Performers on Their Favorite Records, 1921

While searching our files on past exhibits at the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, the 1978 exhibit  “My Favorite Recordings, 1921” caught our attention. To our surprise, along with the press release and left-over captions were the exhibit items themselves: letters dated 1921 from notable recording artists to a New York Times education writer named Wilson Fairbanks.

Between January and May of 1921, Fairbanks mailed letters to 70 musicians asking them to list their favorite published recordings of themselves, either on 78rpm disc or cylinder.

Fairbanks’ goal, it seems, was to publish the results of his survey inThe New York Times as part of an article promoting classical music (“good music,” as he called it) as an antidote to what for him was the bewildering popularity of jazz and dance music. Interestingly, while an undergraduate at Tufts University, Fairbanks had become known for speaking out against snobbery in fraternity culture--a cause that seems somewhat at odds with the underlying elitism of his 1921 survey.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives' exhibit file contains 41 letters from opera singers, instrumentalists and one bandleader (John Philip Sousa). Some were written by the musicians’ secretaries and others by the musicians themselves. While violinist Fritz Kreisler enclosed annotated pages torn from record company catalogs (indicating the recordings that came closest to “perfection”), cellist Pablo Casals simply listed his “top ten.” (His 1915-1916 recordings of selections from Bach’s C Major Cello Suite take up the first four slots).

Sadly, soprano Mary Garden did not feel that she had any to positively recommend. Her secretary wrote to Fairbanks: “In answer to your letter of March 2, Miss Garden wishes me to say that as she has only made Columbia records--which she considers very bad--she would ask you to wait for her new ones on the Victor machine, which she hopes will be better.”

Similar to Garden, baritone David Bispham also seems to have attributed the artistic success of his recordings as much to the record company as to the quality of his performance. In his letter, Bispham states his preference for his recordings for Columbia Records over those for Pathé. (He notes, however, that Columbia’s marketing efforts were sub-par).

Baritone Thomas Chalmers explains that the quality of his top picks had been verified through the Edison Tone Tests, in which an audience would listen to a live performer and a recording of the performer from behind a curtain. In these tests, Chalmers attests, “the public was unable to find any difference in tone.”

The letters show the role of recordings in musicians’ self-evaluation, including the extent to which (for example) a singer might strive to improve her technique based on what she heard on her recording. They also offer an insider’s view into the repertoire and performance practices that were most valued among classical music stars of the era.

Unfortunately, it seems that Fairbanks never published the results of his survey. Fairbanks’ daughters donated the letters to the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound some time during the 1970s. Now rediscovered, they will be put into our queue to be processed as an archival collection. In the meantime, patrons can access the letters in our Special Collections Reading Room at the Library for the Performing Arts by emailing recordedsound@nypl.org.