By Bruce Warren, Program Director for XPN

I’m calling today’s Daily Dose the “chicken or the egg.” We were sitting around the office the other day and I made a rather bold statement: “I know what the number one moment should be!” I excitedly claimed. “Well, it’s not up to you, but what is it?” asked Jen, our 885 Project Manager. “It’s not The Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Woodstock or any of these songs that changed everything…” I said, leaving my colleagues hanging. “Well, what was it?” they demanded to know. I said: “It’s the invention of the phonograph, by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison, insisting that recorded music would not have existed without the technology or the platform on which it could be played. The technology, I submit to you remains the great enabler of pop culture.

So, while we have the greatest of the great works of Beethoven, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Motown, Miles Davis or Robert Johnson to consider for your most memorable musical moments, we can not forget the technology which made it possible. These devices are much more than playback machines. One of my favorite books on the subject, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 by William Howland Kennedy is a fascinating historical analysis of recorded music and its place in popular culture.

In the description of the book Amazon.com writes: “Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what’s already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself.”

And such are the questions we’d like you to ask yourself when considering your historically significant moments and sharing them with us.