Today's Spoken Word Albums
There have been some spoken word albums over the past fifteen years or so that have been recorded specifically for compact disc; these have often been combined with classical music. Among them are the Naxos audiobooks, as well as a Chandos Records series of albums which combine the music that William Walton wrote for several Shakespeare productions (including the Olivier film adaptations) with readings from the author performed by such actors as John Gielgud and Christopher Plummer. There is also a Hyperion Records stereophonic re-creation of Ralph Vaughan Williams's 1942 radio play adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress, again with Gielgud. Excerpts from Gielgud's 1959 one-man Shakespeare production Ages of Man, once available on LP, are now available as a manufactured-on-demand CD.
Today, such websites as BBC, ZBS, L.A. Theatre Works and The Hollywood Theater of the Ear offer full-length recordings on CD of their dramatic productions. These recordings are possibly the closest that modern day discs have come to the spoken word albums of the 1960s.
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Famous quotes containing the words today, spoken and/or word:
“What
Reply can the vast flowering strike from us,
Unless it be the one
You make today in London: to be married?”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“I put away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage. “A servant of servants shall she be,” must have been spoken of women, not Negroes.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm, U.S. newspaperwoman, abolitionist, and human rights activist. Half a Century, ch. 8 (1880)
“The books may say that nine-month-olds crawl, say their first words, and are afraid of strangers. Your exuberantly concrete and special nine-month-old hasn’t read them. She may be walking already, not saying a word and smiling gleefully at every stranger she sees. . . . You can support her best by helping her learn what she’s trying to learn, not what the books say a typical child ought to be learning.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)