THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH. By Roland Gelatt. (Cassell, 21s.) FRom time
to time as editor of The •Gramophone I used to make attempts to secure for serial publication a history of the machine or instrument—call it which you please—that within these last thirty years has turned the British people from being the least enthusiastic listeners to music into the most enthusiastic. I could get plenty of reminiscences and plenty of expert advice, but an accurate history of the phonograph, graphophone, gramo- phone and all the rest of them seemed unobtainable.
At long last Mr. Roland Gelatt has provided exactly what was wanted, and although I raised my eyebrows at the title when I picked up The Fabulous Phonograph, I had not read more than a few pages before realising that 'fabulous' was the perfect epithet. I am still a little dizzy under the impact of realis- ing how little I know about the history of recorded music after editing a paper which for thirty-three years has devoted itself to recorded music and enjoys today very much the largest circu- lation of anysphonographic or gramophonic review in the world.
'A history of the phonograph is at once the history of an inven- tion, an industry, and a musical instrument. Science and business and esthetics are inseparably commingled in the historical pro- gression from Edison's raucous tin-foil apparatus to the high fidelity reproducers and recordings of today.'
In those words Mr. Gelatt tells us what he was setting out to accomplish, and I' shall be expressing the opinion of every devotee when I assure him that he has succeeded triumphantly.
Perhaps he might have mentioned the National Gramophonic Society, which was undoubtedly the spearhead of the resthetic attack on the timidity of the recording companies. And certainly he should have mentioned the magnum opus of Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. I hasten to add that a book written from the American point of view is unusually fair to the part that Europe played in the development of recorded music, particularly Britain. The intricate narrative is disentangled with exemplary neatness in agreeably swift and simple prose.
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