Webster Wire Recorder

Wolfgang Ernst
Tight-Rope Act

Two sounds from the past, one long silenced, the other still with us. When in the mid-1930s the Harvard anthropologist Milman Parry investigated the South Yugoslavian unwritten memorizing techniques of epic singers (the Guslari) as a living analogy to Homer’s ancient songs, it was sound recordings that formed the actual basis for the resulting theory that the hour-long oral tales were regenerated for each occasion from a stock of existing formulae.¹ “Even Homer’s rose-fingered Eos was thus a goddess transformed into a piece of chromium dioxide that was stored in the memory of the rhapsodes and could be combined with other material to create entire epics.”²

Around 1950, Parry’s assistant Albert Lord returned to the scene to repeat some of the first recordings with the same singers. But this time he used a new technology, a magnetic recording on steel wire. This wire recorder is not a phonograph, which, as the name suggests, is part of the tradition of technical (cultural) recordings, but instead transforms the sound memory into a different physical state. The process of electromagnetic recording and reproduction is, however, not a continuation of writing in a new form,³ but rather a fundamentally different and genuine technical media event born of the very nature of electricity.

In September 2006, I suddenly found myself holding such a device, a 1948 technological dinosaur in the form of the wire recorder by the Webster company of Chicago. I immediately recalled Lord’s recording, and, more intuitively than anything else, set off the next day with the wire recorder in my luggage for the Serbian town of Novi Pazar, one of the places where Parry and Lord had made their recordings. My aim was to play back, to re-play, to the local culture its memories from the sound recordings using the same device. The local radio and television station in Novi Pazar phoned around until they tracked down one of the last surviving Guslari in the remote mountains. At the end of the village we came across the singer chopping wood in front of his house – as in a scene from Homer.

When the singer, Hamdo, sang into the wire recorder microphone accompanied by his Gusle, a knee-held violin, looking directly into my eyes, I was overcome with a sudden and double astonishment. Firstly, the singer: although this moment was one of a symbolic configuration, a combination of body, epic and instrument, what I was seeing and hearing was not a sound machine but rather the power of an individual in the state of poetry; a culture that at this moment rose up above all symbolic and technical mechanisms and – although a function of the latter – transcended them. At the same time I was overcome by the impression that took the almost surrealist proximity of the Gusle and the wire recorder and created a new image: the mysterious correspondence between the string that was being bowed and the recording wire.

The most human aspect was expressed precisely in the playing of the instrument, and it was the wire recorder that recorded exactly this momentum: the circle of vibrations in technology and poetry was thus complete. Thus the most human was at the same time the most inhuman – precisely the coldest media archaeology ear was listening to the most magical of all sound machines.

Footnotes:

1 See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass., London 20012, with a CD of recorded examples.

2 Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon – Film – Typewriter, Berlin 1986, p. 15.

3 See Wolfgang Ernst, Homer gramm(at)ophon, in: ibid., Friedrich Kittler (ed.), Die Geburt des Vokalalphabets aus dem Geist der Poesie, Munich 2006.