The Gramophone Collection of the Phonogram Archive in Berlin on the Web: Samples from nearly every disk available (original) (raw)

I wrote this little piece in June in a hurry to announce an important event: the publication of more than 2000 audio samples from the music archive of the Ethnological Museum on the DISMARC platform. However, the piece didn't get published as originally intended. While I don't think that this short text constitutes a particularly nice piece of writing, I do think that that the world is slightly better off with than without it, so I thought I put it on my website. It is intended for a non-specialist audience and is the first time I write something about historical recordings.

The actual audio samples can be found at DISMARC (http://www.dismarc.org) by searching for the archive "EMEM" and the identifier "VII 78". The collection contains roughly 2500 disks collected from 1902 to 1945. That the samples ended up on the web is a late outcome of the DISMARC project.

The founders of the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin, Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) and Erich M. von Hornbostel (1877-1935), established a collection of gramophone records in 1902. They regarded the collection of gramophone discs as a complementary to their main endeavor: an archive of traditional music recorded on phonograph cylinders. They latter were recorded by travelers on location, and by sound archivists in Berlin using visiting musicians. Today the cylinder collection is listed as a UNESCO memory of the world. Both collections together, the collection of mostly commercially-produced gramophone discs and the field recordings made originally on wax cylinders belonged to the phonogram archive in Berlin, famous to this day among ethnomusicologists for being one of birthplaces of the discipline, then best known as comparative musicology.

At the time, Stumpf and Hornbostel looked mainly for music still untouched by European music traditions. In contrast to the academic recordings made by the archive on wax cylinders, the gramophone recordings were typically made with a commercial interest and not by researchers, but by the early commercial music industry. When the recording industry first developed, it was dominated by companies operating in the colonial and industrial centers of the world, such as London, Paris and Berlin. One well relatively known example for sucha company is the British His Masters Voice. Soon, local markets emerged in the colonies with local enterprises for local audiences, for instance in Egypt and India. The recordings produced in this commercial setting were considerably different from those made or collected by Western researchers like Stumpf and Hornbostel. In the commercial sector, the local trends of the time are sometimes better represented than in the academic recordings made by travelers from the colonial centers who with their outsiders' position often looked for the most untouched or simply the oldest repertoire and were not always able to motivate the best performers to record.

For Stumpf and Hornbostel, the commercial recordings must have certainly been interesting for a variety of reasons. Compared to the cylinder recordings the gramophone records offered a much better recording quality and thus were also able to record complex ensembles, for example, something usually very difficult with a phonograph on a wax cylinder. However, commercial recordings often had less information accompanying the recording: no long accounts of the traveler, researcher or missionary who described sometimes in detail where he (and more rarely she) made the recordings and under which circumstances.

In spite of some research on these early record industries of the non-western world in recent years, not much is known about them. It seems that too long researchers concentrated on the academic recordings made by their academic predecessors. What has appeared in the last decades is mostly research into the first "megastars" of the early Non-Western music industries. Umm Kulthum is one such case. The Egyptian singer born into a poor rural family sometime between 1898 and 1904 — the accounts vary — quickly rose to an international star of Arab music. To this day, decades after her death in 1974, she is often regarded as the Arab's world most famous female singer.

Another interesting story which came to light only recently (see text quoted below) is the story of the "Musik des Orients" (Music of the Orient), possibly the world's first "world music sampler. Published in May 1931, the collection contained 24 recordings with recordings from Japan, China, Java, Bali, Siam, India, Persia, Egypt and Tunis. The recordings were accompanied with a thorough booklet. Although the booklet was signed by Hornbostel alone, correspondence indicates that the selection was made in close collaboration with other well-known music specialists in Berlin and elsewhere such as Robert Lachmann and Curt Sachs. The compilation was produced by the Berlin-based company Lindström, but contained recordings originally made by other companies such as Odeon. Up to this time, these recordings had typically been for sale only in the countries of origin and not internationally. Extensive correspondence as well as the fact that the collection was re-issued in English indicates that the compilation was a commercial success.

The anthology "Music of the Orient" is itself not part of collection at the Ethnological Museum today. Presumably it was lost during the disturbances of the World War II. However, many of the records from which Hornbostel made his selection still survive up to this day.

Like many other items from the museum, the fragile gramophone discs were evacuated from the museum during Word War II for protection against bombing. After the war, they happened to be in the newly-created Soviet sector, were confiscated and taken to Leningrad where they were catalogued, and received a Russian catalogue number which they carry until this day. Later, the collection was returned to East Berlin and finally came back to the Ethnological Museum only after Germany's reunification in 1989.

With only 2,576 records, this is a relatively small collection of gramophone discs, but one which according to the Finnish specialist for historical recordings Pekka Gronow contains many unique or extremely rare recordings. The collection also contains some unique experimental recordings made for acoustic and psychological laboratory experiments.

In the course of re-integrating the collection in the Ethnological Museum and to preserve the recordings, the discs were digitized in the 1990s, then stored on digital audio tape (DAT). With help from the DISMARC project, it was possible to transfer the recordings to modern digital files in 2008 and to link them with the available catalogue information (metadata). In May 2010, 30-second samples of most of the recordings were published on the DISMARC portal. These recordings shall also become accessible through Europeana soon. Only those recordings which are not playable anymore due to degradation of the material or which are still subject of copyright protection were not yet made public. So the recordings of the aforementioned Umm Kulthum as well as those of the famous blues artist McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, still have to wait until well into the 2040s and the 2050s respectively until they enter the public domain and can be made available free of charge.

Cited

Susanne Ziegler. 2010. Carl Lindstrom and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. In: Pekka Gronow and Christiane Hofer (eds.), The Lindström Project: Contributions of the history of the record industry, Vol. 2, GHT: Vienna.