Quebec's First Record

A LITTLE RECORD-SHOP TRIVIA

Two different answers, four years apart. One of them you can still hear.

Ask “what was the first record made in Quebec” and you get two honest answers, because “made” is doing double duty. There’s the first record pressed here — stamped out from masters recorded somewhere else entirely — and there’s the first record actually recorded here, a real voice in a real room. They’re four years apart, and the second one has a name attached: Joseph Saucier, a Montréal baritone, singing “La Marseillaise.”

PRESSED

January 2, 1900

Berliner’s Montréal plant begins stamping 7-inch discs — from masters recorded in Europe and the U.S.

RECORDED

c. 1904

Joseph Saucier sings “La Marseillaise” at Berliner’s new studio, 138A Peel Street — the first recording actually made in Montréal.

Portrait photograph of Joseph Saucier in profile, wearing a bow tie and suit, early 20th century
Joseph Saucier, the voice behind it — from Le Canada musical, via Library and Archives Canada. CC BY 2.0.

Hear Saucier Sing

“La Marseillaise,” recorded roughly 1904 — the actual performance, preserved and shared on YouTube.

▶ Play on YouTube

1900: needle down

Berliner’s Montréal operation starts pressing in the first week of January — 2,000 records in the whole first year. The discs came out a light-to-medium brown, a material collectors have never found from any other plant; they still call it “brown wax.”

An early brown wax Berliner Gramophone disc, showing the worn paper label
An early Berliner’s Gramophone disc — “brown wax,” the Montréal-only material, c. 1900–1910.

1901: from 2,000 to two million

One year after the first pressing, Berliner sold over two million records out of Montréal. Whatever novelty hesitation existed around the gramophone, it didn’t last long.

Emile Berliner standing beside an early disc gramophone and horn, in a museum display setting
Emile Berliner, later in life, with the disc and horn gramophone he built the whole company around.

Aside

A trademark, pressed right in. A handful of Canadian Berliner 7-inches didn’t just print the His Master’s Voice dog-and-gramophone mark on the paper label — they etched it straight into the playing surface of the disc itself.

1904: a voice, finally

Berliner opens an actual recording studio at 138A Peel Street. First through the door: Joseph Saucier — Montréal-born baritone, choirmaster and piano teacher — singing “La Marseillaise.” He’s thought to be the first French-Canadian musician to record on cylinder or disc anywhere in the country, not just in Quebec.

Two workers in the Berliner Gramophone Company workshop in Montreal, 1910, using horn gramophones to inspect pressed records
Berliner Gramophone Company, Montréal, 1910 — freshly pressed discs being checked on horn gramophones.

1906–08: outgrowing Peel Street

Berliner buys a corner lot at Saint-Antoine and Lenoir and puts up a five-storey plant. It outlives the company that built it: Victor bought Berliner in 1924, RCA bought Victor in 1929, and the building spent decades after as an RCA Victor recording studio — one of only five the label ever ran worldwide, alongside Nashville, Rio de Janeiro, New York and Los Angeles. It’s also the only one of the five still standing with its original wooden polycylindrical walls, built on purpose to bend the sound inside them.

The record matrix room at Berliner Gramophone Company, Montreal, 1910, showing shelves of record masters and gramophones
The record matrix room, Berliner Gramophone Company, Montréal, 1910.

Ninety-some years and every genre this shop sells stand between “La Marseillaise” and a 12-inch house single. Different room, different corner of the city, same basic trick: figuring out how to keep a performance after the air’s gone quiet.

Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia (“Joseph Saucier” and “Berliner Gramophone Company”); Westmount Magazine, “How Recorded Sound Came to Montreal”; Musée des ondes Emile Berliner. Saucier portrait via Library and Archives Canada / Flickr Commons, CC BY 2.0; other images via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Recording: Joseph Saucier, “La Marseillaise,” via YouTube.

Retour au blog