Lost Sounds

by Peter Burwasser

Thomas Edison didn't really know what he invented when he invented the phonograph. It was 1879, and the practical wizard thought he'd created an office dictation machine.

It would be a decade before the first musical experiments were conducted, and yet another decade before the recording industry really took off. But a music-loving businessman in Russia by the name of Julius Block immediately realized the potential of Edison's phonograph, and came to the great man's New Jersey laboratory in 1889 to buy one, returning to Russia to make a series of recordings of musicians there and in Germany.

The so-called Block cylinders (this was before the disc format), deposited in a Berlin museum after Block's death in 1934, were presumed to have been destroyed by wartime bombings. As it turns out, they were scooped up by the Russians after the war, and deposited in a Leningrad library, where they languished behind the Iron Curtain. After the fall of the Soviet Union, rumors of the cylinders tantalized collectors and scholars; is it true that there are recordings of the young Jascha Heifetz? The great pianist Jósef Hofmann? The spoken voices of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky? Funding was secured, and a crack team of American producers and technicians was assembled, off to what is now called St. Petersburg in 2008, including renowned Swarthmore-based historical recording specialist Ward Marston. It was a big roll of the dice. The chances were great that they would find nothing but dust, or sound so deteriorated as to be without any value. But they hit the jackpot. All of the rumors were substantiated, and then some.

Marston Records released the three-CD set The Dawn of Recordings earlier this year. The value of this material will be assessed with years of scholarship, but much of it is instantly striking. A 19-year-old Hofmann plays shimmering Wagner in 1896, just 13 years after the death of the composer. There is Tchaikovsky played and sung by the very musicians he wrote the music for. The spoken-voice selections are amazing, a window into another century. The sound is, as expected, primitive, but these CDs push our knowledge of musical practices back a full decade. As Marston puts it, when you listen, "you have to get your ears a little dirty."

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)