Music: Yesterday & Today

These days, music is everywhere. It’s on television and film, elevators and restaurants, public bathrooms and dentist offices. It’s in our cars and on our phones. With just a few taps to our screens, we can access almost any song from anytime and anywhere. But it hasn’t always been this way. For most of human history, music was a strictly ephemeral experience. Sound was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century, and it wasn’t until the very late-nineteenth century that recorded music as a form of entertainment became normative. Before then, if someone wanted to hear music, they had to…