Folkways Records

Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound

Tony Olmsted

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135353551
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

In 1949, immigrant recording engineer Moses Asch embarked on a lifelong project: documenting the world of sound produced by mankind, via a small record label called Folkways Records. By the time of his death in 1986, he had amassed an archive of over 2,200 LPs and thousands of hours of tapes; so valuable was this collection that it was purchased by the Smithsonian Institute. FolkwaysRecords is an account of how he built this business, working against all odds, to create a landmark in the history of American music.

1

Early Influences

1870s to 1930s

Much as Moe would have insisted, it is necessary to set the stage with some context before jumping into many of the business details that preceded Folkways. Moe's attitudes to recording and the values that he sought to enshrine did not arise in a vacuum. The vast changes of the Industrial Revolution set the foundation for a myriad of astounding technological innovations. One of these—Edison's invention of the phonograph—can easily be called the seminal event of a now-ubiquitous recording industry. However, as is often the case, the value of such an invention was not immediately apparent. Eventually, its power as a medium for music found footing and began to blossom. It was into this growing technology, and the turmoil of East European expansion, that clearly shaped Moe's vision about the world around him, and what he could contribute to the world in the form of his famous “encyclopedia of sound.”

The Phonograph and Sound Recording

The first ten years of the phonograph's existence after its invention in 1877 were quite noneventful, with not a great deal done to take full advantage of its potential. Certainly, the novelty of the phonograph's abilities were recognized, but even its inventor, Thomas Edison, conceived of the phonograph more as a business machine (primarily to be used as a dictaphone) than anything else. However, it was not long before others began to realize the importance of the phonograph, or at least its commercial appeal. In particular, Alexander Graham Bell, with his brother and an associate, were granted a number of patents based on their improvements of the consistency and clarity of recordings.

One of the most important of these patents was granted on 4 May 1886. The patent outlined the substitution of an incising stylus in place of Edison's indenting stylus and the replacement of the tinfoil cylinder with a cardboard cylinder covered with wax.¹ Changing the action of the stylus was critical in allowing the recording of more acoustic detail, based on lateral movement of the stylus at a consistent depth on the substrate. In addition, the substitution of wax for tinfoil on the cylinder further improved both recording and playback by providing a softer, smoother, more consistent surface that could capture the minute movements of the stylus. The downside was that the wax was more prone to damage, but the advantages definitely outweighed the disadvantages. The consequences of these improvements were that, despite the formation of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in 1878 to “exploit the tremendous popular interest” surrounding a “machine that could talk,” it was Bell and his associates, as the Volta Graphophone Company in the 1880s, who were “directed towards exploiting [the graphophone/phonograph] for the reproduction of music.”²

It was the reproduction of music that was to quickly solidify the potential popular and academic value of the phonograph. The speed and range of the early efforts by individuals to get out and collect music were astounding, and set the groundwork for the recognition not only of material culture, but more importantly for a growing group of scholars, the expressive culture of a group. Prior to the invention of the phonograph, there was no way for someone to record how a song or recitation actually sounded, except through inadequate notation methods developed for Western musical idioms. Needless to say, the value of this new tool in musical collecting was soon discovered in the field, where aural expressions from around the world were directly recorded.

Interestingly, although over a decade old, neither Edison's phonograph nor Bell's “graphophone” were available to the retail market. Recording machines were only available through a commercial lease from the respective companies. Therefore, when ethnographer Walter Jesse Fewkes made recordings on the Passamaquoddy reserve at Calais, Maine, in February and March of 1890, it was through the support of philanthropist Mary Thaw Hemenway, who was also a substantial shareholder of Edison Phonograph Co. stock. It is presumed that she supplied Fewkes with his phonograph as something of a marketing ploy, and a successful one at that. Hemenway was also reported to have funded collecting expeditions to the Zuni (1890) and to the Hopi (1891–1894),³ presumably using an Edison phonograph.

By the mid-1890s, less than twenty years after its invention, the influence of the gramophone/phonograph had jumped American borders with interest in the new machine becoming international. By 1899, 151,000 phonographs had been made in the United States, with evidence of steadily growing markets in England, Germany, France, and Russia, and even some development in India, Egypt, and Japan.⁴ Clearly, the speed with which the commercial recording enterprise was encompassing the globe far outstripped any research projects. With so many machines, and the entertainment potential growing in leaps and bounds, there was a skyrocketing demand for material to play on the machines. The depth of the international penetration of the phonograph is highlighted by a recording engineer, who noted that by 1910:

In the Caucasus mountains the talker [phonograph] can be heard in every one of the multitudinous villages; the records are played unceasingly and are therefore soon worn out, causing a result which is not particularly pleasing to other than the Cossacks themselves who will never buy another record of the same title until one is actually broken. Even then they retain the pieces and in some cases decorate their huts with them.⁵

There was a growing body of experts in the recording field who found themselves making recordings all over the world for the European and American markets, in addition to the efforts of music scholars.⁶ Edison's company, now named the National Phonograph Co., had set up offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, and Milan, and by 1899 many professional recordists had found ready employment in Europe.⁷

In the United States, the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution played an important role in supporting early research into Native American communities and in the collection of American folk music from various parts of the United States. In Europe, a similar pattern was developing through several universities and musical organizations. With early collecting expeditions recording Hungarian peasant music in 1895,⁸ Tatar and Bashkir songs in the late 1880s and 1890s, and music in the Ukraine in 1900,⁹ for example, the early range of recording efforts was quite remarkable.

By the turn of the century, a variety of forces swirled around the phonograph. In the United States a commercial war was brewing over supremacy in the phonograph market. In Europe the home-consumption market for recordings was growing rapidly and needed to be fed with new products. On both sides of the Atlantic, scholars were recognizing the incredible tool that the phonograph represented in terms of ethnographic collecting of music and oral histories. Nonetheless, it appeared that the commercial interests appeared to be dominating the recording market.¹⁰ The cost of the machines and blanks was still prohibitive for many individuals. Support came primarily through either individual philanthropists (like Mary Thaw Hemenway), larger organizations that wished to acquire samples of a wide variety of music, or commercial music companies looking for musical novelties.

After some technical modifications made recording easier, there were areas where the interests of all three groups overlapped:

Almost immediately, students of languages, tribal customs, and folk lore realized that here was an instrument of great value. Enthusiastically, leading universities and museums sent out recording expeditions to the heart of darkest Africa, to the wilds of the Amazon, and to reservations of vanishing Indian tribes of the South and West.¹¹

By the turn of the twentieth century, the academic collection of music began to state its presence in the collection and systematic comparison of the world's music. The first, and most important effort, was through the work of E. M. von Hornboestel and Carl Stumpf at the Berlin Phono-gramm-Archiv, founded in 1901. Trained in the natural sciences, von Hornboestel and Stumpf saw analyzing music collected in the field as a way to find common features in music from around the world, and to see whether those features might be based in human psychology and cognition. The Phonogramm-Archiv set the stage for the practice of systematic collection and analysis of recordings from around the world, establishing an important standard that would influence collectors and analysts alike throughout Europe and the world.

Youth and Family Influences

Side by side with the growing phonograph industry was the growing Asch family. Matilda Asch (nee Spiro) and eminent Jewish writer Sholem Asch brought Moses Asch into the world on 2 December 1905. Moses entered the family as the second-oldest of siblings Nathan (b. July 1902), Janek, or John as he was commonly called (b. January 1907), and Ruth (b. February 1910), the only daughter.¹² The early lives of all the Asch children were filled with international elements. The parental and family influences on the Asch children were strong. Both parents were strong social activitists who worked for a variety of humanitarian and nationalist causes. Both individually and as a young couple, Sholem and Matilda were involved in defying Russian control of Poland at the end of the 1800s by teaching Yiddish and Polish—languages forbidden under occupation. Matilda's family were also involved in a wide range of nationalist and prolabor struggles. Although some of their efforts, including the fight for a shorter workweek, seem of less consequence now, strikes and rallies organized throughout Poland could often result in imprisonment or death to both organizers and participants.

In concert with such struggles, Sholem began to find fame throughout the world with a variety of novels and plays dealing with Jewish life and experience in Poland. However, as public appearances and the literary life beckoned, the children were increasingly left behind with Basha Spiro, Matilda's sister, as Sholem and Matilda began their extensive travels in support of Sholem's work—a pattern that continued well into Moe's adulthood. Whether such travels ultimately had a positive or negative effect on the Asch children, and Moe in particular, is open for debate, but there is little doubt that such cultural and political exposure early in Moe's life left a lasting impression.

Moe's first foray into international travel began in 1912, when Sholem's frustration with the labor and nationalist conflicts in Poland finally drove the family away for good. Arriving on an estate in northern France, Sholem began to impose a sort of worldliness on the family by decreeing that they would only communicate in the language of the country they lived in. Political intent aside, it was likely a considerable practical and cultural challenge for seven-year-old Moe and his siblings. Nonetheless, while the location sounds idyllic, there was little contact with Sholem—if he wasn't traveling, he would demand silence from the children while he was writing. Often, most of the parenting was left to Basha.

Life in the French countryside was shortlived. In 1914, World War I erupted, providing impetus and opportunity for Sholem to work in the United States, renewing his ties to the Jewish Daily Forward in New York City that he had first established through Abe Cahan after an extended writing tour in 1909. For a year, Basha and the children stayed in Paris, joining Sholem and Matilda in 1915, settling into a home in Greenwich Village in New York City. Exposed to yet another language in less than a decade, Moe, Nathan, and John were left to adapt to life in the United States. The progression of World War I appeared to have little effect on the material life of the Asch family, with the exception that the royalty money that Sholem had collected from Germany, in particular, had ceased. Nonetheless, it didn't stop Sholem from sending Moe and his brothers on vacations with Basha at a union-based summer “resort” run by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union each year until 1918.¹³

Travel, language, and disinterest all seemed to play a part in disrupting Moe's education. Moe struggled through his general education, showing little enthusiasm for the curricula of the day. Eventually, however, he demonstrated great interest and talent in technology, becoming an avid amateur ham radio operator, an interest that would serve him well. Attempts to finish high school first in New York in 1921, then at the Jewish National Farm School in Pennsylvania in 1923, were not successful.¹⁴ Instead, Moe began a trip to Europe that would again expose him to some harsh political realities that would leave a lasting impression, particularly the growing and increasingly overt anti-Semitism that would be directed at him. However, despite the downside of the experience, Sholem was able to again get Moe into school, this time exploiting Moe's interest in electronics. With the growing political and economic difficulties in post–World War I Germany, inflation made American dollars go a long way. Taking advantage of this via Sholem's financial support, Moe enrolled in the highly respect electronics school, the Electronische Hochschule in Bingen-en-Rhine, to pursue his technical education.

During his late teens, Moe would experience some of the seminal moments behind his later Folkways success. Amid the mix of European and international folk idioms that he encountered among the students at the Hochschule, there was criticism from other students that there was no real “culture” from the America that Moe had come from. Knowing this was not true, it was nonetheless difficult for Moe to prove it, until one fateful day in Paris. As Moe recalled:

Whenever he [Sholem] would travel West, he would pick up books about cowboys and these book...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword Michael Asch
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Early Influences 1870s to 1930s
• 2 Beginnings Asch Records
• 3 Broadening the Mandate DISC Records of America
• 4 The Birth of Folkways Records
• 5 The Business of Making Records
• 6 Finances
• 7 Easing the Burden Folkways in the 1960s
• 8 The Sale of Folkways
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index