High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 195019611

Picture, if you will, a tour through the halls of a music school, past 100 practice rooms each with its occupant singing or playing at top volume, and you will have some idea of how the Audio Fair sounded last week-end, wrote the New York Times of the third annual New York Audio Fair of 1951.2 Ten thousand electronics experts, high-fidelity fans and home-style music lovers descended on the Hotel New Yorker that fall, constituents of a high-fidelity boom that took off with the introduction of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948, grew from a do-ityourself hobby into a 1950s fad, and entered the mass market in the 1960s. The fair-goers came to see and hear equipment that delved into the deep bass and produced the tones above 5,000 Hertz that define sounds timbre, unlike obsolescent phonographs that played 78 rpm records and radios tuned to the AM band. The most popular exhibit was given by Emory Cook, who attracted crowds with his spectacular recordings of train sounds, music boxes, and an organ.3 According to High Fidelity, Cook made history with his sensational demonstrations of Rail Dynamics (Cook 1070), an LP in his Sounds of Our Times series. For three days, said the magazine, the hall outside his exhibit room . . . was jammed solid with fevered audiomaniacs, blenching with ecstasy at the tremendous whooshes and roars of Cooks locomotives.4 Audio

Published in David Suisman and Susan Strasser (eds.), Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 115-138. 2 At the Audio Fair, New York Times, 11 November 1951. 3 Ibid. 4 John M. Conly, Brahms, Thunderheads and Cachalot Courtship, High Fidelity, October 1954, 51. High Fidelity was founded in 1951 as an independent, quickly gaining a circulation of 20,000, and growing to a monthly with over 100,000 readers during the mid-1950s. The magazine for music listeners, as its covers declared, was the first high-fidelity magazine aimed specifically at the consumer rather than the professional or do-it-yourselfer. The magazine was sold to Billboard in the late 1950s and supplanted by hobby publisher ZiffBarry 1

Fairs were the most visible examples of high fidelitys culture of demonstration, inculcated in retail showrooms and in magazines, and brought home by audiophiles who continually evaluated and showed off the quality of sound they experienced. What drew customers to high-fidelity audio in the 1950s was not merely the prospect of reproduced music indistinguishable from actuality. True, this ide fixe, as audio writer Roland Gelatt called it, threads its chimerical way throughout the history of the phonograph.5 Indeed, in the science-obsessed 1950s, the customary claims of verisimilitude made by advertisers, journalists, salesmen, and phonophiles were redoubled, underwritten by new technical bona fides like frequency response, distortion, and signal-to-noise ratio. Despite the appeal of these technical criteria, the final standard of sound quality for most audiophiles remained evaluation by ear. And in practice at least, concert-hall realism, a catchphrase of the day, was not listeners sole desire. Indeed, the audiomaniacs in thrall to Cooks recordings of roaring locomotives were not basking in the glow of music transparently renderedthey were entering a spectacular world of sound and reveling in the power of technology to deliver a sublime experience. Perhaps no image is more evocative of the overlapping values of fidelity, spectacle, and the sublime power of technology than the iconic Is it live or is it Memorex? advertising campaign begun in 1971. The signature commercial of this campaign depicted jazz singer Ella Fitzgeralds feat of breaking a wine glass with the power of her voice, followed by Memorexs feat of breaking a second glass via tape playback of her performance. While this ad certainly implies the fidelity of recorded sound to its antecedent, it does so by transforming sound into a Daviss HiFi Review (subsequently HiFi/Stereo Review) as the top-selling magazine in the industry around 1960. 5 Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), 270. Barry 2

spectacle of shattering glass, an image meant to awe the viewer with the prowess of technology. Memorex reproduction is so faithful, implies the ad, that it might blow you, or at least your stemware, away.6 A second advertising campaign inaugurated by Maxell in 1978 also created a spectacle of the material power of sound, but in this case the listener as well as inanimate objects were affected. In Maxells iconic photographic image, subsequently adapted for TV, a man clings to his chair as his necktie, hair, and even the martini and lamp beside him recoil from the blast of his stereo. While Memorex presents real indices of faithful reproduction, Maxells photographic image presents a fantasy of the power of recorded sound to create a sublime experience. These images of high fidelitys power over listeners evoke the technological sublime, what new media scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum calls a simultaneous ecstasy and oblivion immanent in our encounters with the virtual.7 As defined by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, the sublime is beyond words, giving a sense of majesty, awe, wonder, or even danger that overwhelms reasonthemes that recur in the discourse of high-fidelity sound. As deployed by its inventors in American studies departments, the term technological sublime describes how wondrous technologies such as railroads and electric light became

John Mowitt, Music in the Age of its Electronic Reproducibility in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary. Music and society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) muses on the implications of subsequent Memorex commercials which made a spectacle out of technologys ability to confound expert listeners, including Fitzgerald herself, with the question is it live or is it Memorex, subordinating sound to vision and music to technology. Mary Ann Doane, The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of the Body and Space in John Belton and Elisabeth Weis, Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) highlights in this same advertisement a claim to transmit not just an empirically equivalent sound, but indeed the charismatic presence of the star. 7 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 33. Barry 3

objects of aesthetic pleasure and symbols of American identity. 8 Historian of technology David Nye, for example, chronicles Americans persistent love of the technological sublime that allowed them to glory in nearly magical displays of scientific prowess.9 High-fidelity spectacles tapped into this longstanding love of the technological sublime. During the 1950s, as the high-fidelity equipment market grew by leaps and bounds, an audiophile record market grew alongside it, offering disks of audiophile spectacle that could test the accuracy of your equipmentor blow you away. Audiophile record labels such as Cook, Audiophile, Audio Fidelity, HiFi, and Command found marketplace success with LPs of sonic obstacle courses that verified the capabilities of hi-fi and thrilled listeners with the sounds of trains, planes, and automobiles, of bullfights and bullfrogs, of storms and surf, of exotic music from foreign lands and conventional Western music tinged with exotic accents, of music laced with percussion instruments of all stripes, and in the stereo era, of music leavened by the movement of sounds. Some classical labels such as Mercurys Living Presence division, Westminster, and Vanguard likewise found success with sound as their selling point, highlighting the audiophile recording techniques used to capture the splendor of the orchestra, and programming LPs with works that featured awesome bass sounds from organs, tympani, and cannon, and high-pitched sounds from bells and cymbals. In the wake of this discovery of an enthusiastic market for audiophile spectacle by independent entrepreneurs, major labels like Capitol, RCA Victor, and London capitalized too, offering both classical and popular recordings that could give ones audio system and ones ears a workout.

Simon Zoltn, The Double Edged Sword: The Technological Sublime in American Novels Between 1900 and 1940 Philosphiae doctores, 22 (Budapest: Ph.D. dissertation, Akadmiai Kiad, 2003), traces the origins of the phrase from Perry Miller to Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1963) and John F. Kasson in Civilizing the Machine (1977). 9 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 199. Barry 4

This essay will trace the popularization and commercialization of audiophile spectacles through the 1950s, chronicling the attendant changes in the aesthetics of sound recording that were negotiated by engineers, impresarios, musicians, and fans in this period. At first, engineers used new technologies to close the gap between the rhetoric of verisimilitude and the recording techniques that had been required to create plausible illusions of reality. Some record labels utilized innovative equipment, including magnetic tape, the long-playing microgroove record, and improved microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers to thrill customers with a newfound ability to document sublime, noteworthy, or unusual sounds, making a spectacle of fidelity, much like Memorexs subsequent advertisements. These recordings aimed to present sound from the perspective of an audience member or at least from a real, unitary perspective, which meant not only portraying sounds as though they came from a distance but capturing some of the reverberation of the performance space. The leap in fidelity offered by the LP created elaborate tapestries of sound that five years ago would have been sensational, said Saturday Review in 1953.10 But as the mimetic capabilities of high fidelity became commonplace, engineers made use of new technological facilities to make recorded sound more sensational than the real thing. To judge from sales figures, audiences too became increasingly interested in the processes and possibilities of reproduced sound and increasingly desirous of synthesized soundscapes that deviated from the natural perspectives on sound they might hear at a live performance. Nowhere was this trend more visible than in stereo percussion records that deployed multiple microphones extremely close to the various instruments, synthesizing multiple perspectives that deemphasized reverberations from the performance space and manipulating the sounds

10

C. G. Burke, Five Years of LP, Saturday Review of Literature, 26 September 1953, 59. 5

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electronically to move them back and forth across the virtual stage in an effect known derisively as ping-pong stereo. Audiophile percussion records, like the subsequent Maxell campaign, emphasized a sublime listening experience rather than fealty to an original event. But even in the conservative realm of classical music, engineers deployed some of the same techniques, synthesizing close-up perspectives in order to create delicate instrumental balances not possible in live performance. As conductor and composer Morton Gould said in 1959, Concert hall realism has been technically superseded.11 The sonic world of the classical LP did not merely represent a snapshot of a performance but evoked an ideal version of the work, and of sound itself, that existed only in the mind. These trends in sonic presentation conform closely to the characteristics of new media that Walter Benjamin described in his 1930s consideration of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.12 In this essay, Benjamin theorizes the aesthetic effects of reproducible media, particularly cinema and photography, by contrasting them to traditional works of art. In his reckoning, the work of art is characterized in large part by its singularity, its provenance, and the social ritual that surrounds it, all of which add up to what he calls aura. The aura of Western concert music, for instance, would include its ephemerality, its cultural authority, the social and physical distance between audience and orchestra, and the symbolism and sound of the concert hall as a cathedral of sound. While he claims these features wither when reproduced, Benjamin also analyzes how new media is not only reproductive, but
11 12

Morton Gould, Upbeat on Two Counts, HiFi Review, March 1959, 37. The essay, which exists in four versions composed in German and French in the late 1930s, is still best known by its original English title, to which the title of this volume pays homage: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The recent scholarly edition of Benjamins Selected Writings (4 vols., 1996-2003) as well as a 2008 volume of Benjamins writings on media adopt the translation above. I find the new translation more useful to think with both because it applies to digital and electronic media, and because the crucial term reproducibility has more specificity than reproduction. 6

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productive. He uses cinema as his example, highlighting how the careful crafting of films using editing techniques such as jump cuts and montage means that the sense of reality portrayed by film is actually the height of artifice, a property of reproducible objects that have no single antecedent original. As in cinema, a variety of technological techniques can heighten the illusion of reality in sound recording. In Benjamins formulation, the technological artifices of the work of art in its new context of reproducibility function as the counterpart to aura in new media, creating new perceptions of reality. He focuses on the ability of the camera to transcend the eye with its acuity and to bring attention to things not normally noticedfor instance, by panning across perspectives, zooming in to close-ups, or the use of slow motion. Though sound is not his concern, analogous sound recording techniques such as multiple microphones, equalization, and dynamic-range compression similarly transcend the capabilities of the ear. The revolutionary facility of new media to strip the veil, in Benjamins words, i.e. to remove the aura from objects and show things as they really are, is one of the pleasures of technological reproducibility. The urge to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness becomes an imperative with new media, according to Benjamin.13 This desire to feel close to the object reproduced was satisfied by 1960s recording techniques which granted LPs an analytic clarity, immediacy, and indeed almost tactile proximity that contrasted sharply with the cathedral-like sound of the concert hall, according to pianist Glenn Gould. 14 Unfortunately, Benjamin does not describe the process by which these changes occur, nor the tensions they provoke. An analysis of the audiophile world, rich with fine-grained discussions about sound
13

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23. 14 Glenn Gould, The Prospects of Recording, High Fidelity, April 1966, 48. Barry 7

reproduction and its relation to music, will elucidate the complex cultural negotiations over technological reproducibility. Despite the marketplace success of technologically enhanced sound, it took some time for the pleasures of technological reproducibility and the transcendence of natural sound to gain legitimacy. On one hand, as musicologist Tim J. Anderson writes, high fidelity was always already positioned as a celebrated form of artifice and spectacle that, through the union of science and the arts, would provide listeners with sensational renditions of the real.15 But at the same time, strict ideals of fidelity and technological transparency in sound recording were (and are) durable, one of the chief differences between cinema, on which Benjamin bases much of his analysis, and phonography. The ideal of sonic fidelity and the aesthetic of realism appeal as a bulwark against the defilement of musical culture by commercially motivated producers, promising to fix meaning amid the deceptive surfaces of the modern marketplace.16 Fidelity to the sound of the concert hall also appealed to those invested in the cultural authority or the crowd-drawing powers of music performance, because its supersession by records left audiences shocked by . . . natural acoustics, in the words of Lincoln Centers program director.17 Meanwhile, sonic spectacle, often denigrated as sound effects, novelties, and gimmicks, threatened the hegemony of music over sound and art over technology. As engineers answered the urge to strip the veil with what musicologist Colin Symes calls super-realism, some were

15

Tim J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 113-14. 16 See Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chapter 3, for a discussion of the history of ideologies of mimesis and realism in American commercial culture. 17 Gould, Prospects, 47 (sidebar). It is worth noting that many people through the years have been shocked by the poor natural acoustics of Lincoln Centers main hall, which underwent a $10 million acoustic makeover, funded by hi-fi magnate Avery Fisher, in 1973, just eleven years after it opened. It is currently slated for another costly renovation toward the same end. Barry 8

left to ask if, in the words of the president of Columbia Records, high fidelity [had] become an end in itself, a gross scientific toy . . . a sort of microscope of sound, a great revealer of unimportant minutiae.18 Over the course of the 1950s, audiophiles, musicians, and critics became increasingly comfortable with recording artifices that dispensed with the documentary ideal. By 1960, the recording art was plainly directed not toward duplicating the sound of an original performance, but toward crafting a soundscape specifically for the home listener. Though some listeners continued to yearn for an effacement of technological mediation, many began to trumpet its benefits. A chorus of musicians and critics gloried in the advances of modern technology, declaring that the best seat was now at home, in front of the stereo. For classical music this recording aesthetic was justified because making all the musical voices audible could provide a fidelity to the work--that is, to the score and thus the intentions of the composer--greater than that of a concert performance. In popular music, this recording aesthetic made the creation of distinctive soundscapes by sonic experimentation in the studio part and parcel of legitimate musical creation, as heard, for instance, in the tremulous echo of Sam Phillips recordings of Elvis Presley and others in the 1950s, in Phil Spectors wall of sound in the early 1960s, and in the psychedelia of the Beatles and others during the mid-1960s. In what follows, I trace these developing aesthetics of recording, and their marketplace success, from the largely documentarian early 1950s efforts of Cook Records and Mercurys classical division toward the more overtly crafted soundscapes proffered by Command Records and classical labels at the end of the decade.

18

Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 83; Goddard Lieberson, The Insider, High Fidelity, May 1957, 35. 9

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Emory Cook: The Spectacle of Fidelity As the first king of audiophile spectacle, Emory Cook played a central but largely forgotten role in 1950s high fidelity as the industry carved out an alternative to the mass market, largely from the ground up. By playing up his maverick identity and contrasting his fidelitarian methods with the conventions of commercial recording, Cook made New Horizons in Sound, captured in stark realism, as one ad put it, into a million-dollar business.19 Cook used new highfidelity technologies in an explicit attempt to capture the aura of sublime and unusual sounds that included railroads, theater organs, symphony orchestras, folk rituals, calypso competitions, earthquakes, and the steelpan bands of Trinidad and Antigua. In turn, manufacturers, salesmen, and audiophiles used Cook Records ability to suggest sonic aura not only for stay-at-home sonic tourism, but to demonstrate the wondrous pleasures of high-fidelity technology to the uninitiated. Cooks documentarian approach promised an authentic perspective on authentic performances, untainted by the commercial process or the engineering hubris that produced ersatz culture. And Cook played a key role in developing a market for both sonic spectacle and sonic exploration that would be transformed and popularized by record labels less documentarian in approach. The circumstances of Cooks entry into the record business exemplify the ground-up appeal of high fidelity as technological sublime. In 1946, he made a career out of his love of sound with his first product, a record-cutting apparatus that, he claimed, was the first to engrave records with the full 20,000 cycles per second to which human hearing extended.20 He made his first records not for sale but to show off the capabilities of that cutting apparatus. When people

19 20

Audio Devices advertisement, High Fidelity, June 1956, 1. The pitch of a sound is measured in cycles per second (now more commonly referred to as Hertz). 10

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wanted to buy the records rather than the apparatus, Cook met the demand with his 1950 LP The Christmas Music Box (Cook 1011), which featured the sublime high frequencies of antique music boxes, to the tune of 50,000 copies sold.21 The next issue from his fledgling label, a bagpipe record entitled Kilts on Parade (Cook 1025), also featured high-frequency sounds to which old technology was deaf. The horrific realism of Rail Dynamics and a record of a rumbling theater organ did the same trick with bass and volume, cementing the labels reputation for both fidelity and sublime sound.22 Like his samples, Cooks commercial releases were superb fodder for showing off the capabilities of hi-fi technology as well as for the enjoyment of sound for its own sake. High-fidelity spectacles like Cooks hearken back to the turn-of-the-century cinema of attractions, which, by depicting spectacular scenes such as fires and collapsing buildings, both exploited the novel technology of film and established its ability to show something.23 Cooks label at first featured the technological marvel of sublime frequencies, then sonic wonders both man-made, such as trains, steamship whistles, symphonies, and massive choirs, and natural, such as thunder, the sea, earthquakes, and the ionosphere. The public response translated into a thriving small business in the mid-1950s, with thirty employees and annual sales of 300,000 LPs.24 Subsequently, Cook showed off the technological sublime by documenting the aura of the exotic in recordings of religious rituals from Yemen to Cuba, as well as Japanese koto, Mexican marimba, and a range of Caribbean music. He supplied the nostalgic as well, with recordings of
21

Outdoors in Connecticut, Hartford Courant, 25 October 1954, copy in Emory and Martha Cook Collection, Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Folder 12. 22 Audiomania Sweeps the Nation, Pathfinder, 28 November 1951, copy in Emory and Martha Cook Collection, Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Folder 12. 23 Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990). 24 Daniel Lang, Ear Driven II, New Yorker, 10 March 1956, 60. In addition to his label, Cook operated a pressing plant that did work for independent labels like Folkways. Barry 11

forgotten blues shouters, a burlesque show, the clavichord, and tales from storytellers.25 Cook added a series of sonic collages similar to musique concrte but in comic guise. Beginning in 1956, the label specialized in Calypso and steelpan music as well as audiophile fare. In the audiophile culture of demonstration and spectacle, Emory Cook was king. At the 1952 Audio Fair, he followed up the 1951 success of Rail Dynamics with an experimental demonstration of stereo sound that was described as literally breathtaking.26 Cooks exhibit at the 1954 New York Audio Fair, a collaboration with his Connecticut neighbor, speaker manufacturer Rudy Bozak, deployed a hi-fi system that offered visual as well as sonic spectacle. Nicknamed Thumper, each enclosure of this stereophonic pair of speakers was large enough to contain both men and held eight woofers and ten tweetersat a time when a single speaker comprising woofer and tweeter was the hi-fi norm. Rendered by this fantastic apparatus, installed on the sixth floor of the Hotel New Yorker, Cooks recordings of the Queen Marys all-aboard bass whistle resounded through the elevator shaft, shaking the lobby and befuddling onlookers. Sick of the din, hotel management moved to muzzle the demonstration, and show organizers promised to keep the volume down at subsequent fairs. Cook was such a signature presence at the New York Audio Fair that when he failed to attend in 1956, the New York Times reported his absence.27 Though high fidelitys unique selling point was its measurable advances in bandwidth, distortion, and background noise, the industry was convinced that nothing sold equipment better than demonstrations of the newly enhanced pleasures of technological reproducibility. As a 1952

25

Anthony Seeger and Nicholas Spitzer, Emory Cook. CD-R with audio recording of interview, 12 February 1990, Emory and Martha Cook Collection, Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 26 Conly, Brahms, Thunderheads, 130. 27 Harold C. Schonberg, Records: Hi-Fi 1956, New York Times, 30 September 1956, X18. Barry 12

advertisement aimed at drawing businesspeople into the trade exhorted, you must be prepared to demonstrate high-fidelity, because people can only appreciate full-range tone by hearing it. It cant be described in words.28 Salespeople needed records that could effectively differentiate high-fidelity sound, and their customers wanted to own those same records in order to thrill themselves and impress their friends. Used in this way, Cooks records were as responsible as any other single factor for making converts, High Fidelity editor John Conly told the New Yorker.29 This idiom of conversion, proselytizing, and the hi-fi adepts missionary zeal was so commonly repeated it became a clich.30 The indescribable experience of hearing high-fidelity sound was so compelling, wrote eminent music and hi-fi critic Edward Tatnall Canby, that publicity or no, the first hearing of a good hi-fi system, properly used, is a revelation.31 In order to propagate this revealed truth, entrepreneurs in major cities built well-appointed listening salons capable of demonstrating the full force of high-fidelity sound in a home-like environment. Likewise, organizers of the annual New York Audio Fair, begun in 1948, expanded to a series of fairs across the country, attracting an estimated half-million attendees in 1958.32 High fidelitys appeal derived not only from the pleasures of music, sound, and technology, however. It carried significant cultural symbolism that added to its popular appeal. High fidelitys foundation myth, repeated in both the general-interest and enthusiast press, highlighted the self-reliance, iconoclasm, and risk-taking of the pathfinding high-fidelity hobbyists-cum-entrepreneurs who, the story went, had rejected the antiquated standards of sound reproduction after World War II and established new standards and a flourishing industry by dint
28

Theres Profit in High-Fidelity (advertisement), Audio Engineering 36, no. 11 (1952): 53. Emphasis in the original. 29 Lang, Ear Driven I, New Yorker, 3 March 1956, 49-50. 30 Ibid., 49. 31 Edward Tatnall Canby, The New Recordings, Harpers, November 1952, 117. 32 Noted with Interest: Show Biz, High Fidelity, January 1959, 6. Barry 13

of their own talent and determination.33 Male audiophiles who wished to distance themselves from the passivity of mass consumption and the conformist manhood imputed in popular sociology texts such as David Riesmans Lonely Crowd (1949), C. Wright Mills White Collar (1952), and William H. Whyte, Jr.s Organization Man (1956) could instead identify with the swashbuckling entrepreneurialism of men like Emory Cook. Cook reported his own temperamental incompatibility with the ethos of compromise and harmony at the corporations that employed him before he set off on his own.34 Though late in life Cook lamented that his unwillingness to compromise his sound was not commercial, in truth his maverick personality helped establish his success with the burgeoning ranks of audiophiles.35 He made a spectacle of himself, attracting generous press coverage with his charismatic combination of iconoclastic bombast, plain-speech self-effacement, dry wit, scientific seriousness, and beatnik-ish adventureseeking.36 The personal and financial risks that Cook took on his customers behalf allowed his listeners to imagine themselves as participants in his thrill-seeking nonconformity. His unilateral introduction of stereo discs in an idiosyncratic format, requiring an unwieldy twin-tonearm assembly to trace their two concentric grooves, five years before the industry settled on the

33

Although this basic story was trotted out repeatedly, perhaps the first example in the press appeared in Music For the Home, Fortune, October 1946, 156ff. The story has much to it, though it downplays the key role played by the record industry in the growth of high fidelity, particularly in introducing the vinyl LP. 34 Seeger and Spitzer, Emory Cook. 35 Ibid. 36 In the 1950s, Cook was the subject of a lengthy two-part profile in the New Yorker (1956) as well as shorter pieces in Time (1954 and 1956) and High Fidelity (1954) and various regional newspapers. He contributed several articles to High Fidelity and an opinion piece to the New York Times, and these publications regularly reviewed his releases. Barry 14

stereo LP format familiar today, exemplified his recalcitrance in the name of sonic advance.37 He also acted as a sort of techno-Kerouac with his series of Road Recordings, ranging from gullcries and backwoods Haitian drums to Southwest bar-room pianos, not to mention the whaling stories he collected on his travels.38 As a recordist in search of remarkable sound in the field rather than an electrical engineer tethered to a laboratory bench, Cook cut a particularly colorful figure in the industry, perched variously at entrances to railroad tunnels, in the copilot seat of a prop plane, or in the hills of Trinidad. Journalists hyped the thrill-seeking element of high fidelity by playing up Cooks pursuit of the extraordinary, as in the headline He Risks Death Daily to Capture Real Sounds.39 Cooks adventurism was symbolically linked to the adventurism of audiophiles who dared their systems to reproduce his recordings. In the words of the New Yorker, Never has Cook been held in higher esteem by his disciples than when he returned from Mount Washington with his recording of the thunderstorm and it turned out to contain such extreme frequencies that only a few audiophiles had equipment capable of handling them.40 Journalists and advertisers contrasted the aural challenges of high fidelity to the putatively soporific pleasures of radio and television.41 Played back through high-fidelity equipment, specially made records for the hi-fi enthusiast were to the average record as a sports racer was to a four-door sedan, according to

37

Instead of using two grooves, each of which is modulated horizontally, as Cook did, standard stereo LPs matrix the left and right channel information onto a single groove that is modulated both horizontally and vertically. 38 Conly, Brahms, Thunderheads, 50. 39 Michael Sheridan, He Risks Death Daily to Capture Real Sounds, Toronto Star Daily, 30 July 1955. 40 Lang, Ear Driven I, 50. 41 Keir Keightley, Low Television, High Fidelity: Taste and the Gendering of Home Entertainment Technologies, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 47, no. 2 (2003): 236-60. Barry 15

Canby.42 This type of rhetoric layered a veneer of manliness over what was in fact a characteristic form of homebound consumption during the 1950s.43 In contrast to the excitement offered by enthusiast-oriented hi-fi firms, electronics giants like RCA promoted a less arresting, more genteel listening pleasure in which music is woven into the pattern of good living.44 Audiophiles wanted not merely the background diversions of a cultured lifestyle, but something deeper. Sound is a way of daydreamingan escape into the wild blue, Cook told the New Yorker. To retreat from the corrosive influences of daily life into the private fantasies stirred by a fine record were wonderful therapy, he reported.45 The escape Cook offered was the aura of a different place: The listener would like to imagine himself on the flying carpet and transported to . . . an optimum listening position within the audience.46 The impression of being in another place depended upon capturing the sonic aura of the original sound, the ambience of a reverberating performance space or the background noise of the outdoors. The newly available German omnidirectional condenser microphone, the Telefunken U-47, was key to capturing this ambience. Unlike the directional ribbon microphones standard in American studios before the war, it captured sounds from all directions equally well. Cooks deliberately simple microphone placements maintained a unitary perspective and opened up a spacious soundscape that could be likened to widescreen cinema. He hoped to recreate the visuals of what he recorded, to allow his customers to hear what was to be heard with a plausible sense of distance between the auditor and sonic subject rather than provide the upfront sound of commercial recording.47

42 43

Canby, The New Recordings, Harpers, July 1953, 103. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 44 RCA advertisement, Time, 15 November 1954, 62. 45 Lang, Ear Driven I, 59. 46 Seeger and Spitzer, Emory Cook. 47 Ibid. Barry 16

With his omnidirectional mikes and portable Magnecord tape recorder, Cook was equipped to travel the world in pursuit of aura. The basic reason for serious records, is to preserve something: a performance, a situation, a sound, an emotion, he told Time.48 Cooks portable equipment and on-the-road mentality allowed him to capture sounds in situ, with minimal if any intervention in the events he taped. An admirer of the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, Cook had an ethnographic ear for folk music and rituals from around the world, and at home in the U.S.--not least a burlesque show in New Jersey.49 Like Benjamin he linked the power of art to the fantastic power tapped by ritual practices. 50 He even used the term aura, though obviously not exactly as Benjamin did: Both Zither and Cimbalom have persisted almost unchanged for centuries. The reason they both have remained is because of their unique ability to create mood, to speak the intense language of mens inner feelings. And they still do. That is what is on this record. . . . The unique aura of music and instrument stems directly from the artist....51 The sublime sounds Cook captured, as emanations from an exotic other, defie[d] dissection and pat intellectual understandings.52 But not all of his listeners had such a philosophical attitude. Despite Cooks anticommercial rhetoric, Benjamin was correct that wrenching events out of context and circulating them in commodity form turned them, for some listeners at least, into entertainment to be judged on the same terms as any other record. A review of Three Rituals, for instance, praised Cooks aura-imbued recording of shango, a Trinidad sacrifice rite, for its wonderfully frenzied native drumming, enchanting singing by an untrained native girl, with village noise as a
48 49

Sounds of Our Times, Time, 15 November 1954, 83. Seeger and Spitzer, Emory Cook. 50 Liner notes to Cook 1043, Three Rituals (1955). 51 Cook 1032, Zither and Cimbalom (1953). Emphasis in original. Cook himself wrote all liner notes and advertising copy for his label. 52 Cook, Three Rituals. Barry 17

backdropincluding the barking of a dog. In contrast, the reviewer complains that the Cuban ritual sounded like a completely abandoned orgy that was too lengthy and repetitive for a record.53 And though Cook understood Trinidads carnival and new musical traditions like steel drum bands as rituals, he saw commercial potential in his recordings of The Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, and the Brute Force Steel Band. Unfortunately for him, he stood first on the leading edge and then on the margins of a calypso craze that arrived with Harry Belafontes million-selling 1956 RCA-Victor album Calypso. 54 While Cook hoped his records would sell, he was unwilling to use a commercial recording style that sacrificed aura. His label copy advised that Cook records were not studio productions, but are made on the roadon location in their natural habitat, which he was convinced was crucial to getting good musical performances as well as good sound. By contrast, commercial recordings often suggested an intimacy between musician and listener, performer and audience, by emphasizing the proximity of the musical source to the listener by virtually cutting out ambient sound.55 Engineers captured the detail and vividness of sound where it was first emitted by carefully reducing the reverberation of the studio space and placing microphones close to each instrument or voice in order to minimize the dispersion, reverberation, or blending that smoothed or muddled the sound when heard from a distance.56 The signals from various microphones were then balanced in the mixing process, and when desired, artificial reverberation
53

David Spurgeon, Recordings Offer Unusual Sounds. Toronto Globe and Mail, 7 December 1955. Another reviewer disagreed, finding the Negro cult music out of Cuba . . . almost hypnotic in its unflagging, unchanging rhythmic backdrop. Howard Lafay, Folk Music, High Fidelity, March 1956, 93. 54 Unlike other American labels that recorded Trinidadian music, Cook established a partnership in a pressing plant and record label in Trinidad. Seeger and Spitzer, Emory Cook. 55 Stephen Struthers, Technology in the Art of Recording, in Avron Levine White (ed.), Lost in Music: Culture, Style and the Musical Event (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 249. 56 Milton T. Putnam, A Thirty- Five Year History of the Recording Studio, Audio Engineering Society Preprint 1661 (1980). Barry 18

was added to create a controlled sense of spaciousness. As Peter Doyle argues, these techniques could combine to make recordings into a conceptual non-place in which musician and listener could commune directly.57 All together, such techniques added up to the destruction of aura in favor of the possibilities of reproducibility, paralleling Benjamins analysis of cinema. The resultant blend of sound, asserted an RCA engineer upon the debut of these techniques in film sound around 1930, may not be said to represent any given point of audition, but is the sound which would be heard by a man with five or six very long ears, said ears extending in various directions.58 From Cooks perspective, these promiscuous adulterations of true sound stemmed from the fact that most recording engineers are frustrated musicians. They want to put themselves into the records they make, from behind a forest of microphones and a 17-channel mixer, to create something they can identify later, with pride.59 But even Emory Cook, the staunchest defender of realism and aura in the record business, imposed himself on his recordings; he just didnt want to get too heady about it.60 When pressed, Cook admitted with some pride that recording was an impresario problem that required conducting a performance to make an impression on an audience.61 Nor was he above sometimes exaggerating the sonic truth by separating his microphones to enhance the spread of sound or using directional microphones to capture particular sounds. Indeed, one does not ordinarily hear a train from inside a tunnel, or a burlesque show from the stage itself, or thunder from a mountaintop, the perspectives presented on Cooks records.

57

Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 19001960 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 25. 58 Rick Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992), 50. 59 Conly, Brahms, Thunderheads, 49. 60 Ibid., 50. 61 Spitzer and Seeger, Emory Cook. Barry 19

Despite his generally laudatory press, Cook was sometimes criticized for his portrayal of perspective and came in for some scorn over his fetish for sound. Displaying the urge for clarity and immediacy that Benjamin identified as a characteristic of reproducibility, the High Fidelity review of Three Rituals complained, The chanters are somewhat distant relative to the drums, as if Cook should have rearranged the traditional ritual in order to excite the LP listener or abandoned his unitary perspective by mixing in sounds from an additional close-up microphone. Paradoxically suggesting that realism could occur only in a studio, the review added, Although recorded in the field, the sound is realistic.62 More frequently, Cook was ridiculed for challenging the priority of musical quality vis vis sound. For instance, when RCA executive Frank Walker quipped that Cooks lasting contribution to the music business was the record without royalties, he was impugning Cooks lack of legitimate music or legitimate musicians and his ethos of sound for sounds sake.63 Record reviewers as well commonly pitted the high sound quality of Cook LPs and other audiophile efforts against their lack of musical interest. The Drums of Willie Rodriguez (Cook 1086), said High Fidelity, was for collectors of pure sound effects, but any relation to genuine jazz . . . is purely semantic.64 Similarly, after lending an ear to the melodic mediocrities of the band on A Night at the Tropicoro (Cook 1187), another reviewer questioned why anyone would tote a single mike, let alone two, into their presence.65 Cook himself echoed the allegiance to fidelity as a musical tool instead of a fetish, and like most audiophiles he put serious music on a pedestal above sonic shenanigans.66 But Cook clearly loved sound for its own sake, releasing a handful of tape collages that played around with
62 63

Lafay, Folk Music, High Fidelity, March 1956, 93. In fact, he did pay a royalty on the music box album, though not on some others. Seeger and Spitzer, Emory Cook. 64 High Fidelity, April 1954, 55. 65 High Fidelity, April 1959, 91. 66 Cook advertisement, High Fidelity, December 1954, 72. Barry 20

the fascination for sound, much like the contemporaneous musique concrte of French avantgardist Pierre Henry. Cooks Speed the Parting Guest (Cook 1041, 1953) featured seven tympani, five cocktail shakers, four marimbas, and one wind machine, while Cooks Tour of High Fidelity (Cook 1079, 1958) offered, in a combination typical of the hi-fi demonstration record, both a serious experiment with high-fidelity recording techniques and a monumental farce.67 Perhaps the pinnacle of this genre was The Compleat in Fidelytie (Cook 1044, 1956), a parody of the whole trend toward the glorification of odd sounds, which [Cook] himself has largely brought about, said the New Yorker. In addition to a babys yowling, Mexican firecrackers, and the sounds of scratchy acoustic cylinders, the record featured a Technical Section that comprised a truly incredible monstrosity of screaming, plunging distortion that is guaranteed to turn conscientious hi-fi perfectionists into blubbering, cringing idiots.68 Though he was unwilling to bend toward the close-up commercial sound, Cook sold a surprising number of records and established an audiophile repertoire that was copied by many labels, big and small. Said an RCA engineer, His business is small enough so that he can act as a kind of trial balloon for the rest of us.69 The commercial potential of Cooks approach to capturing aura is perhaps demonstrated most clearly by the career of his second-in-command, Bob Bollard, after he left Cook for RCA-Victor. Under corporate auspices, Bollard produced such classics of audiophile spectacle as the percussion record Music for Bang, Baaroom, and Harp (RCA LSP-1866), the hi-fi demonstration disk Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular (RCA LSP-1773), and the first live album to see substantial chart success, 1959s Belafonte at Carnegie Hall (RCA LSO-6006). The latter record, a triumph in the portrayal of aura that has

67 68

Philip C. Geraci, Fi Mans Fancy, High Fidelity, September 1958, 87. J. Gordon Holt, Emory: Cut It Out, High Fidelity, April 1956, 88. 69 Lang, Ear Driven I, 50. Barry 21

been an audiophile reference since it was released, rode the charts for three years.70 To this day, audiophiles sit in awe at the ability of this recording to put them on a proverbial flying carpet, conjuring the aural presence of Belafonte as he moves about the stage, the palpable placement of the instruments, and the aura of being in the audience, at a distance from the stage, immersed in the noises of the crowd, as if psychically transported.71

Mercury: The Spectacle of Presence If any mainstream record imprint promised to capture the aura of the concert hall with an audiophile approach, it was Mercurys classical division, whose Olympian series, like Cook LPs, served as spectacles that could challenge and show off the capabilities of high-fidelity systems. In lieu of the charisma Cook exuded, Mercurys calling card was its recording method, which employed a single omnidirectional microphone suspended twenty-five feet above the conductor that transported the listener to a privileged, Olympian vantage point that was at once real and spectacular. The tension between aura and presence, between fidelity and spectacle, and between music and technological gimmick in Mercurys history had a special resonance because many listeners were invested in safeguarding the traditions of classical music against the potential adulterations of technology. Despite Mercurys strong rhetoric of realism and its engineers own

70 71

Wes Philips, Quarter Notes, Stereophile, December 1995, 249. The album has been discussed countless times in the audiophile journals The Absolute Sound and Stereophile during the past thirty years. In one recent example, the reviewer focuses on spatiality and distancefor example, the sensation of a great distance between instrumentalists and audience, the solid, convincing, individual images of the performers arrayed front to back, and Belafontes dramatically apparent movements. Michael Fremer, Music Reference RM-200 power amplifier, Stereophile, April 2002, 173. Another reviewer focused instead on psychic transportation, claiming, Whatever the magic of the original moment, I was able to reach out and feel it . . . as though my entire psyche had been transported to the scene. Dick Olsher, Basis Audio Ovation Turntable, Stereophile, July 1993, 100-101. 22

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devotion to preserving the cultural meaning of classical music, the Mercury story also exemplifies listeners strong desire to get hold of an object at close range, a desire embodied in their trademark Living Presence. And with its 1956 version of Tchaikovskys 1812 Overture, Mercury earned its biggest sales by rendering sublime sounds as a spectacle that highlighted the processes of reproducibility and served as an audio test record among audiophiles. For most audiophiles, classical music and high fidelity were joined at the hip. Both were in part fruits of a multifaceted effort by the radio, piano, and record industries to market classical music and the charisma of its stars in the years before World War II.72 The music industry hoped that if technology could deliver the full sensuality of the orchestra at home, classical music would be irresistible to the masses, whose souls would find uplift. In the words of Peter Goldmark, who headed the development of the LP at CBS, he hoped the new format would change nothing less than the musical taste of a nation.73 Indeed, the introduction of the LP did catalyze substantial growth in the classical record market as well as the high-fidelity market. But high fidelitys ability to capture the beauty of music was also appealing as technological sublime. As cultural historian Jacques Barzun put it, This mechanical civilization of ours has performed a miracle for which I cannot be too grateful: it has, by mechanical means, brought back to life the whole repertory of Western music.74

72

Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Suisman, The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 18901925 (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2002); Louis E. Carlat, Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic Music and American Culture, 1922-1939 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1995); and Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: Knopf, 1987). 73 Mark Coleman, Playback: From the Victrola to Mp3: 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 52. 74 Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 301. Barry 23

The aesthetics of this miraculous resurrection that occurred when needle hit vinyl were confusing and controversial. While many listeners loved the new sense that the music they heard was close at hand, for some listeners in the 1950s the fetish for sound threatened to strip the veil that was key to classical musics meaning and power. In its liner notes, Mercury promoted the musical and sonic aura that they captured by going on location rather than recording in a studio, their truly realistic depiction of the sonority of the respective orchestras performing in the acoustical surrounding of their own halls.75 Like Cook, Mercury promised transparent representation of an authentic, unadulterated performance as well, since their microphone technique meant that the control of instrumental balances and dynamic range remains where it rightfully belongsin the hands of the performing artist rather than the mixing engineer of typical classical productions, who balanced the feeds from microphones spread throughout the ensemble.76 Their influential single-mike perspective allowed the listener to inhabit the role of a privileged, Olympian observer. Indeed, Mercury was praised for the completeness of its big orchestral sound.77 In addition to aura and authenticity, Mercury cagily emphasized the quality of sound they created by choosing a repertory of what critic Edward Canby called spectacular orchestral noises.78 The debut release in 1951 featured Moussorgskys 1874 composition Pictures at an Exhibition (MG 50000), which aimed explicitly to conjure the visualten sketches and watercolorsvia sound. The version recorded, Maurice Ravels 1922 transcription of the piece for orchestra, brought Mussorgskys musical depictions of such scenes as hatching chicks, quarreling Jews, and the catacombs of Paris to a new level of aural grandeur with such sonic
75 76

Liner notes to Smetana, Ma Vlast, and Mozart, Symphony Nr. 38, Mercury MG 50043 (1952). Mercury advertisement, High Fidelity, November 1955, 78. 77 C. G. Burke, Five Years of LP, Saturday Review of Literature, 26 September 1953, 59. 78 Canby, The New Recordings, Harper's, May 1953, 109. Barry 24

treats as chirping woodwinds, reverberant, dark brass, and pealing carillons. The second release, Bartoks Music for Stringed Instruments, Percussion and Celesta (MG 50001), had a title befitting a novelty percussion record designed to show off high-frequency extension and dynamics to hi-fi enthusiasts. The recordings themselves, while realist in that they documented the sound that arrived at a real point in an orchestra hall, were not exactly natural, in that no human set of ears ever had, or would, experience the sound from twenty-five feet above the conductors head. Mercurys minimalist miking, their spectacular vantage point, and the topflight equipment deployed by engineer Robert C. Fine created a sound that Canby called stunning in its basic clearness and transparency, causing no small sensation among the hi-fi record fans.79 Compared with other classical recordings of the 1950s, Mercurys Living Presence recordings were known for close-up perspective, vivid presentation of detail, and attention-grabbing dynamics. Reviewing Mercurys Pictures, for instance, the New York Times gushed, the orchestras tone is so lifelike that one feels one is listening to the living presence, giving the label its Living Presence trademark.80 Others averred that Mercury had a tendency toward shrillness and exaggerated vividness that was a consequence of capturing more direct sound than live audiences heard. The responses to Mercurys sound demonstrate the illusory nature of fidelity and the consequent overlapping meanings of descriptors such as clarity and presence. Breathless claims of fidelity were suspect; since the original sound could never be directly compared to the record of it, one could only judge faithfulness to the imagined original, as the critic Canby pointed

79 80

Ibid. Howard Taubman, Records: Kubelik, New York Times, 25 November 1951. 25

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out. All to often, he noted, so-called high-fidelity sound was often anything but natural.81 According to film scholar Michel Chion, definitionthat is, the acuity and precision in rendering of detailis actually the standard by which fidelity is subjectively judged.82 The apparition of presence derives largely from what Chion calls materializing sound indices, sonic details that cause us to feel the material conditions of the sound source.83 In parallel to Benjamin, Chion characterizes the desire for definition as boundless. Indeed, as early as 1934, pioneering acoustics researcher Harvey Fletcher suggested the possibility that reproduced sound could provide greater emotional thrills to music lovers than those experienced from the original music.84 In answering this desire for definition, recording engineers pleased the majority but fell afoul of some conservative audiophiles and music lovers, particularly those invested in the sacralization of concert performance. In addition to unnaturally close microphone placement, engineers utilized electronic adulterations such as equalizers to boost what is known as the presence range of frequencies and volume limiters to make the quietest sounds in a recording more audible relative to the loudest and to diminish the background crackle from LP surface imperfections.85 In 1953 New York Times critic Harold Schonberg complained that these techniques threatened an essential falsification of what is heard in the concert hall, where we

81

Edward Tatnall Canby, Home Music Systems: How to Build and Enjoy Them (New York: Harper, 1953), 4. 82 Ibid., 98. 83 Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman, and Walter Murch, Audio-Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 114. 84 Harvey Fletcher, Auditory Perspective: Basic Requirements. Electrical Engineering, January 1934, 9. 85 J. Gordon Holt, The Haunted Loudspeaker, High Fidelity, March 1956, 48. These practices originated sound-film engineering, which early on had abandoned the spatial realism and unitary perspectivethat is, auraand used equalization for the sake of speech intelligibility. See also Altman, Sound Theory, 53-62. Barry 26

ordinarily do not hear heavy breathing from a singer . . . or the tapping of fingers against a cello fingerboard, or the click of fingernails against ivory.86 Mercury too disavowed sonic excess such as the tonal distortion resulting from attempts to create spurious effects of ultra-wide frequency range and brilliance.87 Westminster, an independent classical label that focused on the audiophile market with its Lab series of LPs, joined the chorus against unfaithful enhancements in an ad that declared, When you hear castanets and triangles so loud that you cant hear the music any more . . . that is only a sound effect but IT IS NOT HI-FI.88 By the mid1950s, these spectacular deviations from naturalism were making presence a dirty word to some audiophiles, a synonym for ersatz enhancements that marked a recording as fake and intruded on the direct connection between music and the sensitive listener.89 Musical Quarterly criticized the approach behind such sonic shenanigans, which treated music as mere pleasing sounds to be communicated by synthetic electronic instruments.90 The magazine, like many music lovers, took the romantic position that music was more than just sound.91 Thus they praised hi-fi writers who properly subordinated the fetish for sound to the appreciation of music and thus could be caught listening to great music, completely enthralled, even though the phonograph at hand happened to be a poor one. Under the intoxicating influence of great music, said the magazine, sound is a stranger to everything material,

86

Harold C. Schonberg, Records: FidelitySome Problems of Sound in Relation to Disks, New York Times, 10 May 1953, X14. 87 Liner notes, MG50042. 88 Westminster advertisement, High Fidelity, JanuaryFebruary 1954, 75. 89 Holt, The Haunted Loudspeaker. 90 Editorial, Musical Quarterly, July 1952, 426. 91 Michael Chanan, Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music From Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1994); James P. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); John Corbett, Free, Single and Disengaged, in Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). Barry 27

addressed not to the tympanic membrane of the ear but to our souls. Likewise, High Fidelity was troubled enough by the fetishistic aspects of high fidelity to ask, Would Mozart Have Been a Hi-Fi Fan? as if the composer was so concerned with spiritual expression that he might have disdained the innate physical characteristics of the materials with which he worked so deftly.92 But for the majority, the ability of technology to transcend the reality of performance was becoming a more important aspect of high-fidelity sound, even when attached to the classical canon, as proved by Mercurys million-selling 1956 release of Tchaikovskys 1812 Overture (MG 50054). The records selling points were the sublime fidelity of its cannon blasts and bells and the technological legerdemain that blended four disparate recordings into a synthesized whole, making a classical symphony into a popular audiophile test record. The composition itself, commissioned for the 1882 Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition, evoked the technological sublime with its remote-control cannon, triggered by an electric signal from the conductors podium, and with the sonic bombast of its brass band and all the carillons of Moscow, meant to duplicate the sounds of the battle and its victory.93 Mercurys LP version was an instant sensation among audiophiles in part because it pushed the limits of hi-fi technology, providing a stern test of a styluss ability to track the violent squiggles engraved in its grooves without distorting and of a systems ability to portray the high frequencies of the bells and the prodigious bass and transient energy of the cannon shotsperfect examples of materializing sound indices.

92

Would Mozart Have Been a Hi-Fi Fan? High Fidelity, January 1956, 56. Despite some discomfort with audiophile folkways, the author did eventually answer the question in the affirmative. 93 In fact, the original performance was cancelled, and the piece entered the repertory with conventional instrumentation. Barry 28

The other principal appeal of Mercurys 1812 Overture was that it lifted the veil on the recording process, reveling in all the art and artifice of reproducibility that created it. On the second cut of the LP, critic and composer Deems Taylor, who had officiated that classic of sonic spectacle Walt Disneys Fantasia (1942), chronicled how Mercury produced the 1812. On this cut, at least, the LP validated the claim by Mercurys music director that documentation is our watchword.94 In other respects, the record was no document, but rather a creative technological synthesis whose fealty was not to the sound of a real performance but to an imagined one that embodied the producers notion of the intent of the composer. Taylor revealed to the listener, with recorded examples, the machinations that went into recording the perfect boom at West Point and creating the impression of sixteen cannon cloned from that single shot. The sound of the Russian bells was another special effect accomplished by mixing the sound of the bells from Yales Harkness Tower with the sound of the same tape played twice as fast, creating the illusion of higher-pitched bells to accompany the sound of the actual ones.95 For the aural thrill seeker, Mercury provided the opportunity to hear the cannon track alone, the carillon track alone, and the cannon and carillon together, mixed as for the finale of the Overture, without the distraction of the orchestra. Accordingly, most reviewers treated the disc as an exercise in sonic spectacle rather than music, recommending alternate recordings for music and even for sound. Gelatts audiophile viewpoint was that on good equipment the record made a tremendous, soul-satisfying noise.96 The New York Times acknowledged Mercurys hard to beat feature of real cannon and real bells, but scoffed at Mercurys hyping of the artillery belches that were almost as loud as a

94 95

The Talk of the Town: Boom! New Yorker, 12 February 1955, 23. Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture (Mercury MG00054, 1956), liner notes. 96 Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977, 2nd. rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1977) 313. Barry 29

bass drum, preferring a version on Vanguard.97 High Fidelity, commenting on the stereo rerecording released in 1959, was also less than satisfied with the concessions made to spectacle, which entailed sacrificing the average volume level and ironically the presence of the orchestra in order to make this climax sound really big. While the Taylor commentary was deemed the most interesting part of the album, a London version was preferred for its full and rich sound, while a monophonic Angel version took the prize for those who really care about the music rather than the gimmicks.98

Fi Mans Fancy Despite such sneers, by 1957, audiophile records, gimmick or not, had become important and recognizable enough for High Fidelity to inaugurate a new column called Fi Mans Fancy to review them. The records that fell under that rubric, an emergent genre designated exotica by collectors today, were marked by liner notes promising spectacular sound and fantastical, hyperpresent soundscapes, rich in the sonic details with which audiophiles could test and enjoy the sublime capabilities of phonography. Newer audiophile labels like Audio Fidelity applied a close-up multi-mike recording style to the repertoire established by Cook, aiming to produce the feeling of being in the band instead of the sensation of listening at a distance, and outselling Cook in the late 1950s and early 1960s.99 Mimicking many of these features but framing his records for the average customer, Enoch Light exploited the new medium of stereo LPs, producing the signature demonstration albums of the new format on his Command label.
97

Harold C. Schonberg, Records: Ninth, New York Times, 22 April 1956, 126. The description is apt. 98 High Fidelitys Records in Review (1959), 195. 99 Burt Order, Plaza de Toros (Audio Fidelity, 1957), in Fi-Mans Fancy, High Fidelity, July 1957, 58. Audio Fidelity sold 4.2 million records from 1957 to 1960. Noise Merchant, Time, 19 May 1961, 87. Barry 30

Commands Persuasive Percussion series (195961) turned exotica-inflected, percussiondrenched albums of pop standards into audio test records for the mainstream, a template copied by labels both big and small, who mimicked their luxuriously glossy sound, their luxuriously glossy album covers, and their fanciful exploitation of a stereos ability to suggest the location and movement of sounds. Triumphant products of modern technology, the exotica LPs of Light and others were bearers of a synthetic sonic world of sound for sounds sake, one for which not only the best seat, but the only seat, was in front of stereo speakers. Despite his unmitigated willingness to manipulate sound in the name of listening pleasure, Lights story demonstrates the continued cultural appeal of high fidelity in his adoption of tropes of realism and maverick perfectionism. Nonetheless, in making two dozen best-sellers in a three-year span, Light labored to counter critics disdain for percussion records by dissociating his work from the sound fetishism of audiophiles, framing it as respectable middlebrow music perfectly captured. As high fidelity became more popular during the 1950s, the fi man wanted adventures in sound, like David Carrolls Percussion in Hi-Fi (Mercury MG 20166, 1956) and exotica that evoked foreign or heavenly sounds, such as Arthur Lymans Taboo (HiFi R806, 1958) or Esquivels Other Worlds, Other Sounds (RCA LSP-1753, 1958). In contrast to the documentary approach of Emory Cook, Martin Denny, the genres most popular artist, presented what he called a pure fantasy of the tropics, a submissive but alluring Quiet Village rendered with a percussion-heavy mix of semi-jazz or latin beat and accented with ethnic instruments.100

100

V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Incredibly Strange Music, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1993), 142-43. Les Baxter, the founder of the genre, also presented a fantasy, noting that at the time he composed his ground-breaking exotica he had never got further than Glendale. Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 62. These fantasies of exotic islands dovetail with the rubrick of Cold War orientalism. See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 31

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Instead of offering the actual music of the islands, exotica artists played cocktail-hour sentimentality with a liberal spiking of pseudojungle sound effects and exotic percussion recorded so that every jingle jangle appeared in bright purity, as a Denny review put it.101 The basic musical and sonic approach was quite similar to a percussion album, in fact: We establish a mood by stressing melodic content and highlight it with novel effects, explained Denny on his debut LP Exotica (1957), which had a recording budget of just $850 but sold 400,000 copies.102 You have to hear it, experience it, to believe that glasses, small cymbals, bamboo sticks with drum heads, and exotic Oriental effects can enrich music so much.103 Exoticas popularity was not the result of the machinations of the music industry but groundlevel desires that labels underestimated for several years. Dennys signature psuedojungle bird calls started as a goof that their audience wanted to hear again (and again), and his single Quiet Village charted at number two in 1959, two years after its release on his debut Exotica, a bottom-up phenomenon that spread from a single disc jockey whose listeners responded to the track.104 Like exotica but unlike Cook Records, Grand Award, Enoch Lights first label, frequently presented facsimiles and allusions in preference to the real thing. Whereas Cook, for instance, went on location to New Orleans to record forgotten musicians like Lizzie Miles, Grand Awards best-sellers enlisted session ace Dick Hyman to play the honky-tonk piano of Knuckles OToole and Lights own big band to play a series of Roaring Twenties hits in a topdrawer New York studio. A master merchandiser, Light used the liner notes to explain every aspect of Grand Award records in smooth puffery, heralding Acclaimed by Music
101 102

R. D. Darrell, Hi-Fi Music, High Fidelity, September 1959, 94. Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica, 60. 103 Liner notes to Martin Denny, Exotica (Liberty LRP 3034). 104 Liner notes to Martin Denny, Exotica I & II (Scamp SCP 9712, 1996). Barry 32

Critics/Approved by Music Educators/Treasured by Music Lovers on every LP jacket. Anticipating Command, Grand Awards notes offered the technical bona fides of the recording process, explained the provenance of the paintings used for cover art, and conjured the aura implied in the music. Light knew his audience well, and he made his first fortune when ABC bought Grand Award in 1959. Lights big idea for his new label, Command, was to exploit the new medium of stereo LP and the interest in sound that stereo had stirred with a mainstream audience, and to sell at a premium price. Stereo LPs were pushed to market prematurely by an audiophile label, Audio Fidelity, in late 1957, and were selling almost exclusively to audiophiles through 1958, but they quickly garnered widespread attention.105 Believing that too many LPs in the fledgling stereo market were aimed at eggheaded classical music fans and nerdy audiophiles, Light saw an opening for a good musical pop record whose sound was so noticeably directional that the average customer of phonograph records would notice it.106 Commands Persuasive Percussion and Provocative Percussion series (four volumes each from 1959 to 1961), were not documents of a performance but entities in themselves--artificial, self-contained worlds of sound, tailored to the vicissitudes of mechanical reproduction in the living room, representing the triumph of the urge to strip the veil.107 In this, they merely expanded upon the soundscapes of the monophonic exotica and percussion records that were Commands antecedent while aiming

105

Audio Fidelity disrupted what the industry hoped would be a slow, orderly transition from mono to stereo by ordering test pressings in a proposed stereo format, then releasing those records to the public even before a stereo phono cartridge was available to play them; by 1958, nearly every label had a stereo catalog. 106 Richard A. Gradone, Enoch Light (19051978): His Contributions to the Recording Industry (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1980), 73. 107 RD 800, 806, 808, 810, 817, 821, 830, 834. To these were added Bongos, Bongos/Flutes/Guitars, Pertinent Percussive Cha-Chas, two volumes of The Percussive Trombone of Urbie Green, Reeds and Percussion, and Off Beat Percussion, all before 1963. Barry 33

for a wider market.108 Commands hyper-real, incandescent sonic clarity resulted from Lights engagement of engineer Robert C. Fine, the man responsible for the Living Presence sound and also a number of exotica, pop, and jazz recordings, who combined the most sensitive recording equipment available with modern studio techniques that captured detail that only an array of electronic ears, i.e. microphones, could hear. Commands most overt and innovative deviation from naturalism was ping-pong stereo, in which sounds would switch from one speaker to the other willy-nilly. The results, described as ultra-stereoistic, dazzlingly brilliant, and glassy-hard by High Fidelity, assaulted the listener in spectacular fashion with a battery of sharply defined percussive transients embedded in light, melodic tunes.109 In creating a synthesis of mobile close-up perspectives, Light abandoned the notion of fidelity, admitting to an interviewer that no live jazz band ever sounded quite like a Persuasive Percussion record.110 In fact, it required up to six people just to operate the mixing board.111 In foregrounding the medium of representation, Light went beyond the desire for immediacy or even the shock effects identified by Benjamin to what media theorists Bolter and Grusin call hypermediacy.112 With a Command record, wrote Light in his bombastic fashion, with terms evoking the sublime and Maxells blown-away

108

Tim J. Anderson makes the spatiality of stereo central to his otherwise excellent discussions of high fidelitys tension between the fantastic and the real, but a simple chronology of exotica LPs in the mono era shows that stereo was merely an elaboration of an established aesthetic of fantasy space. Further, as Peter Doyle demonstrates in Echo and Reverb, recordings have long conveyed the illusion of space through the use of different microphone placements, acoustic environments, and electronic adulteration. 109 High Fidelity, August 1960, 74-75. The term had originated in non-musical recordings of sounds like a ping-pong ball moving back and forth or a train passing from one side of the stereo to the other. Lights innovation was to put such movement in a musical context. 110 Herbert Kupferberg, They Shall Have Music, Atlantic Monthly, December 1961, 94. 111 Gradone, Enoch Light, 211. 112 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Barry 34

listener, it is possible to reproduce music of such great intensity that it actually approaches the threshold of pain, an experience he described as shocking, exhausting, and exhilarating.113 The unmistakable directionality of a Command LP, in concert with the brilliant, crystalline treble combined to imbue a sheen of reproducibility so obvious that even owners of cheap console stereos with deficient treble response and inadequate stereo separation could recognize it as stereo high fidelity, making perfect demonstration material for audio retailersand the perfect electronic foil to Benjamins notion of aura. Fidelity may have been abandoned in practice, but Lights rhetoric, rich in audiophile tropes, demonstrates its continued discursive traction. Command declared fealty to ideals of realism, coyly promising true sound and new and more exacting standards of clarity and brilliance.114 Even the most unfaithful aspect of his discs, the ping-pong stereo, was marketed as an audio test of the in-room, subjective balance between left and right channels. Likewise, the glassy hard transients presented a test for contemporary phono cartridges to reproduce without adding fuzzy distortion. According to High Fidelity, the dramatic channel switching did indeed provide useful and rigorous playback system tests as well as a few new sonic titillations.115 Light made it easy for the novice with annotations that explained where the ear should focus on each track. As with other consumer audio test records, the home listener, rather than measurements from the test bench, was the proper judge the sound quality. Echoing Emory Cook and other high-fidelity pioneers, Light also painted himself as a maverick perfectionist. Despite his successful track record, his Grand Award partners and his new bosses at ABC initially refused to finance Persuasive Percussion. Confident his concept would pay off, he fronted the

113 114

Stereo 35/MM (Command RS 826 SD, 1961). Persuasive Percussion (Command SD 801, 1959). 115 High Fidelity, November 1959, 113. Barry 35

$80,000 recording cost himself, as he told every interviewer who would listen. Even with his own money tied up, he explained, he was so committed to quality that he held up the record for six months as Fine struggled to properly engrave the sound of the Chinese bell tree on the disk. In 1961 he similarly undertook an expensive entrepreneurial risk in switching his recording medium to 35-mm film, which had greater measurable fidelity than recording tape, reinforcing his commitment to fidelity.116 In marketing audiophile spectacles more to the average customer than the serious audiophile, Command attempted to dissociate from the fetishization of sound for sounds sake and the erotic overtones that characterized the fi mans fancy by hyping the quality of music that was pedestrian even at the time. Staking a claim of uniqueness in a world of audiophile gimmick, the liner notes to Persuasive Percussion claimed, These are the most unusual records you have ever put on your turntable. Whats on these records? MUSICnot sound effectsbut music. Brilliantly recorded music, played on fascinating percussion instruments with new and exciting tone textures.117 A more valid distinction was in Commands album covers, which became the object of countless imitations. The eroticism of exotica album covers partook of popular notions of primitive sexuality that offered escape from American ideals of committed romantic love and served as an idealized reminder of military service in the Pacific.118 The sexy, playful covers common to percussion albums featured what Light deemed too many girls in too few clothes, typically juxtaposing cheesecake with circuit diagrams, electronic components, and decidedly

116

In using film Light presumable benefited from Commands association with Mercury, the only other label at the time to use 35mm film instead of tape for their recording activity. 117 This verbiage from Persuasive Percussion was duplicated in Commands print advertisements. 118 Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica, chapter 1. Barry 36

nerdy men.119 In contrast, Command introduced luxuriously laminated gatefold covers embossed with distinctive abstract paintings and imprinted with smooth hype that assured the buyer that Command Records were the fruits of concentrated effort by a dedicated group of world renowned artists and sound scientists that would add to the musical stature of the record libraries of discriminating people. The proudly modernist covers, the first few by Bauhaus artist Joseph Albers, though seeming to offer no more intrinsic meaning than the music in the grooves, perfectly matched the music by deploying standard figures in a novel way. Commands success in reframing exotica for the average customer is inarguable. Persuasive Percussion was one of the best sellers of the 1960s, and overall Command shifted more than 100,000 copies of twenty-two of its initial twenty-six releases. The first two alone grossed $5 million, in addition to whatever sales heavy bootlegging produced.120 In the wake of Lights success, stereo percussion albums became a fad. Soon RCA mimicked Commands concept of luxurious album covers and disks filled with artificial aural movement with their Stereo-Action series, packaged in sumptuous die-cut jackets with colorful abstract art and the slogan The sound your eyes can follow.121 Decca/London offered Phase Four Stereo in glossy gatefold sleeves, and Mercury answered with the similar Perfect Presence Sound. In their success, exotica records overcame the many stigmas associated with the love of sound. The tension between the appreciation of hi-fi technology and the appreciation of music was still operative, reprised for example in Edward Canbys characterization of stereo lovers as musical ignoramuses compared with the real music lover.122 Likewise, critics frequently

119 120

R. D. Darrell, High Fidelity, February 1961, 10. Kupferberg, They Shall Have Music, 93. 121 RCAs emphasis was on music and not on sound for sounds sake. Cash Box, 31 December 1960. 122 Canby, Stereo for the Man Who Hates Stereo, High Fidelity, September 1961, 48. Barry 37

complained of yet another percussion demonstration record, exoticas unnaturally bright tones, and the threat posed to good music.123 In addition, percussion sounds, popular with audiophiles in part because they are such effective materializing sound indices, were a particular affront to legitimate music because percussion threatened to replace keyboard-influenced music with what avant-garde composer John Cage characterized as an academically forbidden non-musical field of sound.124 Light himself traded in notions of percussion and sound as non-musical, contrasting his label to those that were enraptured by various kinds of noisesthose of locomotives, cowbells, etc.125 The immature, uncivilized associations of percussion are captured by a record executive who told Downbeat, I have the feeling that little boys who pound on drums, or generally make lots of other noises, grow up to buy percussion albums. Like, they like to beat their stereo rig, or their wife, or maybe both.126

Conclusion: Fidelity Redefined Throughout the 1950s, critics endlessly repented for the excesses perpetrated in the name of high fidelity by audiophiles of dubious musical sensibility who aimed to cleave the ear with piercing and growling exaggerations of reality.127 By the end of the decade, the tension between musical values and spectacular sound finally began to find resolution in a distinctive blend of technophilia and romanticism that refocused on a new object of fidelity, the work itself, and applauded the ability of technology to deliver it. There are moments in Wagner when you just cant hear the singers, asserted conductor Igor Markevitch in 1957. To restore the balance
123 124

J. Gordon Holt, Bell, Drum, and Cymbal, High Fidelity, August 1956, 51. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 79. 125 New York Sunday News, 5 August 1962. 126 Bill Coss, Big Bang in Percussion, Downbeat, 31 March 1961. 127 Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 298. Barry 38

is part of the real art of recording. . . . To tell the truth you have to change a little.128 The new philosophy of recording was coming into line with recording practices that abandoned natural perspective and sonic aura in the name of clarity, detail, and balance. Classical performances were now understood as simulations of the written score, and high-fidelity technology was hailed for its ability to transcend mere reality in order to convey the true meaning of the abstract musical work.129 Soon, the spectacular soundscapes of exotica would spread to popular music. Moreover, the use of recording technologies to create sublime sounds became assimilated not as ersatz but as authentic art in the Romantic mode of self-expression. The acceptance of the new recording approach as authentic was heralded by the arrival of John Culshaws production of Richard Wagners opera Das Rheingold for UK Decca, a classical sensation and best-seller in 1959.130 Das Rheingold was the first record to combine explicitly spectacular production, the cultural authority of classical music, and unanimous critical acceptance. Using a self-consciously cinematic approach marked by movement and effects, recording director John Culshaw hoped to get a sound . . . which is perhaps more intense than the sound you could ever hope to hear in an opera house.131 Like its antecedents discussed above, Das Rheingolds spectacular effects, including eighteen pounding anvils, maidens floating underwater, and the tremendous thunderclap of the third act, became a sort of

128 129

Herbert Kupferberg, Markevitch in Transit. High Fidelity, May 1957, 44. Andrew Blake, Towards a Musicology of Early-Mid 1960s Recordings by Suvi Raj Grubb, paper delivered at Centere for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, 18 September 2005: http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/events/s2Blake.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2009. Blake uses the Baudrillardian term simulacra to describe the state of classical recordings. 130 UK Decca released Das Rheingold in the United States under the London imprint. U.S. Decca was an entirely separate entity by the 1950s. U.S. sales in 1959 were an impressive 100,000 for the three-album set. 131 David N. C. Patmore and Eric F. Clarke, Making and Hearing Virtual Worlds: John Culshaw and the Art of Record Production., Musicae Scientiae 11, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 275. Barry 39

international standard by which you judged the quality of your gramophone.132 But instead of falling afoul of audiophile stigmas, Das Rheingold was praised by critics for staying true to every single effect as Wagner wanted it, offering what Decca called a new kind of personal involvement to the listener by placing him closer to the score, and thus to the drama, than has been possible hitherto.133 The theater of the mind Culshaw evoked with movement, effects, and resonant aura was superior to live performances with their grease-painted actors before cardboard rocks.134 So unanimous was the appreciation of Culshaws work that even such a curmudgeon as Theodor Adorno, who had once complained bitterly of the depredations that electronic reproduction visited upon the sound of the orchestra, used opera recordings as the linchpin of his argument that listening at home was superior to attending live performance.135 By the 1960s, recording no longer needed to break the glass, as Memorex did, in order to prove itself, and indeed mere fidelity was no longer all that exciting. Over the course of the 1950s, encouraged by consumer response, producers gave the artifices of technological reproducibility an increasingly overt role in the creation of records. As the goal of documenting an original sound faded, the audiophile practice of escaping into a sublime virtual soundscapea theater of the mindenjoyed new popularity and legitimacy not only in classical and exotica, but more broadly with the flowering of psychedelic pop in the mid-1960s. Rather than fearing its
132

John Culshaw, Ring Resounding (New York, 1972), 89. Though Culshaw claimed to portray height in promoting the record, and many critics and fans claimed to hear it, others knew stereo could do no such thing. Culshaw was merely demonstrating the power of suggestion and the strength of popular desire for technological illusion, for his own amusement (see p. 98). 133 Patmore and Clarke, 280. 134 Only later did some complain that Culshaws explosive sound effects, stereophonic spatialization and occasional electronic alteration of voices reduce The Ring, [of which Das Rheingold was the first installment] to a sound-surround spectacular. Alex Ross, Georg Solti, New York Times, 16 April 1993, C27. 135 See in particular The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory and Opera and the Long Playing Record in Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Barry 40

taint, listeners expressed a newfound faith in technology to deliver them from the comfort of their living rooms to a place beyond the concert hall. While these audiences were far from the first to enjoy titillating manipulations of sound, the sheen of technology, rather than assuring the triumph of fidelity, infused sonic experimentalism with new cultural authority.

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