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On Christmas Eve 1818, Austrian priest Josef Mohr asked his church organist Franz Gruber to set a poem he had written to music. That evening during the Christmas Eve service ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ had it’s first ever performance. The first English translation of the song, ‘Stilly Night, Holy Night’ was made in 1858 by Emily Elliott. Elliott was the daughter of an English clergyman, who started off writing hymns for her father’s church and went on to publish extensively under the pen name E. S. Elliott. A year later in America, Episcopal priest John Freeman Young published what has become the most commonly sung English-language translation.
This is the first recording of ‘Silent Night’, made in 1912 on Edison’s Blue Amberol, performed by soprano Elizabeth Spencer, tenor Harry Anthony and baritone James F. Harrison, accompanied by the Venetian Instrumental Quartet. The Edison Phonograph Monthly, a trade publication for the burgeoning market of recorded music, describes the trio number as ‘unsurpassed for beauty of harmony.’ In 1912 Christmas music hasn’t quite yet found it’s niche marketing value. Instead it’s classified as ‘sacred music’ and sits alongside a varied selection that includes opera, instrumental and popular band selections – advertised as a ‘great pot-pourri of Phonographic entertainment’.
A mere two years after this recording, on Christmas Day in 1914, British, French and German soldiers are said to have sung the carol in their respective languages during the infamous World War I Christmas truce.
You can listen to a larger selection of early wax cylinder Christmas songs put together on our Sound Cloud playlist Songs for Christmas.
Portrait of W. J. Holloway, taken in 1893. Copyright National Portrait Gallery.
It is not often that you can hear the voice of someone born more than 180 years ago. Actor W. J. (William James) Holloway was born in Westminster in 1843 but at the age of thirteen his family decided to settle in Australia, a voyage on which his mother died. He took up acting in 1862 and the following year married, a union which produced four children. His second wife already had a daughter known as Essie Jenyns (1864-1920) whose talent Holloway developed - apparently driving her to fame as Australia’s greatest Shakesperean actress, and exhaustion. When she married brewery heir John Robert Wood in 1888 she gave up the stage altogether. The Holloways returned to England the following year and W. J. Holloway stood in for an indisposed Henry Irving by playing King Lear at the Lyceum in 1892 opposite Ellen Terry for a short period. His company continued to tour, most notably in South Africa, and he managed Terry’s Theatre in London from 1894. W. J. Holloway died at Clapham Common in 1913.
In 1909 Holloway made some speech recordings for the Odeon label. While many famous recordings exist from this period of great Shakesperean actors such as Lewis Waller, Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree and even private recordings of Henry Irving, these all display aspects of theatrical, declamatory delivery that sound almost risible to the modern listener. Holloway’s discs do not, and this may be because they were made with the object of reproducing the spoken English language in the clearest possible way for study purposes, rather than as a souvenir or an entertainment, as in the case of those mentioned above.
From a technical point of view and date of recording, the recorded sound is extremely clear and it seems that the discs were recorded in a special way developed by Wilhelm Doegen. I am indebted to Jolyon Hudson for unearthing the following information about this process.
Until the introduction of electrical recording in 1925, the recording process remained almost unchanged since its invention by Edison in 1877. Essentially, this process consisted of a horn, usually conical in shape, which funneled the sound to a recording diaphragm mounted at the horn's apex. Through a stylus, this diaphragm cut the groove into a wax master.
The energy available for cutting the record was limited to the small fraction of acoustic energy picked up by the horn. The experimental distance test recording that Nellie Melba made in 1910 vividly illustrates the reduction in amplitude and the loss of frequencies as she moved away from the horn.
In addition to this limitation, there was the difficulty of capturing both upper and lower frequencies, the distortion created by the mechanical process, and the significant challenge of recording sibilants.
We do not know exactly how Wilhelm Doegen achieved the enhanced recording quality in his work. However, a photograph of Doegen and fellow linguist Alois Brandl, taken in 1916 during the First World War at the Wahn prisoner-of-war camp as part of the Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission project to collect recordings of the languages and dialects of internees, provides a clue.
The internee is shown standing with his face very close to the recording horn, while Doegen holds the back of his neck with his left hand. In his right hand, Doegen holds a prepared text for the prisoner to read. As someone by then well-versed in achieving satisfactory speech recordings, Doegen presumably adjusted the prisoner’s head position relative to the horn, giving him greater control over the process. He may have pressed the prisoner’s head closer to the horn to emphasize sibilants or achieve better sound quality where the recording process was at its weakest sensitivity.
Doegen also developed a special gramophone for post war recordings, known as the Doegen Lautapparate. The gramophone, like his records, was produced by the Odeon company. It featured two separate reproducing horns connected to the tone arm and reproducer, or ‘sound box.’ One horn, made of wood, was directly connected to the tone arm, while the second horn, made of metal, was connected to the tone arm via a longer route through a metal tube.
The design had two main purposes: first, the faint sibilants reproduced through the metal horn would reverberate more, and second, the slight delay caused by the different horn lengths would create a subtle echo effect. It is possible that a similar arrangement was used in reverse for the recording process.
Outside of speech recording, none of Doegen’s improvements would have made any difference to the sound quality of music recordings, the mainstay of the recording industry then as now. Moreover, persuading artists to record under such conditions would have been virtually impossible.
We are deeply saddened to report the passing of Patrick Sellar who died in November at the age of 95.
Patrick Sellar co-founded the wildlife section in 1969 along with BBC natural history broadcaster Jeffery Boswall. Though Patrick never worked for the sound archive in an official capacity, he was a constant source of support, advice and ideas, without ever trying to control the direction of the section. He helped build the foundations of the collection which today is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives of wildlife and environmental sounds in the world. With connections across Europe, Asia and Africa made through a lifelong love of ornithology, Patrick played a pivotal role in obtaining so many of our most important natural history collections. He was well known for his excellent fieldcraft and experience of travelling in harsh environments, especially in Scandinavia and the Arctic, and was a popular figure among scientists, naturalists and broadcasters alike.
For me, Patrick was always there to offer advice and encouragement during my early days as a wildlife administrative assistant and especially when I took on the role of curator. His kind words and confidence in my abilities helped guide me through my first couple of years within the sound archive and I honestly don’t think I could have done it without his support.
He also regularly donated recordings to the collection and some of my favourites of his are accompanied by his evocative commentary, such as this example where he describes the beauty of Fair Isle while other visitors to the island are being attacked by a very angry seabird. Amazingly he remained unscathed.
Aside from his contributions to the wildlife section, Patrick was also one of the founding members of the International Bioacoustics Society (IBAC), becoming Honorary President in 2005. Since its inception in 1969, IBAC has grown from a handful of enthusiasts to a society of hundreds of scientists, naturalists and field recordists working on some of the most cutting edge research within the field of Zoology. He was a great travelling companion and we always travelled together to IBAC conferences, the last of which was in Brighton in 2019. Below is one of my favourite photos of Patrick, taken at the 25th IBAC conference in Murnau, Germany in 2015.
Patrick was a man of boundless optimism and enthusiasm, was never unkind and was always great company. He was rightly proud of how the wildlife section developed and was pleased to see how its remit and use expanded over the years, particularly in terms of education and the arts. He lived a full and rewarding life and will be deeply missed by all who knew him.
Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds