Christopher Silver (@christophersilver.bsky.social)

An ongoing inventory of the Brussels phonographic collection has yielded, "galoubet, music from popular and religious festivals in Provence, Ottoman repertoire and rebetiko from Istanbul, Peking opera and Chinese popular songs, classical music from Egypt, etc."

loading . . .

The phonographic archives of the MIM | MIM At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, probably towards the very end of 1899, Victor-Charles Mahillon, curator of the Instrumental Museum of the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels, conceived the project of building up a ‘collection of graphophone cylinders reproducing popular music from different countries’ (Archives MIM, Correspondance Mahillon). From January 1900 onwards, he travelled all over the world in search of phonograph recordings: in Brittany (Quimper and then Vannes), London, Istanbul, Madrid, Dublin, Java, Tokyo, Peking, Calcutta, and so on. The creation of a collection of sound recordings dedicated to the world's popular musical traditions is striking in its precociousness. It is exactly at the same time as the Phonogrammarchiv project initiated by the Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the Musée Phonographique designed by Léon Azoulay for the Société Anthropologique de Paris. However, while the latter two projects integrated instrumental music into a vast programme with mainly ethnographic and linguistic aims, Mahillon's project gave it a central role, with the declared aim of using the phonograph as a tool for musicological and organological documentation. In this respect, it predates by several years the famous Phonogramm-Archiv created at the Berlin Institute of Psychology by Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. https://www.mim.be/en/collection-piece/phonographic-archives-mim?fbclid=IwY2xjawEYkZBleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHdOaOKH95cabXWO3ziOfbfrZpRDlSGbK-apKZhDfwzAI_dwrMMSawOvcpA_aem_Nwmw30U1aRNZuI5K1OoJ6Q