摘要：Background in music history. The study of historical recordings has recently gained more
attention among musicologists and investigations have approached these from different points
of view. This field of research is comparatively new from the perspective of music historians,
because the recordings of art music belong only to the 20th century as the sound recording does
not go further back in the history. Historical recordings are a new group of sources that enable
us to directly study the qualities of sound and live performance that traditional musicology has
investigated using secondary sources like reviews and memoirs.
Background in sound technology. Information science can provide a musicologist with
helpful tools for doing research. In our case that means discographic knowledge and knowledge
concerning sound archives. In addition, studying old recordings often includes technological
tasks – transfer, restoration, and evaluation of the recordings. In specific cases, a very special
technology has been used to transfer the music from 78-rpm discs into digital form – the
bipointed stylus – to play back father matrices.
Aims. The present study focuses on a set of recordings made in 1939, when the Estonian
government, together with the State Broadcasting Company, launched a program of recording
Estonian music and invited the Danish branch of EMI with their technical equipment to Tallinn.
Asking questions about the selection of music and the aesthetics of performance, we try to
describe the musical scene of the 1930s.
Main contribution. The main contribution of our research will be collecting together the
material and making it available for musicological research. This task also includes the
historical description and evaluation of the music and the performers, discussing the
representativeness of the selection – i.e. contributions to Estonian music history writings as
well as discographic resources.
Implications. Studying this set of recordings from 1939 helps us to understand the formation
and the reception of the canon of Estonian music, as well as illustrating the continuity of
performance traditions in Estonian art and entertainment music. This study shows how
technology can be used as an effective tool for the music historian.
