Claude Debussy died in 1918, at the age of 55: still quite young for a com­pos­er, and still quite ear­ly in the his­to­ry of sound record­ing. This means that, a lit­tle over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we have a great many record­ings of Debussy’s music, but pre­cious few record­ings of Debussy’s music played by the man him­self. Once he accom­pa­nied opera singer Mary Gar­den in the per­for­mance of three mélodies from Ari­ettes oubliées, his cycle based on the poet­ry of Paul Ver­laine. Those record­ings were made in 1904, and sound it. But in his final years, Debussy also pre­served his play­ing with an out­ward­ly more prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy that nev­er­the­less sounds much more pleas­ing today: the piano roll.

Designed to be fed into and auto­mat­i­cal­ly repro­duced by spe­cial­ly engi­neered instru­ments, the piano roll — an ear­ly form of the music media we’ve enjoyed over the past few gen­er­a­tions — was com­mer­cial­ly pio­neered by the Amer­i­can com­pa­ny M. Welte & Sons. “It is impos­si­ble to attain a greater per­fec­tion of repro­duc­tion than that of the Welte appa­ra­tus,” Debussy once wrote to Edwin Welte, co-inven­tor of the fam­i­ly com­pa­ny’s Welte-Mignon Repro­duc­ing Piano.

The four­teen pieces Debussy record­ed for Welte include the Sym­bol­ist- and Impres­sion­ist-inspired “La soirée dans Grenade,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, as well as his most beloved and wide­ly heard work, “Clair de lune.”

Imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able in iso­la­tion, the also Ver­laine-based “Clair de lune” con­sti­tutes one of the four move­ments of the Suite berga­masque. The entire piece was first pub­lished in 1905, but Debussy had actu­al­ly begun its com­po­si­tion fif­teen years before that. The still-fre­quent use of the third move­ment in pop­u­lar cul­ture has, at this point, made it dif­fi­cult to hear the essen­tial qual­i­ties of the piece itself; under such cir­cum­stances, who bet­ter to bring those qual­i­ties out than the com­pos­er him­self? The video at the top of the post presents a repro­duc­tion of “Clair de lune” from the piano roll that Debussy made 109 years ago, the next best thing to hav­ing him at the piano. Enthu­si­asts won­der what Debussy would have writ­ten had he lived longer; hear­ing this, they may also won­der what he would have record­ed had he stuck around for the hi-fi age.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Debussy’s “Clair de lune”: The Clas­si­cal Music Visu­al­iza­tion with 21 Mil­lion Views

A Dancer Pays a Grav­i­ty-Defy­ing Trib­ute to Claude Debussy

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1913

Rach­mani­noff Plays Rach­mani­noff: Three Famous Pieces, 1919–1929

Hear Rav­el Play Rav­el in 1922

Gersh­win Plays Gersh­win: Hear the Orig­i­nal Record­ing of Rhap­sody in Blue, with the Com­pos­er Him­self at the Piano (1924)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The sto­ry of Nir­vana’s first album, first sin­gle, and first video launch­ing the band to instant mega-star­dom, and the sto­ry of their trag­ic crash back down to Earth, have been told too many times to count. Less well known are the years of the band’s ear­ly ascent through the local Pacif­ic North­west scene, open­ing for then-big­ger acts like TAD (who got swept up, then left behind in grunge’s first wave). Nir­vana first formed in 1987 in Aberdeen, WA and played as a few iter­a­tions with names like Fecal Mat­ter and Skid Row, always as a three-piece with Kurt Cobain out front and Krist Novosel­ic on bass.

As they ironed out their image (avoid­ing a law­suit from the Jer­sey hair met­al band), Nir­vana also moved through a cou­ple dif­fer­ent drum­mers behind the kit before luck­ing into Dave Grohl. “Aaron Bur­ck­hard was Nir­vana’s first drum­mer,” writes the Muse­um of Pop Cul­ture, “but he and the band ulti­mate­ly part­ed ways. While the band searched for a replace­ment, Dale Crover helped Nir­vana with their first demo and Dave Fos­ter hon­ored their live book­ings. Chad Chan­ning offi­cial­ly joined Nir­vana in 1988, and the band began work on their debut album Bleach, which was offi­cial­ly released in June of 1989 fol­lowed by a short Amer­i­can tour and a lengthy UK tour.” Just above, you can see them open for TAD on Decem­ber 1, 1989 at Fahren­heit, Issy-les-Moulin­eaux, France.

Signed to Seat­tle indie label Sub Pop at the time, the band was eager for suc­cess but had­n’t quite nailed down their sound. When Nev­er­mind pro­duc­er Butch Vig heard Bleach the fol­low­ing year, after Sub Pop recruit­ed him to work with the band, he “thought it was pret­ty one-dimen­sion­al,” he writes, “except that one song, ‘About a Girl.’ ” Cobain would only say he want­ed the band to sound like “Black Sab­bath.” The label’s Jonathan Pone­man assured Vig that Nir­vana “would be as big as The Bea­t­les,” but that would­n’t hap­pen until Chan­ning left, or felt pushed out. As Vig remem­bers, there was con­sid­er­able “ten­sion between Kurt and Chad” dur­ing their first ses­sions in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin in 1990. “Kurt would some­times go behind the drums and show Chad how to play.” Of course, that’s some­thing the moody Cobain was also known to do to Chan­ning’s replace­ment.

Musi­cal ten­sion did not result in long-term hard feel­ings, Chan­ning says. “I found out what a real­ly nice guy Dave is.” For his part, Grohl has pushed for recog­ni­tion of Chan­ning’s con­tri­bu­tions, object­ing to his exclu­sion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. “Grohl took steps to rec­ti­fy the injus­tice,” notes Far Out Mag­a­zine. “With Chan­ning in atten­dance, Grohl pub­licly applaud­ed and thanked Chan­ning for his vital con­tri­bu­tions to the band, and more crit­i­cal­ly, not­ed that some of Nir­vana’s most icon­ic drum riffs from the peri­od were, in fact, Chan­ning’s.” Hear some of the evi­dence above in a setlist that includes sev­er­al tracks from Bleach, includ­ing “About a Girl,” and “Pol­ly” from the upcom­ing Nev­er­mind. And stick around for TAD, for­got­ten stal­warts of the Seat­tle scene.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Record­ing Secrets of Nirvana’s Nev­er­mind Revealed by Pro­duc­er Butch Vig

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

Nir­vana Refus­es to Fake It on Top of the Pops, Gives a Big “Mid­dle Fin­ger” to the Tra­di­tion of Bands Mim­ing on TV (1991)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Between 1985 and 1988, a teenag­er by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attend­ing punk and post-punk shows around the Wash­ing­ton, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video cam­era he’d bring to the show and let roll, doc­u­ment­ing entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glo­ry. Just a kid try­ing to doc­u­ment a great night out. Habibion might not have known at the time what an impor­tant time cap­sule he was cre­at­ing, but these 60 or so tapes have now been dig­i­tized and uploaded to YouTube, thanks to Roswell Films and the DC Pub­lic Library’s Punk Archive.

“Please keep in mind that I was a teenag­er when I shot these shows,” Habibion writes, “and had zero pro­fi­cien­cy with the equip­ment. And, as you might imag­ine, nobody was doing any­thing with the lights or the sound to make things any bet­ter. What you get here is what was record­ed on my Beta­max and prob­a­bly best appre­ci­at­ed with a bit of gen­eros­i­ty as a view­er.”

High­lights include the above full con­cert by Fugazi on Decem­ber 28, 1987, a year before their first e.p. and play­ing songs that would turn up on their 1990’s clas­sic debut Repeater; Descen­dents in 1987 at the height of their career; The Lemon­heads when they were a punk band and not a pow­er pop group; the insane and hilar­i­ous GWAR from 1988, the year of their debut; and anoth­er home­town punk band, Dain Bra­m­age, which fea­tured Dave Grohl on drums, long before he played with Nir­vana and the Foo Fight­ers (see below).

Habibion went on to his own musi­cal career: first as the front­man for post-hard­core band Edsel, and cur­rent­ly as part of the band SAVAK.

Habibion’s tape archive makes one won­der: who else is out there sit­ting on a trove of his­toric record­ings? And where is that person’s equiv­a­lent of the DC Library? Who would help fund such a project? And who would see the worth of such record­ings? Not only are Habibion’s tapes about the bands them­selves, but they tell a sep­a­rate his­to­ry of music venues come and gone, of a time and place that will nev­er come again. Watch the shows here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.