¿Cómo se guarda algo que solo existe mientras suena?

We ask ourselves

• If a flute and a guitar play the same note, how do you know which is which?
• How many people made a living playing music before loudspeakers existed?
• Why do almost all songs last about three minutes?
• Does a piece played today sound like the same piece played eighty years ago, if the score has not changed?
• If nobody had ever recorded your grandmother singing, would that version exist?
• Why did twentieth-century music turn towards percussion and towards noise?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

First, with no recording at all. Everyone play the same A: the flute, a voice, the guitar, the keyboard, the glockenspiel. Same note, same vibrations per second, and still nobody has to look to know who is sounding.

Now try to make them match. Make the flute sound like the guitar without it stopping being a flute. You can't. That thing that refuses to match is what this unit is about.

The second half of the fragment is four bars: the opening of the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite no. 1, which almost everyone has heard without knowing where it came from. You listen twice — once in Pau Casals's recording, once in the Netherlands Bach Society's. More than seventy years apart.

Same score, same instrument, same notes. While they play, write down four things only: fast or slow, whether the player stops to breathe or pushes through, how much the note trembles, and whether you can hear the room. Don't say which one you prefer. Say what each one decided.

Then the whole Prelude, with nobody talking over it.

What changed

Until December 1877, every note of music ever played had been lost. All of it. There were scores, instruments and the memory of whoever had been in the room, but the sound itself stayed nowhere. Music was an event, not an object.

That month Edison wrapped a sheet of tinfoil around a grooved cylinder and recorded a voice that came back out. From 1888 the cylinder was made of wax, and in 1887 Emile Berliner had patented the flat-disc version, which is the one that won. What those machines kept was not the music: it was the sound.

And that is the difference that matters. A score keeps which notes and when. It does not keep who. The phonograph keeps exactly the other half, and that half has a name: timbre.

Timbre is what separates two sounds with the same pitch, the same length and the same volume. It comes from two places. First, the harmonics: above the note you recognise, higher vibrations are sounding too, and every body shares them out differently. Second, how the sound begins, which is called the attack: the hammer on the string, the pick, the breath against the edge.

The attack counts for more than you would guess. Take the beginning away from a piano note and leave only what follows, and it becomes hard to tell that it is a piano. Much of an instrument's identity fits into the first tenth of a second, and that is precisely the part a score cannot write down.

Once sound could be kept, the format started giving orders. A standard cylinder held about two minutes, and the 1908 Amberol reached four. The 78 rpm disc settled the song at around three minutes.

That limit stayed. The three-minute single was still the norm into the 1960s, and it is still roughly the length of what you played this morning. It was decided by the size of a disc made over a century ago.

It also changed who eats from this. Sound film arrived in 1927, and within two years 20,000 musicians lost their jobs playing in cinema pits. In 1930 the American union set up the Music Defense League against what they called canned music. They lost. It is the first time a machine replaced musicians in bulk, and it will not be the last.

Foto: autor desconocido, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

And it changed what gets played. Pau Casals found an edition of Bach's cello suites in a Barcelona shop in 1889, aged thirteen; at the time they were hardly ever performed in public. He recorded them between 1936 and 1939, the first one in Paris in June 1938.

After those discs, the six suites became core repertoire for the instrument everywhere. A recording does not only preserve: it also decides what gets preserved.

With timbre captured, timbre starts carrying the weight. Debussy heard a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, and out of it came "Pagodes", full of chords that go nowhere and stay ringing because of how they sound.

Others pushed further. Schoenberg and his circle removed the tonal centre, and with it the feeling of knowing where home is. Varèse wrote Ionisation between 1929 and 1931 for thirteen percussionists: almost everything you hear has no fixed pitch.

Hard facts: phonograph, December 1877, tinfoil; wax cylinder from 1888, about two minutes. Berliner's disc gramophone, 1887. Columbia's LP, 21 June 1948, 33⅓ rpm. Ionisation, 1929-1931, premiered 6 March 1933 in New York.

The same device elsewhere

Once timbre can be stored, it stops being decoration and becomes the thing that carries the music. These three do it, and they are worth hearing back to back:

• Birds of a Feather, Billie Eilish — the voice is recorded so close to the microphone that you hear the air and the lips. In a hall, four metres away, none of that would reach you. That timbre exists only because recording exists.
• Varèse's Ionisation — thirteen percussionists and no tune you could sing on the way out. The only thing moving from start to finish is the colour of the sound.
• The Javanese gamelan — an orchestra of gongs and metallophones whose scale does not match a piano's, and which is tuned differently from one gamelan to the next. It is not out of tune: tuning is part of timbre too.

None is better than the others. All three say the same thing: sometimes what holds music up is not the melody, it is the colour.

And here at home?

Start with what is missing. El Royo del Rabal — Pedro Nadal y Auré, Zaragoza, 1844-1905 — was the most celebrated jota singer of his time, mainly between 1860 and 1895. The phonograph already existed, and there is no record of a single cylinder or disc of him. All that survives of how he sang is what the people who heard him wrote down.

Now what is there. Antonio Aramburo, born in Erla, province of Zaragoza, in 1840, was an opera tenor who set up his own recording house in Madrid, at Calle Príncipe 12, under the name Viuda de Aramburo. It issued 48 wax cylinders sung by him, and among them is the jota from La Dolores. He paid not to disappear, and it worked.

Foto: revista Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires), 7-9-1912, n.º 727, dominio público, digitalizada por la Biblioteca Nacional de España, vía Wikimedia Commons

That jota comes from La Dolores, the opera by Tomás Bretón, premiered on 16 March 1895 at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid and set in Calatayud, in Aragón. First it left Aragón inside an opera. Then it left again, inside a cylinder.

In 1903 Isaac Albéniz recorded piano improvisations onto Edison brown wax cylinders. An improvisation is the most fragile thing there is: it is invented while it sounds and then it is over. From those, the sound survives, and you can play it.

Radio arrived in 1924 and finished the job. Radio España (EAJ-2) opened on 10 November 1924, and Radio Barcelona (EAJ-1) four days later. From then on you did not even need to buy the disc: music walked into the house by itself.

What came next is the part that looks most like a classroom. Between 1931 and 1936 the Misiones Pedagógicas travelled to some 7,000 towns and villages on 196 circuits with around 600 "missionaries". In many of them they left behind "a gramophone and a collection of records, renewed from time to time".

So a village with nobody in it who could play Bach could hear Bach for the first time.

And now a judgement, because this needs one. What got kept was not the best: it was whatever somebody chose to pay for. A tenor with money recorded himself and survives. The finest jota singer of his century had no record company and sounds nowhere. When you hear an old recording, the useful question is not whether it is good. It is who paid for the cylinder.

Classroom activities

• While the two preludes are compared: raise your hand every time the player stretches the time or stops to breathe. Afterwards we count the hands for each recording and compare the two numbers.

• While Ionisation plays: count timbres, not instruments. Write down words only — dry, metallic, low, rough — and at the end we pool how many different words came up. Then we run the count again on La Gozadera, which has more percussion timbres than you will manage to count first time.

• While Birds of a Feather plays: listen only to what is not a note. Raise your hand when you hear air, a lip, a breath.

• Play: take a four-note tune and pass it through every instrument in the room, one after another without stopping. That is orchestration. To hear it done by others, the guitar on With or Without You is a guitar with the pick stroke taken off the front; its article has the chart and the tab.

• Record: eight seconds of the classroom on a phone, played back straight away. It is literally what Edison did. The question to answer in writing is what has been lost compared with being in the room.

Key vocabulary

• Timbre — timbre: lo que distingue dos sonidos con la misma nota, duración y volumen
• Harmonics — armónicos (las vibraciones más agudas que suenan sobre la nota principal)
• Attack — ataque: cómo empieza un sonido, el golpe o el soplo inicial
• Phonograph — fonógrafo: la máquina que guardó un sonido por primera vez
• Performance decisions — criterio interpretativo: lo que decide quien toca y la partitura no dice

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Birds of a Feather, With or Without You, La Gozadera.

Same music, another era (1) — the Prelude from Cello Suite no. 1 played by Pau Casals. Casals recorded all six suites between 1936 and 1939.

Same music, another era (2) — the same Prelude by the Netherlands Bach Society, on instruments of Bach's time.

A piece made of timbre alone — Varèse's Ionisation, by the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Tuning that will not fit a piano — Javanese gamelan, by the NIU School of Music ensemble.

An improvisation that was not lost — Isaac Albéniz at the piano, Edison brown wax cylinder, 1903, digitised by the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.

A jota on a wax cylinder — from the zarzuela Gigantes y cabezudos, set in Zaragoza, recorded by the El Fonógrafo house.

The jota that left Aragón inside an opera — the one from La Dolores, by Tomás Bretón, played by the Agrupación Musical de Muel.

• The next question — once sound can be stored, somebody works out that it can also be manufactured. That is what "La sala donde suena esta canción no existe", the unit on the studio as an instrument from the 4th-year book, is about. It is in the library.