I think that the absence so far of any answer to Jack's query means simply that the subject is so vast that nobody knows where to begin. I too am deeply interested in it and have been so for fifty years or more, but the amount of information I have been able to gather is miserably scanty. For example, one would think that the musical directors of the Gramophone & Typewriter/Gramophone Company major recording studios would be fairly significant people in the musical world and thus easily identifiable, but to this day I cannot put a name to those who held this office in London (up to the appointment of George Byng in 1915), in Paris or in Vienna. (If anyone does know, I wish they would tell!) Bruno Seidler-Winkler officiated in Berlin from at least 1907 and Carlo Sabajno in Milan from 1904; both were musicians of real stature who continued to work far into the electrical era. I think I have read somewhere that Seidler-Winkler wrote an autobiography, which should be an incomparable historical source, but I have never seen it, discovered its title or met with any quotation from it. Of course we know of Landon Ronald (later Sir Landon), a very distinguished conductor, who was closely associated with G&T and its successor in London from 1900 onwards (initially as pianist), but I do not know of his acting as orchestral accompanist to singers except in isolated instances such as Melba's first recording session in March 1904.
On a less exalted level, a competent violinist named Victor Opferman did some work as both conductor and soloist on Edison-Bell cylinders in the 1900s. Twenty years later he appears as leader/conductor on Homochord discs.
We know a little more about conditions at the Victor studios in America. The diaries of Raymond Sooy, who joined Victor's technical staff in 1903 (
http://www.davidsarnoff.org/soo-maintext.html) identify the band-leader and composer Arthur Pryor as Victor's first musical director, perhaps as early as 1903. Sooy says that initially the 'orchestra' numbered only seven or so. Later house conductors included, successively, Walter Rogers, Josef Pasternack and Rosario Bourdon; all were, again, fully qualified musicians, and Rogers had had some opera-house experience. Unfortunately all these conductors, presumably acting on instructions received, seem to have emasculated their orchestras by eliminating almost all the brass along with timpani, oboes and lower strings, so that all one hears is a shapeless, colourless humming whose only virtue is that it does not get in the way of the voice. British and European orchestras are usually less incomplete, though also frequently less polished.
Orchestral accompaniments of some kind existed before 1900. I have a Columbia slow-speed brown-wax cylinder of the Armourer's Song from Reginald de Koven's
Robin Hood, sung by J.W. Myers with what sounds like substantial instrumental support, but the cylinder is too faint to allow me to establish whether this was a true orchestra, with strings, or only a military band; the word 'Orchestra' was constantly misapplied by the early companies. There are isolated examples on Berliner discs too.
Stanley Chapple, musical director to the Aeolian company in London, contributed an article to the newly-founded magazine
The Gramophone in 1923, giving some details of his methods and a diagram of how the instruments were placed. Unfortunately it is many years since I read this.
Wynn Reeves, second violin in the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1920s, left some notes describing a recording session in the acoustic era, and these are quoted in
The LSO At 70 by Maurice Pearton (1974). Reeves says that there were only two first violins and one second – and this in an extract from Wagner's
Ring!
These are just a few scattered snippets from what I have been able to learn over the years; and of course I have not even touched on the question of orchestral accompaniments outside the classical and operatic fields. I do hope others in our group will have something to add.
Oliver Mundy.