Historical Recordings from the Beginning of the 20th Century (Elam Rotem, Early Music Sources, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting YouTube video from a man named Elam Rotem who runs a Web site called Early Music Sources. He sounds hike one of those guys I usually can’t stand – one of those “historically informed performance” fanatics who insist on doing research to go back to the way pre-Romantic music was presumably played when it was written by making mountains out of historical molehills – but this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPW9ENtNKA, proved unexpectedly interesting because its subject was historical recordings. Beginning in the late 19th century and through the 20th,we had major composers actually making recordings of their own music, and he played a snippet of a brief piano recording by Edvard Grieg of one of his minor piano pieces, then compared it to a modern recording of the same piece. He also played a recording of the opening of the second act of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake with John Barbirolli conducting the London Philharmonic in 1931, a recording by Frederic Lamond (one of Liszt’s piano students) playing one of the Liebestraum pieces and then a modern pianist playing .t, and likewise a record of Conchita Supervía singing the “Habañera” from Bizet’s Carmen compared to a modern singer’s performance. (Regrettably, he didn’t identify any of the modern performers, perhaps because he was worried about being hauled up by the Copyright Police.)
Rotem’s conclusion was that the older recordings were generally faster than the modern ones – no surprise there – and they also had considerably more rhythmic irregularity and looser coordination between the main melody and the accompaniment. The differences in overall tempi are due at least in part to the limitations of the recording media. The original Edison cylinder had a maximum duration of just a shade over two minutes – the Grieg excerpt was 2:13 and he was clearly racing against the clock – though Edison’s engineers figured out ways to narrow the grooves and thereby extend the time to four minutes. As for discs, the standard 19-inch 78 rpm disc had an upper limit of three minutes and 20 seconds, while a 12-inch disc (usually, though not always, reserved for classical music) could last 4 ½ minutes. All too many 78 rpm recordings have a sense that the musicians are raching through the music as fast as they can execute it because they want to make sure they’ll get it all on the record before they run out of time on the master disc. But the other items Rotel was discussing – particularly the looser sense of rhythmic values and the looser attitude towards coordinating melody and accompaniment – do seem to me to be differences in musical style and evidence of a quite different approach to what constitutes music – and especially music played from a written score and therefore not subject to the very different rules of improvisation.
Maybe it’s because I’m a fan of both classical music and jazz, and therefore respond to the application, within tasteful limits, of the kinds of freedom jazz musicians have even to playing music where the notes are laid down for you on a piece of paper. The older recordings simply seemed to have more “soul,” a greater freedom of emotional expression, as if the older musicians felt greater freedom to use the printed notes to convey emotions rather than just dutifully pump them out in a correct tempo and make all of them. Former Fanfare cr4ic Lynn René Bayley once reviewed a collection of Claude Debussy’s recordings, mostly on Welte-Mignon piano rolls (which have their own set of issues,mostly in terms of how well the mechanical recording accurately captured the pianist’s sense of touch), in the January-February 2013 issue. According to Bayley, “Debussy’s own sense of rhythm is represented properly in Golliwog’s Cakewalk, and it is different from the way nearly all professional pianists perform it. Debussy slightly shortens the first half of the beat of each syncopated two-note figure in the bass while slightly emphasizing and elongating the second half. This creates a rhythmic feel much closer to Black (African-American) ragtime performances than to white (imitation) rhythms. (Listen, too, to the way he crushes some of the chords, blurring the notes, the way Black pianists did.) It’s a subtle distinction, but if you hear it and you know this piece, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
"Another interesting performance that contradicts to some extent the written page is La Cathédrale engloutie. This is played with far fewer dynamic contrasts than almost anyone else’s recordings, largely because those contrasts are written into the score — Debussy just chooses to ignore them. And again, I believe that the Welte piano roll is accurate, and this is the way he actually played it that day.” In other words, composers from the nate 19th and early 20th centuries did not regard their own manuscripts or published scores as holy writ. They played with the music, altering rhythms and dynamics the way they felt the music as they were performing it. It’s precisely this kind of musical freedom that the more strait-laced performances of today largely miss, and that’s why I often find an older recording, despite the limits of sound quality (or the lack thereof), really brings me closer to what the music is about than a newer one.
Yesterday at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting YouTube video from a man named Elam Rotem who runs a Web site called Early Music Sources. He sounds hike one of those guys I usually can’t stand – one of those “historically informed performance” fanatics who insist on doing research to go back to the way pre-Romantic music was presumably played when it was written by making mountains out of historical molehills – but this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPW9ENtNKA, proved unexpectedly interesting because its subject was historical recordings. Beginning in the late 19th century and through the 20th,we had major composers actually making recordings of their own music, and he played a snippet of a brief piano recording by Edvard Grieg of one of his minor piano pieces, then compared it to a modern recording of the same piece. He also played a recording of the opening of the second act of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake with John Barbirolli conducting the London Philharmonic in 1931, a recording by Frederic Lamond (one of Liszt’s piano students) playing one of the Liebestraum pieces and then a modern pianist playing .t, and likewise a record of Conchita Supervía singing the “Habañera” from Bizet’s Carmen compared to a modern singer’s performance. (Regrettably, he didn’t identify any of the modern performers, perhaps because he was worried about being hauled up by the Copyright Police.)
Rotem’s conclusion was that the older recordings were generally faster than the modern ones – no surprise there – and they also had considerably more rhythmic irregularity and looser coordination between the main melody and the accompaniment. The differences in overall tempi are due at least in part to the limitations of the recording media. The original Edison cylinder had a maximum duration of just a shade over two minutes – the Grieg excerpt was 2:13 and he was clearly racing against the clock – though Edison’s engineers figured out ways to narrow the grooves and thereby extend the time to four minutes. As for discs, the standard 19-inch 78 rpm disc had an upper limit of three minutes and 20 seconds, while a 12-inch disc (usually, though not always, reserved for classical music) could last 4 ½ minutes. All too many 78 rpm recordings have a sense that the musicians are raching through the music as fast as they can execute it because they want to make sure they’ll get it all on the record before they run out of time on the master disc. But the other items Rotel was discussing – particularly the looser sense of rhythmic values and the looser attitude towards coordinating melody and accompaniment – do seem to me to be differences in musical style and evidence of a quite different approach to what constitutes music – and especially music played from a written score and therefore not subject to the very different rules of improvisation.
Maybe it’s because I’m a fan of both classical music and jazz, and therefore respond to the application, within tasteful limits, of the kinds of freedom jazz musicians have even to playing music where the notes are laid down for you on a piece of paper. The older recordings simply seemed to have more “soul,” a greater freedom of emotional expression, as if the older musicians felt greater freedom to use the printed notes to convey emotions rather than just dutifully pump them out in a correct tempo and make all of them. Former Fanfare cr4ic Lynn René Bayley once reviewed a collection of Claude Debussy’s recordings, mostly on Welte-Mignon piano rolls (which have their own set of issues,mostly in terms of how well the mechanical recording accurately captured the pianist’s sense of touch), in the January-February 2013 issue. According to Bayley, “Debussy’s own sense of rhythm is represented properly in Golliwog’s Cakewalk, and it is different from the way nearly all professional pianists perform it. Debussy slightly shortens the first half of the beat of each syncopated two-note figure in the bass while slightly emphasizing and elongating the second half. This creates a rhythmic feel much closer to Black (African-American) ragtime performances than to white (imitation) rhythms. (Listen, too, to the way he crushes some of the chords, blurring the notes, the way Black pianists did.) It’s a subtle distinction, but if you hear it and you know this piece, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
"Another interesting performance that contradicts to some extent the written page is La Cathédrale engloutie. This is played with far fewer dynamic contrasts than almost anyone else’s recordings, largely because those contrasts are written into the score — Debussy just chooses to ignore them. And again, I believe that the Welte piano roll is accurate, and this is the way he actually played it that day.” In other words, composers from the nate 19th and early 20th centuries did not regard their own manuscripts or published scores as holy writ. They played with the music, altering rhythms and dynamics the way they felt the music as they were performing it. It’s precisely this kind of musical freedom that the more strait-laced performances of today largely miss, and that’s why I often find an older recording, despite the limits of sound quality (or the lack thereof), really brings me closer to what the music is about than a newer one.
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