Meet the father of all music piracy – National

Because God quickly realized that humans were a thieving bunch, He made rules against stealing one of the first things downloaded to Moses’ tablet 1,500 years ago: “Thou shalt not steal.” It’s ranked at number four on the list of things we’re not supposed to do, so it’s pretty clear that this was important to The Almighty: Don’t take stuff that’s not yours.

Lionel Mapleson didn’t think he was stealing. When he did what he did, it wasn’t stealing. Only later did history brand Mapleson as the father of all music piracy.

Mapleson came from a long line of music librarians who can be traced to the 1700s. Before moving from London to New York in 1889, where he hoped to become a great concert musician, his father trained him in the finer points of the occupation. Good thing, too, because six years in, it was clear Mapleson wasn’t cutout to be a top-level performer. His fall back position was a gig as the librarian at the newly formed Metropolitan Opera.

In early 1900, he bought a newfangled Edison Talking Machine — a phonograph — so he could listen to the newest thing: Recordings of performances scratched into wax cylinders. A friend then recommended that he purchase a Bettini Micro-Reproducer, a phonograph-style machine that could also record audio onto four-to-six-inch-long cylinders as well as play them back. It was about the size of a suitcase, so it was reasonably portable.

“You want a perfect reproduction without any metallic resonance, screeches, or blasts?” said the ads. “Then buy the Bettini Micro-Reproducer for the clearest and loudest made! A novice can make a perfect record!”

The machine would soon win a gold medal for innovation at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Mapleson picked one up for $30 (equivalent to $1,000 today) on March 17, 1900.

On March 22, he wrote this in his diary: “For the present, I neither work properly nor eat nor sleep. I’m a phonograph maniac!! Always making or buying records. The Bettini apparatus is simply perfect.”

His family became used to Mapleson recording them at home as he captured everyday audio, keeping some cylinders and recycling others by carefully shaving out the groves. Mapleson had become one of the original recorders of home audio.

As a librarian and archivist, he also realized the Bettini’s potential; he had the ability — and the access — to record performances from the Met’s stage for posterity. Then, after letting his bosses at the Met know what he had planned, he got to work. On Jan. 16, 1901, he recorded Nellie Melba in an opera entitled Le Cid. He set up the Bettini in the prompter’s box, a booth in front of the stage where someone sat to remind actors of their lines when they blanked.

But the audio he captured from that vantage point wasn’t very good, so Mapleson nested on a catwalk maybe 40 feet above the stage and the orchestra. A large horn was hung on the Met’s fly system — the network of ropes and pulleys used to raise and lower curtains and scenery — to funnel as much sound as possible to the Bettini.

For the next couple of years, Mapleson recorded dozens, maybe hundreds, of performances two minutes at a time (that was a cylinder’s maximum capacity), keeping the good ones and recycling cylinders when the gig didn’t live up to his standards. No one complained except for the occasional member of the audience who was annoyed that the Bettini’s horn interfered with sightlines.

Some of Mapleson’s recordings were surprisingly clear considering the technology of the time. Others were muffled, crackly, and tough on the ears. But they all had one thing in common: They documented music of the era at one of the most famous venues in the world. He also managed to capture some famous singers and conductors who never had a chance to make a formal commercial recording.

Here’s a sample.

Mapleson was keen to share his experiments, often inviting singers, conductors, and musicians to listen to what they had done.

Mapleson’s semi-secret recording practices suddenly ended in 1904, perhaps because someone somewhere realized the commercial value of such cylinders. Maybe it was the Met demanding that their employee stop freelancing for himself so it could make and sell such recordings. Maybe some artists complained, realizing that their talent and labour was being used without their permission. Or maybe he just got bored.

By the time he packed up his machine, Mapleson had a library of maybe 140 of these very fragile cylinder recordings. Others were given away as gifts or thrown out. When he died of a heart attack on Dec. 21, 1937, no one quite knew what to do with them.

William Seltsam, the head of the International Record Collectors Club, had met with Mapleson earlier in 1937 and was given a challenge: Do something with these blasted things. After borrowing 124 cylinders from the family, Seltsam tinkered with things until he was able to slowly move the audio to 1o-inch 78 RPM records.

Those recordings have since been issued and reissued many times, including on CD, most recently with digital techniques that screened out the static and scratchiness.

Long-lost cylinders still occasionally turn up. Some were found in a junk store in Brooklyn. Others were acquired by collectors. A couple were located in Mexico. The family, which had been sitting on about 16 cylinders for decades, donated them and about 50 journals documenting their contents and other events on Mapleson’s life to the New York Public Library for study. They were found in a beer cooler that had lived under a recliner on Long Island.

But back to the issue of piracy. Was Mapleson the equivalent of someone making an illicit recording of a concert today? Not really, because when he was doing his thing, sound recordings were not yet covered by copyright and intellectual property laws. The technology of audio recording was so new that the legal codes had yet to recognize that making unauthorized recordings (and distributing them) as something that should be filed under “Thou shalt not steal.” American sound recording copyright laws weren’t settled until 1972.

It’s unfair, then, to include Mapleson in the parade of characters who have taken and/or distributed other people’s music without their permission. He wasn’t exactly Napster, Limewire, The Pirate Bay or Megaupload, but he’s definitely in the family tree.

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