The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in music, Thai studies, ASEAN studies, history, library science, ethnomusicology, technology, and related subjects.
Music and Recording in King Chulalongkorn’s Bangkok is by Professor James Leonard Mitchell, who teaches ethnomusicology at Missional University, Australia.
The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of the recording industry in Thailand.
TU students have access to another book by Professor Mitchell, Luk Thung: The Culture and Politics of Thailand’s Most Popular Music, through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
As the publisher’s description page explains,
Music and Recording in King Chulalongkorn’s Bangkok is the first comprehensive history of Siamese music during the celebrated reign of Rama V (r. 1857–1910). Following on from the author’s 2015 exploration of Thailand’s most popular music genre, luk thung, James Leonard Mitchell focuses in on the brief period from 1903 to 1910 when gramophone recording came to Siam and almost failed. Music and Recording in King Chulalongkorn’s Bangkok is the story of Siamese musicians, European recording experts and Chinese middlemen. It is the story of the city that was inherited and developed by Rama V, of a Chinese community seething with secret societies and revolution, and of the adventurous western companies that dreamed of global commercial domination. Based on research from the EMI Archive in London and the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, along with years of fieldwork in Thailand, the book contains 88 photographs, a discography of all known recordings, and links to YouTube videos.
One reviewer, John Garzoli, noted in the Journal of the Siam Society (Vol. 110, Pt. 1, 2022):
Mitchell’s documentary research has, for the first tme, uncovered dates, repertoire and key personnel involved that enable a historically verifiable account of the early recordings. Where there are gaps in the documentary record, as in the case of French company Pathé, Mitchell fills them in with educated and well-reasoned speculation about the most plausible series of events. In doing so, he proposes that some mistakes were made by previous scholars in their speculation about the business activities and catalogue numbers of Pathé. By consulting personal journals and clarifying how Pathé assigned identifying numbers, Mitchell offers new historical evidence that aims to straighten the record on how Pathé did its work, who did it, and when. This is a highly valuable contribution to contemporary knowledge of Thai music, musicians, the recording industry, and Bangkok. But the abundance of detail and the manner in which the information is presented lacks focus.
In 2019, Professor Mitchell received a grant for the Sounds of Siam Archival project, which
seeks to preserve the recorded heritage of Thailand through digitisation. The purpose is to safeguard the earliest but endangered recorded musical traditions of Thailand, known as Siam before 1938, and to make these recordings available throughout the global community. The materials date from the first expedition to Asia by the Gramophone Company in 1903 to the 1960s, when independent Thai recording companies used the moribund 78 rpm format to escape the control of major companies. These recordings are significant as our only existing aural documentation of pre-industrial music in Thailand/Siam.
In June 1903, Fred Gaisberg, the celebrated record producer for HMV, visited Bangkok as part of an Asian tour. He made many recordings. As his diaries note, hundreds of valuable recordings were made at that time.
There was mutual interest in the recent invention of recorded music from Siam and also from Western listeners fascinated by newly available sounds and culture of Siam.
The TU Library collection includes copies of The Treasured One: The Story of Rudivoravan, Princess of Siam.
As told to author Ruth Adams Knight, the story of Princess Rudivoravan, twenty-second child of Prince Narathip Prabhabongse, a favored son of His Majesty King Mongkhut, Rama IV, this book introduces Princess Rudivoravan to readers this way:
As a child, my home was the City of Forbidden Women, the Grand Palace of Bangkok. I went to school in rural England. Back in Siam, I attended my sister Queen Lakshami [wife of H.M. King Vajiravudh, Rama VI] and lived with her in the villa of Dusit Palace. I married a prince and later scandalized my royal family by getting a divorce. For love I became the wife of a commoner. I am the mother of three children. A princess of Siam, I have also been a designer, a restaurant keeper, an actress, a dancer, a reporter, an air controller, and wife of a diplomatic attaché. In these widely differing positions I have lived in both East and West and have learned, in the intimate way of a woman, to know the heart of each.
Princess Rudivoravan was also an avid radio broadcaster in the 1950s and 1960s. Describing an early visit to Marseilles, France, where she met a Thai minister assigned to the diplomatic staff, she informed him:
I was ready when he knocked on my door, and he took me out and gave me a fine dinner. Afterward, when he saw how excited I was about being in a city, he said we could stroll about a little. We passed a gramophone shop and I told him how interested I had become in Western music. He promised that the next day he would buy me some records to take home with me. When he asked me what I wanted and I promptly said, [George Bizet’s opera] Carmen, he seemed surprised. But I had learned the opera in England and I could picture myself playing the music for my sisters and explaining to them what it was all about.
“I shall need a gramophone when I get home,” I announced, “although my sister Chow Peong Ying Lakshami probably will have one when I go to see her in the Grand Palace.” I said the words grandly. It was my first chance to use my sister’s new title to a Thai. The minister looked at me. “Her Royal Highness is not” he started to say. Then he stopped. “Not going to waste her time listening to Western records? Is that what you think?” I demanded. “They are very exciting. I’m sure she will like them.”
“Her Royal Highness is a busy woman,” Phya Prapah said rather stiffly. “She won’t be too busy to listen to Carmen” I assured him.
Correspondingly, in the West, National Toy Company dancing dolls were manufactured to accompany early recordings. Among these, in 1921, was one known as Siam Soo.
Resembling a three dimensional Indonesian dancing shadow puppet instead of anything Siamese, these expressions of interest in Southeast Asian tradition were quaint and inauthentic. But they answered accurate examples of Siamese culture produced by ensembles that toured Europe and made recordings at the turn of the century.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)