Pristine Classical's "1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording": An Electrifying Compilation

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve just downloaded a fascinating compilation of 1925 electrical recordings from Pristine: a two-CD set (for which I also received a download link, so I’m listening to it now) of the very first electrical recordings ever released publicly. These are recorded documents that until now had only been the stuff of legend for me, names mentioned in Roland Gelatt’s book The Fabulous Phonograph but which I’d never thought I’d actually get to hear. A brief précis is necessary here: until 1925 virtually all officially released sound recordings were made by an acoustic process. The sound waves being recorded were collected by a giant metal horn, which transmitted the sound to a cutting stylus that inscribed a groove on a master disc or cylinder. In the early 1920’s Western Electric, the research arm of the giant American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) monopoly, started a project to see if they could invent a way to record sound electronically. What they came up with was basically a grafting of the nascent radio technology to recording: the sound would be collected by one or more microphones, then fed through an amplifier, whose output would activate a cutting head and record the audio onto a master disc. Among the ultra-rarities here are two sides of hymn tunes, William H. Monk’s “Abide with Me” and John Dykes’s “Recessional,” recorded live by British Columbia at the ceremony for the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920 (the sound was taken by an ordinary telephone sending microphone to a cutting lathe away from the hall, and the sound is absolutely wretched; “Abide with Me” begins too fast and slows down later, which Pristine annotator Mark Obert-Thorn explains was due to the lathe having still not got up to speed when the performance started, and I’m surprised a usually conscientious transfer engineer like Obert-Thorn didn’t fix this in his transfer). “Abide with Me” and “Recessional” are billed as by the “Choir, Congregation, and Band of H.M. Grenadier Guards,” but on “Abide with Me” it’s difficult to tell that there are people actually singing (the voices are clearer on “Recessional” but still below the clarity level needed to understand the words) and obviously the technology was limited by the poor quality of telephone equipment at the time.

Fortunately, things get better sound-wise after that. The next two tracks on the Pristine collection are two sides from the Autograph label of Chicago, owned by Orlando R. Marsh. Autograph didn’t last long but was the first record label in history to record entirely electrically. I’ve heard two previous Autograph recordings, “King Porter Stomp” and “Tom Cat Strut,” played by Joseph “King” Oliver on cornet and Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton on piano. The transfers I’ve heard of the Morton-Oliver sides (on LP from Milestone/Riverside and CD from Jazz Retrieval) were unbearably harsh and not at all what one would want from a meeting of two of the original African-American New Orleans jazz legends in their only records together. The two Autograph sides heard here are much better in terms of sound quality; they are an organ solo on the Isham Jones/Gus Kahn song “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else” by Jesse Crawford and Irving Berlin’s “All Alone” by the Dell Lampe band with a vocal chorus by Al Dodson. There’s also an experimental recording of Chopin’s Waltz No. 14 in E minor by pianist Mischa Levitski and a quite good song recording of Pietro Cimara’s “Stornello” by baritone Giuseppe de Luca (Sharpless in Madama Butterfly at its infamous world premiere at La Scala in February 1904 and an astonishing singer best known for his Rossini’s The Barber of Seville Figaro and the title role of Verdi’s Rigoletto). Then we get to the records that were commercially released at the time, including two great recordings by Art Gillham, “You May Be Lonesome” by Billy Smythe and Gillham himself, and “I Had Someone Else Before I Had You” by Jack Stanley, Harris, and Darcey (neither Pristine nor Fanfare reviewer James A. Altena gave first names for the latter two, so I presume they were the lyric writers).

Gillham was a pioneer of the “crooning” style of singing that became practical when microphones replaced megaphones as the amplifying device not only on records but live as well. I’m more than a bit surprised that the curators of Columbia’s short-lived “Art Deco” series didn’t include Gillham on their compilation The Crooners (though among the people it did include were such non-crooners as Willard Robison and Jack Teagarden), since he was quite good. Mark Obert-Thorn’s liner notes say Gillham received $1,000 – a whopping payment in 1925 dollars – for being Columbia’s electrical-recording guinea pig on these two songs. The compilation also includes contralto Margarete Matzenauer’s recordings of “Ah, mon fils!” from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète (the plaintive aria sung by Fidès, mother of the false prophet John of Leyden, who because the Anabaptist sect that are putting John forward as a pretend-Messiah have told their followers that John was created by God and did not have human parents, so when she approaches him at a big ceremony, he has to deny any connection to her) and a Mexican folk song called “Pregúntales a las Estrellas” (“Ask the Stars”), the first electrical recordings released by a classical singer; Schubert’s “Litany (Chant for the Repose of Souls” and Chopin’s Impromptu No. 2 in F-sharp by Alfred Cortot, the first electrical recordings by a classical instrumentalist; and the stunner of disc one, William Metcalfe’s “John Peel” and John Wade’s familiar Christmas song, “Adeste Fideles” (here sung in English starting with the second chorus, “Sing, choirs of angels”) recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on March 31, 1925 by the Associated Glee Clubs of America. The Columbia publicity for this disc claimed that 850 voices were singing on “John Peel” and 4,850 on “Adeste Fideles,” since the audience of 4,000 people had been invited to sing on the last number. “John Peel” was a capella and “Adeste Fideles” features solos for both piano and organ. The notes quote the book The Fabulous Phonograph by Roland Gelatt (who noted rather waspishly in a footnote that the 4,850-voice number for “Adeste Fideles” “was Columbia’s own computation, and it seems rather inflated”) on this recording:

“It was staggeringly loud and brilliant (as compared to anything made by the old method), it embodied a resonance and sense of ‘atmosphere’ never before heard on a phonograph record, and it sold in the thousands. Although Columbia’s ‘Adeste Fideles’ was not the very first electrical recording to reach the public, it was the first one to dramatize the revolution and the first to make a sharp impression on the average record buyer.”

Gelatt also quoted writer H. T. Barnett from the British magazine Gramophone (which still exists, by the way) on “Adeste Fideles”:

“It was given to me in great disgust by a friend on whose machine it sounded more like a complicated cat fight in a mustard mill than anything else I can imagine. I took it home and put it on my own gramophone, and the result overwhelmed me; it was just as if the doors of my machine were a window opening onto the great hall in which the concert was held. If it produces any less perfect result in your hands, blame your reproducing apparatus and not the record.”

Side two of the Pristine CD contains more “serious” classical fare. The first piece is a medley of the prelude and intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana played by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under Gennaro Papi, a decades-long routinier at the Met. This was a Brunswick original and Brunswick had a rather different system of electrical recording than Victor and Columbia, developed by General Electric. Instead of a microphone, it used rays of light and a photoelectric cell. “A powerful beam of light was reflected to the cell by a tiny crystal mirror so mounted as to respond to minute vibrations of sound waves; thus the movements of the mirror could be translated into electrical vibrations by the photoelectric cell and subsequently made to engrave a phonograph record,” Roland Gelatt describes this alternative process. “It sounds complicated and it was. Brunswick’s ‘Light Ray’ method of recording was not destined to last long.” I’ve listened to previous “Light Ray” recordings from the late 1920’s and they sounded in between acoustical and microphone-driven electrical recordings in quality. This Cavalleria medley is the best-sounding one I’ve heard, though part of that may be due to the typically fine transfer engineer, Mark Obert-Thorn, who remastered all these recordings. Then the Pristine disc gives us what’s often, if erroneously, listed as the first electrical recording by an orchestra (it was actually Georges Bizet’s Petite Suite, conducted by Victor house man Joseph Pasternack, of which two movements are also included here): Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Like a lot of acoustical recordings, this one doubled the low basses with woodwinds and substituted a contrabassoon for the tympani – which, as Fanfare editor James A. Altena notes in his review, quoting Obert-Thorn’s program notes, “only increases the macabre aspect.”

The next item on Pristine’s program was the very first electrical recording of a full-length symphony: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, played by the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra under conductor Landon Ronald on July 20, 21 and 27, 1925. Compton Mackenzie of Gramophone was less than thrilled by either the piece itself or its performance: “The music itself is a jangle of shattered nerves, and even when there is any attempt to rid the music of the exasperation which sets us on edge, the recording steps into the breach and sees that our nerves are not allowed any rest.” Unlike Mackenzie, I quite like the Tchaikovsky Fourth (it stands for me even above the “Pathétique” as Tchaikovsky’s greatest symphony) – it’s been a favorite of mine since my childhood – and Ronald gives us a quite energetic and impactful performance of it. The engineers at His Master’s Voice, then Victor’s British distributor, were able to record the piece with a few low woodwinds doubling the string parts but with the tympani going full-blast (maybe that’s one of the things that unnerved Mackenzie so!). The last nine tracks on Pristine’s collection are live recordings from President Calvin Coolidge’s inauguration ceremony on March 4, 1925 (before the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution moved it up to the current date of January 20), including Coolidge receiving the oath of office from then U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice (and former President!) William Howard Taft, about half of his inaugural address, and the U.S. Marine Band playing “Hail to the Chief.” This is apparently the only electrical recording of Taft’s voice, though in the acoustical cylinder days he’d made records for Edison. The Edison company recorded both major-party Presidential nominees in 1908, Taft and William Jennings Bryan, and boasted in their ads, “No matter how the November elections may result, we shall have records by the new President. This makes history. It indicates progress.” Obviously spoken-word records by political candidates were a much bigger commercial attraction in the early days of recording than they are now that radio, TV, computers and social media have made the voices of politicians so ubiquitous! This remarkable compilation 1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording can be ordered on CD’s or downloads at https://www.pristineclassical.com/products/pasc734?_pos=2&_sid=e5c8fffe4&_ss=r