EDISON'S LEGACY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 264, 7 November 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

EDISON'S LEGACY.

A MODERN MIRACLE.

VALUE OF THE GRAMOPHONE

(By KARL ATKINSON.)

On August 12 four yearn ago was celebrated the jubilee of the phonograph and, when, on that occasion Edison was asked where it ranked among his inventions he placed it third, with incandescent lights and power systems first, and moving, pictures a good second.

When we recall that his first idea for the use of the phonograph was not as a musical instrument, but as a dictation recorder for the business office, the most hostile foes to "canned music" will think more kindly of the invention and all it has been responsible for in the intervening fifty-four years. Asked what he believed the phonograph had contributed to civilisation, the inventor replied with characteristic modesty that it had made life a little more attractive, and expedited business transactions in its role as commercial dictaphone.

But one thing is sure. The phonograph has been of service to the art of music in a way that Edison seems to have overlooked. In music it has served as a factor in education that is far more important than most people realise. Do we fully own our debt to Edison and the ..phonograph, or the gramophone as we now call it? Music From Outside.

"Bringing music to the home" is no idle phrase. For that matter, music has always been in the house when there has been music at all. There will never be apy satisfactory substitute for the actual personal participation in the making of Shakespeare's "concord of sweet sounds." From far-off days *n the past (and a notable example is found in Elizabethan times, when, after the evening meal, the entire family would sit around the table and sing madrigals from part-books) people as people, not only as musicians, have loved to make music. But there must be something more. It is a rare family that has its own symphony orchestra.; few glorious voices remain in the homo; it takes time and skill to perfect any ensemble, however small. Even those who make beautiful music themselves must hear others doing the same thing. Music must be brought into the home, and to-day it is being brought from the entire world.

When in the closing years of last century a few adventurous souls brought • home from their local music dealers a queer looking box and a halfdozen cumbersome cylinders which gave out wheezy sounds when placed just so in the box, the jeering cry of "faddist" greeted them. "That music?" the,family would laughingly inquire. Even when,' in the beginning of this century, the toy had assumed the shape of a huge horn attached to a smaller square box, and the cylinders had been replaced by thin discs, the "talking machine" was still more or less of a fad. From those discs would issue one of Harry Lauder's choicest bits of minstrelsy or a noisy march by Arthur Pryor's band. Only curiosity or a farseeing confidence in the ultimate development of this crude plaything took the machine from the music shops to the homes. The musical results were certainly not much to speak of. Artistry Creeps In.

Then, as the years went by, clever inventors schemed to improve the mechanics of the scratchy old machine, astute people began to realise that there was more in this thing than they had imagined. Artistry began to creep in as soon as it was given a fair chance of faithful reproduction. With new artistic demands, tjie mechanical processes improved constantly; as perfection in technique was approached, the artistic scope was widened. To-day we think nothing of demanding entire symphonies and operas on records.

The story of recording evolution makes as colourful reading as any fairy tale. Its stages from tinfoil to wax in the cylinders, from cylinders to discs, from the acoustical to the electrical recording, from the acoustical to panatrope gramophone, all these advances contain the germs of romance at every step. Little wonder Compton Mackenzie likened the invention of the gramophone in relation to music to the invention of printing in relation to literature.

The gramophone and its records, in a few short, sharp strides, have accomplished more for the spread of the best music than all other factors combined. The position from the standpoint of the New Zealander is unique and urgent beyond that of almost any other civilised country. Our isolation condemns us to dwell, as it were, in an artistic backwater. But the gramophone is changing all that very quickly.

Mr. E. Douglas Tayler, late Superintendent of Musical Education in New Zealand, summed up the possibilities of the gramophone in his eloquent foreword to Mr. T. Lindsay Buick's fascinating "Romance of the Gramophone." Mr. Tayler says: "The gramophone insensibly enlarges our life by multiplying indefinitely our acquaintance with the spirit of our fellows and of the whole human face. Not only does this mean an immense degree of enjoyment, but a wonderful educative and humanising influence."