Miscellaneous News

1. The BAS is looking for a new webmaster. The current webmaster will train you and hand it over to you, and provide support as necessary. The website is written in simple HTML. You will need a computer and a high speed internet connection (you will need to download a 6GB backup in a reasonable amount of time). $300 is the annual payment. You may be asked to support admin of the BAS Facebook pages as well.

2. V45n4 of the BAS Speaker has been published.  It features an extended interview (28 pp!) with Edgar Villchur by David Moran from 1985.  Also the December 2021 meeting summary on Zoom and AV Recording by John S. Allen and Upscale Home AV by Kenneth Wacks

3.  This is the 100^th anniversary of the introduction of electrical recording, replacing the acoustical process. One of the most significant innovations in recorded music took place in New York City on Feb. 25, 1925.   Art Gillham, a musician known as "the Whispering Pianist" for his gentle croon, entered Columbia Phonograph Company's studio to test out a newly installed electrical system. Its totem was positioned in front of him, level with his mouth: a microphone.

This was the moment when the record industry went electric. By the end of the year, a writer for the Washington, D.C. newspaper the Evening Star marveled at "the capitulation of the world's leading musical artists to the power of the microphone." (Hollywood's sound revolution with "talkies" wasn't far behind.) Today, a performer's microphone technique can help define their sound. Yet no plaque marks the spot where Gillham made history with the first commercially released electrical recording.

Singers had relied on vocal projection. Bessie Smith, feted as "the Empress of the Blues," called herself a "shouter." Al Jolson promoted himself as "the Blackface with the Grand Opera Voice." Although Jolson appeared in the pioneering talkie "The Jazz Singer," neither he nor Smith adapted well to the arrival of electrical recordings. Both were too set in their ways to adjust to the microphone's paradoxical qualities of detail and volume. With electrical amplification, the quietest person in the room can be the loudest.

Initially people thought electrical recordings sounded overly strident and tinny. They had gotten comfortable with the warm sound of the acoustical recordings.

But the public ear quickly acclimatized. Whisper singers evolved into crooners, and microphones migrated into concert halls. Rudy Vallée claimed to be the first singer to perform a live show with electrical amplification, in 1930.

[Curiously the article doesn’t mention that the simultaneous development of the electrical disc cutter was essential—DBH] NYT 25Fe25