Women on Record

In a 1957 High Fidelity review of Columbia Records' The Complete Music of Anton Webern, an album that included the first recordings of most of Webern's oeuvre, Alfred Frankenstein registered his surprise at the "heavy emphasis on the voice." "Singers avoid him because of the difficulty of his music," Frankenstein noted, "but roughly half of his total output is vocal." Many others made similar remarks. In the decades since, Webern's vocal music has achieved a somewhat higher profile, but it remains overshadowed by the aphoristic miniatures and rigorously organized twelve-tone works-both largely instrumental genres-for which he is best known.


Yet vocal works and the vocalists who perform them have played a key role in the reception of Webern's music. Chief among the latter group are sopranos, since fourteen of Webern's seventeen published works for voices feature a soprano soloist. In the 1950s, as the "instrumental" image of Webern was being refined at Darmstadt, an alternative view of the composer was emerging from the United States. Bethany Beardslee gave posthumous premieres of three Webern works in New York and drew acclaim for the "astonishing accuracy and style" of her recordings for Dial Records. Marni Nixon and Grace-Lynne Martin split Webern's fifteen works for soprano on the Columbia album, accomplishing what one critic had previously thought impossible: singing Webern's "cruel vocal lines neatly, accurately, with expression and without screaming."


In this paper I present new findings on how the response to these performances shaped the reception of Webern's music-for better and for worse. At times, the lyricism and religiosity of Webern's vocal works paved the way for favorable reappraisals of his music more generally, anticipating the richly nuanced approaches to Webern that emerged in the scholarship of the 1990s. At other times, ideas about what vocal music and female vocalists should sound like dominated the discourse. Beardslee, Nixon, and Martin earned praise for weathering the extreme technical challenges of Webern's soprano lines, but those same challenges led some to recoil at a perceived harshness which reflected poorly on composer and vocalist alike. I conclude, then, with a consideration of how performing Webern's music shaped these vocalists' artistic and professional lives. 

Known today for recording country music and R&B/soul artists such as James Brown, in its early years, Syd Nathan's King Records also recorded jazz. After the demise of an artistically satisfying if not financially lucrative association with Moe Asch and his eponymous label, pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams sought to secure a regular, long-term recording contract. Hopeful, she recorded eight sides for King Records in 1949 and 1950. 


My paper examines this time in her career through detailed study of the archival evidence. Letters, contracts, royalty statements, and business and personal correspondence document what transpired between Williams and King Records. Nathan and her manager, Joe Glaser, tended to dismiss Williams as troublesome and to ignore her concerns. Yet, seeking to maintain both artistic integrity and freedom, she pushed back against both. 


Her struggle with King is illustrative not just of her alone, but of a paradigmatic shift then taking place in jazz. The record industry and consumer tastes were changing: independent labels like King filled a niche, recording emerging musics such as jump blues, rhythm and blues, and rock'n'roll. Through Williams's interactions with Nathan and Glaser, we see her own agency. We also come to understand Williams's complex negotiation of the power imbalances between performer and the producer and label, and the intersections of race and gender in three key areas. First, despite pressure to record more accessible material, Williams recorded bebop tunes, including the experimental "In the Land of Oo-Bla Dee." Second, as King lacked the distribution and promotion networks required for jazz recordings, Williams resorted to promoting these recordings herself at personal expense. Finally, by demanding full financial accounting from her label, she challenged King's and industry business practices that exploited musicians.

It is a cliché of the history of recording that the first phonographs favored middle-register sounds and that female singers and speakers were not reproduced well by the technology.  It is certainly the case that women played little part in the early American and European recording industries, which during the 1890s and early 1900s centered on a noisy boys' club of brass band ensembles, male monologists, and tenors and baritones singing popular hits.
In this paper I will draw on a long-forgotten historical episode and ideas from sound studies and technofeminism to propose a new way of thinking about early recording's "woman problem".  The episode concerns the inventor-entrepreneur Gianni Bettini, who for fifteen years in turn-of-the-century New York City and Paris made and sold recordings of opera singers.  He did so using a specially-designed stylus attachment, the "micro-phonograph," and from the first his activities were bound up with gender and specifically the idea that he had found a way to "successfully record and reproduce the Female Voice".  Bettini's claims are borne out by the surviving evidence, which shows that he worked with a large number of female performers, and produced recordings of them that were acoustically rich and detailed.  Bettini's case reveals the true nature of early recording's "problem", which was not in the end with women but with the recording industries themselves and their practices and values.  These practices and values were limited and rooted in the phonograph's past as a scientific, historical-archival, and/or stenographic device.  Bettini and his team sought to promote other ways of interacting with recorded sound, a project in which they were ultimately only partly successful.