Before the audio recording, classical music was passed down through the centuries because it was written on a score which obeyed conventional, widely followed rules, and later performed more-or-less exactly as the composer intended. Folk music tunes and lyrics were memorised as oral histories between generations. The nineteen-twenties is undoubtedly best known for the “Jazz Age”; but the period leading up to that decade was when the variety of the oral tradition was directly recorded using cumbersome rudimentary equipment carried on foot between remote communities—each of which had its own songs and its own stories. If two young musicians seduced by both folk music and embryonic recording technology enrol at the same music college in Boston, in the U.S., in the closing months of the First World War, fell in love, and embarked upon such a mission, a story could be imagined. This would be, in part, a romance, and, in part, a history of the art of recording. “The History of Sound” (Universal) is showing now at the Montrose Playhouse.
Confirmation that the film is a work of fiction (it’s an adaptation of a short story) comes at the very end of the credits. “The History of Sound” toys with the audience; it feels like a conventional, chronological biopic—telling the story of the musicians in discrete, non-linear fragments. “Blue Moon,” which I reviewed in December, is a musical biopic too, but especially intriguing because it creates the profile in one meandering evening. But that’s based upon a true story.
The film stars two well-known actors—Paul Mescal as Lionel and Josh O’Connor as David. (Mr Mescal is also starring in “Hamnet,” which I reviewed last month.) Lionel is quiet, serious, and intermittently escapes when things get serious (“I’ve been here too long,” he says). David is impulsive, forward, and perhaps manipulative (Mr O’Connor is, unwisely, rarely photographed without a cigarette in his mouth). Lionel has much more of the screen time. As well as his upbringing on a homestead in sleepy Kentucky, his college days in Boston, and his experiences roaming up and down the coast of Canada on foot, we meet him in choral-music-capital-of-the-world Rome, and on an uptight, upper-class, English country estate, amongst other places. Both men have subsequent relationships with women—it is said that the best hiding place for a gay man is married to a woman—and neither seems to be willing to give their relationship with each other much of a go. This leads to an oddly muted romance—the scenes walking across the crisp mid-winter leaves in the woodlands of Canada are more trudged than sashayed—and regrets later which feel inauthentic. It is about as far away from risqué “Pillion,” which I reviewed in December, as could be imagined. Lionel remarks that his grandfather once said, “Happiness isn’t a story”; for that reason, “There isn’t much to say about those first weeks.” But that’s a writer’s decision and not a law of physics.
One shot about a quarter of the way through provides a potential way to understand the filmmakers’ thinking. David and Lionel clamber up a rock face in the distance, their backs to the audience. The (initially static) camera is positioned the other side of a narrow gulley of trees in the foreground of the shot. Gradually, the camera tracks inwards through the trees towards them, as if to follow their romance from a subtle distance. Don’t eavesdrop, the filmmakers are saying, Their relationship is private. The whole shot is light-brown; the colour of autumn, but also of many of the clothes that Mr Mescal wears, and of the trees, campfires and log cabins that bedeck the first half of the film.
Still, the process of choosing the locations, obtaining the songs and storing the outputs on wax cylinders is fascinating. “Where we walking now?” Lionel asks, as they tramp across another woodland. They believe that colonies of mixed immigrants and foreign slaves in coastal Canada where people earn a living in traditional ways make for interesting music. Upon arriving there, David and Lionel introduce themselves, loosely, as academics on a song-collecting mission. They discuss how out-of-town strangers should proceed; “You walk up to someone and ask them for a song,” David says. Lionel gets two inquisitive children to put their hands on their throats. “Do you feel something,” he asks, “like a vibration?” “A little tickle,” one of the children replies. “Right,” he says. “That’s sound.” David is impressed; “That was a nice way to explain it,” he says.
When their time recording the children on the island comes to an end, we meet the old patriarch of a family of folk-singers. He sits outside his wooden house looking out into the distance. We sense that he has sat here many times before. “I thought it would all just go away,” he says. “Find another project…Same trees, same rocks, nothing coming. But when it comes, it will be coming from there.” It’s unclear exactly what this refers to but shortly afterwards the filmmakers capture yet another stunning shot: rowing-boat in silhouette, sunlight reflected on the water in the foreground. Slow and graceful.
As Lionel returns to his family’s farm, where his mum, an excellent character played by Molly Price, is sick, the filmmakers linger patiently to take in the roads—some dirt, some gravel, and some paved. They thoughtfully consider the time of day for each of their gorgeous shots. They succeed in illustrating the gap between sophisticated urban Boston, with its electric lights and gossipy men-only bars and upscale clothes, and rural Kentucky, where the land is plenty but buildings are snug and there is nothing to do after sundown except to wait and watch in silence. But the superb control of the shots doesn’t quite hide the unsatisfactory nature of the romantic story. One morning, decades later, an older Lionel sits at his piano. Formally written-down classical music “sharpens the mind,” he says. “Folk songs are filled with the voices of thousands.”
Adam Poole
22nd February 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
