The Record Industry Comes to the Orient

Abstract

sailed from England to India on the S/S Coromandel. Gaisberg was a representative of the Gramophone Company, founded only four years before in London by a group of English and American businessmen who held the rights to Emile Berliner's disc recording patents.1 Gaisberg already had a remarkable career in the record industry. He had started as an accompanist with the Columbia Phonograph Company in Washington, D.C., making cylinder recordings while still at school. He then joined Berliner's enterprise, which became the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901, and was sent to London to initiate recording activities there. Before his journey to India he had already toured all over Europe, recording such celebrities as Caruso and Chaliapin. record business was expanding rapidly. purpose of Gaisberg's trip was to open up new markets, establish agencies, and acquire a catalogue of native (Gaisberg 1942:48). Upon arrival in Calcutta, he promptly recorded several hundred titles with local singers and instrumentalists such as Goura Jan, Janki Bai, and Abdul Ghafur. expedition continued farther east, and by spring 1903 Gaisberg had recorded a total of 1700 discs of Indian, Burmese, Siamese, Malay, Javanese, Chinese and Japanese music. master recordings were then sent back to Europe to be processed, and the finished records shipped to local agents along with gramophones manufactured by the same company. Within a few years, all major record companies had made recordings in the Orient and established agencies in the most important countries. When Heinrich Bumb of Beka-Record G.m.b.H. arrived in Hong Kong in January, 1906, he found, The Columbia Graphophone Company had just finished its latest recordings-said to be of 1,000 titles, for which fees of 50,000 dollars had been paid. 'Victor,' 'Grammophon' as well as 'Zonophon-Records' and 'Odeon' were represented in the colony (Bumb