganda, at least from an American perspective, would not begin until 1942, and we have other troubles in 1941.

And yes, there is also a lot going on in jazz and rhythm and blues this year, but let's talk more about that next time.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Leopold Stokowski - Toccata And Fugue In D Minor

(Clip from H.G. Wells and Orson Welles interview. Radio KTSA San Antonio on October 28, 1940)

(Clip from BBC - It's That Man Again - Tommy Handley)

2:50:07 Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys - Bob Wills Special

(Clip from John F Kennedy's First Recorded Interview - 1940 on KROC AM in Rochester, MN)