Archival and field work
In the segment of collection and processing of material, six basic categories should be distinguished: (i) the gramophone records themselves in physical form; (ii) archival material on the work of the three companies; (iii) sales catalogs and similar printed materials; (iv) newspaper clippings about the three record companies and their releases; (v) material that attests to the links between the record industry and other areas of the music industry; (vi) testimonies of the living witnesses from the periods in question as well as collectors. In Croatia, as far as we currently know, relevant archival material is stored in institutions in Zagreb, Osijek, Rijeka, and Split. Archival work outside of Croatia will include archival holdings in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Prague.
From November 2 to 13, 2020, the project leader Naila Ceribašić and PhD student Dora Dunatov documented the total fund of shellac records from Phono Material Collection 1936–1994 (sign. HDA 1397) kept in the Croatian National Archives.
See: Report (Cro)
On February 14 and 15, 2021, the project associate Joško Ćaleta inspected the gramophone record collection kept in the Music School Josip Hatze in Split.
See: Report (Cro)
On November 13, 2020, the project associate Jelka Vukobratović visited the Dutch House of the Sisak City Museum, where the collection of Velimir Kraker is located.
See: Report (Cro)
During four working days in October 2020, the project associate Željka Radovinović documented the archive collection of lawyer Milan Dečak in the State Archives in Zagreb, insolvency administrator of the record company Edison Bell Penkala.
See: Report (Cro)
On July 23, 2020, the project associate Jelka Vukobratović was at the Museum of the City of Zagreb to inspect and document the collection of shellac records in the Museum’s possession.
See: Report (Cro)
On June 18, 2020, project associates, Joško Ćaleta and Željka Radovinović, conducted research at the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum in Zagreb.
See: Report (Cro)
On October 13, 2020, the project associate Jelka Vukobratović inspected and documented the shellac records in the possession of the Music Department of the Zagreb City Library.
See: Report (Croatian)
Workshops with experts from abroad
The experts who will come to Zagreb as part of this project are leading authorities in the field of research on the record and broader music industry and various aspects of audio recordings. Those experts are Drago Kunej, the head of the Sound Archives of the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana; Peter Tschmuck, the head of Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna; and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus at the King’s College in London.
WORKSHOP WITH DRAGO KUNEJ
In two three-hour terms, on Monday and Wednesday, January 18 and 20, 2021, doc. dr. Drago Kunej held a workshop on the technical characteristics of 78 rpm music records. He is currently the head of the sound archive of the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. He greatly contributed to the scientific field of old records through a three-year project “Sound material of gramophone records as a source of ethnomusicological and folkloristic research“, officially completed in April 2012. In the first part of the interactive workshop, held via online Zoom platform, he presented the development of various recording techniques, from the invention of phonographs to the invention of vinyl records. The second part was reserved for a detailed analysis of the complex information obtained from the label area of 78 rpm music records produced by the leading record companies.
WORKSHOP WITH PETER TSCHMUCK
On Monday, November 16, 2020, a workshop was held with Peter Tschmuck. Tschmuck is head of the Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts. The focus of his research is the music industry, economics of copyright, cultural institutions, and cultural policy evaluation. He excelled in the research of creativity and innovation in the music industry, and his extensive study on the subject was published in 2003. The workshop was designed as an interactive dialogue between Tschmuck and project collaborators with comments and questions. It is worth noting the extremely comprehensive review and analysis of the music industry in the period from its beginnings to the late 1950s.See: Report (Croatian)
Study visits
The collaborators at the project will be trained at the research and archival centres that are most relevant to the topic of this research: the National Museum in Prague, the two popular music studies institutions in Liverpool (Institute for Popular Music at the University of Liverpool and the Harry McKinnel Popular Music Resource Centre at Liverpool Hope University), and two institutions in Washington D.C. (the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Research workshops
Research workshops of the project collaborators will be held once a year. In them we will discuss: the devising the contents of the module Hrvatska e-diskografija (Croatian e-discography); issues of the record “filers”; the relationship between record industry and other driving forces of musical life; and opportunities for developing EU projects.
Due to epidemiological measures, the research workshop “Designing the content of the Croatian e-discography module in the IEF repository” could not be held live, so the project associates remotely agreed on the basic elements. Nada Bezić, Naila Ceribašić, Irena Miholić and Željka Radovinović held a series of video meetings in March 2020, during which they defined and specified the content of the Croatian e-discography database. See: Report (Croatian)
Work meetings and other
See records of work meetings:
1st meeting (Croatian) (2020/2/20)
2nd meeting (Croatian) (2020/6/3)
3rd meeting (Croatian) (2020/9/24)
4th meeting (Croatian) (2020/12/4)
5th meeting (Croatian) (2021/2/23)
June 2020 – Visit to the Record Fair
The project collaborators visited the International Record Fair, held on June 28, 2020 in the yard of the Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb. Among the small number of exhibitors, those from Croatia prevailed (Zagreb, Sisak, Varaždin, Koprivnica, Pula), with a few from Slovenia and Austria, which should probably be attributed to the conditions of the pandemic. No one on offer had gramophone records from the shellac period, and some suggested that we prefer to look for them at the fair in Hrelić.
