Sound and vision blog

No exhibition about the Arctic would be complete without some reference to icebergs. It just wouldn’t be right. During the planning of the British Library’s current exhibition, Lines in the Ice: seeking the Northwest Passage, icebergs, or more specifically, the sounds of icebergs, cropped up in a number of meetings and so the hunt for these sounds began.

A common misconception would be that icebergs are silent, white giants, moving noiselessly through the freezing waters of the polar seas. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Though at the opposite end of the world, crew members of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917) commented on the sheer variety of sounds heard in the presence of the Rampart Berg:

“Close to the berg the pressure makes all sorts of quaint noises. We heard tapping as from a hammer, grunts, groans and squeaks, electric trams running, birds singing, kettles boiling noisily, and an occasional swish as a large piece of ice, released from pressure, suddenly jumped or turned over.”

Frank Worsley, Captain of the Endurance (excerpt from 'South' by Sir Ernest Shackleton)

With our focus firmly on the Arctic, the work of Irish composer Dr Karen Power, who, in 2013, spent time in the Arctic as part of the Arctic Circle Residency programme, came to the forefront. Wanting to explore and document the sounds of the ice, Power armed herself with a weaponry of drills and hydrophones in order to explore this mysterious world.  

“Despite the silence, there is a tremendous pressure in the atmosphere. I wanted to get inside what I thought might be the cause of this pressure – the ice reshaping, melting - so I drilled some holes in some icebergs, at first on the shore and then floating in the middle of the water, and I was introduced to the most amazing sonic world”.

“First above the ice, then inside the ice, and finally at different degrees below the ice, I managed to drop hydrophones down as far as 20 metres below the surface to hear the icebergs cracking and resonating on the sea floor. What I found down there was truly, truly extraordinary.”

The field recordings collected during the residency open a fascinating acoustic window onto the usually hidden world of Arctic ice. Pops, cracks, creaks, groans, bangs and taps are just some of the sounds encountered during this incredible journey beneath the surface of the Arctic Ocean, a few of which are featured here:

Close up iceberg pops just under surface

Extreme iceberg close up with moaning

With room for only one recording from the collection in the exhibition however, the decision was made to include this wonderful example, which ranges from high-pitched tinkling to low, drawn-out groans.

Pops and smashes from icebergs at waters edge

On her return from the residency, Power created a short documentary, Can you Hear the Arctic?, in an attempt to express how the Arctic has affected her past and present practice, but also what compositional work might lie ahead of her as she draws on the life-changing experiences of spending time in one of the most beautiful and extreme regions of the world.

“I thought I was going there to record above and below the ice, and that’s what I did. What I didn’t think about was all of the other ways that these spaces, the silence, the vistas, people and the places would affect me and leave their imprint on my work.”

“I left there with the most amazing sound recordings but also a change in the way I think about time and space and sound.”

Dr Karen Power in the Arctic (Tina Kohlmann)

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A versatile, enthusiastic and well-received Irish composer, improviser, educator and curator Karen seeks to stimulate, engage and interact with audiences. Her work utilizes two primary sources; acoustic instruments and everyday sounds, spaces and soundscapes. Karen’s output is diverse - both in its approach and delivery - and her primary aim is to capture and translate the essence of an idea through any artistic means necessary. For example, recent projects have been presented as orchestral works, sonic installations, radio art, collaborations between sound and dance, image and experimental film, free improvisations and musical happenings.

Some exciting current and upcoming projects include; Gorging Limpet, which is a collaborative project between sound and experimental film, The Arctic Circle Residency, hearSpace (2014) - an exploration into the world of Radio with a new interactive radio art composition, a large-scale collaborative commission for Canadian-based Quatour Bozzini and a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Award for 2015/16 residency. Her latest album, Is it raining while you listen, features compositions and field-recording based work.

The British Library and International Dunhuang Project will be hosting a free evening of music and film on 28 November 2014. The London Uyghur Ensemble, a London-based group which plays traditional and popular music of the Central Asian Uyghurs, will open the evening with a live performance.

Following the performance, will be a screening of the award winning documentary The Silk Road of Pop, a portrait of the explosive pop music scene among the Uyghur community in China's Xinjiang Province. The Silk Road of Pop tells the story of Ay, a young Uyghur woman in China curious about the outside world who turns to music for answers and is drawn to musicians who mirror her struggles in their songs. The screening will be followed by a Q&A sessions with the film directors.

Friday 28 November 2014, 18:30 - 20:30

The British Library Conference Centre

96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB

MAP

BOOKING ESSENTIAL

A new online portal in English and Arabic which provides access to previously undigitised British Library archive materials relating to Persian Gulf history and Arabic science, was launched by the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership last week on 22 October.

The new portal, Qatar Digital Library, hosted by the Qatar National Library, provides contextual material to help make the best use of the 500,000 digitised pages available. This includes 475,000 pages from the India Office Records and 25,000 pages of medieval  Arabic manuscripts.

Photo credit: Rolf Kilius

Available on this portal are around 200 titles of traditional music from the Gulf region. These are from The British Library's Middle Eastern music collection and consist mainly of 78 rpm shellac discs from the 1930s to 1960s. The vast majority of these discs are from labels such as Gramophone/HMV (UK), Columbia (USA), Baidaphon (Lebanon) and Odeon (Germany). Many discs were recorded by agents from the recording companies in the fast-developing urban areas of the Gulf region. Thus these recordings mainly represent a (then) new urban culture, which was important in nation-building, cultural exchange and in crossing of social and tribal borders.

Rural musical genres were also recorded, though to a much lesser degree. The following articles explain the circumstances around these recordings:

Dusty Streets and Hot Music in Baghdad: Iraqi Maqam Music and Chalgi Ensembles

Sing, Play and Be Merry: The Unique Ṣawt Music of the Arabian Peninsula

To complement these historical, commercial recordings (mainly shellac discs and older fieldwork recordings from the Gulf region) traditional music performances were filmed in Oman, Qatar and Kuwait during field work trips as part of the partnership programme. These videos are also available on the Qatar Digital Library Portal. You can read more about this research in the following article:

Modernity meets Tradition: Reflections on Traditional Music in Qatar

For updates on the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership and the Qatar National Library, follow us @BLQatar!

Article written by Rolf Killius, Curator of Oral and Musical Cultures, British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership.

We are delighted to be organising a short series of classic BBC radio drama listening events, in partnership with listening event specialists In the Dark, Bournemouth University's Centre for Media History and the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster. At these free events, held at the British Library’s Foyle Suite, listeners can enjoy some outstanding archival recordings in a group setting, including Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, Louis MacNiece’s The Dark Tower and David Jones’s In Parenthesis. Each event will be followed by discussions on their continuing relevance and significance for a contemporary audience.

These listening events are part of the British Library's contribution to the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage for 2014. Annually on 27 October, audiovisual archives from around the world put on activities that highlight the vulnerability of the audiovisual heritage and celebrate the work of those heritage institutions that work to protect it.

These are the five programmes we will be presenting (please note that all events will begin at 17:15 sharp).

The March of the ’45 (1956)

The March of the ‘45 written by D.G. Bridson and produced by D.G. Bridson and Gordon Gildard was originally broadcast in 1936. Bridson's influential verse drama described the unsuccessful attempt by 'Bonny Prince Charlie' to take the British crown. From his landing in Scotland in 1745 where he rallied the clans to his cause, the 'Young Pretender' marched successfully south into England before turning back to eventual defeat at the Battle of Culloden. At moments in the programme there are voices from the north of England in the 1930s as a way of giving the Jacobite uprising political relevance. Perhaps more than any other example, 'The March of the '45' established the radio feature as a creative genre with distinct characteristics; verse narrative, acted sequences and music to tell a story based on historical fact.

When: Thu 2 Oct 2014, 17.15-19.45 (doors open at 17:00)

Where: Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation

Price: Free  Book here

In Parenthesis (1955)

In Parenthesis was written by David Jones and produced by Douglas Cleverdon with music by Elisabeth Poston. The cast includes Richard Burton as Private Ball and Dai Greatcoat. David Jones's epic poem about the First World War, In Parenthesis, was published in 1937 to extraordinary critical acclaim; T.S.Eliot called it 'a work of genius' and for W.H. Auden it was 'a masterpiece'. The feature follows Private John Ball as he crosses the channel with his English and Welsh comrades on their way to battle. There are passages which describe the everyday life of soldiers, including the intimacy of male friendship, and others which use myth and legend to reflect more generally on war. The classic radio feature ingredients are all present with verse narration, music, striking sound effects and acting. This is one of the more literary radio features and is full of references to literature, the Bible and Welsh legend. The original broadcast was in 1946 in the very early days of the Third Programme (launched less than two months before).

When: Thu 16 Oct 2014, 17.15-19.45 (doors open at 17:00)

Where: Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation

Price: Free  Book here

The Rescue (1943)

The Rescue, Edward Sackville-West’s 1943 radio dramatisation of part of Homer’s Odyssey with music by Benjamin Britten, appears to be the first substantial treatment of Homeric epic on BBC Radio, and also the most enduring (with six further productions to 1988). The collaboration of Sackville-West and Britten on this work resulted a distinctive exploration of the dramatic potential of radio. Further, the close association of words and music suggest a reflective awareness of The Rescue’s relationship with ancient epic performance, especially through the character of the bard Phemius. The narrative both resonates with the contemporary international situation and argues for the humanising potential of aesthetic experience.

When: Thu 30 Oct 2014, 17.15-19.45 (doors open at 17:00)

Where: Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation

Price: Free  Book here

The Dark Tower (1946)

The Dark Tower is one of the most acclaimed creative works written and produced for BBC Radio. The poet, classicist and BBC writer and producer Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) wrote it in the spring and summer of 1945, at the close of the Second World War, and it was first broadcast on 21 January 1946, with many subsequent revivals. Alongside MacNeice's words, an exciting score by Benjamin Britten provided another dimension to the aural experience. The location of the piece in its historical moment is crucial for its interpretation.

When: Thu 13 Nov 2014, 17.15-19.45 (doors open at 17:00)

Where: Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation

Price: Free  Book here

Under Milk Wood (1954)

The Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) conceived of Under Milk Wood, which he subtitled A Play for Voices, as a piece for performance on radio, although it has also had a vigorous performance life on stage, television and film. In this centenary year of his birth, the play has been much revived. The very first radio production of Under Milk Wood was an immediate success, winning the Prix Italia as well as a rapturous reception both in the press and amongst the 244 listeners individually surveyed by the BBC. Douglas Cleverdon, who had nurtured it during its long gestation, produced it for the Features Department with an all-Welsh cast and it was broadcast on the Third Programme on 25 January 1954. This 94-minute version was repeated several times, and the Home Service broadcast a shortened version later in the same year. 60-minute versions were made for overseas networks and the play was translated into at least eight languages for radio productions across Europe and beyond.

When: Thu 27 Nov 2014, 17.15-19.45 (doors open at 17:00)

Where: Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation

Price: Free  Book here

There is background information on each of the programme at Bournemouth University’s Public Listenings site. We hope that these will be the first in an ongoing series of listening events to be held at the British Library. Look out – or listen out – for news of these in 2015.

The British Library’s relationship with WOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance) is nearly as long as the festival's existence, recording performances for archival purposes since 1985. The first recording in the WOMAD Collection, C203/1, was of the Chinese sheng and flute players, the Guo Brothers, who had recently arrived in London to study at the Guildhall School of Music and were just beginning to create a name for themselves in this country. It was made on Ampex 456 ‘Grand Master’ tape at half-track stereo and in the recordists' notes, strong winds were reported as interfering with the quality of the recording.

Since 1985 and each year, with the exception of three, a small team of staff from the British Library record as many of the performances as possible, including workshops and interviews. This summer, between 24 and 27 July, six members of staff attended the festival equipped with portable digital recorders and recorded ninety-one performances, covering 95% of the festival. These recordings have recently been catalogued and processed and are searchable on our catalogue. They can be listened to free of charge through our listening service on-site at the British Library in King's Cross in London and in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. 

The British Library holds a significant number of early UK appearances by artists who, since performing at WOMAD, have made great inroads on the international music scene; artists such as Baaba Maal, first recorded by the British Library at WOMAD in 1991, Thomas Mapfumo, first recorded in 1990 and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, first recorded in 1985, to cite only a few. In total we hold around 2,100 hours of audio (you would need close to 3 months of non-stop listening to listen to it all!) of performances at WOMAD, held on different physical formats such as open reel tape, DAT, CD-R and digital audio files; all are stored in our basements and backed up digitally for preservation and access.

The British Library holds five million recordings on over one million items dating back to the 1890s and possibly earlier. The sound collections have their origin in 1906, when the British Museum began collecting metal masters from the Gramophone Company. Recording performances at WOMAD is one example of the many ways in which the British Library actively develops its sound collections although the majority of material is acquired through donations, purchases or loans.

Steven Dryden, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist, was a member of the WOMAD team this year. In this paragraph he relays his highlight of the festival: experiencing the live sound of DakhaBrakha, made possible thanks to Dash Arts, the creative agency which brought the group to the United Kingdom.

My highlight of WOMAD 2014 has to be ‘Ethno Chaos’ founders DakhaBrakha - brooding, shamanic ‘noisescapes’ from Ukraine. The Siam Tent filled to capacity throughout the four piece set, the atmosphere building and building with each song. The sound is eclectic, in the truest sense of the word; there is a traditional folk element but also, dance, hip-hop and tribal rhythms. The songs often build to terrifyingly claustrophobic dins, but remain rhythmic and chant like - just as the ‘Ethno Chaos’ tag might suggest, there is a lot of beauty in this chaos. One couldn’t help but reflect on everything that has happened in the Ukraine in the last year. Perhaps DakhaBrakha are capturing the zeitgeist of a generation of Ukrainians? The performance is swamped with pride, Ukrainian flags are featured on stage and amongst the audience. But there is something more here, the sound of the four piece is defiant and confident, totally uncompromising between the past and the future sounds of the Ukraine. This band sucks you in to their world of noise and forces you to contemplate, all while moving your feet.

Listen to an excerpt from DakhaBrakha's performance

Andrea Zarza Canova, Curator of World and Traditional Music, attended WOMAD festival for the first time.

Bernie Krause's talk at the Society of Sound Stage was an inspiring complement to the numerous musical performances I recorded at WOMAD: The Good Ones, Monsieur Doumani, Aar Maanta, Siyaya, Amjad Ali Khan, Mulatu Astatke, Kobo Town, Magnolia Sisters, amongst others. In his talk, the bio-acoustician and founder of Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to recording and archiving natural soundscapes, invited the audience to reflect on the origins of music by suggesting structural relationships between what he identifies as the three layers of the soundscape - the geophony ('non-biological sound that occurs in the natural world'), biophony ('all of the sounds that animals create collectively in a natural wild environment') and the anthrophony ('all the human noise we create'). Using spectograms and audio recordings from his personal archive and recordings of the BayAka Pigmies made by Louis Sarno, his points were made audible.

Listen to an excerpt from Bernie Krause's talk

Andy Linehan, Curator of Pop Music, first attended WOMAD festival in 1985.

As ever, it is difficult to pick out the highlights of WOMAD – there is so much to see, hear, taste and enjoy even though we are working - but Manu Dibango has long been a personal favourite on record so it was great to see him live and Richard Thompson’s late-night set reminded me what a great guitarist and songwriter he is. Ibibio Sound Machine played a storming set on Saturday afternoon and Youssou N’Dour was as classy as ever that evening. Sunday brought my favourite band of the weekend – Les Ambassadeurs, the reformed band led by Salif Keita who revisited their 1970s blend of afrobeat, funk, jazz and soul in an all-too short 75 minutes of aural pleasure.  And in a contrast of style the final performance of the weekend was a blistering set by Public Service Broadcasting (probably the first band to have played both the British Library Entrance Hall and Womad) who enthralled a packed Siam tent and drew proceedings to a close. It didn’t rain either.

Listen to an excerpt from Public Service Broadcasting's performance

Get in touch to listen to performances from WOMAD on-site at the British Library and listen online to sounds from World & Traditional Music and Pop Music online! See you next year for WOMAD 2015!

Organisations from across Europe visited the British Library on 17 - 18 February to mark the launch of the Europeana Sounds project (more information about the project). The three-year project is being coordinated by the British Library, and we were delighted to be able to welcome all the delegates who made the journey to London, braving the typically wet February weather.

image: British Library/Elizabeth Hunter CC-BY-SA

Europeana Sounds will use innovative digital technology to improve access to some of Europe’s leading collections of sounds and related material. The event was therefore an opportunity to meet face-to-face to discuss just what sort of inventive strategies will be adopted in order to enrich the audiences’ experience of the wealth of recordings that will be made available through the project’s life-span and beyond.

Many fruitful discussions occurred over the two days. Of particular interest was the issue of licensing material in order to provide as much access as possible, whilst ensuring that content providing institutions feel that the material in their custody is sufficiently protected. Indeed, in the case of recordings of ‘traditional’ or ‘ceremonial’ music that may contain culturally sensitive material, this will need to be taken into account in the same way that legal consideration must be adhered to.

Whilst there is a great deal of expertise amongst the project partners, this sense of balance could not be achieved without an engaged and enthusiastic audience. Fortunately, we will be working with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and Historypin to engage different communities and to enrich the project’s metadata through crowdsourcing and edit-a-thons. In turn, this will make it easier for end-users to find what they are looking for. This focus on usability will be augmented by the development of thematic channels on the Europeana portal, and through other digital sound sharing platforms, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Those attending the meeting were reminded of the joy of listening and of discovering new sounds by the two ‘concert’ sessions, where selected partners presented recordings from their archives.

Janet Topp Fargion of the British Library selected this recording of a Sora ancestor song to illustrate the fact that although Europeana aggregates digital objects held in European institutions, the subjects may be international, reflecting the research interests of scholars and users based in Europe.

Sora ancestor song

(Recorded by Rolf Killius, Orissa, India, 2001. Source: The British Library)

Mairead Dhòmhnallach of Tobar an Dulchais presented 'Latha Dhomh ’s mi Buain a’ Choirce' as sung by Kate MacMillan. It is a recording of a traditional Gaelic, one of thousands that will be made available through Europeana thanks to the project.

Latha Dhomh ’s mi Buain a’ Choirce

(Recorded by John Lorne Campbell, Scotland, 1949. Source: The National Trust for Scotland)

Zane Grosa from the National Library of Latvia shared this recording, the only surviving work of orchestral music by Latvian composer Emils Dārziņš. He destroyed his other symphonic works after being accused of plagiarism, and ended his life when he was just 34, apparently throwing himself under the train.

Melanholiskais valsis

(Source: National Library of Latvia)

Alexander König of the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics gave us this field recording, made in the village of Tauwema in the Trobriand Islands as part of a project to document the Kilivila language. This example serves to highlight that Europeana Sounds will work with environmental and linguistic, as well as musical, material.

Tauwema Village

(Recorded by Gunter Senft, Tauwema, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, 2003. Source: Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics)

Europeana Sounds is funded by the European Union under its ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programm.

The songs and calls of 100 species have been specially selected for the British Library’s upcoming exhibition Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight. Taken from the Library’s extensive collection of natural sounds, these recordings have been incorporated into a rather fab bit of phylogenetic software – welcome everyone to OneZoom.

This tree of life explorer helps users discover and visualise the evolutionary relationships between species in an easy to access way. Working much like a map, the explorer lets you zoom into particular areas of curiosity and in so doing so reveals interesting and sometimes surprising branches in our planet’s evolutionary history. Did you know that elephants and hyraxes are basically first cousins? You will once you’ve had a look at OneZoom.

As you zoom ever deeper into the tree, families, genera and eventually species are gradually revealed. Each species is represented by a leaf on the tree; each leaf is then colour-coded to reflect the current conservation status of that animal. Now, for the first time, some of these leaves also carry with them the typical vocalisation of the species they represent. Here are just some of the birds, mammals and amphibians that made the final cut:

Western Lowland Gorilla

Gorilla gorilla gorilla, recorded by Nerissa Chao in Mikongo Conservation Area, Lope National Park, Gabon, 2002

Manx Shearwater

Puffinus puffinus, recorded by Alan Burbidge, Skokholm, Wales, 1998

Humpback Whale

Megaptera novaeangliae, recorded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Caribbean Sea, 2000

Common Toad

Bufo bufo, recorded by Eric & May Nobles, Radnor, Wales, 1989

Crested Bellbird

Oreoica gutturalis, recorded by Vicki Powys, Northern Territory, Australia, 1993

OneZoom is the brainchild of Dr James Rosindell, a biodiversity theorist based at Imperial College London who, together with Dr Luke Harmon from the University of Idaho, came up with the initial concept.

The idea of representing relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, in the form of a tree gained popularity within the scientific community during the 19th century. The great naturalist, Charles Darwin, used this concept to express the diversification of species from a common ancester in his seminal work 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel produced several trees of life that reflected refinements in his research into the phylogenetic history of life.

Darwin's tree of life published in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)

Tree of life featured in Ernst Haeckel's The Evolution of Man (1879)

The evolutionary illustrations of Darwin and particularly Haeckel are beautiful visualisations of data that reflect the scientific knowledge of the time. The level of information available however is defined by the medium on which they are presented. The future lies with phylogenetic trees, such as OneZoom, that exist beyond the page, allowing an unprecedented level of exploration and understanding of how life on Earth evolved.

Beautiful Science runs from 20 February to 26 May, 2014, is sponsored by Winton Capital Management, and is free to the public.

27th October is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. UNESCO designated this day to highlight the work of archives worldwide in preserving and making accessible their unique audiovisual collections that are at risk of decay. It also acknowledges the importance that audiovisual records have in shaping mankind's memory. "Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation" is this year’s theme, and it draws attention to the fact that there is an estimated ten to fifteen year window for digitising audiovisual records before irremediable loss occurs due to the obsolescence of playback equipment or the degradation of carriers. It is quite likely that future viewers and listeners will be accessing content in a purely digital environment so the challenge for us now is to digitise as much existing material as we can without compromising quality or meaning.

To celebrate World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, World and Traditional Music at the British Library has added fifteen European recordings made by Peter Kennedy in the 1950s to the Peter Kennedy Collection available through British Library Sounds. The recordings online are only a small portion of  Kennedy's work, 150 hours of a total of around 1500, that were made during the four decades in which he was very active 'in the field': 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970.  These European recordings add an interesting international slant to Kennedy's folk music collecting activities, otherwise based entirely in the British Isles.

Peter Kennedy in the 1990s [MS Mus. 1771/1/PR0924]

Many of these recordings wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the fact that Alan Lomax made Peter Kennedy responsible for the Yugoslavian and English volumes in his LP compilation set A World of Folk and Primitive Music. The set was commissioned by Goddard Liberson, President of Columbia Records, after a chance meeting between Lomax  and Liberson in a Broadway coffee shop. The thirty LPs that make up this set are available to listeners in British Library Reading Rooms: you can search for them on our Sound and Moving Image Catalogue. Lomax based himself in London to put together the collection and one of the first places he called at was Cecil Sharp House, as at the time the British Institute of Recorded Sound (what is now the Sound Archive of the British Library) was still at an embryonic stage. The Director of the English Folk Dance & Song Society at the time was Douglas Kennedy, Peter's father, and Kennedy soon became one of Lomax's most important collaborators.

The recordings that formed the basis of the Yugoslavian LP were made at the Opatija Folk Music Festival in September 1951 in what is now Croatia. You can listen to Kennedy's recordings made on reel-to-reel tape at this festival by browsing the Peter Kennedy Collection by location, under 'Croatia'. His recordings at the festival, which had been organized as a special event for the members of the Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (founded in 1947 in London), convey the excitement that must have been palpable at this international gathering which brought together over 700 performers from around the world.

Listen to this Serbian group performing. You can hear the performers feet busily thudding in perfect synchrony with the sound of the duduk and male and female voices. At the festival, Kennedy also made recordings of Croatian music, Macedonian music, music from Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia.

Programme for the II International Folk Music and Dance Festival

Kennedy's other European recordings were made two years later in July 1953 in the Basque country (Pamplona, Spain and Biarritz, France) during the II International Folk Music and Dance Festival. The festival was celebrated in both Biarritz and Pamplona to coincide with the 6th International Council for Traditional Music Conference. “…I travelled eastwards along the Pyrenees…towards the Atlantic coast…into the 'Basque Country proper'. Here everything was different…the people, the faces, costumes, houses, language and the music. It was strange! To get here I had travelled the full length of France, almost into Spain, and now…in a way I almost felt I was back home. You know that strange sort of feeling of 'familiarity' that you get sometimes – the feeling that you’ve been to a place before and yet, in fact, this is really your first visit. Well this curious feeling swept over me only a few hours after my arrival…” (extract from Peter Kennedy’s transcript to ‘Basque Festival’ which aired on the BBC Light Programme in March and April 1954). He was reminded of a Welsh Eistedfod when hearing the Oldarra choir sing because of “the same spirit of devotion and working together – a small community with the resulting natural harmonising ability.” Seeing the costumes of the Basque dancers also brought to mind English Morris dancers, and he was struck by the image of something that looked to him like a hobby horse.

In Pamplona Peter Kennedy attended the encierros and “danced the whole night through – quite a fact when I think of it now – but at the time I found the music and the friendly spirit of the people of Pamplona in Fiesta kept me going on and on and on." In this recording you can hear how the crowd in Pamplona reacts fervently to the songs performed.

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is an important moment to celebrate and draw attention to the efforts currently being made in audiovisual preservation, such as the digitising of the Peter Kennedy tapes. But the story doesn't end here as the digital environment raises its own preservation challenges concerning the ephemerality of websites and digital formats. Saving our heritage for the next generation involves engaging with the ongoing complexities of preservation in a rapidly changing environment.