Larry Fast ’73 visits History 206, the Politics and Practice of History (Fall 2019)

This semester’s version of the Politics and Practice of History (Professor Barclay) began with a unit on the history of popular music as a lens through which to view the spread of generational, class, and race labels as primary loci of identity and social memory. Musician, documentarian, and public intellectual Larry Fast ’73, a Lafayette history major himself, visited class to give student’s an insider’s view of the history of recorded music. Mr. Fast drew upon his vast experience as a performer and producer, advisory board member of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, and active contributor to the Moogseum (an institution dedicated to the history of synthesizers and the inventions of Robert Moog). In the classroom, Larry walked us through the technical side of recording music with a riveting and illustrated history of recording technology from the 1870s through the 1930s.