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:
“There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“One thinking it is right to speak all things, whether the word is fit for speech or unutterable.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)