Early Recordings Association Conference 2026

The 2026 annual conference of the Early Recording Association (ERA) took place from 18 to 20 June at the University of Glasgow. This year’s conference offered a rich programme of presentations, lecture-recitals, and discussions around the theme “Unheard Legacies: Rethinking Early Recording Histories”. Speakers approached this theme from a wide range of perspectives, with contributions from academic researchers, performing musicians, archivists, and specialists in early recording technologies and their continuing legacies.

Across the three days, the conference repeatedly returned to questions of whose voices have been preserved, whose labour has been made visible or invisible, and how early recordings continue to shape historical, cultural, and technological understanding today. Two of the conference’s externally facing events were especially effective in connecting early recording research with broader contemporary concerns. In the introductory talk, Eva Moreda Rodriguez reflected on the role of migration in early recording history, linking the conference theme to Refugee Week at the University of Glasgow. The roundtable “Women in Early Recorded Sound: Performance, Archives, Technologies”, consisting of Barbara Gentili, Elodie A. Roy, and Rachael Finney, similarly broadened the discussion by focusing on the complex visibility of women in early recorded sound: from the obscurity of uncredited or unknown vocalists to the heightened public presence of operatic divas. Attention was also drawn to women’s labour within early recording cultures, including its social, financial, and health implications, as well as questions on reception, professionalism, and moral judgement. Together, these events demonstrated how early recordings can be approached not only as research objects, but also as cultural materials through which contemporary questions of migration, gender, and public memory can be explored.

The paper sessions developed these questions through an immense range of case studies. One early session considered the influence of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musicians, collectors, researchers, and technologists on methods of recording, cataloguing, and preservation. Bashir Saade’s paper introduced the distinctive case of the Egyptian nay player Amin Buzari, whose recorded repertoire brought together Western chamber traditions and local stylistic practices. Simon Crab’s presentation on Mady Sauvageot and the Institut de Phonétique highlighted some of the more unconventional scientific and technological contexts surrounding early sound research, including experiments with recorded voices and bodily analysis. Sarah Fuchs’ discussion of the actor and singer Guy Ferrant foregrounded the role of the collector, asking what is lost when a carefully curated personal collection is later dispersed and absorbed into a universal archival holding. August Rabe’s account of Rudolf Trebitsch’s expedition to Greenland further complicated the relationship between recording, scientific authority, and colonial or ethnographic ambition.

Several presentations were especially memorable in the way they used early recordings to unsettle familiar assumptions about performance practice. Pianist Jorge Gonçalves’s lecture-recital on Chopin’s nocturnes allowed us to hear well-known works through practices that now sound unfamiliar, including improvisatory transitions that wove four nocturnes into a single, continuous musical experience. László Stachó’s paper drew parallels between Western classical performance traditions and jazz, showing how style-based performance analysis can reveal broader shifts in musical expression, individuality, and artistic identity. Austin Oting Har’s paper on early recordings of Japanese Noh theatre was also thought-provoking in its discussion of transmission. What I took from Har’s paper was a question about how different forms of evidence preserve practice: orally transmitted traditions and neglected recordings may not function in the same way, but both can reveal something about how performance is remembered, sustained, or allowed to fall out of use.

Other papers foregrounded the material, commercial, and cultural lives of early recordings. Marija Maglov’s paper on Mita Đ. Palić’s record catalogue showed how recorded sound could mediate between patriotism and capitalism, with records marketed not only as commodities but also as vehicles of national feeling and identity. In the final session, “Beyond Music: Other Uses of Early Recording Technologies”, Aleksander Kolkowski’s demonstration of using ceramic discs to make new recordings further showed what can be learned through direct engagement with recording technologies, treating early-recordings mediums not only as archival recovery but also as embodied, material investigation.

A fitting final reflection came through YuHao Chen’s paper on early phonographs for prayer. In one of his slides, people gathered to listen to a recorded message and song, while the gramophone itself remained absent from the photograph. Something similar might be said of the conference itself: although there was no gramophone at the centre of the room, early recording technologies were no doubt the unseen presence around which delegates, representees of early-recording societies (such as the Centre of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society), and curious passers-by gathered. Overall, the conference demonstrated not only the continuing scholarly relevance of early recordings, but also their capacity to draw wider publics into questions of sound, memory, technology, and cultural history.

The Early Recording Association is founded by Professor Eva Moreda Rodriguez and  Dr. Inja Stanović to welcome all researchers, practitioners, curators, and specialists engaging with early recordings, https://www.surrey.ac.uk/early-recordings-association

The Roundtable is sponsored by: the RMA; Thinking Culture/School of Culture and Creative Arts; and ArtsLab Lab “From Page to Stage”

Dr. Joyce Tang is a musicologist and pianist, and Research Associate on the IAA funded project: Creating digital ecosystems to engage audiences with historical recorded sound (PI: Prof Eva Moreda Rodriguez; University of Glasgow)