When we listen to a recording of an old song — say, the D.C. nightclub semi-fixture Eva Foster singing “You’ll Never Know” roughly 68 years ago — something excellent happens: the air that surrounds us shakes the same way it shook in 1953. Is there anything else like it? Old music might plunge our imaginations into the past, but more tangibly, it changes the physical reality directly outside of our heads. Listening to an old song isn’t a revisitation. It’s a material reenactment. Then happens now.