Early Recordings Association (ERA) Conference 2025

Tuesday, 1 July 2025

9:30 - 11:00   Session 1: Recording historiography

Dr. Ferenc János Szabó: Early Recordings and the Challenges of Discography in the 21st Century

Paul Kerensa: The Earliest BBC Recording: The First Monarch on Air

Trayce Arssow (online presentation): Centenary of the Beginnings of Electrical Recording in Great Britain. Paul Voigt’s Technological Inventions and the Development of His Own Electrical Recording Method, 1925-1927

11:20 – 12:20   Session 2: Recording markets 

Professor George Kokkonis, Dr.  Nikos Ordoulidis: Their Agent’s Voice: A Letter to HMV in the 1930s About the Greek Market 

Dr. Marija Maglov: Selling Sound Carriers in Serbia/Yugoslavia in the early 20th century

14:00 - 15:00 Keynote address: Professor Mark Katz

15:10 – 16:40   Session 3: Analysis

Dr. Ana Llorens: Pau Casals’ recording of Bach’s cello suites: micro-scale shaping in the sarabandes

Dr. Luís Bastos Machado: Continuity and/or Segmentation: Strategies for Formal Articulation in Early Recordings of Johannes Brahms's Piano Music

Dr. László Stachó (online presentation): The potential of complex statistical analyses in characterising performance style

17:00 - 17:45    Workshop 1: Preservation of Phonographic Cylinders in the Czech Republic - WorkFlow and Methodology, National Museum Sound Lab (Filip Sir, Martin Mejzr and Veronika Gašparová)

Wednesday, 2 July 2025

9:00 – 10:30   Session 4: Music and rhetoric

Orestis Papaioannou: 'Speak-against-the-music': Variation and Traces of Epic Singing in Selected Historical Recordings of Die Dreigroschenoper (1928-1930).

Carlota Martínez Escamilla: Music and Rhetoric: Recorded Performances of the Prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach's Suite II for Solo Cello

Dr. Riccardo La Spina: ¡Dobla, Campana! – New Phonographic Implications for a Zarzuela Vocality in Emigrantes

10:45 – 12:45  Session 5: Performance styles

Ella Fallon: Asynchrony in Cécile Chaminade’s Recorded Performance Style

Greg Szwarcman: Classical and Romantic Approaches to Conducting Beethoven’s Symphonies in the late Nineteenth Century

Christos Yiallouros: Fixing Elgar; Re-editing his 1929 Piano Improvisations

Hilary Metzger (online presentation): Comparing different recordings of the same composition: the case of Victor Herbert

14:00 – 15:30   Session 6: Lecture recitals

Dr. Marco Ramelli and Enrica Savigni: The Recording by Federico Mompou and Miguel Llobet - The Interplay of Sound and Tactile Perception in Catalan Music

Professor Neal Peres Da Costa: Waxing lyrical: Observations on recording onto wax disc

15:45 – 17:15   Workshop 2:  Connecting European Archives: A Collaborative Network for Sound Recording Repositories.

Participants (in alphabetical order):

Austria: Österreichische Adademie der Wissenschaftern Phonogrammarchiv (Dr. Kerstin Klenke)

Austria: Die Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger (Claus Peter Gallenmiller)

Croatia: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (Professor Naila Ceribasic, Dr. Jelka Vukobratović)

Czechia: Národní muzeum Prague (Filip Šír)

Greece: Music Documentation Laboratory, University of Ioannina (Professor George Kokkonis, Dr. Nikos Ordoulidis)

Greece: AltSol (Nikos Papazis)

Hungrary: Archives and Department for Folk Music and Folk Dance Research, Institute for Musicology (Dr. Ferenc János Szabó)

Italy: SOFOS (Professor Angelo Pompilio and Dr. Cristina Paulon)

Norway: Norweigan Academy of Music (Professor Tore Simonsen)

Portugal: Arquivo Nacional do Som / National Sound Archive (Dr. Pedro Félix)

Spain: Universidad Internacional de Valencia (Professor Maria Lourdes Rebollo)

The UK: The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society (Jonathan Emeruwa)

The UK: King's College London Music Archives (Andrew Hallifax)

Thursday, 3 July 

9:30 – 11:30   Session 7: Belgian recordings

Dr. Fañch Thoraval: The project for a phonographic archive in Brussels: Mahillon and the struggle between sound and notation (1899-1900)

Dr. Jeroen Billiet: Couleur Locale, Disque Chantal. Ghentian musicians and the emergence of Belgian creative industries

Joanna Staruch-Smolec: Performer’s Creative Gesture as a Key in Approach to Early Recordings: The Example of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Acoustic Discs

Matthieu Thonon: The audiovisual collection of the MIM (Musical Instruments Museum of Brussels): from Mahillon to the present day

12:00 – 13:00   Session 8: Mechanical music

Dr. Joyce Tang: In search of the pianist: The Role of the Piano in Early 20th Century piano concerto rolls 

Achille Kienholz: The fairground musical libraries: mechanical music (not) to be shown

14:00 – 15:30   Session 9: Non classical repertoires

Dr. Arja Kastinen: Searching for traces of 19th century Karelian kantele improvisation in early recordings

Professor Hon-Lun Helan Yang: Asian Popular Music’s Global Network: “The Fragrance of the Durians” and its Related Recordings

Dr. Salvatore Morra: “Musical Orient” in Italy: The Early Recordings (1930s) of the International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (ISMEO) 

16:00 – 18:00  Workshop 3

Exploring Casals' Sounds: Mechanical recording technologies and cello 

Cellists:

Dr. Kate Bennett Wadsworth (Guildhall School of Music)

Dr. Iagoba Fanlo (Aragon Conservatory of Music)

Dr. Aldo Mata (Conservatorio Superior de Salamanca)

Dr. Job ter Haar (HKB Bern)

Pianists:

Dr. Inja Stanović (ERA and University of Surrey)

Laura Granero (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)

Sebastian Bausch (Bern University of the Arts)

Professor Neal Peres Da Costa (Sydney Conservatorium)

Recording engineer (acoustic):

Duncan Miller (The Vulcan Cylinder Record Company)

Abstracts

Tuesday, Session 1

Trayce Arssow (Yugoslav Discographic Society)

Centenary of the Beginnings of Electrical Recording in Great Britain:

Paul Voigt’s Technological Inventions and the Development of His Own Electrical Recording Method, 1925-1927

While the very first electrical recording in Britain can be traced to as early as 1920, it was not until the development of the electrical recording method by Western Electric in North America in 1924 that this recording method became more firmly introduced in the British record industry during 1925. It was in this context, while employed by J.E. Hough Ltd. in their wireless (i.e. radio) department, that Paul Voigt, Edison Bell’s foremost electric engineer, began his work on developing an electrical recording method of his own, which for all copyright purposes was to be considered as an original one. Although Voigt had been contributing with technological inventions to the wireless world already since the early 1920s, it was only following the emergence of the new electrical recording method that he began in earnest making an inroad in this fast-developing field. Drawing from preserved primary sources (manuscripts and test prints) in the Voigt Collection at the Library and Archives Canada, and about a dozen of patents granted to Voigt by the British patent office between the early 1920s and the mid 1930s, as well as other contextual sources, this article seeks to examine the development of Voigt’s electrical recording method, and more broadly his contribution to the history of technology and science. To this purpose, the article attempts answering the question: to which extent did Voigt’s electrical recording method build on the one already devised in North America, yet was sufficiently original so as to merit Edison Bell’s avoidance of any licence payment to Western Electric? The preliminary answer is that while Voigt’s electrical recording method in general terms considerably resembled to the Western Electric method, it was nevertheless in the particular nuances that Voigt introduced which merited a series of patent acknowledgements that accorded him the placard of originality.

Luís Bastos Machado (Centro de Estudos em Sociologia e Estética Musical)

Continuity and/or Segmentation: Strategies for Formal Articulation in Early Recordings of Johannes Brahms's Piano Music

The moment of transition between two musical phrases creates an opportunity for articulation in performance. The systematic use of unnotated phrase-final lengthening as a device of phrasal delineation has been identified in comparative analyses of twentieth-century recordings of Western classical music. This systematic structural segmentation of the musical discourse at the phrase level has been taken for granted in formalist models of expressive timing in performance designed by various researchers in past decades, and is often assumed to be a universally desirable feature of performance for the sake of a supposedly necessary structural clarification through segmentation. However, Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) wrote in the early years of the twentieth century that '[t]he requirement that a composition's form not be exposed too nakedly frequently demands considerably quicker playing where the seam occurs,' (Schenker 2000, 55) indicating wholly different priorities when dealing with points of formal articulation in performance. What, then, does the evidence of recordings made during the first half of that century suggest in terms of strategies of formal articulation at the phrase level? In particular, how does Schenker's generation compare with later performers? In this paper, we discuss our computer-assisted comparative analysis of recordings of Brahms's piano music made during the first half of the twentieth century. We propound that systematic segmentation by phrase-final lengthening emerged as a consolidated practice mainly as part of a historical performance style developed by performers born around and after 1880, by contrast with their recorded predecessors' general preference for a continuous, and sometimes rushed- through, transition between most phrases. We argue that systematic phrase-final lengthening is a culturally and historically contingent phenomenon: shifts in aesthetics and music theory entailed a novel relationship between expressivity and musical structure, giving rise to a preference for segmentation over continuity in several performers born in the late nineteenth century.

Dr. Jeroen Billiet (Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel)

Couleur Locale, Disque Chantal. Ghentian musicians and the emergence of Belgian creative industries.

While Belgium's industrialised neighbours developed thriving domestic record industries, Belgium itself remained dependent on major international players such as Pathé and Columbia until the end of World War I. However, this landscape began to change in the Roaring Twenties, when the entrepreneurial Moeremans family established the Compagnie Belge Chantal, positioning itself as an ambitious new player in this growing market. Operating for about a decade from a newly established production hub in Ghent, the company produced a diverse portfolio of acoustically recorded gramophone records, players, and accessories. Despite its pivotal role in shaping Belgium’s early recording industry and contributing to the country’s artistic heritage, the legacy of this first large-scale Belgian record production house remains largely unexplored to this day. Recent research, combined with re-enactment projects by Billiet & Stanovic (2021, 2023), has demonstrated that Disques Chantal offers a unique lens through which to examine the artistic and cultural dynamics, performance practices, and stylistic shifts at this pivot moment between the Romantic and Modernist periods. While an extensive multi-dimensional re-enactment project on the label is currently underway, this lecture will unveil information from historical sources and a selection of rare recordings by local belle-époque trained Ghentian artists from Chantal’s overlooked catalogue, shedding light on its production process, artistic vision, and the unique intersection of Ghent’s local musical identity with early globalisation trends.

Ella Fallon (TU Dublin Conservatoire)

Asynchrony in Cécile Chaminade’s Recorded Performance Style

Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) was a prolific French composer and pianist who published approximately four hundred works which were popularised through performances and recordings. Between 1901 and 1930, she recorded twenty-two of her works on Gramophone Discs and Duo-Art reproducing piano rolls. These recordings provide a lens into her performance style, within which several parameters can be identified. One of these, asynchrony – whereby one hand plays before the other – is the focus of this presentation. This technique, connected with ‘melodic rubato’ (Brown, 1999) gives a sense not only of Chaminade’s own pianism, but of romantic performance practices of the late nineteenth century also. In this paper I will examine Chaminade’s use of asynchrony in several of her most popular works including Pas des Echarpes and Élévation. Findings from my analysis of her recordings of these works, which have been undertaken through a combination of close listening and use of Sonic Visualiser, will illustrate Chaminade’s style and show how she integrated this technique into her recordings. Furthermore, additional recordings of Chaminade’s work by contemporaneous pianists such as Yolanda Mero (1887–1963) and Charles G. Spross (1874–1961) will be compared to the composer’s own performances. The specific characteristics of Chaminade’s style have remained largely unexplored in the field of early recordings scholarship to date, this paper will examine her pianistic approach as well as a pivotal technique of late nineteenth century performance practice that was captured though piano recordings from the early twentieth century.

Dr. Arja Kastinen (Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki)

Searching for traces of 19th century Karelian kantele improvisation in early recordings

As part of the ancient runosong culture, Finnish and Karelian people regarded the hollow kantele as a sacred instrument with an otherworldly connection that affected their everyday lives. In the 19^th century, when Western musical culture was slowly moving eastwards with new instruments, people in remote villages in Karelia continued to cling to the aural traditions of their ancestors. From this period we have some interesting descriptions of kantele players who, when improvising for hours on end, would immerse themselves in their own world - they were said to be "playing their own power". At the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish scholars began to use the phonograph as part of their collection work. The influence of the new musical culture had begun to spread to Karelia by this time. As a result, the early recordings consist mainly of short excerpts from the popular dance tunes of the time. However, they also contain many interesting features that can be traced back to the ancient culture. Unfortunately, the surviving copies of the kantelephonograms are quite poor, because the sound of the hollow kantele was small and it was difficult to get the instrument close enough to the horn. In addition, the wax cylinders were listened to again and again as researchers made transcriptions, and as a result, the quality of the sound deteriorated with each listening. The copies of the wax cylinder recordings are kept in the archives of the Finnish Literature Society. In my research, I have re-recorded some of the kantelephonograms using transcriptions and other written information we have from that time. The research has revealed interesting details about the differences between the musical transcriptions and the original music.

Paul Kerensa (Independent researcher, BBC)

The Earliest BBC Recording: The First Monarch on Air

There is only one extant recording of the BBC’s first decade. Once called the electrical era’s “first experimental record”, it was thought lost for decades, then saved by a listener. Recent research suggests that Buckingham Palace may have had a copy all along. King George V became radio’s first monarch on 23^rd April 1924, in Britain’s biggest broadcast. Ten million listeners heard the king open Wembley’s Empire Exhibition, thanks to loud-speakers in town centres. The BBC’s John Reith called it “the biggest thing we had yet done”. Yet it’s little-known today. After Elgar conducted the National Anthem, speeches came from the king, the Prince of Wales, then the Bishop of London with the clearest broadcast: the Lord’s Prayer. “Every word could be distinguished. That of course was because they were familiar,” a listener commented. Traffic stopped and parliament paused for this first royal audience of millions, reaching as far as Poughkeepsie, New York. It was recorded by The Gramophone Company, with permission granted from the crown for, that evening, the first BBC repeat.  But this notable recording was not kept. Records – perhaps the BBC’s – were presented to the king (enquiries are ongoing at the Royal Archives to see if they remain). The British Museum received the metal matrices. But for decades, the BBC believed the recording lost. In 1955, Leslie Baily mentioned this gap in the archive on his programme Scrapbook for 1924. Dorothy Jones of Croydon contacted the BBC, saying that her husband had recorded it at home. She loaned her metal disc to the BBC – the recording available today. This landmark audio’s century-long journey is remarkable: heard by millions, retained only by the king and a Croydon enthusiast. It represents broadcasting’s first decade, and demonstrates the paucity of early radio recordings, before a culture of preservation gladly grew.

Achille Kienholz (University of Fribourg)

The fairground musical libraries: mechanical music (not) to be shown

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, specific models of automatic organs were being built for the use of show people throughout Europe. Fundamental components of the entertainment entreprises set on fairgrounds, each of them led by an individual or a family aiming at profitability but also at respectability, the organs played an important role in the way those professionals presented themselves and their businesses to their patrons. The instruments were thus used both to attract people’s attention and to testify to their owners’ musical taste. By conforming to the general appreciation of the repertoire available at the time – or, sometimes, by showing more idiosyncratic preferences – show people situated themselves on a social map polarised between what have been called “highbrow” and “lowbrow”. In this contribution, I attempt to give a better idea of how showpeople constituted and envisaged their collections of musical pieces, while paying particular attention to the specific storage media then in use – i.e., pinned cylinders, book music (folded perforated cardboard) and paper rolls. I firstly address the practice of tunes’ transcription and arrangement, a crucial task, complexified by instrument-related constraints such as the limited playing time of a barrel or the non-chromatic scales generally found in organs, varying from one model to another. Next, I examine how, through their evolution, reading mechanisms were being kept away from the view of the public, in order to focus on the attraction as a holistic performance. Finally, I show the progressive emergence of a documentary value associated with these records. I conclude by suggesting that, as a reception discourse gradually structured itself about mechanically generated music – associating it with the preservation of time-tested classics rather than the diffusion of new music – the organ lost its appeal to showpeople because of its image, but not of any technical obsolescence.

Drs. George Kokkonis and Nikos Ordoulidis (University of Ioannina)

Their Agent’s Voice: A Letter to HMV in the 1930s About the Greek Market

In April-May 1930, Edmund Michael Innes, born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1897, visited Greece. His occupation was commercial traveller, patent and trademark expert, and legal assistant. Following his visit, he drafted a lengthy letter, which he sent to His Master’s Voice, a company with which he presumably collaborated. This letter was discovered by Hugo Strötbaum in EMI’s archives and published online in an edited form in 2010. Titled “Report on Visit to Greece – April-May 1930,” the letter contains numerous highly interesting details regarding the state of the Greek record market, HMV’s position within it, and suggestions for the company’s future business activities in the region. In our presentation, we will introduce Innes’s letter, comparing its information with other sources available to us from that period in Greece. Finally, we will examine the extent to which his proposals were adopted by the company and how it subsequently operated in this market.

Dr. Riccardo La Spina (University of California, Riverside)

¡Dobla, Campana! – New Phonographic Implications for a Zarzuela Vocality in Emigrantes

The 1920s saw Italian tenor Tito Schipa associated with the emblematic ”Granadinas” by

Tomás Barrera (1870-1938) from the one-act zarzuela Emigrantes (in collaboration with

Librettist Pablo Cases 1875-1943) and co-composer, Rafael Calleja (1870-1938), recording it for several labels. Little memory remained of its original 1905 Madrid production to compete with this new rendition’s phenomenal success. But rediscovered evidence reveals these now-emblematic versions as manifestly different from that heard by the work’s first Madrid audiences. No evidence of an extended run or of repeat performances exists, despite critical endorsement that Emigrantes remain on Madrid’s boards. And notwithstanding its main composer’s occasional success producing it on two continents over nearly three decades, evidence of its trajectory remains obscure and scattered. The comparison with Schipa, while important, illustrates an unrecognized historical fact: the original version of Muleta’s song by role creator Enrique Gandía was eventually supplanted by Schipa’s. Each betrays distinct deliveries manifesting divergent vocalities, two singers divided by a common vehicle. Transcending interest in merely comparing each singer’s stylistic differences of interpretation or ‘musical choices’ these recordings reflect, this paper examines their significance as a ‘case’ study of how these ‘choices’ speak to a greater question: the recognition of a specific endemically Spanish vocality and its inherent qualities. Furthermore, putting these findings into the proper context means entering a discussion already begun with recent breakthrough scholarship by Eva Moreda Rodriguez and Barbara Gentili, and others uncovering Schipa’s relevant association. My presentation validates this with new perspectives and insights stemming from different sources.

Dr. Ana Llorens (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Pau Casals’ recording of Bach’s cello suites: micro-scale shaping in the sarabandes

Recorded between 1936 and 1939 and perhaps constituting the most remembered legacy by Casals, his HMV interpretation of Bach’s suites for solo cello represent not only invaluable evidence of pre-IIWW performance practice and recording mediation, but also, and very importantly, the culmination point of the cellist’s engagement with these solo pieces, which had already started in the 1910s in his recitals and orchestral concerts. Each suite has a unique character through its key, its motivic content and manipulation, and changing phrase and harmonic structure within the closed dance format of most of the pieces. Indeed, Casals exploits the particular effects that each of the suites affords on the cello, yet one can perceive a common stylistic thread across them, despite the constant fluctuation between interpretive resources and the time span elapsed between the first and the last recordings. However, appreciations of the sort stem from an auditory perception and thus, one may wonder what it is really that makes Casals’ performance of the suites so unique and recognizable. To respond to this, I applied computational techniques to the digitized original records, extracting duration and dynamic data. On such data, I applied unsupervised learning techniques (clustering and dimension reduction) to determine the micro-level duration and dynamic strategies that Casals employs in the sarabandes. Through the analysis, I show how he recorded wisely, producing an interpretation that seems to be cautiously calculated and that pays attention to harmony, melodic contour, and contrapuntal facture, and in which he had to react to the unforeseen behaviour of his instrument, including the sound of a wolf tone. In this manner, through the dialogue between musicology, embodied knowledge, and computation, a better insight into Casals’ performance style and, importantly, musical understanding and technique is gained.

Dr. Marija Maglov (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

Selling Sound Carriers in Serbia/Yugoslavia in the early 20th century

In recent years the scholarship on early recording industry had intensified and blossomed in the countries of former Yugoslavia. Extensive research was done on many aspects of early recordings. Still, the more in-depth research on middlemen (mainly distributors and sellers) is to take place. While recent studies do bring forward valuable information on the sellers and places where one could buy sound carriers at the time, this information is usually not the central topic of the articles (at least to my present knowledge). In this paper, I will present the traces of the business practices of record sellers, building on existing scholarship and offering more detailed information found in periodicals, advertising, and archives dedicated to commercial activities at the time. Starting with the beginning of the century, I will conclude the paper with the 1930s. By that time, there were several record shops (not always exclusively dedicated to records) which promoted their catalogue by borrowing it to the program of recently established Radio Belgrade, to various outcomes. This will be the first presentation of the research in its early stages.  

Carlota Martínez Escamilla (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Music and Rhetoric: Recorded Performances of the Prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach's Suite II for Solo Cello

For Aristotle, rhetoric is the ability to find everything that can persuade in discourse, and for Quintilian it is the art of good speech (Barthes, 1993). With sounds instead of words, performers use rhetoric when interpreting a work, in order to convey a message, whatever its nature, to the listener and connect with them. In this context, this communication investigates the relationship between musical interpretation and rhetoric in the interpretive act, that is to say, not the compositional act. Of the five rhetorical operations (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and actio) (Barthes, 1993), it only focuses on elocutio and actio, that is, on how discourse is embellished and declaimed. To this end, a selection of sound recordings of the Prelude from Suite II for solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach is analysed. Based on quantitative methodologies (Fabian, 2015, 2017; Llorens, 2021; Llorens and Martínez-Escamilla, 2024) for the analysis of tempo, durations and silence/rest, it studies the ways in which the manipulations of these parameters by the performers reflect particular rhetorical visions, focusing on diastole, synaloepha and hyperbole in relation to durations and rests; anaphora to agogics and performative motif (Rink, Spiro and Gold, 2011) repetition; periphrasis to ornaments; and euphony resonance of the instrument's harmonics.

Hilary Metzger (Teatro Nuovo)

Comparing different recordings of the same composition: the case of Victor Herbert

Much has already been written about Victor Herbert’s exciting life (1859-1924): his nonconformist, talented ancestors; his auspicious emigration from Ireland to Germany and then to America on the coattails of his wife, a recently hired soloist with the Metropolitan Opera Company; his love of beer and German food; his prodigious talent as a cello virtuoso and an operetta composer; his stupendous work ethic; his fierce desire to be financially successful; and his generosity and loyalty to his fellow musicians. This presentation will discuss Herbert’s interpretative choices as a string player, particularly his preferences concerning portamento, vibrato and tempo rubato. It will analyse the written technical instructions for string players that Victor Herbert left in the orchestral material for his own compositions. Most importantly, it will compare spectrogram analyses of Herbert’s cello recordings to recordings of the same pieces made by other cellists at the same time. Herbert’s example will serve as a springboard for further comparisons of these three factors in other recordings of the same pieces made by several different cellists within a small time frame. I will examine whether the following criteria: date of birth of the cellist, age of the cellist at the time of the recording, country of education, country of most professional activities, and type of career (predominantly soloist, chamber musician or orchestral player) have any statistically relevant correlation with the interpretative choices we hear. Some pieces were so popular that many artists recorded them at about the same time. Especially for a musician whose presence on stage has been repeatedly described as show-boat, exaggerated, larger-than-life, Herbert’s playing on his recordings appears rather subdued. What other factors might have been influencing his interpretative choices, perhaps without his full awareness?

Salvatore Morra (University of Cambridge)

“Musical Orient” in Italy: The Early Recordings (1930s) of the International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (ISMEO) 

The years following the unification of Italy (1870s) marked a flourishing period of cultural and scientific revival in which Italy took the first steps towards a colonial project (Philesi, 1964). The collection of discs (78rpm) (still unknown number of items) of the IsMEO – Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East – today, The International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (ISMEO), is part of a conspicuous collection of materials from the Italian colonies in Africa (1930s), particularly from Ethiopia and Libya. Part of the collection, which until the 1995 belonged to the Italian Institute for Africa and the East (IsIAO), is now held at the National Library of Rome and some at the Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi. The collection comprises recording from Columbia (Marconiphone; Milan), Odeon but also from the Italia Cetra and the Italian branch of the German Parlophon (green series). This paper explores the collection considering the wealth of contexts - social, physical, visual, material - tracing the myriad of ways in which these recordings have been implicated and intertwined with Italian colonial histories.

Orestis Papaioannou (Hamburg University of Music and Theatre)

'Speak-against-the-music': Variation and Traces of Epic Singing in Selected Historical Recordings of Die Dreigroschenoper (1928-1930).

Die Dreigroschenoper is one of Brecht’s earliest attempts at Epic Theatre, an innovative dramatic form that aims to discourage empathy and emotional engagement while provoking a didactic experience for spectators. Regarding the songs— influenced by styles such as ballad singing and cabaret—Brecht required a detached, speech-like, and demonstrative style, a stance that could be seen as conflicting with Weill's melodic structure. Following the work’s unexpected success, recordings featuring members of the original cast quickly emerged. These recordings exhibit significant individual variations in performance practice, sparking debates among musicologists regarding their representativeness of Brecht’s ideas on singing. This paper interprets the recordings’ unique characteristics as a reflection of the precise historical context of the premiere: The actors’ diverse artistic backgrounds, their lack of experience in this new genre, and chaotic rehearsal conditions resulted in recordings that incorporated vocal practices from various traditions. Actress Carola Neher interprets the songs with a ballad-like aesthetic, often replacing the melody with intoned speech. Cabaret actor Kurt Gerron sings with an exaggerated nasal timbre and wide portamenti between syllables. In contrast, the recordings of Lotte Lenya, Harald Paulsen, and Willy Trenk-Trebitsch reveal elements aligning with Brecht's vision, showing remarkable differences in their singing style compared to other recordings they made in the same period. Their performances feature staccato and highly enunciated renditions, transitions between Sprechgesang and singing, pseudo-lyricism, and an emphasis on gestural words—all aligning with Brecht’s written instructions on ‘singing the songs’ and marking them as the earliest recorded examples of ‘epic singing’.

Neal Peres Da Costa (Sydney Conservatorium of Music)

Waxing lyrical: Observations on recording onto wax disc

How does it feel to record songs and arias (with piano accompaniment) onto wax discs? What expressive practices of the initial performance can be heard on playback and how do these sound by comparison with microphone recordings of the same performance? Were elements of performance modified to suit the wax disc recording process? Do the results sound like us? These questions and several others will be the focus of attention in this paper by researchers on the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project The shock of the old: Rediscovering the sounds of bel canto 1700–1900. In early December 2024, sopranos Claire Burrell-McDonald and Anna Fraser, and pianist Neal Peres Da Costa were invited by Inja Stanovic (University of Surrey) to record ten wax discs of vocal works annotated with profusions of bel canto expressive practices by the celebrated pedagogues Manuel García II and Domenico Corri. The experience was absolutely thrilling, but also eye and ear opening. In situ we listened back to test recordings, and made adjustments to both physical positionings and sound projection in order to get the ‘best’ possible result. Did we perform differently to ‘normal’ (modern) recording circumstances? And if so, how did this impinge on our expressive practices. To what extent does the wax recording capture our musical intentions? We have had a sneak preview of one of the recordings and it sounds beautiful, charming, and antique: as if we had made the recording back in the early 1900s. In this paper we will interrogate our suite of recordings and make observations about how our experience of wax disc recording might help us understand and to some extent extrapolate the chiaroscuro sound worlds of singers and pianists on early recordings.

Marco Ramelli and Enrica Savigni (TU Dublin Conservatoire)

The Recording by Federico Mompou and Miguel Llobet - The Interplay of Sound and Tactile Perception in Catalan Music

The lecture delves into the aesthetics of two Catalan composers, Frederic Mompou and Miguel Llobet, examining how their reflections and recordings reveal a profound interplay between touch perception and tempo. It also explores the broader aesthetics of Catalan composers, including Felip Pedrell, Pau Casals, and Roberto Gerhard, reflecting on how tempo and tactile perception are intertwined in the distinct identity of Catalan music. This research is part of the TouchTheSound project, where we investigate how historical instruments and their inherent challenges, pedagogical methods, and the structure of past musical communities may have stimulated brain plasticity. This, in turn, likely fostered a deeply integrated tactile approach to playing and listening, profoundly influencing perceptions of time and fostering creativity. In this lecture, we will analyze historical recordings by Mompou and Llobet, focusing on their recordings of their own arrangements of Catalan folk songs. These recordings provide valuable insights into their nuanced approaches to tempo and offer clues about their relationship with their instruments and the integration of touch in their performance practices. To further illustrate these concepts, we will perform works by Mompou and Llobet on two original Catalan historical guitars. Drawing inspiration from these recordings, we will demonstrate how we develop the relationship between nuanced timing and the perception of the instrument's vibrations, exploring the practical application of Mompou and Llobet's pedagogical approaches and philosophies. Additionally, we propose that their approach to timing is influenced by the characteristics of the instrument they were using, which required greater dynamic coupling and a heightened reliance on haptic feedback.

László Stachó (Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest)

The potential of complex statistical analyses in characterising performance style

Among the youngest and most interdisciplinary subfields of musicology is the study of musical performance, which is often viewed as part of the broad, multidisciplinary field labelled ‘performance studies’. This field combines the perspectives and methods of historical and systematic musicology, and in collaboration with related disciplines – primarily psychology and sociology – it supports classical research on performance practice with the integrated methodologies of these disciplines, focusing not only on written historical documents but also on the empirical analysis of sound recordings. I began my research on Bartók’s performance practice nearly two decades ago and gradually developed a unique methodology, through which the playing style of performers trained at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century can be characterised in a comparative manner – relative to both their contemporaries and predecessors – supported by multifaceted, comparative methods of enquiry, including empirical measurements. These studies represent both an etic and emic perspective: beyond the objective and comparative description of phenomena (such as structural-level descriptions of performances), by approaching the cognitive functioning and habitus of the performer, the analyst may attempt to place themselves in the artist’s perspective, thereby characterising the style “from within”. In my paper, I would like to demonstrate with examples of my own findings how this complex methodology – involving such novel methods as higher-level statistical analyses of microtiming measurements of sound recordings – can carefully and thoroughly capture and contextualise the performance style of a performer from the past, considering both historical and cultural contexts, as well as psychological factors.

Joanna Staruch-Smolec (Université libre de Bruxelles and Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles)

Performer’s Creative Gesture as a Key in Approach to Early Recordings: The Example of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Acoustic Discs

Performances captured on early recordings often seem peculiar to modern listeners, especially in the context of today’s training in strict adherence to the score. This is evident in the modern perception of Eugène Ysaÿe’s (1858–1939) violin playing, where his frequent slides, unwritten accents, and rhythmic flexibility largely defy score-centred explanations. However, if we consider these elements within the context of the period’s performance practices, rather than through the lens of contemporary values, a different understanding emerges. Ysaÿe himself, in his handwritten notes titled Observations (1897), suggests viewing performance as a new ‘composition’, an act of ‘completing’ or even ‘correcting’ the composer’s necessarily unfinished work. Thus, he evaluates performance as an independent work of art, rather than simply judging its faithfulness to the score or to the so-called composer’s intentions. This paper proposes to analyse Ysaÿe’s recordings (Columbia’s 12-inch discs, 1912–1914) through the lens of his creative gestures. Drawing on the understanding of this notion developed in early recording studies (Leech-Wilkinson, 2009; Rink et al., 2011; Vollmer and Bolles, 2019), I treat Ysaÿe’s gestures not as isolated additions to or deformations of the score, but as intentional, structured movements that form a cohesive artistic expression. Using computational methods, a comparative approach with handwritten annotations, and violinistic emulation, I identify throughout Ysaÿe’s recordings a series of concrete performative patterns and further explored them in my own violin performance. This approach not only enriches modern understanding of Ysaÿe’s artistry but also offers a valuable tool for the analysis and re-enactment of early recordings more broadly.

Ferenc János Szabó (Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest)

Early Recordings and the Challenges of Discography in the 21st Century

For a researcher working on early sound recordings, it is essential to have access to accurate metadata on the recordings examined. The basic reference works for metadata on sound recordings are discographies, of which a significant number have been produced since 1936. But how do we know that the data in a discography are reliable? What are the criteria for the reliability of discographies? This topic has been a concern for some discographers since the 1970s. Tim Brooks’ 1996 proposal to apply the reference system of scientific publications to discographies points to the methodological issue that, while references were not needed for the first discographies, following the principle of ’first to do it’, this is no longer acceptable for today’s discographers especially when using earlier discographies as sources. Brooks’ call has provoked sharp criticism from parts of the discographic community, arguing that the extensive referencing of discographic data sets not only overloads the data but also increases printing costs enormously. For an online published discography, this problem can be solved in several ways. In addition, it would now in principle be possible to compile a universal discography from the set of national discographies, with practical display, search and access options. However, there appear to be a number of obstacles to the creation of a global discographic database. Some of the obstacles are financial and IT-related, while others are methodological, such as the issue of standardisation or the fact that some national discographies have not yet been completed. For the latter reason, even recordings of important performers are excluded from interpretation analyses because no data are available on early recordings of the respective country. In my presentation, I will discuss these two of the current challenges of discography, the reliability of discographies and the issues of a global discography, using literature and international examples. The presentation is linked to my research on the history and methodology of discography funded by the Bolyai János Research Fellowship (2022-2025).

Greg Szwarcman (The Phillips Collection, Washington)

Classical and Romantic Approaches to Conducting Beethoven’s Symphonies in the late Nineteenth Century

In the late nineteenth century, competing aesthetics on the nature of performances of Beethoven’s symphonies proved to be fraught and well publicized. By this time, two competing conducting styles were widely perceived to have existed with respect to these works: a Classical and a Romantic aesthetic, each of which claimed to best fulfill the composer’s intentions. The former stressed the need for transparency with the performer maintaining steady tempi with little interference from the conductor, whereas the latter emphasized the active involvement of the conductor, particularly through wide ranging tempo modifications. While scholars have analyzed written nineteenth-century sources that describe these conducting styles, it is much less clear how they were manifested in actual performances. Likewise, studies of early orchestral recordings tend not to contextualize their findings with nineteenth-century aesthetic debates, preferring instead to contrast these performance styles with those practiced today. By comparing concert reviews to early recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies made by conductors born in the nineteenth century, I elucidate precisely how the descriptive language of observers of concerts during the late-Romantic era corresponded to the sounds they heard. I maintain that a clear distinction can be made between the Classical and Romantic approaches to conducting an orchestra, even if these differences were often more nuanced than observers liked to admit. While the Classical style of conducting bears some resemblance to the modernist aesthetic that arose in the twentieth century, musicians and critics widely perceived this to be the older and more conservative approach to conducting Beethoven’s symphonies. As such, I challenge the prevailing historiography which suggests that Romantically-styled orchestral performances were the norm throughout the nineteenth century, and argue that early orchestral recordings which bear little to no tempo modifications may bear stylistic roots to that of Felix Mendelssohn and Carl Czerny.

Joyce Tang (University of Glasgow, Musical Museum)

In search of the pianist: The Role of the Piano in Early 20^th Century piano concerto rolls 

This presentation begins with a mystery: an Ampico piano roll, discovered at the Musical Museum Brentford, labelled handwriting ‘Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B flat major, Unknown Pianist.’  This mystery serves as a springboard to explore the broader significance of concerto rolls produced by player piano companies like Ampico in the 1900s to 1920s. Unlike commercially circulated piano rolls intended for home use, concerto rolls featuring only the solo piano part were created exclusively for performances alongside a live orchestra. These recordings offered a unique opportunity for fusion between automated music reproduction and human performance, reshaping how music was experienced by both musicians and audiences. Whilst uncovering the identity of the pianist is an intriguing goal, the central aim of this presentation is to examine whether the technology of the piano itself became the ‘pianist’ in performance. By tracing the potential use of this roll and others akin in 1910s and 1920s concert settings through press reviews and concert programs, we will explore whether the pianist’s presence mattered in these performances– both to the audience and to the musicians playing alongside the roll. In this inquiry, questions of artistic ownership and licensing are also in the probe: Did pianists receive compensation for the use of their recorded performances in these concerts? Did the live orchestra bring its own interpretation, and if so, who ‘owned’ the performance – the pianist who recorded the roll, the orchestra, or the technology itself? 

Matthieu Thonon (Musical Instruments Museum of Brussels)

The audiovisual collection of the MIM (Musical Instruments Museum of Brussels): from Mahillon to the present day

Officially founded in 2017, the beginnings of the MIM's audiovisual collection date back to the first phonographic collections made at the end of the 19th century by Victor-Charles Mahillon, the museum's first curator and founder. It includes wax cylinders dating back to 1900, field recordings of instrumental folk music from France, China and India that are unique in the world. They were collected by Mahillon and will be digitized and rediscovered for the first time in 2025. Initially, there was no question of a ‘collection’ as such. The devices and their sound carriers were incorporated into the museum as technical equipment or documentation objects, in the same way as the books in the library. It was not until the 1960s that audiovisual material was inventoried as an inalienable part of the museum's collections. Among the various sound carriers kept at the MIM, there are almost 15,000 items, estimated to last more than 10,000 hours. And that's not counting the new digital productions, including the documentary video series started in 2017 on musical traditions in Belgium. The MIM's audiovisual collection also includes some 300 items of equipment, recording and reproducing devices, from the oldest phonographs to MP3 players, not forgetting tape players and other obsolete wire recorders from the 1940s. The recent acquisition by donation in 2022 of the private collection of Charles-Emmanuel Lemaire will make a prodigious addition to the museum's existing collection, enabling it to exhibit a wide range of recording equipment from the era of mechanical recording, from the first phonographs until the late 1940s. 

Fañch Thoraval (Musical Instruments Museum of Brussels)

The project for a phonographic archive in Brussels: Mahillon and the struggle between sound and notation (1899-1900)

Recent archival research has shown that from late 1899 onwards, Victor-Charles Mahillon,

curator of the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, began to build up a “collection of

phonograph cylinders reproducing popular music from different countries”. Relying on personal contacts, diplomatic networks and international trade, he collected commercial and home-made recordings from Brittany, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Dublin, Java, Tokyo, Beijing, Kolkata, etc. Mahillon never inventoried this collection because it was not part the museum’s core business. Consequently, it never enjoyed the status of its counterparts in Paris, Vienna or Berlin, and remained unnoticed up to now. The collection suffered numerous alterations over time, but it could be partly reconstituted after the rediscovery in the MIM's repositories of around 70 wax cylinders from Belgium, Provence, Egypt, China, Ottoman Empire, India, England and North America. Though the gathering of worldwide musical recordings in Brussels was exactly concomitant with the launching of the Phonogrammarchiv at the Sciences Academy in Vienna and the Musée Phonographique at the Anthropological Society in Paris, it served a different purpose. Whereas the latter two projects had a broader ethnographic and linguistic agenda, Mahillon's project focused on musical instruments in order to build a tool for musicological research. In this respect, it predates by several years the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. Mahillon’s focus on musical instruments makes this collection particularly relevant for the early recordings history. Since the museum’s foundation in 1877, Mahillon only documented the music related to his instruments by the means of scores. Whereas his 1899 collection accounts for a shift to a “sound-based” approach to instrumental music, his approach to vocal performance remained conditioned by notation. Eventually, Mahillon’s ambivalent conception of music gives evidence for a struggle between notation and sound that might provide further explanation for the late recognition of the phonograph as a full musical medium.

Hon-Lun Helan Yang (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Asian Popular Music’s Global Network: “The Fragrance of the Durians” and its Related Recordings

Early recordings can be a dynamic site through which a greater understanding of a place and its people becomes possible. These recordings documented many forms of musical transmissions fluid in circulation and meaning production, particularly when they appeared at the intersection of diametrically opposing forces, traditional versus contemporary, local versus global, regional versus national, past versus present, and colonial versus post-colonial, etc. The objective of this paper is to show early recordings’ capacity to embody such complex phenomena. This paper focuses on the Cantopop song “The Fragrance of the Durians,” tracing its origin to a film sound track of the 1950s, and then earlier recordings, namely the recording of the Malaysian hit “Mr Malay,” which was itself a cover of the recording of the Indonesian pop Impian Semalam from the 1940s. Each of these songs carries its own lyrics and arrangements reflective of its time and place, all showing Western influences, and each has attracted an array of new covers since its production. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s (2009, 129) notion that commodities can serve as objectified containers of meanings, I argue that early recordings can be a way to look at music’s fluidity in the following aspects: 1) in geography, how music travelled through a complex web of transnational networks and created the sonic imagination of ‘nanyang’, the nickname for south-east Asia; 2) in meaning, how each of them constructed and produced its own meaning as a result of re-contextualization connected to music’s moving geography; and 3) in creativity, how new covers of each introduced stylistic changes for the music to remain engaging to those who consumed it. 

Christos Yiallouros (University of Oxford)

Fixing Elgar; Re-editing his 1929 Piano Improvisations

Early recordings have mainly been studied as aural documents offering invaluable insights into performance practices, as well as composers' interpretations of their own published works. Nonetheless, a limited number of such recordings feature improvisations by notable composers and performers, which, unsurprisingly, were never notated by them. In 2006, Novello published transcriptions of five improvisations recorded by Elgar in 1929, notated and edited by Iain Farrington using a digitised version of the original 78 rpm record. The improvisatory nature of these five pieces resulted in a musical text lacking melodic and rhythmic coherence in the recurring thematic material and sequential/analogous passages throughout, and although the are several opportunities for editorial refinement aimed at achieving greater uniformity in the musical text, the edition preserves the inherent spontaneity of Elgar’s improvisations with note-by-note transcriptions. Also, a comparison between Elgar's recording and the published transcriptions reveals that many performance directions indicated there are of descriptive nature, stemming from subtle dynamic and tempo changes heard in Elgar’s recording that raise questions about their suitability for inclusion in a musical text intended to be used for future performances. Namely, such detailed and descriptive performance directions suggest the slavish imitation of Elgar’s playing style, potentially limiting performers' interpretive freedom. This paper explores the potential to transform these descriptive transcriptions into prescriptive scores, as well as the opportunities and limitations arising from the quality of the recording used by Farrington to transcribe Elgar’s improvisations. Considering Andy Hamilton’s ‘aesthetics of imperfection’, the discussion addresses any limitations posed upon the editorial process by the compositions’ ontological identity as improvisations rather than predetermined, fixed works. In addition, this paper engages with the tension between compositional intention – if such a concept can be meaningfully applied to improvisational output – and editorial authority when attempting to produce a prescriptive score for posthumously notated improvisations.

Workshop 1 (Tuesday, 2 July): Preservation of Phonographic Cylinders in the Czech Republic - WorkFlow and Methodology, National Museum Sound Lab

This workshop will focus on the preservation of phonograph cylinders, an invaluable yet fragile medium for historical audio recordings. Participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of the workflow required to document, digitize, and ensure the long-term preservation of these unique artifacts. The process begins with a specific identification  connected with creating a unique identifier for the whole workflow process. Documentation, including the identification and cataloging of each cylinder, carrier, and box, is very important. High-resolution photography is used to capture detailed images of the physical carrier, preserving their visual characteristics and inscriptions most of the time located on boxes. Digitization follows, utilizing specialized playback machine Endpoint and software to convert the audio content into high-quality digital formats while minimizing physical wear on the specimen. Finally, the workshop will address strategies for long-term digital preservation, including metadata creation, storage solutions, and best practices for ensuring accessibility and integrity over time. By combining practical demonstrations and theoretical discussions, this workshop equips participants with the tools and knowledge to safeguard phonograph cylinder collections for future generations.

Workshop 2 (Wedesday, 2 July): Connecting European Archives: A Collaborative Network for Sound Recording Repositories

The workshop will explore the potential for developing a collaborative network of catalogues for historical sound recordings, bringing together professionals from European universities, libraries, and cultural institutions. The workshop introduces a case study from the MELOS network (https://melos-project.gr/en) and the University of Ioannina’s Music Documentation Laboratory, including the Vassilis Tsitsanis Collection of Recordings (https://epsetem.project.uoi.gr/?lang=en). It presents the underlying repository platform, ReasonableGraph.org, an innovative open-source solution for managing metadata and digital files, illustrating its practical implementation in historical discography and offering participants the opportunity for a hands-on demonstration of the network’s functions.

Following the presentation, participants will engage in a discussion on the possibilities of establishing interconnected archives within a unified platform for historical recordings, under ERA. This exchange will consider the technological and conceptual frameworks necessary to foster a sustainable and collaborative digital environment for European sound heritage. Key issues for discussion include the ontology for organising material, procedures and policies for sharing metadata and digital files, documenting the provenance of deposited knowledge, and the engagement of the wider community. The collaborative network will serve as a digital space for sharing, reusing, and enriching materials, as well as for the further development of innovative digital services and tools.

Participants (in alphabetical order):

Austria: Österreichische Adademie der Wissenschaftern Phonogrammarchiv (Dr. Kerstin Klenke)

Austria: Die Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger (Claus Peter Gallenmiller)

Croatia: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (Professor Naila Ceribasic, Dr. Jelka Vukobratović)

Czechia: Národní muzeum Prague (Filip Šír)

Greece: Music Documentation Laboratory, University of Ioannina (Professor George Kokkonis, Dr. Nikos Ordoulidis)

Greece: AltSol (Nikos Papazis)

Hungary: Institute for Musicology, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Dr. Ferenc János Szabó)

Italy: SOFOS (Professor Angelo Pompilio and Dr. Cristina Paulon)

Norway: Norweigan Academy of Music (Professor Tore Simonsen)

Portugal: Arquivo Nacional do Som / National Sound Archive (Dr. Pedro Félix)

Spain: Universidad Internacional de Valencia (Professor Maria Lourdes Rebollo)

The UK: The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society (Jonathan Emeruwa)

The UK: King's College London Music Archives (Andrew Hallifax)

Workshop 3: 

Trayce Arssow, of the Yugoslav Discographic Society, holds an MA in History with expertise in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe. In the past several years they discovered scholarly interest in discography, history of the sound recording industry, record companies’ business history, history of technology and science, musicology and ethnomusicology. Driven by their multi-disciplinary interests, at present they are pursuing a book-length project entitled ‘Paul Voigt’s Quadrangular Record: Edison Bell’s Early Electrical Recordings in Great Britain and Eastern Europe, 1925-1933.’ The proposed paper may be considered as first draft of an introductory or first chapter of the intended extended essay.

Luís Bastos Machado is a pianist and a researcher at Centro de Estudos em Sociologia e Estética Musical (Portugal), where he co-created and coordinates the Thematic Line in Music and Interpretation. After an MA in Piano Performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he is now completing a PhD in Historical Musicology at NOVA University Lisbon under the supervision of Professor Paulo Ferreira de Castro. His doctoral project, which seeks to shed light on the impact of modernist aesthetics and the sociocultural environment during the first half of the twentieth century on the performance of Johannes Brahms's piano works, was granted a full studentship from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. He performs internationally and has recorded for classical radio stations in Portugal and Germany. He has received several awards and a merit scholarship during his training. 

Jeroen Billiet studied the horn at the Royal Conservatories of Ghent and Brussels with Luc Bergé, graduating with highest honors in 2001. He furthered his studies with Froydis Ree Wekre and specialized in historical instruments —his great passion— under the guidance of Claude Maury. His career subsequently led him to some of the most prominent ensembles for early music. He currently holds solo positions with Le Concert d’Astrée (Emmanuelle Haïm) and Les Talens Lyriques (Christophe Rousset). As a member of these ensembles, he has performed at nearly all major European music festivals and contributed to over 70 CD and DVD recordings.Jeroen received the prestigious Punto Award from the International Horn Society in recognition of his international career as a performer, educator, and researcher. In 2021 he obtained a PhD in the Arts from Ghent University for his artistic study of the Ghent horn playing tradition in the Belle Époque, and was appointed as Professor of Horn and Natural Horn at Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel in the same year.

Ella Fallon is a PhD student at TU Dublin Conservatoire, conducting research on the recorded performance style of Cécile Chaminade under the supervision of Dr Maria McHale. In 2020, she completed her Bachelor of Music at the Conservatoire with a specialisation in Musicology for which she wrote dissertations on Mozart’s cadenzas and the concept of late style. Most recently, she presented her doctoral research at the Society for Musicology in Ireland’s Plenary Conference and at ‘Piano Playing Styles of the Nineteenth Century’ in Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Alongside her studies, Ella is a pianist and the organist for St. Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare. Performance highlights include the National Concert Hall in Dublin and the Orgelpark in Amsterdam.

Hon-Lun Helan Yang is professor emeritus at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Music. Her research interest is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ranging from nineteenth-century American symphonic music to contemporary Chinese music, both “serious” and “popular” in style and appeal. Co-editor of China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception (2017) and lead author of Networking the Russian Diaspora: Russian Musicians and Musical Activities in Interwar Shanghai (2020), her writings also appeared in edited volumes, namely the Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora (2023), Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars (2021), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class (2019), The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship (2018) as well as journals such as Twentieth-Century Music (2021, 2018), International Communication of Chinese Culture (2020), Journal of Musicological Research (2019), Twentieth-Century China (2012), Asian Music (2010), and Journal of American Music (2003).

The kantele player Arja Kastinen was the first Finnish folk musician to take the Doctor of Music examination in the artistic study programme at the Sibelius Academy in December 2000. What inspired her to do this was the ancient Karelian kantele improvisation. Since then, she has continued her research into the ancient kantele tradition with articles, pedagogic material, six solo albums and three publications on archival recordings. She is currently working as a visiting researcher at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki, in the project "Kantele of the Runosong Culture and the Dialogue of Creativity". Her website: https://www.temps.fi/en/.

Paul Kerensa is a British Comedy Award-winning writer, including BBC1’s Not Going Out, Miranda, Top Gear, Buble at the BBC, and CBBC’s Andy and the Band. As a stand-up, Paul won ITV’s Take the Mike and was a BBC New Comedy Awards finalist. He’s a regular voice on Radio 2’s Pause for Thought, Radio 4’s Daily Service, and has presented on BBC Radio Sussex and Surrey. Paul hosts The British Broadcasting Century Podcast, retelling the BBC origin story. He tours An Evening of (Very) Old Radio, recreating early moments and celebrating forgotten pioneers. Paul has lectured in Screenwriting at the University of Winchester. Books include Hark! The Biography of Christmas and the forthcoming Auntie and Uncles, a novel on the early BBC.

Achille Kienholz is a PhD student, enrolled in the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project “The musical world of fairgrounds in Switzerland, 19^th-21^st centuries”, led by Prof. Anna Stoll Knecht, at the University of Fribourg. He holds a bachelor's degree in musicology and art history from the latter university and a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Neuchâtel. His dissertation project aims to clarify the origins, use and functions of the fairground organ in the period between 1850 and 1950, as well as to study interactions and social meanings still generated by and around this kind of instruments.

George Kokkonis studied in Paris composition (École Normale), jazz composition-orchestration (CIM) and mostly musicology at Paris VIII University, focusing on greek music (art and popular). In 2006, at the same University, he received a PhD («The issue of greekness in Greek art music»). From 1987 to 1993 he worked in Paris as musicologist-Librarian (Library BPI [Centre Pompidou], National Library [BNF] and Library of IRCAM – CNRS). In 1998, he was the principal coordinator of the foundation of the Department of Traditional Music in Greece. Since 2002 he is a permanent staff member at the Department and head of the Music Documentation Laboratory and «Greek Music Archives». His research activity focuses on the artistic and folk music traditions of Greece and the Mediterranean.

Riccardo La Spina: A passionate life-long collector and student of historical recordings, Riccardo researches nineteenth-century opera composition, reception and vocality, enjoying membership in international study groups and learned societies. Scholarly presentations include Società Italiana di Musicologia; Society for Musicology in Ireland; American Musicological Society; and IRCTP, Tbilisi, etc. Research honors include residencies in Italy, Mexico, Spain (the ICCMU/Universidad Complutense), Madrid, and UK, US awards (Royal Historical Society 2002, AMS Hampson Fund for Research in Song, 2014). He recently earned his doctorate in Musicology (Universidad de La Rioja) while a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music, University of California, Riverside (2024). Published contributions include Grove, RILM, PMM, Studies in Musical Theatre, Diagonal, and 19th-Century Music (forthcoming). Riccardo also composes, teaches/coaches voice privately, concertizes as a tenor-soloist and performs ethnic song self-accompanied (accordion, Georgian panduri).

Ana Llorens holds a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge. She is Lecturer in Music Theory and Analysis at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the scientific director of the ERC ‘DIDONE’ project. She is specialized in the analysis of large corpora and, since 2019, board member of the Spanish Society of Musicology. Currently, she is Principal Investigator of the project ‘The Sound of Pau Casals’, funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as co-editor of the volume The Cambridge Companion to Music in Spain (Cambridge University Press, to appear). Her work has been published in Music Theory Online, Empirical Musicology Review, Routledge, and Brepols. She received the 2024 “Julián Marías” Prize for Research on the Humanities by the Comunidad de Madrid.

Marija Maglov is a Research Associate at the Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her main research interests are interdisciplinary musicological studies of music and media, radio art, music practices of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, discography, and theories of media and mediation. She received her PhD at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade in 2022. In 2018, she received a DAAD Short-term research grant for her research project carried out at Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hanover, Germany. She published a monograph on classical music catalogue of Serbian label PGP RTB/PGP RTS (The Best of: Classical Music in PGP, Belgrade: Faculty of Media and Communication, 2016). 

Carlota Martínez Escamilla. Musicologist and cellist. She graduated in Musicology at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2021, finishing with honors in the Final Degree Project and the award for the best academic record of the degree. During 2021/2022 she studied the Master in Spanish and Hispano-American Music at the same university. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology with a predoctoral contract UCM. His academic interest in the analysis of the interpretation of sound recordings begins from the elaboration of the Final Degree Project. At this moment, she is part of the working group of the i+D project “The sound of Pau Casals” with reference number PID2021-124445OA-I00.

Hilary Metzger is principal cellist of Teatro Nuovo (Will Crutchfield and Jakob Lehmann), rotating principal cellist of Anima Eterna Brugge and Opéra Fuoco (David Stern), a member of l’Orchestre des Champs Elysées (Philippe Herreweghe), and a frequent chamber music collaborator with members of these and other period instrument ensembles. She teaches historically informed performance at the Pôle Aliénor in Poitiers and at the Jeune Orchestra Atlantique Masters degree program in Saintes. In 2020, she received a residency research grant from the Orpheus Institute to study secco recitative realization by cellists in the 19th and the 21^st centuries. Her articles on historically informed performance practice in the 19th century have been published by Brepols, Performance Practice Review, Microsillon éditions, and the American Rossini Society.

Salvatore Morra: I am currently the music curator of the ISMEO in Rome, and vice-chair of the Mediterranean Music Study group of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD). He holds a Ph.D. in Music Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London and his research focuses on ethnomusicological perspectives of Arab music and interdisciplinary debates around post-colonial nationalism, multiculturalism and decoloniality in the Maghreb. 

Nikos Ordoulidis is a Greek musicologist and musician. He earned a Ph.D. in Music from the University of Leeds, UK, focusing on the commercial discography of 20th-century rebetiko music. His research encompasses repertoires that have been ignored in the past, across Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. His activity revolves around musical syncretism, examining the social contexts that shaped the music he studied and emphasizing on cultural transfer and cosmopolitanism. He published extensively, exploring topics such as music’s relationship with power and ideologies, historical discography, and interactions amongst scholarly, folk, and popular ethnic repertoires. His latest monograph is titled Musical Nationalism, Despotism and Scholarly Interventions in Greek Popular Music, published by Bloomsbury. He is currently a researcher at the Music Documentation Laboratory at the University of Ioannina.

Orestis Papaioannou is a Greek composer and music lecturer. He earned a Master's degree in musicology, composition, and music theory from the Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki and the Lübeck University of Music. He is currently completing his DMA in artistic research on hybrid vocal phenomena in opera at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, under the supervision of Nina Noeske and Gordon Kampe. His compositions have been performed internationally and have received various awards. The artistic outcome of his research, an original opera, will be staged for a full week at the Greek National Opera in May 2025.

Marco Ramelli is an artist of diverse interests, encompassing roles as a guitarist, composer, researcher, lecturer, and artistic director. He is currently a lecturer at TU Dublin Conservatoire in Ireland. After winning international competitions in Italy, Spain, the UK, Serbia, and France, he has performed worldwide appearing in important venues as a soloist and chamber musician. As a composer, he won the World Guitar Composition Competition, and his music has been performed by top international artists. Together with Enrica Savigni and Gabriele Lodi created the TouchTheSound project. He is an advocate for music education and an Artistic Director of music festivals in Italy, the Czech Republic, and Ireland. In 2019, Marco earned a Doctorate in performing arts from the University of St Andrews. As researcher his most recent publication is a chapter in the book "Roberto Gerhard: Re-appraising a Musical Visionary" published by Oxford University Press.

Enrica Savigni is a classical guitarist who has been deeply interested in historical instruments since 2012. She graduated in 19th century-guitar at Civica Scuola di Musica in Milan in 2013, and in 2021 she obtained her Master of Arts in music performance in the Early Music department of the Koninklijk Conservatorium of Brussels. She plays in a duo with her sister, fortepianist Laura Savigni, performing the nineteenth-century repertoire for piano and guitar and exploring the duo formation through transcription and contemporary compositions. In addition, she collaborates with guitarist Marco Ramelli and luthier Gabriele Lodi in the organisation TouchTheSound Project, a project that shares research in performance practice, ancient instruments, and historical repertoire. She is currently a third-year DMus research student at the TU Dublin Conservatoire, a freelance performer and a guitar tutor at Maynooth University.

Musicologist, psychologist, and pianist László Stachó is a faculty member at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and a regular guest professor at the Santa Cecilia Conservatoire (Rome) and the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska Conservatoire (Madrid). As a musicologist, he specialises in early 20th-century performance practice, has written the first monograph on the pianist Béla Bartók’s performing style, and leads masterclasses and coaching sessions in historically informed performance (HIP) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, employing a specific cognitive approach to performance history. As a pianist and chamber musician, he has performed across three continents. As a music educator, he has led attention training workshops as well as piano and chamber music coaching sessions in 19 countries to date in Europe, Asia, and the US. He was Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Music of the Cambridge University in 2014 and 2017, and Guest Professor at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance in 2023.

Joanna Staruch-Smolec is an FNRS research fellow and a PhD candidate in art and art sciences at Université libre de Bruxelles and Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles under the supervision of Valérie Dufour, Véronique Bogaerts and Vincent Hepp. Her research focuses on violinistic gestures of the great Belgian violinist, Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), that she studies through the analysis of his acoustic recordings and musical library. Joanna regularly gives lecture-recitals related to her thesis, actively participates in international conferences, and publishes the artistic and scientific results of her research, most recently in the volume Early Sound Recordings: Academic Research and Practice (Routledge, 2023), and in Revue Belge de Musicologie (2025).

Greg Szwarcman: I am an aspiring archivist currently working as a music intern at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. At the moment I am pursuing an MLIS degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, where I also hold an M.A. in musicology, as well as a B.A. in music performance from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, my instrument being the violin. My research interests center on late nineteenth-century performance practice of Western Art Music, particularly through the use of early sound recordings, aspects which I strive to incorporate into my own violin playing. Through my archival work, I aspire to preserve and digitize sound recordings found on wax cylinders and gramophone records which would otherwise be lost for posterity.

Joyce Tang is a pianist and an early-career researcher. She obtained her Bachelors from the Royal Academy of Music, Masters from the University of Oxford, and PhD from the University of Southampton. Her research interest and specialism are in historical pianos and their reception, dissemination, and associated performing practices. At present, she is a Research Assistant of the AHRC IAA Funded Project - Building audiences for private collections of early recorded sound, and the head Archivist at the Musical Museum Brentford, a museum showcasing the history of music reproduction instruments.

Matthieu Thonon studied musicology (ULB, 2004) and works at the MIM's library since 2009. He became curator of the museum's newly-created audiovisual collection in 2017. The audiovisual collection consists of a material part and an immaterial part. On the one hand, the sound devices and their carriers, such as phonographs, gramophones, tape recorders, wax cylinders, shellac discs, etc. On the other hand, the digitalized museum's audiovisual archives and the new audio and video productions such as the documentary series Traditional Music in Belgium, the podcasts and the collaborative projects abroad such as PRIMA (Kenya), RIETMA (Gabon), SHARE (Rwanda). Matthieu Thonon also took part in the exhibitions SAX200 (2014) and Toots 100. The Sound of a Belgian Legend (2022).

Fañch Thoraval is currently researcher at the UCLouvain and curator of the Asiatic and Oceanian collections at the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels. He holds a PhD in musicology (Paris-Sorbonne) and social history (Ca'Foscari). His research deals mainly with social/cultural history of music, focusing both on western religious traditions (15th-17th centuries) and on the reception of musical distance (16th-19th centuries). He has been teaching musicology in various universities in France and Belgium and was involved in various European research projects (Montpellier, Tours, Louvain-la-Neuve, Poitiers, Athens, Paris). He is presently involved in the FED-tWIN research project MaHiOn: A Material History of Otherness: Musical Instrument Museums as source and resource in contemporary debate.

Christos Yiallouros is currently pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, holding the Hélène La Rue Scholarship. His research, supervised by Professor David Maw, focuses on un-notated and posthumously notated compositions, exploring their ontological identity and the editorial processes that can transform transcriptions of these pieces from descriptive representations of their composers’ performances into prescriptive scores. He is currently transcribing and editing Nicolas Economou’s un-notated piano works, as well as editing his notated oeuvre, which will be published in the near future. Christos is also a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied piano under the guidance of Tatiana Sarkissova, obtaining his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees with Distinction and First Class Honours respectively.

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