16 - Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas

Summary

Drop the needle on the record and the voice of the chanteuse fills the living room: Sei lieb zu mir / komm nicht / wie ein dieb zu mir / sag nicht immer Sie zu mir / wenn andere dabei sind. Mixed in front of the swelling strings, the tinkling piano, a fitfully ardent accordion, her voice is close to listeners, the studio microphone having rendered its sighs and hesitations and quavering holds with full presence, but without reverberation. For listeners sitting at home, these production techniques are meant to evoke the nostalgic and melancholy intimacies associated with the small café or cabaret. It is a quiet record that amplification has made possible. The arrival of high-fidelity, long-playing microgroove vinyl records on the commercial market in 1948 ushered in what Roland Gelatt called the ‘renaissance at a new speed’, or what has since come to be known as the LP era (Gelatt 1955: 290–304). Although long-playing discs made from a variety of materials and spinning at various speeds had been employed in the broadcasting industry for close to two decades, the war had accelerated research into plastics, which had resulted in both a durable base for magnetic tape and the vinylite products used in the production of long-playing records. It was Columbia who first brought out the 33-rpm vinyl record and called the new format the ‘LP’, in so doing promising the listening public a revolution in how music could be played back and stored at home. For listeners, the plastic base produced noticeably less surface noise and a greater dynamic range, while the slower rate of rotation and narrower grooves allowed for more music and better continuity (Schicke 1974: 114–30). Record labels initially marketed ‘high fidelity’ recordings as the realisation of a sonic documentary ideal, as the capability to bring the concert hall or night club faithfully into any domestic space. Yet the new format’s finer sonic definition also offered a challenge to this aspiration toward mimetic auditory realism, precisely through the enhanced ability to arrange and manipulate sounds within the field of the recording. Rather than ‘duplicat[e] the sound of an original performance’, engineers and producers might instead construct ‘a soundscape specifically for the home listener’ (Barry 2010: 120).