Modernism Meets the Phonograph: On the Sound Recordings of Guillaume Apollinaire

For Jacket2's series "Clipping," on "experimental digital analyses of poetry audio," Chris Mustazza writes about Apollinaire, poetry audio, and experimental French phonetics. We had no idea: "The oldest recordings in PennSound are currently those of Guillaume Apollinaire, recorded on December 24, 1913, almost exactly 102 years ago from the time of this post." And: "Interestingly, Apollinaire’s recordings of the same year also came from a linguistic speech lab, that of Ferdinand Brunot, the founder of Les Archives de la Parole at the Sorbonne." More:

“Brunot in 1912-13 recorded examples of patois in the Ardennes, the Berry, and the Limousin as well as samples of the ‘street language’ of Parisian workman—first steps toward his ambitious project of producing a “linguistic atlas” of France on the phonograph. To illustrate ‘la parole au timbre juste, au rythme impeccable, à l’accent pur’ (i.e. high standard French), he also recorded the speeches and lectures of various French politicians, university professors, clergymen and other public figures (including Dreyfus and Barrès). Brunot’s most celebrated recordings, however, were devoted to contemporary poets. On December 24, 1913 (that is, later in the same year that Pound visited Rousselot’s laboratory), he recorded Paul Fort, André Billy, André Salmon, and Guillaume Apollinaire…1913: modernism meets the phonograph.”

This is interesting for a number of reasons. As I’ve written about before, two of the earliest poetry audio archives in America, Columbia’s Speech Lab Recordings and Harvard’s Vocarium Recordings, were both born in speech labs, built for the study of American dialects, in the early 1930s. Unlike Brunot’s corporate sponsorship, though, the American archives were created in response to American record companies’ refusal to create recordings of poets. The Speech Lab Recordings, in particular, was founded with an anti-corporate manifesto.

Read more about why "these recordings of Apollinaire should be recognized for their place toward the beginning of a 125-year+ lineage of recorded poetry" at Jacket2.