music recording

Introduction

      physical record of a musical performance that can then be played back, or reproduced.

      Because music evaporates as soon as it is produced, humans, seeking permanence in life's ephemera, have long sought ways to record and reproduce it. The efforts to capture the fleeting sounds (musical sound) of music have followed two basic methods: that of symbols and that of signals. The former—musical notation—matured earlier, and in one form or another it virtually monopolized the recording of music for centuries; the latter had to await the emergence of technology for its development. In notation, symbols are written down as a message to a trained performing musician who understands them and reinterprets them into sound. Signals, on the other hand—being direct physical impressions of, and potential stimuli to, sounds—bypass the performer in their reproduction and, in some electronic compositions, even in their recording. This article concerns itself solely with the latter, nonsymbolic, method. For information on the former method see notation (musical notation).

Types of reproduction

      The physical reproduction of music has been accomplished in three major ways, which can be designated the mechanical, the acoustical, and the electrical. In the mechanical, an automatic instrument, such as the barrel organ, plays music that has been built, or programmed, into the mechanism by the designer; the resulting sound is that of the apparatus. In the acoustical and electrical methods of reproduction, sonic vibrations themselves are captured in performance and reproduced—by purely mechanical means in the acoustical method and by the use of vacuum tubes, transistors, and other such devices in the electrical. In both cases, the resulting sound is expected to be that of the independent performance.

      Until the end of the 19th century, music was reproduced primarily by means of the mechanical method. There are reports of other methods, probably based on the action of wind or forced air, dating as far back as about 1500 BC, in the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt, when a colossal statue of the god Memnon at Thebes made some sort of sounds to greet his mother, the goddess of the dawn. (Toppled by an earthquake in the year 27, the statue seems to have lost this ability upon reconstruction.) Friar Roger Bacon is reported to have invented some sort of talking head in the Middle Ages, and Josef Faber created in Vienna in 1860 a talking man with ivory reeds for vocal cords, a rubber tongue and lips, and with a keyboard that altered the mouth cavity to control word formation. The most common technique, however, called for a human hand or clockwork to turn a cylinder embedded with pins that would strike or otherwise operate some sound-producing apparatus, such as the metal teeth of a music-box comb; the hammers, quills, or pipes of a keyboard instrument; or the clappers of a set of bells. Automatic carillons are known from the 1300s; automatic harpsichords and organs, from the 1500s. King Henry VIII of England owned an automatic virginal; his daughter Queen Elizabeth I in 1593 sent the sultan of Turkey an elaborate musical clock. Every six hours it played a tune on 16 chimes, followed by a two-trumpet tantara, then by an organ tune and performance by “a holly bushe full of birds and thrushes, which at the end of the musick did singe and shake theire winges.” In the 19th century Queen Victoria of Great Britain owned a bustle that would play “God Save the Queen” when she sat down.

      Some of the most illustrious composers in the history of music wrote for mechanical devices. Haydn wrote tunes for musical (pipe organ) clocks; Mozart wrote several pieces for mechanical organ; and Beethoven wrote his Wellington's Victory (or Battle Symphony) for the panharmonicon, a full mechanical orchestra invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (Mälzel), a German musician who perfected the metronome.

      At the end of the 19th century two inventions superseded the barrel-and-pin mechanism. One was the player piano, which used a perforated cardboard roll to control a stream of air that activated the piano's hammers. This had the advantage of enabling pianists to record their performances for future playback, and many virtuosos and composers took advantage of this device, among them Ignacy Paderewski, Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, and Sergey Rachmaninoff. Some composers, including Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor) and Paul Hindemith (Hindemith, Paul), wrote music especially for the piano roll, using devices such as combinations of as many as 30 notes played simultaneously; while impossible for two hands, such chords could readily be played by the perforated paper.

      The second invention, which was to make obsolete all previous music-reproducing apparatuses (except in toys and cuckoo clocks), was the phonograph.

The influence of recording

Composition (musical composition)

      In 1967 a survey of hundreds of American composers indicated that they were almost unanimous in regarding the recordings of their works as being more important than either printed publication or live performances. Through recordings, composers gained not only an easy familiarity with the music of others but also a new medium for their own works.

      The contemporary American composer and teacher Milton Babbitt (Babbitt, Milton), in a conversation in 1965 with the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (Gould, Glenn Herbert) (who maintained his own reputation largely by means of records and broadcasts, rather than by concert performances), said:

We have all been affected as composers, as teachers, as musicians by recordings to an extent that cannot possibly be calculated as yet. . . . I don't think one can possibly exaggerate the extent to which the climate of music today is determined by the fact that the total Webern is available on records, that the total Schoenberg is becoming available.

      The use of the record as a medium had superficial beginnings as early as 1904 in Ruggero Leoncavallo's song “Mattinata,” specifically writtenfor the record according to the label. Later, in 1925, Stravinsky composed a piano piece, Serenade in A Major, expressly for the record medium, though it is also perfectly capable of being performed live. Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome (1924) incorporates a recording of a nightingale's song in its third movement. Much more important use of recording as a medium occurred toward mid-century in works fundamentally relying on recorded tape, such as Edgard Varèse's (Varèse, Edgard) Poème électronique, an 11-channel tape played through 425 speakers at the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon (1967), an electronic work playable only as a recording.

Teaching (pedagogy)

      In music education the phonograph was early adopted as a tool in teaching both serious students and laymen. Teachers who could not adequately illustrate musical examples at the piano found in records a means of demonstration. They could also bring entire orchestras into the classroom by means of the phonograph.

      In 1930 the Columbia History of Music by Ear and Eye, a phonographic survey that became popular in music history classes, enabled many students—as well as many of their teachers—to hear for the first time such instruments as viols, lutes, virginals, clavichords, and harpsichords together with the then little-known music written for them. A half dozen years later another educational recorded project, L'Anthologie sonore, added impetus to this specialized field. By the 1960s the Baroque music of the 17th and 18th centuries—as well as the earlier music of the Renaissance and medieval era—increasingly was recorded in performances using the instruments for which it was written. Such music found a wide audience beyond educational institutions; this audience was developed in large part by the phonograph.

      By the late 20th century many conservatories, colleges, and universities, and even some secondary schools, had constructed recording studios to enable students to analyze their own performances or to rehear their own compositions.

Criticism (musical criticism)

      Records also enabled music critics to expand their knowledge and perspective of music and performance practices. Unfortunately, a record collection also allows reviewers to write on superficial differences between performances with very little expenditure of intellectual energy. New music has suffered especially from the resulting loss of the ability of many critics to expostulate on music for their readers.

Concerts

      The impact of recordings on the concert hall has also been enormous, both for classical and for popular performances. Performers today can hardly hope to attract a concert audience if they have not produced distinguished recordings; usually, their audiences, both at home and abroad, consist of persons who know the performers' work through recordings. In the popular music field especially, many performers cannot compete in live appearances with recordings in which they depend heavily on technical aid. There are some who feel that the phonograph may cause the demise of live performance in the concert hall, which, if it survives at all, will do so for social rather than musical reasons. A possible indication of this trend is the disappearance of independent, nonacademic, nonprofessional classical music magazines (magazine) in America; instead, there are record magazines. Their name changes are significant: The American Record Guide, established in 1935 as The American Music Lover; High Fidelity, established in 1951; and Stereo Review, established in 1958 as Hi Fi/Music Review. The record magazine is not a peculiarly American phenomenon; England has The Gramophone and Records and Recording; France, Diapason and Harmonie; Germany, HiFi Stereophonie and Fono Forum; Italy, Discoteca Hi Fi; Holland, Luister; Belgium, Hi-Fi Musique; Sweden, Musikrevy; and Japan, Record Art/Record Geijutsu, among many other periodical publications.

musicology

      The entire field of comparative musicology—i.e., the study of the relationships between Western, non-Western, and primitive music—depends upon disc and tape recordings. Although the discipline may be traced to the 18th century, it did not emerge from a primitive state until it acquired phonographic tools. Primitive music is generally transmitted orally rather than through a written tradition, and as such its performance practices—certainly in rhythm and intonation—cannot be accurately transcribed into Western notation. Since World War II anthropologists and musicologists have visited the most remote parts of the world with tape machines to record aboriginal music before it was either tainted or wiped out by Western civilization. The most recent studies have been conducted as a race against time or more specifically against the transistor radio, a ubiquitous commodity that is homogenizing the world's musics.

The role of the producer

      Although the record producer has at times become an equal partner with the musicians in creating the recorded performance of classical music, in the popular field he is frequently in total command. Here, in fact, the sounds produced by the musicians may simply be the raw material for the producer to work with; artificial sounds, overlays of sound upon sound, electronically introduced reverberation, multichannel effects with directional interplay and moving instruments, all may serve as vital ingredients of the recording. Paradoxically, as technological advancement brought the recording beyond the mere imitation of live performances, popular musicians began to bring complex electronic equipment into the concert halls to imitate the sounds of their recordings.

      In productions of classical music, serious thought is given to whether the recording should faithfully capture the performance as heard from the optimum position in the concert hall or studio or whether the recording setup should be used to “enhance” the performance. Few question any longer the common practice of correcting actual mistakes. Ever since magnetic tape made detailed editing possible, extra takes have been made of sections in which musical problems are evident. The best taping of each section is spliced into a master tape. Even in recordings made during an actual concert, performers sometimes return to the hall afterward to emend any blemishes. The improvements in recorded performances made possible by tape splicing, however, often mislead audiences into anticipating the same perfection in live performances. Also, although tape editing facilitates the excision of poor passages that, while acceptable in the heat of a concert, would become irritating upon repeated hearings, it also has been said to hamper the continuity of the performance. It is unlikely, however, that a listener can spot the rare movement that has required no splicing from the majority that have. This alleged lack of continuity, however, was much worse when music had to be recorded in five-minute segments, for recordings at 78 revolutions per minute (rpm).

       microphone placement has been perhaps the major criterion in separating the “natural” or “re-creative” from the “creative” technique of large-scale classical recordings. In a natural setup microphones are placed in the optimum positions in the hall—often directly over the conductor—in order to re-create the concert-hall or opera-house effect. In the natural arrangement the conductor is responsible for instrumental and vocal balances.

      Some record-producing companies prefer to put microphones closer to the performers—this is called close-miking technique. Here the record producer—generally with the final approval of the conductor or leader—is responsible for balances, for bringing out particular instrumental or vocal lines; in other words, the producer participates in the interpretation. Studio-made popular recordings—other than those of a lush semiclassical nature—have generally used the close-miking technique; in some cases, each performer in a small musical group is assigned his own microphone. In a close-miked symphonic recording session, as many as 18 microphones may be used: three for violins; one for cellos and basses (sometimes one for each); one each for woodwinds, brasses, timpani, snare drum and triangle, bass drum and cymbals, celesta or harp, and soloist; and from three to six for a chorus. Several separate recordings, or “tracks,” each comprising the inputs of several microphones, generally are made at the same time, and the producer must balance the strength of these various inputs during the recording session. Until about 1960 two-track machines were ordinarily used; by 1970 eight-track recorders were in use, allowing much more subtle mixing of channels during the editing sessions subsequent to the actual recording. For popular music sessions 16-track recorders are sometimes used. For stereophony (stereophonic sound system) all the recording tracks must be edited and mixed to make the final two channels. The record producer also determines the degree of separation between those two channels, and during a dramatic recording—an opera, for example—he may function as stage director in guiding the performers around the aural stage.

      In quadraphony (quadriphony), which has four channels and which, in disc format, unsuccessfully tried to find a market in the early 1970s, the controversy between natural and close-miked recordings persisted. In classical music, when the two rear channels were used mainly for hall ambience, the arguments centred on the placement of the two front channels. Some companies, however, began to use the four channels as equal partners even in the classics. Columbia, for example, sometimes placed the conductor in the middle of the orchestra, which was seated for optimum quadraphonic array rather than for optimum concert-hall effect. In the early 1970s several quadraphonic disc systems competed for prominence, most notably Columbia's SQ, Japan Victor Company's CD-4 (RCA's Quadradisc in the United States), and Sansui's RM (also called QS). Since they were incompatible systems, confused consumers, waiting for one to become standard, withheld their votes from all, and by the end of the decade the aural and aesthetic benefits of quadraphony had all but disappeared from the marketplace.

The development of musical recording

The early years

      In 1877 the U.S. inventor Thomas Alva Edison (Edison, Thomas Alva) heard “Mary had a little lamb” emanate from a machine into which he had just spoken the ditty. It was the first time a recording of the human voice had been reproduced, and the event signalled the birth of the phonograph.

      Edison sent representatives, machines, and cylinders (cylinder recording) to Europe almost as soon as he had invented the phonograph, and between 1888 and 1894 recordings were made by such notables as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and even Johannes Brahms, who played a Hungarian rhapsody. The first “celebrity” recording, however, was made in Edison's West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories when the pianist Josef Hofmann, then a 12-year-old prodigy, paid a visit to Edison's studio in 1888. Hans von Bülow followed shortly after with a recording of a Chopin mazurka on the piano.

      In 1894 Charles (Pathé, Charles) and Émile Pathé built a small phonograph factory in a suburb of Paris and began to record singers as eminent as Mary Garden. Within a decade their catalog boasted some 12,000 items, and their name became almost synonymous with the cylinder phonograph in Europe. Meanwhile, Emile Berliner (Berliner, Emil), a German immigrant living in Washington, D.C., had filed a patent in 1887 for a “Gramophone,” using a disc rather than a cylinder, and he began manufacturing Gramophones and discs in 1894. The disc had the commercial advantage of being more easily manufactured than the cylinders. One of his representatives established a branch in London, the Gramophone Company (in 1898), a branch in Berlin, Deutsche Grammophon AG, and one in France, the Compagnie Français du Gramophone, while Berliner's brother set up a disc-pressing facility in Hannover, Ger. Most of Europe's recording industry thus was started by Berliner's representatives, and in the United States the small Berliner organization was to turn into the giant Victor company.

      By the beginning of the 20th century, recording industries had been established in Germany, Austria, Russia, and Spain. Much of the managerial and technical talent, not to mention equipment, had been imported from America. (By 1970, the positions would be reversed, with Europe in command of most of the American market.)

      During the 1890s recordings had become popular primarily through coin-in-the-slot phonographs in public places. Talent was incidental to the novelty of the apparatus; most of the recordings were of whistlers, bands, comic numbers, ditties, ethnic routines, and the like. In the first years of the 20th century, Victor and its affiliates raised cultural expectations with its Red Seal series (Red Label in Europe), particularly with discs made, beginning in 1902, by Enrico Caruso (Caruso, Enrico). By 1910 the vast majority of record sales—some estimates are as high as 85 percent—were classical.

      The Red Label had been initiated in 1901 in Russia with some of the first 10-inch disc recordings made, and the basso Fyodor Chaliapin was among the first artists to record on the new Russian Red Label.

      In 1902 Victor and another major label, Columbia, decided to help the development of the new industry by pooling their patents. Victor was thereby legally able to record on wax (which would then be electroplated) for the first time, and the new wax discs were then used in recording Caruso in Milan. Caruso's discs were a major catalyst in transforming the amusing gadget of a phonograph into a respected cultural phenomenon. That same year the new series received London-made recordings by stars of the Covent Garden opera house, primarily through the efforts of the Gramophone Company's music director, Landon Ronald, a bona fide serious musician and conductor who was able to convince his colleagues of the musical worth of the Gramophone. One instrumentalist also appeared in the new Red Label series, the violinist Jan Kubelík.

      In the United States, Columbia followed suit in 1903 with its 10-inch Grand Opera Records, recording Metropolitan Opera stars. Shortly after, Victor began its own celebrity recording sessions of opera stars and others on 3¹/₂-minute 12-inch discs. Victor also made many of its associated European companies' Red Label recordings—which included Mary Garden singing music by Debussy with the composer at the piano—available in the United States on its Red Seal series. Columbia soon dropped its opera series when the recordings did not sell as well as songs and marches, but Victor saw an institutional value in the celebrity recordings. The prestige of the Red Seal influenced Victor's other products: “Victrola” became, in the popular mind, almost a generic term for the (disc) phonograph, and the company practically monopolized the quality-minded market for many years. Indeed, the total Western Hemisphere record market became virtually monopolized by Victor and Columbia, while their London affiliates controlled the rest of the world. The first major break did not come until World War I, when ties were severed with Deutsche Grammophon, which emerged after the war as the independent Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft (DGG).

      Between 1907 and 1910 Columbia tried to approach Victor's cultural prominence by releasing records from Europe and later by reinstating its own recording sessions with operatic singers. Columbia also began issuing double-sided discs, as had already been done in Europe. Victor did not do so until 1923.

      During the early days of recording, both the cylinder and the disc were produced acoustically rather than electronically. A singer would sing into a horn, and the accompanist behind him played a piano placed on a platform so that the rear of the instrument—with the back removed—would also be level with the horn. With the development of a sound box to be placed on violins and violas, small orchestras could be used as accompaniment, but bassoons were required to play the cello part and a tuba the double bass part. It was an event worthy of a London newspaper announcement in 1904 when Kubelík made two records with his own Stradivarius, rather than on a violin with the sound box. When symphonic recordings came to be made, the wind and brass instruments still played or doubled the parts written for the lower strings, which could not be reproduced adequately. Although acoustical recordings were improved by the 1920s, the problems were not overcome until the introduction of the microphone and the consequent electrical recording process around 1925.

Birth of a mass medium

      In the decade 1910–20, the phonograph became a truly mass medium for popular music, and recordings of large-scale orchestral works and other classical instrumental music proliferated. The rise of the popular record coincided in the United States with the new ragtime, popularized by Scott Joplin's rags at the turn of the century and sensationalized by Irving Berlin's “Alexander's Ragtime Band,” written in 1910, which swept the country the following year. It stimulated an unprecedented dance craze at a time when the phonograph was becoming increasingly available. As the fad spread to millions who had never danced before, phonographs were sold to people who had never owned records before. Between 1914 and 1919 phonograph sales increased more than fivefold. In 1917 Victor issued the first jazz recordings, by the Original Dixieland Jass (sic) Band, but few major jazz releases appeared before the 1920s.

      The first large-scale symphonic recording, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, was issued in 1909 in England. The first attempt to record a concerto came the following year, also in London, when Wilhelm Backhaus recorded a cut version of the first movement of Grieg's Piano Concerto. In 1913 the first complete symphonies, Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth, were recorded in Germany under an anonymous conductor; later that year, a celebrity conductor, Arthur Nikisch, led a full-scale symphony for the first time, again the Beethoven Fifth. Solo instrumentalists vied with the opera singers for the record-buying public's affection, mainly by recording tidbits. In 1917 Victor began to record with a combination that was to prove its star classical music attraction for decades: Leopold Stokowski (Stokowski, Leopold) and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

      The serious recording of serious music became a growing phenomenon as the phonograph matured during the early 1920s. Tidbits and orchestral snatches gave way to a spate of uncut symphonies, sonatas, quartets, and concerti; the music itself came to mean as much as its star performers, and the electrical recording process, from 1925 on, raised the quality of the recordings as well. But in the mid-1920s radio, which provided free music, developed, and this new factor, plus the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, threw the phonograph industry into serious decline.

      The companies realigned themselves. In 1929 the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) bought Victor. Later that year, Edison left the phonograph business he had created. In 1931 the English Columbia Graphophone Company divested itself of its near-defunct American progenitor and joined the Gramophone Company to form Electric and Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI), bringing into the merger nearly every important European firm except DGG and its export label, Polydor. American Columbia was revived by its purchase, in 1938, by the Columbia Broadcasting System.

      During the 1930s, as the American companies relied mainly on dance records in jukeboxes to satisfy a dwindled market, Europe supplied a slow but steady trickle of classical recordings. In 1931 the His Master's Voice (HMV) label in Great Britain began its “Society” issues: a limited public was asked to subscribe in advance to then esoteric releases—the complete Beethoven piano sonatas played by Artur Schnabel or Pablo Casals performing the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. A new British company, Decca, organized in 1929, also began to issue serious recordings. In the United States, Columbia began to record a number of distinguished orchestras, including those of New York City, Chicago, Cleveland, and Minneapolis. RCA retained its leadership, however, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky, and—perhaps the greatest orchestral combination ever assembled—the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini (Toscanini, Arturo), as well as with the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

Advancements since World War II

      British Decca had a far-reaching role to play after World War II when its ffrr—full frequency range recording—became internationally known. The frequency range of discs had been dramatically extended, and Ernest Ansermet's recording of Stravinsky's Petrushka in the new process was to awaken the unsuspecting ears of many record collectors in 1946 to the future high fidelity, or “hi-fi,” possibilities of the phonograph.

      Two other developments in the late 1940s combined with the extended frequency range to produce a radical change in the development of recordings: magnetic recording and the first commercially successful long-playing (LP) record. In 1948 Columbia Records demonstrated 12-inch unbreakable vinyl discs that could play about 25 minutes of music per side. The standard shellac disc had revolved at 78 rpm, and a 12-inch disc had to be changed, automatically or manually, every five minutes, thus breaking up the continuity of longer works; the 12-inch LP, revolving at 33¹/₃ rpm, could hold the average symphony, sonata, or quartet on a single side. And the vinyl discs had quieter surfaces than the shellac. Victor soon countered with its own microgroove records: seven-inch vinyl discs at 45 rpm. Each contained approximately as much music as a 12-inch 78-rpm disc, but the package was smaller. By 1950, a pattern had been set: 12-inch LPs for classical works and popular albums, 45s for individual popular songs. Extended-play 45s also were developed and successfully marketed. The LP opened up an entirely new market—not only newcomers but older record collectors who could see the advantage of the new technology and were willing to repurchase their collections as LPs. The 78-rpm shellac disc followed the cylinder into oblivion.

      Tape had a major impact on recording starting in the late 1940s: anyone with a good recorder and microphone could become a record producer. Small companies sprang up in areas of music ignored by the giants: the esoteric and the avant-garde, the music of the periods before and after the highly popular Romantic classics of the 19th century. Chamber music, as well as Baroque works of the 18th century and earlier, which required paying fewer musicians than an entire symphony orchestra, flooded record stores and resulted in an unprecedented Baroque revival among music lovers. All-Vivaldi concerts were sold out, and Bach became a best-seller. Orchestral recordings of less familiar works—produced in a Europe that had been ravaged by World War II, where musicians' fees were minimal—crested the flood. New companies recorded for the first time many symphonies, quartets, masses, little-known operas, and many other once esoteric works, some of which were now available in competing versions. The more popular standard works, the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, became duplicated by the dozens. By the mid-1950s it seemed that most of the worthwhile musical output of Western civilization—and much from Asia and Africa—had been made available to the average home.

      For a few owners of some deluxe tape recorders, a new listening experience was available by 1956: stereophonic tape recordings. Within two years stereo discs made their commercial appearance; every major U.S. company began issuing stereo discs by the end of 1958.

      Now a new flood of records hit the market: notably popular were those that displayed the spectacular effects possible with stereo. It was again Decca/London that convinced the serious music lover of the musical benefits of stereo with the release in 1959 of Wagner (Wagner, Richard)'s Das Rheingold, conducted by Georg (later Sir Georg) Solti, a pioneer work in the “creative” school of classical record production. Within a decade two complete recordings of Wagner's Ring cycle, comprising four complete operas on 19 discs, were available. Again, as with the advent of the LP, a technical advance spurred the record industry into recording an even greater repertoire than was available previously. By the late 1960s most American record companies had discontinued their monaural recordings, except for “historical reissues.”

      The 1950s saw a rearrangement of record company alliances, as Europe began its strong invasion of America. By the 1970s not only did Europe own a sizable chunk of the American record industry, but it had taken over the recording, for the first time, of many of the most prestigious U.S. orchestras.

      Another far-reaching phenomenon of the 1950s was Elvis Presley (Presley, Elvis), a popular U.S. singer who inspired a new, militantly youth-oriented style of music: rock and roll. It generated a multitude of solo singers and groups as well as a teenage and subteen culture of rabid record buyers. The success of the British rock group the Beatles (Beatles, the) helped stimulate record sales in the 1960s to an all-time high. The sales of classical records, however, represented a declining portion of the total. It seemed that most people who wanted the standard classics had already bought them and that few new standard works of any length were being written. Rather than new classical recordings, re-releases were issued in new packages (e.g., “Debussy's Greatest Hits”) and in the new medium of tape. During the mid-1960s two small and conveniently packaged tape formats began a steady rise to popularity: the continuous-loop one-reel cartridge and the two-reel cassette. Each obviated the need for threading tape in order to play it. The cartridge first achieved consumer acceptance as an automobile accessory and was designed primarily as a playback-only format; the cassette configuration was first introduced in an inexpensive portable recorder player.

      Cassettes had the advantage over continuous-loop cartridges in being rewindable and thus easier to control for selective “spotting” and for amateur recording. For non-selective music or music in which it is not necessary to start at the beginning—background music, for instance—the continuous-loop cartridge had the advantage of not having to be rewound at all. By the end of 1982 sales of recorded music on cassettes had overtaken those of LP discs in the United States.

      Meanwhile, a new recording technique that boasted, among other things, a wider dynamic range had begun to revolutionize the market for quality recordings (digital sound recording): the music was taped “digitally,” via pulse-code modulation. Pioneered by the Denon label in Japan, it was most enthusiastically adopted by Cleveland-based Telarc Records in the late 1970s. Another small company, Sheffield Lab, had already been producing impressive-sounding results by recording directly onto disc, foregoing the tape stage entirely. These and other “audiophile” companies began to corner the quality market, while charging two to three times the price of standard discs for their products; by 1983 this had led more than 40 companies, including the major labels, to adopt audiophile, primarily digital, techniques for at least their new classical releases. The first true digital discs, called Compact Discs (compact disc), played back with a laser as the “stylus,” became available in Japan in 1982 and in Europe and the United States in 1983.

      Video has continued to be used to record musical performances via several incompatible disc and tape formats. The first years of the medium demonstrated that the grafting of images onto music would become viable only with the emergence of genius comparable to that of the great composers themselves.

Leonard M. Marcus Ed.

Additional Reading

Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 2nd rev. ed. (1977), a general history of the phonograph, particularly good on the complex corporate developments; Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, 2nd ed. (1976), a scholarly and detailed phonographic history with much elucidation of technical matters; Frederic W. Wile, Emile Berliner: Maker of the Microphone (1926, reprinted 1974), an adulatory, but worthwhile, biography; Fred Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round (1942, reprinted 1977), an autobiographical account of the history of the phonograph by a man associated with Berliner from the earliest days (a valuable source despite many inaccuracies); Matthew Josephson, Edison (1959), a thoroughly researched biography of the inventor of the phonograph; Joseph Batten, Joe Batten's Book: The Story of Sound Recording (1956), another personal documentation of early phonographic history, not as far-ranging as Gaisberg's but with much unduplicated material. Russell Miller and Roger Boar, The Incredible Music Machine (1982), is a popular history.

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