Recording a 16th-century madrigal on brown wax

[Menophanes]

A few weeks ago I tried something which I have dreamed of for some years: to capture on brown wax the sound of a choir I sing with, a group which specialises in unaccompanied vocal music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The piece we sang into my thirty-inch horn was Fair Phyllis I saw by John Farmer (c. 1570–1601); you can easily find modern performances on YouTube for comparison. The result can be heard (just) on http://www.oliviastationery.co.uk/cylin ... rding.html (about half-way down the page). I have to admit that it is very faint. Twenty-odd singers make rather a large handful for the acoustic process, especially in the hands of a novice like myself; besides, the wax was not really warm enough – I had to abandon the idea of heating it with an old hair-dryer when this, something of a technological relic in its own right, proved to have developed a hideous internal clatter.

I wish some of our experts in recording would try something like this, just to see what the phonograph can do with types of music and ensemble which it would very rarely have encountered in its own day.

Oliver Mundy.