North Indian Classical Vocal Music of the 78 rpm era
Music is an art that lives and dies in time, unless preserved by human memory or by technological reproduction. The recorded music of India, especially that recorded in the 78rpm format during the first five decades of the twentieth century, presents a fascinating encounter between technology and music. On the one hand, records were an enabling medium in which music could be circulated and preserved. On the other hand, the limits of that technology – just over 3 minutes to a side in an ordinary 10-inch 78rpm disc (only slightly more in the 12-inch format) – presented musicians with a challenge that was all the more difficult given the innate improvisatory nature of Indian music. The vocalists took on the challenge and availed of the opportunity in a manner that constitutes one of the most remarkable achievements of musical culture at the interface between technology and creativity. We are lucky to have a huge corpus of recordings that date back to the beginnings of the twentieth century. Michael Kinnear reports, “by mid 1908, it is estimated that there was upwards of 10,000 different recordings of the various styles of Indian music on the market” (The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899-1908, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1994, p.29), and in 2000, commemorating one hundred years of recording technology, Suresh Chandvankar estimates that the total number of gramophone records issued in India would amount to about half a million, each with 500 to a few hundred thousand copies (The Record News, 2000, p.99). A large portion of this corpus remains unheard by, and inaccessible to, contemporary audiences.
This current project is a way of honoring this cultural achievement by helping the dissemination of knowledge about it to a wider listening audience.
Representative Sound Clips
The Broadcast Label
Additional Sound Files
Music On the Web
Acknowledgements
The information included here is based on the scholarly work of many researchers and enthusiasts, to whom all music lovers are indebted. A huge amount of music was recorded in the 78rpm era, most of it is very competent, and much of it is fine in quality. Yet, to this day, information about how much, and what precisely, was recorded remains fragmentary and difficult to find out. Therefore, a situation has resulted in which even knowledgeable music lovers have an incomplete, inaccurate, or approximate notion of the recordings made by any given musician. These lists are a small contribution towards changing this situation by sharing information about the 78rpm legacy as widely as possible, giving due credit to those who have made the original efforts to prepare lists and discographies. Special thanks to
Alain Danielou for A Catalogue of Recorded Classical and Traditional Indian Music (Unesco, 1952),
to Michael Kinnear and his many contributions to the discography of Indian music
and the Society of Indian Record Collectors, based in Bombay, and its journal, The Record News. The group is doing pioneering work in compiling discographies of Indian music, and in the dissemination of information about the music and musical culture of the 78rpm era. All music lovers owe the SIRC a great debt of gratitude, and are encouraged to contact the SIRC Secretary Suresh Chandvankar at chandvankar@yahoo.com
The site is an ongoing project, hence more or less indefinitely UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
Last updated on 13 March 2012