Phonopoetics by Camlot Jason;

Phonopoetics by Camlot Jason;

Author:Camlot, Jason; [Camlot, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


Figure 6. Record catalogue description of “A Dramatic Recitation by Rose Coghlan.” Victor Records Catalogue, July 1910, 120.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!80

In listening to Coghlan deliver this final stanza with the orchestra supporting her, we can understand dramatic recitation as a powerful, hybrid form of art in performance, drawing on elocutionary technique, dramatic performance, historical and descriptive interpretation, and a kind of vocalization that verges, in the end, on singing. The record mobilizes a full range of sonic media in the service of literary interest and excitement.81

The audiotextual format of the Victor recitations with orchestral accompaniment influenced subsequent American recordings of “Charge,” including those released by United Talking Machine Co. in 191382 and Emerson Phonograph Co., ca. 1917.83 The United Talking Machine release, recited by Edgar L. Davenport, imitates the Victor orchestral accompaniment extensively, with bugles at the start, kettledrums for cannon in the middle, and a more solemn horn outro, only in this instance, the bugle call played at the end is “Taps,” which had been associated with the American military since the Civil War.84 The performance in the Emerson recording is unattributed, and may have been delivered by a less-seasoned recording artist given the way the speaker seems to need to speed up his reading at the end (despite the text’s demands to slow down and linger in sadness and gravitas) to fit the poem onto the record. Even the orchestral arrangement (which is, again, imitative of the Victor approach, and of the United adaptation) must hurry its delivery of “Taps” by playing over the speaker through the last stanza. This last recording was marketed among a series of “Patriotic Selections” released under the Emerson label, in this instance, “Charge,” Americanized and integrated into a list alongside U.S. Army and Navy Bugle Calls, and such titles as “American Patrol,” “All American March,” and “Stars and Stripes Forever.”85 The pedagogical motives behind the inclusion of recitation recordings like “Charge” in Victor’s education catalogue and the multimedia production of their delivery of “literary” works seem absent in Emerson’s “Patriotic Selections,” where it is not a new kind of literary sound that is being conveyed but the sound of American military patriotism.

All these recordings were produced in the United States, albeit in some instances with artists, like Rose Coghlan, who had begun their careers on the British stage before moving to America. Recitation records produced in the United Kingdom usually lack the kind of orchestral accompaniment heard on Victor and Edison records.

Tennyson’s Spectral Energy

Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” was also recorded between 1907 and 1912 by the British Victorian actors and elocutionists Canon James Fleming,86 Lewis Waller,87 and Henry Ainley.88 According to John R. Bennett’s list of vocal recordings from English catalogues, Waller and Fleming first recorded “Charge” on ten-inch Gramophone and Typewriter Co. Black Label “Concert” records in 1906. (Fleming also recorded Poe’s “The Bells” on two separate records—verses 1–3 on one disc, and verse 4 on another—in the same year.



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