This week’s choice is “Song of Reproduction” by Michael Flanders, set to music by Donald Swann and I have chosen it for the memories and because it’s funny.
All the highest notes
Michael Flanders (1922—1975), music by Donald Swann (1923—1994)
Neither sharp nor flat
The ear can’t hear as high as that!
Still I ought to please any passing bat!
With my high fidelity.
Poem 391. Song of Reproduction
I had a little gramophone
I’d wind it round and round
And with a sharpish needle
It made a cheerful sound
And then they amplified it
It was much louder then
And you sharpened finer needles
To make it soft again
Today for reproduction
I′m as eager as can be
Count me among the faithful fans
Of high-fi-de-li-ty
High fidelity
Hi-fi’s the thing for me
With an LP disc and an FM set
And a corner reflex cabinet
High frequency range
Complete with autochange
All the highest notes
Neither sharp nor flat
The ear can’t hear as high as that!
Still I ought to please any passing bat!
With my high fidelity.
Michael Flanders, speaking over Donald Swann’s piano playing:
Who made this circuit up for you anyway?
Bought it in a shop?
Ooh what a horrible shoddy job they fobbed you off with.
Surprised they let you have it in this room anyway—
The acoustics are all wrong—
If you raise the ceiling four feet,
Put the fireplace from that wall to that wall,
You’ll still only get the stereophonic effect if you sit in the bottom of that cupboard!
I see you’ve got your negative feedback coupled in with your push-pull input-output
Take that across through your red-head pick-up to your tweeter
If you′re modding more than 8,
You’re gonna get wow on your top.
Try to bring that down through your preamp rumble filter to your woofer
What’ll you get?
Flutter on your bottom!
They both sing:
High fidelity
FFRR for me
I′ve an opera here that you shan’t escape
On miles and miles of recording tape.
High decibel gain
Is easy to obtain
With the tone control at a single touch
‘Bel Canto’ sounds like ‘Double Dutch’
Then I never did care for music much
It’s the High Fidelity!
This is another song that was played frequently in my childhood from the “At the Drop of a Hat” LP my parents owned. They had been to see Flanders and Swann in the follow-up revue “At the Drop of Another Hat” so this is a strong link to them both and I can imagine them sitting in the audience and laughing at Michael Flanders’s witticisms and enjoying Donald Swann’s wonderful piano playing.
The song itself parodies the new craze (new for the 1950s that is) for high fidelity audio reproduction. Flanders usually introduced it by saying rather apologetically that the title might be a little ‘near the bone’ if misinterpreted, but that the song was for the audiophile community. As a side note here, I am reminded of the wonderful introductions to the “Pick-up Song” round in I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue when Humph, perfectly deadpan as ever, would deliver the most incredible double entendres, the work of Iain Pattinson:
DJ Samantha has kindly got my reproduction equipment out and plugged it in. On the front is a large knob which at my command she will twist firmly in an anticlockwise direction causing the volume to drop while the teams sing along.
It begins with the singers reminiscing about their old gramophones: the kind you powered by turning a handle, with a sharp needle to pick up the music from the record. Technology, as ever, moves on—“And then they amplified it/It was much louder then”—and so they had to sharpen the needles even more to pick out the music from the noise. Most lyrics sites render this as “And you sharpened fibre needles/To make it soft again” but this doesn’t make much sense, since fibres aren’t generally that easy to sharpen—”finer needles” is what they actually sang.
The audiophile of the 1950s was spoiled by comparison, with the advent of transistor-based electronic audio equipment bringing many innovations: FM (frequency modulated) radio stations and LP (long-playing) records; “a corner reflex cabinet” to boost the bass end of the “high-frequency range” and “autochange” for those who wanted to play several records without the bother of changing them over—the basis for jukeboxes and the genesis of the playlist. Flanders begins to mock the audio enthusiasts a little here, suggesting that the frequencies produced by their amplifiers extend well beyond the range of the human ear, but that the local bat population will enjoy it. The words “High Fidelity” are sung to the tune of “Hi-diddle-dee-dee” from the Walt Disney film Pinocchio, by the way.
The next part of the song is spoken by Flanders over the top of Swann’s piano playing, and he parodies the geeky audiophile, whose snobbery excludes all laymen and is an armchair expert on all things sonic, suggesting that only by completely remodelling the music room (and the house) can perfect enjoyment be experienced.
Flanders’s audiophile goes on to criticise the configuration of the audio equipment, introducing a couple of suggestive remarks in the process: “You’re going to get wow on your top” being a perfectly innocent statement that the listener will hear a sort of warbling effect in the upper registers of their audio, and “Flutter on your bottom” being a similar effect at the bass end; both of these sallies were received by the audiences with rather knowing laughter, and we circle back to Humph and his reproduction equipment.
The last verse extols the splendours of “FFRR”—Decca’s Full Frequency Range Recording technique—before going on (slightly ominously) to offer the experience of listening to an opera on “miles and miles of recording tape”—presumably Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a full performance of which can be 15 hours long…
We finish with a slight barb suggesting that to the audiophile, the music is far less important than the quality of the audio: “With the tone control at a single touch/’Bel Canto’ sounds like ‘Double Dutch’/Then I never did care for music much/It’s the High Fidelity!” (Bel Canto is Italian for “beautiful singing” and refers to an Italian vocal style that prevailed between the 18th and 19th centuries, so making it sound like Double Dutch (or as I’ve always understood it, Donald Duck) is a travesty that could only be perpetrated by the sort of person who prizes their equipment’s capabilities over the art that it is reproducing. I’m beginning to sound like Humph reading a double entendre, so I should probably wrap it up now, so to speak.
I like it because it is just as applicable to the technology nerds of today as it was to the audiophiles of the 1950s, I like it because although it mocks these people, it does it gently and without malice, and I like it because it reminds me of listening to Flanders and Swann on my parents’ record player when I was young(er).