National Gramophonic Society

The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in England in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to promote music which was ignored by major music companies. The Society was proposed shortly after Mackenzie had launched music magazine The Gramophone (still in publication today as Gramophone), and was announced and its releases promoted through the pages of his magazine.

The Society was established for the recording and publication by subscription of classical music, principally chamber music, which was of limited circulation. Prominent on the committee for the selection of material was Walter Willson Cobbett, who was joined by Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), W. R. Anderson, Alec Robinson, Peter Latham and Compton MacKenzie.

Cobbett (b 1847), a chamber-music specialist, had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works, prizes won variously by William Yeates Hurlstone (1876-1906, pianist) (1905), Frank Bridge (1908), John Ireland (1909), J. Cliffe Forrester (1916), H. Waldo Warner (viola of the London Quartet) (1916), York Bowen (1918) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1919). In 1921 he was offering further awards to Royal Academy and Royal College of Music graduates, and commissioned many new chamber works from English composers.

The National Gramophonic Society was therefore an expression of this impetus to the development of the taste for modern chamber music. The records, issued on 12-inch 78rpm (or in some cases 80rpm) discs with distinctive yellow labels, included the first-ever recordings of familiar works such as the C major quintet of Schubert and Brahms's clarinet quintet, along with pieces (then relatively little known) by Henry Purcell, Vivaldi and Mozart.

The organization also helped several living composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Peter Warlock (first recording of The Curlew), Eugene Goossens, Arnold Schönberg (original chamber version of Verklärte Nacht) and Sir Edward Elgar to gain greater recognition for their works. The repertoire consisted largely of chamber music, featuring the Spencer Dyke Quartet and the International String Quartet, but included some works for small orchestra and a few vocal items. Musicians who took part included John Barbirolli (as both cellist and conductor), the clarinettists Charles Draper and Frederick Thurston, the oboist Leon Goossens, the violinist Adila Fachiri, and the pianists Donald Francis Tovey, Harold Craxton, Kathleen Long and Ethel Bartlett.

The NGS ceased operations in 1931, partly due to low sales, and partly because the major record companies, in particular EMI with their own Society issues overseen by Walter Legge, had begun to take on the role of recording similar repertoire, and thus the Society was seen as no longer necessary.

In 2006 the then-editor of Gramophone magazine, James Jolly, contacted audio restoration engineer Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio with a proposal to transfer and remaster the entire NGS collection of 78s still held in Gramophone's collection. The discs were transcribed by Rose in 2006 and a rolling programme of remastering and issuing the results as downloads began at the Pristine Classical website in March 2008. This was followed by an article by Jolly, now Editor in Chief, in the June 2008 issue of Gramophone magazine.