Early Recording Technologies: Transnational Practices, History and Heritage

Eva Moreda Rodríguez

About the symposium:
The first fifty years of the record industry, from the invention of the phonograph by T.A. Edison in 1877 to the advent of electrical recording in 1925, changed in dramatic and irreversible ways how people performed, listened to and thought about music and sound; archiving and transmission of musical culture was also greatly challenged. At the turn of the twentieth century, the record industry constituted one of the earliest and most vibrant global industries, relying on a complex yet often little-known infrastructure. 
Against a homogenising or flattening history of the industry, we would like to retrace and interrogate the persisting heterogeneity of practices, interpretations and discourses accompanying the rise of phonography. By bringing together scholars from across Europe, as well as sound archivists and sound artists, this one-day symposium intends to uncover these multi-layered processes in a culturally and contextually sensitive way. With contributions focusing on the development of the recording industry at the local, national and transnational levels, the nascent aesthetics of recorded sound and the changes it brought to listening, the repertoires registered in early recordings and the changing role of recording technologies in memory practices, the symposium will ask the following questions:
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How were the early reception and uses of sound recording technologies informed by local practices and cultural specificities across Europe? 
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How did the advent of phonography, reciprocally, challenge regional identities and modes of cultural production? 
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What can we learn from the study of such practices and specificities in order to build the foundations of a differential transnational history of phonography that contextualizes the listening and creative remediation of such recordings, increasingly available nowadays through online collections and repositories? 
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How can we navigate and productively theorise the phonographic archive without succumbing to its overwhelming vastness?
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</UL>
 
Venues:
All sessions will take place in the James Arnott Theatre (Gilmorehill Centre), 9 University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8NN. 
 
The evening performances will take place in the Concert Hall, Gilbert Scott Building (Main Building), University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ.
 
Programme at a glance: 
 
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9:00-9:30
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Registration &amp; welcome
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9:30-11:00
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Panel 1. Commodification, circulation and consumption of early recordings
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11:00-11:30
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Tea &amp; coffee 
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11:30-12:30
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Keynote lecture
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12:30-1:30
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Lunch break
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1:30-2:30
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Listening session
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2:30-4:00
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Panel 2. Materiality, mediatisation and spatiality
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4:00-4:30
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Tea &amp; coffee
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4:30-5:30
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Panel 3. Between memory and playback: Phonography and the archive
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5:30-6:30
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Extended break
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6:30-7:30
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Creative works (in Concert Hall)
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Detailed programme:
 
Panel 1. Commodification, circulation and consumption of recorded sound
João Silva: “Commodifying sound in Portugal in the early phonographic era”
Henri Chamoux: “The broadcasting and distribution of sound recordings during the Belle Époque in France (1893-1914)”
Benedetta Zucconi: ““Phonographic awareness”: discussions around recorded sound in early twentieth-century Italy between aesthetic questions and economic struggles”
 
Keynote.
Thomas Y. Levin: "Towards a Media-Archaeology of Voice Mail: French Audio Postcards 1905-1907" 
Listening session.
Thomas Y. Levin
Following from his keynote lecture, Professor Levin will play and discuss examples of phono-postcards in France, ca. 1905. (N.B. Contrary to what was initially advertised, this session will be open to all participants)
 
Panel 2. Materiality, mediatisation and spatiality
Ulrik Volgsten: "Utilitarian vs. solipsistic phonography in early 20th-century Sweden - mediatization of music and musicalization of the media"
Thomas Henry: "From the birth of the first record shops to the development of a record collecting culture in early 20th century Paris: using a map to trace the history of recorded sound" Elodie A. Roy: “For a natural history of the gramophone record: Origins and politics of shellac”
 
Panel 3. Between memory and playback: Phonography and the archive
Richard Ranft: “The dawn of sound recording and sound archiving in Britain”
Alistair Bell: "Sounds like Scotland: Scotland likes sound"
 
Creative works. 
Naomi Kashiwagi: “Gramophonography: Reinvention, transculturalism and the everyday”
Marie Guérin: “Même morts nous chantons”
 
Funding:
We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and to the School of Culture and Creative Arts for their financial and material support.

Gilmorehill Halls (James Arnott Theatre)

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