Terrifying Invention

Phonograph Inventor Thomas Alva Edison has a lot to answer for--as the most casual record-shop browser can testify. Sir Arthur Sullivan once declared: "I am terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on records forever." Edison's invention has so profoundly altered the performance and consumption of music that it was possible for the most popular singer of the day--Elvis Presley--to build a recording-studio career while scarcely ever opening his mouth in public. To commemorate Edison's recent election to the Hall of Fame, the Edison Foundation has issued on one LP a sampling of some of Edison's earliest recordings. They should convince any listener that the "sound-writer" was well worth the cost of rock 'n' roll.

There is a 1920's dance orchestra (The Piccadilly Players) bouncing through a two-step version of Rose Room, a fine recording of Sir Harry Lauder singing

Roamin' in the Gloamin', one of his most popular tunes, and a 1911 track by that "loud, cheerful noise," Sophie Tucker, in which she belts out Some of These Days in a voice already impressively seamed and corrugated. The piano selections by Rachmaninoff (Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, recorded in 1919) and Moriz Rosenthal (various Chopin Preludes, recorded in 1929) are less successful, chiefly because the early acoustical method of recording tended to blur the percussive piano sound. But Rachmaninoff's glittering technique is there, and so is a remarkable and ornate cadenza that is preserved in no other performance. The album's most fascinating track is a 1911 recording of the magnificent Soprano Emmy Destinn in a soaring performance of the Suicidio from La Gioconda.

None of it would have happened, Edison once said, if he had not been almost completely deaf: he perfected the phonograph in 1887 because his own faulty hearing made him fascinated by the science of sound. His invention so fascinated the public that in those early years audiences sat for whole evenings in stunned silence listening to the tinfoil phonograph crow like a cock, bark like a dog or babble in foreign tongues. Later, the German Pianist-Conductor Hans von Bulow was so moved by Edison's handiwork that when he heard a recording of himself playing a Chopin mazurka, he fainted dead away. In the early days Columbia slipped commercials in between the musical selections on its cylinders, forcing the listener who bought the Chirp, Chirp polka to endure a sales pitch for men's overcoats. Columbia, also in those early days, considered the phonograph to be a potential boon to the illiterate. Instead of giving themselves away in writing, suggested Columbia, people could record their messages on a cylinder and ship it through the mails, thus avoiding "disclosure of their educational defects."

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