Electric media, because of their total "field" character, tend to eliminate the fragmented specialties of form and function that we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and mechanization. The brief and compressed history of the phono- graph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word. It was the advent of the electric tape recorder that only a few years ago released the phonograph from its temporary involvement in mechanical culture. Tape and the l.p. record suddenly made the phonograph a means of access to all the music and speech of the world. Before turning to the l.p. and tape-recording revolution, we should note that the earlier period of mechanical recording and sound reproduction had one large factor in common with the silent picture. The early phonograph produced a brisk and raucous experience not unlike that of a Mack Sennett movie. But the undercurrent of mechanical music is strangely sad. It was the genius of Charles Chaplin to have captured for film this sagging quality of a deep blues, and to have overlaid it with jaunty jive and bounce. The poets and painters and musicians of the later nineteenth century all insist on a sort of metaphysical melancholy as latent in the great industrial world of the metropolis. The Pierrot figure is as crucial in the poetry of Laforgue as it is in the art of Picasso or the music of Satie. Is not the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation to the organic? And is not a great industrial civilization able to produce anything in abundance for everybody? The answer is "Yes." But Chaplin and the Pierrot poets and painters and musicians pushed this logic all the way to reach the image of Cyrano de Bergerac, who was the greatest lover of all, but who was never permitted the return of his love. This weird image of Cyrano, the unloved and unlovable lover, ٛ was caught up in the phonograph cult of the blues. Perhaps is misleading to try to derive the origin of the blues from Negro folk music; however, Constant Lambert, English conductor-composer, in his Music Ho.', provides an account of the