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Those gramophone days
S. MUTHIAH
Fred Gaisberg
The Music Season I find is going much beyond Classical South Indian music and dance. We have international dance and music programmes – like the one staged by the Koreans – Other Festivals that look at music and dance not only beyond Peni
nsular India but also in the modern idiom, and, newest of all, a Poetry Festival. To lecdems we now have to add popular talks on musical heritage and exhibitions beyond the art galleries. It’s time the State Tourism authorities began to focus harder on The Season and sell it as the prime reason to visit Madras in December-January.
I might not be a music and dance enthusiast myself, but I do see how The Season can be a major tourist draw if packaged right and special programmes for the newcomer to the Indian performing arts scene are arranged. For instance, getting me a little more interested in this scene have been a couple of the talks and exhibitions on musical heritage I’ve been to in the last couple of weeks.
Will Gaisberg
At the exhibition on Print and Music, that’s on till January 4 in the Roja Muthiah Library in Adyar – an exhibition and an inaugural talk by Sanjay Subramaniam that did not get the publicity it deserved – what caught my eye was a brief history of the early days of the recording industry that had me searching for more.
Emile Berliner of the US, who invented the gramophone record in 1887 and the player to go with it, founded The Gramophone Company in London in April 1898 to manufacture both. To become the company’s first recording engineer, he sent his young assistant from America, Frederick William Gaisberg. Gaisberg’s record masters were sent to Berliner’s brother Joseph’s factory in Hanover, Germany, ‘Telephon Fabrik’, to be ‘reproduced’. Amongst the recordings Fred Gaisberg made in London were the first of Indian music – 20 in Persian, 15 in Hindi, five in ‘Urdoo’ (Hindustani), five in ‘Sikh’ (Gurmukhi) and two in Arabic. Capt. Bholanath, Dr. Harnamdas and an Ahmed were those who sang or recited for these recordings that were released in May 1899.
Fred GaisbergWill GaisbergMax Hampe (left) and William Sinkler Darby (right) in Bombay, February 1905
Gaisberg was, however, determined to be more authentic; to get Indian music recorded in India by professional Indian artists in as many of the major languages of the subcontinent as possible. So he sailed for Calcutta in September 1902, leaving his assistant, another from Berliner’s American stable, William Sinkler Darby, in charge in London. And on November 8, 1902 he made the first ‘native’ recording in India. Something over 550 matrices were made by him during his six weeks in Calcutta, but only about half of them returned to India for sale. Meanwhile, Gaisberg and his team sailed on to China and Japan.
The Company that had become The Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd next decided to send out Darby on an all-India tour. Between December 1904 and March 1905, Darby and his assistant Max Hampe visited seven cities, including Madras, and made nearly 1300 matrices. In Madras he recorded in Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Canarese and Malayalam. Darby was followed out to India by Fred Gaisberg’s younger brother William, who had joined the company in 1901. Will Gaisberg spent over a year in the ‘Orient’ in 1906-7, about six months of them in India, split into two sojourns. Once again, seven Indian cities, including Madras, were covered and this time nearly 1,400 matrices were taken back. This was the nucleus of a collection that was to make what became once again The Gramophone Company Ltd. the largest recorder of Indian music.
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