The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv is a collection of ethnomusicological recordings or world music, mostly on phonographic cylinders, assembled since 1900 in Berlin, Germany by the institution of the same name.
The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv is a collection of ethnomusicological recordings or world music, mostly on phonographic cylinders, assembled since 1900 in Berlin, Germany by the institution of the same name.
The project was initiated in September 1900 by the psychology professor Carl Stumpf, after the visit to Germany of a music theater group from Siam, which Stumpf recorded on Edison cylinders with the assistance of the Berlin physician Otto Abraham. The archive's first director was Erich von Hornbostel, serving from 1905 to 1933. Its recordings, which comprise Edison cylinders and 78-rpm records of the traditional musics of the world, were first used for studies in comparative musicology, and now used for studies in ethnomusicology. The archive comprises approximately 350 collections, containing music from Africa (30%), North America (20%), Asia (20%), Australia and Oceania (12%), and Europe (10.4%), as well as multiregional collections (7.4%), which contain material from several continents.
The last cylinder field recording in the collection was made in 1953.
In 1944 during the wartime invasion of Germany, around 90% of the collection was taken into Russia. In 1991, following the reunification of East and West Germany, the pre-1944 collections held by the Soviets were returned to the Museum für Völkerkunde. [1]
The historical collections include approximately 30,000 cylinders (original recordings and copies, positives and negatives) on which more than 16,000 distinct recordings are stored.
In 1999, the cylinder recordings of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. [2]
Initially, the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv belonged to the Institute for Psychology of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Later, in the 1920s, it was relocated to the Berlin Conservatory, and then in the 1930s, it became part of the Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Ethnological Museum of Berlin), with which the Phonogramm-Archiv had earlier cooperated.
After the Second World War the collections of the Phonogramm-Archiv were divided. Most of its recordings were in East Germany, while the bulk of the corresponding documentation remained in the West. Both sides viewed the collection to be mainly lost. In West Berlin, Kurt Reinhard rebuilt an archive at the Ethnological Museum. New recordings were made, mostly on tape. Due to this, and the fact that by this time the archive had also assembled an important collection of musical instruments, in the 1960s the collection was renamed the "Department for Ethnomusicology" (musikethnologische Abteilung).
The Department for Ethnomusicology continued to collect music, with a focus on traditional music, from all areas of the world, so that by its 100th anniversary it claimed to house an estimated 150,000 recordings [3] An international conference called "100 Years Berlin Phonogramm-Archive: Retrospective, Perspective and Interdisciplinary Approaches of the Sound Archives of the World" was held from September 27 to October 1, 2000, at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.
Today, the Ethnomusicological Museum forms part of the Musikethnologie department of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin of the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), under the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. [3] It is in 2021 in the process of moving to the newly built Humboldt Forum in the center of Berlin. The Berlin Phonogram Archive is part of the Museum's Media Department under the direction of Dr. Maurice Mengel.
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs.
Kurt Reinhard was a German musicologist and ethnomusicologist who specialised in Turkish music.
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The Alte Nationalgalerie is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. The gallery was built from 1862 to 1876 by the order of King Frederick William IV of Prussia according to plans by Friedrich August Stüler and Johann Heinrich Strack in Neoclassical and Renaissance Revival styles. The building's outside stair features a memorial to Frederick William IV. Currently, the Alte Nationalgalerie is home to paintings and sculptures of the 19th century and hosts a variety of tourist buses daily. As part of the Museum Island complex, the gallery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 for its outstanding architecture and its testimony to the development of museums and galleries as a cultural phenomenon in the late 19th century.
The Bode Museum, formerly called the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin. It was built from 1898 to 1904 by order of German Emperor William II according to plans by Ernst von Ihne in Baroque Revival style. The building's front square featured a memorial to German Emperor Frederick III, which was destroyed by the East German authorities. Currently, the Bode-Museum is home to the Skulpturensammlung, the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst and the Münzkabinett. As part of the Museum Island complex, the Bode-Museum was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 because of its outstanding architecture and testimony to the development of museums as a cultural phenomenon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden is a cultural institution in Dresden, Germany, owned by the State of Saxony. It is one of the most renowned and oldest museum institutions in the world, originating from the collections of the Saxon electors in the 16th century.
The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin are a group of institutions in Berlin, Germany, comprising seventeen museums in five clusters; several research institutes; libraries; and supporting facilities. They are overseen by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and funded by the German federal government in collaboration with Germany's federal states. The central complex on Museum Island was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1999. By 2007, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin had grown into the largest complex of museums in Europe. The museum was originally founded by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia in 1823 as the Königliche Museen.
The Vorderasiatisches Museum is an archaeological museum in Berlin. It is in the basement of the south wing of the Pergamon Museum and has one of the world's largest collections of Southwest Asian art. 14 halls distributed across 2,000 square meters of exhibition surface display southwest Asian culture spanning six millennia. The exhibits cover a period from the 6th millennium BCE into the time of the Muslim conquests. They originate particularly from today's states of Iraq, Syria and Turkey, with singular finds also from other areas. Starting with the Neolithic finds, the emphasis of the collection is of finds from Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, as well as northern Syria and eastern Anatolia.
Albert Grünwedel was a German indologist, tibetologist, archaeologist, and explorer of Central Asia. He was one of the first scholars to study the Lepcha language.
The Ethnological Museum of Berlin is one of the Berlin State Museums, the de facto national collection of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is presently located in the Humboldt Forum in Mitte, along with the Museum of Asian Art. The museum holds more than 500,000 objects and is one of the largest and most important collections of works of art and culture from outside Europe in the world. Its highlights include important objects from the Sepik River, Hawaii, the Kingdom of Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania, China, the Pacific Coast of North America, Mesoamerica, the Andes, as well as one of the first ethnomusicology collections of sound recordings.
The Museum of European Cultures – National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation came from the unification of the Europe-Department in the Berlin Museum of Ethnography and the Berlin Museum for Folklore in 1999. The museum focuses on the lived-in world of Europe and European culture contact, predominantly in Germany from the 18th Century until today.
The Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Decorative Arts, is an internationally important museum of the decorative arts in Berlin, Germany, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The collection is split between the Kunstgewerbemuseum building at the Kulturforum (52°30′35″N13°22′03″E) and Köpenick Palace (52°26′38″N13°34′22″E).
The Kupferstichkabinett, or Museum of Prints and Drawings, is a prints museum in Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Berlin State Museums, and is located in the Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz. It is the largest museum of graphic art in Germany, with more than 500,000 prints and around 110,000 individual works on paper.
Music archaeology is an interdisciplinary field of study that combines musicology and archaeology. As it includes the study of music from various cultures, it is often considered to be a subfield of ethnomusicology.
Gerd Koch was a German cultural anthropologist best known for his studies on the material culture of Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Santa Cruz Islands in the Pacific. He was associated with the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. His field work was directed to researching and recording the use of artefacts in their indigenous context, to begin to understand these societies.
The Museum of Islamic Art is located in the Pergamon Museum and is part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
George Herzog was an American anthropologist, folklorist, musicologist, and ethnomusicologist.
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52°27′25″N13°17′31″E / 52.457°N 13.292°E
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