The phonograph (sound writer), record player, or gramophone (letter + sound) is a device introduced in 1877 that continued common use until the 1980s for reproducing (playing) sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds. The recordings played on such a device generally consist of wavy lines that are either scratched, engraved, or grooved onto a rotating cylinder or disc. As the cylinder or disc rotates, a needle or other similar object on the device traces the wavy lines and vibrates, reproducing sound waves.

The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, USA. On February 19, 1878, Edison was issued the first patent (U.S. patent #200,521) for the phonograph. While other inventors had produced devices that could record sounds, Edison's phonograph was the first to be able to reproduce the recorded sound. (In announcing the demonstration, Scientific American noted that the non-reproducing devices that preceded Edison's had been built by Marey and Rosapelly, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and Barlow.) Although Edison began experimenting on the Phonograph using wax coated paper as a recording medium, this first Phonograph recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders, and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a "zig zag" pattern across the record. Then at the turn of the century, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to gramophone records: flat, double-sided discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center. Other improvements were made throughout the years, including modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the needle and stylus, and the sound and equalization systems.

The gramophone record was one of the dominant audio recording formats throughout much of the 20th Century. However, that status was eventually replaced by the compact disc and other digital recording formats.

Terminology

Usage of these terms is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, this device is often called a turntable, record player, or record changer. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ set up, they are often called decks.

The term ''phonograph'' ("sound writer") is derived from the Greek words (meaning "sound" or "voice" and transliterated as ''phonē'') and (meaning "writing" and transliterated as ''graphē''). Similar related terms ''gramophone'' and ''graphophone'' have similar root meanings. The coinage, particularly the use of the ''-graph'' root, may have been influenced by the then-existing words ''phonographic'' and ''phonography'', which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 ''The New York Times'' carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers' Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

F. B. Fenby was the original author of the word. An inventor in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was granted a patent in 1863 for an unsuccessful device called the "Electro-Magnetic Phonograph". His concept detailed a system that would record a sequence of keyboard strokes onto paper tape. Although no model or workable device was ever made, it is often seen as a link to the concept of punched paper for player piano rolls (1880s), as well as Herman Hollerith's punch card tabulator (used in the 1890 United States census), a distant precursor of the modern computer.

Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice it has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone" and the like were still brand names specific to different makers of sometimes very different (i.e., cylinder and disc) machines, so considerable use was made of the generic term talking machine, especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech by simulating the workings of the vocal chords, tongue and lips, a potential source of confusion both then and now.

United Kingdom

In British English, ''gramophone'' referred to any sound reproducing machine using 78 rpm gramophone records, as disc records were popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. The term ''phonograph'' was usually restricted to devices playing cylinder records.

''Gramophone'' generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, 33 1⁄3 rpm LPs and 45 rpm EPs, the common name became ''record player'' or ''turntable'' initially as part of a system that included radio (''radiogram'') and, later, might also play cassettes. From about 1960 such a system began to be described as a ''hi-fi'' or ''stereo'' (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s).

United States

In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others, but it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to the upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs. "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but in the early 20th Century the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played.

By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victor Talking Machine Company's Victrolas (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were however still called "phonograph records" or simply "records", almost never "victrola records".

After electronic disc-playing machines started appearing on the market during the second half of the 1920s, usually sharing the same cabinet with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs".

In the years following the Second World War, as component "Hi-Fi" (high-fidelity) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the literal description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which was usually meant to be burdened with only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By circa 1980 the use of a "record changer", which might scuff up or otherwise damage the discs, was widely disparaged, so the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the end of the 20th Century and beyond. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records".

The brand name ''Gramophone'' was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, though it has survived in its nickname form, ''Grammy'', as the title of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm.

Modern amplifier equipment still labels the input that accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input, abbreviated from "phonograph".

Australia

In Australian English, ''record player'' was the term; ''turntable'' was a more technical term; ''gramophone'' was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and ''phonograph'' was used as in British English.

History

Predecessors to the phonograph

Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to produce a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound and were not be reproduced as sound until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the Phonograph in 1877, existed only as a concept.

The phonautograph

thumb|230px|right|Dictionary illustration of a phonautograph. The barrel is made of plaster of paris.

Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physician Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves traveling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph.

In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian.

The paleophone

Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leaps from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.

Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air, reproducing the original sound.

An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a "phonographe", but Cros himself favored the word "paleophone", sometimes rendered in French as "voix du passé" (voice of the past) but more literally meaning "ancient sound", which accorded well with his vision of his invention's potential for creating an archive of sound recordings that would be available to listeners in the distant future.

Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.

Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.

First phonograph

Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. He announced his invention of the first ''phonograph'', a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said : " Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?" The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."

Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph. "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm travelled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible."

"From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: ' Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice."

"Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of."

The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881-2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct."

Early machines

Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder using an up-down ("hill-and-dale") motion of the stylus. The tinfoil sheet was wrapped around a grooved cylinder, and the sound was recorded as indentations into the foil. Edison's early patents show that he also considered the idea that sound could be recorded as a spiral onto a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated engraved recordings using wax coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone.

The Gramophone was patented in 1887 by Emile Berliner. The Gramophone involved a system of recording using a lateral (sideways) movement of the stylus as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc coated with a compound of beeswax in a solution of benzine. The zinc disc was immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched the groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements the flat disks of Berliner could be produced in high quantities at much lower costs than the cylinders of Edison's system.

In May 1889, the first "phonograph parlor" opened in San Francisco. Customers would sit at a desk where they could speak through a tube, and order a selection for one nickel. Through a separate tube connected to a cylinder phonograph in the room below, the selection would then be played. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. Another common type of phonograph parlor featured a machine that would start or would be windable when a coin would be inserted. This jukebox-like phonograph was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. Many early machines were of the Edison Class M or Class E type. The Class M had a battery that would break if it fell or was smashed with another object. This would cause dangerous battery acid to spill everywhere. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120V DC.

By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "Laughing Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.)

Oldest surviving recordings

Frank Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. The phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888 at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a waveform of "Au Clair de la Lune", recorded on a phonautograph on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only an attempt to transcribe audio waves onto paper as a visual representation.

Improvements at the Volta Laboratory

Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.

Thomas A. Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877. But the fame bestowed on Edison for this invention (sometimes called his most original) was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted and squeaky, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had hit upon the secret of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system.

Volta's early challenge

Meanwhile Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate.

In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled photophone.

Volta Graphophone

By 1881 the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men.

The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables.

One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted Patent No. 385886 for it on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch.

The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style ''hill-and-dale'' (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method with both cylinder and disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both types, as early as 1881.

The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent, and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin-foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.

Graphophone commercialization

In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone.

After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records.

Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers. This would postpone the popularity of the Graphophone until 1889 when Louis Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company would popularize it again through the promotion of nickel-in-the-slot'' 'entertainment' ''cylinders.

The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment.

Disc versus cylinder as a recording medium

Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantage of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: Discs can be stamped; cylinders cannot.

Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the groove compared to the inner portion.

Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove.

Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings.

Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses.

Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones" or "talking-machines". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Berliner's early records had poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. By 1908, a majority of the public demanded double-sided disc recordings, and cylinders fell into disfavor. Edison felt the commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his movement to disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record.

From the mid-1890s until the early 1920s both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system gradually became more popular because of its cheaper price and better marketing by disc record companies. Edison ceased cylinder manufacture in the autumn of 1929, and the history of disc and cylinder rivalry was concluded.

Dominance of the gramophone record

Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording through the 20th century. See gramophone record.

The 1920s brought improved radio technology and radio sales, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business.

In 1940, vinyl was used as a record material. Victor apparently pressed some vinyl 78s.

Booms in record sales returned after World War II as standards changed from 78s to vinyl long play records, which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit popularized on the radio, plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer selections, or two regular-length songs per side.

By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes.

High fidelity made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost under $1000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise, though it was difficult to keep records completely free from scratches, which produced popping noises. Another characteristic failure mode was ''groove lock'', causing a section of music to repeat, separated by a popping noise. This was so common that a saying was coined: ''you sound like a broken record'', referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious.

A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play seemingly at random.

Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media such as audio magnetic tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower priced music format. However, even as the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs would remain a higher priced music format than cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s.

By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free from pops and scratches, fell far lower than high fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest as many big-box media stores stock turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input but, on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. The list price of first-run CDs remains above $15, while used records are very inexpensive, and some are rare and sought after. Some combination systems include basic turntables with a CD and radio in retro-styled cabinets. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in very small quantities when compared to the disc phonograph's heyday.

Turntable technology

Turntable construction

Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an ''idler wheel'' (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced.

Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds.

By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in all-in-one stereos from assorted far-east brands, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While no longer as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap all-in-one stereo, this type has made a resurgence in nostalgia-marketed players.

Turntable drive systems

From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century.

Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system.

Idler-wheel drive system

Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it.

Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive.

Belt drive system

Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter."

The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch ''"Jobo prof"'') of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the ''"Pabst Aussenläufer"'' ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved.

Direct drive system

Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. The platter functions as a motor armature. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long standing favourite among disc jockeys (''see "Turntablism"''). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable.

Direct vs belt drive

The evaluation of the "best" drive technology is not clear and more depending on the implementation than on the drive technology itself. Technical measurements show that similarly low flutter (0.025% WRMS) and rumble (-78dB weighed) figures are possible for high quality turntables, be they belt drive or direct drive.

Pricing

Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price - a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables despite vinyl records being long past their peak in popularity as replay media.

==Pickup systems==

Historically, most high-fidelity component systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type.

Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges, with high-end systems often having both MM and MC settings.

Piezoelectric (crystal/ceramic) cartridges

Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric crystal for pickup, where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long styli used prevent close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is with the nature of the crystal itself: it is hydroscopic and tries to absorb moisture from the air and dissolve in it. So it needed protection from the environment by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement.

The next development was the ceramic cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer, and better, materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater compliance, that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made.

During the 1950s to 1970s, ceramic cartridge became common in low quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges, and the availability of low cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type.

Another popular ceramic stereo cartridge was the Audio Technica model AT66, which because of its price performance ratio was favoured by many as an alternative to more expensive magnetic cartridges.

Magnetic cartridges

There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called ''dynamic''). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound.

In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field which causes a small electrical current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamp may be necessary.

In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell which then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manfacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge which cannot be upgraded.

An alternative design is the ''moving iron'' variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above.

Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O; (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC.

Strain-Gauge cartridges

Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamp. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others.

The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are):

The electrical connection from the cartridge to the preamp is immune to cable capacitance issues.

Being non-magnetic, the cartridge is immune to "hum" induced by stray magnetic fields (same advantage shared with ceramic cartridges).

The combination of electrical and mechanical advantages, plus the absence of magnetic yoke high-frequency losses, make them especially suitable to reproducing frequencies up to 50 kHz. Technics (Matsuhita Electric) marketed a line of strain-gauge (labeled "semiconductor") cartridges especially intended for Compatible Discrete 4 quadraphonic records, requiring such high frequency response. Bass response down to 0 Hz is possible.

By using a suitable mechanical arrangement, VTA (vertical tracking angle) stays steady independent of the stylus vertical movements, with the consequent reduction in related distortions.

Being a force sensor, the strain-gauge cartridge can also measure the actual VTF (vertical tracking force) while in use.

Main disadvantage is the need of a special preamp that supplies a steady current (typ. 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization (different than the one needed for magnetic cartridges.)

A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamps available.

Optical readout

A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean.

An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality.

Styli

In the sound recording industry, a stylus or needle is a phonograph or gramophone needle used to play back sound on gramophone records, as well as to record the sound indentations on the ''master record''.

The stylus is subject to increased wear as it is the only part of the phonograph that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transfers the vibration to the system, second, that it does not damage the recorded disc, and third, its resistance to wear.

Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison diamond disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The latter stylus for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O;) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O; turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%.

Other than the Edison models, early disc players (such as external horn phonographs or internal horn "Victrola" style models) required the use of exchangeable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, fibre, and cactus needles were used. These needles needed to be replaced often due to the forces exerted by the record. Early advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were sold in packets that varied due to their thickness and length. Thick, shorter needles produced strong loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, Victor introduced their tungsten-tipped "Tungs-Tone" brand extra longplay needle which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. At the end of acoustic 78 rpm, "longplay" hardened steel needles came on the market, which were advertised to play 10-20 sides on a single disc.

When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disk and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the end into sphere of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when the stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls.

Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but purists accepted these costs all the more, because by now stylus life was much higher than before.

The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges.

The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl which were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile.

Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). These styli are marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", and "Stereohedron" (Stanton).

A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible "ridge" shaped styli such as the Namiki (1985) design , and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. These styli are marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), "Replicant" (Ortofon).

It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles, despite the CD4 quadraphonic system being a marketing flop.

Equalization

Early "mechanical" gramophones used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm radiating through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this:

The maximum sound level achievable was quite limited, being limited to the physical amplification effects of the horn,

The energy needed to generate such sound levels as were obtainable had to come directly from the stylus tracing the groove. This required very high tracking forces that rapidly wore out both the stylus and the record on lateral cut 78 rpm records.

Because bass sounds have a higher amplitude than high frequency sounds (for the same perceived loudness), the space taken in the groove by low frequency sounds needed to be large (limiting playback time per side of the record) to accommodate the bass notes, yet the high frequencies required only tiny variations in the groove, which were easily affected by noise from irregularities (wear, contaminates, etc.) in the disc itself.

The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and/or reduced low frequencies. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations.

During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped.

The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers.

Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamps, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamps, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them.

Arm systems

The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure.

However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world:

The tone arm must track the groove without distorting the stylus assembly, so an ideal arm would have no mass, and frictionless bearings, requiring zero force to move it.

The arm should not oscillate following a displacement, so it should either be both light and very stiff, or suitably damped.

The arm must not resonate with vibrations induced by the stylus or from the turntable motor or plinth, so it must be heavy enough to be immune to those vibrations, or it must be damped to absorb them.

The arm should keep the cartridge stylus tangent to the groove it's in as it moves across the record, with minimal variation in angle.

These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys properties lend themselves to S-type arms.

Prices vary largely: the well known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME-arm of the 1970-1980 era not only possessed a complicated design, but was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be professional quality: The "All Balance" arm made by a now defunct Dutch company, "Acoustical" was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used in that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea.

Basic arm design has changed relatively little. S-type tonearms can be found on even the early 1925 Victor Orthophonic Victrola. Though early electrical pickup tonearms were light, their full weight rested on the record. This created the ''tracking force'' required to transmit accurately to the crystal pickups of the day, with relatively stiff styli. Friction resulted, and record wear was high. As better technologies emerged (such as magnetic cartridges), far smaller tracking forces became possible, and the ''balanced arm'' came into use. Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism. Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description).

Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction skating force is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an anti-skate mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero. The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise.

Linear Tracking

If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as linear tracking or ''tangential'' arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, and/or for song selection.

Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early '60s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early '80s. Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A '70s design from Revox harkened back to the '50s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the dust cover, hinged in the back, to fold down over the record.

The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late.

Recent innovations include practically frictionless air bearing linear arms, which require no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove itself. These provide many of the benefits of the electronic linear tonearms, without the complexity. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics, in the form of pumps and tubing.

Phonograph in the 21st century

Turntables continue to be manufactured and sold into the 21st century, although in small numbers. While there are many audiophiles who still prefer vinyl records over digital music sources (primarily compact disc) for what they consider superior sound quality, they represent an enthusiastic minority of listeners. The quality of the available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite a diminishing market, allowing turntables to remain competitive on the high-end audio systems market. Together with these high-end modern devices, vinyl enthusiasts are also often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems. The chart on the right illustrates that users of the forum www.vinylengine.com post pictures of disappeared or superseded makes as much as of modern makes.

Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ.

In hip hop music, the turntable is used as a musical instrument. Manipulation of a record as part of the music rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism and its best known technique is ''scratching'', pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context.

The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely. Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable.

Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold. Many audiophiles believe that all-analogue recordings made using a traditional tape recorder, simple microphone arrays and few overdubs have a more natural sound than digital recordings.

USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes.

See also

Analog sound vs. digital sound

Audio signal processing

Compact Disc player

Gramophone record

Graphophone

Phonograph manufacturers

Radiogram (furniture)

Record changer

RIAA equalization

Seeburg 1000

Sound reproduction

Laser turntable

Turntable anti-skating

Notes

References

Brady, Erika. A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Koenigsberg, Allen, The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877–1912, APM Press, 1991.

Bruil, Rudolf A. (January 8, 2004). "Linear Tonearms" Retrieved on July 25, 2011.

External links

The 1888 Crystal Palace Recordings

The Birth of the Recording Industry

The Cylinder Archive

Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project – Over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara, free for download or streamed online.

Cylinder players held at the British Library - information and high-quality images.

History of Recorded Sound: Phonographs and Records

EnjoytheMusic.com – Excerpts from the book ''Hi-Fi All-New 1958 Edition''

Listen to early recordings on the Edison Phonograph

Mario Frazzetto's Phonograph and Gramophone Gallery.

The Phonograph vs. the Gramophone

Record scanning - Ofer Springer

San Francisco State University Museum of Anthropology

Say What? – Essay on phonograph technology and intellectual property law

Vinyl Engine – Information, images, articles and reviews from around the world

The Analogue Dept - Information, images and tutorials; strongly focused on Thorens brand

45 rpm player and changer at work on You Tube

Historic video footage of Edison operating his original tinfoil phonograph

Category:Thomas Edison Category:Alexander Graham Bell Category:Audio players Category:1877 introductions Category:Greek loanwords Category:American inventions

ar:فونوغراف bg:Грамофон ca:Gramòfon cs:Gramofon da:Grammofon de:Grammophon es:Gramófono eo:Gramofono eu:Gramofono fa:گرامافون fr:Gramophone ko:포노그래프 hi:ग्रामोफोन hr:Gramofon it:Giradischi he:פטיפון la:Discophonum lt:Patefonas hu:Gramofon mr:ग्रामोफोन nl:Platenspeler ja:レコードプレーヤー no:Grammofon pl:Gramofon pt:Toca-discos ru:Граммофон sk:Gramofón fi:Gramofoni sv:Grammofon tl:Ponograpiya tr:Gramofon

name	Robert Johnson
background	solo_singer
born	May 08, 1911Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA
died	August 16, 1938Greenwood, Mississippi, USA
genre	Delta blues, folk blues
occupation	Musician, songwriter
instrument	Guitar, vocals, harmonica
years active	1929–38
notable instruments	Gibson L-1 }}

Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American blues singer and musician. His landmark recordings from 1936–37 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend, including a Faustian myth. As an itinerant performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson enjoyed little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime.

His records sold poorly during his lifetime, and it was only after the first reissue of his recordings on LP in 1961 that his work reached a wider audience. Johnson is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly of the Mississippi Delta blues style. He is credited by many rock musicians as an important influence; Eric Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived." Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an "Early Influence" in their first induction ceremony in 1986. He was ranked fifth in ''Rolling Stone'' 's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Life and career

Early life

Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, possibly on May 8, 1911, to Julia Major Dodds (born October 1874) and Noah Johnson (born December 1884). Julia was married to Charles Dodds (born February 1865), a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker with whom she gave birth to 10 children. Dodds had been forced by a lynch mob to leave Hazlehurst following a dispute with white landowners. Julia herself left Hazlehurst with baby Robert, but after some two years, sent him to live in Memphis with Dodds, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer.

Around 1919, Robert rejoined his mother in the area around Tunica and Robinsonville, Mississippi. Julia's new husband was known as Dusty Willis; he was 24 years her junior. Robert was remembered by some residents as "Little Robert Dusty." However, he was registered at the Indian Creek School in Tunica as Robert Spencer. He is listed as Robert Spencer in the 1920 census with Will and Julia Willis in Lucas, Arkansas, where they lived for a short time. Robert was at school in 1924 and 1927 and the quality of his signature on his marriage certificate suggests that he studied continuously and was relatively well educated for a boy of his background. One school friend, Willie Coffee, has been discovered and filmed. He recalls that Robert was already noted for playing the harmonica and jaw harp. He also remembers that Robert was absent for long periods, which suggests that he may have been living and studying in Memphis.

After school, Robert adopted the surname of his natural father, signing himself as Robert Johnson on the certificate of his marriage to sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929. She died shortly after in childbirth. Surviving relatives of Virginia told the blues researcher Robert "Mack" McCormick that this was a divine punishment for Robert's decision to sing secular songs, known as 'selling your soul to the Devil'. McCormick believes that Johnson himself accepted the phrase as a description of his resolve to abandon the settled life of a husband and farmer to become a full-time blues musician.

Around this time, the noted blues musician Son House moved to Robinsonville where his musical partner, Willie Brown, already lived. Late in life, House remembered Johnson as a 'little boy' who was a competent harmonica player but an embarrassingly bad guitarist. Soon after, Johnson left Robinsonville for the area around Martinsville, close to his birthplace Hazlehurst, possibly searching for his natural father. Here he perfected the guitar style of Son House and learned other styles from the brothers Ike and Herman Zimmerman. Ike Zimmerman was rumoured to have learned supernaturally to play guitar by visiting graveyards at midnight. When Johnson next appeared in Robinsonville, he had seemed to have acquired a miraculous guitar technique. House was interviewed at a time when the legend of Johnson's pact with the Devil was well known among blues researchers. He was asked whether he attributed Johnson's technique to this pact, and his equivocal answers have been taken as confirmation.

While living in Martinsville, Johnson fathered a child with Vergie Mae Smith. He also married Caletta Craft in May 1931. In 1932, the couple moved to Clarksdale in the Delta. Here Caletta fell ill and Johnson abandoned her for a career as a 'walking' (itinerant) musician.

Itinerant musician

From 1932 to his death in 1938, Johnson lived his life in a manner that makes biography scarcely possible. He moved frequently between such large centers as Memphis and Helena, Arkansas and the smaller towns of the Mississippi Delta and neighboring regions of Mississippi and Arkansas. On occasion, he travelled much further. Fellow blues musician Johnny Shines accompanied him to Chicago, Texas, New York, Canada, Kentucky, Indiana. David Honeyboy Edwards shared a musical engagement with him in St Louis. In many places he stayed with members of his large extended family, or with women friends. He did not marry again but formed some long term relationships with women to whom he would return periodically. One was Estella Coleman, the mother of the blues musician Robert Lockwood, Jr.. In other places he stayed with a woman seduced at his first performance. In each location, Johnson's hosts were largely ignorant of his life elsewhere. He actually used different names in different places. Even those who travelled with him from place to place were granted only a limited insight into his life and personality. Shines and Lockwood travelled with him on numerous occasions, but their recollections are different and sometimes contradictory.

When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Musical associates stated in live performances Johnson often did not focus on his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day – and not necessarily blues. With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, Johnson had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries later remarked on Johnson's interest in jazz and country. Johnson also had an uncanny ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he stopped, Johnson would establish ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.

Fellow musician Shines was 17 when he met Johnson in 1933. He estimated Johnson was maybe a year older than himself. In Samuel Charters' ''Robert Johnson'', the author quotes Shines as saying:

During this time Johnson established what would be a relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman about fifteen years his elder and the mother of musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. Johnson reportedly cultivated a woman to look after him in each town he played in. Johnson supposedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families whether he could go home with them, and in most cases the answer was 'yes'...until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.

In 1941, Alan Lomax learned from Muddy Waters that Johnson had performed in the Clarksdale, Mississippi area. By 1959, Samuel Charters could only add Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band remembered Johnson had once briefly played with him in West Memphis, Arkansas. In the last year of his life, Johnson is believed to have traveled to St. Louis and possibly Illinois, and then to some states in the East. He spent some time in Memphis and traveled through the Mississippi Delta and Arkansas.

In 1938, Columbia Records producer John H. Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's records, sought him out to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, but still played two of Johnson's records from the stage.

Recording sessions

Around 1936, Johnson sought out H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi, who ran a general store and doubled as a talent scout. Speir put Johnson in touch with Ernie Oertle, who offered to record the young musician in San Antonio, Texas. At the recording session, held November 23, 1936 in room 414 at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio which Brunswick Records had set up as a temporary studio, Johnson reportedly performed facing the wall. This has been cited as evidence he was a shy man and reserved performer, a conclusion played up in the inaccurate liner notes of the 1961 album ''King of the Delta Blues Singers''. Ry Cooder speculates that Johnson played facing a corner to enhance the sound of the guitar, a technique he calls "corner loading". In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson played sixteen selections, and recorded alternate takes for most of these.

Among the songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio were "Come On In My Kitchen", "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Cross Road Blues". The first songs to appear were "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", probably the only recordings of his that he would live to hear. "Terraplane Blues" became a moderate regional hit, selling 5,000 copies.

His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", was part of a cycle of spin-offs and response songs that began with Leroy Carr's "Mean Mistreater Mama" (1934). According to Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle" and stood apart from most rural blues as a through-composed lyric, rather than an arbitrary collection of more-or-less unrelated verses. In contrast to most Delta players, Johnson had absorbed the idea of fitting a composed song into the three minutes of a 78 rpm side. Most of Johnson's "somber and introspective" songs and performances come from his second recording session.

In 1937, Johnson traveled to Dallas, Texas, for another recording session in a makeshift studio at the Brunswick Record Building, 508 Park Avenue. Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year. Because Johnson did two takes of most songs during these sessions, and recordings of those takes survived, more opportunity exists to compare different performances of a single song by Johnson than for any other blues performer of his time and place.

By the time he died, at least six of his records had been released in the South as race records.

Playback issues in extant recordings

The accuracy of the pitch and speed of the extant recordings has been questioned. In ''The Guardian'''s music blog from May 2010, Jon Wilde states that "the common consensus among musicologists is that we've been listening to [Robert] Johnson at least 20% too fast;" i.e., that "the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78 [rpm records], or else were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting." He does not give a source for this statement. Former Sony music executive Lawrence Cohn, who won a Grammy for the label's 1991 reissue of Johnson's works, "acknowledges there's a possibility Johnson's 1936–37 recordings were sped up, since the OKeh/Vocalion family of labels, which originally issued the material, was 'notorious' for altering the speed of its releases. 'Sometimes it was 78 rpms, sometimes it was 81 rpms,' he says. It's impossible to check the original sources, since the metal stampers used to duplicate the original 78 discs disappeared years ago."

Death

Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi. He had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about from Greenwood. Differing accounts and theories attempt to shed light on the events preceding his death. A story often told is that one evening Johnson began flirting with a woman at a dance, the wife of the juke joint owner, according to rumor, unaware that the bottle of whiskey she gave to Johnson had been poisoned by her husband. In another version, she was a married woman unrelated to the juke joint owner. Johnson was allegedly offered an open bottle of whiskey that was laced with strychnine. Fellow blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson allegedly advised him never to drink from an offered bottle that had already been opened. According to Williamson, Johnson replied, "Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand." Soon after, he was offered another open bottle of whiskey, also laced with strychnine, and accepted it. Johnson is reported to have begun feeling ill the evening after drinking from the bottle and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours. Over the next three days, his condition steadily worsened and witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain—symptoms which are consistent with strychnine poisoning.

Musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick claims to have tracked down the man who murdered Johnson, and to have obtained a confession from him in a personal interview. McCormick has declined to reveal the man's name, however.

In his book ''Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson'', Tom Graves uses expert testimony from toxicologists to dispute the notion that Johnson died of strychnine poisoning. He states that strychnine has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong liquor. However, according to the CDC, strychnine is bitter but odorless. He also claims that a significant amount of strychnine would have to be consumed in one sitting to be fatal, and that death from the poison would occur within hours, not days. This observation was also noted in a recent ''Guitar World'' comment from contemporary David "Honeyboy" Edwards, who said that it couldn't have been strychnine, since he would have died much sooner than the three days he suffered.

Gravesite

The exact location of his grave is officially unknown; three different markers have been erected at possible church cemetery burial sites outside of Greenwood.

Research in the 1980s and 1990s strongly suggests Johnson was buried in the graveyard of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church near Morgan City, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, in an unmarked grave. A one-ton cenotaph memorial in the shape of an obelisk, listing all of Johnson's song titles, with a central inscription by Peter Guralnick, was placed at this location in 1990, paid for by Columbia Records and numerous smaller contributions made through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund.

In 1990 a small marker with the epitaph "Resting in the Blues" was placed in the cemetery of Payne Chapel near Quito, Mississippi, by the cemetery's owner. This alleged burial site, in an apparent attempt to strengthen a claim, happens to be located in the center of Richard Johnson's family plot.

More recent research by Stephen LaVere (including statements from Rosie Eskridge, the wife of the supposed gravedigger) indicates that the actual grave site is under a big pecan tree in the cemetery of the Little Zion Church north of Greenwood along Money Road. Sony Music has placed a marker at this site.

An interviewee in the documentary The Search for Robert Johnson (1991) suggests that due to poverty and lack of transportation Johnson is most likely to have been buried in a pauper's grave (or "potter's field") very near where he perished.

Devil legend

According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Robert Johnson was branded with a burning desire to become a great blues musician. He was "instructed" to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The "Devil" played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. This was in effect, a deal with the Devil mirroring the legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Robert Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous.

Various accounts

This legend was developed over time, and has been chronicled by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Edward Komara and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades after his death. Son House once told the story to Pete Welding as an explanation of Johnson's astonishingly rapid mastery of the guitar. Welding reported it as a serious belief in a widely read article in ''Down Beat'' in 1966. Other interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were fully two years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a master.

Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by Greil Marcus and Robert Palmer. Most significantly, the detail was added that Johnson received his gift from a large black man at a crossroads. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was attached to the Robert Johnson story. All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography ''Crossroads'' by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of Blues musician Tommy Johnson. This story was collected from his musical associate Ishman Bracey and his elder brother Ledell in the 1960s. One version of Ledell Johnson's account was published in 1971 David Evans's biography of Tommy, and was repeated in print in 1982 alongside Son House's story in the widely read ''Searching for Robert Johnson''.

In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zinnerman of Hazelhurst, Mississippi learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zinnerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Robert Johnson. Recent research by blues scholar Bruce Conforth uncovered Ike Zinnerman's daughter and the story becomes much clearer, including the fact that Johnson and Zinnerman did practice in a graveyard at night (because it was quiet and no one would disturb them) but that it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed. Johnson spent about a year living with, and learning from Zinnerman, who ultimately accompanied Johnson back up to the Delta to look after him. Conforth's article in ''Living Blues'' magazine goes into much greater detail.

The film ''O Brother Where Art Thou?'' by the Coen Brothers incorporates the crossroads legend and a young African American blues guitarist named Tommy Johnson, with no other biographical similarity to the real Tommy Johnson or to Robert Johnson. There are now tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" at Clarksdale and in Memphis.

His own account

Johnson seems to have claimed occasionally that he had sold his soul to the Devil, but it is not clear that he meant it seriously, and these claims are strongly disputed in Tom Graves' biography of Johnson, ''Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson'', published in 2008. The crossroads detail was widely believed to come from Johnson himself, as it would explain his high emotions and religious fervor in "Cross Road Blues" when simply hitchhiking at night; the myth offers a literal explanation.

In "Me And The Devil" he began, "Early this morning when you knocked upon my door/Early this morning, umb, when you knocked upon my door/And I said, 'Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go,'" before leading into "You may bury my body down by the highway side/You may bury my body, uumh, down by the highway side/So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride."

The song "Crossroads" by British psychedelic blues rock band Cream is a cover version of Johnson's "Cross Road Blues", about the legend of Johnson selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads, although Johnson's original lyrics ("Standin' at the crossroads, tried to flag a ride") suggest he was merely hitchhiking rather than signing away his soul to Lucifer in exchange for being a great blues musician.

Interpretations

The Devil in these songs may not solely refer to the Christian story of Satan, but equally to the African trickster god, Legba, himself associated with crossroads—though author Tom Graves deems the connection to African deities tenuous. As folklorist Harry M. Hyatt discovered during his research in the South from 1935–1939, when African-Americans born in the 19th or early-20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they had a different meaning in mind. Ample evidence indicates African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with this so-called "devil" at the crossroads.

Folk tales of bargains with the Devil have long existed in African American and European traditions, and were adapted into literature by, amongst others, Washington Irving in "The Devil and Tom Walker" in 1824, and by Stephen Vincent Benet in "The Devil and Daniel Webster" in 1936. In the 1930s, Hyatt recorded many tales of banjo players, fiddlers, card sharks, and dice sharks selling their souls at crossroads, along with guitarists and one accordionist. Another folklorist, Alan Lomax, considered that every African American secular musician was "in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".

Musical style

Robert Johnson is today considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style; Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said in 1990, "You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it." But according to Elijah Wald, in his book ''Escaping the Delta'', Johnson in his own time was most respected for his ability to play in such a wide variety of styles—from raw country slide guitar to jazz and pop licks—and to pick up guitar parts almost instantly upon hearing a song. His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues," in contrast to the prevailing Delta style of the time, more resembled the style of Chicago or St. Louis, with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement." Unusual for a Delta player of the time, a recording exhibits what Johnson could do entirely outside of a blues style. "They're Red Hot," from his first recording session, shows that he was also comfortable with an "uptown" swing or ragtime sound similar to the Harlem Hamfats but, as Wald remarks, "no record company was heading to Mississippi in search of a down-home Ink Spots ... [H]e could undoubtedly have come up with a lot more songs in this style if the producers had wanted them."

Voice

An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing." The song's "hip humor and sophistication" is often overlooked. "[G]enerations of blues writers in search of wild Delta primitivism," writes Wald, have been inclined to overlook or undervalue aspects that show Johnson as a polished professional performer.

Instrument

Johnson mastered the guitar, being considered today one of the all-time greats on the instrument. His approach was highly complex and extremely advanced musically. When Keith Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his band mate Brian Jones, he replied, "Who is the other guy playing with him?", not realizing it was Johnson playing on one guitar. "I was hearing two guitars, and it took a long time to actually realise he was doing it all by himself," said Richards, who would later add "Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself."

Johnson would sometimes sing over the triplets in his guitar playing, using them as an instrumental break; his chord progression not being quite a standard Twelve-bar blues.

Influences

Johnson fused approaches specific to Delta blues to those from the broader music world. The slide guitar work on "Rambling on My Mind" is pure Delta and Johnson's vocal there has "a touch of ... Son House rawness," but the train imitation on the bridge is not at all typical of Delta blues, and is more like something out of minstrel show music or vaudeville. Johnson did record versions of "Preaching the Blues" and "Walking Blues" in the older bluesman's vocal and guitar style (House's chronology is questioned by Guralnick). As with the first take of "Come On In My Kitchen," the influence of Skip James is evident in James's "Devil Got My Woman", but the lyrics rise to the level of first-rate poetry, and Johnson sings with a strained voice found nowhere else in his recorded output.

The sad, romantic "Love in Vain" successfully blends several of Johnson's disparate influences. The form, including the wordless last verse, follows Leroy Carr's last hit "When the Sun Goes Down"; the words of the last sung verse come directly from a song Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in 1926. Johnson's last-ever recording, "Milkcow's Calf Blues" is his most direct tribute to Kokomo Arnold, who wrote "Milkcow Blues" and who influenced Johnson's vocal style.

"From Four Until Late" shows Johnson's mastery of a blues style not usually associated with the Delta. He croons the lyrics in manner reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson, and his guitar style is more that of a ragtime-influenced player like Blind Blake. Lonnie Johnson's influence on Robert Johnson is even clearer in two other departures from the usual Delta style: "Malted Milk" and "Drunken Hearted Man". Both copy the arrangement of Lonnie Johnson's "Life Saver Blues". The two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" show the influence of Peetie Wheatstraw, calling into question the interpretation of this piece as "the spontaneous heart-cry of a demon-driven folk artist."

Legacy

Robert Johnson has had enormous impact on music and musicians that came after him. His influence on his contemporaries was much smaller, due in part to the fact that he was an itinerant performer—playing mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances—who worked in a then undervalued style of music, and who died young after recording only a handful of songs. Johnson, though well-traveled and admired in his performances, was little noted in his own time and place; his records even less so. "Terraplane Blues", sometimes described as Johnson's only hit record, outsold his others but was still only a minor success.

If one had asked black blues fans about Robert Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Elijah Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'" This lack of recognition extended to black musicians:

With the album ''King of the Delta Blues Singers'', a compilation of Johnson's recordings released in 1961, Columbia Records introduced his work to a much wider audience—fame and recognition he only received long after his death.

Rock and roll

Johnson's major influence has been on genres of music that weren’t recognized as such until long after his death: rock and roll and rock. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four of his songs in a set of 500 they deemed to have shaped the genre:

“Sweet Home Chicago” (1936)

“Cross Road Blues” (1936)

“Hellhound on My Trail” (1937)

“Love in Vain” (1937)

Johnson recorded these songs a decade and a half before the recognized advent of rock and roll, dying a year or two later. The Museum inducted him as an “Early Influence” in their first induction ceremony in 1986, almost a half century after his death. Marc Meyers of the ''Wall Street Journal wrote that, "His 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' from 1937 is so far ahead of its time that the song could easily have been a rock demo cut in 1954."

English rockers

Many of the artists who claim to have been influenced by Johnson the most, injecting his revolutionary stylings into their work and recording tribute songs and collections, came from a land many thousands of miles from his homeland—and one he’d never visited. His impact and influence on these future star musicians from England—who would then come to develop and define both the rock and roll and rock music eras—resulted not from personal appearances or direct fraternization. Instead, the artistic power of his exceptional talents and original compositions would be relayed across the Atlantic many years after his death through the compilation of his works released in 1961 by Columbia Records (''King of the Delta Blues Singers''). Examples of the influence he had on major English musicians include:

Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin referred to him on NPR's ''Fresh Air'' (recorded in 2004) as “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in some way.” His group recorded "Traveling Riverside Blues", a song that drew from Johnson's original and quoted a number of Johnson's songs in the lyrics.

To Eric Clapton, founder and member of many legendary groups, Johnson was "the most important blues musician who ever lived." He recorded enough of his songs to make ''Me and Mr. Johnson'', a blues-rock album released in 2004 as a tribute to the legendary bluesman (also made into the film ''Sessions for Robert J''). He also recorded "Crossroads", an arrangement of "Cross Road Blues", with Cream.

Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced bandmate Keith Richards to his first Robert Johnson album. The blues master's recordings would have as much impact on him as on Mick Jagger. The group would perform his "Walkin' Blues" at the Rock and Roll Circus in 1968. They arranged their own version of "Love in Vain" for their album ''Let It Bleed''; recording "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" for ''Exile on Main Street''.

He was a strong influence on Fleetwood Mac in the group's early years as a British blues band. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer contributed two covers of Johnson-derived songs to the group's early albums, and lead guitarist Peter Green would later go on to record Johnson's entire catalog over the course of two albums, ''The Robert Johnson Songbook'' and ''Hot Foot Powder''.

Alexis Korner, referred to as "the Founding Father of British Blues", co-wrote and recorded a song entitled "Robert Johnson" on his ''The Party Album'' released in 1978.

Guitar playing

His revolutionary guitar playing has led contemporary experts, assessing his talents through the handful of old recordings available, to rate him among the greatest guitar players of all time:

In 1990 ''Spin Magazine'' rated him 1st in its ''35 Guitar Gods'' listing—on the 52nd anniversary of his death. In 2008 ''Rolling Stone'' magazine ranked him 5th on their list of the ''100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time''—70 years after he died. In 2010 Guitar.com ranked him 9th in its list of Gibson.com’s ''Top 50 Guitarists of All Time''—72 years after he died.

Musicians who proclaim his profound impact on them, i.e., Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, all rated in the top ten with him on each of these lists. The boogie bass line he fashioned for "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" has now passed into the standard guitar repertoire. At the time it was completely new, a guitarist's version of something people would only ever have heard on a piano.

Lifetime achievement

''The Complete Recordings'', a double-disc box set released by Sony/Columbia Legacy on August 28, 1990, containing almost everything Robert Johnson ever recorded, with all 29 recordings (and 12 alternate takes) won a Grammy Award for “Best Historical Album” that year. In 2006 he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (accepted by his son).

Problems of biography

Very little is known of Johnson's early life with any certainty. Two marriage licenses for Johnson have been located in county records offices. The ages given in these certificates point to different birth dates, as do the entries showing his attendance at Indian Creek School, Tunica, Mississippi. That he was not listed among his mother's children in the 1910 census casts further doubt on these dates. Carrie Thompson claimed that her mother, who was also Robert's mother, remembered his birth date as May 8, 1911. The 1920 census suggests he was born in 1912. Five significant dates from his career are documented: Monday, Thursday and Friday, November 23, 26, and 27, 1936, at a recording session in San Antonio, Texas. Seven months later, on Saturday and Sunday, June 19–20, 1937, he was in Dallas at another session. His death certificate was discovered in 1968, and lists the date and location of his death.

The two confirmed images of Johnson were located in 1973, in the possession of the musician's half-sister Carrie Thompson, and were not widely published until the late 1980s. A third photo, purporting to show Johnson posing with fellow blues performer Johnny Shines, was published in the November 2008 edition of ''Vanity Fair'' magazine. The same article claims that other photographs of Johnson, so far unpublished, may exist.

Johnson's records were greatly admired by record collectors from the time of their first release and efforts were made to discover his biography, with virtually no success. Noted blues researcher Mack McCormick began researching his family background, but was never ready to publish. McCormick's research eventually became as much a legend as Johnson himself. In 1982, McCormick permitted Peter Guralnick to publish a summary in ''Living Blues'' (1982), later reprinted in book form as ''Searching for Robert Johnson''. Later research has sought to confirm this account or to add minor details. A revised summary acknowledging major informants was written by Stephen LaVere for the booklet accompanying the compilation album ''Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings'' (1990), and is maintained with updates at the Delta Haze website. The documentary film ''The Search for Robert Johnson'' contains accounts by Mack McCormick and Gayle Dean Wardlow of what informants have told them: long interviews of David Honeyboy Edwards and Johnny Shines, and short interviews of surviving friends and family. These published biographical sketches achieve coherent narratives, partly by ignoring reminiscences and hearsay accounts which contradict or conflict with other accounts.

A relatively full account of Johnson's brief musical career emerged in the 1960s, largely from accounts by Son House, Johnny Shines, David Honeyboy Edwards and Robert Lockwood. In 1961, the sleeve notes to the album ''King of the Delta Blues Singers'' included reminiscences of Don Law who had recorded Johnson in 1936. Law added to the mystique surrounding Johnson, representing him as very young and extraordinarily shy.

Discography

Eleven Johnson 78s were released on the Vocalion label during his lifetime, with a twelfth issued posthumously. All songs are copyrighted to Robert Johnson, and his estate.

''The Complete Recordings'': A double-disc box set was released on August 28, 1990, containing almost everything Robert Johnson ever recorded, with all 29 recordings, and 12 alternate takes. (There is one further alternate, of "Traveling Riverside Blues," which was released on Sony's ''King of the Delta Blues Singers'' CD and also as an extra in early printings of the paperback edition of Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta.")

To celebrate Johnson's 100th birthday, May 8, 2011, Sony Legacy released a re-mastered 2 CD set of all 42 Robert Johnson recordings extant, entitled ''Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection''. In addition, there were two brief fragments: one where Johnson can be heard practicing a guitar figure; the second when Johnson can be heard saying, presumably to engineer Don Law, "I wanna go on with our next one myself." Reviewers commented that the sound quality of the 2011 release was a substantial improvement on the 1990 release.

Awards and recognitions

Grammy Awards

{| class=wikitable |- ! Year ! Category ! Title ! Genre ! Label ! Results |- align=center | 1990 | Best Historical Album | ''The Complete Recordings'' | Blues | Sony/Columbia Legacy | Winner |- align=center |}

Grammy Hall of Fame

{| class=wikitable |- ! Year Recorded ! Title ! Genre ! Label ! Year Inducted |- align=center | 1936 | Cross Road Blues | Blues (Single) | Vocalion | 1998 |- align=center |}

National Recording Registry

''The Complete Recordings'' of Robert Johnson (1936–1937) was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2003. The board selects songs in an annual basis that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four songs by Robert Johnson in the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll.

{| class=wikitable |- ! Year Recorded ! Title |- align=center | 1936 | Sweet Home Chicago |- align=center | 1936 | Cross Road Blues |- align=center | 1937 | Hellhound on My Trail |- align=center | 1937 | Love in Vain |- align=center |}

The Blues Foundation Awards

{| class=wikitable |- | colspan=5 align=center | Robert Johnson: Blues Music Awards |- ! Year ! Category ! Title ! Result |- align=center | 1991 | Vintage or Reissue Album | ''The Complete Recordings'' | Winner |- align=center |}

Honors and inductions

On September 17, 1994, the U.S. Post Office issued a Robert Johnson 29-cent commemorative postage stamp.

{| class=wikitable |- ! Year ! Title ! Results ! Notes |- align=center | 2006 | Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award | Winner | accepted by son Claud Johnson |- align=center | 2000 | Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame | Inducted |- align=center | 1986 | Rock and Roll Hall of Fame | Inducted | Early Influences |- align=center | 1980 | Blues Hall of Fame | Inducted |- align=center |}

Tribute albums

There have been a number of tribute albums by guitar virtuosi, including

Artist !! Album !! Year
Eric Clapton	''Me and Mr. Johnson''	2004
Peter Green Splinter Group	The Robert Johnson Songbook (album)>The Robert Johnson Songbook''
Peter Green Splinter Group	Hot Foot Powder (album)>Hot Foot Powder''
Peter Green Splinter Group	''Me and the Devil''
John P. Hammond	John Hammond	''At the Crossroads''
Todd Rundgren	''Todd Rundgren's Johnson''
Big Head Todd and the Monsters	Big Head Blues Club	''100 Years of Robert Johnson''

Films and other media

The 1986 film ''Crossroads'' is about a young white blues guitarist's search for Johnson's "missing" 30th song and the theme of blues artists selling their souls to the devil.

''Stones in My Passway: The Robert Johnson Story'' (1990), a biographical film by Martin Spottl.

''The Search for Robert Johnson'' (1991), UK documentary hosted by Blues musician John P. Hammond, son of John H. Hammond.

Sherman Alexie's novel ''Reservation Blues'' (1995) centers on the myth of the crossroads.

''Can't You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson'' (1997)

''Hellhounds On My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson'' (2000, directed by Robert Mugge)

The 2000 Coen Brother's film ''O Brother, Where Art Thou?'', set in the Deep South, features a blues guitarist called "Tommy Johnson." In the story, Tommy sells his soul to the devil in exchange for teaching him "how to play this here geetar reeeal good."

''Eric Clapton – Sessions for Robert Johnson'' (2004, documentary)

''Supernatural'' – "Crossroad Blues" (2006)

''Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson'' (published in 2008) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Akira Hiramoto. It is a phantasmagoric reimagining of Johnson's life.

''Celebration of the music and legend of Robert Johnson: Show 502'' WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Rory Block and Scott Ainslie discuss Johnson and play his music. Taped 2008-09-29; 60 minutes audio (WMA, MP3), 88 minutes video (WMV).

To commemorate Johnson's 100th birthday, Dogfish Head Brewery released "Hellhound on My Ale", a limited edition beer, in collaboration with Sony's Legacy Recordings division.

See also

27 Club

References

Bibliography

''Blues World – Booklet No.1 – Robert Johnson – Four Editions'', First published 1967

Blesh, Rudi (1946) "Jazz Begins" quoted in Marybeth Hamilton (below).

Charters, Samuel B (1959). ''The Country Blues''. Rinehart.

Charters, Samuel B (1967). ''The Bluesman. The story of the music of the men who made the Blues'' Oak Publications.

Charters, Samuel B (1973). ''Robert Johnson''. Oak Publication. ISBN 0-8256-0059-6

Evans, David (1971). ''Tommy Johnson''. Studio Vista. SBN 289 70150

Freeland, Tom (2000). ''Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life'' in ''Living Blues'' no. 150 March/April 200 p. 49

Graves, Tom (2008). ''Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson''. DeMers Books, ISBN 978-0-9816002-1-5

Greenberg, Alan (1983). ''Love in Vain: The Life and Legend of Robert Johnson''. Doubleday Books, ISBN 0-385-15679-0

* 1994 revised edition retitled ''Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson'', with foreword by Martin Scorsese, Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-80557-X

Guralnick, Peter (1989). ''Searching for Robert Johnson'' (1989). E. P. Dutton hardcover: ISBN 0-525-24801-3, Plume 1998 paperback: ISBN 0-452-27949-6

Komara, Edward (2007). ''The Road to Robert Johnson, The genesis and evolution of blues in the Delta from the late 1800s through 1938''. Hal Leonard. ISBN 0-634-009079

Marcus, Greil (1975). ''Mystery Train''. E.P. Dutton.

Hamilton, Marybeth (2007). ''In Search of the Blues. Black Voices, White Visions''. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-06018-X

Lomax, Alan (1993). ''The Land Where the Blues Began''. Methuen. ISBN 0-413-67850-4

Palmer, Robert (1982) paperback edition. ''Deep Blues''. Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-34039-6

Pearson, Barry Lee; McCulloch, Bill (2003). ''Robert Johnson: Lost and Found''. University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0-252-02835-X

Schroeder, Patricia R. (2004). ''Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture''. University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0-252-02915-1

Russell, Tony (2004). ''Country Music records, A Discography, 1921–1942''. Oxford. ISBN 0-19-513989-5

Wald, Elijah (2004). ''Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues''. Amistad. ISBN 0-06-052423-5

Wardlow, G., & Komara, E. M. (1998). ''Chasin' that devil music: searching for the blues''. San Francisco, Calif: Miller Freeman Books. ISBN 0879306521

Welding, Pete (1966). ''Robert Johnson. Hell hound on his trail.'' In ''Down Beat Music'' '66: 73–76, 103

Wolf, Robert (2004) ''Hellhound on My Trail: The Life of Robert Johnson, Bluesman Extraordinaire''. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions. ISBN 1-56846-146-1

External links

The Robert Johnson Blues Foundation

Robert Johnson Mount Zion Memorial Fund

1980 Hall of Fame Inductee at The Blues Foundation

The Robert Johnson Notebooks. Courtney Danforth and Adriana Rissetto. University of Virginia. 1997-07-07/2003-11-03.

Robert Johnson Death Certificate. State of Mississippi.

Robert Johnson at Find-A-Grave

Robert Johnson recordings. Three Perfect Minutes – Milestone Recordings in American Music. Bryan Mangum. ''User-generated reviews of each of Johnson's tracks.''

;Articles

Bluesman's Son Gets His Due Ellen Barry, Los Angeles Times. June 2, 2004. ''Johnson legal battle.''

Portrait of a Phantom – Searching for Robert Johnson. Frank DiGiacomo, Vanity Fair. November 2008. ''Purported new photo of Robert Johnson with Johnny Shines.''

Steady Rollin’ Man – A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson. John Gibbens, Touched Press Books. ''About speed adjustments.''

Escaping the Delta/Robert Johnson Elijah Wald. ''About the book, w/links to related material.''

Delta Guitar Player Robert Johnson. Guitarz For Ever. 2004. ''(Portion copied from ezinearticles.com)''

Deal with the Devil: Understanding Robert Johnson, His Music and His Impact. D.A.N. Soul of Rock 'n' Roll. 2007-04-06

Category:1911 births Category:1938 deaths Category:People from Hazlehurst, Mississippi Category:African American singer-songwriters Category:African American guitarists Category:Delta blues musicians Category:Country blues musicians Category:Country blues singers Category:American male singers Category:Blues Hall of Fame inductees Category:Blues musicians from Mississippi Category:American blues guitarists Category:American blues singer-songwriters Category:American buskers Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Slide guitarists Category:Vocalion Records artists Category:Murdered entertainers

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Name	Paul Whiteman
Background	non_performing_personnel
Birth name	Paul Samuel Whiteman
Born	March 28, 1890
Died	December 29, 1967
Origin	Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Instrument	Violin
Genre	Jazz
Occupation	BandleaderComposer
Associated acts	Bix BeiderbeckeFrankie TrumbauerJoe VenutiEddie Lang
Notable instruments	}}

Paul Samuel Whiteman (March 28, 1890 – December 29, 1967) was an American bandleader and orchestral director.

Leader of the most popular dance bands in the United States during the 1920s, Whiteman's recordings were immensely successful, and press notices often referred to him as the "King of Jazz." Using a large ensemble and exploring many styles of music, Whiteman is perhaps best known for his blending of symphonic music and jazz, as typified by his 1924 commissioning and debut of George Gershwin's jazz-influenced "Rhapsody In Blue". Whiteman recorded many jazz and pop standards during his career, including "Wang Wang Blues", "Mississippi Mud", "Rhapsody in Blue", "Wonderful One", "Hot Lips", "Mississippi Suite", and "Grand Canyon Suite". His popularity faded in the swing music era of the 1930s, and by the 1940s Whiteman was semi-retired from music.

Whiteman's place in the history of early jazz is somewhat controversial. Detractors suggest that Whiteman's ornately-orchestrated music was jazz in name only (lacking the genre's improvisational and emotional depth), and co-opted the innovations of black musicians. Defenders note that Whiteman's fondness for jazz was genuine (he worked with black musicians as much as was feasible during an era of racial segregation), that his bands included many of the era's most esteemed white jazz musicians, and argue that Whiteman's groups handled jazz admirably as part of a larger repertoire. In his autobiography, Duke Ellington declared, "Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity."

Biography

Early life and career

Whiteman was born in Denver, Colorado. After a start as a classical violinist and violist, he led a jazz-influenced dance band, which became popular locally in San Francisco, California in 1918. In 1920 he moved with his band to New York City where they started making recordings for Victor Records which made the Paul Whiteman Orchestra famous nationally. (In his first five recordings sessions for Victor, Aug 9-Oct 28, 1920, Whiteman used the name "Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra," presumably because he had been playing at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City; from Nov. 3, 1920, he started using "Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra.")

Whiteman became the most popular band director of the decade. In a time when most dance bands consisted of six to 10 men, Whiteman directed a much larger and more imposing group of up to 35 musicians. By 1922, Whiteman already controlled some 28 ensembles on the east coast and was earning over a $1,000,000 a year.

He recorded Hoagy Carmichael singing and playing "Washboard Blues" to the accompaniment of his orchestra in 1927.

In May 1928 Whiteman signed with Columbia Records, and stayed with that label until September 1931, when he returned to Victor. He would remain signed with Victor until March 1937.

"The King of Jazz"

In the 1920s the media referred to Whiteman as "The King of Jazz". Whiteman emphasized the way he had approached the already well-established style of music, while also organizing its composition and style in his own fashion. While most jazz musicians and fans consider improvisation to be essential to the musical style, Whiteman thought the genre could be improved by orchestrating the best of it, with formal written arrangements. Whiteman's recordings were popular critically and successful commercially, and his style of jazz music was often the first jazz of ''any'' form that many Americans heard during the era.

For more than 30 years Whiteman, referred to as "Pops", sought and encouraged musicians, vocalists, composers, arrangers, and entertainers who looked promising. In 1924 Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin's ''Rhapsody in Blue'', which was premiered by Whiteman's orchestra with George Gershwin at the piano. Another familiar piece in Whiteman's repertoire was ''Grand Canyon Suite'', by Ferde Grofé.

Whiteman hired many of the best jazz musicians for his band, including Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Steve Brown, Mike Pingitore, Gussie Mueller, Wilbur Hall (billed by Whiteman as "Willie Hall"), Jack Teagarden, and Bunny Berigan. He also encouraged upcoming African American musical talents, and initially planned on hiring black musicians, but Whiteman's management eventually persuaded him that doing would be career suicide due to racial tension and America's segregation of that time. However, Whiteman crossed racial lines behind-the-scenes, hiring black arrangers like Fletcher Henderson and engaging in mutually-beneficial efforts with recording sessions and scheduling of tours.

In late 1926 Whiteman signed three candidates for his orchestra: Bing Crosby, Al Rinker, and Harry Barris. Whiteman billed the singing trio as The Rhythm Boys. Crosby's prominence in the Rhythm Boys helped launch his career as one of the most successful singers of the 20th century. Paul Robeson (1928) and Billie Holiday (1942) also recorded with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

Whiteman had 28 number one records during the 1920s and 32 during his career. At the height of his popularity, eight out of the top ten sheet music sales slots were by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

His recording of José Padilla’s Valencia topped the charts for 11 weeks, beginning 30 March 1926, becoming the #1 record of 1926.

Whiteman signed singer Mildred Bailey in 1929 to appear on his radio program. She first recorded with the Whiteman Orchestra in 1931.

Jazz musician and leader of the Mound City Blue Blowers Red McKenzie and cabaret singer Ramona Davies (billed as "Ramona and her Grand Piano") joined the Whiteman group in 1932. The King's Jesters were also with Paul Whiteman in 1931.

In 1933 Whiteman had a #2 hit on the ''Billboard'' charts with the song, "Willow Weep for Me".

In 1934 Paul Whiteman had his last two #1 hits, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", with vocals by Bob Lawrence, which was #1 for six weeks, and "Wagon Wheels", which was #1 for one week, his final hit recording. From 1920 to 1934 Whiteman had 32 #1 recordings, charting 28 of them by 1929. By contrast, during the same period, the 1920s Jazz Age, Louis Armstrong had none.

In 1942 Whiteman began recording for Capitol Records, cofounded by songwriters Buddy DeSylva and Johnny Mercer and music store owner Glenn Wallichs. Whiteman and His Orchestra's recordings of "I Found a New Baby" and "The General Jumped At Dawn" was the label's first single release. (Another notable Capitol record he made is the 1942 "Trav'lin Light" featuring Billie Holiday (billed as "Lady Day", due to her being under contract with another label).

Later career and personal life

Whiteman was married four times; to Nellie Stack in 1908; to Miss Jimmy Smith; to Mildred Vanderhoff in 1922. In 1931 Whiteman married motion picture actress Margaret Livingston following his divorce from Vanderhoff that same year. The marriage to Livingston lasted until his death.

Whiteman resided at Walking Horse Farm near the village of Rosemont in Delaware Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey from 1938 to 1959. After selling the farm to agriculturalist Lloyd Wescott, Whiteman moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania for his remaining years.

Whiteman died at the age of 77 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania on December 29, 1967.

Movie appearances

In 1930 "Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra" starred in the first feature-length movie musical filmed entirely in Technicolor, ''King of Jazz''. The film was technically ahead of its time, with many dazzling camera effects complementing the Whiteman music. Whiteman appeared as himself, and good-naturedly kidded his weight and his dancing skills. A highlight was a concert rendition of ''Rhapsody in Blue''. Unfortunately, by the time ''King of Jazz'' was released to theaters, audiences had seen too many "all-singing, all-dancing" musicals, and much of the moviegoing public stayed away. (It also didn't help that the film was shot as a revue with no story and not particularly imaginative camerawork.) The expensive film didn't show a profit until 1933, when it was successfully reissued to cash in on the popularity of ''42nd Street'' and its elaborate production numbers.

Whiteman also appeared as himself in the 1945 movie ''Rhapsody in Blue'' on the life and career of George Gershwin and also appeared in ''The Fabulous Dorseys'' in 1947, a bio-pic starring Jimmy Dorsey and Tommy Dorsey. Whiteman also appeared as the baby in ''Nertz'' (1929), the bandleader in ''Thanks a Million'' (1935), as himself in ''Strike Up the Band'' (1940), and in the Paramount Pictures short ''The Lambertville Story'' (1949).

Radio and TV

During the 1930s Whiteman had several radio shows, including ''Kraft Music Hall'' and ''Paul Whiteman's Musical Varieties'', which featured the talents of Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, Jack Teagarden, Johnny Mercer, Ramona, Durelle Alexander and others.

In the 1940s and 1950s, after he had disbanded his orchestra, Whiteman worked as a music director for the ABC Radio Network. He also hosted ''Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club'' from Philadelphia on ABC-TV from 1949–1954. The show was seen for an hour the first two years, then as a half hour segment on Saturday evenings. In 1952 a young Dick Clarkread the commercials for sponsor Tootsie Roll. He also continued to appear as guest conductor for many concerts. His manner on stage was disarming; he signed off each program with something casual like, "Well, that just about slaps the cap on the old milk bottle for tonight."

Legacy

The Paul Whiteman Orchestra introduced many jazz standards in the 1920s, including "Hot Lips", which was in the Steven Spielberg movie ''The Color Purple'' (1985), "Mississippi Mud", "From Monday On", co-written and sung by Bing Crosby with Bix Beiderbecke on cornet, "Nuthin' But", "Grand Canyon Suite" and "Mississippi Suite" composed by Ferde Grofe, "Rhapsody in Blue", composed by George Gershwin who played piano on the Paul Whiteman recording in 1924, "Wonderful One" (1923), and "Wang Wang Blues" (1920), covered by Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Joe "King" Oliver's Dixie Syncopators in 1926 and many of the Big Bands. "Hot Lips" was recorded by Ted Lewis and His Jazz Band, Horace Heidt and His Brigadiers Orchestra (1937), Specht's Jazz Outfit, the Cotton Pickers (1922), and Django Reinhardt Et Le Quintette Du Hot Club De France.

Herb Alpert and Al Hirt were influenced by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, particularly the solo work of trumpeter Henry Busse, especially his solo on "Rhapsody in Blue".

Compositions

Whiteman composed the standard "Wonderful One" in 1922 with Ferde Grofé and Dorothy Terris (also known as Theodora Morse), based on a theme by film director Marshall Neilan. The songwriting credit is assigned as music composed by Paul Whiteman, Ferde Grofe, and Marshall Neilan, with lyrics by Dorothy Terriss. The single reached #3 on Billboard in May 1923, staying on the charts for 5 weeks. "(My) Wonderful One" was recorded by Gertrude Moody, Edward Miller, Martha Pryor, Mel Torme, Doris Day, Woody Herman, Helen Moretti, John McCormack; it was released as Victor 961. Jan Garber and His Orchestra, and Ira Sullivan with Tony Castellano also recorded the song. Henry Burr recorded it in 1924 and Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1940. On the sheet music published in 1922 by Leo Feist it is described as a "Waltz Song" and "Paul Whiteman's Sensational Waltz Hit" and is dedicated "To Julie". "Wonderful One" appeared in the following movies: ''The Chump Champ'' (1950), ''Little 'Tinker'' (1948), ''Red Hot Riding Hood'' (1943), ''Sufferin' Cats'' (1943), ''Design for Scandal'' (1941), ''Strike Up the Band'' (1940), and ''Westward Passage'' (1932).

In 1924 Whiteman composed "When the One You Love Loves You" with Abel Baer and lyricist Cliff Friend. Whiteman recorded the song on 24 December 1924 in New York with Franklyn Baur on vocals and released it as Victor 19553-B backed with "I'll See You in My Dreams". The single reached #7 on the Billboard national pop singles charts in April 1925, staying on the charts for 3 weeks. The song is described as "A Sentimental Waltz Ballad" on the 1934 sheet music. Singer and composer Morton Downey, Sr., the father of the talkshow host, recorded the song in 1925 and released it as Brunswick 2887. Eva Shirley sang the song in Ed Wynn's ''Grab Bag'', a Broadway musical which opened in 1924 at the Globe. Leo Feist published the sheet music for the Shirley version in 1924 featuring Eva Shirley on the cover.

Paul Whiteman composed "Flamin' Mamie" in 1925 with Fred Rose, one of the top hits of 1925, which was recorded by the Harry Reser Band, Merritt Brunies and the Friars Inn Orchestra, Billy Jones and Ernest Hare, the Six Black Diamonds in 1926 on Banner, the Toll House Jazz Band, Aileen Stanley in 1925 with Billy "Uke" Carpenter on the ukulele, Hank Penny in 1938, Turk Murphy, the Frisco Syncopators, the Firehouse Five Plus Two, Bob Schulz and His Frisco Jazz Band, and the Coon-Sanders Nighthawk Orchestra led by Carleton Coon and Joe Sanders with Joe Sanders on vocals. The lyrics describe Mamie as a Roaring Twenties vamp: "Flamin' Mamie, a sure-fire vamp/When it comes to lovin'/She's a human oven/Come on you futuristic papas/She's the hottest thing he's seen since the Chicago fire."

Paul Whiteman also composed "Charlestonette" in 1925 with Fred Rose which was published by Leo Feist. The song was released as Victor 19785 backed with "Ida-I Do" in 1925. Ben Selvin's Dance Orchestra and Bennie Krueger and His Orchestra also recorded the song in 1925.

Paul Whiteman composed the piano work "Dreaming The Waltz Away" with Fred Rose in 1926. Organist Jesse Crawford recorded the song on October 4–5, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois and released it as a 78 on Victor Records, 20363 . Crawford played the instrumental on a Wurlitzer organ.

In ''Louis Armstrong & Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz'' (2004), Joshua Berrett wrote that "Whiteman Stomp" was credited to Fats Waller, Alphonso Trent, and Paul Whiteman. Lyricist Jo Trent is the co-author. The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra first recorded "Whiteman Stomp" on 11 May 1927 and released it as Columbia 1059-D. The Fletcher Henderson recording lists the songwriters as "Fats Waller/Jo Trent/Paul Whiteman". Paul Whiteman recorded the song on 11 August 1927 and released it as Victor 21119.

"Then and Now", recorded on December 7, 1954 and released in 1955 on Coral, was composed by Paul Whiteman with Dick Jacobs and Bob Merrill. The song was released as a 45 inch single in 1955 as Coral 61336 backed with "Mississippi Mud" by Paul Whiteman and His New Ambassador Orchestra with the New Rhythm Boys.

Whiteman also co-wrote the popular song "My Fantasy" with Leo Edwards and Jack Meskill, which is a musical adaptation of the Polovtsian Dances theme from the opera ''Prince Igor'' by Alexander Borodin. The Paul Whiteman Orchestra recorded "My Fantasy" in 1939.

Honors

In 2006 the Paul Whiteman Orchestra's 1928 recording of ''Ol' Man River'' with Paul Robeson on vocals was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The song was recorded on 1 March 1928 in New York and released as Victor 35912-A.)

Major recordings

Whispering (song), 1920, #1 for 11 weeks, the no.2 hit of 1920, 1998 Grammy Hall of Fame inductee

The Japanese Sandman, 1920, #1 for 2 weeks

Wang Wang Blues, 1921, #1 for 6 weeks, on the soundtrack to the 1996 Academy Award–winning movie ''The English Patient''

My Mammy, 1921, #1 for 5 weeks

Cherie, 1921, #1 for 6 weeks

Say It With Music, 1921, #1 for 5 weeks

Grieving For You-Feather Your Nest, #26 hit of 1921

Play that "Song of India" Again, 1921, #1 for 5 weeks, music adapted by Paul Whiteman from the Chanson Indoue theme by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov from the opera ''Sadko'' (1898) with lyrics by Leo Wood and Irving Bibo

Bright Eyes, the #13 hit of 1921

Hot Lips (He's Got Hot Lips When He Plays Jazz), 1922, #1 for 6 weeks, featured in the Oprah Winfrey movie ''The Color Purple'' (1985), directed by Steven Spielberg

Do It Again, 1922, #1 for 2 weeks

Three O'Clock in the Morning, 1922, #1 for 8 weeks

Stumbling, 1922, #1 for 6 weeks

Wonderful One, 1922, music composed by Paul Whiteman and Ferde Grofe, with lyrics by Theodora Morse, #3 on Billboard charts in 1923

I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, 1923, #1 for 1 week

Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, 1923, #1 for 7 weeks

Bambalina, 1923, #1 for 1 week

Nuthin' But, 1923, co-written by Ferde Grofe and Henry Busse

Linger Awhile, 1924, #1 for 4 weeks

What'll I Do, 1924, #1 for 5 weeks

Somebody Loves Me, 1924, #1 for 5 weeks

Rhapsody in Blue, 1924, arranged by Ferde Grofe, with George Gershwin on piano

When the One You Love Loves You, 1924, composed by Paul Whiteman

All Alone, 1925, #1 for 3 weeks

Charlestonette, 1925, composed by Paul Whiteman with Fred Rose

Birth of the Blues, 1926, #1 for 4 weeks

Valencia, no.1 for 11 weeks in 1926, the #1 record of 1926

My Blue Heaven, 1927, #1 for 1 week

Three Shades of Blue: Indigo/Alice Blue/Heliotrope, 1927, composed and arranged by Ferde Grofe

In a Little Spanish Town, 1927, #1 for 8 weeks

I'm Coming, Virginia

Whiteman Stomp, 1927

Washboard Blues, 1927, with Hoagy Carmichael on vocals and piano

Rhapsody in Blue, 1927, "electrical" version, Grammy Hall of Fame inductee

Chiquita, #36 hit of 1928

From Monday On, 1928, with Bing Crosby, the Rhythm Boys, and Jack Fulton on vocals and Bix Beiderbecke on cornet, #14 on Billboard

Mississippi Mud, 1928, with Bing Crosby and Bix Beiderbecke, #6 on Billboard

Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy, 1928, composed by Ferde Grofe, with Bix Beiderbecke on cornet

Ol' Man River, 1928, first, fast version, with Bing Crosby on vocals, #1 for 1 week. This recording was Bing Crosby's first #1 record as a vocalist. Crosby would have 41 such hits during his career.

Ol' Man River, 1928, second, slow version, with Paul Robeson on vocals, Grammy Hall of Fame inductee

Concerto in F

Among My Souvenirs, 1928, #1 for 4 weeks

Ramona, 1928, with Bix Beiderbecke, #1 for 3 weeks

Together, 1928, with Jack Fulton on vocals, #1 for 2 weeks. Dinah Shore recorded this song in 1944, which became a hit. Connie Francis recorded the song in 1961; it reached #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. The song was also recorded by Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards (1928), Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest (1944), and Tony Pasror and His Orchestra on a V-Disc.

My Angel, 1928, with Bix Beiderbecke, #1 for 6 weeks

Great Day, 1929, #1 for 2 weeks

Body and Soul, 1930, #1 for 6 weeks

New Tiger Rag, 1930, #10 on Billboard

When It's Sleepy Time Down South, 1931, vocal by Mildred Bailey and the King's Jesters

Grand Canyon Suite, 1932

Mississippi Suite

Rise 'N' Shine, 1932, featuring Ramona Davies and her Grand Piano

All of Me, 1932, #1 for 3 weeks

Willow Weep for Me, 1933, #2 chart hit

It's Only a Paper Moon, 1933, with Peggy Healy on vocals. The Whiteman recording, Victor 24400, was used in the 1973 movie ''Paper Moon''

San

Sun Spots, 1934, with Frankie Trumbauer

You're the Top, #21 hit of 1934

Fare-Thee-Well to Harlem, 1934, with vocals by Johnny Mercer and Jack Teagarden

Wagon Wheels, 1934

My Fantasy, 1939, Paul Whiteman co-wrote the song "My Fantasy", an adaptation by Paul Whiteman of the Polovtsian Dances theme from the opera ''Prince Igor'' by Alexander Borodin, credited to "Paul Whiteman/Leo Edwards/Jack Meskill". Artie Shaw recorded "My Fantasy" in 1940.

Trav'lin' Light, 1942, with Billie Holiday on vocals

Then and Now, 1955

The Night is Young (And You're So Beautiful), 1956, with Tommy Dorsey

It's The Dreamer In Me, 1956, with Jimmy Dorsey

Quotations

"Jazz is the folk music of the machine age."

"Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul."

"Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains."

See also

Ramona (vocalist)

Notes

References

Paul Whiteman: Pioneer of American Music (Volume 1: 1890–1930), ''Studies in Jazz'', No. 43, by Don Rayno, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003.

''Pops: Paul Whiteman, King of Jazz'', by Thomas A. DeLong, New Century Publishers, 1983.

''Jazz'' by Paul Whiteman, J. H. Sears, 1926.

''How To Be A Band Leader'' by Paul Whiteman and Leslie Lieber, Robert McBride & Company, 1948.

External links

Paul Whiteman at the Red Hot Jazz website: http://www.redhotjazz.com/whiteman.html

Paul Whiteman at IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0925842/

''The King of Jazz'' (1930) at IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021025/

Category:1890 births Category:1967 deaths Category:American radio personalities Category:Jazz bandleaders Category:People from Denver, Colorado Category:People from New York City Category:Vaudeville performers Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Victor Records artists

de:Paul Whiteman es:Paul Whiteman eo:Paul Whiteman fr:Paul Whiteman ko:폴 화이트먼 it:Paul Whiteman he:פול וייטמן la:Paulus Whiteman nl:Paul Whiteman nds:Paul Whiteman pl:Paul Whiteman fi:Paul Whiteman sv:Paul Whiteman

name	Her Space Holiday
background	solo_singer
birth name	Marc Bianchi
origin	California, United States
genre	IndietronicIndie rock
years active	1996–present
label	Mush RecordsTiger StyleWichita
associated acts	Indian SummerMohinder
website	www.herspaceholiday.com
notable instruments	}}

Her Space Holiday is the recording moniker of indietronic and indie rock artist Marc Bianchi.

History

Marc Bianchi began as a musician in the California hardcore scene. He was a part of Indian Summer and Mohinder before assuming the moniker "Her Space Holiday" in 1996. Initially, Bianchi was not interested in releasing Her Space Holiday's first works, as he was focused on launching the bands associated with his new (now defunct) record label Audio Information Phenomena. However, after being approached by Chocolate River Industries to record a 12" EP, Her Space Holiday became Bianchi's full time project.

Since the release of Her Space Holiday's first EP, the band has released six full length albums, several singles and EPs, and a remix album. He has toured with Bright Eyes, The Faint, Pinback, Bob Mould, The American Analog Set, Lymbyc Systym and others. He has also remixed songs from REM, Duster, The Faint, The American Analog Set, Xiu Xiu, and others.

Marc's newest addition to his discography, the album released on October 7, 2008 in the United States titled "XOXO, Panda And The New Kid Revival" is a great departure from previous Her Space Holiday albums and with a new sound. Completely throwing away the computer on this project, he brings a folk and jam sound to his material, with emphasis on songwriting. The live band for the Xoxo Panda material features Andrew Kenny of American Analog Set and Mike Bell & Jared Bell of Lymbyc Systym.

Discography

Studio

''Audio Astronomy'' 12" (1997, Train Bridge)

* Re-release: ''Audio Astronomy'' 12" (2002, Tiger Style Records) – with additional tracks

''The Astronauts Are Sleeping, Volume 1'' (1999, Skylab Operations)

''The Astronauts Are Sleeping, Volume 2'' (1999, No Karma)

* Re-release: ''The Astronauts Are Sleeping 2.0'' (2002, Neoplex Records) – Japanese release

''Home Is Where You Hang Yourself'' (2000, Tiger Style / Wichita Recordings)

* Re-release: ''Home Is Where You Hang Yourself 2.0'' (2002, Tiger Style)

''Manic Expressive'' (2001, Tiger Style / Wichita)

''The Young Machines'' (2003, Mush Records / Wichita / & Records)

''The Past Presents the Future'' (2005, Wichita / V2 / & / Neoplex)

''The Telescope'' (2006, Youth Records / And) – Japanese release

''XOXO, Panda And The New Kid Revival'' (2008, Mush)

''Her Space Holiday'' (2011, No More Good Ideas)

EPs

''Something Blue'' CDEP (Bravenoiserecords)

''Silent Films'' CDEP (2000, Dogprint)

''Let's Get Quiet Vol. 1'' CDEP / 12" (2005, Mush)

''Let's Get Quiet Vol. 2'' CDEP / 12" (2007, Mush)

''Sleepy Tigers'' CDEP / 12" (2009, Mush)

''The Early Paws Collection'' (2009, No More Good Ideas)

Singles

''Electronic Sunshine'' (Audio Information Phenomena)

Split single with Flowchart, featuring the track "Silent Films"

''Wish List'' 7" (Motorway) – Japanese release

"Slide Guitars and Moving Cars" 7" (Clover) – Japanese release

"Bright Eyes vs Her Space Holiday" split 7" / CD - Witchita Recordings 2000

"My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" CD single Witchita Recordings – European release 2004

Remix and compilation albums

''Ambidextrous'' (2001, Wichita) – UK release

''The Young Machines Remixed'' (2004, Mush / Wichita / &)

A promotional MP3 of the song "Sleepy Tigers," from the album XOXO, Panda And The New Kid Revival, can be found here.

References

External links

Her Space Holiday

Lazy-i Interview: September 2004

Category:American indie rock groups Category:Musical groups established in 1996 Category:Remixers Category:Musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO (13 May 1842 – 22 November 1900) was an English composer. He is best known for his internationally successful series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as ''H.M.S. Pinafore'', ''The Pirates of Penzance'' and ''The Mikado''. Sullivan composed 23 operas, 13 major orchestral works, eight choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous hymns and other church pieces, songs, parlour ballads, part songs, carols, and piano and chamber pieces.

Apart from his Savoy operas with Gilbert, Sullivan is best known for some of his hymns and parlour songs, including "Onward Christian Soldiers", "The Absent-Minded Beggar", and "The Lost Chord". His most critically praised pieces include his ''Irish Symphony'', his ''Overture di Ballo'', ''The Martyr of Antioch'', ''The Golden Legend'', his incidental music to ''The Tempest'' and, of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, ''The Yeomen of the Guard''. Sullivan's only grand opera, ''Ivanhoe'', was initially highly successful, but it has been little heard since his death.

Life and career

Beginnings

Sullivan was born in Lambeth, London. His parents were Thomas Sullivan (1805–1866), a military bandmaster, clarinettist and music teacher born in Ireland and raised in Chelsea, London, and Mary Clementina (''née'' Coghlan, 1811–1882), English born, of Irish and Italian descent. Thomas Sullivan was based from 1845 to 1857 at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he was the bandmaster. Young Sullivan became proficient with many of the instruments in the band and had composed an anthem, "By the waters of Babylon", by the age of eight. He later recalled:

Despite the boy's obvious musical talent, Thomas Sullivan knew the disappointments and insecurity of a musical career, and discouraged him from pursuing it. While studying at a private school in Bayswater, Sullivan, then aged 11, persuaded his parents and the headmaster, William Gordon Plees, to allow him to apply for membership in the choir of the Chapel Royal. Despite concerns that Sullivan at nearly 12 years of age was too old to give much service as a treble before his voice broke, he was accepted and soon became a soloist and, by 1856, was promoted to "first boy". Even at this age, Sullivan's health was delicate, and he was easily fatigued.

Sullivan flourished under the training of the Reverend Thomas Helmore, master of the choristers, and began to compose anthems and songs. Helmore encouraged the young Sullivan's composing talent and arranged for one of his pieces, "O Israel", to be published in 1855, Sullivan's first published work. Helmore also enlisted Sullivan's assistance in creating harmonisations for a volume of ''The Hymnal Noted'' and arranged for Sullivan's compositions to be performed; one of the boy's anthems was given at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace under the direction of Sir George Smart.

Mendelssohn scholar

In 1856, the Royal Academy of Music awarded the first Mendelssohn Scholarship to the 14-year-old Sullivan, granting him a year's training at the academy.|group= n}} His principal teacher there was John Goss, whose own teacher, Thomas Attwood, had been a pupil of Mozart. He studied piano with the head of the academy, William Sterndale Bennett. During this year at the Royal Academy, Sullivan continued to sing solos with the Chapel Royal, which provided a small amount of spending money.

Sullivan's scholarship was extended to a second year, and in 1858 in what the biographer Arthur Jacobs calls an "extraordinary gesture of confidence" the scholarship committee extended his grant for a third year so that he could study in Germany, at the Leipzig Conservatoire. While there, Sullivan studied composition with Julius Rietz, counterpoint with Moritz Hauptmann and Ernst Richter and the piano with Louis Plaidy and Ignaz Moscheles. He was trained in Mendelssohn's ideas and techniques but was also exposed to a variety of musical styles, including Schubert, Verdi, Bach, and Wagner. Visiting a synagogue, he was so struck by some of the cadences and progressions of the music that thirty years later he could recall them for use in his serious opera, ''Ivanhoe''. Originally intended to spend a year in Leipzig, Sullivan stayed there for three years.

During his years in Germany, Sullivan became friendly with the composer Franz Liszt, the singer and later impresario Carl Rosa, and the violinist Joseph Joachim. For his last year at Leipzig, his father scraped together the money for living expenses, and the conservatoire assisted by waiving its fees. Sullivan credited his Leipzig period with tremendous musical growth. His graduation piece, completed in 1861, was a set of incidental music to Shakespeare's ''The Tempest''. Revised and expanded, it was performed at the Crystal Palace in 1862, a year after his return to London, and was an immediate sensation. He began building a reputation as England's most promising young composer.

Rising composer

Sullivan embarked on his composing career with a series of ambitious works, interspersed with hymns, parlour songs and other light pieces in a more commercial vein. His compositions were not enough to support him financially, and from 1861 to 1872 he supplemented his income by working as a church organist, which he enjoyed, and as a music teacher, which he hated and gave up as soon as he could.

Sullivan's long association with works for the voice began with ''The Masque at Kenilworth'' (Birmingham Festival, 1864). During a spell as organist at Covent Garden, he composed his first ballet, ''L'Île Enchantée'' (1864), and had his first experience of opera, which was directed there by Michael Costa. In 1866, he premiered his ''Irish Symphony'' and ''Cello Concerto'', his only works in each such genre. In the same year, his ''Overture in C (In Memoriam)'', commemorating the recent death of his father, was a commission from the Norwich Festival. During his lifetime, it was one of his most popular works for orchestra. In 1867, his overture ''Marmion'' was premiered by the Philharmonic Society. ''The Times'' called it "another step in advance on the part of the only composer of any remarkable promise that just at present we can boast."

In the autumn of 1867, Sullivan travelled with George Grove to Vienna, in search of neglected manuscript scores by Schubert. They found and copied several, and were particularly excited about their final discovery, which Grove described thus: "I found, at the bottom of the cupboard, and in its farthest corner, a bundle of music-books two feet high, carefully tied round, and black with the undisturbed dust of nearly half-a-century. … These were the part-books of the whole of the music in ''Rosamunde'', tied up after the second performance in December, 1823, and probably never disturbed since. Dr. Schneider [curator] must have been amused at our excitement; but let us hope that he recollected his own days of rapture; at any rate, he kindly overlooked it, and gave us permission to take away with us and copy what we wanted."

Sullivan's first attempt at opera, ''The Sapphire Necklace'' (1863–64) to a libretto by Henry F. Chorley, was not produced and is now lost, except for the overture and two songs from the work, which were separately published. His first surviving opera, ''Cox and Box'' (1866), was originally written for a private performance. It then received charity performances in London and Manchester, and was later produced at the Gallery of Illustration, where it ran for an extraordinary 264 performances. W. S. Gilbert, writing in ''Fun'' magazine, pronounced the score superior to F. C. Burnand's libretto. The first Sullivan-Burnand collaboration was sufficiently successful to spawn a two-act opera, ''The Contrabandista'' (1867; revised and expanded as ''The Chieftain'' in 1894), which did not do nearly as well. Sullivan's last major work of the 1860s was a short oratorio, ''The Prodigal Son'', premiered in Worcester Cathedral as part of the 1869 Three Choirs Festival to much praise.

1870s; first collaborations with Gilbert

Sullivan's most successful orchestral work, the ''Overture di Ballo'', was composed for the Birmingham Festival in 1870.|group= n}} In 1871, he published his only song cycle, ''The Window; or, The Songs of the Wrens'' (1871), to words by Tennyson. In the same year, he wrote the first of a series of suites of incidental music for West End theatre productions of Shakespeare plays. In the same year, Sullivan composed a dramatic cantata, ''On Shore and Sea'', for the opening of the London International Exhibition. At the end of 1871, the impresario John Hollingshead commissioned Sullivan to work with W. S. Gilbert to create the burlesque-style comic opera ''Thespis'' for the Gaiety Theatre. Conceived as a Christmas entertainment, it ran through to Easter 1872, a satisfying run for such a piece. After ''Thespis'', Gilbert and Sullivan went their separate ways until they collaborated on three parlour ballads in late 1874 and early 1875.

Sullivan's large-scale works of the early 1870s were the ''Festival Te Deum'' (Crystal Palace, 1872); and the oratorio, ''The Light of the World'' (Birmingham Festival, 1873). He provided suites of incidental music for a production of ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' at the Gaiety in 1874 and ''Henry VIII'' at the Theatre Royal, Manchester in 1877. He continued to compose hymns throughout the decade, the most famous of which is "Onward, Christian Soldiers" (1872, words by Sabine Baring-Gould). In 1873, Sullivan contributed two songs to Burnand's Christmas "drawing room extravaganza", ''The Miller and His Man''.

In 1875, the manager of the Royalty Theatre, Richard D'Oyly Carte, needed a short piece to fill out a bill with Offenbach's ''La Périchole''. Carte had conducted Sullivan's ''Cox and Box''. Remembering ''Thespis'', Carte reunited Gilbert and Sullivan, and the result was the one-act comic opera ''Trial by Jury''. ''Trial'', starring Sullivan's brother Fred as the Learned Judge, became a surprise hit, earning glowing praise from the critics and playing for 300 performances over its first few seasons. The ''Daily Telegraph'' commented that the piece illustrated the composer's "great capacity for dramatic writing of the lighter class", and other reviews emphasised the felicitous combination of Gilbert's words and Sullivan's music. One wrote, "it seems, as in the great Wagnerian operas, as though poem and music had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain." Soon after the opening of ''Trial'', Sullivan wrote ''The Zoo'', another one-act comic opera, with a libretto by B. C. Stephenson. But the latter work had only a few short runs, and for the next 15 years, Sullivan's sole operatic collaborator was Gilbert; the two created an additional 12 operas together.

{|align=right | |} Sullivan also turned out more than 80 popular songs and parlour ballads, most of them written before the end of the 1870s. His first popular song was "Orpheus with his Lute" (1866), and a successful part song was "Oh! hush thee, my babie" (1867). The best known of his songs is "The Lost Chord" (1877, lyrics by Adelaide Anne Procter), written in sorrow at the death of his brother Frederic. The sheet music for his best received songs sold in large numbers, and were an important part of his income; many of them were adapted as dance pieces.

In this decade, Sullivan's conducting appointments included the Glasgow Choral Union concerts, 1875–77 and the Royal Aquarium, London, 1876. In addition to his appointment as Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, of which he was a Fellow, he was appointed as the first Principal of the National Training School for Music in 1876. He accepted the latter post reluctantly, fearing that discharging the duties thoroughly would leave too little time for composing. In this he was correct, as his successor Hubert Parry also discovered. Sullivan was not a success in the post, and resigned in 1881.

Sullivan's next collaboration with Gilbert, ''The Sorcerer'' (1877), ran for 178 performances, a success by the standards of the day, but ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' (1878), which followed it, turned Gilbert and Sullivan into an international phenomenon. ''Pinafore'' ran for 571 performances in London, and more than 100 unauthorised productions were quickly mounted in America alone. |group= n}} Among other favorable reviews, ''The Times'' noted that the opera was an early attempt at the establishment of a "national musical stage" ... free from risqué French "improprieties" and without the "aid" of Italian and German musical models. ''The Times'' and several of the other papers agreed, however, that while the piece was entertaining, Sullivan was capable of higher art, and frivolous light opera would hold him back. This criticism would follow Sullivan throughout his career. ''Pinafore'' was followed by ''The Pirates of Penzance'' in 1879, another international success that opened in New York and then ran in London for 363 performances.

Early 1880s

In 1880, Sullivan was appointed director of the Leeds Festival. For his first festival he was commissioned to write a sacred choral work. He chose Henry Hart Milman's 1822 dramatic poem based on the life and death of Saint Margaret the Virgin for its basis. Gilbert adapted the libretto for Sullivan, abridging it, rearranging sections, reassigning lines, and making a few additions of his own. ''The Martyr of Antioch'' premiered in October 1880. Sullivan was an unshowy conductor, and some thought him dull, Bernard Shaw, who praised Sullivan as a composer ("They trained him to make Europe yawn, and he took advantage of their teaching to make London and New York laugh and whistle.") was less impressed by Sullivan as a conductor: "Under his ''bâton'' orchestras are never deficient in refinement. Coarseness, exaggeration, and carelessness are unacquainted with him. So, unfortunately, are vigor and earnestness. … It is well for Sir Arthur to be fastidious; but one cannot help thinking that he would get a firmer grip sometimes if he took his gloves off."|group= n}} but his composition had an enthusiastic reception and was frequently revived. A grateful Sullivan presented his collaborator with an engraved silver cup inscribed "W.S. Gilbert from his friend Arthur Sullivan."

After the profitable run of ''The Pirates of Penzance'', Carte opened the next Gilbert and Sullivan piece, ''Patience'', in April 1881 at London's Opera Comique, where their past three operas had played. In October, ''Patience'' transferred to the new, larger, state-of-the-art Savoy Theatre, built with the profits of the previous Gilbert and Sullivan works. The rest of the partnership's collaborations were produced at the Savoy, as a result of which they are widely known as the "Savoy Operas". ''Iolanthe'' (1882), Gilbert and Sullivan's fourth extraordinary success in a row, was the first of the operas to premiere at the new theatre. Sullivan, despite the financial security of writing for the Savoy, increasingly viewed his work with Gilbert as unimportant, beneath his skills, and also repetitious. After ''Iolanthe'', Sullivan had not intended to write a new work with Gilbert, but he suffered a serious financial loss when his broker went bankrupt in November 1882. Therefore, he concluded that his financial needs required him to continue writing Savoy operas. In February 1883, he signed a five-year agreement with Gilbert and Carte, requiring him to produce a new comic opera on six months' notice.

On 22 May 1883, Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria. Although the operas with Gilbert had earned him the broadest fame, the honour was conferred for his services to serious music. The musical establishment, and many critics, believed that this should put an end to his career as a composer of comic opera – that a musical knight should not stoop below oratorio or grand opera. Having just signed the five-year agreement, Sullivan suddenly felt trapped. In mid-December, Sullivan bade farewell to his sister-in-law Charlotte, Fred's widow, who emigrated with her young family to America. Sullivan's oldest nephew, Herbert, stayed behind in England as his uncle's ward. The next opera, ''Princess Ida'' (1884, the duo's only three-act, blank verse work), was noticeably less successful than its four predecessors, although Sullivan's score was praised. With box office receipts lagging, Carte gave the six months' notice for a new opera required under the partnership contract. Sullivan's close friend, the composer Frederic Clay, had suffered a serious stroke in early December 1883 that effectively ended his career at the age of 45. Sullivan, reflecting on this, on his own longstanding kidney problems, and on his desire to devote himself to more serious music, replied to Carte, "[I]t is impossible for me to do another piece of the character of those already written by Gilbert and myself."

Gilbert had already started work on a new opera involving a plot in which people fell in love against their wills after taking a magic lozenge. Sullivan pronounced it unacceptably mechanical and too similar to their earlier work, and he asked to leave the partnership. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan asking him to reconsider, but the composer replied that he had "come to the end of my tether" with the operas: "I have been continually keeping down the music in order that not one [syllable] should be lost. ... I should like to set a story of human interest & probability where the humorous words would come in a humorous (not serious) situation, & where, if the situation were a tender or dramatic one the words would be of similar character." The impasse was finally resolved when Gilbert proposed a plot that did not depend on any supernatural device. The result was Gilbert and Sullivan's most successful work, ''The Mikado'' (1885). The piece ran for 672 performances, which was the second longest run for any work of musical theatre, and one of the longest runs of any theatre piece, up to that time., and Gänzl, Kurt. "Cloches de Corneville, Les," ''The New Grove Dictionary of Opera'', Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 18 August 2011|group= n}}

Later 1880s

In 1886, Sullivan composed his second and last large-scale choral work of the decade. It was a cantata for the Leeds Festival, ''The Golden Legend'', based on Longfellow's poem of the same name. Apart from the comic operas, this proved to be Sullivan's most successful full-length work. It was given hundreds of performances during his lifetime, and at one point he declared a moratorium on its presentation, fearing that it would become over-exposed The work was so popular that only Handel's ''Messiah'' was performed more often in Britain in the 1880s and 90s. It remained in the repertory until about the 1920s, but since then it has been seldom performed, although it received its first professional recording in 2001. The musical scholar and conductor David Russell Hulme writes that the work influenced Elgar and Walton.

''Ruddigore'' followed ''The Mikado'' at the Savoy in 1887. It ran profitably for nine months but was less successful than most of the earlier Savoy operas. For their next piece, Gilbert submitted another version of the magic lozenge plot; Sullivan immediately rejected it. Gilbert finally proposed a comparatively serious opera, to which Sullivan agreed. Although it was not a grand opera, ''The Yeomen of the Guard'' (1888) provided him with the opportunity to compose his most ambitious stage work to date. As early as 1883, Sullivan had been under pressure from the musical establishment to write a grand opera. In 1885, he told an interviewer, ""The opera of the future is a compromise [among the French, German and Italian schools] – a sort of eclectic school, a selection of the merits of each one. I myself will make an attempt to produce a grand opera of this new school. ... Yes, it will be an historical work, and it is the dream of my life.” After ''The Yeomen of the Guard'' opened, Sullivan turned once again to Shakespeare, composing incidental music for Henry Irving's production of ''Macbeth'' (1888).

Sullivan wished to produce further serious works with Gilbert. He had collaborated with no other librettist since 1875. But Gilbert felt that the success of ''The Yeomen of the Guard'' had "not been so convincing as to warrant us in assuming that the public want something more earnest still." He proposed instead that Sullivan should go ahead with his plan to write a grand opera, but should continue also to compose comic works for the Savoy. Sullivan was not immediately persuaded. He replied, "I have lost the liking for writing comic opera, and entertain very grave doubts as to my power of doing it." Nevertheless, a compromise was reached: Sullivan commissioned a grand opera libretto from Julian Sturgis (who was recommended by Gilbert), while suggesting to Gilbert that he revive an old idea for an opera set in the sunshine of Venice. The comic opera was completed first: ''The Gondoliers'' (1889) was a piece described by Hughes as a pinnacle of Sullivan's achievement. It was the last great Gilbert and Sullivan success.

1890s

The relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan suffered its most serious breach in April 1890, during the run of ''The Gondoliers'', when Gilbert objected to Carte's financial accounts for the production, including a charge to the partnership for the cost of new carpeting for the Savoy Theatre lobby. Gilbert believed that this was a maintenance expense that should be charged to Carte alone. Carte was building a new theatre to present Sullivan's forthcoming grand opera, and Sullivan sided with Carte, going so far as to testify erroneously as to certain old debts. Gilbert took legal action against Carte and Sullivan and vowed to write no more for the Savoy, and so the partnership came to an acrimonious end. Sullivan wrote to Gilbert in September 1890 that he was "physically and mentally ill over this wretched business. I have not yet got over the shock of seeing our names coupled ... in hostile antagonism over a few miserable pounds".

Sullivan's only grand opera, ''Ivanhoe'', based on Walter Scott's ''novel'', opened at Carte's new Royal English Opera House on 31 January 1891. Sullivan completed the score too late to meet Carte's planned production date, and costs mounted as the producer had to pay performers, crew and others, while the theatre sat empty. Sullivan was required to pay Carte a contractual penalty of £3,000 for his delay. The opera was a success, running for an unprecedented 155 performances and earning good notices for its music. Carte was unable to fill the new opera house with other opera productions, however, and ''Ivanhoe'' was blamed for the failure of the opera house. The opera passed into obscurity after a touring revival in 1894–95. The episode was, as the critic Herman Klein observed, "the strangest comingling of success and failure ever chronicled in the history of British lyric enterprise!" Sullivan did not seriously consider writing grand opera again. Later in 1891, Sullivan composed music for Tennyson's ''The Foresters'', which was a success at Daly's Theatre in New York in 1892, but a failure in London the following year.

Sullivan returned to comic opera, but because of the fracture with Gilbert, he and Carte sought other collaborators. Sullivan's next piece was ''Haddon Hall'' (1892), with a libretto by Sydney Grundy based loosely on the historical elopement of Dorothy Vernon with John Manners. Although still comic, the tone and style of the work was considerably more serious and romantic than most of the operas with Gilbert. It enjoyed a modest success, running for 204 performances, and earned critical praise. In 1895, Sullivan once more provided incidental music for the Lyceum, this time for J. Comyns Carr's ''King Arthur''.

The partnership with Gilbert had been so profitable that, after the financial failure of the Royal English Opera House, Carte and his wife sought to reunite the author and composer, eventually succeeding with the help of Tom Chappell, their music publisher. Their next opera, the expensively-produced ''Utopia Limited'' (1893), ran for 245 performances – barely profitable and disappointing in comparison to the team's bigger successes. Sullivan came to disapprove of the leading lady, Nancy McIntosh, and refused to write another piece featuring her, while Gilbert insisted that she must appear in his next opera. Instead, Sullivan teamed up again with his old partner, F. C. Burnand. ''The Chieftain'' (1894), a heavily revised version of their earlier two-act opera, ''The Contrabandista'', flopped. Gilbert and Sullivan reunited one more time, after McIntosh announced her retirement from the stage, for ''The Grand Duke'' (1896). This also failed, and Sullivan never worked with Gilbert again, although their operas continued to be revived with success at the Savoy.

In May 1897, Sullivan's full-length ballet, ''Victoria and Merrie England'', opened at the Alhambra Theatre to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. The work's seven scenes celebrate English history and culture, with the Victorian period as the grand finale. Its six-month run was considered a great success. ''The Beauty Stone'' (1898), with a libretto by Arthur Wing Pinero and J. Comyns Carr was based on mediaeval morality plays. The collaboration did not go particularly well: Sullivan wrote that Pinero and Comyns Carr were "gifted and brilliant men, with ''no'' experience in writing for music", and, when he asked for alterations to improve the structure, they refused. Sullivan's score, moreover, was too serious for the Savoy audiences' tastes. The opera was both a critical and popular failure, running for only seven weeks.

In ''The Rose of Persia'' (1899), however, Sullivan returned to his comic roots, with a libretto by Basil Hood that combined an exotic ''Arabian Nights'' setting with plot elements of ''The Mikado''. Sullivan's tuneful score proved to be his most successful full-length opera apart from his collaborations with Gilbert. Another opera with Hood, ''The Emerald Isle'', quickly went into preparation, but Sullivan died before it could be completed.

Death, honours and legacy

Having suffered from long-standing recurrent kidney disease that made it necessary, from the 1880s, for him to conduct sitting down, Sullivan died of heart failure, following an attack of bronchitis, at his flat in London on 22 November 1900. His unfinished opera, ''The Emerald Isle'', was completed by Edward German and produced in 1901. His ''Te Deum'', written to commemorate the end of the Boer War, was performed posthumously.

A monument in the composer's memory featuring a weeping Muse was erected in the Victoria Embankment Gardens in London and is inscribed with Gilbert's words from ''The Yeomen of the Guard'': "Is life a boon? If so, it must befall that Death, whene'er he call, must call too soon". Sullivan wished to be buried in Brompton Cemetery with his parents and brother, but by order of the Queen he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. In addition to his knighthood, honours awarded to Sullivan in his lifetime included Doctor in Music, ''honoris causa'', by the Universities of Cambridge (1876) and Oxford (1879); Chevalier, Légion d'honneur, France (1878); The Order of the Medjidieh, by the Sultan of Turkey (1888); and appointment as a Member of the Fourth Class of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) on 30 June 1897.

In all, Sullivan's artistic output included 23 operas, 13 major orchestral works, eight choral works and oratorios, two ballets, one song cycle, incidental music to several plays, and numerous hymns and other church pieces, songs, parlour ballads, part songs, carols, and piano and chamber pieces. His legacy, apart from writing the Savoy operas and other works that are still being performed, is felt perhaps most strongly today through his influence on the American and British musical theatre. The innovations in content and form of the works that he and Gilbert developed directly influenced the development of the modern musical throughout the 20th century. In addition, biographies continue to be written about Sullivan's life and work, and his work is not only frequently performed, but also frequently parodied, pastiched, quoted and imitated in comedy routines, film, television, advertising and other popular media.

Personal life

Romantic life

Sullivan never married, but he had serious love affairs with several women. The first was with Rachel Scott Russell (1845–1882). Sullivan and his friend Frederic Clay were frequent visitors at the Scott Russell home in the mid-1860s, and by 1866 the affair was in full bloom. Rachel's parents did not approve of a possible union to a young composer with uncertain financial prospects, but the two continued to see each other covertly. At some point in 1868, Sullivan started a simultaneous (and secret) affair with Rachel's sister Louise (1841–1878). Both relationships had ceased by the end of the decade.

Sullivan's longest love affair was with the American socialite, Mary Frances ("Fanny") Ronalds ''née'' Carter, a woman three years Sullivan's senior, who had two children. He met her in Paris around 1867, and the affair began in earnest soon after she moved to London permanently in 1871. A contemporary account described Fanny Ronalds this way: "Her face was perfectly divine in its loveliness, her features small and exquisitely regular. Her hair was a dark shade of brown – ''châtain foncé'' [deep chestnut] – and very abundant ... a lovely woman, with the most generous smile one could possibly imagine, and the most beautiful teeth." Sullivan called her "the best amateur singer in London". She often performed Sullivan's songs at her famous Sunday soirees. She became particularly associated with "The Lost Chord", singing it both in private and in public, often with Sullivan accompanying her. When Sullivan died, he left her the autograph manuscript of that song, along with other bequests.

Ronalds was separated from her American husband, but she was never divorced. Social conventions of the time compelled Sullivan and Ronalds to keep their relationship private. In his diary, he would refer to her as "Mrs. Ronalds" when he saw her in a public setting, but "L. W." (for "Little Woman") or "D. H." (possibly "Dear Heart") when they were alone together, often with a number in parentheses indicating the number of sexual acts completed. It is thought that Ronalds was pregnant on at least two occasions, and she apparently procured an abortion in 1882 and again in 1884. Sullivan had a roving eye, and his diary records the occasional quarrel when Ronalds discovered his other liaisons, but he always returned to her. She was a constant companion up to the time of Sullivan's death, but around 1889 or 1890, the sexual relationship seems to have ended. He started to refer to her in the diary as "Auntie", and the tick marks indicating sexual activity were no longer there, although similar notation continued to be used for his relationships with other women who have not been identified, and who were always referred to by their initials.

In 1896, Sullivan proposed marriage to the 20-year-old Violet Beddington, but she refused him.

Leisure and family life

Sullivan loved to spend time in France (both in Paris and the south of France), where his friends ranged from Princess Marie-Amélie of Orleans to the composer Claude Debussy. In 1865 he was initiated as a Freemason of the aristocratic Studholme Lodge № 1451, where he met and dined with its numerous well-connected members. He was the Grand Organist of the United Grand Lodge of England in 1887 during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee.

Sullivan was devoted to his parents, particularly his mother, with whom he corresponded regularly when away from London, until her death in 1882. Henry Lytton wrote, "I believe there was never a more affectionate tie than that which existed between [Sullivan] and his mother, a very witty old lady, and one who took an exceptional pride in her son's accomplishments. Sullivan was also very fond of his brother Fred, whose acting career he assisted whenever possible, and of Fred's children. When Fred died at the age of 39, he left his pregnant wife, Charlotte, with seven children under the age of 14. After Fred's death, Arthur visited the family often and became guardian to all of the children.

In 1883, Charlotte and six of her children emigrated to Los Angeles, California, leaving the oldest boy, "Bertie", in Sullivan's sole care. Despite his reservations about the move to America, Sullivan paid for the trip and continued to give very substantial financial support to the family. Only a year after moving to Los Angeles, in January 1885, Charlotte died, leaving the six children to be raised mostly by her brother and the older girls. From June to August 1885, after ''The Mikado'' premiered, Sullivan visited the family in Los Angeles and took them on a sightseeing trip of the American west. He continued, throughout the rest of his life, and in his will, to take good care of Fred's children, continuing to correspond with them and to be concerned with their education, marriages and financial affairs. Bertie stayed with his uncle Arthur for the rest of the composer's life.

Three of Sullivan's cousins, the daughters of his uncle John Thomas Sullivan, performed with D'Oyly Carte: Rose, Jane ("Jennie") and Kate Sullivan, the first two of whom used the stage surname Hervey. Kate was a chorister who defected to the Comedy Opera Company's rival production of ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' where she had the opportunity to play Josephine in 1879. Jennie was a D'Oyly Carte chorister for fourteen years. Rose took principal roles in many of the companion pieces that played with the Savoy operas.

Music

Method and text setting

Sullivan told an interviewer, Arthur Lawrence, "I don't use the piano in composition – that would limit me terribly". Sullivan explained that his process of composition was not to wait for inspiration like "a miner seated at the top of a shaft", waiting for "the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. ... He has to dig for it. ... The first thing I have to decide upon is the rhythm, and I decide on that before I come to the question of melody. The notes must come afterwards. ... I mark out the metre in dots and dashes, and not until I have quite settled on the rhythm do I proceed to actual notation." Sullivan's text setting, compared with that of his 19th century English predecessors or his European contemporaries, was "vastly more sensitive. ... Sullivan's operatic style attempts to create for itself a uniquely English text-music synthesis", and, in addition, by adopting a conservative musical style, he was able to achieve "the clarity to match Gilbert's finely honed wit with musical wit of his own."

In composing the Savoy operas, Sullivan wrote the vocal lines of the musical numbers first, and these were given to the actors. He, or an assistant, improvised a piano accompaniment at the early rehearsals; he wrote the orchestrations later, after he had seen what Gilbert's stage business would be. He left the overtures until last and often delegated their composition, based on his outlines, to his assistants often incorporating his suggestions or corrections. Those Sullivan wrote himself include ''Thespis'', ''Iolanthe'', ''Princess Ida'', ''The Yeomen of the Guard'', ''The Gondoliers'', ''The Grand Duke'' and probably ''Utopia Limited''. Most of the overtures are structured as a ''potpourri'' of tunes from the operas in three sections: fast, slow and fast. However, those for ''Iolanthe'', and ''The Yeomen of the Guard'' are written in a modified sonata form. The overtures from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas remain popular, and there are many recordings of them. Sullivan invariably conducted the operas on their opening nights.

In 1957, a review in ''The Times'' gave this rationale for "the continued vitality of the Savoy operas": :"[T]hey were never really contemporary in their idiom. ... Gilbert and Sullivan's [world was] an artificial world, with a neatly controlled and shapely precision. ... For this, each partner has his share of credit. The neat articulation of incredibilities in Gilbert's plots is perfectly matched by his language.... [Of] equal importance ... Gilbert's lyrics almost invariably take on extra point and sparkle when set to Sullivan's music. ... Sullivan's tunes, in these operas, also exist in a make-believe world of their own. ... [He is] a delicate wit, whose airs have a precision, a neatness, a grace, and a flowing melody".

Melody and rhythm

''The Musical Times'' noted that Sullivan's tunes, at least in the comic operas, appeal to the professional as much as to the layman: his continental contemporaries such as Debussy, Leoncavallo and Saint-Saëns held the Savoy operas in high regard. Hughes writes, "When Sullivan wrote what we call 'a good tune' it was nearly always 'good music' as well. Outside the ranks of the giants there are few other composers of whom the same could be said." Sullivan told Lawrence that his melodies sprang from rhythm, although some of his themes may have been prompted by his chosen instrumentation or his harmonic techniques.

{|align=left | |} In the comic operas, where many numbers were in verse-plus-refrain form, Sullivan frequently was required to produce two climaxes in the melodic line. Hughes instances "If you go in" (''Iolanthe'') as a good example. In Hughes's view, though most of the tunes in the Savoy operas are good ones, Sullivan rarely reached the same class of excellence elsewhere when he had no librettist to feed his imagination. Even so, on those occasions when Gilbert wrote in unvaried metre, Sullivan often followed suit and produced phrases of simple repetition, such as "Love is a plaintive song" (''Patience'') and "A man who would woo a fair maid" (''The Yeomen of the Guard'').

Sullivan's deliberate echoes of other composers are covered below under "Musical Quotations", but other echoes may not have been conscious: Hughes cites the concluding bars of "Tell a tale of cock and bull" from ''The Yeomen of the Guard'' as an example of Handel's influence, and another critic, Edward Greenfield, found a theme in the slow movement of the Irish symphony "an outrageous crib" from Schubert's Unfinished.

Harmony and counterpoint

;Harmony Sullivan was trained in the classical style, and contemporary music did not greatly attract him. Harmonically his early works used the conventional formulae of Auber, Donizetti, Balfe and Schubert. Later he drew on Gounod and Bizet. Mendelssohn's influence, conspicuous in early works, appears intermittently in later ones. As a contemporary writer observed, Sullivan draws on these various influences while remaining recognisably himself.

In general, Sullivan preferred to write in major keys. In the Savoy operas, there are only eleven substantial numbers wholly in a minor key (less than 5% of the musical numbers), and even in his serious works the major prevails. Examples of Sullivan's rare excursions into minor keys include the long E minor melody in the first movement of the Irish Symphony, "Go away, madam" in the Act I finale of ''Iolanthe'' (echoing Verdi and Beethoven) and the funeral march in the Act I finale of ''The Yeomen of the Guard''.

Both Hughes and Jacobs in ''Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' comment adversely on Sullivan's over-use of tonic pedals, usually in the bass, which Hughes attributes to "lack of enterprise or even downright laziness". Another Sullivan trademark criticised by Hughes is the excessive use of the chord of the augmented fourth at moments of pathos. In his serious works, Sullivan attempted to avoid harmonic devices associated with the Savoy operas, with the result, according to Hughes, that ''The Golden Legend'' is a "hotch-potch of harmonic styles". The same writer comments that harmonic contrast in the Savoy works is enhanced by Sullivan's characteristic modulation between keys, as in "Expressive glances" (''Princess Ida''), where he smoothly negotiates E major, C sharp minor and C major, or "Then one of us will be a queen" (''The Gondoliers''), where he writes in F major, D flat major and D minor.

Though generally conservative in his harmony, Sullivan was happy on occasion to use chords traditionally considered technically incorrect. When reproached for using consecutive fifths in ''Cox and Box'', he replied "if 5ths turn up it doesn't matter, so long as there is no offence to the ear." In the field of harmony, Hughes writes, Sullivan remained an eclectic: "He had easily recognisable ''habits'' but his style never achieved individuality".

;Counterpoint Despite his thorough academic contrapuntal training in London and Leipzig, as well as his experience as a church organist, Sullivan rarely composed fugues. Hughes cites the examples from the Epilogue to ''The Golden Legend'' and ''Victoria and Merrie England''. In the Savoy operas, fugal style is reserved for making fun of legal solemnity in ''Trial by Jury'' and ''Iolanthe'' (it is the Lord Chancellor's motif in the latter). Less formal counterpoint is employed in numbers such as "Brightly Dawns our Wedding Day" (''The Mikado'') and "When the Buds are Blossoming" (''Ruddigore'').

Sullivan's best known contrapuntal device was "the simultaneous presentation of two or more distinct melodies previously heard independently". He was not the first composer to combine themes in this way, but it became a characteristic feature of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Sometimes the melodies were for solo voices, as in "Once more the face I loved so well" (''The Zoo''), and "I am so proud" (''The Mikado''), which combines three melodic lines; other examples are in choruses, where typically a graceful tune for the ladies is combined with a robust one for the men. Examples include "When the Foeman bares his steel" (''The Pirates of Penzance''), "Gaily tripping" (''H.M.S. Pinafore''), "In a doleful train" (''Patience''), "Welcome, gentry" (''Ruddigore''), and "Night has spread her pall once more" (''The Yeomen of the Guard''). At other times, notably in "How beautifully blue the sky" (''The Pirates of Penzance''), one theme is given to the chorus and the other to solo voices.

Orchestration

Gervase Hughes concludes his chapter on Sullivan's orchestration: "in this vitally important sector of the composer's art he deserves to rank as a master." Sullivan was a competent player of at least four orchestral instruments (flute, clarinet, trumpet and trombone) and a technically highly skilled orchestrator. Though sometimes inclined to indulge in grandiosity when writing for a full symphony orchestra, he was adept in using smaller forces to the maximum effect. Percy Young writes that orchestral players generally like playing Sullivan's music: "Sullivan never asked his players to do what was either uncongenial or impracticable."

Sullivan's orchestra for the Savoy Operas was typical of any other pit orchestra of his era: 2 flutes (+ piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. According to Geoffrey Toye, the number of players in the Savoy orchestra was originally 31. Sullivan argued hard for an increase in the pit orchestra's size, and starting with ''The Yeomen of the Guard'', the orchestra was augmented with a second bassoon and a bass trombone. Sullivan generally orchestrated each score at almost the last moment, noting that the accompaniment for an opera had to wait until he saw the staging, so that he could judge how heavily or lightly to orchestrate each part of the music. For his large-scale orchestral pieces, Sullivan added a second oboe part, sometimes double bassoon and bass clarinet, more horns, trumpets, tuba, and sometimes an organ and/or a harp. Many of these pieces used very large orchestras.

One of the most recognisable features in Sullivan's orchestration is his woodwind scoring. Hughes especially notes Sullivan's clarinet writing, exploiting all registers and colours of the instrument, and his particular fondness for oboe solos. For instance, the ''Irish Symphony'' contains two long solo oboe passages in succession, and in the Savoy operas there are many shorter examples. In the operas, and also in concert works, another characteristic Sullivan touch is his fondness for pizzicato passages for all the string sections. Most of the operas have at least one number that Hughes calls "virtually a ''pizzicato ostinato''"; he instances "Kind sir, you cannot have the heart" (''The Gondoliers''), "Free from his fetters grim" (''The Yeomen of the Guard'') and "In vain to us you plead" (''Iolanthe'').

Musical quotations and parodies

Sullivan often quoted or imitated famous themes and passages from popular tunes or parodied the styles of well-known composers such as Schubert, Donizetti, Bellini, Gounod and Mendelssohn. He also liked to evoke familiar musical styles, such as his madrigals in ''The Mikado'', ''Ruddigore'' and ''The Yeomen of the Guard'', glees in ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' and ''The Mikado'' and gavottes in ''Ruddigore'' and ''The Gondoliers''. In ''The Sorcerer'', there is a country dance and folksy duet between the men and women's chorus in "If you'll marry me." Of the sextette "I hear the soft note" in ''Patience'', Sullivan said to the singers, "I think you will like this. It is Dr. Arne and Purcell at their best."

In early pieces, according to Debussy, in addition to his reflection of Mendelssohn (for example in his incidental music for ''The Tempest''), Sullivan imitated Auber in his ''Henry VIII'' music and Gounod in ''The Light of the World''. In his comic operas, Sullivan followed Offenbach's lead in guying the idioms of French and Italian opera, such as those of Donizetti, Verdi and Bellini. Later, Sullivan's music shows the influence of Handel, Schubert and, conspicuously in the fairy music in ''Iolanthe'', Mendelssohn. The then-popular Michael Balfe is parodied in ''The Sorcerer'' and ''The Pirates of Penzance'', and "Twenty Love Sick Maidens" imitates William Vincent Wallace's "Alas Those Chimes" from ''Maritana''. The sextet "A Nice Dilemma" in ''Trial by Jury'' parodies "D'un pensiero" in Bellini's ''La Sonnambula''.

Other examples of opera parody include Mabel's aria "Poor Wand'ring One" in ''The Pirates of Penzance'' and the duet "Who are you, sir?" from ''Cox and Box''. In ''H.M.S. Pinafore'', the whispered plans for elopement in "This very night" parodies the conspirators' choruses in Verdi's ''Il Trovatore'' and ''Rigoletto'', and the octet, "Farewell, my own," evokes the ensemble "Mag der Himmel euch vergeben" in Flotow's ''Martha'' and such concerted numbers as the sextet in Donizetti's ''Lucia di Lammermoor''. The mock-jingoistic "He is an Englishman" in ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' and choral passages in ''The Zoo'' satirise patriotic British tunes auch as Arne's "Rule, Britannia!".

In ''Princess Ida'', there is a strong Handelian flavour to Arac's song in Act III ("This helmet, I suppose"), and the Act II quartet "The world is but a broken toy" has been called "Gounodesque". Florian's statement in "Gently, Gently": "In this college, useful knowledge/Everywhere one finds" is a quotation from Chopin's Waltz No. 5 in A-flat Major (Op. 42). In ''The Gondoliers'', there are the Spanish cachucha, the Italian saltarello and tarantella, and the Venetian barcarolle. Hughes compares "Here is a case unprecedented" from ''The Gondoliers'' to the Act II quintet from Bizet's ''Carmen''. In "A more humane Mikado", when the Mikado mentions "Bach interwoven with Spohr and Beethoven", the clarinet and bassoon quote the fugue subject of Bach's ''Fantasia and Fugue in G minor''. ''The Golden Legend'' shows the influence of Liszt and Wagner.

Sullivan frequently gives groups or locations their own characters and motifs. Hughes points to the striking difference between the male chorus of rustics in ''The Sorcerer'' and the eponymous gondoliers, and between the fairies in ''Iolanthe'' and the undergraduates in ''Princess Ida''. ''H.M.S Pinafore'' retains "a nautical tang ''throughout''", and in ''The Yeomen of the Guard'' the Tower of London is evoked continually by its own motif. This use of Wagnerian leitmotif technique is repeated and developed further in ''Ivanhoe''.

Reputation and criticism

Sullivan's critical reputation has undergone extreme changes since he first came to prominence in the 1860s. At first he was hailed as the long-awaited great English composer. His incidental music to ''The Tempest'' received an acclaimed premiere at the Crystal Palace in April 1862. The ''Athenaeum'' wrote:

His ''Irish Symphony'' of 1866 won similarly enthusiastic praise, but as Arthur Jacobs notes, "The first rapturous outburst of enthusiasm for Sullivan as an orchestral composer did not last." A comment typical of those that followed him throughout his career was that "Sullivan's unquestionable talent should make him doubly careful not to mistake popular applause for artistic appreciation."

When Sullivan turned to comic opera, the serious critics began to express disapproval. The critic Peter Gammond writes of "misapprehensions and prejudices, delivered to our door by the Victorian firm Musical Snobs Ltd. … frivolity and high spirits were sincerely seen as elements that could not be exhibited by anyone who was to be admitted to the sanctified society of Art." Few critics denied the excellence of Sullivan's theatre scores; ''The Theatre'' wrote that "''Iolanthe'' sustains Dr Sullivan's reputation as the most spontaneous, fertile, and scholarly composer of comic opera this country has ever produced." However, comic opera, no matter how skilfully crafted, was viewed as an intrinsically lower form of art than oratorio. ''The Athenaeum's'' review of ''The Martyr of Antioch'' declared, "[I]t is an advantage to have the composer of ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' occupying himself with a worthier form of art.

Sullivan's knighthood in 1883 gave the serious music critics further ammunition. ''The Musical Review'' of that year wrote:

Sullivan redeemed himself in critical eyes with ''The Golden Legend'' in 1886. ''The Observer'' hailed it as a "triumph of English art" and wrote of "a sublimity about the music which transcends description". Hopes for a new departure were evident in the ''Daily Telegraph'''s review of ''The Yeomen of the Guard'', Sullivan's most serious opera to that point: "[T]he music follows the book to a higher plane, and we have a genuine English opera, forerunner of many others, let us hope, and possibly significant of an advance towards a national lyric stage. Sullivan's only wholly serious opera, ''Ivanhoe'' (1891), received generally favourable reviews; J. A. Fuller Maitland wrote in ''The Times'' that the opera's "best portions rise so far above anything else that Sir Arthur Sullivan has given to the world, and have such force and dignity, that it is not difficult to forget the drawbacks which may be found in the want of interest in much of the choral writing, and the brevity of the concerted solo parts."

Although the more solemn members of the musical establishment could not forgive Sullivan for writing music that was both comic and popular, he was, nevertheless, "the nation's ''de facto'' composer laureate".

In the decade after his death, Sullivan's reputation sank considerably. In 1901, Fuller Maitland took issue with the generally laudatory tone of most of the obituaries: "Is there anywhere a case quite parallel to that of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who began his career with a work which at once stamped him as a genius, and to the height of which he only rarely attained throughout life?... [H]ow can the composer of "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Absent-Minded Beggar" claim a place in the hierarchy of music among the men who would face death rather than smirch their singing robes for the sake of a fleeting popularity?" Edward Elgar, to whom Sullivan had been particularly kind, rose to Sullivan's defence, branding Fuller Maitland's obituary "the shady side of musical criticism... that foul unforgettable episode."

Fuller Maitland's followers, including Ernest Walker also condemned Sullivan, as "merely the idle singer of an empty evening". As late as 1966, Frank Howes, music critic of ''The Times'' condemned Sullivan for "inability to perceive the smugness, the sentimentality and banality of the Mendelssohnian detritus … to remain content with the flattest and most obvious rhythms, this yielding to a fatal facility, that excludes Sullivan from the ranks of the good composers." In the 1920s, Thomas F. Dunhill wrote a chapter entitled "Mainly in Defence" in his 1928 book, ''Sullivan's Comic Operas''; the defence was necessary because "[Sullivan]'s music has suffered in an extraordinary degree from the vigorous attacks which have been made upon it in professional circles. These attacks have succeeded in surrounding the composer with a kind of barricade of prejudice which must be swept away before justice can be done to his genius." Sir Henry Wood continued to perform Sullivan's serious music, but it was not until the 1960s that Sullivan's music began to be widely revived and reassessed.

In 1960 Gervase Hughes published the first full-length book about Sullivan's music "taking note of his weaknesses (which are many) and not hesitating to castigate his lapses from good taste (which were comparatively rare) [and attempting] to view them in perspective against the wider background of his sound musicianship" The work of the Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, founded in 1977, and books about Sullivan by musicians such as Percy Young (1971) and Arthur Jacobs (1986) have contributed to the re-evaluation of Sullivan's music.

The ''Symphony in E'' had its first professional recording in 1968, and a considerable number of Sullivan's non-Gilbert works have since been recorded, including ballet music, the cello concerto, and solo piano and chamber music. Scholarly critical editions of Sullivan's works have been published.

In a 2000 article in ''The Musical Times'', Nigel Burton wrote: |}}

Recordings

In 1888, Thomas Edison sent his "Perfected" Phonograph to George Gouraud in London, England, and on 14 August 1888, Gouraud introduced the phonograph to London in a press conference, including the playing of a piano and cornet recording of Sullivan's "The Lost Chord", one of the first recordings of music ever made.

A series of parties followed, introducing the phonograph to members of society at the so-called "Little Menlo" in London. Sullivan was invited to one of these on 5 October 1888. After dinner, he recorded a speech to be sent to Thomas Edison, saying, in part:

These recordings were discovered in the Edison Library in New Jersey in the 1950s.

See also

Gilbert and Sullivan

Savoy opera

Notes and references

;Notes ;References

Sources

Further reading

External links

Arthur Sullivan biography and further information

Extensive list of, and links to Sullivan works at the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive

Obituary notices in ''The Times''

Detailed 1879 article about Sullivan

Gilbert and Sullivan Discography

"Sir Arthur Sullivan Buried in St. Paul's" ''The New York Times'', November 28, 1900, p. 9

"The Other Side of Sullivan", lecture by Robin Wilson on the non-operatic musical output of Sullivan, given at Gresham College, 11 June 2008.

Sir Arthur Sullivan Society

Article on Sullivan's rhythmic treatment of Gilbert's texts

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