by Daniel Hathaway and Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
. Oltman tributes welcome
. Wax cylinders spin again & a January classical music diet
. Marking the birthdays of Pergolesi & the 33-⅓ rpm vinyl record
DWIGHT OLTMAN:
Although we haven’t yet received an official obituary for Dwight Oltman, who passed away in North Carolina on December 31, ClevelandClassical.com invites his many former students and colleagues to offer tributes in his honor to be archived on a special page in this website beginning in the near future. Please email them here.
INTERESTING READS FROM THE WEB:
Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format of wax cylinders. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived. Read the article from The New York Times here.
Feed your soul: the 31-day classical music diet for January.
Classical music has a reputation for being dusty and difficult, something you have to know about to “get”. (Do you like it or not? Not such a hard question and the only one that matters.) These 31 pieces might lead you to aural pleasures as well as greater confidence in following your enthusiasms. Read Fiona Haddock’s listening plan in The Guardian.
ALMANAC FOR JANUARY 4:
Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was born on this day in 1710. He’s best known for the work he wrote in the final weeks of his short life: the Stabat Mater. The British period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment brought it to Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series in Finney Chapel in 2019, when countertenor Iestyn Davies shared his thoughts about the work in a preview with Mike Telin:
The penultimate movement, ‘Quando corpus morietur’ — when my body dies and gets delivered to paradise — is so evocative of somebody lying on their deathbed…It’s the dying moments of a composer and yet it’s his most celebrated work. Pergolesi was only in his late 20s when he died, so it’s tragic that he never saw the success of the piece.
Listen here to a recording of that last movement by Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony, then go have a good, cathartic cry.
Following up on the story of the wax cylinders (above), here’s an important later development to celebrate today in classical music history. In 1950, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) announced that it would produce LPs — 33 1/3 rpm long playing records — following the lead established by Columbia Records in 1948.
These records would replace 78 rpm discs — made of an abrasive shellac compound and limited to about five minutes of recording time per side — with vinyl, and formerly wide grooves with “microgrooves,” extending playing time to 22 minutes per side.
The history of this development gets a bit complicated (RCA had attempted to bring out an earlier version in 1931 that failed), but suffice to say that the change from shellac to vinyl — with all the attendant technical details — was a boon for classical music.
RCA has produced two films about “The History of Vinyl.” Click here to watch a 1946 film narrated by longtime Metropolitan Opera commentator Milton Cross that includes a tour of RCA’s Camden, New Jersey plant, and here to watch Part II, which followed ten years later. Part III, which followed in 1958, introduced stereo recording.