“The Bass
Drum Heard `Round the World”: Telarc, Frederick Fennell, and an
Overture to Digital Recording
by Tracy Eddy
Over the past twenty
years, the compact disc has become the primary format for recorded
music. Compact disc players have replaced turntables and tape decks
in most of our homes and automobiles, and the development of digital
audio has made the crisp and authentic quality of CD recordings we
now enjoy possible. The first commercial digital classical recording
in the United States was Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland
Symphonic Winds’ performance of Holst: Suite No.1 & 2,
Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks and Bach: Fantasia
in G for Telarc Records in 1978. Five years later, the recording
also was one of the first to be released in the new digital format,
and it would help to launch the technology to audiences worldwide.
Telarc, founded in
Cleveland, Ohio, in 1977 by Jack Renner and Robert Woods, both of
whom were classically trained musicians and educators, made its
first two recordings in the then-typical direct-to-disc format. At
the same time, Renner and Woods were inspired by the new digital
recording technology of Tom Stockham’s Salt Lake City-based
Soundstream, Inc., the first commercial digital recording company in
the United States. Stockham, whom Renner calls “the father of
digital signal processing,” had developed a 16-bit digital audio
recorder using a high speed instrument magnetic tape recorder and
demonstrated the recordings at the fall of 1976 AES convention.
Renner and Woods formed a partnership with Stockham. They requested
that he increase his digital system’s high frequency response, from
17 kHz to 22.5 kHz at a sampling rate of 50 kHz, an unprecedented
level. Renner and Woods committed completely to digital earlier than
all the major labels, placing Telarc on the cutting edge of
recording technology. As Woods recalled, “The digital recordings we
made were a nightmare to master for LPs, but we knew it was the only
way to create the realism of live performance that had just become
technically possible.”
Renner and Woods decided
that their first digital project must be something with, as Renner
recalled, “Something really spectacular, with great dynamic range.”
They also needed a conductor to help coordinate the project, and
quickly contacted Frederick Fennell, a Cleveland native and musical
innovator in his own right. Fennell had founded the Eastman Wind
Ensemble in 1952 at the University of Rochester in New York, where
he created its prolific high-fidelity and stereo recording program
with Mercury Records. For his conducting work, he is credited in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for bringing
about a “complete reconsideration of the wind medium.” His
expressive and often innovative arrangements generated new interest
and respect for band music, and transformed music programs in
schools across the United States. Renner and Woods offered Fennell
the opportunity to re-record some of his Eastman Wind Ensemble hits
with sections of the Cleveland Orchestra, and he eagerly accepted.
The program featured
Gustav Holst’s two Suites for Military Band, which Fennell
considered part of the foundation for American band music. For the
performances, he had the opportunity to consult the Suites’
holograph scores, which had surfaced for the first time in 1977. For
Song of the Blacksmith, he also used the same anvil as his
family had used in their Cleveland shop during Fennell’s childhood,
lending what he called “a familiar sound.” The program also included
Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, and Bach’s
Fantasia in G.
The recording introduced
The Cleveland Symphonic Winds, which included the entire
reed-brass-percussion section of The Cleveland Orchestra, and a few
local professional musicians needed to complete the instrumentation.
Fennell lauded this repertory as “one of the few times in the
history of professional symphonic recording [a group of such caliber
has ever performed in the United States].” The performances that
took place on 4-5 April 1978 in Severance Hall, the Cleveland
Orchestra’s home, were captured on a Soundstream Digital Tape
Recorder by Schoeps Colette Series microphones. That year, World
Book Encyclopedia’s Yearbook called the recording “the bass drum
heard ‘round the world,” in reference to the distinctive percussion
featured in Holst’s Suites.
After several years of
research and collaboration, a joint taskforce of engineers from Sony
and Philips produced the “Red Book,” the standard format for the
audio disc, in 1981. When compact discs finally reached the
commercial market in 1983, the Telarc and Fennell collaboration
would become one of the first recordings released in the digital
format, which continues to be the standard for audio recording. It
is still available on the Telarc label (ASIN: B000003CSE). Telarc
continues to produce recordings in many different genres, including
classical, jazz and blues. Its editors still work at the company’s
Cleveland production studios.
Tom Stockham contributed
to the fields of digital commercial sound recording and editing
until his death in 2004. His accomplishments were recognized with an
Emmy (1988), the first technical Grammy (1994), and a Scientific
/Engineering Academy Award (1999).
Frederick Fennell
continued his prolific career, making other recordings with the
Cleveland Symphonic Winds and the Eastman Symphonic Wind Ensemble.
In addition to his thirty-year association with Eastman, he served
as Associate Music Director of the Minneapolis Symphony and
Conductor in Residence of at the University of Miami. Fennell died
at the age of 90 on 7 December 2004 at his home in Siesta Key,
Florida, USA. His legacy lives on, not only in his contributions to
musical recording history, but in the estimated 20,000 wind
ensembles in American schools which his work in the wind medium
helped to create.
You can explore many
other musical technologies by visiting Songs in the Key of E,
the new exhibit about electronic music on The IEEE Virtual Museum [www.ieee.org/museum].
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