01	Gustav Holst / 1st Suite in E Flat: Chaconne						04:41
	02	-Intermezzo						02:51
	03	-March						02:55
	04	Gustav Holst / 2nd Suite in F: March						04:24
	05	-Song without Words						02:42
	06	-Song of the Blacksmith						01:22
	07	-Fantasia on the ""Dargason""						03:02
	08	Bach / Fantasia in G Major						05:45
	09	George Frederick Handel / The Royal Fireworks: Ouverture						06:48
	10	-Bouree						01:36
	11	-La Paix						02:03
	12	-La Rejouissance						02:04
	13	-Minuet/Trio						03:28

Frederick Fennell was responsible for making recording industry history when he made the very first digital recording with Telarc in 1978. It was to be the first commercial classical recording produced in the United States, and it helped to launch the technology worldwide. World Book Encyclopedia’s Yearbook for 1978 tagged the recording as “the bass drum heard ‘round the world,” as it showcased the advantages of the new digital technology and Telarc’s unique recording style. The release captured a huge audience of audio fans around the world. Featuring Gustav Holst’s Suite for Wind Ensemble (CD-80038), Cleveland, Ohio native Fennell conducted a hand-picked group of musicians, most all members of the Cleveland Orchestra, for this historic project. In 1983 with the launch of CDs, it would be also become one of the first recordings to be released in that format as well.

Recorded at Severance Hall in April 1978, the Cleveland Symphonic Winds bring the brilliance of 18th century composers Holst, Handel, and Bach to the 20th century. They coax 200-year-old ideas off the pages of music using a well-balanced combination of dexterity and lung capacity. The sounds produced by the air that resonates through the instruments of the Cleveland Symphonic Winds are simply breathtaking.

Gustav Holst’s Two Suites for Military Band are like the mortar that binds the building blocks of military band instrumentation since the end of World War II. Modern compositions are often held together by familiar melodic ideas from these pieces.

Fantasia in G, originally composed by Bach, has been arranged here by Richard Franko Goldman. Intended for the performance resources of ""today’s large wind band—a sort of living organ from which the necessary continuous outpouring of sound is limited only by the skill with which the players provide the breath that produces it.""

The Music for the Royal Fireworks was composed by Handel to celebrate the 1748 Peace of Aix-La-Chapelle. However, the celebratory fireworks accidentally ignited and consumed in flames, all that was prepared for the occasion. Regarded as one of the best pieces ever written for winds, it was incidentally arranged for orchestras due to the inferiority of the organized wind bands of Handel’s time.

“The Bass Drum Heard `Round the World”: Telarc, Frederick Fennell, and an Overture to Digital Recording

by Tracy Eddy

Over the past twenty years, the compact disc has become the primary format for recorded music. Compact disc players have replaced turntables and tape decks in most of our homes and automobiles, and the development of digital audio has made the crisp and authentic quality of CD recordings we now enjoy possible. The first commercial digital classical recording in the United States was Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Symphonic Winds’ performance of Holst: Suite No.1 & 2, Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks and Bach: Fantasia in G for Telarc Records in 1978. Five years later, the recording also was one of the first to be released in the new digital format, and it would help to launch the technology to audiences worldwide.

Telarc, founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1977 by Jack Renner and Robert Woods, both of whom were classically trained musicians and educators, made its first two recordings in the then-typical direct-to-disc format. At the same time, Renner and Woods were inspired by the new digital recording technology of Tom Stockham’s Salt Lake City-based Soundstream, Inc., the first commercial digital recording company in the United States. Stockham, whom Renner calls “the father of digital signal processing,” had developed a 16-bit digital audio recorder using a high speed instrument magnetic tape recorder and demonstrated the recordings at the fall of 1976 AES convention. Renner and Woods formed a partnership with Stockham. They requested that he increase his digital system’s high frequency response, from 17 kHz to 22.5 kHz at a sampling rate of 50 kHz, an unprecedented level. Renner and Woods committed completely to digital earlier than all the major labels, placing Telarc on the cutting edge of recording technology. As Woods recalled, “The digital recordings we made were a nightmare to master for LPs, but we knew it was the only way to create the realism of live performance that had just become technically possible.”

Renner and Woods decided that their first digital project must be something with, as Renner recalled, “Something really spectacular, with great dynamic range.” They also needed a conductor to help coordinate the project, and quickly contacted Frederick Fennell, a Cleveland native and musical innovator in his own right. Fennell had founded the Eastman Wind Ensemble in 1952 at the University of Rochester in New York, where he created its prolific high-fidelity and stereo recording program with Mercury Records. For his conducting work, he is credited in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for bringing about a “complete reconsideration of the wind medium.” His expressive and often innovative arrangements generated new interest and respect for band music, and transformed music programs in schools across the United States. Renner and Woods offered Fennell the opportunity to re-record some of his Eastman Wind Ensemble hits with sections of the Cleveland Orchestra, and he eagerly accepted.

The program featured Gustav Holst’s two Suites for Military Band, which Fennell considered part of the foundation for American band music. For the performances, he had the opportunity to consult the Suites’ holograph scores, which had surfaced for the first time in 1977. For Song of the Blacksmith, he also used the same anvil as his family had used in their Cleveland shop during Fennell’s childhood, lending what he called “a familiar sound.” The program also included Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, and Bach’s Fantasia in G.

The recording introduced The Cleveland Symphonic Winds, which included the entire reed-brass-percussion section of The Cleveland Orchestra, and a few local professional musicians needed to complete the instrumentation. Fennell lauded this repertory as “one of the few times in the history of professional symphonic recording [a group of such caliber has ever performed in the United States].” The performances that took place on 4-5 April 1978 in Severance Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra’s home, were captured on a Soundstream Digital Tape Recorder by Schoeps Colette Series microphones. That year, World Book Encyclopedia’s Yearbook called the recording “the bass drum heard ‘round the world,” in reference to the distinctive percussion featured in Holst’s Suites.

After several years of research and collaboration, a joint taskforce of engineers from Sony and Philips produced the “Red Book,” the standard format for the audio disc, in 1981. When compact discs finally reached the commercial market in 1983, the Telarc and Fennell collaboration would become one of the first recordings released in the digital format, which continues to be the standard for audio recording. It is still available on the Telarc label (ASIN: B000003CSE). Telarc continues to produce recordings in many different genres, including classical, jazz and blues. Its editors still work at the company’s Cleveland production studios. The company was sold to Concord Records in 2005.

Tom Stockham contributed to the fields of digital commercial sound recording and editing until his death in 2004. His accomplishments were recognized with an Emmy (1988), the first technical Grammy (1994), and a Scientific /Engineering Academy Award (1999).

Frederick Fennell continued his prolific career, making other recordings with the Cleveland Symphonic Winds and the Eastman Symphonic Wind Ensemble. In addition to his thirty-year association with Eastman, he served as Associate Music Director of the Minneapolis Symphony and Conductor in Residence of at the University of Miami. Fennell died at the age of 90 on 7 December 2004 at his home in Siesta Key, Florida, USA. His legacy lives on, not only in his contributions to musical recording history, but in the estimated 20,000 wind ensembles in American schools which his work in the wind medium helped to create.

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"The Fred Fennell story is about the bass drum beater. The bass drum belonged to TCO and is/was fabulous. Two other people were involved besides Jack Renner and Frederick Fennell, and that was Stan Ricker (crazy disc mastering genius) and Bob Woods.

They wanted a powerful tight sound for the big whop at the start of the last movement of the Holst and none of the beaters were cutting it. Fred still had family in Cleveland Heights and they went there on a mission with him to find an old bed frame ornament-a solid wood ball about the size of a baseball -and hard as a rock. Fred drilled it for the drum stick, covered it with leather and it made the perfect sound.

Stan Ricker was with them to do a lot of things, and one thing he was great at was tuning bass drum heads-to get rid of the spurious frequencies and get a clear and solid fundamental-hard to do when you are working down at frequencies that low (somewhere around 20hZ or lower). He also instructed them, and they coerced the musicians, to turn the instrument perpendicular to the front of the stage and tilted down toward the floor at about 45 degrees. That way-since they still had to cut the signal to LPs-there would be no out of phase reflections that would make the cutting head rise up out of the groove. The result was what the Encyclopedia Britannia 1978 Yearbook called "The bass drum heard 'round the world”.

That is the story and the process to know they needed a better bass drum beater and find one was probably more like a 2-3 day "gotta sort this out quick" kind of thing."