The development of musical recording

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.