Cylinder Recordings Research Articles

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library (review)

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library. http://memory.loc.gov/. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Requires standard web browser; for audio: requires RealAudio player with 14.4kbps or faster Internet connection, MPEG2/layer 3 (.mp3) player, or WaveForm (.wav) player; for highest quality images some collections require Tagged Image File Format (.tiff) viewer. It is appropriate that, in this bicentennial year of the establishment of the Library of Congress, we review the library's gift to the nation--a digital multimedia library named the American Memory Project (AMP). The aim of the project, to have over a million items on the site by this anniversary year, has been achieved. AMP has been growing rapidly since 1995, and now has over seventy fully digitized collections. Its contents range from manuscript letters to baseball cards, daguerreotypes to digital photographs, wax cylinder recordings to commercial jazz recordings, music manuscript scores to printed sheet music, and film clips to motion pictures. This wealth of resources is intended for researchers, students, teachers, and the public at all levels. The materials are drawn not only from the Library of Congress, but from a variety of institutions across the country. To date, approximately $60 million from both public and private sources has been spent on the project. Private donors include both individuals a nd corporations; noteworthy are Ameritech's three-year competitive grants. These funds provided support for institutions nationwide. Of the seventy collections, eighteen contain music or are music-related, with seven more music-related collections in preparation. This review concentrates on these eighteen collections. Collections The wide variety of topics included in AMP is reflected in the music collections. There are sheet music collections from Duke University (Historical American Sheet Music) and Brown University (African-American Sheet Music) from the same period, 1850-1920. Other sheet music collections include Music for the Nation, American Sheet 1870-1885, a collection of sheet music originally submitted for copyright registration during the post--Civil War era, and We'll Sing to Abe Our Song, a collection devoted to President Lincoln and the Civil War. This collection spans the period from the presidential campaign in 1859 to the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909. The sheet music collections generally include scanned scores in their entirety; some, such as the We'll Sing to Abe Our Song, also transcribe the lyrics separately. Cover art is scanned in color where the original was in color. At present, there are no sound recordings of the music to go with the scores. In addition to sheet music, there is a c ollection of nineteenth-century song sheets, America Singing, which contains only lyrics and no music. AMP is rich in ethnographic collections with multimedia access. These include: Gold, Sidney Robertson Cowell's WPA California Folk Project; Southern Mosaic, John and Ruby Lomax's recordings from their trip to the southern states; Hispano and Culture from the Rio Grande, Juan Rael's documentation of religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; the American Folklife Center's Indian Music, which presents traditional Omaha Native American music; and Alan Jabbour's Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier, performed by octogenarian Henry Reed of the Virginian Appalachians. Another ethnographic collection, 'Voices from the Dust Bowl, though not primarily a music collection, also contains some music. The collection documents the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941 through audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, an d ephemera collected during two field trips. …

A Guide to Early Field Recordings (1900-1949) at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology

This book is a useful guide to songs and spoken narratives that were collected from Native American tribal groups all over the California region as part of an ethnological survey conducted by University of California researchers between 1900 and 1940. The collection is illuminated by a large body of published sources and manuscripts containing translations and other information on the cultural significance of the recordings. This volume provides a comprehensive inventory of the cylinder recordings and cites available documentation for each item. A summary of more recent recordings collected on disc, wire, or tape is also included.

MEXICAN-AMERICAN MUSIC IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CALIFORNIA: THE LUMMIS WAX CYLINDER COLLECTION AT THE SOUTHWEST MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES

In 1904 Charles Lummis began a large project to record Spanish-language folk, popular and theatre songs onto wax cylinders. These cylinder recordings of Mexican-Californian, Mexican, and Spanish music, recorded by some thirty-five local Southern California informants and visitors to California, may well be the earliest non-commercial field recordings of Spanish secular songs in existence. This article will examine the history and importance of the Lummis Wax Cylinder Collection, the social and personal aspect of music making in Hispanic California, the place of music in the lives of some of Lummis's singers, and the genres and sources of Hispanic-American music.

Dictionary of Afro-American performers: 78 RPM and cylinder recordings of opera, choral music, and song, c1900-1949

Dictionary of Afro-American performers: 78 RPM and cylinder recordings of opera, choral music, and song, c1900-1949

Dictionary of Afro-American Performers. 78 RPM and Cylinder Recordings of Opera, Choral Music, and Songs, c. 1900-1949

Dictionary of Afro-American Performers. 78 RPM and Cylinder Recordings of Opera, Choral Music, and Songs, c. 1900-1949

Early Field Recordings: A Catalogue of Cylinder Collections at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music

Acknowledgments How to Use This Catalogue Ethnographic Cylinder Recordings, An Introduction Catalogue of Cylinder Collections Index of Names Index of Culture Groups Index of Subjects Index of Geographical Names Other Catalogues Published by the Archives of Traditional Music

The Record Industry Comes to the Orient

sailed from England to India on the S/S Coromandel. Gaisberg was a representative of the Gramophone Company, founded only four years before in London by a group of English and American businessmen who held the rights to Emile Berliner's disc recording patents.1 Gaisberg already had a remarkable career in the record industry. He had started as an accompanist with the Columbia Phonograph Company in Washington, D.C., making cylinder recordings while still at school. He then joined Berliner's enterprise, which became the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901, and was sent to London to initiate recording activities there. Before his journey to India he had already toured all over Europe, recording such celebrities as Caruso and Chaliapin. record business was expanding rapidly. purpose of Gaisberg's trip was to open up new markets, establish agencies, and acquire a catalogue of native (Gaisberg 1942:48). Upon arrival in Calcutta, he promptly recorded several hundred titles with local singers and instrumentalists such as Goura Jan, Janki Bai, and Abdul Ghafur. expedition continued farther east, and by spring 1903 Gaisberg had recorded a total of 1700 discs of Indian, Burmese, Siamese, Malay, Javanese, Chinese and Japanese music. master recordings were then sent back to Europe to be processed, and the finished records shipped to local agents along with gramophones manufactured by the same company. Within a few years, all major record companies had made recordings in the Orient and established agencies in the most important countries. When Heinrich Bumb of Beka-Record G.m.b.H. arrived in Hong Kong in January, 1906, he found, The Columbia Graphophone Company had just finished its latest recordings-said to be of 1,000 titles, for which fees of 50,000 dollars had been paid. 'Victor,' 'Grammophon' as well as 'Zonophon-Records' and 'Odeon' were represented in the colony (Bumb

The tuning of a Sundanese (West‐Javanese) gamelan: 1893 and 1977

Field Museum's gamelan pelog (7‐tone scale), a 24‐piece orchestral ensemble with 109 bronze and 18 wood sounding parts covering a 6‐octave range, was brought to Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Recently discovered were 33 wax cylinder recordings of the 1893 performances. Six of these cylinders recorded the tuning of individual instruments representing nearly the total range of the gamelan, including 91 of the bronze and all 18 wood sounding parts. In early 1977, the tones were again recorded along with repeated soundings of a 440‐Hz tuning fork as a control. The 1893 and 1977 tunings were analyzed; frequencies and intervals compared. The results provided new insights into the stability of bronze and wood musical instruments as well as significant evidence of the gamelan's age when it arrived in Chicago in 1893. In late 1977, the tunings of some sounding parts were adjusted, and the gamelan has since been used for the teaching and performance of Javanese gamelan music. [Work supported by NEA and the Walter E. Heller Foundation.]

Notes on Ethnomusicology in Venezuela

Venezuela has extensive areas populated by aborigines who either remain uncivilized or who are in the process of acculturation. There are tribes like the Yanoama of the Federal Territory of Amazonas who are hunters in the paleo-Indian tradition; the Warao of the Orinoco Delta who are both hunters and fishers in the meso-Indian tradition; and various tribes of the Carib families, the Arawacos, and even the Chibchas (for example, the Motilones), who are cultivators in the neolithic tradition. All of these Indians have music and nearly all possess musical instruments. The first scientific study of the music of the Indians in Venezuela was undertaken by Erich M. von Hornbostel, who transcribed and analyzed the valuable collection of indigenous music recorded by Theodor Koch-Grfinberg during his voyages in northern Brazil and Venezuela, in the years 1911 to 1913, sponsored by the Baessler-Institut of Berlin. Koch-Griinberg's first report was published in 2 vols., 1909-10, under the title Zwei jahr unter den Indianern (revised and reissued in one volume, Stuttgart, 1923, under the title Zwei jahre bei den Indianern nordwest-Brasiliens). But the more important work for Venezuelan ethnology is his Vom Roroima zum Orinoco, published in 3 vols. (Berlin, D. Reimer, 1917-28), which contains, Musik der Masuschi, Taulipang und Yekuana von Erich M. v. Hornbostel (aus dem phonogramm-archiv im psychologischen institut der Universitait Berlin, (vol. 3, pp. 307-440). Descriptions of Indians' songs and dances are given in vol. 3, pp. 154-166, together with translations into German of the song-texts, by Koch-Griinberg. A Spanish translation of Hornbostel's appendix was made by Dr. Federica de Ritter in Caracas and was published in the Archivos Venezolanos de Folklore (Affo IV-V, Tomo III, No. 1, 1955-56). In addition to analyzing 37 melodies, Hornbostel studies the corresponding musical instruments, which are illustrated with drawings. In 1934 the original cylinder recordings were transferred from the University of Berlin to the Museum fiir V6lkerkunde. In Venezuela, Dr. Lisandro Alvarado (1858-1929), a many-sided man of science whose interests ranged from medicine to linguistics, from history to ethnology, published a useful work titled Datos Etnogr~ificos de Venezuela (Biblioteca Venezolana de Cultura, 1945), which contains a chapter on the music of the Venezuelan Indians, dealing mainly with musical instruments. It also includes resumes of accounts of indigenous music from various travellers and observers of the last century. Alvarado also compiled three Glosarios, of which the most pertinent is the Glosario de voces indfgenas de Venezuela (Caracas, 1953), containing numerous descriptions of instruments and festivals.