The project for a phonographic archive in Brussels: Mahillon and the struggle between sound and notation (1899-1900)

Recent archival research has shown that from late 1899 onwards, Victor-Charles Mahillon, curator of the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, began to build up a “collection of phonograph cylinders reproducing popular music from different countries”. Relying on personal contacts, diplomatic networks and international trade, he collected commercial and home-made recordings from Brittany, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Dublin, Java, Tokyo, Beijing, Kolkata, etc. Mahillon never inventoried this collection because it was not part the museum’s core business. Consequently, it never enjoyed the status of its counterparts in Paris, Vienna or Berlin, and remained unnoticed up to now. The collection suffered numerous alterations over time, but it could be partly reconstituted after the rediscovery in the MIM's repositories of around 70 wax cylinders from Belgium, Provence, Egypt, China, Ottoman Empire, India, England and North America. Though the gathering of worldwide musical recordings in Brussels was exactly concomitant with the launching of the Phonogrammarchiv at the Sciences Academy in Vienna and the Musée Phonographique at the Anthropological Society in Paris, it served a different purpose. Whereas the latter two projects had a broader ethnographic and linguistic agenda, Mahillon's project focused on musical instruments in order to build a tool for musicological research. In this respect, it predates by several years the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. Mahillon’s focus on musical instruments makes this collection particularly relevant for the early recordings history. Since the museum’s foundation in 1877, Mahillon only documented the music related to his instruments by the means of scores. Whereas his 1899 collection accounts for a shift to a “sound-based” approach to instrumental music, his approach to vocal performance remained conditioned by notation. Eventually, Mahillon’s ambivalent conception of music gives evidence for a struggle between notation and sound that might provide further explanation for the late recognition of the phonograph as a full musical medium.