November – More music history #1

1910

John Lomax

Lomax recording gear

US folklorist John Lomax publishes Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

Lomax would spend the rest of his life creating folklore societies and, with his son Alan Lomax, travelling to record oral history and American folk music. Much of John’s work, including more than 10,000 recordings, is preserved in the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress, which he heads until his death in January, 1948.

Alan continues the work, dogged the whole time by FBI interviewers. In the 50s he edits the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music.

Alan Lomax

In December 1955 his ballad opera Big Rock Candy Mountain debuts, featuring Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. In April 1959 he produces the Folksong ’59 show at Carnegie Hall.

▷LOC John Lomax bio▹ ▷Lomax books▹ ▷Lomax bio▹ ▷Lomax audio archives (17000+)▹

 ~ American Folklife Center 

1918

Victoria Hall, Geneva

The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande of Geneva, founded by Swiss conductor (and former math professor) Ernest Ansermet, gives its first concert.

From 1915 to 1923 Ansermet conducts Sergei Diaghilev‘s Ballets Russes. During WW1, he begins a close friendship with composer Igor Stravinsky, who was exiled in Switzerland, and who had introduced him to Diaghilev. The OSR gains international prominence after World War II through a long-term contract with Decca Records.

It specializes in modern (non-serial) music of elegance and color … Satie, Falla, Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Honneger. Ansermet heads the OSR until 1967. The orchestra is based in Geneva’s Victoria Hall.

Brahms:Sym3.4 (NHKSO 1964)  Debussy:Pelleas  Faure, Pelleas 

1938
Organ-maker Hammond begins producing the Novachord, an early — and likely the first commercial — polyphonic sound synthesizer.

With the lid up

It is first heard at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Complex and heavy, it uses 163 tubes and 1000 capacitors to make sound waveforms with electronic oscillators, to control volumes with voltage-controlled amplifiers , and to shape the sounds with bandpass filters. It’s controlled with a 72-note keyboard. Pitch is temperamental.

In 1942 production ceases due to war shortages; in time over 1000 instruments are made.

 ( Novachord site )  ▷Samples ▹ ▷Novachord restoration project ▹

1955

US rocker Little Richard releases his breakthrough song, Tutti Frutti.

Womp-bomp-a-loom-op-a-womp-bam-boom!! Oh Rooody! It reaches USR&B#2 by the end of the month! and is the first black record to get significant plays on radio, reaching US#17.

▷About the original lyrics▹ ▷The scoop @ Cracked▹ 1956, ‘Don’t knock the Rock’  France, 1966 

October – More music history #1

1912

Diamond disks

Edison Records, which had produced only cylinder records for four decades, introduces its Diamond Disk. (*)

These 10-inch diameter, quarter-inch-thick records – with cores made from wood flour – have 150 grooves per inch. Like Edison cylinders they reproduce using a vertical stylus motion rather than lateral (side-to-side) motion. (*) (Lateral-cut will eventually become the standard.) They’re played with a long-lasting diamond stylus, at a time when most players use steel or even fiber needles that must be replaced frequently.

The heavy disks are more costly to ship, Edison players are more expensive, and the firm releases less popular music. The records don’t sell as well as the (lateral-cut) Victors and Columbias… with which they are incompatible.

Edison also introduces Blue Amberol Records (celluloid plastic … highly flammable … over a molded plaster core) in 1912. The company goes out of business in 1929.

▷Chocolate phonos▹  Antique phono gallery   OGG: Rachmaninoff playing MP3: KFMU:All-DD podcast

See also: Unusual types of gramophone records, Great Phenol Plot

1949

The first Schwann LP record catalog is published by William Joseph Schwann.

An organist and trained musicologist, Schwann is owner of The Record Shop, across from MIT in Cambridge, MA. A canvass of other record-store owners encourages him to create his first catalog. The 26-page (mainly classical music) catalog, with 674 entries from 11 companies, typed by hand and mimeographed, sells 11,000 copies.

In 1953 Schwann quits the store to do the catalog full-time at 137 Newbury St. in Boston. By 1958 it lists nearly 20,000 LP’s; by the time he sells it in 1976, it lists 40,000 LPs in over 300 pages.

▷NYTimes obit▹  Covers gallery

1967

Island Records issues the first of its pink label records, John Martyn‘s London Conversation. Back to Stay 

By 1972 there’d been 56 ‘pink’ releases, with three designs. ▷Label discog▹

1979

First issue of Seattle‘s The Rocket, a free biweekly local music newspaper. Offices were originally over the Rendezvous Bar in Belltown.

The paper is sold to SF’s BAM in 1995, marking the beginning of the end. How The Rocket Fell to Earth
Review of new book Before Seattle Rocked by Kurt Armbruster