Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom) - winner  - International Folk Music Film festival 2016

This year marks the 6^th successive year that the International Folk Music Film Festival in Nepal has gathered together a collection of filmmakers from across the globe whose films of musical traditions reveal the true vitality of the medium in the documentation of music and performance. Despite the impact of natural disasters and political embargoes, Ram Prasad (the Director of the festival) has been determined to continue to keep the festival going. With the support of his dedicated collaborators and an international field of inspiring filmmakers, the festival has continued and his determination has paid off.  Copies of selected films from the festival are held in the British Library (with the collection reference C1516) which has now developed into a very interesting archive of films that record ‘traditional’ or folk music and the role of music in traditional cultures around the world.

In the six years since its inception the festival has screened over 180 films submitted by a wide range of filmmakers from a variety of disciplines. The advisory board for the film festival includes ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, musicians and filmmakers whose diverse perspectives on the role of music in culture ensure the content remains multi-faceted and wide in focus. Like music itself, the films cannot be defined through words alone and they continue to expand the concept of what a folk music film really is.

Muktir Gaan

There are several categories of awards including: short film; Best Nepali film; Best instructional film; Music therapy award; Intangible Heritage documentation award and a Lifetime achievement award. The winner of the long film category in 2016 was Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom), a film by Tareque Masud and Catherine Masud. The film follows a music troupe, singing to inspire the freedom fighters, during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971. 

The Folk Music film festival differs from many of the more well-known ethnographic film festivals by the breadth of film styles included in the programme. The film committee selects record footage and films from very low budget productions to screen alongside big budget and crowd funded productions and archive films. Alongside the competition films there are a number of invited films which allow the viewer to reflect on the work of a filmmaker whose work demonstrates the power of  documenting music through film; an international filmmaker or ethnomusicologist who has created significant documents of Nepali culture; an artist or significant figure from within the Nepalese musical community who has contributed to Nepalese musical heritage.

Prev Dem discussing Arnold Bake film

The inclusion of archive footage of Nepalese traditions sourced from international filmmakers and archives and locally made films about Nepalese culture is not an accident. Rather it is one of the stimuli for the founders of the film festival, Ram Prasad and Norma Blackstock, who are both on the board of the Music Museum of Nepal.

The museum is home not only to a large collection of traditional instruments but also to a growing archive of audio and film recordings of Nepali musical traditions made by the museums founders and local filmmakers. Norma and Ram have been slowly bringing together digital copies of archive footage of Nepali music and culture found in archives and personal collections around the world to add to the collection including copies of ethnomusicologist, Arnold Bake's, material from British Library collection C52 (see music blog 2012).

Film festival audience

The film festival therefore serves as a vehicle for reconnecting communities with their cultural heritage through screening historic footage of these traditions. The invitations to attend the festival are extended throughout the Nepalese community across generations. The success of the festival in extending the legacy of documenting music on film is exemplary.

The festival is also a key part of the Music Museum of Nepal's cultural engagement programme.  This year they hosted filmmaker Karen Boswall as they extended their training opportunities to local filmmakers interested in documenting their own traditions.  Encouraging and developing local filmmakers and students to engage with documentation of their own cultural traditions in film adds to the ever growing collection of contemporary footage of the wide range of musical traditions found throughout the many culture groups of Nepal.

The documentation of cultural traditions and the communication of knowledge about these traditions is one of the main aims of the festival. The results from this workshop will be included in the final batch of films to be received from the festival. Many of these films have now been added to the videoserver which is available in the reading rooms at the British Library.

 

Videoserver

For anyone wanting to access videoserver in the British Library Reading rooms please contact the Listening and Viewing Service  for more information. 

Find out more about the work of the British Library's Sound Archive and the new Save our Sounds programme online.

Follow the British Library Sound Archive @soundarchive and the British Library's World and Traditional Music activities @BL_WorldTrad on Twitter.

 

 

 

 Michael McKenzie QC, Clerk of the Central Criminal Court 1979-84.

Crown Court clerks are pivotal to administering trials of the most serious criminal offences such as burglary, rape, murder and terrorism. In-depth life history interviews with former Crown Court clerks have revealed how they dealt with listening to harrowing stories day after day. Interviewees spoke about the effort involved in trying to appear expressionless and impartial, as their job demanded, particularly when they may have been feeling incensed by what they were hearing in court, or holding back tears, or trying not to laugh and to keep a straight face. They described taking a verdict in a murder trial, their hearts pounding, palms sweating, absorbing the tension in the courtroom, and feeling nervous about taking the verdict correctly under pressure. Interviewees discussed the emotive moment the foreman of the jury has just announced the defendant has been found, “Guilty”, and then the court clerk waits until the shouts and wails from the public gallery have abated before they carry on, seemingly unphased and unflappable, in their measured and controlled ‘court voice’. They spoke about seeing photographs of murders and injuries that were so disturbing that they made the conscious decision that they would never look at court photos again; the horror of dealing with child abuse cases especially; having nightmares when they first began clerking; and recounting in vivid detail the cases that they said came back to haunt them. In the following clip, clerk of the Central Criminal Court between 1979-84, Michael McKenzie QC reflected on putting the charges to the notorious serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshre Ripper.

Michael McKenzie reflects on putting the charges to the Yorkshire Ripper

The Crown Court clerk interviews were conducted by PhD student Dvora Liberman and will be publicly accessible towards the end of 2017. This collection was created as part of a collaborative research project between National Life Stories and the Legal Biography Project at the London School of Economics.

By Dvora Liberman

 

The Changing Landscape of Radio is the title of a report commissioned by the British Library into the future of UK radio and radio archiving. The report was commissioned from Rosina Sound with the aim of informing the Library’s developing plan for a national radio archive, which is one of the key strands of the Save our Sounds programme, the goals of which are both to ensure that the Library's existing sound archive is properly preserved, and that there are adequate systems in place for the acquisition of future sound production in the UK. Future heritage matters as much to us as past heritage.

Ford patent for an autonomous vehicle entertainment system (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via Jeff McMahon, 'Ford Turns The Driverless Car Into A Driving Movie Theater', Forbes, March 2016, http://bit.ly/2e6TOFM)

The report has been published online on a new British Library project page, The Future of Radio,  along with project blog posts and a podcast in which radio experts debate the present and future state of the medium. The report is, we think, an entertaining reading, with stimulating ideas on how radio might evolve in the future which should engage anyone who listens to sounds, whether for pleasure or study. The Library's interest is, of course, primarily in sounds for study, and the report looks at the needs of researchers, and the issues the future archivist of radio will need to consider.

The report considers audiences (who are they? when do they listen? where do they listen?), devices, content, the industry, technology and legal considerations, as well as those researcher needs. Will radio become all catch-up or will the traditional 'linear' mode of broadcasting endure? What is the future for podcasting? What happens to in-car radio if we all end up in driverless cars and feel like watching video instead? In what ways will we be able to interact with radio in the future? Will innovations such as immersive audio change how we think of radio? Will we continue thinking of radio as 'radio', or will it turn into/be absorbed by something else? In ten years' time, what exactly is it that the radio archivist will be archiving?

Here are some snippet observations from the report to whet the appetite:

• "The overall radio audience is stable. The majority of radio listeners have not changed the way they consume their content. Radio audiences are not, at present, being affected as dramatically by the digital revolution as audiences for music, newspapers or television."
• "While linear listening is likely continue, there is a trend for media to be consumed in ever-smaller chunks. Shorter segments do not necessarily result in less linear listening or less listening overall. The shareable, ‘snackable’ nature of segments means they can be used for promotion alongside linear broadcasts, or to reach different audiences."
• "Alongside the car, the home – and in particular the kitchen – remains the place where British people listen most to the radio. This helps explain why breakfast shows tend to have the biggest audiences and budgets, and therefore why these shows should be high on the priority list for inclusion in a national radio archive."
• "Radio apps compete for people’s attention with all the other mobile apps available on a device – audio and otherwise. Streaming audio will quickly burn through most people’s data allowances, a problem that content downloaded over Wi-Fi avoids."
• "The medium of radio is about emotional connection. People like radio for its companionship and for the connection it provides with the wider world. For these reasons the availability of music streaming services has not and will not kill off radio."
• "Content that is related to radio output but provided on other media is becoming increasingly common and important in driving audience behaviour. A national radio archive would ideally include such content (e.g. web pages with further information, social media or live video streamed from the studio)."
• "Increased choice means listeners can turn towards content that is more personal to them. The larger number of DAB stations increases the likelihood that one will be tailored to a specific need. The logical progression is for modular delivery of content to provide highly-personalised stations curated for individuals."
• "Modular delivery mechanisms provide the building blocks for new ways to deliver radio: more personalised, more interactive, more contextually relevant. The BL should note that modular delivery could see the demise of the linear radio channel but we believe this will not be for at least ten years."
• "A key factor for the success of a national radio archive will be accessibility, both in terms of how and where the system can be accessed as well as how easy it is to use the interface. Many archive projects have failed because potential users cannot get to them or if they can they do not understand how to operate them."

The British Library cannot guess the future for radio, but it does want to be informed about the options and the possibilities. Our next step is to start building a pilot national radio archive, the development work for which will begin next year.

This week's selection comes from Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical music Recordings.

Many texts cite the very first recording of a Beethoven symphony to be that of the Fifth made by Artur Nikisch in 1913. This is incorrect because there were two earlier recordings of Beethoven’s masterpieces. One, a recording of the sixth symphony, the Pastoral, was made in November and December 1911.

Rustic Contentment (Samuel Palmer, 1805-1881). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Symphony no. 6, op. 68, F major (Pastoral)_Side 1

Although the disc labels reveal very little with no conductor's name, recent research has confirmed this recording to be the Großes Odeon-Streich-Orchester conducted by Eduard Künneke (1885-1953). Indeed, it was Künneke who made the very first recording of a Beethoven symphony, the Fifth, in August 1911. The suppression of the conductor's name on the disc labels was due to the fact that by the time the recording of the Pastoral was released in 1913 and reached the shops in England, the country was already at war with Germany.

Sketch of the first movement from Symphony no. 6, op.68, F Major (Pastoral) - Ludwig van Beethoven (1808). Add. MS 31766

The full version of Beethoven's sixth can be heard on British Library Sounds. The digitised version of Beethoven's sketchbook for the Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony from 1808 can be explored here.

Follow @BL_Classical  and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

Honk Conk and Squacket. Fabulous and Forgotten Sound-words from a Vanished Age of Listening is a compilation of sound-related words by researcher and sound recordist I. M. Rawes.

I. M. Rawes, aka Ian Rawes, is a former British Library Sound Archive colleague. He worked at the Library for years while building The London Sound Survey on the side. This is a unique online sound map documenting the sounds of everyday life in London. It includes urban field recordings made by the author, archival materials, photographs, illustrations and a related blog.

Honk Conk and Squacket  explores the sounds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their surrounding socio-cultural context through what is often - notably in regard to the Victorian, pre-recording, era - the only evidence remaining: written documentation.

For this the author has investigated a myriad of sources including patents, dictionaries, glossaries and out-of-copyright period illustrations from the British Library collections.

The book works as a virtual audio nostalgia trip, laced with charm, humour and insight. On a more melancholy note, it touches on the ephemeral nature of everyday sounds and their eventual disappearance. I would recommend it as playful shared reading for the inevitable procrastination of Christmas and a must-reference volume for accurate historical sound writing.

Some sample entries:

Honk: was naval slang meaning to drink in an impressive way, echoic of the noise that eventually results. Early 20C.

Conk: is a large conch-shell of the genus Strombus, imported and then fitted with a mouth-piece. In former times it was used by fishermen as a fog-horn, producing as it did a loud and distinctive note on being blown. Late 19C. Cornwall.

Squacket: to quack as a duck; to make any disagreeable sound with the mouth. Late 19C. Surrey, Sussex and Somerset.

 Laist: to listen. Late 19C. Suffolk

Talking-trumpet. Late 19C.

If you are interested in sound and would like to know more about the Library’s sound preservation programme to digitise the nation's rare and unique sound recordings check out our Save Our Sounds programme and #SaveOurSounds.

Find more about the British Library's Drama and Literature Recordings and keep up with our activities on @BL_DramaSound.

This week's selection comes from John Berry, Technical Services Preservation Assistant.

The recording is poor; a cacophony of background noise, the content speech is quiet. In many respects the speaker, Christabel Pankhurst, is unpolished stuttering and stammering through the speech in a manner that we could not envisage in our highly managed and marketed world of western politicians. But this detracts nothing from the demands which are being made for enfranchisement of women to vote, which are clear, convincing and to the point. It is a highly illuminating glimpse into the justifications and strategies as well as the political aspirations of the women’s suffrage movement in the early 20th century.

Christabel Pankhurst_Suffrage for Women

Suffrage poster depicting an issue of the periodical, The Suffragette, with a figure of a woman, "Justice," clad in armour, bearing a banner labeled W.S.P.U. (Schlesinger Library)

Follow @BLSoundHeritage and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

Earlier in the year the Irv Teibel Archive generously donated a complete set of the hugely influential environments LP series to the British Library. This collection of environmental field recordings, released over a 10 year period from 1969 - 1979, represents the work of Irv Teibel, the ambient and new age music pioneer whose record label Syntonic Research Inc brought the sounds of nature to a public that was becoming increasingly interested in the natural world. In this special post, Creative Director of Syntonic Research and the Irv Teibel Archive, Jonathan Een Newton, writes about the work and legacy of one of the leading figures from the environmental sound movement.

If you’ve ever drowned out your co-workers’ chatter with rainy sounds, or fallen asleep to a loop of the ocean, you owe your peace of mind, in large part, to field recordist Irv Teibel. His environments series, released on eleven albums from 1969 to 1979, helped introduce popular culture to the utility of natural sound.

Gentle Rain in a Pine Forest

Irv was born in 1938 in Buffalo, New York and studied art in New York and California before becoming a public information specialist for the US Army. While stationed in Germany in the early 1960s, he began experimenting with electronic music at a local radio station. After his service, he found his way to New York City where he photographed and designed layouts for magazines Popular Photographer and Car and Driver. 

His fascination with natural sound was piqued while on a field recording trip for Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant’s film Coming Attractions. Playing back his ocean recordings the next day, Irv became excited by their potential to mask noise and positively affect mood. He soon threw his creative energy into producing a record designed to be "useful.” In late 1969, he released environments 1, which he assembled with his friend Lou Gerstman, a Bell Labs neuropsychologist.

Cover image of environments 1 (courtesy of the Irv Teibel Archive)

Over the next decade, the series found surprising mainstream success and was even licensed to Atlantic Records for distribution. The thought of a major label releasing a record with just a single 30 minute track per side and without the involvement of a known artist is unimaginable today. Irv eventually released most of the series on cassette and some on CD while he experimented with other projects like video environments, and continued to run a mail order business from his house until his death in 2010.

Environments has often been lumped together with the new age music genre it helped inspire, most likely because of the way it was marketed. But talk to almost any sound artist of a certain age and they’ll tell you that these recordings were hugely influential and helped pave the way for the flood of environmental releases that proliferated in the 1980s and 90s and continues today as Spotify playlists and white noise apps. Like me, many younger listeners have picked up an environments LP in a local record store bin precisely because of the colourful quotes and distinctive Bauhaus-inspired design. But in the end, it is the meticulously constructed soundscapes, which include everything from the classic “Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” to the porto-ambient “Tintinnabulation,” that keep us loyal fans of Irv’s work. 

In the Syntonic Research office at the top of the Flatiron Building, Manhattan, NY (courtesy of the Irv Teibel Archive)

What continues to surprise me as I've worked on this project over the past two years is environments' diverse admirers. I’ve connected with musicians working in metal (Earth), noise (Prurient), and electronic music (Matmos) who all cite Irv Teibel and the environments series as an influence. Even pop musician Henry Gross told me he used environments to help write his hit single “Shannon.” There are also pages of comments I'm still sorting through—from students and teachers to army captains and correctional officers of every age—collected via the feedback cards inserted into each record sleeve.

Snowman in the field, a self-portrait that Irv often included on stationary and feedback cards (courtesy of the Irv Teibel Archive) 

We’re excited to be working on a number of projects to showcase Irv's work including a recently-launched website featuring his writing, photography, and of course, recordings. We're also in the early stages of creating a mobile app to re-imagine environments for the twenty-first century.

Wind in the Trees

We’re thrilled that the British Library’s exceptional sound archive now has a full set of environments. I hope you’ll take some time to listen to this seminal series of creative field recordings and discover your own favourite (mine is "Dusk in the Okefenokee Swamp"). Thanks for caring and keep in touch.

Jonathan Een Newton