Light Music

The invention of sound recording as the 19th century came to a close, followed by the arrival of radio in the 1920s, hastened changes in musical styles at a far greater pace than had ever happened previously. There is no doubt that our ancestors who listened to what we might term ?their? light music in the 1800s would find the sounds of the 1960s too avant-garde for their ears. The somewhat sedate styles of earlier years were inevitably affected by the influences of the jazz era, the arrival of electrical sound recording in the 1920s and the major impact of the cinema when talking pictures arrived, consuming (and creating) vast amounts of Light Music in its many varied forms. Finally by the 1960s the perfection of high fidelity and stereo sound often allowed composers, arrangers and conductors to express themselves in a spectacular fashion previously unimaginable. All this is vividly illustrated in the very varied collection on this CD.