Tuesday 16 August 2016

First Musical Experiences

I recently disposed of a charming (though woodworm riddled) radiogram made in 1954. It was, I think, a wedding present for my parents and when I was very small, had pride of place in their living room.


It was connected to a radio ariel on a tall pole in the garden and its list of stations connected it via shortwave to all sorts of European stations; I can remember my father fiddling to tune into the results of the American presidential elections.




Unfortunately, almost as soon as I could walk, I taught myself how to operate it in order to play LPs and 78rpm. I was enthusiastic, but none too careful and was often told off for playing 78s using an LP stylus (not good for the stylus which was made from different material to the 78rpm one).


Here's the instruction manual.


78rpm discs had just about stopped being manufactured by this time (around 1962-3), but there were still plenty around the house, and many of my father's friends and colleagues off-loaded their collections on to me (which I was overjoyed to receive). These included an acoustic recording of composer York Bowen playing Chopin's Third Ballade (rather good) or, high up in the kitsch levels, an acoustic recording of Ketélbey's In a Monastery Garden, replete with the sounds of mechanical birds. As you can see, I still have these.


There were LPs as well and many EPs - Extended Play 33rpm 7' inch discs. When my parents bought their first fridge in 1964 I quickly snaffled up ten EP discs that came with it as a special offer - Chopin  piano works, Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave, Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances, the Sextet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and piano works by Liszt among many others.


6 comments:

  1. What a lovely post Peter - we've recently sold our family home and had to do similar clearing out - the music stuff brought back so many memories and stories, sadly we didn't still have our old radiogram, but it was much loved like yours.

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    1. Thank you Anita – we often remember the music that was important to us, but forget how bound up it is with the medium through which we heard it.

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  2. Lovely read Peter, I grew up with one of those I have my mother-in-law's Dansette and have recently spent a fair bit of time getting it back to working order...something very evocative about the sound. I recently stumbled across some "audio postcards home" - one-off 78rpm records recorded in Australia, typically called "To Grandma, Christmas 1948"....I don't think there is a word for how listening to those makes me feel.

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    1. Thanks Odilon - your grandmother's Australian records sound fascinating. Would be very interested to see / hear them at some point.

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  3. A lovely Collaro idler drive table in that, and like all our parents gramophones, the one flipover stylus probably stayed in it all its life!.
    York Bowen, my mind was playing tricks on me, as I was about to say I have all the Lyritas of him I can find, but there was just the one I think now, and it was Iris Loveridge that played the Bax recitals I thought he was on. He looks to have been poorly served in the vinyl era, better on cd. Lovely pianism. I find myself in the unfortunate position of starting to acquire a taste for 78's, I just bought the Ida Haendel Brahms concerto set.

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  4. I believe that the Lyrita recording that Bowen made at the end of his life (he died in 1961) was the first commercial recording for many years, but he was very active in the studio in the 1920s and actually made the first commercial recording of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto - worth looking out for the original Vocalion discs if you're beginning to take up collecting 78s.

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