On a blustery winter day in December 1985, a small group of ethnomusicologists and scholars gathered at the Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to journey back into the past. A hush fell over the room as Dr. Carney Gavin, curator of the museum, turned on a small tape recorder and invited his listeners to "envision a warmer climate, and step back through this doorway in time."
Crackles of static broke the silence, followed by the clear, haunting sound of an 'ud an Arab stringed musical instrument and forerunner of the lute. Slowly, the 'ud gave way to the vibrant drumbeat, swaying rhythms and festive music of a bridegroom's song in Arabic. As the music drew to a close, a man's voice reached out of the past and began to describe a trip he had taken on the Hijaz railroad to celebrate the opening of the Ma'an railway station - in 1907.
What captivated these listeners was not necessarily the quality of the music, which was somewhat amateurish. Rather, it was the fact that for the first time, they were hearing songs and melodies captured in the Arab world on wax cylinders over 80 years ago. The precursor of flat disk records, cylinders were used in the early 1900's to record sound on the original Edison phonographs. Today, Gavin believes these cylinders and the sounds they contain are "priceless time capsules ... important messages deliberately sent forth in time and space."
How these cylinders were discovered and subsequently restored over the past eight years is an intriguing detective story that itself crosses history and continents. As Gavin explains, it is a story with an explosive beginning.
On October 14, 1970, a bomb planted by anti-Vietnam War protesters in the Harvard Semitic Museum, which then also housed the Center for International Affairs, literally blew the roof off the building. Remarkably, the explosion resulted in a fateful "moment of light," as Gavin put it, uncovering more than 27,000 old photographs of the Middle East (See Aramco World, November-December 1983). The 19th-century photographs, known as the Bonfils Collection, had been acquired by the museum in the 1890's, stored neatly in boxes up in the attic, and forgotten for almost 80 years.
As a trained archeologist, Gavin was thrilled by the accidental discovery of the photographs. It is ironic, he noted, that "the two girls who planted the bomb opened up this whole world of early photos of the Middle East - the only region of the world where people avoided image-making." Gavin could not have guessed then that the photographic research initiated by the bomb blast would eventually lead them into the uncharted world of "phono-archeology."
Shortly after the collection was discovered, Gavin and his staff began the laborious and challenging task of identifying, cataloguing and preserving the photographs. A grant from King Fahd ibn 'Abd Al-'Aziz of Saudi Arabia in 1982 enabled the museum to complete this task and, in conjunction with the FOCUS project, to explore "extraordinary new fields" of photo research. An outgrowth of two international conferences, held at the museum in 1978 and 1981, the FOCUS project was given the task of "finding, organizing, copying, using and sharing" photographs important to the history of the Middle East.
This is where the story of the wax cylinders begins. Convinced that other historic photographs of the Middle East were hidden away, waiting to be discovered, Gavin and his staff began to cast their net out around the world. In 1983, photographs dating back to the late 1800's were rediscovered at the Oriental Institute in Leiden, Holland. The photographs had been taken by various consuls general of the Netherlands assigned to Jiddah during the late 1800's and early 1900's.
While documenting the collection in Leiden that summer for the KFA, Elizabeth Carella, curator of historic photographs at the Harvard Semitic Museum, recalled how they unearthed "a very exciting photograph, a small snapshot." In the picture, labeled "Jeddah February 20, 1909 - the Recording of Sayyid Mohammed," four white-suited men sit on thick carpets laid on a plank floor in the corner of an elegant room. The pattern on the windowpanes identifies the room as a salon in the Dutch Legation in Jiddah. Placed in front of the group is an early Edison phonograph, the horn of which reaches up to the 'ud being played by one of the men.
Astonished to find an Edison phonograph in use at such an early date in the Arabian Peninsula, Carella and her museum colleagues enlarged and carefully studied the photograph. Unwittingly, they had stumbled upon evidence that sound recordings were being made in the Middle East much earlier than scholars thought.
As the photograph of the recording session had been found in Leiden, Gavin and his staff thought the wax-cylinder recordings themselves could not be too far away. The search began. Returning to Leiden in 1984, they rummaged through the Oriental Institute's attics and storage rooms, and ultimately discovered 211 wax cylinders, some 150 of which contained the earliest sound recordings ever made in the Arabian Peninsula. The cylinders were stored in cardboard cases, with sparse annotations in Arabic, Dutch and Malay. Shortly thereafter, to their delight, the Harvard team also found an old Edison phonograph. William Corsetti, a designer at the museum, assembled a makeshift paper horn for the phonograph and they played one of the fragile wax cylinders. "For the first time," Carella recalls, "we were able to hear these voices from the past. It was a little bit like eavesdropping on history. We were hearing people celebrating, people at prayer, people playing music in the normal course of their everyday lives. It really was a very mysterious moment."
Just as the 27,000 photographs had been forgotten in the attic of the Harvard Semitic Museum, so had the cylinders been overlooked for more than 70 years. "The people who collected and stored these cylinders here would have been totally flabbergasted that their work was forgotten," Gavin observes. "They took the photographs and made the recordings because everything was changing."
In fact, Gavin theorizes that the cylinders found in Leiden may have been part of intelligence-gathering under the direction of the famous Dutch Islamist and colonial administrator Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936). In addition to teaching Arabic and Arab history at the University of Leiden, Snouck Hurgronje was professor of Arabic at Batavia, Java - now Jakarta, Indonesia. In 1870, the Dutch colonial government in Batavia recognized the importance of Jiddah as the gateway to Makkah for Indonesian Muslim pilgrims, and established a Netherlands Legation in Jiddah; Snouck Hurgronje was assigned to teach Arabic and Islamic culture to Dutch diplomats assigned there. Although the official purpose of the legation was to facilitate the flow of pilgrims from the Dutch Indies, another less official task was to observe and document the social and political climate in Jiddah and Makkah.
"I think the quest for accurate recording inspired the application of the Edison gramophone to the uncharted world of the Middle East," Gavin notes. Carella agrees: "It makes a lot of sense that the cylinders were a part of an ongoing process of observation. They certainly were utilized as raw data."
According to the original markings on the cylinders, they were shipped back to Leiden by the various consuls and their staff between 1907 and 1920. Stored in Snouck Hurgronje's personal archives, the cylinders were moved to the Oriental Institute when it was founded in 1927.
Once Gavin and his staff had discovered these unique "time capsules," their immediate task was to restore and preserve what was left of the wax cylinders. Decades of neglect had left mold on many of the fragile cylinders that threatened the quality of the recordings. In 1985, the cylinders were delivered into the hands of experts in the field - the Phonogrammarchiv, or Sound Recording Archive, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1902 by Emperor Franz Josef, the Phonogrammarchiv began that same year to record Arab music systematically and preserve Semitic languages scientifically on cylinders.
Dr. Dietrich Schueller, director of the Phonogrammarchiv, and engineer Franz Lechleitner began the laborious process of restoring and electronically re-recording the Leiden cylinders onto tape. As Lechleitner explains, the cylinders' age and composition ruled out ultrasonic cleaning or liquid treatment of any kind. Most of the restoration work involved hand-cleaning - carefully brushing the mold off the individual cylinders. As a result, it often took several hours' work to be able to record just one minute of sound off an old cylinder.
While Schueller and his staff worked on restoring the cylinders in Vienna, Gavin began to investigate the history and importance of the sound recordings. "Gavin coined the term 'phono-archeology' because the cylinders were leading us toward discoveries that seemed to be revealing, historically and archeologically, components of a greater picture," Carella explains. "The entire process has been a wonderful detective story for us," she adds, noting that "all along the way there has been something new to discover."
The history of mechanically recording sound waves dates back to the mid-1800's. In 1857, two decades before the invention of the phonograph (and the year Snouck Hurgronje was born), French physicist Leon Scott had developed the "phonautograph." His invention visibly etched the patterns of sound waves onto thin metal foil. On December 8, 1877, Thomas Edison developed the phonograph, and one year later the first tinfoil cylinders were sold. Wax-cylinder phonographs were not developed until 1881.
In 1889, the year observed by the Phonogrammarchiv as the beginning of sound recordings for scientific purposes, the Edison phonograph became portable. Clues found in early documents and books reveal that the phonograph was being used in the Arab world before the 1900's. In 1890, Daniel Bliss, president of the American University of Beirut, demonstrated the use of a phonograph. Three years later, Harvard Professor Benjamin Ives Gilman traveled to the Chicago World's Fair, where on September 25,1893, he recorded Arab and Indonesian music in the Turkish theater. Gilman's nine wax cylinders, two of which are in Arabic, are the first known acoustic recordings of Arabic made in the United States. Seven years later, at the Paris Exposition, 55 wax-cylinder recordings were made of performances by Berber, Zanzibari and Senegalese musicians.
As Gavin dug deeper, his research grew "curiouser and curiouser, and more and more exciting." From the correspondence of Snouck Hurgronje, we know that he was recording speakers of Arabic and Indonesian on Java in Indonesia from as early as 1900 until 1906, when he returned to The Netherlands. Letters to colleagues back in Europe find him requesting information from the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv on the best way to preserve cylinder wax during his journey back to Leiden. In 1907, Snouck Hurgronje received over 100 cylinders of music, recorded for him by his faithful students, now diplomats, in Jiddah.
By the early 1900's, Arab musicians and singers were being recorded commercially on wax cylinders in the Arab world. Abdu al-Hamuli, a famous Cairene singer, was recorded before his death in 1901. Newspapers in Cairo advertised wax cylinder recordings of the "best singers" up to 1904.
Clearly, the cylinders found in Leiden, which now number over 700, constitute one of the largest and most varied collections of Arabic language and music recorded in the Arab world. Although the Phonogrammarchiv made the first formal recording of an Arabic singer, a Dofari from Oman, at its Vienna institute in 1902, the Leiden cylinders are the earliest known sound recordings of Arabian voices made in the Arabian Peninsula.
As Gavin dug deeper, his research grew "curiouser and curiouser, and more and more exciting." From the correspondence of Snouck Hurgronje, we know that he was recording speakers of Arabic and Indonesian on Java in Indonesia from as early as 1900 until 1906, when he returned to The Netherlands. Letters to colleagues back in Europe find him requesting information from the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv on the best way to preserve cylinder wax during his journey back to Leiden. In 1907, Snouck Hurgronje received over 100 cylinders of music, recorded for him by his faithful students, now diplomats, in Jiddah.
By the early 1900's, Arab musicians and singers were being recorded commercially on wax cylinders in the Arab world. Abdu al-Hamuli, a famous Cairene singer, was recorded before his death in 1901. Newspapers in Cairo advertised wax cylinder recordings of the "best singers" up to 1904.
Clearly, the cylinders found in Leiden, which now number over 700, constitute one of the largest and most varied collections of Arabic language and music recorded in the Arab world. Although the Phonogrammarchiv made the first formal recording of an Arabic singer, a Dofari from Oman, at its Vienna institute in 1902, the Leiden cylinders are the earliest known sound recordings of Arabian voices made in the Arabian Peninsula.
The cylinders contain rare musical performances of every sort: adhans (calls to prayer), wedding songs, cantillations of the Qur'an, traditional poems, individual compositions and festive choral performances by groups of men or women, as well as a wide variety of instrumental pieces for traditional reed and stringed instruments.
Since most of the cylinders were recorded by the Dutch Legation in Jiddah - a city known historically as a crossroads for trade and pilgrimage - they also embrace a broad geographical spread of dialects and languages. Yemeni, Hadrami, Zanzibari, as well as Hijazi, Indonesian and Sudanese speakers of Arabic have been identified on the cylinders. Given the variety of voices and melodies recorded, the cylinders represent the first comprehensive corpus of Arabic speech and music.
Dr. Emeri van Donzel, director of the Oriental Institute in Leiden, believes that the cylinders will be very useful for "scholars of the Hijazi dialect and music. They are very moving, not only because they are old, but because of the pleasure of hearing them. The cylinders can help to develop interest in the West in the traditional Hijazi language and music, as well as in the social background which scholars will discover behind these recordings."
In addition to melodies from the past, the cylinders contain the first known recordings of public announcements and travelogues. On one cylinder, the voice of a town crier announces the departure of ships from the port of Jiddah. Another recording explains how refuse "is to be picked up before dawn by the municipality's employees from the entrance of each building where pilgrims are housed."
Elizabeth Carella is intrigued by the travelogues preserved on cylinders. "To think that a person in the early part of the century would have the foresight to record those impressions is just fascinating." Having discovered both the photos of and the commentary on these journeys "provides a wonderful context historically."
History is indeed captured on the cylinders. One travel report tells the story of an exciting journey made in 1907, to attend the grand opening of the Ma'an railway station. Ma'an, today in Jordan, was a settlement on the fringe of the desert, where pilgrimage caravans gathered before journeying on to Makkah. After traveling from Makkah to Jiddah, the "reporter" related that "we traveled to Suez by an Egyptian steamer and stayed there six hours. We then took the railroad to Port Sa'id. From Port Sa'id, we traveled to Beirut by Egyptian steamer and stayed there one day, and then on to Damascus.... Then from Damascus, we took the railroad to Ma'an for three days and stayed there one day. It was the best of days.... Insha'allah [God willing], this year I will take this same route to Madinah and stay there for a month.... May God let us meet again in happiness, and may God's safety be with you." This is the first known broadcast about travel in Jordan, and other travelogues contain seafarer's reports of journeys from Jiddah via Aden to Bombay, Calcutta and on to Rangoon.
Apart from the vast collection of Arab music and Arabic language captured on the cylinders, the songs and speech of several Indonesian languages, such as Gayo, Acehnese, Imperial Malay and Sundanese, have been recorded. Dr. Philip Yampolsky, an ethnomusicologist specializing in Indonesian languages, believes the cylinders contain some of the earliest documentation of Indonesian music.
When a small portion of the re-recorded cylinders was played for the first time on that cold December day in 1985, the response was one of astonishment. Professor Nicholas M. England, former dean of the School of Music at the California Institute of Arts, commented: "On the strength of what I have heard, this is an amazingly preserved sound from the past, which we had rather given up hope of ever capturing." It is, he added, "a simply stunning discovery."
After decades of neglect and six years of painstaking restoration and re-recording, a sampling of these early Arabian recordings will be released on compact disc in 1994 in a joint venture among the Harvard Semitic Museum, the Oriental Institute in Leiden and the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna.
But the story doesn't end here. "The discovery of this early Arabian music is just the tip of an iceberg," Gavin asserts. He and his colleagues are convinced that other forgotten cylinders lie hidden in attics and closets around the world. If one intriguing photograph, uncovered in a dusty attic in Leiden, could unlock the forgotten and fascinating world of early Arabian sound recordings, the discovery of additional cylinders may open other important windows to the past.
Piney Kesting is a frequent contributor toAramco World from her base in Boston.
