ARSC member Frans Jansen (from the Netherlands) sent me an interesting online video last week of him recording a group of men on a cylinder. Of course it was all in Dutch, so I asked Frans for an explanation. Frans replied with the message below. He allowed me to share with ARSC List, Phonolist,78-L and Phono-L. Below his explanation, I will provide the link to the video so you can see it. Enjoy! Steve Ramm Some background information. In the south of The Netherlands in the city of Maastricht there is a male choir with the name: "Mastrichter Staar" (Star of Maastricht we would say) that celebrates in 125th year of being active. They have made some 78 rpm records starting in 1922 with the German label VOX . But they became famous on LP records in the 1960ies, 70ies and later productions. There is no wax cylinder record and now the publicity manager thought it a good thing that the complete choir (125 male voices) would record a Beatle song before the horn of a cylinder phonograph as it would be done 125 years ago. Great was the disppointment when I told that the cylinder would record only 2 minutes and that it would be impossible to record the complete choir of 125 men. They would not fit into the horn. I suggested that they would pick 2 quartets of men with loud voices and learned by heart a short song, less than 2 minutes. When I arrived with an Edison Home phonograph and a Columbia phonograph both with appropriate cutters and 10 new blanks from Paul Morris in England, I was pleasantly surprised to see (and hear) 8 men supervised by an American lady, Louise Deal who is a professional singing tutor, who had studied a short song with the men that was on the repertoire before 1900. During nearly all the morning they rehearsed and I made test recordings on the Edison Home machine. In the end there were two cylinders that we thought to be very good. With me I had a German Edison Gold Guss Walze (Gould Moulded Cylinder) 15555 with a Christmasquartet with brass music and harmonium that sounded horrible although the cylinder looked very nice. I played that before the men and told them that was commercial quality. This cylinder was louder than my recording but mine sounded better. The cylinders that are good will be played at the opening of an exhibition devoted to the 125 anniversary of The Mastreechter Staar. I send some photographs as an addendum. If you send the story further, please send me a copy as well. Best wishes, Frans Jansen And here is the link for the video: _http://tinyurl.com/5ebqdb_ (http://tinyurl.com/5ebqdb)
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