Sounds of Camden

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OUNDS OF CAMDEN The exhibition Sounds of Camden takes as its historical starting point the presence of the Victor Talking Machine Company/RCA Victor in Camden, New Jersey, in the first half of the 20th century as a manufacturer of Victrolas, gramophones, and phonographs.

The company opened recording studios in the 1920s and became one of the premier producers of vinyl recordings, developing labels ranging from opera and classic to fox-trot and gospel. The Stedman Gallery presents a sampling of these early record-playing machines, generously lent by the Camden County Historical Society in Camden, RCA Heritage Project Museum at Rowan University, and the State of Delaware Historical and Cultural Affairs in Dover. A working victrola allows visitors to see the operation of wind-up machines playing original vinyl records. Posters, advertisements, and publicity materials generated by the company, including the loveable Nipper, reflect the publicity campaigns undertaken by the company to become a national and international household brand. Two listening stations allow visitors to sample recordings from the classical and popular RCA playlists.

Sound as a concept allows for a very broad thematic approach, from music, poetry, and theater to ambient sound. At the most contemporary pole of Camden sounds, Associate Professor of Music Mark Zaki has composed a contemporary electro-acoustic work titled “Camden Rounds” that integrates current ambient sounds of Camden, including the sounds of the New Jersey Transit RiverLINE and of PATCO Hi-Speedline. This electronic composition will play continuously in the Stedman Gallery.

Eric Porter, greengreen, 2014

Stedman Gallery October 6 – December 18, 2014

One of Camden’s best known residents is the poet Walt Whitman.

As a fan of the spoken word, Professor of English Tyler Hoffman has provided recorded readings of Walt Whitman’s work; he has also made available the manuscripts of haiku poet and Camden resident Nick Virgilio. Residents of and visitors to Camden can also record their own experiences and memories of the city.

Miranda Powell, arts education and community arts program assistant at Rutgers–Camden Center for the Arts (RCCA), oversees a recording studio that is open to the public.

Complementary programming accompanies the exhibit. Associate Dean Joe Schiavo, artistic director of the Mallery Concert Series, has developed a fall season’s programming of recitals with a Camden connection. Theater Director Ken Elliott has written and is producing “Hand Me Down the Silver Trumpet,” a musical review of recordings from the RCA Victor songbook from the 1920s and 1930s by African-American artists. For its November 1 concert, Symphony in C has programmed Brahm’s “Hungarian Dances 5 & 6” recorded by the Philadelphia Philharmonic orchestra in RCA studios in 1917. Music Director Rossen Milanov will share his thoughts on the importance of recorded music in the city of Camden at the Symphony’s dress rehearsal on Wednesday, October 29, which is open to the public.

The Stedman Gallery and the RCCA is grateful to the many contributors to and supporters of the exhibit. Rutgers-Camden’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) and its director, Professor Charlene Mires, generously supported this endeavor; Mandi Magnuson-Hung, MARCH digital media coordinator and programs associate, and now museum curator at the Wells Fargo History Museum in Philadelphia, undertook exhaustive research on the companies, their history, their products, and their advertisement. Gordon Theater sound technician Stefán Örn Arnarson enthusiastically participated in the selection of the talking machines along with Nancy Maguire, RCCA associate director and Mandi Magnuson-Hung. In addition, Stefán has developed the listening stations, and assisted in the installation of the exhibition. Tyler Hoffman and the English department have been generous supporters of the exhibition. Kevin Emmons and Steve Fritz have generously lent their gramophone. Jim Brown, director, and Robert Emmons, associate director of the Digital Studies Center, are generously supporting and participating in this exhibit.

RCCA exhibition and programming are supported by the New Jersey State Council of the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and other generous contributors.

Cyril Reade, Director Rutgers–Camden Center for the Arts

The Victor Talking Machine Company Recording Studios: Origins and Impact Although the invention of the phonograph is credited to Thomas Edison, it is rarely mentioned that his machines used hollow cylinders, not disks. The credit for inventing a phonograph or gramophone that used the disks we think of today as records goes to Emile Berliner. Edison was also shortsighted about his invention. He thought that his machine would only be used for office dictations and never imagined recording music for the public.

Berliner applied for a patent for his new machine in 1887 and shortly after started working towards the creation of a “master disk.” This invention would allow multiple copies to be made from the original, something that had not been possible before.

Once Berliner had managed to acquire enough funds to start his new company in 1895, he approached Eldridge Johnson, the young owner of a machine shop on Front Street in Camden, New Jersey, to build the motor for his gramophones. Johnson, who made bookbinding machines, was fascinated by this new technology and later wrote: The little instrument was badly designed. It sounded much like a partially educated parrot with a sore throat and a cold in the head. But the little wheezy instrument caught my attention and held it fast and hard. I became interested in it as I had never been interested before in anything. It was exactly what I was looking for.

“Eldridge Reeves Johnson - an Autobiography”; davidsarnoff.org After several years and a development cost of $50,000, the Victor Talking Machine Company quickly became the dominant maker of disk-playing gramophones. As the technology became a reality, so did the need for a quality studio to record the vast amount of music that people wanted to hear. Three brothers—Harry, Raymond, and Charles Sooy—worked in Victor’s “recording laboratory,” and were instrumental in the development of sound recording and the mass production of disks.

The list of music that was recorded in the Camden studios is both long and impressive. The Sooy brothers were responsible for the large majority of these recordings. Musicians considered legends today, violinist Fritz Kreisler, pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, violinist Jascha Heifetz, and of course tenor Enrico Caruso, came just to work with the Sooy brothers. Raymond Sooy said:

No two artists ever face the recording instrument quite alike; some are nervous; some confident; some cannot make records with a spectator in the studio, while others must have someone standing by constantly.

Mr. Caruso was the easiest artist who came to the laboratory to record. Nothing seemed to make any difference to him, he almost always sang perfectly and with this confidence, he had nothing to fear.

“Memoirs of my Recoding and Traveling Experiences for the Victor Talking Machine Company”; davidsarnoff.org There were two main recording venues or “recording laboratories.”

The first studio was on the fourth floor of the building on the corner of Front and Cooper streets. Consisting of only one room, this venue was used for many of the solo and smaller ensemble recordings.

In the fall of 1917, the Sooy brothers recorded the first sounds of a full symphonic orchestra with the Boston Symphony under Karl Much. Soon after, they made the first recording of the Philadelphia Symphony under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Dissatisfied with their space limitations for large recordings, Victor bought a church on the corner of Fifth and Market Streets and converted the building into a studio in 1918. That remained the main studio until 1935, when construction on what is now the PATCO subway line under Fifth Street, made this studio unusable from the noise of trains going by every few minutes. Victor continued to expand and opened recording studios in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

The Sooy brothers traveled around the world recording musicians and speakers, and training engineers for the Victor label.

They recorded the speeches of presidents in the White House, the London Symphony under the direction of Sir Edward Elgar, and the La Scala Symphony under the direction of Arturo Toscanini in Italy, as well as in the Camden studio.

This global vision led Victor to establish a company and recording studios in London, which later became the HMV label (His Master’s Voice)—the most successful record label in Europe of the 20th century. Victor also opened a division in Japan called Japan Victor Camden, or JVC, which today is still one of the largest electronic companies in Japan.

Raymond Sooy wrote a memoir about his experiences with Victor, and the talented artists and figures of history he was privileged to record.

Some of the greatest music in the world has gone out from Camden, and also many a great hope has come to realization here in Camden.

“Memoirs of my Recoding and Traveling Experiences for the Victor Talking Machine Company”; davidsarnoff.org

Stefán Örn Arnarson department of theater

Victor Talking Machine Company Advertising: Getting the Sound Out In the late 19th century, the phonograph business was in a dynamic state of flux as numerous inventors and entrepreneurs attempted to create a viable and salable machine. Overlapping inventions, improvements, and a lot of hard feelings resulted in a series of legal entanglements between the Berliner Gramophone Company and its distributor, National Gramophone Corporation; and Emile Berliner, Eldridge Johnson, and the American Graphophone Company. Following a number of fierce lawsuits and agreements regarding patents, distribution, and naming rights, Johnson consolidated the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901. Soon the sounds of the world were moving through Victor’s recording studios in Camden, New Jersey, immortalized on records that would soon be sold back to a world-wide audience.

Victor Talking Machine Company’s new manager, Leon Douglass, convinced Johnson to dedicate half of his available cash to an extensive advertising campaign. The strategy worked, and Johnson committed the other half to the next month’s ads. Eventually, Victor would establish a department dedicated to creating and selling advertising materials to distributors, while spending millions on national campaigns. The focus on advertising led to incredible financial success for Johnson and his stockholders. By requiring distributors to use specific posters, signs and other materials—at a cost of $25 to $35 a year—Victor presented a reliable face to the public and transformed of the phonograph from a simple distraction into an instrument necessary for reaching middle-class status.

At first, copy focused on what the machines were, how they worked, and implied that Victor customers had discerning taste.

For example, an ad from 1903 featured an inset of Nipper, with his head characteristically cocked to one side. Nipper, it may be recalled, was a white and brown terrier immortalized by the French painter Francis Barraud “listening” to an Edison-Bell phonograph. Emile Berliner purchased the right to a modified version of the painting, which Johnson purchased for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901. In the aforementioned ad, Nipper is positioned before a number of international reviews, touting the machine’s reproduction quality. The Lokal-Anzeiger proclaimed, “The Gram-O-Phone concert was a musical treat. The applause was equally divided between the singers and the Gram-O-Phone.”

Additional copy is flanked by portraits of two famous tenors, Enrico Caruso and Francesco Tamagno. The copy indicates that the “DeLuxe” records “play longer selections and are loud enough to be used in place of orchestra for dancing.”

Continental Europe was the “home” of classical music, composers, and performers, and the advertisement tapped that purported expertise, while the images of two wildly talented and beloved performers enhanced the impression. If listeners applauded both live and recorded performances equally, could recordings bring world-class musicians into the home? The not-too-technical tag at the end told buyers that they were purchasing a high-end instrument.

In the early days of the phonograph, home models were not yet feasible. Enterprising souls fitted machines with coin slots for public use. Expensive machines were housed in respectable businesses, while cheaper models occupied arguably less-refined locations such as arcades and saloons. The short recordings were primarily of American popular music and ethnic or “race” songs largely associated with the vaudeville stage and burlesque halls.

Victor ads distanced Johnson’s instruments from these connotations through technological advancements, allusions to family, and by promoting music that adhered to Victorian ideals.

A proposed ad from 1908 boasted: “Home is more comfortable than an opera house, and a better place to enjoy the magnificent voices of the world’s greatest opera stars.” Father, mother, and daughter sit off to the left as little brother runs the phonograph.

Indicators of middle-class homemaking—pictures on the wall, well-crafted furniture, and floral curtains—can be seen in the periphery.

By 1927, when Victor introduced its Orthophonic model, a visual shorthand had been established, as can be seen in a beautifully crafted trolley card from that year. It was effective to simply direct potential customers to: “Give this marvelous Record.” The Orthophonic itself is unseen, replaced with a brightly glowing candle in a nod to Christmas, the ultimate holiday of hearth and home.

From 1901 to 1929, the Victor Talking Machine Company spent approximately $52 million on advertising space, catalogs, record supplements, promotional materials, and radio broadcasts and, as a result, Victor was everywhere. The persistence and prodigious spending paid off. The resulting consumer demand for Victor machines helped create a few dozen millionaires and more than ten thousand jobs for the workers who built upwards of seven million machines.

Mandi Magnuson-Hung

The Nation’s First Drive-In Movie Theatre The first drive-in movie theatre in America—the 400-acre “Automobile Movie Theatre”—opened on Tuesday, June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey, at the corner of what is now Admiral Wilson Boulevard and Lee Avenue (near Enterprise Rent-a-Car), on the border of Pennsauken. That night, 600 people came to the theater for one of three showings.

It was the brainchild of Richard M. Hollingshead, whose family operated the R.M. Hollingshead Corporation chemical plant in Camden. He first experimented with the concept in his own driveway at 212 Thomas Avenue in Camden, nailing sheets to trees in his backyard and using a 1928 Kodak projector set on the hood of his car with a radio behind the screen to produce the sound.

He was granted a patent for the concept of the drive-in a month before he opened the theater. With three investors, he formed a company called Park-In Theaters, at an investment of $30,000.

As an advertisement for the theatre announced: Eight semi-circular rows, each 50 feet deep, will accommodate 500 motor cars simultaneously. Motorists and their guests will see and hear talking pictures while they smoke, talk, or partake of refreshments without annoying others in the audience. There is a slight incline at the front of each aisle which guarantees uninterrupted vision.

Hollingshead hired RCA Victor to devise a system of sound projection so that the talkies would be plainly audible to the farthest car. The three 6-by-6–foot speakers were mounted next to the 40-by-50–foot screen.

RCA promised that their newly invented “directional sound” would guarantee equal sound placement to everyone in the drivein, although this meant loud, blasting sound that everyone in the neighborhood could hear, sometimes for miles around. Also, because of sound delay, cars in the back rows heard the sound later than did cars in the front rows. It was not until the 1940s that RCA introduced in-car speakers with individual volume controls.

The Camden drive-in theatre promoted itself as family-friendly: “The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” In addition, it insisted on the relative comfort of the drive-in experience, especially if you were of wider girth. One ad stated: “Even Kate Smith would have no trouble getting a seat in the world’s first automobile movie theater where you see and hear talkies without leaving your car.”

The first movie shown was Wives Beware starring Adolphe Menjou, which was then in its second run. The charge was 25 cents per person and 25 cents per automobile, with a maximum cost of $1.

Although at first the theater showed three movies per night, it scaled back soon to just two per night. The Camden drive-in theater remained in business for three years. Although drive-ins were slow to catch on, by 1948 there were 820 across the country.

It was not until the 1970s that their decline began.

Tyler Hoffman Professor of English

Eric Porter, yellow bollards, 2014

Camden Rounds Camden Rounds is an exploration of environment and memory.

Fragmented shards of sound collected across time and space in Camden, New Jersey, form an interwoven tapestry of the city’s ambient soundscape. Almost three hundred sounds were captured on a walking tour around Cooper Street, the waterfront, and in and around the Rutgers University–Camden campus area.

Some of the sounds are also archival, recorded several years ago in the same general area. One might hear things that reflect the bustle of human activity, traffic sounds on the street (and going over the Ben Franklin bridge), the River Line and PATCO, as well as general ambient sounds. Sounds are arbitrarily ordered by a computer program creating an infinite constellation of possibilities and aural experiences.

Environmental Sounds

As environments arise, decay, and are replaced by new ones, we are left with an aura of past events. Our recollections become splintered assemblages of mental souvenirs and erratic memories.

The random structuring of Camden Rounds is intended to be an allegorical statement on the nature of cultural and environmental change—the growth, development, and ultimate erosion of experience.

There is no attempt to convey any kind of narrative directly; the piece does so only in our relationship to the sounds. Objects that are understood initially as purely aural events can gain reference and meaning when eventually seen through the lens of recognizable human experience. Individual inflections become the focal point of activity, which are heightened in the absence of any discernible formal context.

Mobile Mobile

The effect of this installation is one of a sonic mobile. Interchanging sounds are suspended in the gallery and seem to turn freely as we move through the space. The ear chooses between current and past events as trajectories of the objects compete with one another. Distinctions between specific sound events, and past time and present time become blurred, as do our perspectives on location depending on where we are in the gallery.

Process

All of the sounds were digitally recorded, edited, and collected in a database. This database is accessed by a custom program created in a multimedia programming environment called “Max.” Chosen randomly by the program, sounds are sequenced and distributed to speakers located throughout the gallery.

In the end, Camden Rounds is an entity that reflects its own history. To a certain extent, the work could be viewed as another metaphor—a palimpsest, a surface scraped of its layers with traces remaining, of the sound of Camden itself. A place where the sounds of the past are slowly covered up but continue to aurally influence the present.

Mark Zaki

Associate Professor of Music

“Hand Me Down the Silver Trumpet” One of the catalysts for the career of the great playwright August Wilson occurred when, as a young man, he heard an old 78 rpm recording of Bessie Smith singing the blues. This influence can be most vividly seen in his landmark 1984 Broadway play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which featured Charles S. Dutton’s electrifying performance as a gifted but disgruntled jazz trumpeter recording “race music” in a shabby Chicago studio. Dutton’s tragic character was fictional, but Ma Rainey, the star of the session, was a genuine historical figure who recorded for Paramount Records, which billed her as “the Mother of the Blues” until they abruptly terminated her contract in 1928 because they felt her singing was too old-fashioned; jazz and blues styles were rapidly evolving in the late 1920s.

Rainey was far from the first African American to make commercial recordings. As early as the 1890s and through the first two decades of the 20th century, black artists like George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, and the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet made recordings of ragtime, jazz-influenced dance tunes, and other forms that were primarily marketed to white audiences. However, the idea of making recordings by black artists for black audiences did not seem to occur to anyone until 1920, when OKeh Records released Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” and targeted its advertising to African-American audiences. They were rewarded with astonishing sales: over seventy thousand copies of “Crazy Blues” were sold in less than a month.

Blues was the signature sound of “race records,” but the catalog eventually encompassed a wide variety of other musical forms: jazz, dance music, novelty numbers, spirituals, as well as spoken texts, such as sermons by popular black preachers. The term “race music” can be traced to an OKeh Records executive at one of those early recording sessions with Mamie Smith. “Although it might sound derogatory today,” as Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman have noted in American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 (2007), “the term ‘race’ was used in a positive sense in urban African-American communities during the 1920s and was an early example of black nationalism.”

It was not long before other major record companies discovered the rewards of courting the black consumer. However, one of the largest and most important, Victor Records, was late to the table.

Victor’s philosophy is evident in a reply to an inquiry from a customer in 1915: “Our experience has taught us that our customers judge records entirely by the way they sound to them, and care nothing at all about the race of the singer. We do not believe that records by negro singers would appeal to our negro customers except to the few, like yourself, who would be enthusiastic on the subject.” According to African-American songwriter Perry Bradford, “Victor just couldn’t afford to lower their prestige.” By 1927, however, executives at Victor realized that they could not afford not to take advantage of this sizable market, and they were soon issuing a substantial catalog of race records by top artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Alberta Hunter, and even Mamie Smith, many of whom recorded in studios here in Camden, New Jersey.

Although they were originally targeted to a very specific demographic, these legendary recordings became hugely influential on the development of all American popular music in the 20th century. “Hand Me Down the Silver Trumpet” celebrates the achievement of these great innovators by recreating an imaginary recording session. Since it would be nearly impossible to impersonate the famous and lesser-known voices that still resonate after more than eight decades, the characters in our show are fictional. However, all of the tunes were recorded by Victor (RCA Victor after the 1929 merger), and many were included in Victor’s 1928 “Race Records” catalog. We have attempted to recreate the original sound as much as possible; for example, thanks to librarians at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers–Newark, we were able to use some original Fats Waller charts that include Waller’s own penciled-in corrections. In some cases, when music was unavailable, our musical supervisor, Stefán Örn Arnarson, transcribed the charts directly from the old 78s, a truly painstaking task. But unearthing this important history has been a labor of love for all the actors, musicians, and collaborators involved.

Kenneth Elliott

Associate Professor of Theater

SOUNDS OF CAMDEN Stedman Gallery October 6 – December 18, 2014 RUTGERS UNIVERSITY–CAMDEN Phoebe Haddon Chancellor Kriste Lindenmeyer Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Stedman Gallery Rutgers–Camden Center for the Arts Cyril Reade Director Noreen Scott Garrity Associate Director for Education Nancy Maguire Associate Director for Exhibitions Carmen Pendleton Community & Artist Programs Manager Miranda Powell Arts Education & Community Arts Program Assistant William Haas Project Assistant Maria Buckley Administrative Assistant This exhibition is made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.