High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–19611

―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-it-

yourself 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 sound‘s 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 Cook‘s locomotives.‖4 Audio

1
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 Ziff-
Barry 1
Fairs were the most visible examples of high fidelity‘s 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 idée 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 Cook‘s recordings of

roaring locomotives were not basking in the glow of music transparently rendered—they 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

Fitzgerald‘s feat of breaking a wine glass with the power of her voice, followed by Memorex‘s

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

Davis‘s 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 Maxell‘s 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, Maxell‘s

photographic image presents a fantasy of the power of recorded sound to create a sublime

experience.

These images of high fidelity‘s 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 reason—themes 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

6
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 technology‘s 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 equipment—or 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 Mercury‘s 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 one‘s audio system and one‘s ears a workout.

8
Simon Zoltàn, ―The Double Edged Sword: The Technological Sublime in American Novels
Between 1900 and 1940‖ Philosphiae doctores, 22 (Budapest: Ph.D. dissertation, Akadémiai
Kiadó, 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 Memorex‘s 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.
Barry 5
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
Morton Gould, ―Upbeat on Two Counts,‖ HiFi Review, March 1959, 37.
12
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
Benjamin‘s Selected Writings (4 vols., 1996-2003) as well as a 2008 volume of Benjamin‘s
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.‖
Barry 6
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 Benjamin‘s 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 noticed—for 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 Benjamin‘s 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 Center‘s 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 Center‘s 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 Spector‘s ―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 Mercury‘s 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.
Barry 9
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 high-

fidelity 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.

Cook‘s 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 Cook‘s 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
Audio Devices advertisement, High Fidelity, June 1956, 1.
20
The pitch of a sound is measured in cycles per second (now more commonly referred to as
Hertz).
Barry 10
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 label‘s reputation

for both fidelity and sublime sound.22 Like his samples, Cook‘s 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 Cook‘s 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 Cook‘s

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 concrète 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 Cook‘s 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 tweeters—at 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, Cook‘s recordings of the Queen Mary‘s 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 fidelity‘s 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

can‘t 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, Cook‘s 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 adept‘s ―missionary zeal‖ was so

commonly repeated it became a cliché.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 fidelity‘s 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 fidelity‘s 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
―There‘s 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,‖ Harper’s, 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 Riesman‘s 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 adventure-

seeking.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 gull-

cries 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 Cook‘s pursuit of the extraordinary, as in the headline ―He Risks Death

Daily to Capture Real Sounds.‖39

Cook‘s 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 daydreaming—an 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. Cook‘s 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
Canby, ―The New Recordings,‖ Harper’s, July 1953, 103.
43
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 Cook‘s

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 men‘s 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 Cook‘s

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 Cook‘s 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
―Sounds of Our Times,‖ Time, 15 November 1954, 83.
49
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
backdrop—including 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 Trinidad‘s 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 Belafonte‘s

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 road—on 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 Benjamin‘s 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 Cook‘s 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 didn‘t 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 Cook‘s records.

57
Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 1900–1960
(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 à vis sound. For instance, when RCA executive

Frank Walker quipped that Cook‘s lasting contribution to the music business was the record

without royalties, he was impugning Cook‘s lack of legitimate music or legitimate musicians and

his ethos of sound for sound‘s 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
Lafay, ―Folk Music,‖ High Fidelity, March 1956, 93.
63
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 concrète of French avant-

gardist Pierre Henry. Cook‘s Speed the Parting Guest (Cook 1041, 1953) featured seven

tympani, five cocktail shakers, four marimbas, and one wind machine, while Cook’s 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 baby‘s 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 Cook‘s 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, 1959‘s Belafonte at

Carnegie Hall (RCA LSO-6006). The latter record, a triumph in the portrayal of aura that has

67
Philip C. Geraci, ―Fi Man‘s Fancy,‖ High Fidelity, September 1958, 87.
68
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 Mercury‘s 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, Mercury‘s 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 Mercury‘s history had a special resonance because many

listeners were invested in safeguarding the traditions of classical music against the potential

adulterations of technology. Despite Mercury‘s strong rhetoric of realism and its engineers‘ own

70
Wes Philips, ―Quarter Notes,‖ Stereophile, December 1995, 249.
71
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 distance—for example, the ―sensation of a great distance‖ between
instrumentalists and audience, the ―solid, convincing, individual images‖ of the performers
arrayed front to back, and Belafonte‘s ―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.
Barry 22
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 Tchaikovsky‘s 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 fidelity‘s 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, 1890-
1925‖ (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 music‘s 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 belongs—in 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 Moussorgsky‘s 1874 composition Pictures at an

Exhibition (MG 50000), which aimed explicitly to conjure the visual—ten sketches and

watercolors—via sound. The version recorded, Maurice Ravel‘s 1922 transcription of the piece

for orchestra, brought Mussorgsky‘s 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
Liner notes to Smetana, Ma Vlast, and Mozart, Symphony Nr. 38, Mercury MG 50043 (1952).
76
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,

Bartok‘s 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

conductor‘s head. Mercury‘s minimalist miking, their spectacular vantage point, and the top-

flight 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, Mercury‘s Living

Presence recordings were known for close-up perspective, vivid presentation of detail, and

attention-grabbing dynamics. Reviewing Mercury‘s Pictures, for instance, the New York Times

gushed, ―the orchestra‘s 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 Mercury‘s 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
Ibid.
80
Howard Taubman, ―Records: Kubelik,‖ New York Times, 25 November 1951.
Barry 25
out. All to often, he noted, so-called high-fidelity sound was often anything but natural.81

According to film scholar Michel Chion, ―definition‖—that is, ―the acuity and precision in

rendering of detail‖—is 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 perspective—that is, aura—and 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

can‘t hear the music any more . . . that is only a sound effect but IT IS NOT HI-FI.‖88 By the mid-

1950s, 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: Fidelity—Some Problems of Sound in Relation to Disks,‖
New York Times, 10 May 1953, X14.
87
Liner notes, MG50042.
88
Westminster advertisement, High Fidelity, January–February 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 Mercury‘s million-selling 1956 release of Tchaikovsky‘s 1812 Overture

(MG 50054). The record‘s 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

conductor‘s 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 Mercury‘s 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 stylus‘s ability to track the violent squiggles engraved in its grooves

without distorting and of a system‘s ability to portray the high frequencies of the bells and the

prodigious bass and transient energy of the cannon shots—perfect 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 Mercury‘s 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 Disney‘s Fantasia (1942), chronicled how Mercury produced the 1812. On this

cut, at least, the LP validated the claim by Mercury‘s 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 Yale‘s 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. Gelatt‘s audiophile

viewpoint was that ―on good equipment the record made a tremendous, soul-satisfying noise.‖96

The New York Times acknowledged Mercury‘s ―hard to beat‖ feature of real cannon and real

bells, but scoffed at Mercury‘s hyping of the ―artillery belches‖ that were ―almost as loud as a

94
―The Talk of the Town: Boom!‖ New Yorker, 12 February 1955, 23.
95
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 re-

recording 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 Man’s 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 Man‘s 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 Fidelity’s Records in Review (1959), 195.
99
Burt Order, Plaza de Toros (Audio Fidelity, 1957), in ―Fi-Man‘s 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
Command‘s Persuasive Percussion series (1959–61) turned exotica-inflected, percussion-

drenched 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 stereo‘s 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 sound‘s 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, Light‘s 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 Carroll‘s Percussion in Hi-Fi (Mercury MG 20166, 1956) and exotica that

evoked foreign or heavenly sounds, such as Arthur Lyman‘s Taboo (HiFi R806, 1958) or

Esquivel‘s Other Worlds, Other Sounds (RCA LSP-1753, 1958). In contrast to the documentary

approach of Emory Cook, Martin Denny, the genre‘s 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).
Barry 31
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

Exotica‘s popularity was not the result of the machinations of the music industry but ground-

level desires that labels underestimated for several years. Denny‘s 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 Light‘s 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

Award‘s best-sellers enlisted session ace Dick Hyman to play the honky-tonk piano of

―Knuckles O‘Toole‖ and Light‘s own big band to play a series of Roaring Twenties hits in a top-

drawer 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
R. D. Darrell, ―Hi-Fi Music,‖ High Fidelity, September 1959, 94.
102
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 Award‘s 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.

Light‘s 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 Command‘s 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 Command‘s 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 (1905–1978): 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 Command‘s hyper-real, incandescent sonic clarity resulted from Light‘s

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.

Command‘s 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 Maxell‘s blown-away

108
Tim J. Anderson makes the spatiality of stereo central to his otherwise excellent discussions
of high fidelity‘s 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. Light‘s 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

retailers—and the perfect electronic foil to Benjamin‘s notion of aura.

Fidelity may have been abandoned in practice, but Light‘s 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
Stereo 35/MM (Command RS 826 SD, 1961).
114
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 sound‘s sake

and the erotic overtones that characterized the fi man‘s 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. What‘s on these records? MUSIC—not sound effects—but music.

Brilliantly recorded music, played on fascinating percussion instruments with new and exciting

tone textures.‖117 A more valid distinction was in Command‘s 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 Command‘s 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 Command‘s 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.

Command‘s 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

Light‘s success, stereo percussion albums became a fad. Soon RCA mimicked Command‘s

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 Canby‘s characterization of stereo lovers as

musical ignoramuses compared with the ―real music lover.‖122 Likewise, critics frequently

119
R. D. Darrell, High Fidelity, February 1961, 10.
120
Kupferberg, ―They Shall Have Music,‖ 93.
121
RCA‘s ―emphasis was on music and not on sound for sound‘s 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,‖ exotica‘s 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 noises—those 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 can‘t hear the singers,‖ asserted conductor Igor Markevitch in 1957. ―To restore the balance

123
J. Gordon Holt, ―Bell, Drum, and Cymbal,‖ High Fidelity, August 1956, 51.
124
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 Culshaw‘s production of Richard Wagner‘s 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 Rheingold‘s spectacular effects, including eighteen pounding anvils, maidens

floating underwater, and the tremendous thunderclap of the third act, ―became a sort of

128
Herbert Kupferberg, ―Markevitch in Transit.‖ High Fidelity, May 1957, 44.
129
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 Culshaw‘s 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 soundscape—a

theater of the mind—enjoyed 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 Culshaw‘s 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.

Barry 41