[f_minor] Howard Scott/Frederick Plaut

Mon Oct 8 20:06:47 MDT 2012

That would explain it but why did Scott leave Columbia?

For anyone who has the desire/opportunity to visit Yale University
Irving S Gilmore Music Library:

The Fred and Rose Plaut Collection
MSS 52 - The Frederick and Rose Plaut Papers; 28' 
This
 collection consists of 35,688 photographs of recording artists, actors,
 writers, and statesmen taken by Fred Plaut (1907-1985) while he was a 
Recording Engineer for Columbia Records from the mid-1940s through the 
1970s. Most of the negatives have contact sheets, and there are 3,591 
enlargements. Each shot is listed with a unique number in the register. 
An additional 23,256 negatives (most with contact sheets), 2218 
enlargements, and several hundred slides taken during travels, are not 
catalogued. There is also correspondence to Fred and Rose Plaut (d. Feb.
 1, 1992), a singer, from Francis Poulenc, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, 
Aaron Copland, et al., and publications that have reproductions of Plaut
 photographs. Recording artists (musical and spoken) frequently 
requested Fred Plaut to do their recording. He
 would bring his camera to a recording session and request permission to
 shoot a role of film. All in all 657 persons have been identified, many
 in significant numbers (e.g., Leonard Bernstein 1,170 photographs, Robert Casadesus 437, Glenn Gould 393, Eugene Ormandy 387, Rudolf Serkin 1,283, and Igor Stravinsky 1,343).

There also exists The Fred Plaut Recording Studio at Yale School of Music:
(I hope the link will work)

http://music.yale.edu/fprs/index.html

Fred is the formidable gentleman with moustache and tie who first appears at 02:19:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnPIU4RvELg&feature=related 

Mary

To: f_minor at glenngould.org
From: kpapademas at aol.com
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 20:50:21 -0400
Subject: Re: [f_minor] Howard Scott

Perhaps they stopped working together because Scott went to work for EMI records in 1961 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/arts/music/howard-h-scott-a-developer-of-the-lp-dies-at-92.html?_r=0).

K

-----Original Message-----

From: maryellen jensen <maryellenjensen28 at hotmail.com>

To: f_minor <f_minor at glenngould.org>

Sent: Mon, Oct 8, 2012 6:46 pm

Subject: [f_minor] Howard Scott

Herebelow is part of an e-mail sent to someone in early 2009 regarding Howard Scott and the transfer of recorded music from the 78 rpm format to the LP we all know and love (and which sounds better than a cd):

Though most of the serious engineering problems had been solved by 1947, musical and production ones had yet to be resolved. "Lps had to be spliced together from short play masters and safety transcriptions in a way that the customers heard no record breaks and the factory had to turn out high quality discs in large quantity. Goldmark had designed a splicing machine, but it was not sufficiently accurate. Howard Scott, a musician hired to insure musical accuracy, solved the problem. "Scott's job was difficult because the recorded takes on the master safeties had not been calculated for splicing. Scott's task involved tying together separate 78 rpm records often at musically awkward movements. Moreover, Scott had a problem nobody ever anticipated: to keep the surface noise at a steady level, so that listeners would not be conscious of the different levels of the original disc. Together, Bachman and Scott worked out a cuing system for the engineers. Twelve sections were marked on the circumference of the turntable and numbered to guide the engineers in setting down the stylus. Scott would listen to the ends and beginnings of the sections to be spliced and make appropriate notations on the score. When the time came to set the second turntable in motion, he would call, 'Cue point.' When the time came to set down the stylus, he would call, 'Go!' and snap his fingers. Manual controls faded in the new record and faded out the old one to guarantee a smooth splice and steady surface noise without any switching sound.

On listening today, these splices are as good as those that use tape.

(from Journal of Recorded Music)

                    -------------------------------------------------

 As ''the man behind the music of the LP,'' in his words, he was a founding father of the long-playing record. ''The Record That Changed the Music Business.'' The LP, which made 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, produced 20 minutes of music per side, instead of 4 minutes on the old 78 r.p.m.'s. ''They had tried for seven years to connect music on several 78's -- like Humpty Dumpty,'' said Mr. Scott, who figured out how to splice 78's onto 33 1/3 lacquers, or recording disks. Within a decade, the industry went from $2 million to $3 million a year to $2 to $3 billion, he said. - from the N.Y. Times, 1998

                 --------------------------------

 Glenn Gould had the great good fortune of learning from The Master. No wonder Howard Scott was invited for holidays at Lake Simcoe... What I've been trying to find out is why they stopped working together and when, I still haven't found any documentation explaining this.

                    ----------------------------------------

It really is time to remove Gould from the pedestal - "kits" etc. - he really had nothing to do with 

advancing musical recording (technically) at all. As for preferring Streisand and English Rose 

Pet Clark over Dusty, Sandy Shaw, not to mention the black Divas of the mid to late sixties,...sigh...

I suppose it's simply a matter of taste.   

Mary

check out the rest of the Windows Live™. More than mail–Windows Live™ goes way beyond your inbox. More than messages

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