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This chapter focuses on the united front put up by composers, musicians, and record labels against the common foe of rampant piracy. It considers the Supreme Court's endorsement of the new property rights, which arguably impinged on the limitations of copyright set out in the Constitution. The chapter first provides an overview of copyright reforms adopted by Congress between 1955 and 1964 before turning to the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1973 case Goldstein v. California. It then examines Congress's decision to extend copyright to sound recordings before concluding with a discussion of the passage of the Sound Recording Act of 1972 and the Copyright Act of 1976.

This chapter considers the performance and recording of rural miniatures during the first half of the twentieth century, with particular focus on recital programs and the reception of sound recordings. It explores the active roles performers played in the composition and arrangement of rural miniatures, with a detailed historical and analytical case study of Jascha Heifetz and Grigoraş Dinicu’s “Hora Staccato.” The chapter addresses the performance style that prominent violinists developed in playing rural miniatures, characterized by the use of aural tropes to evoke the sounds of folk music performance as they were typically constructed in the urban imagination. Common gestures that violinists used to project this sonic character were rough timbres, heavy downbeats, slides, accented bowings, and ornaments including trills and grace notes.

Moving from theories of film to film itself, the third chapter contends that Citizen Kane employs the same narrative form as the novel Orson Welles wanted to adapt when he went to Hollywood, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Both works revolve around the attempted decipherment of a deathbed phrase by multiple narrators. But Welles also derives from Conrad his concern with the relationship among speech, writing, and image, a relationship transformed by new technologies of sound recording, frequently described as akin to hieroglyphs. The innovative plot structures of Conrad and Welles seek to call attention to the ways in which the medium of the novel or of film, respectively, can uniquely express the visual and the oral, without seeking to mediate between the two.

This chapter examines the state of soap opera collections in three major U.S. television archives: the University of California Los Angeles Film & Television Archive; the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division; and the Paley Center for Media. Exploring the relationship of each archive with the soap opera genre shows not only how these institutions have and will continue to shape soap history, but also what these issues of preservation and the loss of soap history might tell us about the future of soaps.

In this interconnected, socially networked, 24/7, multidimensional, media-centric culture, your students are doing just fine creating, performing, and making things without your help. Thanks to the proliferation of user-friendly, intuitive software applications to create, capture, and perform music, as well as websites that allow easy showing and sharing of these creations, your students can lead very productive, creative, and expressive lives without the baggage of learning traditional music notation and computer code. This realization sends shudders through some of our fellow professors, but nonetheless it is a reality of our times. You can choose to fight these trends and hold fast to the traditions of an educational system designed for another era and different priorities, or you can meet your students where they are. Much of education has been about the transmission of subject-specific content with a focus on the individual. This fosters competition for the teacher’s attention and top grades. Hierarchical classrooms perpetuate the notion of teachers as authority figures and decision makers while supplicant students wait for the teacher’s knowledge to be bestowed upon them. Socialization is rarely encouraged inside the classroom. On the other hand, the modern workplace is flattening its hierarchical structure and becoming ever more dependent upon critical thinking skills, collaboration, teamwork, and shared decision making. In fact, many corporate offices are being designed physically to foster collaboration through shared offices and informal small lounges where workers can gather to brainstorm. Learning to work with others is a lifelong endeavor. These skill sets don’t develop in a vacuum. They need to be nurtured through modeling and experience. As suggested by John-Steiner, students need to be socialized into the culture of collaborative work and the kinds of creative and critical thinking the new workplace requires. As you will discover, collaborative work yields processes and results that are far richer than any that a single person’s expertise can produce.