Activity
Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics: A Royal Musical Association and British Forum for Ethnomusicology Affiliated Study DayDescription
As a sound recordist working in the British film industry from the mid-1930s, Peter Handford excelled in location recording. He was part of the Army Film Unit during World War II and, after a string of post-war British New Wave films, worked in Turkey on Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and in Kenya on Out of Africa (1985). Alongside his day job, Handford was an avid railway enthusiast who began producing and distributing recordings of steam locomotives in the 1950s. Initially available via mail order (and advertised exclusively to readers of specialist magazines), Handford’s train tracks proved unexpectedly popular and were marketed more widely from the 1960s onwards. The label name for these releases was usually some variation on Transacord, a contraction of transcribe and record that Handford had been using since his first attempts at curating the sound of the British railways. Each LP came with extensive sleeve notes, inviting the listener to read along while the record was playing. The net result was both intensely localised—a particular locomotive on a particular line at a particular time in particular weather conditions—and broadly evocative of a disappearing “age of steam.” At a time when branch lines were withering and diesel was in the ascendency, Handford crafted steamscapes that seemed to satisfy a nostalgic imagination. This paper asks what Handford’s work suggests about the place of sound in British attitudes to steam power (ultimately coal power, of course) in the mid twentieth century.| Period | 11 May 2023 |
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| Event title | Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | London, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |