Perhaps no writer was more attuned to the shape-shifting nature of sound recording technology than John Dos Passos, whose fascination with modern mass media inflected his early writing and shaped the form of his multimodal novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1934, 1936). By the mid-1920s, the phonograph was no longer new and was, in fact, threatened with obsolescence by the emergence of the radio. And yet, at the same moment that radio began to encroach on the consumer market for phonographs, rapid changes were taking place in sound reproduction -- including the introduction of the condenser microphone and electrical recording -- that were reshaping the ways people would hear recorded sound. As I show, Dos Passos’s innovation was to make use of readers’ ears as highly tuned instruments for listening. But now these novels require a recuperative act of resonant reading to resurface the sonic logic of Dos Passos’s noisy prose.

The works of Richard Strauss are now central to the programming and scheduling policies of individual artists, opera houses, orchestras, and recording companies. Whether it be Ein Heldenleben or Salome, Metamorphosen or Ariadne auf Naxos, Eine Alpensinfonie or Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss’s works soon attracted the attention of performers and audiences alike and quickly became barometers of orchestral and vocal excellence. This chapter examines performance data and the ways in which that data reflects trends in Strauss performance. The chapter also looks closely at how Strauss’s oeuvre was framed within an orchestral and operatic context, the shifting responses of conductors, singers, and instrumentalists to his compositions, the ways in which those responses are reflected in the discographies of individual artists, orchestras, and opera companies, and the relationship between Strauss’s works and advances in recording technologies.