"Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents!": Representations of Oratory on Early Commercial Recordings

The advent of new technologies of communication and inscription will perforce be of interest to those of us concerned with the representation of performance, and indeed of anything else. In this paper we want to explore how the invention and early commercial development of the phonograph opened a cultural space for imagining how this new technology might be used for the representation of performance--specifically, oratorical performance--and how at least some of those imaginings were realized.