Winner, Scott’s Last Expedition

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The Natural History Museum won the Best of the Best award at the Museums and Heritage Awards for Excellence 2013 ceremony last night.

Scott’s Last Expedition took the award for Best Temporary or Touring Exhibition, recognising the innovative approach it took to revealing the tales of endurance and scientific achievements of Robert Falcon Scott’s epic Terra Nova expedition.

The exhibition was a partnership with the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand, where it is currently open until 30 June, and with the Antarctic Heritage Trust.

When Scott embarked upon the Terra Nova expedition in 1910, he took with him two HMV “monarch” gramophones, donated by The Gramophone Company, which later became EMI, together with several hundred 78rpm discs, chosen to boost the team’s morale.

Scott’s gramophone was rescued and returned to the Gramophone Company – it is currently on loan from The EMI GROUP ARCHIVE TRUST as part of this major exhibition about the expedition.

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The gramophone on which Scott and his men listened to music hall and opera at the bottom of the world.

If your interested in learning more about Captain Scott’s Gramophone check out the EMI Group Archive Trust website http://www.emiarchivetrust.org

For a flavour of what were the happening sounds in Antarctica 100 years ago the hound recommends. SCOTT`S MUSIC BOX Music from Terra Nova. The British Antarctic Expedition (1910-1913) EMI Gold http://www.mdt.co.uk/scott-s-music-box-music-expedition-1910-1913-emi-gold-2cds.html

HIDDEN NIPPER IN NEW HMV SITE

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Our regular commentator David Hughes tipped us off on this one:

Ah, hidden messages in HTML code, the hidden tracks of the internet. Various tweeters who, for some reason, can’t visit a website without checking in on the source code while they’re there, have spotted a cute little hidden addition to the code of the revamped HMV website, that went online as the flagging entertainment retailer emerged from administration last week. If Nipper can live on in the HMTL world, maybe HMV can survive in the digital era? Maybe.

Spinning Discs – Postscript

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By Wayne Shevlin

My previous blog on SOTH—Century of Spinning Plastic Discs—was an abstract musing on the nature of musical records as historical artefacts.  It was originally written a few years ago, back when the great music emporiums—HMV, Virgin and Tower—still presided imperiously over the high street.  Opening salvo of 2013: that abstract musing is turned into cold hard reality as HMV, the last surviving music-megastore, goes into administration.

HMV Shop Oxford Street Circa 1920s-1930s © EMI Group Archive Trust

HMV Shop Oxford Street Circa 1920s-1930s © EMI Group Archive Trust

There are as many explanations for HMV’s demise as there are pundits: it’s because of online piracy or online shopping or the internet in general or online taxation (or lack of it);  it’s due to competition from other media formats such as video games;  it’s supermarkets killing the catalogue market by cherry picking the top 20 and flogging it as a cheap loss-leader; it was simply bad management, they didn’t keep up with the times; it’s the X-Factor factor, that music is now just a ubiquitous commodity; it’s because the kiddies don’t care so much about music and the oldies have replaced everything their nostalgia cares about;  it’s because music is overpriced and simply aint what it used to be;  it’s because the high street is dying and HMV is just another extinction victim like Comet, Jessops and Blockbuster;  it’s because the world is going to hell in a hand carte and nobody really gives a damn anymore.

Indeed, it is all of these things and others too. No single one of them would have been sufficient to fell HMV, but collectively they were inexorable like gravity.  Nothing could have saved the HMV megastore and I am frankly surprised it lasted as long as it did.  The writing was on its poster plastered walls years ago.  On the high street, profit is a ratio of revenue to cubic space and, to those who count the beans, every cubic foot of stuff has to generate X amount of money;  and if it does not, then other stuff must take its place.  When one objectively considers the huge expanses of space in music-megastores, it is easy to see how the precipitous decline in footfall over the past years rendered the grand music emporium model unsustainable.  An early clue that something was amiss revealed itself to me a number of years ago when B and I went into the small HMV in Hampstead and actually had to ask where the CD section was now located.  No kidding, the CD section was that small.

HMV Shop Oxford Street Circa 1920s-1930s © EMI Group Archive Trust

HMV Shop Oxford Street Circa 1920s-1930s © EMI Group Archive Trust

In their heyday the music-megastores were a real experience, an adventure.  B and I looked forward to our regular Saturday trip downtown to visit them. There was a chaotic energy, a frenetic hustle-bustle from literally thousands of music hunters who packed the aisles so densely you could barely move. The entrance was a portal built of the latest chart hits which you passed through to enter the inner sanctum of Rock & Pop which positively buzzed with excitement.  Jazz and Classical were sequestered in separate rooms to provide a sanctuary for the aficionados who required a more refined ambiance, away from the raucous hubbub outside their doors. There was always something there for us, we never left empty handed and more often than not, walked out with a half dozen or more CDs.  That was at the beginning of the 21st century.  In the whole of 2012 we visited the HMV megastore only once, easily navigating the empty CD aisles and struggling to find something—anything— we actually wanted at a price we were willing to pay.

After the announcement, B and I visited the Oxford Street HMV with the explicit purpose of seeing what bargains might be had under the circumstances.  The atmosphere was grim. Customers roamed listlessly around.  The staff put a brave face on it but the sense of sadness and demoralisation was palpable.  Nonetheless, they worked as though it still mattered.  In fact, one salesman took great pains to escort me around the various sections—Rock & Pop, Blues, Rock ‘n’ Roll—in search of Johnny Winter. Here was a knowledgeable salesperson actually helping me to find what I was looking for. Just like the old days.  He was determined to prove that HMV still had that Mojo.  Sadly, the search was in vain: no Johnny Winter anywhere. HMV had failed us both and the look on his face made me feel I had tortured him with some strange form of ritual humiliation.

Far from its past grandeur the shop felt tatty and depressing.  Half the racks in the Jazz and Classical rooms were completely empty.  The main aisle leading from the entrance, once crammed with customers, now featured large cardboard boxes filled with used CDs, spines up, languishing in no particular order, presented with all the dignity of a car boot sale.  The new stock wasn’t much better.  Artist dividers were packed inches thick because there were no CDs of those artists there to separate them.  I turned down the album by Mountain selling at £19.95 because I knew I could get it, re-mastered along with 4 other Mountain albums on the Net for £11.99.  What hope did HMV ever have?  B and I felt like parasites, vultures pecking at a carcass and, in spite of the 25% sale, we walked out with nothing.

The fate of HMV—and other high street shops like it— is not the fault of external forces or sinister conspiracies. We could have an entertaining debate over a pint as to the relative impact that any particular factor had to play in this tragedy but, ultimately, I think we have only ourselves to blame.  We may cry in our beer over the loss of these cultural institutions along with the vanishing high street they enriched, but we voted with our feet—or our mouse finger—and abandoned them to their fate.  We got what we asked for: convenience.  We shall get more of it too, much more of it.  I hope we shall all enjoy the convenience we will all be getting.  As far as shopping for music is concerned, we have made our decision and traded the excitement of the music emporium for convenient shopping.  As Pink Floyd might have put it, we traded our heroes for ghosts.

HMV was the first of the great music emporiums and will soon be the last. There’s part of me that feels very sad for the younger generation who won’t experience something that I enjoyed so much. But they have other experiences they prefer, feel no loss whatsoever and will probably agree that I’m very sad.  It lasted almost a hundred years.  That was a hell of a run, actually.  However, for better or worse, both time and culture have moved on. Perhaps some day, HMV may be resurrected in some diminished form, but the days of the great music emporium are now over.  Goodbye HMV. Thanks for the excitement.

Century of Spinning Plastic Discs

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By Wayne Shevlin

Opening salvo of the 21st century: announcing the end of the copy economy – sunset on the century of spinning plastic discs.
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Viktor Vasnetsov – Grave-digger (1848 modified by WS) – Public Domain   

The Byrds once advised aspiring rock n’ roll stars: “Sell your soul to the company, who are waiting there to sell plastic-ware”.  The goal was crystal clear: multi-platinum.  “The name of the game, boy – we call it riding the gravy train”. That meant millions of copies. Copies of plastic discs.  Plastic discs that must be pressed, be warehoused, be shipped, unpacked & racked, sold and be played.  Millions upon millions of plastic discs – they formed the basis of my personal existence and shaped the culture of my generation for many decades.  They were also the foundation of an entire industry.  An industry based on the unquestioned premise that copies had value.  And now they don’t.

Running a record section in late 1970s New York City we knew all these plastic discs by their catalogue numbers – it was a matter of pride:  Billy Joel’s The Stranger, the first Boston album, Frampton Comes Alive and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.  You may wrinkle your nose, but these were monsters.  They arrived by the truckload.  The boxes lined the walls and filled every available corner of the shop.  We ran out of room.  I threw my back out lifting them all.  Records had weight, let me tell you.  When an album hit it big, you knew about it – physically.   Queues stretched out the door and around the block.  In the surreal rush of a hot new release we were the shamans. We had the mojo everyone was desperate for.  We had gravitas and impact because we were the source – the only source – of the plastic discs.

You could see the sense of awe in peoples’ faces as they held the latest big album in their hands for the first time.  We felt real pride in getting the hot new music to the people.  My father queued up at midnight for the release of The Beatles White Album.  And now, strange as it seems, these once ubiquitous plastic discs are now nothing more than the artefacts of a bygone culture – mine.  They are now relegated to curios that might be dug up by an archaeologist.  Once upon a time, in a place far away, these things really mattered.  How sweet.  How sad.

Once, a serious music collection made a design statement: ceiling high spines of vinyl LP album sleeves replacing the need for wallpaper.  Alan P’s entire flat was wall to wall coloured cardboard in milk crates.  Nowadays, this personal statement of his intense commitment to music would fit in his shirt pocket.  Kind of loses its impact.  Hard to point at it with pride and impress your date by saying “that’s mine”.  (Probably didn’t impress your date back then either, but we always hoped for the best.)  A thousand vinyl albums against a wall had gravitas.   Sharing your space with them proved that you really cared.  It said something about you personally.

Vinyl was superseded by the CD – the new, modern plastic disc.  The CD heralded a new age and an extraordinary renaissance where, for over a decade,  music spanning the entire 20th century was dusted off and given a new lease on life.  New music continued to be created and thrive while, simultaneously, three older generations re-purchased the music of their youth.  I kept an eagle-eye out for über niche artists, waiting for them to make their way to the top of the re-issue schedule: Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, Passport’s Cross Collateral, Gentle Giant’s In a Glass House, and hundreds of others equally obscure. And they all appeared eventually. And then, when the concept of re-mastering became the rage, we waited and bought many of them all again.  How many industries can convince their customers to buy the same thing three times in this way?  The 90s music industry wallowed in sheer mania of it all.  Boy – that was a gravy train.  And now it’s over.  And it won’t happen again.

It won’t happen again because the CD was not just another kind of plastic disc like the 78, the 45 and the LP before it.  The CD was – as it turned out – a Trojan horse.  The CD had – hidden within its friendly, familiar plastic disc persona – the razor sharp teeth of digital bits.  Shiny and round, it masked the truth about itself.  It was not just a copy.  It was a clone. What it contained could be set free from the plastic, every bit as good as the bits that originally made it – the music was not bound to the media. The CD put a digital production-master of its content into the hands of anyone who held it.  Ironically, its very power made it valueless.  The media was no longer the message.  The media was superfluous and the copy had no value.  If CD began the process, then the online digital file completed it: from media is the message to media superfluous to media non-existent.  MP3 killed the value of the copy and signalled the death of the artefact.

Are artefacts important at all to this new generation?  For these digital natives, is there any value in stuff – or does mere access to content trump ownership?  Music is now just bits in the ether.  A 60GB MP3 player may contain the same content, but it is not the equivalent of Alan P’s ceiling high wall of vinyl.  How do we now show our intense, personal commitment to music?  Do we have one?   Somewhere we lost the gravitas.  We lost the mojo.  We lost the love of the artefacts.

Spinning plastic discs: they’re so 20th century, really.

A Whisper That Roars

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By Wayne Shevlin

I’d like to celebrate the microphone and the revolutionary impact it has had on music.

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As technology, the microphone is a marvel: converting into electricity the invisible, minute air pressure waves – what we in our mind’s ear perceive as sound – so that the very essence of sound can be captured and AMPLIFIED.   Yet, however fascinating the technology, history and development of the microphone; however crucial its role in the very existence of audio recording, these are not the aspects I want to explore here.  What I am interested in is the fundamental way in which the microphone has changed music in artistry, aesthetics and style.

In the beginning, the microphone was used merely as an extension of the ear.  It was placed where an ear would normally be, essentially hearing on the ear’s behalf.  But soon, microphones became pioneers, exploring sonic landscapes – going where ears could not go, capturing sound from unusual perspectives and contexts.  From these unique vantage points the microphone creates new sounds and new ways of hearing sound.  It allows unnatural sonic relationships to exist.  With a microphone, the most delicately quiet sound can be highlighted, isolated and elevated to soar above the loudest cacophony.   The microphone allows a whisper to roar.

Without the microphone, naturally quiet sounds require turning down the volume of the surrounding soundscape to be heard.  This directly affected the way music was composed prior to its invention.  In a Mozart flute concerto, the orchestra must lower its volume when the flute plays lest the flute be drowned out.  Mozart deliberately arranges the instruments so that the flute will be heard.  Perhaps the brass cease playing and the violins go pizzicato – maybe it’s a good time for a harpsichord accompaniment.  Flute themes in classical music are seldom set against a thunderous accompaniment because the physics are simply against it.

Even on one leg, Ian Anderson suffers no such impediment because he plays his flute through a microphone.  His lone flute can soar above the bludgeoning onslaught of 120 decibels of electric guitars and drums (which are also amplified using microphones with a resulting change in musical impact) .  With a microphone, Ian Anderson can write music for flute, not as a sweet sound set against light accompaniment, but as a screaming banshee wailing through a maelstrom.  The microphone gives his flute a new character, elevates its sonic relationship with the rest of the band and he writes a different style of music as a result.

Singing has been even more profoundly impacted by the microphone.  In the past, when the fat lady sang, she was attempting to reach the upper stalls of the opera house on the strength of her natural vocal power alone.  This requires a style of singing that, by necessity, must have a high degree of concern for projection.  That’s why opera singers sing that way: larynx wide open, deep from the diaphragm.  They need to reach the gallery.  Power, volume, projection: to be heard above the orchestra (which, must still tone down) – these are the key qualities for opera singing.  And the operatic style reflects this.  It is instantly recognisable. Nuance and delicacy are, to a great extent, sacrificed for power and volume.

And before a clutch of opera buffs huff and puff that, “damn it, opera is full of nuance and delicacy”, please consider the singing style of Billie Holiday.  That’s the kind of delicacy I’m talking about:  a whisper – a vocal teardrop – a sigh that shimmers above the hot brass.   The microphone allows the most intimate vocal style – normally only appropriate for the smallest of spaces – to fill the grandest hall.

When a mother sings a whispered lullaby in her baby’s ear, it has a particular sonic impact.  The relationship between the sound and the baby – the distance between mother’s mouth and baby’s ear – is natural and appropriate.  Filling Wembley Arena with exactly the same sound, but at the volume of a jet engine, changes the sonic impact on the listener and the meaning of the lullaby. The medium is the message.  A whisper heard as a roar acquires new meaning – and becomes a new kind of music.

The microphone creates an unnatural relationship between the listener and the original source of sound. If the microphone is considered an extension of the listener’s ear then it is worth noting that the microphone may be less than an inch from the singer’s mouth and captures the nuance of the voice in that aural space.  Sound is air pressure waves in motion and the sound emanating immediately from a singer’s mouth is high pressure indeed.  Other than babies listening to their mothers’ lullabies, we do not typically listen to singers at such a close proximity.

Singers are aware of the unnatural relationship between their voices and the listener and have developed specific techniques to avoid – and take advantage of – the sonic peculiarities resulting from, effectively, placing the listener’s ear directly in front of their mouths.  Good singers play their microphones like an instrument.  They take advantage of the increased bass when the microphone is close but avoid sibilance (ssssssss’s). They use the detail the microphone captures for dramatic effect.  They vary the distance of the microphone from their mouth to achieve consistency in volume – so that belting out the chorus and humming the softest verse are equally loud.  The microphone has created a new style of singing that is as demanding and specific as that of the opera singer, but completely different in perspective and technique.

A sonic impossibility that we have all come to take for granted is the sound of the drum set.  Today, drums are routinely amplified by placing microphones directly against cymbals and inside the drums.  Though these are mixed to create a holistic drum set, nonetheless the actual sound is completely artificial.  We do not normally listen to drums by simultaneously sticking our heads directly next to the crash cymbal and inside the bass drum.  However, nowadays, this is what we expect drums to sound like.  A drum set mic-ed as we would normally listen with ears – at least 10 feet in front – would sound empty and hollow.  Without the artificial mic-ing technique, heavy metal would simply not have the requisite weight to satisfy the righteous head banger.

Music has always been a reflection of and an adaptation to the available sound producing technology of the time.  The evolution of musical instruments from hollow logs to brass tubes to digital synthesisers has, on the one hand, been a response to the needs of musicians and yet, on the other, has set the limitations on the sounds they could create.  This, in turn, defines the style of music created.  This is a quality not generally associated with the microphone; that it is not merely a passive receiver, but creates sound as much as does a saxophone; that it has changed the course and style of music.  That it is an instrument in its own right.

Tools of the Trade… Al Levitt’s 100th birthday

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The Hounds newest contributor Wayne Shevlin celebrates  NYC’s finest for   Al Levitt’s 100th birthday.   Enjoy!!

by Wayne Shevlin

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One of the first pit stops along my musical road was to work during the late 1960s & early 70s for Levitt & Elrod, a musical instrument sales and repair shop on NYC’s Upper West Side.  Sad, perhaps, but my idea of fun as a 13 year old was hanging around L&E looking at music folios and guitars for hours on end – almost every day.  I’m not sure of his motives (perhaps it was just to get me the hell out of the store) but one day Syd Elrod, who handled selling out front, offered me fifty cents to deliver a French horn to the public school down the block – which I did.  Shortly thereafter I had a regular job working after school and on Saturdays.  It started with sweeping, deliveries and other mundane tasks, but it wasn’t long before I was entrusted with selling accessories – and soon instruments as well.

Syd was the ebullient, friendly outward face of L&E, selling and renting instruments.  But hidden in the back was Al Levitt, the repairman, a musical surgeon who never emerged unless a repair job was so serious that only a personal consultation with the frantic musician would suffice.  Al was very highly respected, and was relied upon by many of the top jazz and orchestra players in NYC including Michael Kamen, Julius Baker and Lee Konitz among many others. He specialised in wind and reeds but, really, he could repair anything (except electric guitars and amplifiers. Hah!  A niche for me perhaps?).  At any one time there would be literally dozens of instruments – from flutes and saxophones to tubas and double bases – lying in bits in the midst of valve replacement or some other surgery. It was from Al that I learned about the guts of musical instruments and what was involved with keeping them alive

Al was a thin, angular, sharp faced man who wore, along with fearsomely distorting horn rimmed spectacles, a magnifier head visor which he kept perpetually perched on his brow, sliding it down over his glasses to inspect the patient.   Al’s workshop, in the back of the store, seemed to always be pitch dark except for a Bunsen burner and variety of small but very bright lights branching like tentacles from his workbench. His workbench – a huge, long thick slab of wood like a mediaeval castle door – was completely customised by Al to suit his own needs,  festooned with all manner of shelves, storage drawers, trays, clips, loops, hooks and holders to hold parts and tools.  Every tool had an official place and was positioned so that it could be reached without him having to budge an inch from his chair.

Wind and reed instruments – such as flutes and saxophones – employ pads which are raised and lowered by keys.  The enemies of wind and reed instruments are sticky keys and pads that leak air – no matter how tiny the leak.  Al found air leaks not by blowing, but with light.  Attaching a light-bulb to the end of a long, stiff but flexible wire, he could snake the light through the instrument, press the pad down and expose even the most infinitesimal leakage as the peep of light would show through – sort of an alto sax colonoscopy.  With his vast array of pivot screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers and other tools Al could bring practically any instrument back to life.

And woe betide you if you tried to touch or looked like you were even thinking of touching his tools.  And don’t dare ask to borrow Al’s tools.  “DON’T TOUCH MY TOOLS!!”  Righteous anger – and no joke.  “My tools are my bread and butter.”  Bread and butter.  Indeed.  I came to understand how tools – which include musical instruments, hammers, fountain pens and bicycles – when used by a serious artisan, mould and adapt to their user’s unique technique and feel. The pressure and balance are just so.  And, if used by someone else – even a skilled user (let alone a clumsy dolt) – these delicate nuances can be compromised.  Or the tool might get damaged.  Or lost.  They will be sorry – but you will be sorrier.  Hence, I would not be insulted if someone wouldn’t let me “try his guitar” – and similarly I hope he won’t be insulted if I don’t let him “try mine”.  You may imagine my pride then when, some years later – when I had begun repairing electric guitars for L&E – and I really needed to borrow a tool of his, that Al trusted me enough to lend it to me.  The look in his eye made the weight of my responsibility crystal clear and you may be sure it was returned in immaculate condition immediately upon my finishing with it.

It was a bit of an event when a repaired or overhauled instrument was returned to its owner – particularly when that owner was someone famous.  The really big stars were invited back to Al’s workshop, but other times Al would emerge from the gloom of his catacomb with the newly restored instrument gleaming in his hands to personally present it to its owner.  He would explain in detail the intricate work that had been done and if he had run into unexpected difficulties he would relate, as if a tale of adventure, the daring do required to rescue their instrument from the shadow of death. The honest gratitude on the owner’s face was inevitably quite humbling.  Al would then quickly double check the instrument by playing a flurry of scales – lest the repair had mysteriously vanished while waiting in the case – and then would hand it over to the grateful musician who would road test it for themselves by treating us to an impromptu performance right there in the shop.

My impression then and my memory now of Al was this gnarled old man in his workshop, hunched in the dark over an open flame, peering through those bizarre head visors, surrounded by his tools, soldering a joint or delicately adjusting a screw to rescue another musical instrument.  It certainly had something gothic about it, like Dr Frankenstein’s lab. Al was fierce and sometimes I felt like Igor or Mickey Mouse.  However, I was not an apprentice and Al never gave me any lessons. But just by observing him I learned not only how to build a workbench and many techniques for fixing instruments, but the workman’s ethic.  I now realise that many of the qualities that I admire and aspire to, I learned from Al: his approach to problem solving, his diligence and patience, his intense dedication to quality, the consistent quality of his work, his integrity and honesty (he never gouged anyone – his prices were always fair).   I can’t say that I am always successful in achieving all of these qualities but I can’t think of a better role model for a young boy regarding what it takes to be a good workman than Al Levitt.

Since those days at Levitt & Elrod I have had a few workbenches of my own, both personally and professionally.  Guess what?  I built them exactly the same way Al did.  I now have a magnifying head visor of my own – Russian, purchased for £5 in Brighton no less – which I use to repair B’s jewellery (a never ending career).  These days I no longer work professionally with screwdrivers and needle-nose pliers, but with a keyboard and a mouse.  But my office is dark, and everything I need is within easy reach. My colleagues sometimes comment on the cave like quality of my office – “Wayne, it’s so dark in here”.  Well – now you know.  It may look like just an office desk with a computer to you, but to me, this is my workbench – Al Levitt style.

 

BBC Radio-90 Years Old- 5.33pm Nov 14 2012

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Today Wednesday 14 November the BBC marks the 90th anniversary of its first broadcast by playing a specially commissioned composition by Damon Albarn to radio listeners around the world at 1733 GMT.

More than 55 BBC radio stations will come together for Radio Reunited – the first attempt at a simultaneous broadcast since what was then the British Broadcasting Company was formed in 1922. Each BBC station will play the composition, entitled 2LO Calling – a combination of specially written music, iconic sounds from radio’s past and present, and messages to the future from listeners around the world.

You can download the piece and find out more about the 90th anniversary by going to www.bbc.co.uk/reunited

EMI Remembers

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The worst incident of the war in Hayes West London occurred in the afternoon of 7th July 1944 when a V1 flying bomb hit one of the surface air-raid shelters at the Gramophone Company (EMI). The monument recalls the names of the 37 people killed in the incident, 12 of who were buried in the Hayes and Harlington Cherry Lane cemetery.