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Dusty Old Phonograph Records

Any largish institution, any home in fact, will find itself with odd accumulations of . . . stuff: old shipping documents, tax reports, Christmas decorations from the Mesolithic.  This happens a lot to public libraries.

Down in our workroom is a small metal truck, the kind used to transport files between offices, full, over full, of old phonograph records, mostly LP’s. The discs are spoken language records, mostly French and German. Where it has been for years and years, who knows.

We were directed to inventory these LPs with a view to discard, and some of them are a caution.

A few examples, with some ad hoc reflections:

Jose Gomes Ferreira: poesia. LP Decca

Cover portrait of the poet looking gaunt, white haired, and poetic.  Inside cover with lots of white space and laudatory remarks, blurbs, from Augusto Abelaira, Eduardo Lourenco and other Portuguese notables. The Portuguese have had first-rate writers, but Portuguese has always been the Cinderella of European literature and the prince has never arrived.

Ludwig Soumagne liest Gedichte im niederrheinische Dialekt aus seinem Buch, Ausgesprochen Navibag Bemerk. 7 inch 33/3 disk with an orange label. No date

Among the LP’s on the truck are a number of other smaller items, many of them meant to illustrate various German dialects.

Over here on the west side of the Atlantic, where we get most of our exposure to German, spoken German that is, from old war movies, German appears to be a single substance. In reality, German has more dialects and accents than Dixie. Somewhere in Toronto, where this is being written, there is a man or woman who, if they heard German in this accent, would feel like an arrow has struck their heart. Will it happen? No. Are professional German stage actors trained in all the dialects of the republic? Perhaps one of our readers knows.

This factor works, by the way, also in western hemisphere Spanish. Every country in central and South America has its own accent, and every accent has three or four varieties within national borders. Very few are the Anglophones who can tell them apart, or who give a damn. But it means a lot to them.

Century. LP from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1967. Two disks

In 1967, the CBC had a special 90-minute broadcast to commemorate the Canadian Centennial. There is a commentary credited to one F.H. Underhill, who was a historian. The jacket also claims that “some of this country’s finest actors” are on the record.

Who? It doesn’t say. One would have to play it, and be familiar enough with the regulars, the Canadian regulars, to identify the voices.  Frances Hyland is probably there. William Hutt? William Hutt was in everything in those days.  Bruno Gerussi?  William Shatner?

On an analogous American or British record, everybody would be identified.

Ley Spricht: Wir Verteidigen Jetzt Die Deutsche Substanz.  No date.  Cover information in German, apparently part of a documentary series

Is that the delicate scent of brimstone? The Ley in question is Robert Ley, minister of Labour for the National Socialists, and famous personally for being one of the most corrupt officials in the party, where the bar was set rather high. Here he is speaking to German “Fabrik Arbeitern” on 6 February 1943.

What is the point of this record?  Who is it for? There might be a louche fascination to hearing Goebbels viva voce, but Ley? Probably this was issued as part of a set with more prominent figures, and is a testament to Teutonic thoroughness.  If there is a reflection here, it is to recognize the danger when government and unions are BFF’s instead of being at each other’s throats, as is normal, healthy and edifying.

L’Ecole des Femmes, by Moliere. Three discs in box, with booklet that includes text and notes. Performed by Louis Jouvet and company

The French do these things awfully well.  They have an official culture and they promote it as an interest of the state. The booklet has photos in that odd sepia style the French used to use that makes everyone look like tan statuary. Louis Jouvet is not much known over here, but according to wiki he was the Spencer Tracy of French comedians – the best and there is no second.  A sharp example of how we still live on separate planets culturally. But you have seen what he looks like.  The acerbic food critic in Ratatouille, Anton Ego, was drawn in his image.

Iphigenie auf Tauris by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. Three record set in a box with booklet from Deutsche Grammaphon Gesellschaft. With Maria Becker, Ewald Balser, Will Quadflieg, Rolf Henninger and Heinz Moog

German official culture. Again, sepia pictures but in a style that might be called “Bureaucratic Romanticism.”

Who are these people?

Top people.

Maria Becker (1920 to 2012), of whom we had never heard, was a German born actress who became a pillar of the Swiss  theatrical world, and a company member of the famous Schauspielhaus in Zurich, which we had never heard of either.  In a European context it amounts to never having heard of Bette Davis. The rest of the cast were luminaries of the German stage.

There is a particular base-line pathos to old phonograph records, not really old recordings, that is, archaic 78’s from 1939 and back – they belong to the unimaginable time when we were not alive – but things from the LP era, about 1950 to about 1980.

*  *  *

Part this pathos is what was recorded. Everyone has old LP’s, resting in piles in the basement or deep under the magazines in the cottage, silent witnesses that you did, you did indeed, have a country and western phase or even took Dylan seriously.

Part of the pathos, which is not sentimentality, comes from the mere physical being of the records. These records are utterly silent, more silent than an old book, for a book may be opened but a record needs a record player, and these are no longer a household staple.

And within those limits the spoken language material on the truck in question has its own built-in sigh.

May we suggest that what we are touching here is a vanished intellectual medium, a distinct way of doing things, as distinctive as Vaudeville or a the papyrus scroll (which we mentioned a few months ago,) a fusion of instrument and cultural material, and an artefact proper to a world gone by?

Records had been with us since the twenties, but the LP was a feature of the immediate post-war world and a part of the culture of that world.

Think about it.  When we use a medium, for example, a book, or more narrowly, a printed book, we participate in the age and the world that produced that item in our hands.  We don’t notice we are in the age of books, because that age is still on (though perhaps, we are beginning to suspect that it is mortal).

The age of the LP, from 1950 to 1980, which, when given to spoken material, had a particular intimacy, the age when serious cultural material was put on LP’s, is over.

The voices of the post-war world have gone silent and taken their world with them.

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Max Arnott is an independent scholar living in Toronto and has been a reader of Voegelin for many years.

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