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SEPTEMBER 1955     45

Robert Donaldson Darrell was born in Newton, Massachusetts on December 13, 1903, the son of Ernest Willis and Elizabeth (Donaldson) Darrell.  He has one sister, Josephine.  His paternal ancestry is English, and his mother, who was born in Nova Scotia, is of Scotch-Irish descent.  The elder Darrell, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, played the trombone and contrabass as a semi-professional musician.

Young Robert attended the local public schools in Newton, Massachusetts, and was editor of the Newton High School Review.  After his graduation from high school in 1922, he went to Harvard College for a few months, on a Cobb scholarship.  Then he left in 1923 to enter the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.  Here he engaged in "quasi-independent studies" for three years.  His major was composition, under Warren Story Smith, and five songs which he wrote, won the conservatory's prize for music composition in 1925.  In the same year he attended the Concord Summer School of Music.

"Failure to win a prize with a large orchestral composition at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1926," Darrell has said, led to his free-lance writing career.  At that time, he was given an opportunity "to do a few . . . reviews" for Warren Storey Smith of the Boston Post.  Following this, came a chance meeting with Richard G. Appel, a staff member of the music division of the Boston Public Library, which resulted in Darrell's participation in the formation in 1926 of the first American record magazine, Phonograph Monthly Review.  He reviewed records for four years and became its editor and publisher in 1930.

His next step was writing reviews for Music Lovers' Guide, which brought him to New York City in 1932. He joined the staff of the Gramophone Shop in 1934 as record researcher and consultant.  From 1937 to 1939 he edited the Gramophone Shop Supplement.  The publication in 1936 of his Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music, the initial compilation of its kind, brought him nationwide recognition.

A reviewer for the New York Times (July 26, 1936) wrote: "This encyclopedia of recorded [classical] music is a real encyclopedia, far removed from the mere catalogue. . . . Under each composer's name is a careful critical résumé, and these well-written paragraphs are exceedingly interesting."  In Current History (November 1936), the book critic described Darrell's encyclopedia as "the most ambitious and most comprehensive work on the subject yet published."

In 1939 Darrell became editor of the Steinway Review of Permanent Music (now the Review of Recorded Music).  He enlisted in the U.S. Signal Corps Reserve in August 1942 and was honorably discharged on February 23, 1943.  In that year, his book, Highroad to Musical Enjoyment, was published by the RCA Victor Company.  He took postgraduate study at the Radio Television Institute in New York City, electing the electronic technician's course.

From 1943 to 1946 Darrell served as senior writer and then supervising editor, for the instruction book department of Hazeltine Electronics Corporation, Little Neck, New York.  His interest in electronics and high-fidelity sound equipment increased, and he prepared for the company an unsigned series of Army-Navy electronic gear instruction books.  Then he returned to what had become the syndicated Review of Recorded Music, as its editor from 1947 to 1950.

[[image: photo of Robert D. Darrell]]
[[caption]] R. D. DARRELL [[/caption]]
[[photo credit]] Rudolph de Harak [[/photo credit]]

In 1951 he compiled Schirmer's Guide to Books on Music and Musicians (Schirmer), which Ennis Davis (Music Journal, October 1952) called "an invitation to reading."  Davis added that "to the serious researcher on a musicological mission the Darrell volume will perhaps have limited value.  Darrell has blithely tossed away many important works with the notation that they are out of print."  Roland Gelatt wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature (July 28, 1951): "If Mr. Darrell had not banished the foreign-language books to the appendix . . . I could pronounce his compendium without fault."

During 1952 Darrell was "classical" record reviewer for Down Beat magazine and he also began writing his column "Highs and Lows" for the Saturday Review. Referring to "the great 'high-fidelity' movement" in his Saturday Review column (August 29, 1953), he called for more specialized tastes - for "close-up, wide-range undiffused sound." Discussing "Chromium Plated Vulgarity" in the Saturday Review (December 25, 1954), he called it a Herculean work to clear "a path through the tangled underbrush of tastelessness which is springing up in No Man's Land where the boundaries of engineering, esthetics, and commercialism overlap in the contemporary world of sound recording and reproduction."

He described "'presence' and reverberation" as "two notable virtues of high-fidelity recording and reproduction," and "realistic recreation of percussive thunders and glitters" as another.

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