Music: Music on Film

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Ever since cinema began to record musical accompaniments in soundtracks on the edge of film, it has been a question whether music on films would replace music on discs. Most obvious advantages of film records over wax records: 1) no surface noise or record wear; 2) simplification of storage problems (film is lighter, less bulky); 3) whole symphonies and operas can be played without stopping to flip a record or change a needle. As in cinema recording, music films can be cut and patched, their wrong notes erased, their sour ones replaced. Unlike phonograph discs, they can even be played backwards, which is said to improve some modern compositions.

So far, the big U. S. recording companies have been too busy improving the fidelity of discs to worry about film. But last fortnight London's Society for Cultural Relations with the U. S. S. R. showed Londoners that the Soviet Government had been pioneering in film records. At the Academy Movie Theatre 5,000 feet of Soviet musical film were unreeled, reproducing Shostakovich's entire Fifth Symphony, a Song of Jubilation by 40-year-old Soviet Composer Alexander Veprik, a scattering of shorter compositions.

Disadvantages of U. S. music films at present: 1) Their fidelity is poorer than that of the best discs; 2) the mechanism which plays them makes a noise; 3) high price of film makes film recordings four to eight times as expensive as phonograph discs. A more important obstacle: a sudden change from disc to film recording would dislocate the $36,000,000 record business, make all present phonographs, record collections and recording apparatus obsolete.