118 Years Later, Japan’s Earliest Sound Recordings Still Resonate
118 Years Later, Japan’s Earliest Sound Recordings Still Resonate - Sessions in a Tokyo hotel room with a sound engineering pioneer captured a nation in transition.
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It is February 28, 1903, and 12 musicians from the Imperial Household Orchestra are seated in front of a gramophone horn in a Tokyo hotel room. American recording engineer Fred Gaisberg carefully lowers the needle onto a spinning blank disc and the session begins. The fragile melody of a bamboo flute breaks the silence, followed by the slow beat of the conductor’s drum. As the song unfolds, Gaisberg’s chikuonki, or “sound storing machine,” records the ceremonial sound of gagaku. The oldest continuously performed orchestral music in the world, gagaku had been the reserve of Japan’s imperial court for over a thousand years. This recital is the first ever to be committed to disc. “Weird and fascinating indeed,” Gaisberg noted in his diary later that day.
When sound artist, musician, and producer Robert Millis discovered this recording on a 7-inch shellac disc in a Seattle thrift shop a few years ago, he was enchanted by what he found: an enduring example of what had been, for most of history, ephemera. “Until that point, the human voice had just disappeared, and all of a sudden we could record it,” he says. A hundred years later, here was a grainy snapshot of a country on the cusp of modernization, a glimpse of the past captured with a machine from the future. “These recordings are a tangible way to listen to history,” Millis adds.
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...und-recordings
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