I seem to have skipped one story in my continuing, occasional audio biography,
from the time when I had my first job, teaching Music Appreciation at a very
square University, Ivy League, which had just established a Music Department.
That was in 1935; I got there in 1936. In two words, the place was abysmally
unmusical, if just fine in other departments. But at the age of 24, I was about
to change all that. Via recorded music-what else? So help me, almost a half-century
ago.
You may remember from previous columns (February 1982 and May 1983) the record lending library I helped to establish at the University, thanks to the extraordinary Carnegie Collection of 78-rpm records. Also the Carnegie Phonograph, that state-of-the-art monster out of Federal Telegraph. Both the machine and the records came under my care, nobody else caring very much.
Then there were the "wooden needles," cactus and bamboo, which we required for all playing, and there was my homemade amp--6L6Gs in push pull, thanks to my new friends in the Physics Department who often borrowed my records. And the huge, plywood, flat speaker baffle in my bedroom, their idea for better subwoofer bass. There was the Professor, my boss and head of the new Department, who hated mechanized music, like most of his generation, as the earlier farmers hated the horseless carriage. But let us proceed onward to the Phonoconcert.
I doubt if I had heard of the British experience with large public or institutional phonograph concerts ("gramophone"), then perhaps just beginning, but I had produced my own already, as a fervid reaction to the sonic cruelties of my college classroom experience. I knew I was right: Given the proper treatment, music from records could be good to hear, even on a concert scale. You may remember my account of my recorded concert on a moonlit summer night at the edge of a lake, with people listening from its glassy surface, in canoes, to the magical sound of a symphony. This was a new experience in those days and I was filled with joy. When I landed that first job I was primed to convert the academic world to music listening of the same sort. And, being 24, I hadn't the slightest doubt that I would.
But the idea was not easy for my new boss, the Professor. Indeed, it was painful. His musical ways were already 25 years old and the Music Appreciation course, the same, had been given for years at another college. It was hugely successful, all those years, without the mechanical help of the phonograph.
Why should he change? From his viewpoint, his system worked well and worked again and again as new students came along. As I have said, his lectures were of the pre-phono sort, largely illustrated, if at all, by his own piano examples--that instrument serving to dish up all kinds of music from string quartets to symphonies and even madrigals. He was good at tossing off samples of all these, like adding a dash of pepper to a good salad. But his forte was lecturing. He could make you weep over a Mozart symphony that you never got to hear at all. Did you have to hear it? Not necessarily.
You understand, this was the tail end of a long, wordy tradition extending back to the great orators of the 19th century and to the fiery preachers who preceded them, all splendid masters of the art of word persuasion. Did the preacher "illustrate" his Heaven and Hell with examples in 3-D, or hi-fi? He managed much better with the power of his voice alone. Should the popular lecturer on music do otherwise? Ah, what a difference the electric phonograph was making. This poor professor was really at sea with a new technology, his distinguished career undermined at the peak of success, his piano skills rendered mostly superfluous, his ability to cope with the new equipment at the traditional artistic zero. I feel the same today when, after 30 years of analog tape editing, I now need a $50,000 digital editor to do even the simplest "splicing" job for me.
(Yes, I'm trying to cope with a digital tape of my Canby Singers.) So I send apologies to the Professor at this late date for so brashly pestering him in my innocence. He must be all of 115 years old by now.
I told the Professor, right away, that I would like to incorporate some phonograph concerts into our music course. Brash me! "That would be quite impractical," he said. The course was already set up to the last detail (it always had been), there was no time for extras, the regular work had to be done, quizzes, exams, taken and corrected, and so on. I was crushed. But not quenched. Okay, then, I'd put on my own concerts, for anybody-for the whole University! I would defy my own boss. (Did I know my humble place? Decidedly not.) That man was a saint.
He should have fired me the next day, ideas or no ideas. But he didn't. Good soul at heart.
So I went ahead. I do think I was unusually perceptive, for that time, as to the needs of phonograph (read hi-fi) listening, as contrasted to live music.
Most of my musical elders were still of the point-it-at-the-audience-and-wince school. I did know what I was doing.
But I wasn't very tactful about it. I think I put on seven or eight of my Phonoconcerts before I gave up. One does not reform a University in a day.
Mostly out of our classes, I collected a small and timid coterie of students who felt that maybe I had something for them, however arty the idea might seem. That "something" was actually listening to the music itself, rather than to lectures thereupon. We had the music, on records, all we could use. So why not? Those kids were right. They got the new idea. They were few but they were willing to brave social anathema, in that extremely "square" environment, to listen under good and pleasing circumstances. Not the classroom. I admire them in retrospect.
And so we were grudgingly given a sort of cooperation (they couldn't very well say no to anything that propagated the musical faith at the college). It was in the form of a classroom, fortunately an odd one and not bad for the purpose. We didn't get it for its special acoustics-it merely happened to be vacant in the evenings, and it had a phonograph.
This was a small, separate building, sort of Victorian and octagonal, all stone and wood casements with ivy on the outside. It obviously was never meant for a classroom, which was all to the good. Inside the single room were a few dozen randomly placed seats (not fastened to the floor). Up front was a sturdy table phonograph of the Magnavox sort, a wooden box with lid. Inside was a skimpy turntable and a heavy pickup, plus volume and tone controls. Below that, in the remaining small space, were a few watts of amplifier and a 4- or 5-inch speaker, also the power transformer. The thing played reasonably well at lowish volume, but, as in most such instruments, if you turned it towards loud you got distortion in the upper (low) highs and growling breakup in the bass. So we mostly kept it soft. I taught classes for three years in that room in the mornings.
Now we had it for our evening concerts. How to set up? I knew that this would be crucial.
You don't just play at your audience, right in a classroom. You must look for better. I figured, quite reasonably, that since classes were always in a brightly lighted and sterile environment, with rigid rows of uncomfortable seats, I should turn the lights down for effect and randomize the chairs. How about a bit of atmosphere? Like, say, some decor, maybe even flowers on the table? In a sense I was right. Atmosphere counts.
So we carried in lamps and a few extra chairs for comfort, rearranged the placement so that the phonograph was less glaringly visible and aimed, not straight ahead, but somewhat off, towards good reflecting surfaces like those casement windows and wood paneled walls. I think I even set out plates of cookies.
No use! We had put up posters, which I made, all over the campus.
They weren't at all academic-the idea being, so to speak, to break the ice. I did my level best. At the first concert maybe a dozen students showed up, stone-faced and ready to be embarrassed. It was sheer risk for them in that squarest of universities. When I turned the lights almost out at one point, they nearly perished. It was awful. I will never forget the faces. From that point on we had audiences of five or six or three. But being me, I would not give up. Music, I really believed, would do its own job.
The end was sudden. In desperation I had a bright idea. I would invite the great and beloved Professor himself, head of the Department, to take over a Phonoconcert. That would do it. They would flock to hear him. Yes, he said to my surprise, he would talk about the Bach "B-Minor Mass," which we had complete on records, its first recording. Wow! My favorite music. I had even sung it in college.
But I had not reckoned with the gentleman. I should have known First, I discovered that the concert would have to be in a larger place--none other, of course, than our regular and hideous concrete lecture hall. And he was right. A huge audience appeared--the man was famous, remember. The lights were up to full brightness, the Carnegie Phonograph was poised, as usual, pointing straight at the audience, and all those nice people were ready to hear the Professor lecture--what else? Talk he did. He was at his old-time best, and they loved it--the students, by the dozens, also the ladies and gents of the faculty community who were of the sort who loved culture and cultural events, especially when the lecturer was eloquent.
But the music-the concert? The Professor waxed so eloquent, indeed, that the little matter of the music quite slipped his mind, time and again. All we got were perhaps two minutes of the usual squawks and screeches as he tried, in his endearing way, to locate a musical theme with the volume control wide open. (The Carnegie Phonograph could mow down the ears like the biggest hi-fi system today.) For me it was a dreadful, devastating occasion and why labor the point? To make my usual pun. But everybody else loved it.
Squawks? Didn't all phonographs make squawks like that, if maybe not quite so loud? But such a glorious lecture! It was the end.
I never tried another Phonoconcert, until I left the place two long years later. And thereby, just perhaps, future audio and hi-fi were set back in their later development by a few short months? Who knows. Could be. In any case, I no longer try to amend my professor's ways of operation, on the grounds that it is none of my business. Except, maybe, in this column.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Feb. 1985; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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