"The phonograph is to music what the printing press is to literature," observed Jacques Barzun, the first historian to recognize the phonograph as a cultural force. His bold comparison now seems vindicated in this season of centennial retrospect.
As our century departs and closing balances are drawn, the
advent of recording emerges as the pivotal musical event of our
era. For the first time since its immemorial beginnings, music
no long
er
must vanish with its own sound. The spinning disc has made music
independent of time and place.
Archivists of recorded music now speak of the "century of sound" to describe the career span of the phonograph, which came in with the beginning of the twentieth century and, by its end, had become music's main venue and principal market.
The phonograph in its infancy wasn't intended for music at all. Aware of tonal shortcomings in his "talking machine," Thomas Edison envisioned his 1877 invention as a dictating device. Only after nearly three decades of technical refinement did the phonograph attain any measure of musical aptitude.
The first major classical recording session took place on March 18, 1902, in a Milan hotel room, where Enrico Caruso, thirty and not yet famous, addressed himself to the flared maw of the recording horn. Surprisingly, he registered well. His strong, slightly baritonal voice was placed just right to drown out the rushing surface noise inherent in early discs, even though the piano accompaniment shrank to a faint tinkle. True, horn resonance falsified the tenor's timbre, but phrasing, inflection and nuance came through and vividly conveyed the singer's style. Listeners were enchanted (as much by the novelty as by the music), sales soared, and countless singers, classical and popular, followed in Caruso's wake, creating an ample catalogue of vocal recordings during the next twenty years.
Orchestra sound fared worse. Brass bands and the jaunty blare of early jazz could cut through the noise of primitive recordings -- at least in the upper range -- but the recording horn faltered before the subtler, more complex textures of symphonic sound. Violins hardly registered at all, while cellos and basses, which furnish the rich foundation of orchestral sonority, lay totally outside the range of the acoustic horn. Nevertheless, in 1913 the Berlin Philharmonic attempted the first recording of an entire symphony -- Beethoven's Fifth, with Arthur Nikisch, the foremost conductor of his day. The result was dismal -- Beethoven reduced to a thin, tinny mewling.
Americans were hoping to do better. The Victor Talking Machine Company of New Jersey, a predecessor of RCA, widened the end of the recording horn into a giant igloo that enclosed the Boston Symphony, conducted by Karl Muck. The idea was to concentrate the musical vibrations of the entire orchestra on the recording needle scratching wiggles into a spinning platter of beeswax. Some sixty sweaty musicians huddled in the igloo in the August heat of 1917, doing their best for Beethoven and Wagner. But even the igloo didn't help. Though hailed as a triumph in Victor's advertisements, the feeble screech coming off these discs was a travesty of orchestral glow.
After that, symphonic recording dwindled to a few sporadic sessions. Many classical musicians of that time spoke disdainfully of "canned music," refusing to set foot in the studio. Even so, by the century's second decade, the phonograph was flourishing -- within limits. The horned contraption in everyone's front parlor could sing arias and do the shimmy, but it wasn't up to Brahms.
All this changed suddenly in the mid-'20s, when the phonograph reached musical maturity in a single mutational leap: it went electric.
Oddly enough, it wasn't the recording industry that laid the groundwork for this radical shift. In their effort to extend the long-distance reach of the telephone, engineers at Bell Laboratories in New York had begun their seminal research on the electrical amplification of sound. At about the same time, the nascent technology of radio led to instructive encounters between music and microphone. These combined developments could be tailored to the needs of the phonograph; by 1925, they had culminated in the first electrical recordings.
The difference was stunning. Electrically amplified and emerging from loudspeakers rather than horns, the reproduced music at last mustered sufficient volume to convey something of the impact of an actual performance. And with the tonal range reaching farther in both bass and treble, it was possible to achieve on recordings an adequate semblance of orchestral sound. The entire realm of music now stood open to the rapidly maturing art of electrical recording.
Not everyone applauded. Compton Mackenzie, editor of The Gramophone -- a British journal devoted mainly to record reviews -- uttered warnings. "The introduction of electricity to the recording process," he declared, "is an unnecessary and possibly dangerous complication." Like many of his Edwardian contemporaries, Mackenzie found electricity alarming.
Musicians, by contrast, were quick to recognize that the phonograph had changed its character. From a mere entertainment device, it had evolved into a shaping force of music. The new technology had given music its first means of absolute documentation, making it possible to preserve every type of music in the sound itself. Music on paper -- in the notation invented by Guido d'Arezzo just a millennium before -- preserved music mummified, as it were. Recordings, by contrast, captured living music-making in all the vitality of its breathing phrases.
Igor Stravinsky said, after his first recording sessions in Paris around 1930, "On record I am able to express all my intentions with real exactitude.... Everyone who listens to my records hears the music free from any distortion of my thought." Similarly, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who also liked to record his own works, stressed the importance of recording as a supplement to the written score: "Until actual sound is produced, music does not exist."
The leading maestros at La Scala -- notably Lorenzo Molajoli and Tullio Serafin -- presided over the first complete operas on disc (mainly Verdi), while Karl Muck in Bayreuth and Bruno Walter in Vienna recorded excerpts of Wagner. Eminent conductors such as Furtwängler, Weingartner, Mengelberg and Beecham lost no time in putting the staples of the concert repertory on record, all issued in bulky sets of 78rpm discs that played no more than four minutes per side. In America, it was Leopold Stokowski who first recognized the musical potential of the electric phonograph and built an impressive and venturesome catalogue for Victor records with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Among soloists, Artur Schnabel traversed Beethoven's piano sonatas in a pathbreaking series, Heifetz and Szigeti explored the violin repertory, and the Budapest and Busch Quartets first essayed the pillars of chamber music.
A special aura emanates from these vintage recordings, which may be why so many of them have resurfaced on CD lately. Often the performances throb with an almost hypnotic intensity stemming from the artists' attitude toward the new medium.
Today, recording is routine in the life of musicians. Back then, it was a kind of apotheosis. Records were not yet an ephemeral market item with a short shelf-life; they were perceived as a musician's lasting testament. The way to the studio was a pilgrimage. Before the microphone, musicians felt in the presence of eternity, and they played as if they were setting down the music for all time to come. As Bruno Walter poignantly put it, "Recordings are our only share of immortality."
At mid-century, the technical fallout from World War II brought other refinements. Submarine warfare, requiring precise analysis of underwater sounds, had led to the development of sensitive microphones and amplifiers capable of handling a wide range of frequencies with minimal distortion. Applied to musical purposes, these technical advances laid the groundwork for what later became known as high-fidelity. By 1947, British Decca issued the first recordings that covered the entire range of human hearing from 20 to 20,000 hertz, thus capturing all the overtones that give voices and instruments their particular timbre.
The following year, Dr. Peter Goldmark at CBS Laboratories perfected a new groove-cutting method that resulted in the vinyl LP, an "unbreakable" disc playing nearly half an hour per side. At last, it was possible to listen to entire movements without interruption.
The vinyl LP stimulated a vast expansion of the recorded repertory, which gradually encompassed the entire history of music. Aided by postwar prosperity and promotional pricing, the LP player grew vastly popular. By the late '50s, the phonograph had surpassed the concert hall as the primary showcase for musicians, and a recording date often served as the springboard for a musical career. Composers as well as performers came to rely on recordings for exposure and recognition.
Meanwhile, the German wartime invention of magnetic tape had been eagerly adopted in sound studios everywhere, allowing recordings to be edited by cutting and splicing the tape. Such patching resulted in note-perfect recordings, though often at the cost of the flow and spontaneity of an unedited performance.
In the late '50s, the new trick of cutting two separate tracks into a single groove led to the first stereophonic recordings, with left and right channels mimicking the perception pattern of our two ears. That way, recordings could take into account the three-dimensional aspect of human hearing and convey the acoustical ambience in which the music is performed. Too often, however, exuberant engineers used stereo for shallow show-off effects, such as pinpointing the location of the players. A sense of depth and tonal perspective often was sacrificed to mere ping-pong directionality.
This drew irate reactions. "I want my orchestra to play well," stormed Thomas Beecham. "I don't give a damn where they sit." Listening to the playback after his first stereo session with the New York Philharmonic, Dmitri Mitropoulos complained to his CBS technicians, "I want the orchestra to play together, but you pull them apart." It took years for engineers to learn that the stereo effect must remain subservient to musical aesthetics.
The last chapter of our century saw the marriage of the phonograph with the computer, with the digital disc as their legitimate offspring. The computer -- the icon of our era -- has taught us (or we have taught it) to encode information, including images and sound, as binary bits. Musical recordings thus became a form of digital data. Recordings on CD no longer were a wiggly analog of musical waveforms. Rather, they were a data track that could be scanned by a laser beam replacing the traditional needle.
The twin plagues of the old needle-in-groove method -- frictional wear and surface noise -- had at last been eradicated. Touched only by weightless laser light, the digital discs last indefinitely, and the music emerges against a background of silence that reveals the subtlest sonic nuance. The one remaining flaw of CDs in their present form -- a slight hardening of tonal timbre -- undoubtedly will be remedied early in the next century by refined software for the conversion of sound signals to numerical digits and vice versa.
How, then, can we sum up the "century of sound"? From our present technically elevated vantage point, the past appears perhaps a bit primitive. But then, the first hundred years are the hardest, and the phonograph has acquitted itself well.
Contrary to promotional boasts, the digital phonograph does not (yet) replicate the true sound of music. It still fails to match exactly the direct experience of a live musical performance. But at its best, the phonograph provides a pleasing facsimile of music, close enough to evoke in our minds the illusion of the real thing. And for the past seventy-five years, recordings have spread before our vastly enriched ears an unprecedented overview of music in the making.
OPERA NEWS, December 1999 Copyright © 1999 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
Sight & Sound
The First Hundred Years Are the Hardest
The First Hundred Years Are the Hardest