100 Years Ago: the Giant Step of Electrical Recording

That big old horn you see at left is what musicians had to contend with in the early days of recording. Until 1925, you made a record by cozying up to the horn, which took the sounds you produced and drove a needle that scratched them (or a rude facsimile of them) onto disc. No microphones, no electronics.

The result was often dim, and worked best with a few voices or instruments. When you got the band together - as you can see in the image above from the Victor studio - the results could be cacophonous.

The horn was relatively insensitive, so orchestras resorted to using such instruments as the Stroh violin - you can see one at front, with its own horn poking out of the soundboard and pointed at the big recording horn.

Electrical recording was a leap forward - probably the biggest qualitative change ever in the recording industry. While acoustic recordings generally had a frequency response of about 300-3000 Hz, electrical recording then covered from about 50-6000 Hz, enough to dramatically improve fidelity.

To demonstrate this difference, I've prepared the same piece of music in acoustic and electrical recordings made just six years apart. For both of these, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski plays an excerpt from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade - "The Young Prince and Young Princess."

The acoustic recording, which is heavily cut and reorchestrated, comes from 1921. The sessions were arduous. Stokowski and band had devoted four dates to the piece in 1920 and 1921 without achieving an acceptable take. (This apparently was the norm rather than the exception for them.) Finally a good take (number 10) was set down on March 25, 1921.

Labels of the acoustic and electrical Scheherazade recordings

The critic Rob Cowan writes in Gramophone (I nicked this idea from him): "Listening to Stokowski’s acoustic recordings of music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, specifically ‘The Young Prince and Young Princess’ (recorded 1921), is instructive. The acoustic version ... sounds as if it’s being played by a chamber ensemble with bongos, whereas by the time the complete work was recorded in 1927, captured on wax, Stokowski’s characteristic Philadelphian opulence could be reproduced with impressive realism."

Stokowski twiddles the dials at an Academy of Music recording session

That second recording session took place in Philadelphia's Academy of Music on October 10, 1927, where the orchestra was able to record an acceptable take in two passes. The aural result is a good example of the Stokowski magic, why he was sometimes called the "old sorcerer," although he was not so old when these discs were made (38 and 45).

There's more about the transition to electrical recording in Rob Cowan's article. Also, historian Allan Sutton writes in detail about the beginnings of electrical recording here.

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Music from 'Lady in the Dark' - But Not by Kurt Weill

The Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin-Moss Hart musical Lady in the Dark was a major hit on Broadway in 1941. Hollywood, as it usually did, made plans for a film version, and then, as it also usually did, began making changes. One of the main modifications was to toss out most of the famous score. Very little "My Ship" and "This Is New." No "Tschaikowsky" (no Danny Kaye either). "The Saga of Jenny" and "Girl of the Moment" did remain.

Paramount did add some non-Weill music to its 1944 release, however. This post concerns the few numbers from the film that came out on commercial records. It is a companion to a post on my main blog that compiles the original recordings from the Broadway Lady in the Dark.

"Suddenly It's Spring"

The most important piece of music written for the film is "Suddenly It's Spring," a wonderful song by leading tunesmiths Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, who were most often found laboring on Bing Crosby's musicals. (They would win an Academy Award for "Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way that same year.)

Ginny Simms

Some record companies got behind "Suddenly It's Spring" - but not as many as you might think. Part of the problem was the ongoing musicians' strike, which was still in force for the biggest record labels in 1944. One company affected was Columbia; while it did record "Suddenly It's Spring" with Ginny Simms, it was with choral backing rather than orchestra. Her version is in the download. She aims to convey deep feeling, but ends up making this optimistic song ("You look at me / And suddenly it's spring") sound mournful.

One of the smaller companies that had made peace with the union also took up the song. HIT records, a budget label, enlisted Blue Barron's sweet band to record "Suddenly It's Spring" with the ever-chipper Tommy Ryan on vocals. The long-time Sammy Kaye vocalist had gone out on his own a few years before, and by 1944 was fronting the Barron ensemble for its leader, who was in uniform. On this record, you will hear Ryan introducing himself - it was common among such bands for the leader to announce the singer.

Technically, both Simms and Ryan do well by the song, which has a tricky release. I've included an aircheck by Frank Sinatra, where that great singer has trouble with the bridge on its second go-round. Nonetheless, only Sinatra's ecstatic version reveals the song's full stature. Too bad The Voice never did a commercial recording. The backing on the aircheck is almost certainly by Axel Stordahl.

"A Message for Liza"

The other music from Lady in the Dark to make it to record was, surprisingly, a bit of the movie score done by music director Robert Emmett Dolan. This music somehow came to the attention of Leopold Stokowski, who decided to record it in an August 1946 session with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, which he had founded the year before. The delightfully lush orchestral miniature is called "A Message for Liza" on the label and "Waltz" or "Glamour Waltz" in the discographies. It is probably what IMDb calls "Artist's Waltz." The orchestration is possibly by Robert Russell Bennett, who worked on the film.

Bonus Stoki silliness

I've also included the other side of the Stokowski 78, although it has nothing to do with Lady in the Dark. It is Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 1 - but wait, what is different here? Stoki has thrown out the composer's orchestration, and substituted his own, complete with prominent xylophone and wild tempo changes that would have challenged even the most adept Hungarian dance troupe. The result sounds like Liszt at his most garish - and maybe that was the idea. The whole thing somehow reminds me of the Bugs Bunny parody of Stokowski conducting at the Hollywood Bowl - minus the tenor, of course.

Most of these recordings were found amidst the huge pile of stuff that is the Internet Archive, and remastered for your listening pleasure. The Sinatra came from a long-ago bootleg.

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