![]() ![]() Because discs were so limited in what they could record directly, Bell engineers came up with a system for recording separate audio signals onto film. Schubert "Unfinished" Symphony (Stokowski, 1924)īut these live sound tests were a way station to the stereo future, while the process of recording in stereo evolved. heard the live Philadelphia-based orchestra through telephone lines and an onstage speaker array. In one particularly notable performance, listeners in Washington D.C. Sometimes, audiences would be watching a darkened stage, with large speaker arrays set up in place of the orchestra, whose musicians were actually playing in the basement. In the following months and years, they invited more and more people to hear their recorded work and amazed audiences further with elaborate live sound tests. After researchers at Bell Laboratories transformed the Philadelphia Orchestra's Academy of Music hall into a huge recording studio, they and Stokowski made the first-ever stereo recordings in 1931, which they played for a select group of listeners at the Institute of Radio Engineers and the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. The first fully electrical recording of a symphony was Stokowski's, made in 1924. An advocate from its very first days, Stokowski was quick to see the possibilities of the medium, and pushed his orchestra to record in ways that were ridiculed by music critics and other conductors at the time. Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, recounts Stokowski's embrace of electrical recording. Stokowski, who helmed the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 through 1940, was decidedly in this second camp. On the other side were those who wanted to use the newly available electrical technology-like microphones, amplifiers, filters, and mixers-to record, refine, and creatively playback the sounds they captured. Musicians played into a sound horn, which funneled their sound down to a needle and disc, and then for playback, this process was simply reversed. On one side were those who wanted music to be recorded and played back as naturally as possible, as in the earliest, acoustical days of the industry. And, while there had been experiments and a few public tests of stereophonic sound, only limited audiences had heard them. Direct-to-disc recording was still the norm, with magnetic tape having been only recently invented in Germany, where it was hidden from much of the outside world. Stereo wouldn't become standard on LPs until the 1950s. Up until Fantasia's release, movie soundtracks-and recorded music of all kinds-were presented in mono. What Taylor failed to mention is the brand-new way this recorded sound was presented: in stereo. ![]() So now we present the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, interpreted in pictures by Walt Disney and his associates, and the music by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor Leopold Stokowski. They might be, oh, just masses of colors, or they may be cloud forms, or great landscapes, or vague shadows, or geometrical objects floating in space. Then, the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. So, our picture opens with a series of impressions of the conductor and the players. At first you're more-or-less conscious of the orchestra. "What you will see on the screen is a picture of the various abstract images that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music. If you were watching the film upon its initial release in 1940, your expectations would have been set by Deems Taylor, the emcee who introduces each of Fantasia's eight segments (and who was sometimes cut from subsequent releases): As the music continues, new silhouetted figures come into view, with harps, trombones, timpanis, and more-each new musician or orchestral section flashing in bright colors, just as you hear the instruments enter the score. Blue bassoons appear on the right, green clarinets above, red violins on the left, and, soon enough, the glowing pink orb of the full orchestra hitting its first crescendo. ![]()
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