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The Fetish of the Oldest Sound. Science, politics, and the fascination with the beginnings of sound recordings
Kratochvíl, Matěj
The invention of the phonograph in the late 19th century started an obsession with the recorded sound as a document of history. As such it became an important part of the human need to create stories from archival materials and to see them as parts of objective truth, a direct connection with the past. With the growing accessibility of historical audio documents, we need to look critically at these sources and at the possibility to take them as a trace leading to the beginning of a particular part of music history. The present paper shows in which ways we can see the phenomenon of sound recording truly as the beginning of something new and in which cases such an impression can be misleading. Unconsciously or with a political or other intent, recordings can present music in a very different, sometimes distorted form. With special focus on traditional music, the author attempts to formulate some general ideas that should be kept in mind when dealing with historical recordings so that we do not become too fascinated with the “past speaking directly to us”.
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Music from an Objective Machine: Folk Music and the Phonograph
Kratochvíl, Matěj
Sound recording began to play a more important role in many areas of human life from the end of the 19th century. The influence of this technology was manifested the most significantly in the area of music industry, where a new form of music consumption was born with the invention and spreading of Edison’s phonograph. In addition, however, this invention influenced the sphere of science as well. The field called ethnomusicology now started to form in approximately the same time that the phonograph appeared, and it may be said that without this device ethnomusicology would have never been what it is today. The possibility of capturing the elusive musical expression, play and study it over and over again, opened a path for scientists to grasp the music cultures of the whole world without being limited by the system of European music notation. At the same time, however, sound recording brought various limitations as well as the danger of a distorted perception of sound sources, and directed the speculations of music towards certain stereotypes, with which ethnomusicology was then coping for a large part of the 20th century. In the Bohemian Lands, the awareness of the technical novelty spread relatively soon among the lay public as well as in the academic circles, but its practical application in the area of the documentation of traditional music culture in the period before World War I was relatively rare. The sound documents that have been preserved were not published until the last decades.
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