专辑简介

In 1887 the record industry was a figment of the imagination of a Jewish immigrant from Hanover, Germany, living in Washington DC. In Emile Berliner's conception of the flat-disc record — with its regular, deep groove spiralling inwards — recordings would be cut straight onto a master, in turn reproduced at the pressing plant as a stamper (in the manner of a photographic negative). After early experiments with celluloid and hard-rubber discs, and then the switch to shellac in 1895, this new format sounded so much better, and a lot louder than the option of wax cylinders. It was decisively more compact, robust and hard-wearing, and the manufacturing process was geared to multiple copies, playable on Berliner's new, motorized gramophone machines. So when the Berliner Gramophone Company expanded into Europe in 1898, setting up the Gramophone Company in London to handle the franchise, it was agreed that an initial delivery of 150,000 records and 3,000 players should be followed up urgently by a recording engineer, Frederick Gaisberg (and soon afterwards another, William Sinkler Darby) who would throw himself into establishing a vast catalogue of recordings not dependent on protracted supply lines from the US. . The Gramophone Company quickly established branches in Germany, France, Italy and Central Europe, and within a few years there were offices in Russia, Austria, India and Japan — propelled by Berliner's original strategy of selling both records and gramophones. In 1899 recordings were made by the Gramophone Company in Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands; the following year Russia, Poland, Turkey, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Spain, Italy and France; in 1902-3 Egypt, India, China, Hong Kong,China, Japan, Singapore, Siam and Burma. By 1906, 60% of company profits originated outside the UK; by 1914, it was selling four million records a year. Typically, a local agent was engaged to identify talent and markets, before company recording engineers were despatched, with piles of zinc blanks and crate after crate of equipment. Gramophones and records would be hauled along on these trips, to demonstrate the technology and promote sales; the recording equipment itself was heavy and cumbersome, but delicate. (And suspicious to officials — Sinkler Darby once registered his baggage at the Swedish border as a 'philosophical apparatus'.) The engineers were intrepid, expert and hard-working. Normally they set up in the evening in their hotel and worked through the night, recording as much as possible, stoically in line with local opinion about sales potential, without filtering talent themselves. Their immersive commitment is clear between the lines of Gaisberg's judgment of the British in India: 'They might be living on another planet for all the interest they took in Indian music. They dwelt in an Anglo-Saxon compound of their own creation, isolated from India.' Travel was routinely arduous; locations were regularly impromptu, sometimes dangerous. In many cultures, musical performance was not considered a respectable profession, especially for women: often, female performers were actresses or courtesans (putting it politely); the men disabled or otherwise 'outsider'. The recordings, though, were all paid for — sometimes extravagantly, to beat off competition from other labels. Sound masters from the sessions were sent to Hanover in the early days, or perhaps Russia, from 1902, or the Hayes factory after 1908, or by 1912 to company plants in Austria, France, India, Poland or Spain — and then finally the records returned where the music came from, to be sold locally. Over the decades, though, technological development and social change — magnetic tape, say, and movements of national liberation — broke down this epic model. Locals began to organize their own sessions, at first still pressing in Hayes perhaps, but later organizing this closer to home too. By the 1950s the adventure was over. It was the idea of the first Managing Director of the Gramophone Company, William Barry Owen, to archive a copy of every record it issued. By the time the company merged with Columbia in 1931, to form Electric & Musical Industries (EMI), the collection was already housed in Hayes, Middlesex, where it continues to accumulate. Unburdened of musicology, our album offers the merest glimpse of its miracles — hopefully with some giddy sense of its reach and range, and a sprinkling of the wonderment described in his memoirs by Gaisberg, recalling his Russian visits: 'Another and totally strange world of music and people was opened up to me. I was like a drug addict now, ever longing hungrily for newer and stranger fields of travel.'