Museokatu 42 B 46
00100 Helsinki
Finland

Great Finnish singers of the 1950s - Historical recordings from radio archives

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The sound archives of Yleisradio (YLE) are the most important source for the study of mid-20th century Finnish singers. Yleisradio, the Finnish Broadcasting Company was founded in 1926. At first, all broadcasts were live, and the performers had to come to the studios at the time of the broadcast. It in 1935 the company bought a disc cutter which made the archiving of programs on 78rpm discs possible. It was now possible to record radio programs in advance at a time most suitable for the performers, and if the performance was successful, the broadcast was repeated. The first tape recorders arrived in 1939, but for more than a decade, tape and disc were used in parallel, until tape became the standard method of archiving radio programs in the 1950s.

At first, professional-quality magnetic tape was very expensive. To save costs, tapes were recycled. Once a program had been broadcast, tapes were erased and used to record new programs. For this reason, relatively few complete radio programs survive from the period before 1955, and the surviving tapes have been poorly documented.

In the 1950s, radio stations all over the world began increasingly to use records in their broadcasts. Commercial recordings of Finnish classical music had been made regularly since early 20th century, but after the Second World War, local record companies focused almost exclusively on popular music. There were practically no new recordings of Finnish serious music. In 1954, Yleisradio's music department initiated a policy of systematically recording the best singers and musicians in the country, to obtain material for broadcasts. The artists were paid a higher fee in return for perpetual broadcasting rights. The recordings were archived as single tracks and used in radio programs like commercial recordings. The practice still continues, and by the year 2000, more than 15,000 tracks of music had been recorded. These music recordings ("kantanauha" in Finnish) are an important source on the performances of Finnish singers and musicians. Today they are all catalogued and digitised, and details of the recordings can be found in the Dismarc database.

To learn more about this subject: please contact me.