Ed Durbrow wrote: > Edison recorded Brahms. The piano is a cordophone.
True, but it rarely gets invited to cordophone family gatherings. Agustin Barrios made commercial recordings around 1913. You can buy one CD (Opal 9851) that contains all the extant recordings of the violinists Joachim and Sarasate (from 1903 and 1904, respectively). The Dolmetsch Online web site has a list of recordings at www.dolmetsch.com/darecordings.htm It lists some recordings of ensembles with Arnold Dolmetsch playing lute as early as 1920. No sound clips. Arthur Robb's lute history page www.art-robb.co.uk/hist.html has a sound clip of maybe eight seconds with this intro: "Here are Arnold and Rudolph Dolmetsch playing lute and viol, possibly in that order and probably about 1930. This is from a Columbia 78rpm record. It has been said that Arnold played a heavily built lute but I have seen a picture of him captioned something like 'Arnold Dolmetsch playing a lute by Micheal Harton'. It is interesting to speculate what lute is heard here." There's a complete recording of the same Dolmetsches playing a Divisions on a Ground by Norcombe on viol da gamba and lute: www.tcd.ie/Music/Recording%20Events_Examples.htm Arnold Dolmetsch died in 1940. There are two LPs by Suzanne Bloch listed on Todd McComb's site; see www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/alg93.htm. The earliest of them is listed as "1951 or prior." I'd love to hear it some time. While I was searching for Suzanne Bloch info on the web just now, I came across a peculiar reminiscence from Jeffrey Dane, a musician and writer whose name is known to me, (if mostly from writings of people who disagree with him) at http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/202/300/inditer/2001/06-04/dane/bloch/ernes t.htm He says: "Ernest Bloch's daughter Suzanne was, like her father, born in Geneva, on August 7, 1907." It must have been quite a day for both of them. Dane continues: "Her interest in the music of previous periods prompted her to learn to play the instruments - lute, harpsichord and others - for which the earlier music was written. She performed and lectured widely, and was for many years on the faculty of the author's alma mater, The Juilliard School in New York, where he met and spoke with her on several occasions. It was she who had organized the ear-training department there during the tenure of William Schuman as the School's president. Though approaching her sixth decade, her vitality, enthusiasm, and still jet-black hair made her look and even sound much more youthful. The natural charm and genuine personal sparkle she exuded made her remarkably attractive to much younger male students, whose emotions could be aroused as much by her smile as by her father's music." And finally, as if we needed to be told at this point: "The author acknowledges he was one of them." HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
