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| From | synchro1 <synchro1@ix.netcom.com> |
| Subject | collecting old records (very old) |
| Date | Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:47:07 -0800 (GMT-08:00) |
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Not specifically pop, but I am sure many vinyl junkies will identify with the sense of joy and wonder in this opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal:
Waxing Nostalgic About Early Recordings
In an old attic, I found a treasure trove for a music lover.
BY BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Recently, while looking through an old house for sale in our neighborhood, I came upon a pile of 78s in the attic. (Note to those who regard even vinyl LPs as antiques: 78 rpm shellac discs were the recording-industry standard before 1950.) I mentioned my interest to the owner, who was delighted that the records would have a good home. They had been her grandmother's, and when I came by to remove them, I discovered that the single pile was only the tip of the iceberg. There were several hundred in all. Bliss!
I grew up in the era of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. My family and friends all played LPs and 45s on their "hi-fi" sets. But a different drummer set my musical gait. Not only was I drawn to classical music, but I preferred to listen to it on old 78s. My affinity had been seeded by a small parcel of old records that had been my grandfather's. They were a motley assortment of 1920s dance music, comic songs, some orchestral selections and opera records.
Two discs particularly fascinated me: Enrico Caruso singing "Rachel, Quand du Seigneur" from Hálevy's opera "La Juive" and John McCormack singing "Una Furtiva Lagrima" from Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore." I loved everything about these relics: I loved the heft of these old discs in my hands; I loved the way they sounded, not just the expressive power of the two tenor voices but also the wheezy orchestras that accompanied them. I loved the way the big red Victor Talking Machine label looked as it spun so fast on the turntable. (As a kid, I used to wonder if the dog listening to his master's voice was getting dizzy.) And I was mystified by the black, blank side of each disc, for until 1923 Victor red seals, the label's premium line, were all single-sided; only cheaper black seals, and records by other labels were double-faced.
It wasn't until high school that I was able to indulge my passion for old music on old shellac at the Salvation Army depot on Manhattan's West 46th Street. There was a room in that blessed establishment piled high with 78s and old books--five cents a disc, 10 cents a volume. For $2 I could fill two shopping bags. I'd stuff one with the works of Lord Macaulay, broken sets of Bulwer-Lytton, leatherbound texts on practical surgery (whose colored engravings were just as horrifyingly detailed as any photograph). In the other I'd load 20 78s (as many as I could carry), everything from Franz Léhar conducting selections from his operettas to Sousa's Band playing his "Pathfinder of Panama" march and the Peerless Quartet singing "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May," with lyrics by New York's dapper future mayor, Jimmy Walker.
Soon I was hunting for the Holy Grail: a genuine spring-wound Victrola. I finally found a 1917 table model in a little antiques shop in Queens. The price was $8, and I carried it home in my arms by bus. Upon arriving with my new treasure, I raised the heavy mahogany lid, savoring the motor's characteristic aroma of lubricating oil. I wound it up, placed a carefully chosen record on the green felt turntable, inserted a steel needle in the sound box, and felt my heart nearly burst as the voices of Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio Scotti and their colleagues melded together in my first experience of pure acoustical reproduction, the "Lucia" Sextet.
Acoustical recording and playback fascinated me because of their sheer mechanical simplicity. Before the introduction of electrical recording with a microphone in 1925, the recording industry still used the basic method invented by Edison in 1877: You sang, spoke or played into a recording horn--a large metal funnel--which collected the sound and channeled it to a recording head containing a micadiaphragm attached to a cutting stylus. The sound waves vibrated the diaphragm, which vibrated the stylus, which made a groove along the surface of a revolving wax disc or, in Edison's case, a cylinder. The resulting wax master was then used to create metal dies from which records were pressed. Basically, the process is reversed for playback on a gramophone. No vacuum tubes, no digital wizardry, no electronic amplification comes between you and the original performers.
Play a well-preserved acoustical record on a well-preserved gramophone (with a big external horn) or a Victrola (with the horn concealed inside the cabinet), and the sound usually surprises listeners because there's hardly any proverbial "scratchy" surface noise. That noise is only apparent when you play 78s on an electrical pickup, which amplifies the scratch along with the music.
This historical immediacy is especially telling when you consider that a number of major composers made 78 rpm records, among them Sir Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Ruggiero Leoncavallo supervised the first complete recording of "Pagliacci" in 1907; four years earlier he had composed his famous song "Mattinata" especially to fit on a 10-inch disc, and then accompanied Caruso's recording of it at the piano. And virtually all of this historic material is available on CD.
More than mere nostalgia, 78s are valuable historic documents of the way music was performed a century ago. Old 78s have attuned my ear to early-20th-century performance practice, especially in the case of vocal style, string and wind articulation, flexible tempo and phrasing that had been standard when Brahms, Dvorak, Verdi and Puccini were actively composing. For instance, singers and string players used to slide between important notes of a phrase, an articulation called portamento that generally vanished by 1950. And thanks to the crystalline diction of early recording artists, vocal discs, especially comic songs and scenes by prominent actors and comedians like John Barrymore, Al Jolson and Billy Murray, document subtle American accents that are no longer spoken.
I maintained my interest in old 78s while pursuing the university and postgraduate degrees that led me from singing to musicology and finally to journalism. And even though I treasure the thousands of CDs I've collected as a critic and lecturer, my passion has never abated.
That trove of 78s I found in my neighborhood proved to be gold. Once I began to sort through them (and to clean off half a century's accumulation of dust) I was astonished at the variety. There are several complete symphonies and operas, complete recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan, and an extraordinary wealth of dance music performed by Paul Whiteman and Duke Ellington. There are discs by Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor (gallows humor on the stock market, recorded right after the crash in 1929: "Reserve a hotel room and the clerk asks, 'For sleeping or jumping?'"). There's Gershwin playing piano in his "An American in Paris," Carl Sandburg singing and strumming folk songs, and a lugubrious ditty called "William Jennings Bryan's Last Fight," praising his old-time religion upon his death following the Scopes Monkey Trial. And there is a true novelty, a "Message by His Excellency Benito Mussolini to the North American People and the Italians of America." Recorded around 1929, in Italian, it reveals him as having a surprisingly well-modulated voice, quite unlike the ranting of his Nazi ally to the north.
I admit that I don't often go hunting for such troves--our house has only so much room to store them. But I'm one of the lucky ones, for my wife is not only patient with my obsession but over the years has come to understand it herself, just as, soon after we met, I came around to her enthusiasm for Wagner.
Mr. Scherer writes about classical music for the Journal.
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