Como sugerido em um comentário de Valorum , você está procurando por novela de Charles Eric Maine Monthly Science FictionAuthentic # 41, janeiro de 1954 , disponível em Internet Archive .
A história é definida no século 21 st "Nyok City". Em uma distopia tecnocrática pós-apocalíptica, alguém encontra um antigo fonógrafo com uma gravação de "Honky Tonk Train Blues" por Meade Lux Lewis . (Lewis não é mencionado pelo nome na história, mas o pianista no illo na página 63 parece com ele, e "Honky Tonk Train Blues" é seu trabalho mais famoso.)
Trecho:
But the girl had produced a small cranked handle from the lid, and, inserting it in a hole in the side of the box, busied herself by winding up an unseen mechanism that creaked and groaned as though burdened with a century of rust and dirt. Then she pushed a small lever near to the turntable, and the latter began to revolve. Carefully, she picked up the long cylindrical tone arm, and dropped the needle on to the shiny black recording. Bax listened—horrified, but fascinated.
The quality was atrocious by twenty-first century standards. There was an almost intolerable hiss and mush from the needle point, and the reproduction was tinny and unreal, but the music that came from the grille was recognisable. It was a recording of a pre-Inferno instrument, a primitive hammer and string device that produced music from the out-moded Reversionist twelve-note chromatic scale. But as he listened the rhythm of the music seeped into his brain.
It was a sound that had not been heard in the world for nearly a hundred years, a type of music utterly foreign to a humanity that knew only the synthetic discords and subtle rhythmic interplay of tones and harmonics produced by an audio-permutator from a metal matrix, inscribed with curves and lines, corresponding to mathematical equations and formulas. It gripped him and hypnotised him. He felt his feet tapping instinctively in time with the precise beat and the dynamic syncopated chords and melody.
It was piano music. It was wonderful piano music. He was listening to boogie-woogie, to the Honky Tonk Train Blues, played by an acknowledged master of his craft. It was Reversionist and primitive, while he was a technocrat and a world-famous composer, but he was entranced.