On January 27, 2003, the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, released a list. It contained twenty-five titles. The announcement was procedural, a fulfillment of the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. The language was administrative. The selections were not ranked.
The list included the 1909 recording of ‘Listen to the Lambs’ by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It included ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by George Gershwin, and ‘Sweet Lorraine’ by Art Tatum. It included John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address and the 1977 album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.’ The criteria were explicit: recordings must be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and at least ten years old.
The act of selection is an act of exclusion. The registry did not claim to contain the ‘best’ of American sound. It claimed to contain the essential. The juxtapositions were deliberate. The aria from *Wozzeck* sat alongside ‘The Sounds of Earth’ from the Voyager Golden Record. This was not a celebration. It was a taxonomy. The registry established a canon by flat, creating an official narrative of the American ear. The power of the list lay in its cold authority. It said, simply, these sounds shall not be lost. All other sounds were placed, by implication, in a different category.