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IN THE GROOVE: Music chair Berger
restores early recordings.
Peter Stember |
In late 2001, with anthrax on everyone’s
mind, associate professor of music Jonathan Berger received
an unexpected package in the mail. The plain brown wrapper
gave no hint of the contents. There was no return address.
Curiosity triumphed over caution—Berger opened the
package to find a cassette tape. Baffled, he popped it into
his car's deck.
A frail, elderly voice identified itself as “Cigar Bill” Neiman.
After apologizing that he was no longer able to write, Neiman
said his lifelong hobby was collecting Thomas Edison cylinder
recordings. He feared his treasures would be liquidated in
a garage sale after his death. Because he had heard Berger
talk about restoring an old cylinder recording of Johannes
Brahms, Neiman wanted to bequeath the entire collection to
him. Berger suggested contacting the Smithsonian Institution
or another library to house such a valuable and fragile archive,
but Cigar Bill was adamant: he did not want his collection
to sit gathering dust. He wanted people to hear it and students
to use it for research.
Berger acquiesced, and Stanford’s Center for Computer
Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced karma)
gained 1,500 pre-1920 cylinder recordings including classical,
popular, folk, spiritual and march music; vaudeville routines;
speeches; two Edison phonographs; and peripheral equipment.
Cigar Bill died shortly after his gift was safely stowed
at the Knoll, home to the newly renovated CCRMA offices
and studios.
Demonstrating the Edison player in the corner office he
inherited when he became department chair last September, Berger
mounts a cylinder on the spindle and turns the hand crank on
the side of the oak housing (the player uses no electricity).
His face breaks into its trademark gap-toothed grin as music
emerges through a cone-shaped amplifier—the technological
equivalent of two hands cupped around a mouth.
Berger began work on his Brahms project at Yale, where
he was a founding director of the Center for Studies in
Music Technology before coming to Stanford. Archivist Richard
Warner had set him on a quest to unearth the music in an
acetate LP transferred from a wax cylinder recording. One
musicologist described it as so noisy that “any musical
value heard can be charitably described as the product
of a pathological imagination.” Most listeners could
not tell that a piano was playing. Various attempts to filter
and enhance the recording had yielded nothing of musicological
significance. Berger’s challenge was to separate out
the noise, then digitally represent the music, staying true
to the original. He likens the process to a paleontologist
painstakingly removing layer upon layer of dirt with a toothbrush
to reach the dinosaur bones hidden underneath.
The original wax cylinder of the Brahms recording has disappeared,
but an introduction recorded with the music tells something
of its origin. After inventing the dictaphone,
Edison—who could have added marketing genius to
his extraordinary résumé—sent emissaries
to record the voices of famous people for use as advertisements.
One of his representatives, Theo Wangemann, recorded Brahms
playing piano at the home of Dr. Richard Fellinger in Vienna
on December 2, 1889. Following the introduction, presumably
by Wangemann, the composer plays measures 13 through
72 of his 1872 arrangement of Hungarian Dance No. 1 for solo
piano.
The first step in excavating a musical dinosaur is
to transfer the sound onto a computer, where it can be displayed
as a graph (typically a series of waves) and subjected to visual
scrutiny as well as mathematical manipulations. Berger
used an algorithm called Best Basis—similar to choosing
the right size chisel—to decompose the signal, isolating
its well-structured components (the music) and removing anything
left over (the noise). In a paleontologist’s terms, too
large a chisel and dinosaur bones might be damaged; too small
and they will remain embedded in hard-packed dirt.
One challenge is figuring out the difference between an
undesirable artifact like a scratch and a cymbal clash—both
show up as spikes on the graph. Once the spike is removed and
replaced with a flat line, the musicologist must postulate
what size and shape of wave might have been hiding under the
spike—just as an archaeologist must make an educated
guess about filling in missing pieces of dinosaur bones. Best
Basis helps evaluate the range of reasonable musical probabilities.
Just as in speech, where the phrase “in the event” has
a high probability of being followed with “that,” so
the structure of musical phrases has a degree of predictability.
For Berger, the results of his analysis were illuminating.
While not perfect or musically pleasing—the fidelity
was low and the sound gritty—the excavated performance
revealed some surprises about how Brahms interpreted his
own music. He improvised. He played in an unconventional
manner Berger calls an inverse Robin Hood syndrome: borrowing
from the short note to give to the long note, nearly doubling
the length of some eighth notes. Berger describes his excitement
at hearing the composer: “To me, Brahms is second only
to God and to hear what might have been his voice . . .
and more, to hear him perform his own music, it’s thrilling.”
Not everyone thinks so. When he published his findings,
Berger received hate mail. Music restoration is as controversial
a pursuit as art restoration, where one school of thought holds
that works should be restored to their original vibrancy, while
another says any modification is heresy. However, unlike
art restoration, music restoration leaves the
original intact.
One of the problems with the Brahms recording is that it
begins at measure 13, a harmonically unsettled moment. Berger
had to use his analysis of the available fragment to extrapolate
what the entire composition would have sounded like. Knowing
that the original piece was for four hands, he also reconstructed
the second pianist’s part. The refurbished performance
is playable on an acoustic reproducing piano such as Yamaha’s
Disklavier. In effect, it recreates Brahms playing a duet
with himself.
Straddling technology and art, Berger brought his talents
as a composer to bear, guessing the dynamics and pedaling that
Brahms might have employed. “Not being a scientist, I
give myself artistic license to go beyond what can absolutely
be determined from the recording,” he explains.
As for Cigar Bill’s collection, in keeping with his wishes,
it is available for undergraduate and graduate research.
Learning from Berger’s work and pioneering their own
methods, students are cataloging and restoring the recordings
so that eventually they will be available online for the
general public to enjoy.
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