10000 wax cylinders online

The University of California (Santa Barbara) is in the process of digitizing its collection of wax cylinders dating from the late 19th and very early 20th centuries. 10,000 done and 2,000 to come. The limitations of technology then mean that individual recordings are fairly short, so there's no way you'll get  symphonic works, far less full operas. But there are interesting snippets like a few minutes of Ah manon mi tradace from 1901, and Angel's Serenade by Caetano Braga recorded by the Edison Symphony Orchestra, created in order to make recordings for Thomas A Edison. I don't know if they did regular concert work. Hence the preponderance of popular music and ethnographic collections, some made in the field. Edison himself travelled all round the world, recording sounds and making moving pictures. The ethnographic recordings are particularly interesting since they capture a world that no longer exists: Tahitian and Native American performers, for example, and the sounds of Europe and America from times past.

Some of these recordings have been digitized before, but it's still fun to listen in on a world that's long gone, and hear the voices of the dead (literally) announce with great excitement the name of the recording organization. There isn't much in the way of "music" in these performances, but that's hardly the issue. The very novelty of being able to reproduce sound through a machine was a thrill.

First Schubert recording - 1890 out now!

First ever Schubert recording? It's 1890 but out now. In the photo is Thomas Edison, with an early phonograph machine - revolutionary technology! It was an experiemntal technique, so Edison marketed it by recording famous people and sounds. The Schubert recording (Wohin) was made on 23rd January 1890 in Cologne. Franz Lachner, who knew Schubert personally had died just three days before in Munich, so it's feasible that there might have been others around who remembered Schubert himself. Performers are Karl Mayer (1852-1933)  baritone, and Franz Wüllner (1832-1902)  piano. The Wagnerian friend who sent me details adds "Wüllner was the conductor of the first ever Rheingold and Walkuere and teacher of Mengelberg, von Schuch, Andreae, Oestvig and many others. A unique document if only it could be heard.!" because the sound quality is hardly bearable. You can hear voices in the background, and the singer seems to wait til it's OK to start.

The audio engineer was Theo Wangemann who worked for Edison in Europe. He also recorded Otto von Bismarck singing the Marsellaise, and Helmut von Moltke reciting Goethe and Shakespeare at Kreisau. A lost world! The cylinders were discovered in 1957 but some were only made available this week.   Here is the link, scroll down and enjoy. SACD it ain't but who cares? Just imagine  those people huddled over state of the art technology, not knowing we'd heard them 122 years later.

Wangemann also recorded Johannes Brahms, playing Brahms, Hungarian Dance no 1, recorded 2nd December 1889. Listen HERE, scroll down.   There are lots of archaic recordings around, which I've written about here many times, including Mahler plays Mahler, Grieg plays Grieg , Grainger playing Grieg, Schoenberg conducting Mahler in 1934, Anton Webern conducting Schubert and the first recording of the Habanera from Carmen. Lots of archive early film including Edison in China 1898. I really should organize all the pieces I've done on this site so they're easier to find.

Grieg plays Grieg - resurrecting the mammoth

 Here, Edvard Grieg plays his own A Butterfly on a piano roll made in 1906. Under the surface noise and primitive sound capture, enough remains that we get an idea of what Grieg himself sounded like, as a pianist.  There are numerous ancient recordings like this about, remastered, cleaned up and reissued. On this site you can hear Mahler play Mahler, (transcriptions of songs and symphonic segments), Debussy and Rachmaninov playing Debussy and Brahms playing Brahms.

Now there's a new reconstruction from Simax records, specialists in Scandinavian repertoire. Two enthusiasts, Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison, have recreated Grieg in a new recording Chasing the Butterfly. What they've done is a mix of cleaning the original and replaying it on Grieg's own piano the low tech way - fingers and feet on keys and pedals. The result is such that you can play Grieg and Slåttebrekk together and marvel at the similarity. Please read the article here in the Financial Times for more detail. 

Reconstructions fascinate because we assume that we're hearing how the composer would have wanted the music played. But it's dangerous to assume that these very early recordings have any kind of interpretive authority. Real performance traditions developed from full, live concerts. These early recordings were semi-experimental. Recording technology 1880-1920 had major limitations. Often they ran only a few minutes - sometimes as little as 120 seconds - so performances had to be tailored to fit the medium, not the other way around. In any case, performers knew that most people wouldn't be listening to cylinders except as snapshots of the real thing. Because the technology was expensive, often only one take was made, not necessarily the best. And many composers aren't specially wonderful performers (compare Debussy and Rachmaninov). When we think of recording, we're referencing 90 years of "proper" recordings. But those who lived pre-1920 did not think in those terms at all. Yiou can almost imagine Mahler sniffing: "If you think you MUST play X at those tempi, you're nuts".

So resurrecting the Mammoth in music history is fascinating, but of limited real application in terms of performance practice. What makes music isn't slavishly following some sacred rule, but bringing out the spirit in the music. It'll always be personal, created afresh by intelligent, capable performers. Still, it's fascinating to listen to these ancient clips that preserve a moment of a composer's life even though he and those helping him make the artefact are long gone. Below is Brahms, playing for Thomas A Edison in 1889. (Also see Edison's film of Hong Kong in 1898  on this site, and his films on Native Americns dancing in 1894):