A subject that is highly-praised in this field is the presence of early studio photographs, many of which are from Edison studios in the 1910's. Most collectors who have seem early studio pictures have seen the more typical ones of the Edison recording rooms, since there were so many images published in magazines of the Edison headquarters. Of course, there are plenty of early studios that we will perhaps never see, since their ledgers are completely gone, and nothing was left of them.
To begin on this matter, I would like to showcase this fantastic image from 1892:
The date is luckily written on the original image, and it was inscribed "Sept. 24/92", which saves any age debate that might come along with this image.
It appears to be one of the oldest Edison studio images I have seen, and it's their studio, not any of their other departments in the process of record making and selling. This is what I want here, it's a picture of where they made the records, to then go through all of the other parts of the process. It's a pretty cluttered room, seeming like an unorganized mess, with a hodge-podge of everything that the Edison Phonograph Works had to offer at the time the photograph was taken. You might have noticed that there's a "talking doll" set on the edge of the piano on the right, which is some great placement there! There's probably specific music set on all the music stands in this picture, but they appear to be unreadable from the quality of the image, if only we could see what music is there! One thing is for certain, is that Edison had some very nice pianos in their studio early on. Those pianos look very expensive compared to the ones that were used later in the same decade. The fact that the pianos are not uprights, and are much more classy tells you that it's certainly a recording studio from the preliminary days of the recording business(1889-1892). They had not learned yet that using very expensive and fancy pianos for the studio was a very bad idea. That was something that was learned not long after this picture was taken it seems. The one thing that this image is missing is the gaudy light fixtures, as the early studios were still set up in a similar way that the pianos were, very fanciful and gaudy Victorian, since it was still the 1880's essentially. You can see one of these exquisite light fixtures I mean here:
Amazingly overkill!
Now that is a Victorian parlor. And it's Columbia!
That just goes to show that my theory of Columbia being the company of gaudy parlors, frivolity, and wealth is true. That parlor it just astonishing! I have never seen such an amazing display of Columbia's inner workings, or just anything in terms of Victorian interior design. It combines a Gothic inspiration with crystal draped gas lamps, just lovely! Other than that, this image gets the point across that Columbia was dedicated far more than Edison to creating a great first impression, with being as ostentatious as they could.
That picture just above is not exactly a Columbia studio picture, but this one is:
Now it be time to play a game of where's Waldo, looking for Len Spencer!
He's probably somewhere in this picture, way in the back behind the horns.
This picture was indeed taken around the same time as the picture just above, so if you think you've found him, leave a comment on this post!
Anyway, that Columbia picture seen above has been used on Tinfoil.com, and is originally from an 1891 edition of The Phonogram. It is a promotional photo for the U. S. Marine band making records for Columbia in their earliest days. One of which you can hear in the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WzmOgcum4c
The announcer on this has yet to be identified, but he seems to have been a regular announcer for the Marine band on their early Columbia records.
The handful of 1890-91 recording by the Marine band can be accessed on Youtube, just like the one above, the one in the link seemed the most musically interesting to me immediately, so there are others if you'd like to hear more of them.
What's great about the 1890 Columbia cylinders that survive is that you can really hear the setup, and that it's just the same one that they used in the picture above. That doesn't often happen with these records, since the balancing was so well done later on that oftentimes we can't really tell how things were set up in the studio.
Now I have said before that I firmly believe every early studio picture is staged, with specific things put in designated places, and out-of-place balancing with instruments. This cannot be said for the Marine Band picture however, that seems to be one of the the rare occasions where the scene was barely manipulated at all before the picture was taken. It's obviously staged though, regardless of that observation, since one of the trumpet/cornet players in the very back row has his instrument down, and some of the overall setupdoesn't look right. It also seems strange that all of them are in their marching uniforms, though that may have been more common than assumed. This setup was also used by Sousa's band later in the mid and later 1890's, as a cylinder like their fantastic ragged rendition of "The Darkie's Temptation" from 1896.(rag-time geeks take note of this recording, it's a very important one in terms of authentic pre-ragtime, and it a great early Rag-Time piece overall). If you listen closely to this cylinder, you can tell that it's balanced the same way that the 1890 cylinders were. That means that since it worked, they kept the method for many years.
Columbia's studios were well-photographed it seems, though not many of the original photographs exist after the destruction of their ledgers. The amount of images that were exhibited in The Phonoscope of Columbia's studio really tell how important they still found their presentation. These images were scattered all around record catalogs and advertisements in New York, as their most popular attraction was the exhibition hall, seen below in two different views:
To begin on this matter, I would like to showcase this fantastic image from 1892:
It appears to be one of the oldest Edison studio images I have seen, and it's their studio, not any of their other departments in the process of record making and selling. This is what I want here, it's a picture of where they made the records, to then go through all of the other parts of the process. It's a pretty cluttered room, seeming like an unorganized mess, with a hodge-podge of everything that the Edison Phonograph Works had to offer at the time the photograph was taken. You might have noticed that there's a "talking doll" set on the edge of the piano on the right, which is some great placement there! There's probably specific music set on all the music stands in this picture, but they appear to be unreadable from the quality of the image, if only we could see what music is there! One thing is for certain, is that Edison had some very nice pianos in their studio early on. Those pianos look very expensive compared to the ones that were used later in the same decade. The fact that the pianos are not uprights, and are much more classy tells you that it's certainly a recording studio from the preliminary days of the recording business(1889-1892). They had not learned yet that using very expensive and fancy pianos for the studio was a very bad idea. That was something that was learned not long after this picture was taken it seems. The one thing that this image is missing is the gaudy light fixtures, as the early studios were still set up in a similar way that the pianos were, very fanciful and gaudy Victorian, since it was still the 1880's essentially. You can see one of these exquisite light fixtures I mean here:
Now that is a Victorian parlor. And it's Columbia!
That just goes to show that my theory of Columbia being the company of gaudy parlors, frivolity, and wealth is true. That parlor it just astonishing! I have never seen such an amazing display of Columbia's inner workings, or just anything in terms of Victorian interior design. It combines a Gothic inspiration with crystal draped gas lamps, just lovely! Other than that, this image gets the point across that Columbia was dedicated far more than Edison to creating a great first impression, with being as ostentatious as they could.
That picture just above is not exactly a Columbia studio picture, but this one is:
He's probably somewhere in this picture, way in the back behind the horns.
Anyway, that Columbia picture seen above has been used on Tinfoil.com, and is originally from an 1891 edition of The Phonogram. It is a promotional photo for the U. S. Marine band making records for Columbia in their earliest days. One of which you can hear in the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WzmOgcum4c
The announcer on this has yet to be identified, but he seems to have been a regular announcer for the Marine band on their early Columbia records.
The handful of 1890-91 recording by the Marine band can be accessed on Youtube, just like the one above, the one in the link seemed the most musically interesting to me immediately, so there are others if you'd like to hear more of them.
What's great about the 1890 Columbia cylinders that survive is that you can really hear the setup, and that it's just the same one that they used in the picture above. That doesn't often happen with these records, since the balancing was so well done later on that oftentimes we can't really tell how things were set up in the studio.
Now I have said before that I firmly believe every early studio picture is staged, with specific things put in designated places, and out-of-place balancing with instruments. This cannot be said for the Marine Band picture however, that seems to be one of the the rare occasions where the scene was barely manipulated at all before the picture was taken. It's obviously staged though, regardless of that observation, since one of the trumpet/cornet players in the very back row has his instrument down, and some of the overall setupdoesn't look right. It also seems strange that all of them are in their marching uniforms, though that may have been more common than assumed. This setup was also used by Sousa's band later in the mid and later 1890's, as a cylinder like their fantastic ragged rendition of "The Darkie's Temptation" from 1896.(rag-time geeks take note of this recording, it's a very important one in terms of authentic pre-ragtime, and it a great early Rag-Time piece overall). If you listen closely to this cylinder, you can tell that it's balanced the same way that the 1890 cylinders were. That means that since it worked, they kept the method for many years.
Columbia's studios were well-photographed it seems, though not many of the original photographs exist after the destruction of their ledgers. The amount of images that were exhibited in The Phonoscope of Columbia's studio really tell how important they still found their presentation. These images were scattered all around record catalogs and advertisements in New York, as their most popular attraction was the exhibition hall, seen below in two different views:
inside to the right, on a hot early September evening
and in front of the place from the middle of Broadway
These two photos give you a very realistic and candid view of Columbia's famed exhibition hall, that supposedly attracted thousands of people a week in the Summer and Fall of 1898. The analyses of these images are endless, since there's a thousand small details in both of them, and there's so much to wonder about when looking these pictures over. Just to point out a few things about the first picture, the flag under the bunted one is well torn, there's an electric fan on the very top of the rack abreast the column in the centre and another one attached to the edge of the piano platform, John Yorke AtLee(in the middle of the picture) is standing on two large books, Hylands is the most formally dresses in the picture(ha!), there are weird looking gas lamps far toward the back of the room, even though there is a monstrous display of (possibly multicoloured) electric lights, and a whole lot more than just those things. These observations are small things that take a while to easily spot. In the second picture, you may notice that the setup inside the parlor is pretty much exactly the same as it was in the other picture. The piano is faced a little more to where the keyboard would be directly facing the doorway rather than a little tilted as it is in the exhibition picture.
Just up those stairs that can be seen in both of these images would be two more floors of long hallways for recording, rehearsing, mailrooms(though I think everyone's mail was in the basement...), and offices for the managers. Many of the staff members used Columbia's address for where their mail went to, which is strange in a way, since I'm sure that things would get confused sometimes, and since the furnace was probably down there, they would all gather in a group to sort through mail when it got below freezing.
Just up those stairs is where you could find scenes like these:
the Columbia orchestra and Fred Hylands in their "big" recording room(in this terrible lithograph thingy of a photograph from 1898)
and this famous photograph of George W. Johnson posed in recording action with Edward Issler in 1897.
These photographs give a very unique view of Columbia's recording rooms, and show how different each room was, as they are very different looking for rooms for the same purpose. It must be pointed out that the first studio picture of these two is the most obviously staged of all these studio pictures I have seen. So much is not right about the setup, as the singer(or announcer?) at the horns is posing as though he were singing or something like that, and the rest of the orchestra is being cued(maybe?) by Tom Clark with his hand up. Also take notice to how queerly Hylands' hands are positioned, one is down, but the other appears to be doing some weird thing I cannot really describe. Also, notice the coats hanging on the wall to the extreme right behind Hylands, as well as the scraps on the shiny floor. The Issler and Johnson picture is very straightforward, though I can tell that one is staged as well, since Issler would be playing behind Johnson when he was singing, not adjusting sheet music it seems, adjusting music would make too much racket. The setup in the Columbia orchestra picture is really comical, with chairs on tables and table on chairs, it's what's to be expected from Columbia and their ragged gang of "thieves" as Edison once called them. But of course, only the piano had its own invention for being balanced correctly, everyone else had to problem-solve for long while Hylands sat contently at his throne that was rigged up by Len Spencer and some of the other early Columbia staff members.
These images are fascinating, and next Tuesday, I have to do a short presentation on the exhibition picture for my English class. I showed my teacher what I will be presenting, and she looked over the image practically laughing at how weird it was. She thought the angle was strange, the flash too bright, torn flag misleading, and the brass bars not a great idea on their part.
Hope you enjoyed this!
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