Mexico City.The audio with the voice of Thomas Alva Edison presenting a musical group, the recording of the Mexican national anthem and the march to Porfirio Díaz, played by the Police Band at the inauguration of the Independence Monument in 1910, as well as some of theFirst commercial music recordings made in the country at the dawn of the twentieth century, are part of the jewels of an important phonographic collection donated by an individual to the National Fonoteca and the state of Querétaro.
Integrated by more than 7,000 elements, with this collection the Reynaldo Mota Molina Regional Fonoteca was established, baptized in a sign of thanks to the donor, which was inaugurated on August 10 at the Historical Museum of the Sierra Gorda, in Jalpan de Serra, Querétaro, as part of the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of that enclosure.
Of that material, nine wax cylinders made by Thomas Alva Edison in the last decade of the nineteenth century, all of them two minutes, one of them even contains the voice of the inventor, who presents a musical group.
Also, 15 wax cylinders carried out in Mexico by the company L. Cortázar between 1901 and 1903, which are known are the oldest documents in the country that are preserved in the speech.
The donation included not only the phonographic material, but also some devices to reproduce it.Among them, a phonograph Edison, 1894, for wax cylinder, as well as a phonograph Victor Primero, from 1904, already for flat disc, as well as a couple of high fidelity tasMagnetophonic tapes, among others.
86 years old, Reynaldo Mota Molina refers in an interview with the day that decided to make this donation to the people of Mexico to concern about the future destination of his collection, which he has integrated over 75 years.
“There is practically all my life.I was 11 years old when I bought my first album, it was pasta and 78 revolutions per minute.When I turned 85, I wondered what will happen to all that material;It would be a pity that over the years he dispersed at the disinterest of my grandchildren and great -grandchildren, and so I looked for a place to protect him. ”
He thought as the first option on Querétaro's radio, an entity where he lives, but by failingA selection of almost 2,450 elements, as documents that were not had and need to be in the vaults to invent.
The agreement, according to the cultural and announcer manager, is that once that institution concludes with the process of conservation, cataloging and digitalization will send the material to the speech of the Museum of the Sierra Gorda.
The economic value of this collection is an issue that Don Reynaldo does not know, although he knows that the devices to reproduce and some recordings reach high prices in the market.For him, however, the most valuable is in the content of the recordings.
Specifically, he mentions a series of pasta discs made by Thomas Alva Edison, who although at first was reluctant to the flat disc, because his invention were the wax cylinders, he finally claudicated and manufactured material in that format.
“They are pasta, also 78 revolutions per minute, but are five millimeters;That is, they are very thick against what was later marketed.Edison was admirer of Mexican José Mojica, renowned tenor, then actor and finally priest.On those albums, five or six, is the voice of José Mojica singing several songs, ”he adds.
The collection donated by Reynaldo Mota Molina is made up of a wide range of Mexican popular music of various genres, as well as concert, opera, jazz, blues, tango, bossa nova and other popular and traditional expressions of various parts of the world.It also highlights an important series of unpublished audios of Huapangos in indigenous language.
