A few years ago a friend played for me a tape copy of an Edison cylinder recorded by Johannes Brahms in Vienna in 1889. Edison’s agent in the city, Theo Wangemann, announces the date and place of the recording and that he is with “Doktor” Brahms himself. After a short pause, the playing begins. I could not at all identify the piece, since the scratch and swish seemed to drown out everything. My friend then conducted what was playing, and it jumped out at me—a snippet from the composer’s “Hungarian Dance No. 1” in G minor. What was also evident was a rambunctious, free- wheeling pianism—what the young Artur Schnabel noted as Brahms’s “creative vitality and wonderful carelessness.” More scientifically, Jonathan Berger, of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, after subjecting the Brahms cylinder to every conceivable scrutiny, notes a “liberal rubato, some protracted fermati, and improvisation at a number of points” and a tempo “considerably slower than any recent recording.” My sense is that Brahms was the kind of player who could play a piece all over again using only the notes he missed the first time around.

Timothy Day is curator of Western Art Music at the Sound Archive of the British Library in London. He has given us, at the very least, a study of the history and implications of recorded music from the late nineteenth century to our day, beginning with an inaccurate description of that Brahms cylinder