1926.1926.This is the year, when LFK purchased its three phonographs. One of those was manufactured by Edison company, while the other two were "Excelsior", made in Cologne. Seemingly a phonograph is quite simple – a clockwork turns the wax cylinder, while the needle attached to a membrane at the end of the cone cuts the grooves. One cone and head for recording, another for playback. Well, actually the simplicity of it is just an illusion... LFK used the phonographs to collect melodies (meaning publishable notation), as thus a song could be recorded from the informant (living somewhere out in the country) by any staff member and then transcribed into a notation by a musically educated person back in Riga. Thus the first recordings are rather short, containing just a couplet and usually not exceeding 15 seconds per sample. On the other hand, the whole cylinder can hold around 3 minutes of sound, so using it sparingly is a quite reasonable requirement.
Judging by the notes and the material itself, the machine has traveled quite far over Latvia, but among personnel using it were quite a few of LFK's staff members, including Anna Berzkalne herself. Still the information on singers is rather scarce, maybe because folklore was considered national heritage and the particular singers - just keepers of it...
The exact number of recordings is not known. The last number in the cylinder index is 159. With regard to the strict cataloging system of LFK it should be considered absolutely reliable. Still with the World War II again approaching Riga, 216 cylinders were deposited at a bank for safekeeping. What were these 57 cylinders like, what was recorded on those, where did they go - these questions remain unanswered.
The last time phonograph was used in summer 1947 - during the field work session, the first expedition in Ilukste district. 10 cylinders altogether were recorded during this period. There are not only traditional Latvian folklore songs, but also quite different songs from the war period, sung in Russian. This marked the end of the first period of sound recordings, with a new one starting in 1951.
A new era for the cylinders started in 1994. That autumn Helga Thiel from Viennese Phonogrammarchiv came to Riga, in order to gather information on sound archives here. She visited also LFK, were the cylinders were recently re-discovered, attempting to rerecord them using the original machine and simple microphones. Interest was mutual and a period of information exchange began, resulting in February 1998 in a fortnight long visit to Riga of Phonogrammarchiv's engineer Franz Lechleitner, along with the cylinder player of his own construction. In the course of the session 181 cylinder were inspected and most of them re-recorded onto DAT, providing an opportunity to listen to them and check the transcriptions against the recordings. A s
Mending a broken cylinder a recording of songs transcribed from live performance in 1930 by Emilis Melngailis were recovered. 63 years later Gertrude Elksne sang the songs she learned from her mother to a video recording.
Some illustrations:
Edison phonograph
Excelsior, Cologne
A well preserved cylinder, with a
description
A cylinder affected by mold
Different cylinders
Some sound samples
