This cross-disciplinary volume illuminates the history of early phonography from a transnational perspective, recovering the myriad sites, knowledge practices, identities and discourses which dynamically shaped early recording cultures. With case studies from China, Australia, the United States, Latin America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, Phonographic Encounters explores moments of interaction and encounter, as well as tensions, between local and global understandings of recording technologies.
Drawing on an array of archival sources often previously unavailable in English, it moves beyond western-centric narratives of early phonography and beyond the strict confines of the recording industry. Contributions from media history, musicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, area studies and the history of science and technology make this book a key and innovative resource for understanding early phonography against the backdrop of colonial and global power relations.
With case studies from China, Australia, the United States, Latin America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, Phonographic Encounters explores moments of interaction and encounter, as well as tensions, between local and global understandings of recording technologies.
Introduction
Part I: Negotiating Geographical and Cultural Boundaries: Intermediaries,
Traders and Operators
Chapter
1. Sergio Ospina Romero, Recording Studios on Tour: Traveling
Ventures at the Dawn of the Music Industry
Chapter
2. Andreas Steen, Global Transfer, Local Realities: Early
Phonographic Practices and Challenges in China (1900-1914)
Chapter
3. Henry Reese, Settler Colonial Soundscapes: Phonograph
Demonstrations in 1890s Australia
Part II: Repertoires, Auditory Practices and the Shaping of New Listening
Identities
Chapter
4. Joćo Silva, Portugal and Mechanical Music in the Early
Phonographic Era: An Intermedial Approach
Chapter
5. Eva Moreda Rodrķguez, Discņfils: Notes on the Birth of the Record
Club and the Record Listener in 1930s Barcelona
Chapter
6. Ulrik Volgsten, Mediatization of Music, Musicalization of
Everyday Life: New Ways of Listening to Recorded Sound in Sweden during the
Interwar Years, 19191939
Part III: Phonography and the Reordering of Knowledge and Sensibilities /
Phonography as Ideology
Chapter
7. Karina Zybina, Recording music, making business: The Russian
recording industry at the beginning of the 20th century
Chapter
8. Benedetta Zucconi, Phonographic Awareness: Recorded Sound in
Early Twentieth-Century Italy between Aesthetic Questions and Economic
Struggles
Chapter
9. Britta Lange, The Construction of das Volk through Acoustic
Knowledge. Recordings of Ethnic German Repatriates from the Institute for
Acoustic Research, 1940-1941
Part IV: The Heterogeneous Geographies of Consumption
Chapter
10. Jacques Vest, The Aesthetic of Arrest: The Victor Talking
Machine Company's Ready Made Windows Program, 1909-1913
Chapter
11. Siel Agugliaro, The Phonograph as a Transnational Tool: Selling
Music Records in Philadelphias Little Italy, 1900s-1920s
Chapter
12. Thomas Henry, From the Grands Boulevards to Montparnasse: An
Essay on the Geohistory of the Phonograph and Sound Recording Business in
Paris (1878-1940)
Conclusion
Elodie A. Roy is a media and material culture theorist. She is the author of Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (Routledge).
Eva Moreda Rodrķguez is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Glasgow and the author of two books on music and politics in Francoist Spain. Her research into early recordings in Spain has received funding from the AHRC and the British Academy.
