June 21 is World Music Day. The event began in Paris, France in 1982 as Fête de la Musique, initiated by the then French cultural minister Jack Lang. The event is now marked in 540 cities around the world.
The history of music dates back to the dawn of human civilisation but the art got a big boost with the arrival of sound recording. Recorded sound meant that music could spread wider than ever before. For centuries music was passed along either vocally or by written notation (and sometimes by mechanical devices such as music boxes).
The history of recorded music is about 150 years old. On this World Music Day listen to the oldest surviving musical recordings.
Au Clair de la Lune (1860)
This 1860 recording of the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune is the earliest known recording of a person singing. It was recorded by a phonautograph, the first device that recorded sound.
The Lost Chord (1888)
On August 14, 1888, George Gouraud played several recordings made using Thomas Edison's phonograph. One of them was a piano and coronet recording of Arthur Sullivan's Lost Chord. This is the oldest known surviving recording of instrumental music ever made.
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