by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, The Cleveland Orchestra will play the live score during an HD screening of Matilda, based on the Roald Dahl book, conducted by David Newman, and hosted and narrated by Danny DeVito.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Jazz Journalists Association has announced winners in 49 categories of excellence in music and journalism at the 31st annual JJA Jazz Awards.
Among artists with Oberlin Conservatory connections, Billy Hart was named Traps Drummer of the Year, and his book Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (Cymbal Press) as told to Ethan Iverson, was named Book of the Year (Biography or Autobiography). And Sullivan Fortner was voted Pianist of the Year and named Duo of the Year along with vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On June 3, 1929, German-born inventor Emile Berliner died in New York City of a heart attack at the age of 78. Like many second-wave innovators, Berliner has largely gone unmentioned for his pair of contributions to the classical music recording industry. The first was his development of the circular disk that replaced Edison’s cylinders and made the mass production of recordings possible. To that end, he founded several companies, including Deutsche Grammophon and the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Berliner was also among those responsible for the invention of the microphone. His achievements are on display at the Library of Congress (click here to view), including such non-musical inventions as a loom for mass producing cloth and an early version of the helicopter. Somewhere in between falls his invention of a type of acoustical tile.
The second milestone for which we can thank August 3 is the introduction of the Tandy Corporation’s TRS-80 personal computer through Radio Shack, a model that was snapped up by thousands of early adopters within weeks of its release in 1977 for $600 each (some $2,600 in today’s currency).
Lacking such mod cons as the ability to render lower case letters, the machine eventually became a device for tinkerers, even though until 1982, it outsold the Apple II series five to one. Most importantly, the TRS-80 presaged today’s ubiquitous PCs through which we’ve been notating and streaming music, and scheduling virtual meetings on Zoom. It’s difficult to imagine 1977 without access to that magic box, much less 2026.
