Echoes of the Guitar: Investigating Early Wax Cylinder Recording at the Royal Academy of Music
Inja Stanovic, Enrica Savigni and Marco Ramelli recording with a phonograph.
© 2026 Steve Goss
News Story
In September 2026, the Academy’s guitar department collaborated with the Early Recordings Association (ERA) and the International Guitar Research Centre (IGRC) at the University of Surrey to explore the relationship between the guitar and the phonograph.
Dr Inja Stanovic (Director of the ERA and Senior Fellow at the University of Surrey), whose research investigates early phonograph recording from the perspective of performers and listeners, led an experimental workshop and public event at the Royal Academy of Music.
Guitarists from the Academy and the Technological University Dublin – including Marco Ramello, Enrica Savigni, Louis Moisan and Kacper Dworniczak – used historical guitars (including the Academy’s Stauffer copy by Bernhard Kresse from the The Calleva Collection) to create new recordings on wax cylinders, which were then played back through the phonograph.
Working with the wax cylinder felt like stepping back in time but it also made me question how faithfully early recordings represent the music of their moment. To capture the sound at all, I sometimes had to play against my natural interpretation, turning the performance into a live experiment shaped by the technology itself.
Excerpt from Echoes of the Guitar
Both the performers and audience members gained an insight into what it would have been like for past performers to adapt to the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the phonograph, and what this can tell us about historical performance practice and listening during the pre-vinyl recording era.
The event was subsequently featured on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight.