This dissertation argues that a cinematic approach to music recording developed during the 1950s, modeling the recording process of movie producers in post-production studios. This approach to recorded sound constructed an imaginary listener consisting of a blank perceptual space, whose sonic-auditory experience could be controlled through electroacoustic devices. This history provides an audiovisual genealogy for electroacoustic sound that challenges histories of recording that have privileged Thomas Edison’s 1877 phonograph and the recording industry it generated. It is elucidated through a consideration of the use of electroacoustic technologies for music that centered in Hollywood and drew upon sound recording practices from the movie industry. This consideration is undertaken through research in three technologies that underwent significant development in the 1950s: the recording studio, the mixing board, and the synthesizer. The 1956 Capitol Records Studio in Hollywood was the first purpose-built recording studio to be modelled on sound stages from the neighboring film lots. The mixing board was the paradigmatic tool of the recording studio, a central interface from which to direct and shape sound. Finally, the electronic synthesizer offered the potential for total control over sonic timbre, as can be seen in the use of the Trautonium in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Together, these histories advance an understanding of recorded sound that de-centers the idea of reproduction, and emphasizes instead twentieth-century cybernetic ideals of influence, and, ultimately, control, through the recorded medium of sound.

This dissertation identifies a series of “Anglo-Italian musical cultures” that emerged in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, by investigating the movement of musical products and individuals—Roman gut strings, singers, instrumentalists, pedagogues, dilettante composers, expatriate music enthusiasts, and tourists—between British and Italian lands. While Anglo-Italian musical interactions had been common and ubiquitous since at least the early seventeenth century, I focus on the period 1813 to 1830 for three reasons: first, because of Britain’s emergence from the Napoleonic Wars as the most powerful global empire (at the beginning of what Jürgen Osterhammel calls the “European century”); second, because of the post-Napoleonic tourist boom; and third because of the rise of musical institutions in London, such as the Philharmonic Society in 1813 and the Royal Academy of Music in 1822, as well as an increase in music-critical activity and music periodical publication in Britain. I argue that, to understand the global impact of “European music” and indeed the modern invention of “Europe” in the context of the European post-Napoleonic polity, requires intentional focus on musical exchanges occurring between what Francis Jeffrey called the “extremes of civilized Europe”: Italy and Britain. The musical interactions raised to prominence here deserve our attention, because thinking about Anglo-Italianness and the formation of distinct Anglo-Italian musical cultures, works to sharpen our understanding of intra-European migration and structures of power when the very concepts of music history and musical knowledge were shifting.

Keyboard instruments are ubiquitous in the history of European music. Despite the centrality of keyboards to everyday music making, their influence over the ways in which musicians have conceptualized music and, consequently, the music that they have created has received little attention. This dissertation explores how keyboard playing fits into revolutionary developments in music around 1600 – a period which roughly coincided with the emergence of the keyboard as the multipurpose instrument that has served musicians ever since. During the sixteenth century, keyboard playing became an increasingly common mode of experiencing polyphonic music, challenging the longstanding status of ensemble singing as the paradigmatic vehicle for the art of counterpoint – and ultimately replacing it in the eighteenth century. The competing paradigms differed radically: whereas ensemble singing comprised a group of musicians using their bodies as instruments, keyboard playing involved a lone musician operating a machine with her hands. By replacing musicians with a machine, keyboard playing amounted to a mechanization of polyphony.

Chapter 1 outlines the mechanization of ars perfecta polyphony through keyboard playing. To illustrate its effects, I analyze several keyboard intabulations in relation to their vocal models, including Marcantonio Cavazzoni's adaptation of the chanson Plusieurs regretz by Josquin, and the intabulation preserved in the Turin Tablature of Rore's Calami sonum ferentes. I show how formal differences relate to changes in agency, script, and sensorimotor experience. Drawing on research in cognition and motor control, I discuss how experiencing polyphonic vocal music through keyboard playing affected how musicians parsed the art form. The remainder of the dissertation examines the relationship between keyboard playing and the ecclesiastical concerto, as exemplified in Lodovico Viadana's Cento concerti ecclesiastici (1602). Chapter 2 investigates the complex material relationship between the vocal partbooks and organ continuo part in printed books of sacred music from the 1590s and early decades of the seventeenth century. I argue that the concerto print served as a virtual site for the convergence of the art of counterpoint and keyboard playing. Chapter 3 proposes that the redesign of the Italian organ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a crucial precedent for the "concertato style." The concertato style itself represents a stylization of the model of distributed cognition inherent in the sacred concerto.