26 Mark Marrington
early in her career when engineer Marc Aubort undertook to train her in
recording techniques. This enabled her to successfully straddle the line
between a more conventional musically focused producer role and that of
the studio technician (Fremer, 2010). In particular, Nickrenz was highly
skilled in the area of editing – that is, the splicing and cutting together of
multiple takes of performances – a process requiring acute aural aware-
ness and considerable precision. Remarking on her editing ability, William
Bolcom, a pianist who worked with Nickrenz on a number of recordings
for Nonesuch, described her as an “absolute whiz . . . probably the best in
the business” (Harvith and Harvith, 1987: 306). Nickrenz’s consummate
skill as an editor was a reflection of her general view that recordings stood
as a permanent record of an artist’s capabilities and therefore ought to be
as technically perfect as possible. Joan Morris summed up Nickrenz’s pro-
duction philosophy in the following terms:
They really go for technical perfection. “Well,” Jo says, “you know
you’re going to be listening to this for the next seventy-ve years. If
that note’s a little sharp and you don’t bother about it – ‘Oh, I’m too
tired to do it’ – that’s going to bother you for seventy-ve years. You
might as well, if you can, have it as perfect as possible”.
(Harvith and Harvith, 1987: 296)
While such a detail-oriented approach to the construction of recordings
can be seen (relative to the era) as a more progressive recording philoso-
phy, at least where classical music was concerned, in other respects the
Nickrenz-Aubort team erred on the side of tradition in their audiophile
recording aesthetics. For example, the Nonesuch team took a similar
approach to Mercury in their insistence upon minimal miking and the use
of concert halls and churches with high-quality acoustics to make their
recordings (Horowitz, 1973; Fremer, 2010).
In contrast, Sniderman took a more progressive attitude towards record-
ing classical music, preferring the studio environment to location record-
ing and willing to use the technological resources of the studio (such as
artificial reverberation and tape splicing) to shape her productions. Her
most significant (and controversial) recording, which was also a bench-
mark in large-scale classical music production for the era, was the 14-LP
set of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas, recorded (between 1975 and
1977) by the Vienna-born Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti (b. 1938). For
the recording, Sniderman close-miked the piano,
in an acoustically dead studio just large enough to contain Kuerti and
his piano. The dry sound was passed through an echo chamber on its
way to the tape, then fed back to Kuerti through the headphones as he
played.
(Hathaway, 1977: 253)
This unusual approach, which had more in common with popular music
recording aesthetics, was seized upon by some critics as a travesty. For
27 Women in Music Production
example, reviewing the discs in 1977, Thomas Hathaway claimed that the
dead studio environment robbed the instrument of the acoustic resources
necessary to accurately portray its colors, while the effects distorted the
balance of frequencies and made the instrument sound too close. He also
argued that the set-up influenced Kuerti’s performance style in a nega-
tive manner, producing dynamic emphases where they were not necessary.
This was a minority perspective, however and elsewhere Sniderman’s
innovative production approach was held in high esteem by the audiophile
recording community, as evidenced by a cable she received from the pre-
eminent European classical recording label of the era, Deutsche Grammo-
phon, congratulating her on her achievement (Dzeguze, 1979). Sniderman
also received a Juno Award for the Kuerti recordings in 1978.
DISCUSSION: HISTORICAL FACT AND
CONTEMPORARY OPINION
My aim in the preceding commentary has been to foreground the careers of
some of the most widely accomplished, but largely undocumented, female
record producers of the last century, with a view to providing a founda-
tional narrative for contextualizing the writing on the subject that has
emerged since the 1990s. In one sense, this is intended to serve the general
purpose of augmenting the existing accounts of women’s presence within
the narrative of music production history. For example, the information
in this chapter might usefully complement Barbara Jepson’s 1991 article
on the situation of women in the classical recording industry, bridging
the careers of Cozart, Laursen, and Nickrenz (who are also acknowledged
by Jepson) with their younger contemporaries, such as Judith Sherman,
Elizabeth Ostrow, and Elaine Martone. Or it may function to expand on
the tidbits of information concerning the earlier history of record produc-
tion, as exemplified by Susan Schmidt-Horning’s pioneering 2013 history
Chasing Sound, which, within its own remit, can only give brief attention
to Mary Howard’s activities in the 1940s or the achievements of Wilma
Cozart in the 1950s.
It may also reveal the shortcomings of the extant historical accounts of
music production, which in general have not taken the broad approach to
the field necessary to capture the presence of its female participants. Part
of the problem relates to the fact that much of the writing on the subject,
whether couched in historical or theoretical terms, has tended to delimit
the field to the territory of popular music, which itself is defined narrowly
in reference to a mostly male canon of iconic producers. Hence, as will
have been observed in the cases of those women working in specialist
or fringe areas such as jazz and easy listening – namely Helen Oakley
Dance, Helen Keane, and Ethel Gabriel – it has been necessary to consult
a range of disparate sources in order to piece together the circumstances
of their careers. Classical recording has also been largely excluded from
the music production studies literature, with the exception of historical
accounts such as Gelatt (1977) or Day (2000)
24
and autobiographical com-
mentaries such as Gaisberg (1942), Culshaw (1982), and Schwarzkopf
28 Mark Marrington
(1982). In general, there has been little systematic documentation of
the work of classical producers per se, which may reflect the common
assumption that in classical recording the producer role, by contrast to
the ‘producer-as-creative-agent’ perspective that is widely recognized in
popular music (see Moorefield, 2005), is not usually elevated above the
artist and the musical interpretation.
The survey has also drawn attention to particular themes that might
be profitably explored in further research. In particular, as this chapter
has shown, a number of the women discussed – Olive Bromhall, Isabella
Wallich, Wilma Cozart, Eleanor Sniderman, Joanna Nickrenz, and Patti
Laursen – all worked as producers in the field of classical music. This has
been an area of record production in which women have clearly been able
to flourish and make important contributions, but this fact that has so far
received little acknowledgement. As Patti Laursen noted, in her response
to Chuck Philips’ 1993 article highlighting the ongoing problem of the
accessibility of the record business to women:
In Chuck Philips’ excellent article on the growing number of women
in executive positions in the recording industry (“You’ve Still Got a
Long Way to Go, Baby,” April 18), and thank goodness for that, he did
not mention, nor perhaps know, that the leader in this area has been
the classical recording industry. . . . Perhaps our abilities and profes-
sional dedication helped top label executives understand that women
have made, and are making, a signicant contribution. The recording
industry will be the richer for it.
(1993: 83)
The reasons for the apparent success of female record producers in the
classical field clearly merit further exploration, and there are certainly
indications in the earlier literature as to the directions this potentially
might take. Comments made by certain interviewees in Jepson (1991),
for example, suggest that classical recording environments may have gen-
erally been more hospitable to female producers. Judith Sherman, while
acknowledging that the industry is competence-oriented, states that: “The
only time I feel a rub is when I go into a pop studio – in the pop world,
women are a commodity” (1991: 345), while Alison Ames comments that
“We’re better off in the classical side than rock and roll” (1991: 344).
These are qualified statements, in that Jepson’s article acknowledges that
the industry ethos at the time of writing was generally challenging for
women. However, it indicates that there are potential differences in studio
culture based upon genre that obviously should not be ignored when con-
sidering these issues.
On a related point, it is also hoped that the foregoing survey might usefully
inform the reading of gender studies accounts (usually focusing on popular
music) that have tended to problematize male-gendered studio culture (see,
for example, Bayton, 1998; Leonard, 2007)). The culmination of this cri-
tique in the recent writing of Wolfe (2012, 2019) is to advocate a re-location
29 Women in Music Production
from such culture into situations of individualized ‘self-production’ in
order “to disrupt the gendering that, historically, has taken place within the
field” (2019: 24). What the historical record demonstrates, however, is that
women have been able to function successfully within the traditional studio
context, many of them working in productive collaborative relationships
with their (usually) male engineering colleagues, whose expertise they har-
nessed in the service of their production visions. Furthermore, the various
women discussed in this chapter have not indicated (at least as far as what
they have put on record about their careers is concerned) that they were
intimidated by the technological context within which they were working.
Rather, like their male counterparts, they were stimulated by it and made
a success of their careers by using the available technological resources as
a vehicle for achieving their creative production goals. Certainly no one
would deny that circumstances of their music production activities were
to varying degrees conditioned by the gender-based distribution of studio
roles that obtained during the era in which they were working, and it would
be naive to suggest that entrenched values concerning gender did not in par-
ticular cases throw up significant obstacles to career progress (as directly
experienced by Mary Howard with the NBC union example). At the same
time, however, an over-reliance on reductionist hegemonical interpretations
of gendered power to evaluate the nature and scope of their contributions
may obscure the importance of their very considerable achievements. As
the successes of these women clearly illustrate, the recording industry can-
not have been an entirely unassailable male fortress.
To summarize, women were active in the recording industry in a range
of capacities as early as the 1890s, and this was by no means a peripheral
or tentative development: the women in question were highly successful
and influential in the field. In several of the cases discussed, they contrib-
uted significantly to the evolution of recording practice with their ideas on
production and their willingness to innovate with emerging technologies
for recording. Given the current high-pitched rhetoric that continues to
problematize the recording industry’s attitude towards women, one could
be forgiven for assuming that the pioneering work to establish women
within the field was just now beginning. As this survey has demonstrated,
however, this is far from the case, and it is hoped that the preceding attempt
to re-write the aforementioned women into the received history of record
production will provide a useful basis for future research.
NOTES
1. See Western (2018) for an insightful essay on the ways in which eld record-
ing can be regarded as a unique area of early music production practice.
2. Fletcher was assisted in her recording projects by Francis La Flesche (1857–
1932), a notable professional Native American ethnomusicologist.
3. Major collections of Boulton’s recordings are housed at Columbia and Har-
vard Universities.
30 Mark Marrington
4. The use of wax cylinders remained popular with eld recordists working in
the 1930s due to the portability of the recording equipment. In her autobiog-
raphy (1969: 17), Boulton wrote: “To have preserved anything at all with that
early equipment was something of a miracle”.
5. Henrietta Yurchenco pioneered eld recording in Mexico in the 1940s. Origi-
nally trained as a pianist, Yurchenco had begun her career as a broadcaster on
New York radio station WNYC, where she had gained a reputation for ‘weird’
programming, in reference to her playlists of American folk and world music.
In 1941 she left this position to take up residence in Mexico with her husband
Basil Yurchenco, and over the next few years toured that country and Gua-
temala for recording opportunities with local tribes (Hart and Kostyal, 2003;
Yurchenco, 2003).
6. Later sources refer to Howard by her married name, Pickhardt.
7. See Sutton (2018) for a succinct summary of Howard’s career.
8. See Schmidt-Horning (1999) for a fascinating interview in which Plunkett
discusses his time working with Howard.
9. The Chittison and Waters recordings can currently be heard in remastered
versions on The Chronological Classics: Herman Chittison 1945–1950
(Classics 1334) and The Chronological Classics: Ethel Waters 1946–1947
(Classics 1249).
10. They were commercially released in the 100th Anniversary box set of Ives’
works in 1974 (Columbia Masterworks M4 32504).
11. This expression came from a New York critic’s comment on the rst released
Mercury LP that experiencing the recording was like being “in the living
presence of the orchestra”.
12. See, for example, the sleeve notes for two of the label’s most innovative
recordings, the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture (1959) and The Civil War, Its
Music and Its Sounds (1958).
13. See, for example, a lengthy High Fidelity article by Shirley Fleming (1961)
documenting Mercury’s stereo re-recording of the Civil War album.
14. The most recent remastered box set compilation, Mercury Living Presence:
The Collector’s Edition 3, was issued by Decca in 2015.
15. Conrmed by a brief mention in the Musical Times dated June 1, 1930.
16. Little has been written about Bromhall from a critical perspective, but it has been
possible to discern the circumstances of her career from liner notes, occasional
references to her activities in periodicals, and informal discussions with EMI
archival personnel. In particular I am grateful to Lester Smith, Ken Townsend,
Tony Locantro, and Malcolm Walker for the assistance they provided in ena-
bling me to conrm certain facts concerning Bromhall’s work at EMI.
17. The recordings are ‘Retired from after any mortal’s sight’; ‘Thus to a ripe
consenting maid’ and ‘Hark, how all things’. They were re-issued on The
HMV Treasury series in 1982 as HLM 7234.
18. She is noticeably absent, for example, from Timothy Day’s A Century of
Recorded Music, other than a brief citation in reference to Fred Gaisberg.
19. Stagg became General Manager of Abbey Road Studios in 1967. For further
discussion of IBC and Stagg’s activities, see Massey (2015). See also Wim-
bush (1967) and Vinyl House UK (2016).
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