Folks,
After coming across a cool photo of Percy Grainger together with Henry
Cowell (both holding guitars - their experimental garage band?), I looked up
Cowell in John Bird's 1976 bio of Grainger. Not a lot of info, but one thing
was definitely interesting in the context of sound archiving. Grainger had
created a collection of English (and other) folk-songs, recorded on
cylinders. "For about ten days around the end of July and the beginning of
August of the same year [1905] he was again in North Lincolnshire. This
time, however, he came armed with an Edison Bell cylinder phonograph and
several boxes of brown wax cylinder blanks. He thus became the first
folk-song collector in the British Isles to make live recordings of his
singers."
These ended up in his home in White Plans NY when, by 1940, he had made
contact with the Library of Congress. Grainger supported Cowell during the
latter's imprisonment and housed him when Cowell was paroled in spring 1940.
Cowell took on the task of cataloging the cylinders in preparation for their
transfer at LOC later that year.
That's a summary of the story according to Bird. Where it gets more
interesting is this:
"Grainger journeyed to Washington, where he worked with an engineer of the
Library of Congress to transfer the entire collection to a record material
more permanent than the brown wax of the cylinders. A system involving a
photo-electric cell light beam was used for the transfers. The cylinders of
Maori, Raratongan, English and Danish folk-songs with their disk transfers
were later deposited by Grainger at various libraries throughout the world."
Photo-electric in 1940? Can anyone flesh-out this story or refute it? Maybe
(probably) this has been discussed in the past here on ARSC-list.
Carl Pultz
Alembic Productions
Rochester, NY
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