“Co-creating the heritage of commercial sound recordings: enthusiasts, ethnomusicologists and institutions”: Panel presentations at the HED Annual Conference (Sinj, 2023/10/18-20)

In October 2023, at the Annual Conference of the Croatian Ethnological Society held in Sinj, three project collaborators outlined a new group of (ethno)musicological collaborators (professional ethnomusicologists and musicologists) who followed the path of devotees of early commercial recordings, i.e., enthusiastic collectors, custodians, promotors, non-academic curators and researchers of the heritage of commercial recordings (sometimes all these combined in the same person), repeatedly confirming their importance, and including them as co-creators of new knowledge within the project. Tanja Halužan, Joško Ćaleta and Naila Ceribašić examined the implications of established relationships in the context of today’s general (both local and global) ethnomusicological confidence in co-creative (collaborative) approaches.
Panel presentation held the title “Co-creating the heritage of commercial sound recordings: enthusiasts, ethnomusicologists and institutions” (see abstracts).
Halužan’s paper (“The place of institutional and private collections of shellac gramophone records in the research of the early record industry in Croatia: origins, permeations, disagreements and reflections”) presented the state of institutional and private collections of gramophone records from the concerned period in Croatia, questioning why institutions appear as inert compared to hyperactive individuals (see PPT).
Ćaleta’s paper (“Collection of gramophone records of Damir Tončić in the State Archives in Split”) concentrated on Damir Tončić’s collection stored in the State Archives in Split, especially the issue of how it reflects the musical and other preferences of its creator, but also the environment and time, i.e., the social circumstances in which it was created, and what Tončić’s example says about a specific collectors’ urge (see PPT).
Ceribašić’s paper (“Co-creation of knowledge about commercial sound recordings: collaboration and controversies of collaboration”) focused on the controversies of research collaboration between do-it-yourself researchers and professional ethnomusicologists (see PPT).
For more information on conference papers, see here.

