Croatian art music sound heritage: a preservation crisis

May 29, 2026
23 min read

The beginnings of recorded sound in Croatia

Just over 130 years ago, Thomas Edison built the first practical machine capable of capturing sound. That invention transformed how music and other sound-based arts are created, distributed, and remembered. Sound-recording media have evolved at breakneck speed, leaving older formats to decay physically or disappear entirely as newer technologies crowd the market. Cultural institutions around the world are fighting to preserve recorded history and make it broadly accessible.

Croatia entered the sound industry early. But shifts in cultural policy during decades of state administration caused the country to fall behind in caring for the material and intellectual value of its recorded sound heritage — especially the art music of Croatian composers and performers. Recordings now sit in just a handful of locations:

The Croatian Film Archive
Sound archives of Croatian Radio in Zagreb and seven regional stations
Archives of publishing companies, which are rich but closed to the general public

Some recordings — mostly gramophone records and CDs — are held in music departments at the National and University Library, public libraries, and the Academy of Music Library in Zagreb.

No one has ever taken systematic care of Croatia's sound heritage. So far, only a small band of determined private enthusiasts has pushed the effort forward, without official support from information specialists or dedicated budgets. The goal of this article is to spur action: collecting information, building lists, setting priorities for digitisation, securing funding, solving copyright issues, and creating a digital repository open for scientific and educational use.

A quick history of sound recording

People have always tried to preserve sound sequences they liked — by imitating, memorising, writing down, using mechanical devices, and finally recording. The first device that could mechanically capture sound, though not reproduce it, was the “phonoautograph,” invented in 1857 by Édouard-Léon Scott. Edison’s practical recording-and-playback machine came 130 years ago. His 1877 mechanical phonograph, using cylinders, spread quickly across the globe and sparked a new industry. In 1887 Emile Berliner patented a zinc disc coated with a fatty film; the following year he introduced a machine for playback, the gramophone. With many refinements and improvements — including the shift to electronic recording and playback, and the adoption of new plastics — the gramophone remained the most popular sound medium well into the twentieth century.

During the 1950s, magnetic tape developed rapidly as a recording medium, enriching broadcast production that had taken shape in the 1920s. Media changes have only accelerated. In the 1980s, sound was recorded as digital patterns of digits. Formats were born, became obsolete, and huge amounts of information were swept along by the imperative of “development” aimed at increasing consumption. Where in all this is history — the stable reference point that keeps us from drowning in oblivion?

Some countries have been preserving sound recordings from the very beginning, systematically caring for their national cultural heritage. The first sound archive, the Phonogrammarchiv of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, was founded in 1899. Alongside scholarly archives, the collections of publishers and broadcasters are among the richest and most important. Libraries began actively collecting sound recordings after World War II.

Sound recordings in Croatia

Croatia has a relatively rich music culture. The first sound recordings made on its territory date to 1908, when engineer Slavoljub Penkala cut the earliest gramophone records. At that time, Croatian musicians were recorded by foreign companies such as Berliner Grammophon, Columbia Company, Victor, and Österreichische Grammophon Gesellschaft. Mavro Drucker, whose workshop was on Ilica Street, ran something like a small publishing house dedicated to Croatian music. His catalogue featured Croatian performers, released under labels including his own hawk emblem, Odeon, Writing Angel, and His Master’s Voice.

The first major record company in Croatia was founded in 1927. Called Edison Bell Penkala, it operated as a branch of the British firm Edison Bell International. In an era without meaningful copyright, the market was highly favourable for such an industry, and production was enormous. The output covered markets that included present-day Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Aside from its own records, Edison Bell Penkala sold products from a dozen other companies. Between 1927 and 1933, the factory produced a very large number of discs, though Croatian performers accounted for only about 5 percent.

The year after Edison Bell Penkala closed, a new factory named Elektroton was founded. After World War II, the company was nationalised and renamed Jugoton. Both its original and licensed production spanned the entire Yugoslav federation. From the 1960s onward, and especially after Croatia became an independent republic, commercial sound recordings multiplied as the number of publishing houses grew.

A radio broadcasting station started operating in Zagreb in 1926. By 1934, Croatian Radio had already begun its own record production, using Philips technology. Today it runs seven regional radio stations, broadcasting three national and seven regional radio programmes.

The state of Croatian sound heritage: art music recordings

The segment of music heritage focused on recordings by Croatian composers and well‑known performers of art music has never been studied or cared for systematically — despite the fact that Croatia’s Law on Archival Material and Archives and its Law on the Protection and Preservation of Cultural Goods require all institutions and individuals who own such materials to protect them and permit access for research and education. In practice, the physical condition of recordings depends on the funds and decisions of each individual owner, and it is more or less possible to find out that the recordings exist at all.

My research began with a list of music libraries and collections in Zagreb, which I supplemented through contacts with colleagues from some of those collections. According to that list, the following Zagreb institutions keep sound materials:

The Croatian State Archive unfortunately does not function as a state music sound archive. Efforts led by its retired director, Dr Josip Kolanović, were continued by the new management only in a very modest way. Within the state archive and under the roof of the Croatian Film Archive, with no qualified personnel and only a very small annual grant from the Ministry of Culture, some research into Croatian sound heritage located in institutions and private collections both inside Croatia and abroad is being done. An internal computer list records 1,168 gramophone records in shellac and vinyl; it looks like an ordinary table in Word format, with columns for order number, title, performer, producer, and notes. Anyone can request a printout. The records themselves belong to the Croatian State Archive, Croatia Records, and Croatian Radio. Records that were not already in the archive were given to it for restoration, which has been done only partially.

Restoration is carried out by an outside collaborator, who first repairs the physical object, then makes an archival magnetic‑tape copy using a vintage gramophone that belongs to them personally, and finally cleans the sound by removing non‑musical noise. For now, it is possible to hear these tapes at the Croatian Film Archive on tape recorders borrowed from Croatia Records. Once those tape recorders are returned — which will happen soon — it will no longer be possible to play the material preserved in this way. During a conversation with Carmen Lhotka, the person in charge of sound recordings at the Film Archive, I learned that they plan to apply for funding to buy a standard audio CD burner and a mini hi‑fi system for playback. Their idea is to digitise the archival tapes themselves in such a primitive way and then make copies available for listening at the mini hi‑fi set within the archive. They are not going to create a computerised database with inventory lists, nor to enrich the description of items, nor to put the recordings online.

The Croatian Radio Sound Archive in Zagreb is the richest sound archive in the country. Even though it is part of a public institution — until 1994 owned by the state — and in spite of containing a large number of heritage items, it is closed to outside users. It was founded alongside the radio station, for programme needs. Initially it held only gramophone records. (It still keeps its collection of so‑called hard PVC records; some have been loaned to the Croatian Film Archive for restoration.) In the 1950s, the new technology of copying onto magnetic tape was adopted. Important parts of the collection include documentary recordings, such as concerts, some of which are of special value for Croatia’s cultural heritage. The current holdings include gramophone records in PVC, shellac, and vinyl; open‑reel and closed‑reel magnetic tapes; DAT tapes; and CDs. These are stored in metal compact archival cabinets in rooms with inadequate climate control. The records are listed in paper catalogues and mostly also registered in a unique computer database built on internationally accepted standards. However, data entry is often inconsistent, subject references are wrong, and the work was done by a loose group of outside collaborators hired for the purpose.

For years, Croatian Radio has been trying to save and update its sound holdings in its own digitisation studios; the results are kept on several hard drives. The selection of materials to digitise follows the needs of a commercial broadcaster — in other words, everyday programming — and what is labelled “serious music” is always at the bottom of the priority list.

Croatian Radio is a member of the European Broadcasting Union. The staff of the sound archive are trying to synchronise their digitisation work with the standards accepted by EBU members. The treatment of old records is adapted to broadcast requirements: non‑musical noise is removed, loudness is brought up or down, and so on, in line with the NOA standard for radio broadcasting.

The sound archives of local radio stations (Dubrovnik, Knin, Osijek, Pula, Rijeka, Split, and Zadar) also contain significant numbers of recordings by Croatian composers and performers. Their inventories were not available for this article.

The Music Collection of the National and University Library in Zagreb holds around 25,000 gramophone records, 12,000 audio cassettes, and approximately 9,000 audio CDs. A simple search cannot determine how many of these contain art music by Croatian authors. Most items in the collection were received as legal deposit copies starting in 1965, when the obligation was introduced. They are catalogued according to ISBD(NBM) and UNIMARC standards, and are normally accessible to the public in a well‑equipped listening room. The older records — those that play at 78 rpm — are protected and not publicly available (there is no functioning player for them), making them candidates for priority digitisation. No concrete plan for digitising sound recordings is included in the broader heritage‑digitisation project managed by the library.

About ten music collections in public libraries in Zagreb and other Croatian towns also contain older gramophone records and CDs. The oldest and largest among them is the Zagreb City Library collection, founded in 1962. These materials are described in a computer database using library standards and are findable through the internet. Most items are mechanically damaged. The library plans to digitise a few rare titles whose content would otherwise be irretrievable, because the originals are in such poor shape on an obsolete format.

The Academy of Music Library in Zagreb holds a number of important gramophone records and commercially available CDs. Some of the gramophone records are rare. They are listed and described in the library catalogues and may be listened to in the reading room. For now, there are no digitisation plans for this collection.

The archives of publishing houses ought to preserve the master copies of everything they have issued. According to Dr Josip Kolanović, his efforts led to the company Hrvatska naklada zvuka i slike d.d. Croatia Records (known as Jugoton before 1991) excluding its archive from the privatisation process, thus saving it from probable destruction. The archive is formally under the jurisdiction of the state but still occupies space within the company’s premises. It includes gramophone records, magnetic tapes, audio cassettes, video cassettes, and CDs—around 40,000 titles in 1997. The collection covers the company’s own publications, including licensed recordings by Croatian artists that were issued on gramophone records, as well as releases made for other publishers. It is inventoried for internal use only; since 1987, the list has been kept in a database file that makes no attempt to follow any information‑profession standards. One copy of every issue is kept. Some recordings on 78 rpm discs are preserved and are awaiting restoration at the Croatian Film Archive. Croatia Records digitises only items that it intends to re‑publish on CD; for that purpose, unwanted sounds are cleaned out. Selected titles from the shellac era, under the series title Glazbeni spomenar, were prepared for release in the last years of the vinyl era. A few music lovers within the company, led by Veljko Lipovšćak, put together about 30 records, but only a tiny portion of that non‑commercial series has actually been published.

Individual items from the very earliest phonograph and gramophone issues are kept in museums in larger Croatian cities such as Zagreb and Rijeka. The cross‑agency digitisation project called Croatian Heritage, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, does not mention sound recordings at all.

Newspaper articles occasionally report on private collectors of old sound media — especially gramophone records. Damir Tomčić, a technologist and composer from Split, owns about 20,000 gramophone records and 14 antique gramophone players. Along with his collection, collectors named Čapka, Kraker, and Mirnik are also mentioned by private‑sector experts. Some of these individuals would be willing to entrust their heritage treasures to a serious institution for preservation and use — but no such institution exists in Croatia.

An interesting and realistic initiative comes from three stubborn enthusiasts: Damir Tomčić, already mentioned, and two other retired people, Veljko Lipovšćak and Ivan Stamać, both from Zagreb. Mostly on their own initiative and at their own expense, they research the earlier history of Croatian sound heritage, consulting recent press materials, publishers’ catalogues, and the catalogues of foreign sound archives. From time to time they display their findings by organizing popular exhibitions in museums or by writing articles for newspapers and journals. For about ten years, they have been asking state bodies — from the National and University Library to the Ministry of Culture — for help, but without success. This year, with support from respectable organisations (the Croatian Composers Society, the Croatian Section of the Audio Engineering Society, the Section for Literature of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also the Österreichisches Phonogrammarchiv and the Österreichische Mediathek), they applied for EU pre‑accession funds to establish a Croatian sound archive. They plan to find and equip their own space where rare materials will be kept in ideal environmental conditions, the entire Croatian sound heritage will be restored and digitised, and a digital repository will be established.

For a complete picture of the current state of Croatian art music sound heritage, one must work through the lists of items held by all the institutions already mentioned, contact other possible owners, and reach institutions abroad that house recordings made by Croatian artists or produced in countries where those artists worked.

Criteria for digitisation selection

Choosing what to digitise first — and how to fund and sustain the work — is the foundation of any digital preservation strategy.

The systematic digitisation of sound recordings deserving preservation as national music heritage is inevitably complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Hence, Croatia must also establish priorities for converting materials — focusing on the art music of Croatian composers and performers — while considering these criteria:

1. Condition of sound carriers (following IASA recommendations) 2. Cultural, scientific, and academic significance 3. Rarity of the title

Ad 2) Music is an art form that relies on continual recreation, in which interpreters share creative responsibility alongside the composer. Selection should prioritise valuable performances by artists who played a role in Croatian history.

Ad 3) Certain compositions survive only in documentary form — such as live concert recordings on magnetic tape — while others have been released across numerous media or editions. Some works, especially by contemporary authors, have never been notated or contain improvisation, making each performance recording unique.

Sceptics question how long a digital archive will last. Can history entrusted to ever-changing machines be lost? Are “five years or eternity” sufficient guarantees for preserving digitised documents?

When setting priorities for preservation through digitisation, these parameters must also be considered:

4. Physical durability of sound carriers 5. Obsolescence of reproduction equipment 6. Disappearance of experts

Ad 4) Physical durability of sound carriers

The aforementioned IASA document lists the physical durability of carriers. Regarding magnetic tapes: “… Generally, only standard play open reel tapes (SP, 52 µm total thickness) should be trusted to be mechanically stable… The lesser the mechanical stability, the greater the chance that the tape suffers from inadequate winding, which is one of the most underrated risks for magnetic tapes… Prolonged storage of badly wound tapes causes irreversible deformations, which may lead to severe replay problems, specifically with thin tapes and high density recordings, e.g. R-Dat.”

The same IASA document addresses new optical carriers. “The data integrity of CD-s, like all other digital media, is objectively measurable by special CD players and suitable software… According to digital archival principles (cf. IASA-TC 03, § 11), every CD must be free of uncorrectable errors.” Replicated audio CDs may contain interpolations that are not part of the original signal. Regular testing for full error correction at set intervals is advisable.

Ad 5) Reproduction equipment

All audio carriers are machine-readable. Following the IASA Task force, the availability of high-quality professional equipment must be taken into account when choosing priorities for migration to new (digital) media. Recent innovations in sound reproduction technology allow a gramophone record to be “read” by a laser beam when a historical gramophone is unavailable or to preserve records suffering from mechanical damage. At the Library of Congress in the USA, a machine for scanning gramophone discs — even broken ones — is being improved, with playback achieved through a computer.

### Techniques of music digitisation – standards for the archival custody of digitised music recordings

Digitisation of sound in information institutions worldwide began in the 1990s. Leading countries were those with strong wealth and well-developed archival and library traditions (Australia, the USA, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, etc.). Over a short period, standards emerged from their practice — first at the national level and eventually at the level of the international information community. As a subject of new scientific and professional research, this produced a body of relevant studies useful for newcomers seeking proper solutions.

The study Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study AHDS recommends these technical standards for the archival custody of digitised sound recordings:

- 96 kHz and 24 bits for the archival copy, offering a dynamic range of 110 decibels, without compression, and at least stereo - For the user copy, AAC compression is preferred over MPEG (MP3)

Digitised data migrated to digital media — like born-digital content — will eventually need to be copied using new technical devices due to obsolescence; this is called emulation.

### Metadata

To organise a collection of digitised recordings and ensure information accessibility, proper description is essential. The description includes three data types: technical, administrative, and data for research and use. Several institutions have developed description standards (Dublin Core, CD Terms, PB Core, METS, PREMIS, AudioMD, etc.). Automation of metadata extraction continues to increase.

Using existing metadata sets is recommended; creating new ones is expensive and rarely worthwhile.

### Organising repository

Audio-visual collections are stored and made accessible in various institutions with differing levels of functionality. Efforts to improve information accessibility require a decision: will the depository be linked to one institution, become part of collaborative service among a group of repositories, or be handed over for administration to an external agency or national service? Good practice shows that the most profitable approach is to develop separate but networked collections, employing network technology and tools such as the Storage Resource Broker (SRB).

### Examples from the neighbourhood

National and University Library in Ljubljana

With foreign funding, employees of the National and University Library in Ljubljana (three computer specialists and one musicologist-librarian) carried out a project entitled Digitisation of old sound recordings. They selected a limited collection of physically endangered and historically interesting shellac gramophone records containing approximately 100 Slovenian compositions. The project followed good practice from the European Minerva project and recommendations from information experts. Lacking an original historical gramophone for playing the old 78 rpm records, they played them at 33 rpm and adjusted the speed using a computer. The sound recording was accurately transferred from analogue to digital medium, including all scars, noise, and cracks, and then cleaned of all non-musical elements using Adobe Audition. A digital copy was stored in WAV (a standard Windows audio format producing large files) and as quality-controlled MP3 files for users. Both sides of each record were scanned to preserve the visual image of the original source. A metadata scheme based on Dublin Core was created, compatible with the European projects TEL-ME-MORE and TEL, as well as the OAI protocol. To integrate into Slovenia’s OPAC (COBISS), which is based on UNIMARC, a computer interface was designed that retrieved data from COBISS (UNIMARC), adapted it to Dublin Core, and transferred it into another database. The database can be searched by standard bibliographic description parameters.

Users can export the electronic source via telephone or mail order. Since the recordings are no longer protected by copyright law, reproduction is legal. The next step in the digitisation process will be digitising catalogues and documentary materials of Slovenian musicians and institutions, followed by the digitisation of endangered music periodicals and their archives.

National Library of Serbia

According to a text from early August of this year, the National Library of Serbia plans to establish a national sound archive to store digitised sound recordings from all available recordings across Serbia — modelled on the national archive of Great Britain. After four years of work, the digitisation of the complete library collection of 78 rpm gramophone records is nearly complete (about 600 of approximately 1,000 records). The library plans to consolidate all Serbian institutions holding similar materials.

### How to preserve Croatian music sound heritage – proposal instead of conclusion

Based on the limited picture of materials conditions in institutions and collections, and drawing on good practice from developed countries, I wish to propose a strategy that first saves a vital segment of Croatian history: sound recordings of art music — compositions and performers alike.

At present, the entire responsibility for preserving these materials rests on employee initiative. Under the law, authorised institutions — among them the Ministry of Culture and the Croatian State Archive — should assume this responsibility and set preservation standards. First and foremost, a detailed study or comprehensive project must be undertaken, following these steps:

1. Make a detailed inventory of sound materials owners (via a survey directed at institutions and private individuals) 2. Develop a detailed standardised list of materials, specifying media format, age, storage location, and physical condition 3. Use this list to select preservation priorities, considering the physical endangerment condition, intellectual value, and rarity of items 4. Determine standards for migration to digital media, based on the recommendations mentioned above; instruct ongoing digitisation efforts in institutions to align with these standards 5. Educate employees in institutions responsible for sound materials 6. Based on the above recommendations, produce at least two copies of each recording — one archival and one compressed for public access — and perhaps equip a single studio for digitisation (boasting by the Croatian State Archive or a future Croatian sound archive) 7. Define a single standard for metadata (description of digitised recordings) 8. Establish a single repository for sound recordings, hosted by an institution — the Croatian State Archive or perhaps a future Croatian sound archive 9. Harmonise differences in interpretations of the Copyright Law to enable free access to heritage materials for educational and scientific purposes 10. The project should be financed by the Croatian state and, in the future, by European institutions that assist acceding countries

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