Wax in My Ears: An Online Journey
By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER
September 10, 2008; Page D11
Back when I was an adolescent collector of antique
phonograph records with
limited pocket capital, my quarry was the black shellac
78. The immediate
ancestors of vinyl LPs, these 78 rpm records were playable
on the 1918
spring-wound, French-polished mahogany Victrola I had
bought for eight
bucks at a local antique shop. Conveniently, they were
also playable on
any modern turntable equipped with a 78 rpm setting. There
was, however,
another recording format that I ignored -- wax cylinders.
These were
mainly produced by the company owned by the phonograph's
inventor, Thomas
Edison. Not only were cylinders extremely fragile and hard
to store, but
they could be played only on antique cylinder phonographs,
an investment I
could ill afford. But now, thanks to the Internet, I have
been able to
supplement my shellac collection while discovering the
extraordinary
pleasure of cylinders. And, as I can preview and download
my finds on my
computer, no antique equipment or new shelf space is
required. The
material is usually free for personal use, though you
should check each
Web site for usage-rights information.
Because historic records of classical repertoire are amply
represented on
CD, my chief crop as a Web harvester of virtual wax and
shellac is the
repertoire of late-19th and early 20th-century popular
music -- vaudeville
routines, minstrel shows, ragtime, dance and salon music,
all of it
exploited by Edison and other record companies. Among the
Web sites that
feature digital transcriptions of old recordings, one of
my favorites is
Turtle's Jukebox (http://turtleservices.com/jukebox.htm1)
with a small but
slowly growing archive of Victor, Columbia and Edison
records made before
1930. Also interesting are the historic recordings section
of the Internet
Archive (www.archive.org/details/78rpm2) and the Edison
Historic site at
Menlo Park (http://www.nps.gov/archive/ edis/edisonia
/sounds.html3).
However, for its scholarly attention to detail, high audio
standards, ease
of navigation and sheer abundance of delightful material,
my favorite
haunt is the Cylinder Restoration Project at the
University of California,
Santa Barbara's Todd Library
(http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu4). Its
vast archive of 7,500 cylinders dates from the 1890s
through the 1920s.
Many are in the public domain, and most are downloadable
in MP3 format and
24-bit WAV, as well as streaming audio. David Seubert, the
library's
curator of performing arts, says that "being able to take
material
inaccessible to the general public -- much of it for over
a century -- and
make a large amount of it available for free is immensely
gratifying."
Launched in 2002 and funded in part by a $205,000 National
Leadership
Grant awarded in 2003, the CRP has been transferring its
cylinders using a
French-made Archeophone together with digital audio
editing software.
According to Mr. Seubert, "the Archeophone is a universal
cylinder player
employing electrical reproduction and modern styli (such
as Stanton or
Shure cartridges) to play back any of the varieties of
cylinders made by
Edison, Indestructible and other firms. Unlike antique
equipment, it
allows minute control over the playback speed and a much
higher quality of
reproduction."
Though Edison has always been credited with inventing the
phonograph, he
based his first cylinder on a French invention, Lèon
Scott's
Phonautograph, developed between 1853 and 1860. Scott's
mechanism was
simplicity itself: A recording horn funneled vocal sound
waves to a
diaphragm (think of a kazoo) connected to a vibrating
bristle stylus,
which left the visible pattern of the sound waves along
the surface of a
revolving paper cylinder coated with lampblack. But
"Phonautograms"
couldn't be played back.
Edison improved on Scott's idea. Instead of paper, he used
tin-foil --
along which the stylus made a groove. And it was on this
still fragile
medium that Edison made his very first sound recording in
1877 -- "Mary
had a little lamb." Playback reversed the process and
produced the sound.
Edison initially regarded his invention purely as a
dictation machine, and
in the 1880s his agents were recording the voices of
celebrities from Lord
Tennyson to Florence Nightingale on wax cylinders -- more
practical than
tinfoil. One recording, from 1888, preserves the prophetic
voice of the
English composer Arthur Sullivan (W.S. Gilbert's musical
partner) saluting
Edison with the observation that "I am . . . astonished at
the wonderful
power you have developed, and terrified at the thought
that so much
hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. . . ."
By 1900, recorded speech was yielding to recorded music,
especially opera.
But by 1905 cylinders were losing their market share to
disc records,
invented by Emile Berliner in 1887. Though discs became
the industry
standard, Edison continued to produce cylinders through
1929 (in a more
durable celluloid plastic he called Blue Amberol).
Though there is some fascinating opera and concert music
among the CRP's
cylinders, the bulk of the repertoire is popular,
featuring gifted
performers who were household names in their day. Billy
Murray, Henry
Burr, the tenor Walter Van Brunt and the Scottish comedian
Sir Harry
Lauder were already familiar to me through their
recordings for Victor and
Columbia. But the Web site's archives introduced me to
several artists,
most notably the delectable comedic songstress Ada Jones
and her frequent
recording partner Len Spencer, a versatile character actor
with an
exceptionally malleable baritone speaking voice.
In routines like "The Crushed Tragedian," "Hezekiah
Hopkins Comes to Town"
and "Becky and Izzy," Jones and Spencer exploit
crystalline diction and
consummate gifts for accents, dialects and vivid
characterization that
reflect the American "melting pot" at the beginning of the
20th century.
Many of these accents -- especially upper crust and Bowery
New York, Down
East, Southern minstrel, Yiddish, German, Italian and
Irish -- represented
a then-living variegated ethnic tradition that stretched
back to before
the Civil War. Even Standard American speech, as spoken
and sung here, has
an elegant, almost patrician crispness that has passed
from the scene.
Musically, the cylinder repertoire of humorous songs,
romantic ballads,
vocal quartets and dialect routines vividly preserves the
alternatingly
sentimental and upbeat tastes of the era between the
presidencies of
Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. There's also an
invaluable
representation of genuine Americana. "If you want to know
how hymns were
sung 100 years ago," Mr. Seubert says, "or how country
music was sung and
played, these cylinders preserve authentic performances."
Among the most compelling recordings in the archive is a
group of
cylinders made by the composer Victor Herbert (1859-1924)
with his
orchestra. He was widely popular as a symphonic conductor
as well as for
such hit operettas as "Naughty Marietta." His recordings
of concert works
like Brahms's Sixth Hungarian Dance and Mendelssohn's "Ruy
Blas" overture
document the expressive late-19th-century performance
style, with its
flexible tempos (rubato) and emotional string portamento
(sliding between
important notes). Of course, Herbert's recordings of his
own compositions
represent definitive interpretations -- the 1909 "Rose of
the World" from
"The Rose of Algeria" is especially touching, with a
golden cornet
substituting for a romantic tenor. Surprisingly, the
recorded sound of
Herbert's cylinders is often so good that you can hear the
delicate
subtleties of his instrumentation and also the eloquent
precision of an
ensemble well-drilled by a beloved chief who knew exactly
how he wanted
his music to go.
Mr. Scherer writes about music and the arts for the
Journal. His current
book is "A History of American Classical Music"
(Sourcebooks).