Sound and vision blog

This week's post comes from Jonathan Summers, Curator, Classical Music Recordings.

I was looking for something by which to celebrate the 150th anniversary this month of the birth of one of England’s greatest symphonic composers of the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). His nine symphonies span more than fifty years from the first, which he began in 1903, to the last, composed in 1956 and 1957.

More than twenty years ago the British Library sound archive acquired the collection of engineer Kenneth Leech, who began to record radio broadcasts from the mid-1930s on to lacquer discs. I was delighted to discover that Mr. Leech had recorded the opening of the Symphony No. 6 from its first performance on 21st April 1948.

Adrian Boult is conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a Royal Philharmonic Society Concert from the Albert Hall. The sound from the unique lacquer disc is low fidelity and the beginning is clipped, but the power and impact of the music of this arresting opening is undeniable. Apparently, this is all that has survived of that first performance.

Listen to British Library disc 1LL0009106

Boult made a commercial recording of the work for EMI with the London Symphony Orchestra on the 23rd and 24th February 1949 at Abbey Road Studios, but he was pipped to the post by Leopold Stokowski who recorded it with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for Columbia on the 21st February 1949 making it the first studio recording of the work. All of these performances are of the work before it was revised by the composer in 1950.

Philip Fowke  (photo © Jonathan Summers)

By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music

One of our great British pianists, Philip Fowke performed and broadcast on BBC radio and television from the late 1970s for more than two decades.  He also made studio recordings for EMI, CRD, Naxos, Chandos, Dutton and Unicorn-Kanchana.

In this podcast I talk to him about his life and career including the pitfalls of excessive working and playing the piano too much.  He also talks candidly about learning major works for one performance and never playing them again and gives his views on current teaching and performing.

For me, the highlight is the performance of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor Op. 40 at the Proms in 1986.  Mr Fowke has supplied some photos of the rehearsal for this performance with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Philip Fowke rehearsing with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra September 1986.  (Photos courtesy of Philip Fowke)

A scene from Viennese life; a Gypsy-concert in the Wurstelprater park’, Illustrirte Zeitung, 4 October 1873

Guest blog by Edison Fellow Dr Jon Banks former Senior Lecturer in Music at Anglia Ruskin University

This project, generously supported by a British Library Edison Fellowship, brings together traditional accounts of one of the great Viennese composers with the parallel story of the Hungarian national bands who worked in the same city, told by newspaper advertisements and also, crucially, by the earliest recordings of Hungarian traditional music. These were made in the decade or so after Brahms died in 1897, but cross-referencing the artists with the ephemera of performance publicity from the last years of his life confirms that they were either the same as the ones he heard, or dynastically related to them. The recordings, mostly commercial 78rpm discs, survive in archives and libraries and I am grateful to the Edison Fellowship for access to the material held in the British Library and the opportunity to explore it.

The connections between Brahms and Hungarian traditional music, or ‘Gypsy music’ as it was often referred to in Vienna, run deep. Though not Hungarian or Roma himself, he encountered it playing as a teenager with Ede Reményi, a revolutionary exile passing through his home town of Hamburg. It has often been cited as a possible influence on his compositions, and is the explicit root of his famous Hungarian dances. Just before beginning the Fellowship, I had written an article for Music & Letters - ‘Brahms Hungarian Dances and the early Csárdás recordings’ - based on material available online from Hungarian collections. I received invaluable help in that from the curators of these collections, especially Ferenc Szabó (formerly an Edison Fellow), Martón Kurutz and Illyés Boglárka of the National Széchényi Library, and in the course of our communications it became clear that there was still much to be discovered and so one of the first objectives of my Fellowship was to establish what might be held at the British Library.

London may not seem the obvious place to search for old Hungarian recordings but the Library is of course an international institution and many of the artists I was interested in had visited Great Britain, either as part of touring schedules or in certain cases in the express employment of the Royal Family here. Locating possible recordings involved considerable catalogue research, something that was new to me; I am again grateful for the help and expertise provided by library staff. Some of the results that turned up could be identified as duplicates of material from Hungary, but there were several that were completely unknown to me. The Fellowship gave me the opportunity not only to view and handle them but also to have some of them digitised in order to listen to what was on them, as in this one:

Repülj fecksém

The first side is listed in the catalogue under the title on the label, ‘Repülj fecksém’. Listening to it reveals that in fact it comprises a medley of two tunes, of which only the first is ‘Repülj fecksém’, an old song melody identifiable from several other recordings in a similar slow hallgató style; in notated form it can be traced back to Színi Károly’s A magyar nép dalai és Dallamai. Hangjegyekre tette és kiadta Színi Károly. 200 dal (1865), no.51. The second tune is similarly identifiable as ‘Lenn a falu végén’, but this is not mentioned on side one though it curiously forms part of the title on the side two, apparently in error. This begs the question of what actually does appear on side two.

Csak egy kislány van a világon lent a faluvégén nem füstöl a kémény

On listening, it transpires that this is another medley of two pieces, given the single title of ‘Csak egy kislány van a világon lent a faluvégén nem füstöl a kémény’. The opening melody is indeed ‘Csak egy kislány van a világon’, again unmistakable from earlier recordings and notations, whereas ‘lent a faluvégén nem füstöl a kémény’ is the part that refers to the music on the first side. The second tune on side two is therefore unnamed; it is in a lively dance rhythm and appears nowhere else, making it a valuable new discovery, since one of the foundations of my project was to compile a concordance of all melodies in the csárdás genre recorded in this early period. Therefore, as well as making it possible to clear up the confusion embodied in the original label, actually hearing this music has unearthed a previously unknown csárdás recording by the violinist Berkes Béla, whose band had previously visited Vienna in Brahms’s time and were favourites of the press there, as in this portrait in the city’s Welt Blatt newspaper shows.

‘The newly-appointed Hungarian court dance music director, Gypsy virtuoso Béla Berkes’ - Welt Blatt, 7 June 1907

In addition, actually hearing the music to ‘Lenn a falu végén’ on this particular recording is invaluable in terms of understanding the interpermeability of melody styles and genres. Side one is unique in presenting the ‘Lenn a falu végén’ tune in a rhythmic guise as a foil to the slow ‘Repülj fecksém’, since other ‘Gypsy-band’ recordings have it as a slow opening hallgató in its own right; it also appears recast in a very different style in a number of military band recordings, with an unrelated title, ‘Csebogár March’. Side two, on the other hand, begins with some distinctively Romanian violin figurations, reminiscent of contemporaries like Grigoraș Dinicu from Bucharest, before launching into an equally distinctive Hungarian csárdás, demonstrating how conventions of national style were always blurred by musicians imitating and learning from each other.

Another objective of the project was to trace the survival of this repertory after the First World War, and I had the opportunity to hear otherwise unobtainable recordings by Hungarian bands from the Library’s collections. These are especially important because this style of music fell out of favour after 1918, when the focus of Hungarian nationalists like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály was on collecting rural peasant songs, compared to which the music of what they called ‘Gypsy bands’ came to be dismissed as little more than an urban light music, or in Bartók’s words a ‘mass product for the half-educated multitudes.’

Even more catastrophic for the society that supported this music were the Second World War, the Holocaust and the suppression of minority identities under communism; and although ‘Gypsy music’ is a favourite genre among record companies now, it is often based on a different Balkan tradition that was called ‘Romanian’ on the pre-1914 recordings and premised on a more modern identity politics.

 The final aim of this project is to tell the forgotten story of the many Hungarian musicians working in the classical ‘eternal city’ of nineteenth-century Vienna, and so re-evaluate their considerable contribution to its cultural life and their interaction with composers who lived there such as Brahms. Studying the early recordings is a vital part of this, because many of them were made by artists who worked regularly in Vienna and so confirm the repertories that they played, which can then be directly related to, for example, Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. They also provide an authentic insight into the performing style of the music, which can only be guessed at from the tantalising descriptions of the time, such as this one from Liszt:

…it seemed as if every possible sound or tone was crashing down together like mountain crests which fall with a frightful uproar on sheets of sand mixed with blocks of rock and stone. We felt uncertain whether the ceiling, which seemed to rock with these sudden displacements of sonorous currents and vibrations, would not really fall upon our heads; such was the crushing nature of the music which all the conservatories of the world would certainly have condemned and even we found to be just a trifle risky.

The recordings are thus essential in establishing the reality behind this kind of hyperbole and also in understanding how ‘classical’ composers such as Liszt came to view this music in such extreme terms. They also feed directly into performance, especially in my professional work with the ensemble ZRI, reimagining some of the great Viennese classics using the soundworld and instrumentation of Hungarian national bands. The recordings lie at the heart of both these projects and I look forward to studying them further in the future.

This week’s post comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist.

The following post is inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s famous work, The Rite of Spring. The audio featured below is an excerpt from a 12” 78 rpm disc from our archive, released on Columbia Records in 1929. Stravinksy himself conducts the Symphonic Orchestra of Paris.

I was drawn to this recording after recently going to see a revival of Pina Bausch’s 1975 staging of The Rite of Spring at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. This was performed by a company of dancers from African countries.

Pina Bausch (1940-2009) was a German dancer and choreographer who was enormously influential in the fields of dance and performance. She worked in the tradition of ‘Tanztheater’ (literally ‘dance theatre’), which marries many different creative skills.

The performance was not very long; it ran for about 45 minutes with no interval. While I was watching it, I kept thinking about the meaning of the title, and its association with the spectacle I was seeing. I found I was often unsure of what exactly I was looking at or whether there was an explicit plotline to follow. It looked to me like a metaphor of seasons passing, of a romantic relationship, but mostly, of an emotional battle framed through an erotically charged dance performance.

The colour red was used throughout the production. Red is the colour of tension, of a bullfight, or, perhaps, of sensual attraction. The pure aesthetic of the movements, and their role in narrating the plot, are probably the things I remember the most. The whole performance revolves around the intrinsic, entangled relationship between two disciplines: theatre and dance.

Ultimately, Bausch’s choreography tells a story of sacrifice. The woman with the red dress is hunted to death by the other men and women on stage.

There is a pervasive emotional tension that is difficult to evade. Whilst the recording we are posting today is not the version used in the stage performance, it relays that said emotional tension, which connects the two works of Bausch and Stravinsky.

Listen to The Rite of Spring (excerpt)

Pina Bausch’s legacy resides in her conception of a new language of dance. She is remembered as one of the most innovative choreographers of all times. Since her death in 2009, her works continue to be performed around the world. It is a testament to Bausch’s interpretative abilities that her choreography for The Rite of Spring continues to reach new audiences, spanning several decades and several continents in the process.

This week’s post comes from Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Recordings.

Above: The Bohemian Quartet in 1895. Left to right: Karel Hoffmann (1st violinist); Hanuš Wihan (violoncellist); Oskar Nedbal (violist); and Josef Suk (2nd violinist). Photographer unknown.

A name rarely heard today, Oskar Nedbal was a talented musician who excelled in many areas of musical life. He first focused on the violin at the Prague Conservatory from 1885 to 1892, where he also studied composition with Dvořák, before moving to viola. He was the founder member and violist in the Bohemian (later Czech) Quartet where Josef Suk was the second violin.

The Bohemian Quartet raised the standards of quartet playing to an international level and Nedbal sometimes played the piano in the group. They first performed in London in 1897 and upon their return a year later were described by one critic as ‘beyond all praise’. However, Nedbal had to leave the Quartet in 1906 as he apparently absconded with the wife of the first violinist Karel Hoffmann.

Nedbal was also a conductor of repute and from 1896 to 1906 was one of the first conductors of the famous Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. He became renowned outside of his homeland, touring as a guest conductor.

Above: Oskar Nedbal, 1901. Portrait by Šechtl and Voseček studios. From Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Rendered here in b&w rather than RGB colour.

In addition to his instrumental and conducting activities, Nedbal was a popular composer and many of his operettas and ballets written before the First World War met with great success not only in Vienna and Berlin, but throughout the world. At the 1898 London concert mentioned above, Hoffmann and Ilona Eibenschütz played Nedbal’s Violin Sonata. His orchestral works continued to be performed in London in the early years of the twentieth century.

Nedbal settled in Vienna in 1907 where he founded the Wiener Tonkünstler-Orchester. He made two sides with them for Deutsche Grammophon in 1910. He also recorded as a solo violist in the same year. A few years later, around 1913, he made four more recordings with the Tonkünstler-Orchester for the Anker label including the first movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. He also recorded two waltzes by Johann Strauss, one of which, Wiener Blut, you can hear below.

Listen to Wiener Blut

Nedbal returned to Prague in the early 1920s after the formation of the Czechoslovak Republic but his style of composition was viewed as dated and out of fashion. He continued to visit London, conducting the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, accompanying violinist Jan Kubelik in 1921.

During the 1920s, Nedbal was Head of Opera at the Slovak National Theatre and worked for Radio Bratislava. Unfortunately, he fell into financial difficulties and committed suicide by jumping out of a window of the Zagreb Opera House in 1930.

Rahul Giri is one of our Resonations artists-in-residence alongside Yee I-Lann, whose recently published blog you can read online. Also known as _RHL, Rahul Giri is a producer and DJ based in Bangalore, India. While studying broadcast journalism, Rahul became one half of the duo Sulk Station, whose work has been described as ‘hypnotic, downtempo electronica with Hindustani musical influences’. For years, he has been an active developer of Bangalore’s alternative scene and musical identity, running Consolidate – an independent collective-turned-record-label. In this blog he gives us some insight into the start of his online residency at the British Library:

Dumre, a small town in central Nepal, was where my father was posted as a civil engineer in the late ‘90s. It was also where I spent many of my vacations. While thinking about how to approach the Resonations artist residency, I wanted to find a personal connection. This came through ethnomusicologist Carol Tingey’s field recordings of the Gaine community at Tarkughat village, Lamjung. A village that was less than 30 kilometers from our camp in Dumre.

Photo of Gaines at Tarkughat Village, Lamjung with their instruments (madal, arbajo, sarangi, from left to right) taken by Dr. Carol Tingey, 1992

Carol Tingey’s recordings took me back to my childhood days in and around the hills of Dumre. During my father’s office hours I would leave the camp and wander around, following narrow winding paths up the neighboring hills surrounded by terraced farming plots, where a few huts were dotted here and there. My fear of the unknown was eclipsed by a sense of adventure and curiosity. My walk would almost always end at a cliff overlooking the boisterous Marshyangdi river; the climb down - steep and slippery, and thick with vegetation – was one I never attempted.

On my way back I’d stop at the solitary chia pasal (tea shop) just outside our camp for a bottle of Coca-Cola (charged against my father’s tab) and sometimes an order of wai wai noodles. The radio would always be on and tuned to Radio Nepal, playing mostly folk music and popular songs from Nepali cinema. At British Library Sounds you can listen to a selection of lok geet (folk songs) recorded by Carol Tingey at Gorkha, approximately 40 kilometers east from Dumre.

Every once in a while there were parties at the camp, and meat (maasu), alcohol (rakshi) and maadal (hollow drum) would come out. The staff and their family and friends would sit around the fire and sing songs. Paan ko Paat (Marshyangdi Salala), a hugely popular folk song in Nepal and for the Nepali diaspora, was a regular feature. Paan ko Paat is part of the dohori tradition in which a group of men and women sing back and forth in an improvised conversational format tied together by a set melody and chorus. Dohori songs are generally sung at melas (fairs), weddings and other festivities. The improvised lyrics are filled with flirtatious and suggestive metaphors in hope of courtship. You can listen to a rendition of Paan ko Paat by Gaine musicians recorded by Carol Tingey at British Library Sounds.

A lot of the songs recorded by Carol Tingey, especially the folk songs from Gorkha and Tarkughat, were the soundtrack of my time at Dumre. However it was her recordings of the Gaine tradition that really drew me into this sound archive collection.

The Gaines are a caste of professional musicians who traditionally traveled from village to village performing songs in return for money or food. Their primary instrument is the sarangi, a four string instrument played with a bow, generally accompanied by a madal (hollow drum). They have been referred to as bards, historians and journalists of the pre-radio era owing to the fact that they would sing songs about current affairs, socio-political issues, cautionary tales and events from neighboring villages. Their repertoire includes folklore, karkha (songs of historical heroic praise), mythologies, devotional and seasonal songs. The Gaines, once considered untouchable, also fall into the lowest bracket in terms of economic and social standing.

Though it was not the main focus of her research, Carol Tingey explored the Gaine tradition. First while researching the work and sound recordings of Arnold Adriaan Bake. Then later as part of a collaborative postdoctoral research project with musicologist Richard Widdess and musician and ethnomusicologist Gert-Matthias Wegner. Tingey’s own recordings of Gaines in Tarkughat, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, Nepal, made in the ‘80s and ‘90s, document much of the Gaine repertoire.

One example of a tragic ballad can be listened to in Tingey's recording of the song Sarumai Rani. The song, recorded in two parts (listen online to part one and part two), revolves around Sarumai Rani's desire to go to her maiti (parental home). She pleads to Raja, her husband, but he keeps refusing, instead he offers her ‘suna bote choli’, a gold studded blouse.

maiti rajako deshni ho

My home is your country too

fulera gayo kesha ni

aba janchhu mero maiti ko desha

My hair has turned gray (I have gotten old)

Now I want to go to my maiti

After much convincing, Raja finally concedes. Unfortunately Sarumai Rani is bitten by a snake on the way home and dies.

The music and story of Sarumai Rani encapsulates ‘dukha’ or sorrow, an emotion that is synonymous with Gaine music. Perhaps this emotion is a reflection of their social standing as well as the plight of rural and marginalized communities of Nepal.

Growing up in Kathmandu - especially during my late teens - I was always looking outwards. I listened to shortwave radio instead of FM or AM and found great joy in picking up albums from music stores in Kathmandu that sold dubbed cassette tapes of international releases. One of these tapes happened to be Radiohead’s Amnesiac. The album was going to be the building block of my musical journey - as a listener and musician. I was constantly looking for music with a similar emotion, which led me to artists like Sigur Rós and Portishead. The common thread joining them was melancholia, a sense of longing and vulnerability that was despairing and comforting at the same time. This experience is something I found in the music of Gaines.

So when I started thinking about the residency and listening to countless recordings in the sound archive, I found myself looking inwards instead. It wasn’t just a nostalgia-driven search but an attempt to find reference points for my musical landscape. A way to find parallels and make sense of what I do as a musician within the Nepali context.

This week's selection comes from Emma Brinkhurst, Learning and Engagement Coordinator.

As Learning and Engagement Coordinator for the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage programme, a highlight of my role has been working in partnership with Camden Somali Cultural Centre to develop a listening project. Weekly listening sessions showed the capacity of recorded sound to make connections, bringing listeners in contact with different times and places, as well as connecting those who share the experience of listening together. Ubah Egal, director of Camden Somali Cultural Centre, explained the significance of Somali sound recordings in the British Library’s World and Traditional Music collections, saying 'Camden Somali Cultural Centre wants to re-engage the community with our oral tradition of sharing stories. The collection at the British Library represents a beautiful selection of recordings capturing our oral tradition from many generations of Somalis.'

Poet and storyteller Elmi Ali selected recordings of song and poetry for the group to listen to, which elicited discussion, reminiscence, laughter and a sharing of cultural pride during the sessions. Of particular interest to participants were recordings from the John Low collection, made in Somalia in the mid-1980s during Low’s time as a development worker in the Lower Shabeelle region. On 12 November 1984, Low sent a postcard from Somalia to the British Institute of Recorded Sound (now the British Library Sound Archive). He wrote that 'songs, poems, work songs abound' and set about making recordings representing a diverse cross section of musical styles and practices. Several decades later, following Somalia’s civil war and the disruption and displacement it caused, Somali listeners in London engaged with these songs and poems, which stimulated memories of cultural heritage and former times, places and people.

During the listening sessions, artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer drew and painted, reflecting the words and stories shared by the group. Sophie’s drawings portray recollections of nomadic life evoked by recordings such as this house building song performed by a group of women and recorded by Low:

House Building Song [BL REF C27/13]

This song stimulated discussion about the role of women in nomadic culture and how women were responsible for building nomadic houses, with one participant commenting that this song made her think of her mum. At the end of the project she said: 'this has brought back so many memories.'

Participants were very moved by lullabies from the collection, such as this one performed by Faadumo Cabdi Maxamed:

Lullaby [BL REF C27/13]

Hearing recordings such as this prompted memories of other lullabies, such as a fondly remembered lullaby that a participant sang to the group, a moment that was captured by Sophie in this drawing:

Low also recorded camel songs, including this watering song for camels at the Shabeelle river, sung by Geedi Maxamed Cali and a male chorus:

Camel Song [BL REF C27/12]

Listening to this evoked much laughter as a participant recounted memories of being a city girl visiting the countryside and running away in fright from various animals – foxes on one occasion and a baby camel on another!

One member of the group described the listening sessions as providing 'an opportunity for us to get to know each other in a different way, tell these stories to each other that we never speak about.' Ubah Egal reflected on the project as 'a wonderful moment capturing the reactions and impact the recordings had on our community and participants.' This small selection of recordings demonstrates the potential for sound heritage to unlock memories, connect listeners, and make a deeply personal impact.

The Somali listening sessions took place as part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, a major project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund which aims to preserve and provide access to thousands of the UK's rare and unique sound recordings.

With thanks to John Low for allowing us to use the sound clips, Sophie Herxheimer for permission to post her artwork, Elmi Ali for selecting recordings, and to Ubah Egal and members of Camden Somali Cultural Centre for allowing us to include their comments and stories in this blog.

Follow @BL_WorldTrad, @BLSoundHeritage and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

This week’s selection comes from Jonathan Benaim, Audio Cataloguing Coordinator.

Taken from the British Library’s Oral History of Jazz in Britain collection, this recording is from an interview with guitarist Ernest Ranglin. In this particular excerpt, prompted by interviewer Val Wilmer, he reflects on the notion of competitiveness between musicians.

Ernest Ranglin on competition in jazz [BL REF C122/198-199] 

Download Transcript

In place of competition, Ernest Ranglin sees a collaborative process, valuing the contribution made by different players. The synergy of collaboration can be perceived in the interaction between interviewer and interviewee too. Their rapport is tangible and it makes for an expansive exchange.

International Jazz Day is celebrated on 30 April. Established by UNESCO, it advocates for the positive influence of jazz, including its capacity to cultivate peace, unity, co-operation and dialogue. The description of solidarity that Ernest Ranglin gives, and the camaraderie of the speakers, neatly illustrates that ethos.

Ernest Ranglin, Tottenham Court Road, London, 17 May 1993. Photograph by Val Wilmer.

With thanks to Val Wilmer for kind permission to use her photograph in this article.

Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.