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From 1944 to 1958, the Romanian musicologist Constantin Brăiloiu amassed sound recordings from the five continents, using the records he had made in Romania, Switzerland and other countries as the core of the Genevan archives, known as the Archives internationales de musique populaire (AIMP). His aim was to compare music from all over the world and publish its various expressions in the Collection Universelle de Musique Populaire (forty 78 records, 1951-1958). The archives now hold nearly 16,000 hours of recorded music. They let us hear the voices of the instruments and explore the history of the publication of world music.
The history of the Archives internationales de musique populaire (AIMP) falls into two main periods, separated by an interval of twenty-five years (1958-1983) when the sound archives were forgotten.
The first period, when Constantin Br?iloiu (1944-1958) was in Geneva, was part of an important stream of musicological research on “folklore” in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The outstanding figures of this era are Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, who built up encyclopaedic collections of folk melodies, particularly from Hungary, recorded in the field or transcribed by ear. In the second period, Laurent Aubert revived the sound archives, publishing more than a hundred music CDs and acquiring over 10,000 phonograms.
Constantin Br?iloiu (Bucharest 1893-Geneva 1958) was a composer, professor of music history, author of academic studies, as well as a broadcaster, lecturer and chronicler. The discovery of rural folk music in Romania had a major influence on his career, which he directed towards the study of what was then known as “folklore.”
His major achievements include collecting folk music recordings and founding the Folklore Archives of the Romanian Composers Society.
Br?iloiu fled to Switzerland in 1943 with a large part of his field recordings and his documentation. Eugène Pittard offered him a post at the MEG in 1944 and together they founded the Archives internationales de musique populaire (AIMP).
The first great record collections of non-Western musical traditions were created in the mid twentieth century. The forty volumes in the Universal Collection of Recorded Popular Music, published by Constantin Br?iloiu between 1951 and 1958, made up the first anthology of this type ever published. Others followed, such as the International Library of African Music founded by Hugh Tracey in South Africa, in 1954, which is still the biggest collection of recorded African music. In 1961, UNESCO launched a record series in collaboration with Alain Daniélou. Until 2003, about a hundred recordings were published in this collection.
The development of recording technology and the record industry in the second half of the twentieth century permitted a wide diffusion of musical traditions collected and studied throughout the world.
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