1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording (Various Artists, 1920-25) - PASC734

This album is included in the following sets:

1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording (Various Artists, 1920-25) - PASC734

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Overview

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4
SAINT-SAËNS Danse Macabre
BIZET Petite Suite
Music by Chopin, Meyerbeer, Mascagni, Schubert & many more

Studio and Live Recordings, 1920 - 1925
Total duration: 2hr 20:22

Alfred Cortot
Jesse Crawford
Giuseppe De Luca
Art Gillham
Mischa Levitzky
Margarete Matzenauer
Landon Ronald
Leopold Stokowski

and many more

This set contains the following albums:

A century ago, the adoption of electrical recording by major labels on both sides of the Atlantic revolutionized the industry. The old method of recording acoustically through a horn-like apparatus had remained fundamentally unchanged since Edison’s invention of 1877, nearly 50 years earlier. With electrical recording, the frequency range captured on disc was greatly expanded. Instrumentalists and singers now sounded more realistic, and there was no longer a need to rescore orchestral music in order to reinforce the bass using tubas (although at first this continued to be done to accommodate acoustic reproducers). Full symphony orchestras and choruses of hundreds of singers could now be recorded. Moreover, recordings could now be taken outside small studios and into large concert halls, even into the open air.

To celebrate this sea change in recording history, Pristine presents in this release the landmark discs from 1925 that forever altered the way people listened to records. All of the major discs that appeared during that year and have long been mentioned in books like Roland Gelatt’s The Fabulous Phonograph (1954; rev. 1977) are here. This development, however, did not come out of nowhere; and our release also features some of the steps that led up to the “electric year”. Also included is the first complete release of all that was recorded of Calvin Coolidge’s Presidential Inauguration ceremony, transferred from rare test pressings.

While claims regarding the “earliest recorded electrical” this or “first issued electrical” that continue to be disputed, one fact that historians have agreed upon is that the first issued electrical recording was made on Armistice Day, 1920, at Westminster Abbey during the ceremony for the interment of the Unknown Warrior of World War I. British engineers Lionel Guest and H. O. Merriman had developed a system utilizing something similar to the speaking end of a telephone as a microphone, transmitting the signal via phone lines to an offsite cutting turntable.

The resultant signal was dim, nearly overwhelmed by the surface noise of the record, and muddied by the vast reverberant space of the church in which it was recorded. (The cutting turntable had not yet come up to speed when "Abide with me" began to be recorded, resulting in the fall in pitch heard as the record begins.) Still, the melodies of the hymns can be clearly discerned, as well as the fact that people are singing (although the text cannot be made out) and that instruments were playing. The record was issued by English Columbia, and sold locally as a fundraiser for the church; but the experiment proved to be a dead end for this system, although it did spur English Columbia to further experimentation in electrical recording over the next few years.

(A note about the pitching of these tracks is in order. At this time, Royal bands still tuned to the Victorian-era “high pitch” of A4=452 Hz. Since the Grenadier Guards would not retire their older instruments until 440 Hz was standardized for Royal bands in 1927, these two tracks have been pitched higher than the others in this release.)

The next two tracks shed light on a pioneer of electrical recording whose work had been largely ignored by (or perhaps unknown to) audio historians until recent years. Orlando R. Marsh was a Chicago-based engineer who developed an electrical system and began issuing recordings using it on his own Autograph label as early as 1922. One of the first performers to gain fame from this source was silent movie house organist Jesse Crawford, who began a forty-year recording career with these discs. Using the old acoustic system with its limited frequency range, it was thought to be impossible to capture the sound of an organ. Marsh was able to accomplish this with his system, even recording Crawford on-site in the large cinema in which he regularly played. Marsh’s system, however, had variable results. The following track, featuring Dell Lampe’s Orchestra (at the time, Chicago’s highest-paid and most popular local dance band) is not quite as successful, exhibiting a more restricted frequency range commonly associated with acoustic recordings.

Since 1919, Western Electric, the commercial research and development arm of Bell Laboratories, had been attempting to develop electrical recording under the direction of Joseph P. Maxfield and Henry C. Harrison. Part of their experiments involved recording broadcast concerts of the New York Philharmonic via direct radio lines. (Pristine has already released several sides recorded in that manner from an April, 1924 concert conducted by Willem Mengelberg on PASC 184.) By late 1924, they had made sufficient progress to offer their system to the two major labels in America, Victor and Columbia. In the same month that Marsh’s Dell Lampe recording was made, Columbia had one of their featured pianists, Mischa Levitzki, make the test recording of Chopin presented here. Even through the surface noise of this unique test pressing, the gain in frequency range and presence is audible.

Surprisingly, Western Electric’s offer at first did not attract any takers. American Columbia was nearly broke and couldn’t afford the licensing fee and royalties being demanded, while Victor’s management had an almost pathological aversion to anything related to its growing competitor, radio, including the use of microphones. It was only after a disastrous Christmas sales season at the end of 1924 that Victor bit the bullet and became open to the offer.

In the meantime, the manager of the New York plant where Western Electric was having its test records pressed surreptitiously sent copies of some of the discs to an old friend in England – Louis Sterling, the head of English Columbia. The package arrived on Christmas Eve, 1924, and Sterling auditioned the discs on Christmas day. The following day, he was aboard the first ship he could book to New York, eager to cut a deal with WE. For their part, WE insisted that the rights could only be granted to an American company; so Sterling swiftly obtained a loan to buy a controlling interest in American Columbia. Shortly afterward, Victor signed up, as well.

By early February, 1925, Victor had set up a special studio in Camden to work exclusively on test recordings using the new system. The Giuseppe De Luca recording included here, from a test pressing unpublished on 78 rpm, was made during this interim period. (British record collector and researcher Jolyon Hudson has identified several sides believed to stem from these trials that were sent over to HMV after March, 1925 and issued in England. However, because Victor did not include recording matrix or date data for these electric tests in its surviving logs, it is impossible to know with certainty whether these sides predate the label’s first electrical releases.)

By the end of February, Victor was ready to proceed with recording electrically with a view to publish. However, they were pipped to the post by rival Columbia, who made two sides which, coupled on a single disc, became the earliest Western Electric process electrical recordings to be issued. Art Gillham, who was billed as “The Whispering Pianist”, had made a successful career on the radio with his intimate, confessional singing, presaging the kind of “crooning” that electrical recording would make possible and which would change the direction of popular singing. Sibiliants that could never be recorded acoustically could finally be heard. Gillham (who was neither fat nor bald, as he described himself in “I had someone else”, but rather resembled silent film comedian Harol