25 October 2012
Music research archives in India
The American Institute of Indian Studies, Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), Delhi, hosted the 43rd International Association for Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Annual Conference from 7 - 11 October.
The World and Traditional Music collection at the British Library comprises both published and unpublished recordings. Within the sphere of sound and audiovisual archiving, the unpublished holdings bring us into the realm of the “research archive”, as defined by IASA and in contrast to Broadcast Archives or National Archives. The distinction is quite fine, of course, because all archives are used for research broadly defined. However, one way to think of a research archive is as one containing primarily unpublished materials made by researchers, for example, by musicologists during fieldwork. And one tends to find too that people leading research archives are themselves researchers who know the discipline and its research concerns and trends. There are many such archives around the world – the American Folklife Centre of the Library of Congress, the Ethnomusicology Archive at University California Los Angeles, the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Research Centre for Ethnomusicology at the CNRS in Paris, the Archives of Traditional Music in Bloomington, USA, the International Library of African Music, the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies - all represented at the conference.
The conference theme was “In transition: access for all”, an apt one for a nation on the rise, but relevant throughout the world as we aim to transfer the results of ethnographic research over the past century into digital form so that communities, musicians, scholars and the general public can have access. Of concern to research archives is that access is provided fairly and ethically. Many papers were thus about preservation and access projects and there were several formal papers and led discussions on issues of intellectual property rights and ethics. In particular it was hugely interesting and inspiring to hear from colleagues in some of the research archive centres in India, such as the Travelling Archive, the Sangeet Natak Academy, the Archive of North Indian Classical Music in Kolkata, Naadsaager Archives and Documentation Society for South Asian Music, Samvaad Foundation in Mumbai.
24 August 2012
British Library at WOMAD
2012 saw the 30th anniversary of the UK World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) Festival. Just three years after its inaugural event in Shepton Mallet, British Library staff started recording the event to create an archive that would be available for generations to come.
In the early years the BL team had to cart around heavy reel to reel recording machines and the tapes had to be copied one by one, stored on basement shelves and manually retrieved for every request. As technology advanced the team recorded on VHS and subsequently DAT tapes and nowadays it’s all recorded digitally. Recordings are made and backed up on site with data entry compiled at the same time, making it very much easier to process back at the Library. The result is that this year's recordings are available for listening via computer terminals in the reading rooms at the St Pancras building in London less than one month after the event.
23 August 2012
The Meanings of Music in Brazilian Culture
Brazil World Music Day: Public Lecture at the British Library
September 7, 2012
In celebration of Brazil World Music Day (http://arcmusic.org/begin.html) and Brazilian Independence Day the British Library is holding a public lecture on the meanings of music in Brazilian culture by David H. Treece, Camoens Professor of Portuguese, King’s College London. David Treece is author of the forthcoming book: Brazilian Jive - from Samba to Bossa and Rap (Reaktion). The lecture will explore key symbolic ideas attributed to Brazilian music and its role in shaping and characterising popular images of the country.
Cost: Free, but booking is essential http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event134792.html
Location: British Library Conference Centre
Time: Refreshments: 12.30; Lecture: 1pm
20 July 2012
Maltese Music Collection
Collected in early 2011, a unique video collection of Maltese għana folk music is now available to view on-site at the British Library through the Listening & Viewing Service. Largely privately filmed by practising musicians and aficionados between 1985 and 2010 in Malta, and its diasporic Australian communities of Sydney and Melbourne, this collection features influential singers and guitarists in a variety of private, public and television performances. Contained within the 140 hours of material are examples of għana spirtu pront (improvised verses on antagonistic themes), għana tal-fatt (ballads), għana bormliża (a rarely-performed, high-pitched melismatic vocal song style), prejjem (instrumental guitar music with a virtuosic lead guitarist), and a number of other traditional Maltese vocal styles. Other than Manuel Casha's recording collection held in the National Library of Australia, this is the only other collection of Maltese folk music that is publicly available. Although it is only possible to view the videos on-site at the British Library, the collection is fully searchable via the Sound and Moving Image catalogue with the collection code C1479. Users can search this archive by any number of keywords such as location, genre, name of performer(s), year, etc, and can glean much information from this alone: common ensembles, the frequency with which particular musicians perform, popular performance locations, etc. As well as being a collection that is of great use to Maltese and Mediterranean studies in its own right, it also represents an exciting emerging branch of archival activity that collects, documents and disseminates private collections recorded by 'insiders' to a tradition, thus presenting an insight into judgments of quality, of motivations for recording, and representations of a tradition by those who know it intimately.
13 July 2012
Rare Tanzanian music recordings preserved
Alison Hope Redmayne conducted anthropological fieldwork in western Tanzania in the 1960s, resulting in her D.Phil from Oxford University’s Nuffield College in 1964 in a thesis entitled The Wahehe people of Tanganyika. As is often the case in ethnographic research disciplines, the doctorate was not the end, but the beginning of a lifetime’s work that has seen Dr Redmayne return to Tanzania every year for nearly 50 years.
In 1965 she realised the value of documenting Hehe oral traditions by recording them and between that year and 1975 she amassed approximately 100 hours on magnetic quarter inch reel tape. The British Library has recently acquired these original recordings. They have been digitised by our audio engineers and are fully catalogued and searchable on our online catalogue. This can be accessed at http://cadensa.bl.uk/cgi-bin/webcat. To find the recordings enter “C3 and Redmayne and Tanzania” (without the quotation marks) in the simple search box.
Unique gems of the collection include recordings of songs accompanied on the ligombo (a large bass trough zither), the sumbi (a gourd zither) and a lidimba or didimba (a large lamellophone) – all little documented instrumental traditions. Dr Redmayne’s recordings also include beautiful renditions of local folktales, performed by a wide range of performers of all ages, and recitations of important historic events, for example, that document German colonisation accomplishments of notable local leaders.
The recordings will become available online via BL Sounds in due course but as a preview, listen to this recording of Pancras Mkwawa: Ligombo mourning song (to 4 min. 56 sec.).- Pancras recites praises of Chief Mkwawa (to 5 min. 30 sec.).- Pancras recites an idalika [an important speech as when rousing the troops before battle] (to end).
10 July 2012
Endangered dongjing archives
The following is a guest post by Lynda Barraclough, Endangered Archives Programme Curator.
In 2007 the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library received digital copies of music scores, lyrics and sutras documenting the Chinese ritual music known as dongjing. We also received audio and video recordings of recitals and interviews with performers and material relating to dongjing societies themselves, including correspondence, research notes and newsletters. The archives were copied from eight separate collections held by dongjing societies and private individuals in North Yunnan, China. In 2010 we received further dongjing scores and related material, this time copied from two privately owned collections in South Yunnan.
The original composers, authors and scribes of this material are largely unknown. Exact dates for most of the compositions are also unknown. The original documents and volumes date to the 20th and 21st centuries, but they contain copies of pieces that may be much older. For example, some of the texts recorded in volumes belonging to EAP209/1 Li Chun Collection on Dongjing Manuscripts are attributed to the Ming dynasty (14th century). The image below comes from EAP209/1/3 San yi za yue shang, thought to have been written by Li Hao during the reign of Emperor Hongwu in the early Ming dynasty.
Most of the scores are written in the jianpu notation, although other notations such as guche and gugin are also present. The image below shows a music score in jianpu notation. It comes from EAP012/8/1/30 Heqing ding jing yin yue. This script includes an introductory explanation to the piece, and comes from Heqing county.
The Endangered Archives Programme is funded by Arcadia. More information on the projects responsible for digitally preserving this material can be found on the EAP webpages:
EAP209 Survey on surviving dongjing archives in Jianshui, Tonghai and Mengzi
Copies of these archives were also deposited with the Institute of Historical Anthropology and the University Library at Sun Yat-sen University. The images received by the British Library are available via the Endangered Archives Programme webpages. Four complete manuscripts are also available on the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts pages (just type in “dongjing”). For information on how to access the audio and video material please email the EAP.
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You can read more about the Endangered Archives Programme on Lynda's Endangered Archives blog.
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