Now Hear This

T.S. Eliot reading aloud, Eleanor Roosevelt's rallying cry, jazz from the hottest clubs of Harlem. In the basement of the music center sits a rare treasury of recordings where anyone can tune in to the past.

by Diane Rogers

Photography by Peter Stember

Library of Congress Recorded Sound Reference Center

The New York Public Library Recorded Sound Archive

The Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings

Syracuse's Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive

BIG SOUND: Archivist Koprowski holds a 20-inch shellac disc produced around 1907 by French manufacturer Pathé. Both sides feature arias by tenor Carlo Albani. Records this large were made to deliver sound at greater volume, for use in restaurants, public halls and spacious music rooms.

'TONIGHT, as on every other night, the rooftop watchers are peering out across the fantastic forest of London’s chimney pots. The antiaircraft gunners stand ready. . . .”

Edward R. Murrow’s voice is fuzzy in spots, but most of his World War II radio broadcasts are in surprisingly good condition.

“They were very moving, even if I sometimes had to turn the volume all the way up,” Marion Lewenstein, professor emerita of communication, says of the Murrow gems she mined from Stanford’s Archive of Recorded Sound. In her course on the history of journalism, Lewenstein used to treat students to archival tapes of Calvin Coolidge’s presidential campaign speeches and Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. She even spotlighted comedians from radio’s earliest days, “although students didn’t think they were funny.” When research papers were due, she often sent her class into the bowels of Braun Music Center to make their own discoveries among the collections of 78 rpms and 33s.

Associate professor of music Jonathan Berger and a team of graduate students conducted similar detective work in transcribing an 1889 wax cylinder recording of Johannes Brahms playing his “Hungarian Dance No. 1” on the piano. Using advanced signal-processing methods to conduct so-called sonic archaeology, Berger was able to digitally isolate musical notes hidden within a background of hisses, scratches and hums.

Musicologists are probably the most frequent visitors to the Braun collection, spending long hours in the hushed inner sanctum of the audio room, where archivists are the only ones who handle the materials and no recording can be played more than three times in one day. A scholar trying to identify and date alternate takes of performances by Enrico Caruso—which may sound virtually identical, though recorded months apart—will listen closely to the instrumentalists, noticing when a particular flute player takes a breath. The search for such clues is painstaking, but it can open new windows on the world of 19th-century music-performance practices.

CRANK IT UP: Perez displays, from left, an Aretino gramophone with morning glory horn; two short wax cylinders; the container for a cylindrical, brown-wax "Edison record"; an Edison horn; a reel-to-reel tape; two boxes of piano rolls; and an Edison cylinder machine, or phonograph.

The archive’s 260,000 wax cylinders, piano rolls, magnetic-wire recordings, tapes, shellac and vinyl records, CDs and laser discs are available to the public as well. When Hilary Connell was a student at nearby Menlo-Atherton High School, researching a paper about political and religious influences on Handel’s music, she went to the archive to dig for primary sources. “I found the sheet music for a lot of his oratorios and listened to recordings of works I couldn’t find on CDs,” the sophomore classics major says. Now that she’s playing bass drum and cymbals in the University’s wind ensemble, Connell expects to make regular trips to Braun to hear how percussionists of the past performed.

FROM DEBUSSY interpreting his own compositions in 1904 to gospel singer Eva Taylor belting out “Thriller Blues” during the Second World War, the holdings span decades and genres. Opera enthusiasts can listen to Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad soar in Brünnhilde’s “Battle Cry” from a 1936 broadcast of Die Walküre, while those who prefer the smoothly sublime will snap their fingers to Mabel Mercer Sings Cole Porter. And of course, there’s a copy of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater radio broadcast of October 30, 1938, “War of the Worlds.”

Established in 1958, Stanford’s archive is one of the so-called “big five” repositories in the United States (along with those at Yale, Syracuse University, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library) devoted to acquiring and preserving materials that document the history of recorded sound. That, you may not recall, began on December 6, 1877, with Thomas Edison’s tinfoil-cylinder recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Today, the shellac 78s and vinyl LPs are shelved in seismically strengthened cabinets in Braun’s environmentally controlled basement, with wax cylinders and shiny aluminum transcription discs tucked away in metal drawers. “The temperature is about 69 degrees, the humidity is 55 percent and nothing can fall off when the compact shelves are closed,” says operations manager Aurora Perez. From one shelf she carefully extracts a 7-inch, 19th-century Berliner gramophone record. It’s made of an aggregate carbon compound and feels like a lead Frisbee. From another shelf, Perez pulls out an old children’s favorite, The Second Bubble Book (1918), which includes 5-inch recordings of standards like “Simple Simon” and “Old King Cole.” Atop dust-free shelves, early 1900s gramophones with neon-green and electric-blue morning glory horns peer down on the rows and rows of recordings like exotic flowers from an Alice in Wonderland garden.

Alongside the melodic holdings are the recordings of historic voices—poets Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot reading from their works, statesmen Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy delivering ultimatums and inspiration. There’s even a copy of the broadcast Eleanor Roosevelt delivered on Sunday evening, December 7, 1941, for her weekly “Over Our Coffee Cups” radio address. “The night after Pearl Harbor, she basically threw away the script,” says Richard Koprowski, acting head of the archive. “We were clearly going to war, and Mrs. Roosevelt gave this wonderful rallying cry about the sacrifices to come.”

Most of the collection, including the Roosevelt recording, was donated to the University by hobbyists like Roy Pryor, ’21. MA ’24. Between 1937 and 1944, Pryor used a home recording machine to make aluminum and acetate discs of radio broadcasts about the war in Europe and the Pacific, and he later turned over more than 1,000 of them for safekeeping. In 1985, the archive welcomed another treasure trove: almost 40 years of recordings from the Monterey Jazz Festival. “They’d had the materials for a long time, stored under a stage, not being taken care of,” says Barbara Sawka, the William R. Moran Curator for Recorded Sound, emerita. “Now we preserve and house and document materials for them, but the rights still reside with the festival.”

Sawka, ’72, was an assistant archivist at Yale’s Collection of Historical Sound Recordings before she returned to the Farm in 1977 to work with then-archivist Ed Colby, MA ’56. As his successor, she supervised the collection’s 1984 move to Braun from the basement of the former University presidents’ home on the Knoll, where the music department had once resided.

Sawka saw the collection through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake with little loss of materials, but then found herself ankle-deep in the flood of February 2, 1998. As the carpeting in her office got soggier and water rose toward wooden pallets holding a large collection from a classical radio station, she made the call to toss the records, which duplicated other Stanford holdings. “We’d spent years processing the commercial LPs, but decided to sacrifice a good number of them,” she says. “We couldn’t allow any wet materials to stay because of the danger of mold.”

IN HER NEARLY 25 YEARS at the archive, Sawka saw the gradual turning of another tide, as scholars outside the music department learned about the recordings and increasingly dropped by. English professors who wanted to hear the inflections of William S. Burroughs as he read his own poems, historians looking at America’s pre-World War I export of ragtime bands to Europe, student documentary filmmakers searching for background accompaniment—all made appointments for time in the audio room.

Koprowski, who fields many of the requests, can pull up an anecdote to accompany almost any research project. “The history of recorded sound sort of parallels the period of invention that began in the 1890s,” he says. “So if you’re doing a documentary on hair dryers, we’ve got songs about hair dryers. There’s even a popular song about the first long-distance phone call between San Francisco and New York City, called ‘Hello, ’Frisco, Hello.’”

Some of his favorite stories feature the German contralto Ernestine Schumann- Heink. “It was said that Christmas in the 1930s didn’t start until Schumann-Heink sang ‘Silent Night’ on the radio,” Koprowski notes. “She was seen as this large mother figure, and she was a very large opera singer. As she walked into a concert hall in San Francisco one evening, she knocked over some musicians’ stands. And on her way out, she knocked over some more stands. So the stage manager said to her, ‘Madame Schumann-Heink, perhaps when you go out for the second part of the program, you could walk sideways?’ And Schumann-Heink replied, ‘Young man, I have no sideways.’”

But seriously. You might have heard that Edison insisted on personally auditioning every artist who wanted to record with him? It also happened that Edison was deaf. “So he would listen by biting into the wood of the recording machine, because he could hear by bone conduction,” Koprowski says. “He turned down some pretty famous performers because they didn’t record well.”

Recordings from the late 1800s have much to teach today’s researchers and performers, he says. William R. Moran, ’42, founder and honorary curator of the archive, would second that sentiment. “You can get a lot out of listening to old-time opera singers who studied with composers and created various roles with them,” Moran says. “You have a direct connection to them with records; you don’t have to go through the written page.”

Moran listened to classical records as a child and was a sophisticated collector by the time he arrived at the Farm. Not only was he the impetus behind the establishment of the archive, but he’s also credited for making an important discovery one afternoon as a guest in the home of the University’s first president, David Starr Jordan. There, Moran came upon a long-lost 78 rpm recording of “The Spirit of Stanford,” the speech Jordan gave at Stanford’s opening in 1891.

NOWADAYS, when someone calls with a new find, the archivists have to think seriously about whether they have room for it. The archive’s strength has always been in recordings made before 1950, the year that marked the debut of the LP and the resulting explosion of pop music. “Faced with a real space crisis, we’ve collected [only] representatively from 1950 on,” Sawka says. “Yes, we have Elvis and the Beatles, but we don’t seek to do it all comprehensively.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the newer holdings that can be the most challenging to maintain. One immediate threat is the damage done by chemical compounds. Iron oxide is applied to tapes, for example, as an adhesive or binding agent. But if the compound is faulty, the oxide can adhere to the recording head as well, causing what’s known in archival parlance as “sticky-shit syndrome.” Then the tape slows down, waaaay down, to the point where it sounds like a badly recorded underwater dream.

By contrast, Koprowski says, 78 rpms are remarkably stable. “I can hold up a 78 made by Caruso in 1917 and a CD issued by RCA Victor in 1993, which has that same 78 on it, and the CD can’t be played anymore because it has suffered from ‘bronzing.’ The silver layer has disintegrated inside the plastic wrap, and it’s become unreadable.”

Archivists nationwide are struggling with disintegrating materials. “There is a tremendous amount of recorded sound material in the country that needs attention,” says Sawka, an alternate member of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board. Even the largest collections, like the Library of Congress, don’t have the resources to do the job well, she says.

A new and fully equipped sound-preservation studio, possibly separate from today’s combined listening and preservation areas, is on Koprowski’s wish list for the Stanford archive. To make the holdings more generally available, he’d also like to add staff and get the word out about what’s inside. “Only a very small percentage of our recordings and special collections is represented in the Stanford Libraries’ online catalog, so people may be unaware that something they are looking for may be right here on campus,” Koprowski says. But perhaps the archive’s most pressing need is space. “We need more space to process and maintain the archive and, ideally, to display some of the treasures, like our vintage machines and posters.”

EVERY SO OFTEN, a new gem turns up. In a curious turn of events, Koprowski recently discovered a series of 1930s films in the archive, some of which are now being restored through a $5,000 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. The movies, created by the wife of opera baritone Richard Bonelli, were filmed at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, New York’s Metropolitan and the Hollywood Bowl. They capture performances, dress rehearsals and even backstage romps by cast members.

“The Bonelli films are a whole new look at costuming, staging and performance styles during the maturing of opera in America, a period that is usually represented only in still photographs,” Koprowski says. “But they are, ironically, silent.”