The development of musical recording
- Key People:
- Georg Solti
- Herbert von Karajan
- Tony Wilson
- Related Topics:
- music
- sound recording
- race records
The early years
In 1877 the U.S. inventor Thomas Edison heard “Mary had a little lamb” emanate from a machine into which he had just spoken the ditty. It was the first time a recording of the human voice had been reproduced, and the event signaled the birth of the phonograph.
Edison sent representatives, machines, and cylinders to Europe almost as soon as he had invented the phonograph, and between 1888 and 1894 recordings were made by such notables as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and even Johannes Brahms, who played a Hungarian rhapsody. The first “celebrity” recording, however, was made in Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories when the pianist Josef Hofmann, then a 12-year-old prodigy, paid a visit to Edison’s studio in 1888. Hans von Bülow followed shortly after with a recording of a Frédéric Chopin mazurka on the piano.
In 1894 Charles and Émile Pathé built a small phonograph factory in a suburb of Paris and began to record singers as eminent as Mary Garden. Within a decade their catalog boasted some 12,000 items, and their name became almost synonymous with the cylinder phonograph in Europe. Meanwhile, Emile Berliner, a German immigrant living in Washington, D.C., had filed a patent in 1887 for a “Gramophone,” using a disc rather than a cylinder, and he began manufacturing Gramophones and discs in 1894. The discs had the commercial advantage of being more easily manufactured than the cylinders. One of his representatives established a branch in London, the Gramophone Company (in 1898); a branch in Berlin, Deutsche Grammophon AG; and one in France, the Compagnie Français du Gramophone, while Berliner’s brother set up a disc-pressing facility in Hannover, Germany. Most of Europe’s recording industry thus was started by Berliner’s representatives, and in the United States the small Berliner organization was to turn into the giant Victor company.
By the beginning of the 20th century, recording industries had been established in Germany, Austria, Russia, and Spain. Much of the managerial and technical talent, not to mention equipment, had been imported from America. (By 1970, the positions had been reversed: Europe had gained command of most of the American market.)
During the 1890s, recordings had become popular primarily through coin-in-the-slot phonographs in public places. Talent was incidental to the novelty of the apparatus; most of the recordings were of whistlers, bands, comic numbers, ditties, and the like. In the first years of the 20th century, Victor and its affiliates raised cultural expectations with its Red Seal series (Red Label in Europe), particularly with discs made, beginning in 1902, by Enrico Caruso. By 1910 the vast majority of record sales—some estimates are as high as 85 percent—were classical.
The Red Label had been initiated in 1901 in Russia with some of the first 10-inch disc recordings made, and the basso Fyodor Chaliapin was among the first artists to record on the new Russian Red Label.
In 1902 Victor and another major label, Columbia, decided to help the development of the new industry by pooling their patents. Victor was thereby legally able to record on wax (which would then be electroplated) for the first time, and the new wax discs were then used in recording Caruso in Milan. Caruso’s discs were a major catalyst in transforming the amusing gadget of a phonograph into a respected cultural phenomenon. That same year the new series received London-made recordings by stars of the Covent Garden opera house, primarily through the efforts of the Gramophone Company’s music director, Landon Ronald, a bona fide serious musician and conductor who was able to convince his colleagues of the musical worth of the Gramophone. One instrumentalist also appeared in the new Red Label series, the violinist Jan Kubelík.
In the United States, Columbia followed suit in 1903 with its 10-inch Grand Opera Records, recording Metropolitan Opera stars. Shortly after, Victor began its own celebrity recording sessions of opera stars and others on 31/2-minute 12-inch discs. Victor also made many of its associated European companies’ Red Label recordings—which included Mary Garden singing music by Debussy with the composer at the piano—available in the United States on its Red Seal series. Columbia soon dropped its opera series when the recordings did not sell as well as songs and marches, but Victor saw an institutional value in the celebrity recordings. The prestige of the Red Seal influenced Victor’s other products: “Victrola” became, in the popular mind, almost a generic term for the (disc) phonograph, and the company practically monopolized the quality-minded market for many years. Indeed, the total Western Hemisphere record market became virtually monopolized by Victor and Columbia, while their London affiliates controlled the rest of the world. The first major break did not come until World War I, when ties were severed with Deutsche Grammophon, which emerged after the war as the independent Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft (DGG).
Between 1907 and 1910 Columbia tried to approach Victor’s cultural prominence by releasing records from Europe and later by reinstating its own recording sessions with operatic singers. Columbia also began issuing double-sided discs, as had already been done in Europe. Victor did not do so until 1923.
During the early days of recording, both the cylinder and the disc were produced acoustically rather than electronically. A singer would sing into a horn, and the accompanist behind him played a piano placed on a platform so that the rear of the instrument—with the back removed—would also be level with the horn. With the development of a sound box to be placed on violins and violas, small orchestras could be used as accompaniment, but bassoons were required to play the cello part and a tuba the double bass part. It was an event worthy of a London newspaper announcement in 1904 when Kubelík made two records with his own Stradivarius, rather than on a violin with the sound box. When symphonic recordings came to be made, the wind and brass instruments still played or doubled the parts written for the lower strings, which could not be reproduced adequately. Although acoustical recordings were improved by the 1920s, the problems were not overcome until the introduction of the microphone and the consequent electrical recording process around 1925.
Birth of a mass medium
In the decade 1910–20 the phonograph became a truly mass medium for popular music, and recordings of large-scale orchestral works and other classical instrumental music proliferated. The rise of the popular record coincided in the United States with the new ragtime, popularized by Scott Joplin’s rags at the turn of the century and sensationalized by Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” written in 1910, which swept the country the following year. It stimulated an unprecedented dance craze at a time when the phonograph was becoming increasingly available. As the fad spread to millions who had never danced before, phonographs were sold to people who had never owned records before. Between 1914 and 1919 phonograph sales increased more than fivefold. In 1917 Victor issued the first jazz recordings, by the Original Dixieland Jass (sic) Band, but few major jazz releases appeared before the 1920s.
The first large-scale symphonic recording, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, was issued in 1909 in England. The first attempt to record a concerto came the following year, also in London, when Wilhelm Backhaus recorded a cut version of the first movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. In 1913 the first complete symphonies, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth, were recorded in Germany under an anonymous conductor; later that year, a celebrity conductor, Arthur Nikisch, led a full-scale symphony for the first time, again the Beethoven Fifth. Solo instrumentalists vied with the opera singers for the record-buying public’s affection, mainly by recording tidbits. In 1917 Victor began to record with a combination that was to prove its star classical music attraction for decades: Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The serious recording of serious music became a growing phenomenon as the phonograph matured during the early 1920s. Tidbits and orchestral snatches gave way to a spate of uncut symphonies, sonatas, quartets, and concerti; the music itself came to mean as much as its star performers, and the electrical recording process, from 1925 on, raised the quality of the recordings as well. But in the mid-1920s radio, which provided free music, developed, and this new factor, plus the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, threw the phonograph industry into serious decline.
The companies realigned themselves. In 1929 the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) bought Victor. Later that year, Edison left the phonograph business he had created. In 1931 the English Columbia Graphophone Company divested itself of its near-defunct American progenitor and joined the Gramophone Company to form Electric and Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI), bringing into the merger nearly every important European firm except DGG and its export label, Polydor. American Columbia was revived by its purchase, in 1938, by the Columbia Broadcasting System.
During the 1930s, as the American companies relied mainly on dance records in jukeboxes to satisfy a dwindled market, Europe supplied a slow but steady trickle of classical recordings. In 1931 the His Master’s Voice (HMV) label in Great Britain began its “Society” issues: a limited public was asked to subscribe in advance to then esoteric releases—the complete Beethoven piano sonatas played by Artur Schnabel or Pablo Casals performing the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. A new British company, Decca, organized in 1929, also began to issue serious recordings. In the United States, Columbia began to record a number of distinguished orchestras, including those of New York City, Chicago, Cleveland, and Minneapolis. RCA retained its leadership, however, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky, and—perhaps the greatest orchestral combination ever assembled—the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini, as well as with the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
