Early Recordings and the Balkans

Rationale

Sound recording reached the Balkans early — almost at the same time as it reached the rest of Europe — and it spread quickly. Within a few years of the first commercial cylinders and discs, the major companies were sending their mobile recording teams to Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Sofia, Bucharest, Istanbul, Thessaloniki and Athens, and, at the Central European edge of the region, to Budapest. They set up local agencies and, in time, pressing plants, and they relied on a whole cast of intermediaries — agents, dealers, go-betweens of every kind — standing between the company headquarters and the local market. The region’s musicians, for their part, did not wait for the companies to come to them: they recorded in Vienna, Berlin, Milan, London, and the other European recording centres, and above all in the United States — wherever touring, migration or the record trade took them. In the same decades, folklorists, linguists and the newly founded phonogram archives were recording the region for reasons entirely their own.

Research on the early recordings of the region is gathering pace. A growing number of publications, the symposium 78 rpm at Home, held by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb in 2023, the Discography as a Scientific Source issue of Muzikologija/Musicology in 2022, and the 2026 Diskografentag held in Istanbul by the Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger and the Orient-Institut, alongside sustained reissue, cataloguing and database work on the diasporic recordings made in the United States, have all brought this material into scholarly view. What is still missing, however, is a body of work — and the collaborative projects that would sustain it — that follows the recordings themselves across the region, instead of examining them country by country. Work on this material — by musicologists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, archivists, collectors and many others — has so far been organised largely along national lines, each country with its own sources, institutions and terminology. The initiatives mentioned above show what becomes possible when those lines are crossed.

The recordings themselves have never respected these national lines. The same musical tune turns up recorded in three cities, in three languages, under three different titles, having in the meantime lived two or three parallel lives; the same performer appears on labels addressed to different “national” publics, a division the recording industry inherited from its times rather than invented; the recordings of a single session are split between two archives, each holding half and neither aware of the other. And beneath the tunes, other things travel that only recordings allow us to observe: a way of ornamenting a line; an operetta number or a revue song that reappears within a year, in another language, on the other side of a border; instruments that migrate from one repertoire into another, changing role as they go; rhythmic patterns and dance-types that keep their shape while changing their names. What were the routes by which all this moved? Who were the protagonists — the musicians, the agents, the publishers — and what part did the companies themselves play? Read together, the recordings offer a view of the region’s connectivity that complements what other fields have brought to light. The Balkans of this conference are therefore not a bounded region but an open space, in constant conversation with the Eastern Mediterranean, with Central and Eastern Europe, and with the diasporas of the Americas and beyond — where the discs made for immigrant markets now serve as some of the earliest field recordings we have of the places those immigrants had left.

The study of these recordings, however, reaches well beyond music. A company’s catalogue and the trade press that advertised it; the repertoire a recording session silently left out; the licence number stamped on a label under a censorship regime; the café or tavern where much of this music was first heard, and where repertoires of every origin were reworked into the polystylistic, constantly re-signified music that the records then carried further — each of these is evidence of a different kind. Together they document the cultures that met, coexisted and mixed in the region; its economies; and social phenomena from urbanisation and migration to the changes the records themselves brought about, as songs were standardised by their circulation and the gramophone found its way into weddings, taverns and family celebrations. In other words, early recordings are a source for all of this — and reading them calls for toolkits of many kinds, some of them still to be built.

Proposals may concern any repertoire recorded in the region or connected with it: folk-popular musics, scholarly repertoires, religious music, military and brass band music, operetta, revue and theatre song, light urban genres, spoken-word recordings. The centre of gravity is the first half-century of recording, from the late nineteenth century to roughly the Second World War, but the frame is open and proposals on later recordings are welcome where they carry these repertoires, practices or sources forward. In keeping with ERA’s tradition, we welcome proposals from established scholars, early-career researchers and postgraduate students, and equally from archivists, curators, collectors, performers and enthusiasts.

Themes

Proposals may address topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Repertoires, their circulation and their multiple local, ethnic and linguistic lives, including their nationalisation, their ideological uses, and their dissemination in diasporic contexts;
• The actors and networks of recording: companies, agents, engineers, pressing plants and reissues, but also expeditions, phonogram archives, researchers and intermediaries;
• Recording technologies and their aesthetic and performative consequences — and inconsistencies;
• Dissemination and reception: censorship, the trade and daily press, radio, and the changing practices of listening and dancing;
• Performance practice, modality, rhythm, instrumentation and style as they can be heard in recordings, including historically informed approaches to them;
• Documentation: discographies, catalogues, databases and archives, and the methodological questions raised by the recording as a primary source.

We particularly encourage contributions on regions, repertoires, languages and archives that remain under-represented in the literature.

Format

Individual papers will be 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions.

We also welcome lecture-recitals of 35 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions. Because the conference is online, musical examples and performances should be supplied in advance as audio or video files, by 23 April 2027, to be played from the conference platform; the spoken presentation and the discussion take place live.

The programme will run as a single track — no parallel sessions — so that all participants can follow every presentation and the discussion can accumulate across the two days. The conference language is English. The conference will take place on Zoom and is open to all, free of charge. Registration details and the link will be announced together with the programme.

Submissions

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography of no more than 120 words, including your affiliation (if any), contact details and the time zone from which you would present, to conference@earlyrecordings.org by 20 January 2027. For lecture-recitals, the abstract should also briefly describe the material to be pre-recorded. The Scientific Committee will communicate its decisions by 19 February 2027, and the full programme will be announced by 19 March 2027.

Committees

Organising Committee

• Patrick Feaster (First Sounds Initiative)
• Eva Moreda Rodríguez (University of Glasgow)
• Nikos Ordoulidis (AltSol)
• Inja Stanović (University of Surrey).

Scientific Committee

• Patrick Feaster (First Sounds Initiative)
• Eva Moreda Rodríguez (University of Glasgow)
• Nikos Ordoulidis (AltSol)
• Inja Stanović (University of Surrey)
• Ferenc János Szabó (Library of the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy, Budapest / Institute for Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
• Joel Rubin (University of Bern)

Further information

For further information, visit Early Recordings Association's (ERA).