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All the world’s on discs: An introduction to the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv and its historical sound recordings by Christian Liebl FSA
The invention of recording on cylinder (Edison, 1877) and disc (Berliner, 1887) eventually led to the establishment of several sound archives around 1900. The first among them came to be known as the Phonogrammarchiv, founded 125 years ago in Vienna by renowned physiologist Sigmund Exner and five other members of what was then the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
Scholars soon realised the importance of the new technology of sound recording: it offered new research approaches, thanks to the possibility of checking phonetic and music transcriptions through repeated listening; and it allowed for documenting and preserving languages and musical performances presumed to be on the verge of extinction. The objectives of the Phonogrammarchiv were to systematically produce, collect and preserve phonographic recordings of (1) European languages and dialects, but ultimately of languages from all over the world; (2) traditional music; and (3) the voices of famous personalities.
It was, however, not until 1901, by which time the problem of copying recordings had been successfully solved, that three expeditions were equipped with the newly invented Archiv-Phonograph. Destined for Croatia, Brazil and the Isle of Lesbos, they were directed by Milan Rešetar, Richard Wettstein and Paul Kretschmer respectively. Despite encountering numerous difficulties both in terms of handling the apparatus and finding suitable informants, the three scholars managed to record 19 wax discs, among them the oldest sound documents from Brazil and of the Roma language.
Such were the humble beginnings of Austrian phonographic field research abroad, which by 1950 had resulted in some 4,000 unique sound recordings from six continents (ca. 3,200 so-called Phonogramme and ca. 800 gramophone discs, with a total duration of ca. 200 hours). 25 years ago, in 1999, these Historical Collections (1899–1950) were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. The same year saw the start of the archive’s ongoing edition of its historical recordings, of which 18 series have so far been released. Apart from Series 2 (comprising so-called Stimmporträts, ‘voice portraits’, with that of Emperor Franz Joseph I taking pride of place), they include the recordings from field research carried out by Rudolf Pöch in Papua New Guinea (1904–1906) and the Kalahari (1908), with the earliest sound documents of Tok Pisin as well as of Khoisan languages and polyphonic music respectively; by Rudolf Trebitsch in Greenland (1906), the Celtic-speaking areas of Europe (1907–1909) and the Basque region (1913), with recordings of poems, tales and traditional music ranking among the first ever made in these communities; by Hermann Junker in Egypt (1911), with unique recordings of Nubian languages; or by Felix Exner in India (1904–1905), with rare recitations of Sanskrit literature.
Featuring audio samples, this lecture will serve as an introduction to the beginnings of the Phonogrammarchiv, its early recording technique and phonographic field research as well as to the edition of its Historical Collections.
Christian Liebl studied English, German and History of Art at the Universities of Edinburgh and Vienna, where he earned an MPhil (“Mag.phil.”) and later also gained an MSc in Library and Information Studies. Formerly a lecturer at the Department of English (University of Vienna), he has since 1994 been associated in various capacities with the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the world’s oldest sound archive, founded in 1899. Currently Curator of the archive’s Historical Collections and its Librarian, he has lectured and published widely on historical sound recordings. In January 2024, he was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
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