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.
See: Report (Cro)
See: Report (Cro)
See: Report (Cro)
See: Report (Cro)
See: Report (Cro)
See: Report (Cro)
See: Report (Croatian)
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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)
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.