Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire

The Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire (AIMP) were founded at the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève (Ethnographic Museum of Geneva) in 1944 by Constantin Brăiloiu. During a period of fifteen years he dedicated his work to collect, archive and edit ethnomusicological sound documents. As a result, the Collection Universelle de Musique Populaire Enregistrée (40 shellac records, 1951-58) and another collection called Musique Populaire Suisse (13 LPs, 1950-54) were edited. In the same time, Brăiloiu establishes an important archive collection based on his own field recordings, mainly Romanian recordings, and on other recordings coming from colleagues and world wide institutions like the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. After Brăiloiu’s death in 1958, the AIMP "fell asleep" until 1984. Louis Necker, who was at that time the director of the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva, employed the ethnomusicologist Laurent Aubert in order to revive and continue Brăiloiu’s work. Thanks to this new impulse, the old archive collection is enriched with thousands of new edited records (CDs and LPs) and with original field works. In the meantime, the editing activity resumes with the publication of numerous field recordings.