Case Study

SCG-557 No v e m b er 5 , 2 0 1 9

C H R I S T I N A L U B I N S K I

Historical Entrepreneurship Case Series

Gramophone: Reimagining Music We entered a new world of musical and artistic values. One had to erase all memories of the music of European opera-houses and concert-halls: the very foundations of my musical training were undermined.1

--Fred Gaisberg on his experience of recording in India, 1902

T he professional talent scout Fred Gaisberg (see Exhibit 1 for picture) found himself at a loss. He had arrived in Calcutta (Kolkata) at the end of October 1902, to record local artists whose music could be sold on gramophone discs. This was not the first scouting trip for the 29-year old. Gaisberg had worked for his employer, the Anglo-American Gramophone Co., since 1898 and had crisscrossed Europe to detect artistic talents—with enormous success. He proudly reflected on his

sessions with the famous tenor Enrico Caruso in Milan, only six short months ago. These recordings not only enhanced Gaisberg's own reputation but also established the gramophone as an important means for spreading art and culture to the masses.2

However, in India, Gaisberg encountered new challenges. The first musicians he recorded were found with the help of two Indian intermediaries from the local theater scene. 3 Yet, Gaisberg had his doubts about the music he heard. Observing one performance at an Indian theater, he noticed:

Quite arbitrarily, there was introduced a chorus of young Nautch girls [female Indian performers] […] accompanied by fourteen brass instruments all playing in unison. I had yet to learn that the oriental ear was unappreciative of chords and harmonic treatment and only demanded the rhythmic beat of the accompaniment of the drums. At this point we left.4

On the way home, Gaisberg pondered: How was he going to recognize the most promising Indian performers if their music was so hard to understand? How would he ever be able to convince his customers that the gramophone should be considered as a serious musical instrument? And would anyone even like the songs that he was about to preserve for all eternity?

For the exclusive use of M. Hu, 2020.

This document is authorized for use only by Meiyi Hu in International Business Strategy Winter Semester 2020 taught by ERIC HUTCHINS, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona from Jan 2020 to May 2020.

SCG-557 Gramophone: Reimagining Music

The Origins of the Gramophone Business The gramophone was a remarkable invention. It was conceived by the serial inventor Thomas

Edison, who, in 1877, discovered a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders. Edison tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into the mouthpiece, and was delighted as the machine played his words back to him.5 In his laboratory notebook, he casually jotted down the name “phonograph” for the machine. However, as it turned out, the term phonograph was commonly used as a synonym for “shorthand;” a method of rapid writing with abbreviations and symbols when dictating. Edison and his staff brainstormed alternatives: Should they call the machine Polyphone (manifold sounder)? Cosmophone (universal sounder) or Antiphone (back-talker)? Maybe Chronophone (time-announcer) or Omphlegraph (voice writer)? (For a full list of the names considered, see Exhibit 2 6) In the end, the alternatives were unsatisfactory and Edison received a patent for his “Phonograph or Speaking Machine” on February 19, 1878. Competitors, notably Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner, who further developed the technology of sound reproduction, distinguished their products from Edison’s by using alternative names, such as “gramophone,” “graphophone,” and “talking machine.”

Like any good entrepreneur, Edison had great plans for his invention and immediately thought about commercialization. He opined, “I have invented a great many machines, but this is my baby, and I expect it to grow up and support me in my old age.”7 As early as January 1878, he licensed his technology to The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, which exploited the new machine by exhibiting it. Edison himself received $10,000 for the manufacturing and sales rights and 20% of the profits. However, the machine remained difficult to operate and the recordings etched on tin-foil could only play about two minutes of audio and were ruined after a few uses. Moreover, exhibiting the machine was not going to generate a constant stream of income. What if the novelty wore off?

Eager to make his invention a long-term commercial success, Edison sat down and speculated about other lucrative applications.8 He explained that the talking machine “brings its possibilities within the range of the speculative imaginations” but also admitted to being “in a somewhat chaotic condition of mind as to where to draw the dividing line.”9 Working through the mental turmoil, Edison presented a list of the twelve most promising applications for his invention:

1. Letter writing and other forms of dictation 2. Books [i.e. reading of existing books] 3. Educational Purposes 4. Music 5. Family Record 6. Phonographic Books [i.e. newly designed for recordings and to preserve languages]

Christina Lubinski, Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California, prepared this case. This case in the Historical Entrepreneurship Case Series was supported by a grant from the Founder Central Initiative. This case was developed from field and archival research. Cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion and are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.

Copyright © 2019 Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. For information about Greif Center cases, please contact us at [email protected]. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted or transmitted without the permission of The Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

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Gramophone: Reimagining Music SCG-557

7. Musical boxes 8. Toys 9. Clocks 10. Advertising 11. Speech and other Utterances 12. Revolutionize the systems of telephone and telegraphy

Edison saw by far the greatest potential in the field of office dictations and “the design [of the machine] is made with a view to its utility for that purpose.”10 He reasoned that the phonograph would allow businessmen to dictate from anywhere, keep duplicates as needed, eliminate many of their clerk positions, and improve the privacy of business correspondence (see Exhibit 3 for his own words on the matter). Eventually, he predicted, stenographers would be disposable altogether, when phonographs became so prevalent that businessmen could send each other cylinders with recordings rather than letters. In addition, one may argue that the corporate customers Edison targeted were less likely to shy away from the steep price of the machine ($150 in 1891; approx. $2,780 today.)11

However, it took almost a decade before businessman Jesse H. Lippincott purchased the Edison Phonograph Company as well as technology licenses from some of the other competitors in the industry. By 1888, phonographs were leased as office dictating machines to various companies. However, financial success eluded the entrepreneurial venture. Moreover, not everybody celebrated the arrival of this new technology. The first National Phonograph Association Convention in 1890 addressed the pressing problem of how to overcome opposition from stenographers, who feared that the machine would devalue their skills and bring unemployment (the film The Stenographer’s Friend; or, What Was Accomplished by an Edison Business Phonograph? addressed some of the widely shared concerns12). When Lippincott fell ill, Edison, as the main creditor of the business, tried to continue it but eventually had to declare bankruptcy.

From Office to Opera As the dictation business failed, Edison and other pioneering entrepreneurs moved into the

entertainment space. Besides Edison’s new company, the “National Phonograph Company,” his main competitors were Edward Easton’s “Columbia Phonograph Company” (founded in 1887) and Emile Berliner’s “United States Gramophone Company” (founded in 1894). While Edison recorded sounds on wax cylinders, Emile Berliner invented the first discs made initially of hard rubber and later shellac. Consumers had to decide for either the cylinder or the disc system, with neither having a strong competitive advantage. Recordings made on cylinder could not be played on disc machines, and vice versa.

The first move into the entertainment space was the opening of talking machine parlors (see Exhibit 4) in the 1890s, where customers could listen to a recording in exchange for a nickel. Gaisberg mockingly described these penny arcades: “It was ludicrous in the extreme to see ten people grouped about a phonograph, each with a tube leading from his ears, grinning and laughing at what he heard.”13

It was not surprising that Gaisberg rejected the unsophisticated musical entertainment of the parlors. Growing up in Washington DC, Gaisberg was a born musician. As a young child, he sang in the choir of famous composer and conductor John Philipp Sousa. He also spent years perfecting his piano play. At age sixteen, still in high school, he worked part-time for the Columbia Phonograph Company on recordings of the whistler John York Atlee, who he also accompanied on the piano. When Gaisberg graduated in 1891, he trained with Columbia and became a full-time producer. In 1894, he met Emile

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SCG-557 Gramophone: Reimagining Music

Berliner, the inventor of the disc, and started working for him. His tasks included scouting for talent, playing accompaniments, and washing up the acid tanks.14 He learned the business inside and out.

The accomplished musician Gaisberg was not alone in objecting to the “nickel-in-the-slot” machines. The trade journal Talking Machine World reported in 1905, “One of the main obstacles to the introduction of the graphophone into many homes is, no doubt, the popular impression that the talking machine in still only a scientific toy.”15 The penny arcades were fine to earn a few nickels but they cashed in on the novelty of the technology and the curiosity and amazement of the customers. The burning question, however, was how to generate a consistent stream of income.

The answer of the US manufacturers was to go after “high-cultured” customers, who they assumed could learn to appreciate the gramophone not for its novelty but for its ability to bring artful music to their living rooms. Repositioning the gramophone as a serious musical instrument was not an easy task. Manufacturers and dealers started by defining the piano and the violin as the gramophone’s left and right competitors. C. V. Henkel of the Douglas Phonograph Co. stressed the “absolute perfection in sound reproduction” and asked pointedly: “Can you name any musical instrument that can compare with the incomparable talking machine?”16 Stores received a make-over to resemble the most elegant piano showrooms,17 and furniture makers designed beautiful high-class cabinets for the gramophones to fit them into the living rooms of the upper classes.18 When well-respected piano dealers, such as Barnett, Samuel & Sons, added talking machine departments to their stores, the industry breathed a little easier.19 A trade journal reported, not without pride, about one piano dealer who admitted that he used to consider talking machines “beneath my dignity” but now saw them as “cultivating a latent love for music among the masses, which in time will create a demand for musical instruments of every description.”20

Unfortunately for the industry, critics of the gramophone were also numerous and vocal. Some criticized the poor quality of the recordings or the fact that both Edison’s cylinders and Berliner’s discs could only play two to three minutes of audio, while musical live performances at the time often lasted for hours. Indeed, professional producers, like Gaisberg, had to cut up longer performances and even reduced the lengths of a song to fit the new medium. Some artists objected to the fact that the recordings eliminated the important interaction between the performer and the audience, and isolated the music lover who now enjoyed the music alone, rather than in the company of family and friends.

Others feared for the effect of the gramophone on American culture. John Philip Sousa, Gaisberg’s early teacher, ranted against the gramophones, which “sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.” He foresaw “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestation, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.”21 Alice Clark Cook, a writer for the classical music magazine Musical America, vexed: “As a diet of canned foods […] injures taste and digestion, so does a diet of ‘canned’ music lead to the destruction of individual taste, to indifference and loss of appetite.”22

To counter such claims, manufacturers moved even more decidedly into the field of “serious” artful music (e.g., classical music and opera) and engaged in marketing campaigns highlighting the gramophone’s role in promoting the arts, not destroying them. Manufacturers also invested in specialized education departments to stress the gramophone’s use as an educational tool for the promotion of classical music in schools and universities. Rudolph Wurlitzer Jr. of the eponymous company argued that the talking machine “offers to persons who have neither means to attend concerts of good music, nor ability to play upon an instrument, the opportunity to become familiarized with high-class selections and the personal interpretations of the best instrumental and vocal artists.”23

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Gramophone: Reimagining Music SCG-557

Similarly, John Prescott of the American Record Co. expressed his belief that “the talking machine is becoming more and more an important factor in educating the public taste.”24

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the talking machine was inextricably intertwined with education and high culture. A journalist of National Music Monthly argued that opera had increased in popularity because of the influence of the gramophone: “People have heard in their own homes beautiful excerpts from the greatest operas, and have come to know their meaning.”25 An observer in Pittsburg found that, “The talking machine in its earlier stage was regarded more or less as a toy and people of culture and refinement refused to buy them. […] [T]hese objections have been swept aside and as a result we see among the buyers […] some of the best and most cultured people of the city.”26 Edward Lyman Bill, the editor of Talking Machine World, even made a claim to the gramophone’s ability to bring culture to the entire world: “Every nation should strive to cultivate the art instinct […] it is through the talking machine that millions of people in all lands are enabled to hear the music of the world’s greatest artists.”27

Into the Unknown Inspired by such missionary zeal, it is not surprising that an ever-growing number of gramophone

manufacturers competed not just in the US but also in foreign markets. Fred Gaisberg’s employer, the Gramophone Co., was early in targeting foreign markets all around the world. The company was founded in 1898 in London, England, on behalf of Emile Berliner. That same year, Gaisberg moved from the US to London to set up the first recording studio in Europe and started his long and successful career as a record producer. Shortly thereafter, in November 1899, the Gramophone Co. acquired the famous trademark “His Master’s Voice,” displaying the fox terrier Nipper listening to a gramophone.

Gaisberg went on a series of recording tours to expand the portfolio of the Gramophone Company. He started with a European tour covering Leipzig, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, Paris and Madrid in the summer of 1899. Gaisberg remembered: “This expedition gave me vast experience in recording under various conditions and produced a rich harvest of musical records, both exciting and delightful to my provincial mind.” 28 The results were so promising that Gaisberg’s manager sent him almost immediately on a second tour across the British Isles with his companion William Sinkler Darby. The two young engineers were regarded as elite employees with special skills. Within the company, they were known as “the experts” or “the boys,” partly because of their young age and partly because of their pleasure-seeking lifestyle during travels.29 In February 1900, Gaisberg embarked upon a major Russia tour, where he recorded for a full six months.30 “I had seen opera performances on a scale unbelievably lavish,” Gaisberg noted after the trip. “I had heard and negotiated with a bevy of the greatest and perhaps most spoiled artists of that epoch.”31

Another opportunity awaited them: India. In India, English and Indian musical instrument dealers began to see talking machines emerge as a high potential line of business, although they struggled with adequately serving a market that was spread out over such a vast territory. In July 1901, Gramophone Co. sent his agent, John Watson Hawd, to Calcutta to investigate the emerging opportunity. Hawd traveled widely in India and concluded: “I think we shall do a fair business here if we only have the goods, but until we get native records we shall only be able to sell to Europeans and they are only 1 per 100 natives.”32 Being on the ground, it became clear to Hawd that the recordings made in Europe and the US would not sell in India. Other traveling agents and scouts confirmed that “American records are absolutely unknown” and “[o]rchestral records are also little in demand.”33

Moreover, the many different languages and dialects spoken in India and the religious diversity made this a challenging music market. Different groups of people wanted different music. Hawd was relentless in telling his superiors: “You must however send one man to make records.” Not surprisingly,

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SCG-557 Gramophone: Reimagining Music

the Gramophone Co. selected Fred Gaisberg, their most experienced scout. He was accompanied by his 19-year-old assistant George Dillnutt, the businessman Thomas Dowe Addis and Addis’ wife. According to Gaisberg, the aim of this trip was “to open up new markets, establish agencies, and acquire a catalogue of native records. [...] As we steamed down the channel into the unknown I felt like Marco Polo starting out on his journeys.”34

However, making local recordings proved more difficult than anyone had anticipated. Upon arrival in Calcutta, Gaisberg first struggled to get his luggage with the recording equipment cleared at customs. After a total of five days of waiting, he declared happily: “Today we at last succeeded in getting our stuff out of the Custom House.”35 It took another week before they had identified the first artists and Gaisberg noted that the first recordings made on November 8, were of two nautch girls “with miserable voices.”36 The accomplished piano player Gaisberg had a hard time making sense of the Indian music. A perfectionist, Gaisberg wanted all recordings to be flawless because unlike live performances, they were supposed to last. However, it was difficult for him to evaluate the Indian performances. Edward Burns, manager of the Columbia export department, confirmed that the talent scouts traveling around were generally “strangers in the countries to which they may be despatched [sic], knowing little, if anything, of the language and customs of the people and ignorant of the material from which to choose suitable recording-making talent.”37

The result was a hodgepodge of questionable material. After their first six-week stay, Gaisberg and his crew went home with over 500 masters, of which records were manufactured in Europe and shipped to India in April 1903. Other companies followed their example and recorded local artists all over the Indian subcontinent. In lieu of any deeper understanding of the music, they relied on easily observables proxies, most importantly language variety. Recording engineers sent detailed reports on the different dialects and languages spoken in all parts of the world.38 The Gramophone Co. instructed its local agent in India to extend the catalogue by 2,500 records in order to cover the twelve languages that were considered most popular.39 The lack of instructions towards musical genre or style mirrors the failure to understand the local music; however, the decision to provide music in a variety of languages was a first step toward diversifying the portfolio.

Unexpectedly for many of the scouts, quite a few of these Indian recordings turned out to be very successful. “To be sure the selections are weird,” argued one recording engineer about his activities in India, “but they sell like hot cakes.” Following a market rather than an art logic, this recording engineer was optimistic about the future: “It may appear queer, but India is the best place on earth for talking machines. The masters must be made on the spot, and be native music … but India … appears to me a great field for American enterprise in this line.”40

Reliable local middlemen could have been extremely valuable in this context, but they were also rare and highly sought after in the competitive Indian market. Gaisberg first turned to the English agents living in India but was disappointed: “They could be living on another planet for all the interest they took in Indian music.”41 A German competitor, Beka Records, attempted to collaborate with locals in Calcutta. Heinrich Bump, owner of the company and lead recording scout, asked a partner in Bombay to introduce him to a friend in Calcutta. However, that friend was unable to accommodate them and instead referred them to a pal, who again passed their wishes on to another associate. The latter was supposed to engage the right artists and attend the recording sessions to guarantee that performers sing the right pieces in the pre-selected languages. However, the lengthy negotiations between the partners yielded few results, and eventually Bump felt that he was being taken advantage of.42

Both the Gramophone Co. and Beka worked with an Indian trading company, Valabhdas Lakhmidas and Co. with great experience in record sales. Because their services were so valuable, Beka offered Valabhdas favorable contract conditions, sending large quantities of goods on consignment and

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Gramophone: Reimagining Music SCG-557

imposing no minimum sales. Gramophone Co. feared that this practice put them at a disadvantage to Beka, and the Germans indeed managed to complete 1,000 Indian records with the help of their local partner.43 Eventually, Valabhdas and Beka entered an exclusive agreement. In addition to the musical artists that Valabhdas selected, they also recorded political speeches and patriotic songs, which became very popular in the context of an anti-colonial protest movement in 1906. Gramophone Co. considered the competition inferior: “The ‘Beka’ Records (Native) are . . . poor stuff. No class whatever, and not to be compared with our Records.”44 However, they sold well and Gramophone Co. debated the option of reissuing records that had been withdrawn from the catalogue at a cheaper price “as a measure for the destruction of the Beka Agency.”45

Over time, the internationalization departments became better at identifying characteristics of foreign music outside of language. Edward Burns of the Columbia export department stressed how he and his colleagues studied migration patterns of different ethnic groups, the musical tastes of different social classes and religions, and even color preferences for designing labels. They discovered that in several foreign countries, where ancestors were particularly worshiped, hearing and possibly preserving “the voice of some dead and gone patriarch of the family” was a major selling point for the gramophone. Columbia even developed a new diaphragm for the recordings abroad. US artists, Burns argued, are “trained, so that high notes are taken by gradation, and they are familiar with the surroundings and apparatus in the laboratory.” However, in the East, he found “voices are explosive, and the diaphragm ‘blasts’,” which made a change in the equipment necessary to better “absorb these sharp inequalities of sound.”46 Based on the experiences with his customers abroad, Burns established three categories of records: (i) native or popular air or monologues, (ii) folk and standard native songs, and (iii) high culture and opera music in foreign languages. Many employees of US gramophone companies traveled abroad to gain first-hand experiences or familiarized themselves with foreign music from the export departments of their respective companies. Continuous travels and learning by trial-and-error helped the gramophone companies to develop more sophisticated strategies for their export markets.

The Big Three in the US In the meantime, the US market matured. The “big three” (Columbia, Edison, and Berliner) were

locked in an intense commercial rivalry, aggravated by lawsuits about patents and the system competition between Edison’s cylinder and Berliner’s disc-format (while Columbia dealt in both.)

Production figures (see Exhibit 5) reveal that from 1899 to 1901, the US industry went through a slump due to intense rivalry, bitter recrimination and costly litigation. In 1901, Emile Berliner withdrew from his business due to this legal dispute and sold his patents and rights to Eldridge Reeves Johnson, an individual who made early contributor to the technological and production side of the business, but lacked significant experience in music. Johnson launched a new company, the Victor Talking Machine Company, in 1901 and signed a multipart commercial agreement with the internationally successful Gramophone Co., including a non-compete agreement and the sharing of trademarks and research and development. The industry was now a patent-based oligopoly and the new big three (Columbia, Edison, and Johnson) would keep a virtual stranglehold on the US industry until 1921.

Fighting the prejudices against “canned” mechanical music, US manufacturers established an expensive star cult centered on high-class and high-culture professional musicians. Male tenors were particularly sought after because early sound recording technology had problems capturing high-end and low-end sounds. This not only led some bands to replace drums with cowbells, but also meant that female voices and high-pitched instruments, such as violins, recorded rather poorly. Male tenors by contrast could be captured particularly well. Gaisberg recorded Fyodor Chaliapin and other members of the Imperial Opera in Saint Petersburg as well as world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso in Milan, whose records were labeled with a red seal to mark the distinct category. These records were also used by many

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SCG-557 Gramophone: Reimagining Music

aspiring artists who could now practice their own playing based on recordings of a well-established performer. These Red Seal labels became popular in the high-brow culture of the US and cemented Victor’s position in the industry (see Exhibit 6 for sales numbers.) Caruso and a few other superstar artists received sizeable financial rewards for their efforts. From mid-1915 to mid-1916, Caruso earned more than $78,000 ($1.96 million in 2019 dollars 47) in royalties from his recordings in the US.48

The marketing strategy that supported the focus on high-brow music required continuous investment. Victor spent $52.7 million49 on advertising from 1901 to 1929, averaging 8.24 percent of the company’s annual expenditures, which made Victor one of the most prodigious and best-known advertisers in the world. In 1912 alone, the company allotted more than $1.5 million 50 ($39.1 million in 2019 dollars) for advertising. By the mid-1910s, Victor was one of the top five magazine advertisers in the US, although in terms of assets it ranked as only the 174th-largest company.51 Victor also invested heavily in other promotional material, such as record and phonograph catalogues as well as specialized publications, such as the Victor Book of the Opera, a hardcover book containing illustrated descriptions of opera plots, translations of arias and integrated listings of Victor opera records.52

The opera had a devoted following among the social elites but was also, occasionally, of interest to popular audiences, sometimes in adapted and modified forms. Even in the immigrant communities in large US cities, people enjoyed opera performances from their home countries. In 1910, 14.7 percent of the overall US population were foreign-born.53 In New York City, a staggering 40.8 percent of the population were first generation immigrants (compared to 18 percent in the 1970s and 37 percent in 2019). In other large cities, such as Boston (36 percent), Detroit (33.5 percent), Chicago (28.7 percent) and Philadelphia (25 percent), the immigrant population made up a significant part of the inhabitants.54 In the immigrant neighborhoods, one could even find small dealers specializing in records of a particular language group and refusing to carry anything else.55

The Victor (and Gramophone Co.) trademark “His Master’s Voice” became an iconic household name. Starting in 1906, the campaign was showcased on a heavily illuminated sign on Herald Square in New York City above the legend “The Opera at Home.” In this ad, Nipper, the dog, stood 25 feet high and was seen by an estimated 800,000 people daily. The advertisement was purportedly the most expensive in the world at that time.56

What’s Next? When World War I broke out on July 28, 1914, all experts in the industry were stunned. This was

the first general war between the European powers since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. It ended a long period of relative stability and great economic integration. Like many observers, the gramophone executives were taken by surprise at the suddenness of the war crisis. The chairman of the Gramophone Co. Trevor Williams noted: “When the war burst upon us … we, with the rest of civilization, were quite unprepared for such a contingency.”57 The shock of the war caused panic among buyers. Consumers’ first reaction was to postpone the purchase of luxury and entertainment goods, like records and gramophones. A week after the war in Europe broke out, Alfred Clark of the Gramophone Co. wrote to Eldridge Johnson in the US: “There is no business, and it would be foolish to attempt to do any.”58 The nations at war included all of their colonies and dependent territories in their war efforts. India, for example, followed Great Britain and declared war on Germany in September 1914.

A US trade journal observed that in the highly integrated world economy, “[A]ll of the manufacturers have European factories and branches, which will necessarily suffer materially from the effects of the war.” Shipping product from US factories to Europe was also not an option because there was “no demand for talking machines and records in Europe” and “foreign shipping has practically ceased.”59 Debates began: Where should the industry turn now?

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Gramophone: Reimagining Music SCG-557

Exhibit 1: Frederick William Gaisberg (1 January 1873 – 2 September 1951)

Gaisberg (l) with Sir Edward Elgar and Yehudi Menuhin outside the EMI Abbey Road studios after the recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto in 1932.

Source: Wikipedia; Under Fair Use.

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SCG-557 Gramophone: Reimagining Music

Exhibit 2: List of Names for the Talking Machine, 1877

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