Events

Nowadays, there are many events involving early recordings, including conferences, performances, symposia, and enthusiast meetings. ERA provides an up-to-date list of past and forthcoming events, including calls for participation. If you are organising an event and would like to list it on this site, please let us know.

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We don’t currently have any upcoming events. Check back soon for further announcements.

November

17/11 at 1:30pm - CLPGS Northern Group – Annual General Meeting. Members: everything HMV 

19/11 at 7pm - CLPGS London Meeting - Catherine Tackley: The Music of the British Dance Bands 

30/11 at 2:30pm - CLPGS Thames Valley Group - Childhood and Education

 

 

December

6/12 at  12.00 am GMT +2 (10.00 am GMT). Online workshop - The Vassilis Tsitsanis collection of recordings in the collaborative research project MELOS (please see all the details below)

10/12 at 7pm - CLPGS London Meeting - Christmas Social Evening 

14/12 at 2pm - CLPGS West of England Group. Paul Morris: Entertainment on Record 1890s-1930s 

14/12 at 2pm - CLPGS Scottish Group - Billy Gray: The Comedian Harmonists, part 3 

 

 

January

21/01 at 7pm - CLPGS London Meeting - Dr. Barbara Gentili: Singing at the Time of Verismo - The Invention of the Modern Voice 

 

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Online Workshop! Online on Friday, December 6, 2024, at 12.00 am GMT +2 (10.00 am GMT).

“The Vassilis Tsitsanis collection of recordings in the collaborative research project MELOS”

MELOS – Greek Music Audiovisual Collections

Participants: 

  • The research team of the Music Documentation Laboratory of the Department of Music Studies of the University of Ioannina.
  • AltSol company, developer of the digital platform.
  • The Early Recordings Association (ERA), University of Surrey, UK.

The research initiative “M.EL.O.S.” brings together musical collections from three organisations. Through this project, we have been developing an open-source music cultural management platform called “ReasonableGraph”, which includes a specialised Music Ontology based on internationally recognised conceptual models. The metadata from these collections form an interconnected and open repository of knowledge within a National Archive of Musical Entities.

The research team at the University of Ioannina is focused on the commercial discography of Vassilis Tsitsanis, one of the most prolific Greek songwriters of urban folk-popular music, who recorded at least 550 original compositions between 1936 and 1983. A significant number of these pieces were recorded more than once. Cataloguing the discography of a popular music composer and performer presents considerable challenges, especially in the context of digital indexing and cataloguing. In addition to entering formal data into the database, the team is focused on managing metadata, both from direct listening (e.g., harmony, rhythm) and from primary and secondary sources (e.g., biographies of prominent figures). The methodologies and findings of this project are intended to serve as a model for documenting similar material, both Greek and international. In this workshop, co-organised with the Early Recordings Association at the University of Surrey, the research teams from the University of Ioannina and AltSol will present the key features of the digital platform, the methodologies employed, and the technical aspects involved.

Online on Friday, December 6, 2024, at 12.00 am GMT +2 (10.00 am GMT).

MS Teams meeting link: 

https://teams.live.com/meet/9395566235208?p=6mSH681F6yx8mKLvXJ

 

Programme

12.00-12.30: Introduction, presentation of the UOI participation (George Kokkonis).

The fields of the platform (Nikos Ordoulidis).

12.30-13.00: Documentation of the material (George Evangelou, Spilios Kounas).

13.00-13.30: The digital platform and the library models (AltSol team).

13.30-14.00: Open discussion (chair: George Kokkonis).

 

University of Ioannina research team

  1. Principal investigator: George Kokkonis, Musicologist, Associate Professor, Department of Music Studies, University of Ioannina.
  2. Nikos Ordoulidis, Musicologist.
  3. Spilios Kounas, Musicologist.
  4. George Evangelou, Musicologist.
  5. Nikos Dionysopoulos, Technical staff.

AltSol research team

  1. Nikos Papazis, IT engineer.
  2. Kostas Maistrelis, IT engineer.
  3. Pantelis Brattis, System librarian.
  4. Simos Leonidakos, IT engineer.

 

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CALL FOR PAPERS: ERA Conference 2024

The Early Recordings Association (ERA) invites proposals for papers, lecture-recitals and panel discussions for ERA’s Annual Conference, to be held from 1 to 3 July 2025, at the University of Surrey, UK.

Deadline for submissions: 3 February 2025.

Programme committee:
Inja Stanovic (University of Surrey)
Eva Moreda Rodriguez (University of Glasgow)
Patrick Feaster (First Sounds Initiative)
Nikos Ordoulidis (University of Ioannina)
Filip Sir (National Museum Prague)
 
The Early Recordings Association (ERA) is a non-profit association and an international platform for communication between researchers and early recording enthusiasts. ERA is a free source and online platform for general audiences, academic researchers, collectors, and enthusiasts interested in early recordings, currently connecting over 200 members all over the world. ERA events open pathways for researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts to collaborate, and share their knowledge, experience and skills.

The Early Recordings Association Annual Conference shall take place from 1 to 3 July 2025, at the University of Surrey in Guildford. The programme committee welcomes proposals from early-career researchers, postgraduate students and established experts who currently work on early recordings in the widest range of genres and perspectives. We welcome proposals for individual papers (20 minutes, plus 10-minutes for questions), lecture-recitals (35 minutes, plus 10 minutes for questions), and panel discussions (1 hour and 30 minutes in total). Researchers, enthusiasts, collectors, performers, early career researchers, and PhD students are warmly invited to share their research on a range of topics including, but not limited to:
 
·      early recording technologies and recording practices
·      early recordings as documents of historical performance practices
·      wider cultural significance of early recordings
·      discographies and record archiving
·      database creation for discographic data and audio files
·      early recording collections and collecting practices
·      folk-popular musics and historical recordings
·      historical records and musical analysis

 
Abstracts (maximum 300 words) and short biographies (120 words) should be sent to earlyrecordingsassociation@surrey.ac.uk, including the applicant’s institutional affiliation and contact details. The programme committee will communicate its decision by 1 March 2025, and the full programme will be announced by 1 April 2025.

 

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CALL FOR PAPERS: IAML 2025

The International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres published the Call for Papers of the Association's next conference which will be held in July 2025 in Salzburg. For more info, please see the homepage of the conference: https://www.iaml.info/call-for-papers