Music Archive Research Articles

The Inevitable Bandstand: The State Band of Oaxaca and the Politics of Sound

The “inevitable bandstand” refers to the music building placed in the central plaza of main towns in Mexico between the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Along with statues of national heroes, it is an emblem of order, civic life, and modernity. Charles Heath revives the concept of civil religion as interpreted by Robert Bellah to argue that the Oaxaca state band played a central ideological role in the political and social plans and programs of the state.Bellah's discussion of a civil religion in the United States called attention to the presence of a religious discourse in the political speeches of the country's founding fathers and more recent politicians. This discourse involved the power of God as the guiding force to rule and govern the country. Is it viable to interpret nineteenth-century Mexican liberal patriotic sentiments as the expression of a civil religion? Mexico is well known for being a Catholic country; however, the construction of the nation and the power of the state were only consolidated with the Reform Laws (1867–1869) and the state's secularization. The suppression of the Te Deum in government enthronement ceremonies during the Benito Juárez government illustrates not only the separation of the state from the church but also the separation of government politics from religious ritual. The wording and appearance of fervent nineteenth-century statements about the nation chosen by Heath may sound religious—and indeed religious expressions still are part of our language—but their moral ideology was not to link state policies and programs with a supernatural authority but instead to generate an awareness of the country's struggles to create a sovereign nation and to instill nationalism, forging an identity based upon the diversity of regional cultures. What the author calls the “eclectic repertoires” of the Banda de Música del Estado de Oaxaca's (BME) musical renditions throughout one and a half centuries exemplify this combination of European romantic militarism, heroic values, and Oaxacan or regional Mexican musical compositions (p. 42).The strength and contribution of this book is the author's detailed historiographical work. Heath uses primary sources, periodicals, annual government reports, and texts from politicians and intellectuals of the time (often musicians themselves) such as Justo Sierra, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, José Vasconcelos, Genaro Vázquez, and Guillermo Rosas Solaegui to account for the state's struggle to modernize government and society and the introduction of social and economic policies and programs, particularly in education and tourism. The BME is made the avatar of that history. Introducing music festivals and popular and regional music as part of a socialist education curriculum was central to the civic calendar of the BME. Under the ideology of mestizaje, Mexican intellectuals imagined social and cultural integration for Latin American societies. Rural education became a priority, and cultural missions trained teachers to encourage regional music and dance in education. The author also discusses the importance of regional music and dances for promoting tourism and economic development. Descriptions of the BME's participation in the Guelaguetza festival are testimonies to the important role that this musical institution plays in the main economic industry of Oaxaca today.The book gives minute detail of government dispositions toward and investments in the growth and improvement of the BME, the band members' labor contracts, and the obligatory and key role that they have played in political and social celebrations, commemorations, and other symbolic events of the official civic calendar. The strong influence of musical directors such as Germán Canseco, Diego Innes, and Amador Pérez Torres is narrated with ethnographic detail. Several descriptions of the music programs are offered, but the reader misses an inventory of the music archive of the BME, which the author had the opportunity to study.The writing is slightly dry but full of information, and it is thus interesting and useful from that point of view. The Inevitable Bandstand is an important book, as it contributes to filling a gap in the modern history of music in Oaxaca City.

Ephemeral Feminist Histories and the Politics of Transmission within Digital Culture

ABSTRACTThis article uses the work of Bernard Stiegler to understand how widespread digitisation has influenced the transmission of ephemeral and marginalised feminist histories and archives, using as a case study my experience of creating a low-budget feminist digital archive in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Women's Liberation Music Archive (WLMA). I explore how the WLMA benefitted from unique transmission conditions enabled by digitisation, namely widened access to recorded matter that had become inoperable within feminist communities, technically, socially and culturally. I then go on to examine two areas that pose both threats and possibilities for the sustainability of digital archives in the long term. The first issue relates to the position of low-financed digital archives within the volatile dynamics of change that propel the innovation-driven market economy. The second relates to metadata and how digital technologies present an opportunity to re-think the terms of categorisation used to describe information within networks of association and reference. Finally, I argue that acquiring the technical skills to take care of digital information will perform a key role ensuring digital archives can survive in the long term.

Genealogies of sense and sound: Home recordings and Greek American identity

Abstract This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family of musicians have employed recording technologies to explore their migrant subjectivity. Focusing on an Ottoman-era collection of handwritten sheet music and home-made audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape from the 1950s to 1970s, I explore the ways that people’s interactions with these materials have enabled the preservation and transmission of family repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Drawing on the work on Robin Bernstein, Georgina Born and Nadia Seremetakis, I highlight the performative agency embedded in these scores and reels, and reveal that, beyond mere archives of musical activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the mediating of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft both a sense of family and a recognizable family sound. These musical archives enter into dialogue with other aspects of the Anatolian Greek community’s material culture to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made them, and interrogate the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘family’ in the immigrant context.

The Current Status and Issues of Music Archives in Korea

The Current Status and Issues of Music Archives in Korea

A Multi-Faceted Decision Making Process for the Design of a Music Archiving System

In this paper, we illustrate the decision making intrinsic that was followed while designing for the users of a music archive. The archive at stake is the Ionian Music Archive, an on-line service at refinement phase that holds records of the characteristic music of the Ionian Islands in Greece. The main challenge was how to best engage user adaptation on a system with certain attributes such as a high variation on users’ music knowledge. We propose a two-folded decision making process for its design. The one side of the process lies on design rationale techniques at earlier stages and the other side is akin to formal multi-criteria approaches and is applied on every high-level decision to further weigh the user adaptation attributes that are included in the system. The initial feedback we collected is very encouraging, setting the basis for future implementations.

Ionian music archive: application of digitisation, management, protection and dissemination technologies for musical cultural heritage

This paper presents the design and implementation of a web-based application aiming at the digitisation, management and dissemination of musical cultural heritage. The architecture of the application is modular consisting of a digitisation layer that provides all the necessary digitisation services to the expert and an information system layer that supports multimedia management, protection through watermarking and dissemination services along with system administration services. The architecture is expandable due to the dynamic nature of a musical heritage archive. The application is safeguarding folklore music of Greek Ionian islands and provides services and tools to the internet user as well as the curator of the musical archive.

Performing the aporias of the archive: Towards a future for South African music archives

CITATION: Lambrechts, L. 2016. Performing the aporias of the archive : towards a future for South African music archives. Historia, 61(1):132-154, doi:10.17159/2309-8392.

Archiv für die Musik Afrikas / African Music Archives (AMA). Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. 1998. In German and English. URL: http://www.ama.ifeas.uni-mainz.de

Archiv für die Musik Afrikas / African Music Archives (AMA). Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. 1998. In German and English. URL: http://www.ama.ifeas.uni-mainz.de - Volume 48

PORTRAITS OF SAHARAWI MUSIC: WHEN CULTURAL PRESERVATION MEETS POLITICAL ACTIVISM

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork done mainly in the Saharawi refugee camps and the development of “Portraits of Saharawi Music” (2013–2014), a collaborative music archiving and research project in partnership with the British Library and the Saharawi Ministry of Culture, this article analyses issues in the political realities for Saharawi refugees from the perspective of the musicians and the cultural authorities in the refugee camps. In addition, it explores methodological and ethical issues derived from the uses of political and cultural activism as an ethnomusicological research method. It examines the interactions of the ideologies, motivations and personal relationships of the researcher, the musicians and the institutions involved in this recording project, focusing on the selection of repertoire as an activist act and the impact of doing advocacy research on an extremely vulnerable social group as the Saharawi refugee community. In agreement with basic principles of social responsibility of academia, it supports the role of “activist researcher”; but it cautions that it is essential for researchers to understand how relations of knowledge and power are produced, perpetuated, and challenged in specific situations of conflict, in order to turn their research into a true collaborative action.

MUSIC ARCHIVE FOR THE PACIFIC

The Music Archive for the Pacific has been established at Southern Cross University in Lismore, New South Wales, Australia, through the generous donation by Malcolm Philpott of approximately three hundred commercial recordings of mainly contemporary Papua New Guinean music, and other related printed materials.

A Response to Peter Cooke’s Response

Abstract In the spirit of scholarly dialogue about issues of common concern, we would like to respond to Peter Cooke’s critique of our article “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in Uganda” (Ethnomusicology 56:2). His comments appear to be based on misunderstandings of our statements and on personal interpretations with which we take issue. We did not state in the article that Wachsmann mistreated or infringed on the rights of the people of Uganda. We highly respect and continue to honor the contributions of Klaus Wachsmann as a scholar, collector, and curator of Ugandan music. Indeed, it is because of the great respect for Wachsmann, and the hard work he did to preserve the great wealth of Uganda’s musical culture, that the Makerere University Klaus Wachsmann Music Archive (MAKWMA) was named after him. Our goal was for readers to reflect on the theoretical premises, ethnographic practices, and ethical standards that informed Wachsmann’s field recordings. How can Wachsmann’s “motivations, preferences, and limitations” help us to understand those premises, practices, and standards (p. 208)? Wachsmann’s work in Uganda raises issues about a particular time and place in the history of ethnomusicology, and it is in the spirit of historical and cultural critique that we wrote the article.

Characteristics and Use of Digital Music Archives in National libraries of the U.S., Canada and Australia

Characteristics and Use of Digital Music Archives in National libraries of the U.S., Canada and Australia

Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines: American Songs of War and Love, 1898–1946: A Resource Guide by Thomas P. Walsh (review)

Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines: American Songs of War and Love, 1898-1946: A Resource Guide. By Thomas P. Walsh. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. [xxv, 411 p. ISBN 9780810886087 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780810886094 (e-book), $94.99.] Bibliographic references, indexes. Thomas Walsh has uncovered a vast forgotten repertoire of popular that serves as an exciting contribution to the growing scholarship on Tin Pan Alley and the intersections of U.S. imperialism, popular culture, and global popular music. This volume covers the period of U.S. colonial rule in the islands, from 1898 to 1946, and includes entries for approximately 1,400 whose lyrics or titles deal in some way with the Philippines. By grouping these together for the first time, Walsh provides scholars with a starting point from which to further explore the ways in which popular song served as a medium to negotiate, perform, and experience the logics and ideologies of U.S. imperialism. The bulk of Walsh's easy-to-use volume consists of individual song entries listed alphabetically by year. These include soldier written by American soldiers during the Philippine-American War and well-distributed Tin Pan Alley hits such as Ma Filipino Babe and Old Manila. One of Walsh's primary contributions is revealing the widespread engagement with this musical subject matter by uncovering a wealth of unpublished sent off for copyright at the Library of Congress that remained unseen and unheard. In addition to popular songs, Walsh also includes a small number of other media, such as recordings, musicals, and classical works. Very little of this repertoire has appeared in earlier discographies. Walsh generated his entries by combing through sheet music archives, examining records of copyrights, and by building a large private collection of Tin Pan Alley pieces. While the subtitle describes the volume as songs of war and love, the majority of these were written around times of formal warfare during the Spanish-American/Philippine-American Wars from 1898 to 1902 and World War II from 1941 to 1946. These eleven years take up 66 percent of the 363 pages of entries, and the earlier period alone comprises almost half the book. Song entries feature standard discographic information, but many also include descriptions of cover art, lyrics for in the public domain, and links to digitized recordings, online sheet music, or primary sources with information about the entry. His inclusion of such information provides scholars access to crucial resources beyond those that could be reasonably included in a printed guide. These links to Web sites hosted by universities and large archives will likely be accessible to scholars well into the future. In addition to this extra information, for about half of the pieces, Walsh offers brief biographies of composers, historically situates events referred to in the lyrics, or analyzes cover art iconography. Much of this is new research, and helps to provide context for lesser-known composers and esoteric subject matter. Walsh concludes with a two-page afterword about popular song and the Philippines from 1947 to 1950, and an eleven-page bibliography of books, articles, discographies, and Web sites on music and U.S. and Philippine popular culture. There are two indexes, one organized by song title, the other by composer, lyricist, and arranger. Walsh more than fulfills his modest goal of providing] a fresh perspective from which to view and analyze how American popular culture recorded its thoughts . …

Review: British Library Sounds and Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis by Ruth M. Stone and Lester Monts

Book Review| August 01 2015 Review: British Library Sounds and Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis by Ruth M. Stone and Lester Monts British Library Sounds. URL: http://sounds.bl.uk/Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis. Ruth M. Stone and Lester Monts, Directors. URL: http://www.eviada.org/ Benjamin Tausig Benjamin Tausig BENJAMIN TAUSIG is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on sound studies, Southeast Asian music, and protest. His current book project is an ethnography of media and sonic space at political protests in Bangkok. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2015) 68 (2): 476–487. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.2.476 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Benjamin Tausig; Review: British Library Sounds and Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis by Ruth M. Stone and Lester Monts. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2015; 68 (2): 476–487. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.2.476 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The musical archive, that perennially wandering figure, stands once more at a foggy crossroads. There are signs but no maps, and glowing screens, seemingly the only sources of light, beckon from every direction. Which path of digital archival practices will offer depth, stability, and accessibility, while making use of new tools to provoke trenchant academic discourse moving forward? One way to address this question is to consider the archival paths that have already been trod—with mixed success—in the digital era. This review considers two prominent online archival collections of musicological interest, the British Library's “Sounds” and the digital archive of the university-affiliated, grant-funded organization EVIA (Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis). Both Sounds and EVIA are focused broadly on the archival storage of recorded music and sound, but the similarities more or less end there. The structures of the collections and their online portals offer substantially different justifications, benefits, and... You do not currently have access to this content.

Historical Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music Archive

This article examines the contemporary role of archives in relation to the curation and preservation of popular music artifacts, drawing upon interviews with a range of archival institutions and popular music curators in several countries. It explores the current technological, financial, and aesthetic challenges facing curators and archivists in the era of digital abundance. Previous strategies of “collecting everything” are being revised, with more recent strategies of selective narratives of particular national significance. This in turn presents further challenges for institutions that wish to adopt more playful and innovative uses of their material, particularly as pressures mount from the state to increase user/visitor numbers. The article also explores how “the national” is configured in these forms and presentations of popular music and cultural memory, and where archives are situated between the music industries, the state, and popular music fan communities.

Keeping Time: An Introduction to Archival Best Practices for Music Librarians by Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force (review)

Reviewed by: Keeping Time: An Introduction to Archival Best Practices for Music Librarians by Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force Creighton Barrett Keeping Time: An Introduction to Archival Best Practices for Music Librarians. By Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force. (Music Library Association Basic Manual Series, no. 9.) Middleton, WI: Music Library Association and A-R Editions, 2014. [xiv, 143 p. ISBN 9780895797865. $50.] Illustrations, appendices, glossary, bibliographic references, suggested readings, index. Librarians and archivists share many common values and responsibilities, but each profession is charged with managing collections with divergent requirements for acquisition, preservation, description, and use. And yet, library and archival collections are frequently unified by institutional missions, collection mandates, administrative structures, and physical spaces. This is particularly true when it comes to music libraries, which frequently include archival materials such as manuscript scores, noncommercial sound and video recordings, photographs, and similar. In Keeping Time, authors Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force address the colliding worlds of music libraries and archives with a comprehensive introduction to archival best practices for music librarians. The manual is the ninth volume of the Music Library Association’s Basic Manual Series, and the first full-length monograph for both authors. Hooper is the Head of the Music and Media Center in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, and Force is Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Force was involved with the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems Project (InterPARES) at the University of British Columbia and has written about records management and electronic records, while Hooper has written on various topics in music archives and libraries and is a regular presenter at regional and national meetings of the Music Library Association (MLA). Keeping Time is a modern and accessible introduction to archival best practices that uses practical examples and hypothetical situations to tailor the content for music librarians. The manual adopts the structure of many archives manuals and textbooks, with the content organized according to what archivists call the “core archival functions.” After a historical introduction, the chapters flow through the steps an archivist would take with a new collection: acquisition and accessioning, arrangement, description, and preservation. The manual lacks a chapter on access services, typically considered a core archival function, but reading room best practices are addressed in the chapter on preservation. Chapters on digitization and funding expand on the core archival functions and should be of wider interest to music librarians. The manual is rounded out with a series of appendices, a glossary, a list of suggested readings, and a five-page index. Hooper and Force begin with a very brief history of archives that serves its purpose well. The basic tenets of archives are easier to comprehend when they are given some historical context, and chapter one puts the core principles of archival science squarely in the context of the French Revolution. The chapter’s brevity, however, results in the exclusion of some important details. The brief section on postmodernism in archives, for example, only makes vague references to Derrida’s Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and simply states that “archivists have become aware that their duties of appraisal, [End Page 674] arrangement, description, and preservation play an intrinsic role in determining whose history is remembered and how it is written” (p. 6). The second chapter focuses on acquisitions and accessioning, core functions upon which all other archival activities are based. At the beginning of the chapter, Hooper and Force comment that these functions “mark the beginning of a collection’s journey from an unprocessed collection in a private home or business to a fully processed, preserved, described, and accessible collection in a music library’s archival holdings or special collections” (p. 7). Highlights from this chapter include an excellent list of questions to be asked when determining whether an archival collection should be acquired and a list of talking points for speaking to donors. Chapter 3 introduces archival appraisal, considered by many archivists to be the most intellectually demanding archival function, and one that distinguishes archival work from other related disciplines. The chapter focuses on appraisals performed after acquisition. Pre-acquisition appraisal...

Saving All the Freaks on the Life Raft: Blending Documentation Strategy with Community Engagement to Build a Local Music Archives

Abstract Louisville, Kentucky, has a rich musical heritage, including an underground scene that influenced the sound of not only punk, indie, and hardcore, but also of popular music regionally, nationally, and internationally. In 2013, faced with the loss of several members of this scene over the course of twelve months, archivists in the University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections launched a project to document this important slice of Louisville's musical culture. The Louisville Underground Music Archive (LUMA) project successfully applies documentation strategy, paired with a strong community engagement component, to address the gap in the historical record related to this culture.

Die spätbarocke Musikpraxis in der oberösterreichischen Zisterzienserabtei Wilhering

Following the reconstruction of the Cistercian Wilhering Abbey in Upper Austria, which was completely destroyed by a fire in 1733, Abbot John Baptist IV Hinterhölzl initiated a comprehensive spiritual renewal of the monastery’s cultural direction. Guided by the late Baroque notion of representation in the sacred arts, elemental changes impacted the development of its music. A considerable number of autographs and copies were purchased, many of which have been preserved intact, or at the very least, their titles. The study provides an overview of the monastery’s music archive from that time-a period that immediately preceded the era of Josephinism.

Does Music Directly Affect a Person’s Heart Rate?

Music can have a profound effect on a person’s body, in that it may cause people to dance and move around, but does it have a direct and significant effect on a person’s heart rate if they are still? In this study, 24 high school students’ heart rates were recorded while listening to 6 selections of 6 different genres of music. The effect of different types of music was tested using heart rate monitors, data collection software, and music from free music archives. We found that music has a significant impact on heart rate. Average heart rates were significantly higher after listening to rock music, despite that selection having the slowest tempo of the six genres tested. Heart rates also significantly decreased after listening to classical music and significantly increased after listening to the subjects’ favorite musical selections. This indicates that someone may be able to decrease or increase their heart rate by simply listening to music. While significant patterns emerged, the study was limited, in that the order of the music was the same for every individual, the sample size was relatively small (n = 24), and heart rates were highly variable between subjects.

The Research Activities of the Department of Ethnomusicology and Hymnology of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and its Music Archive Collections

The aim of this article is to present the research activity of the Department of Ethnomusicology and Hymnology of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) as well as its music collections. They consist of religious folk singing that are relevant to the written sources as well as those that exist exclusively in oral tradition and multigenerational transmission. Research on the repertoire was started in 1970 and so far there have been over 25.000 religious folk songs (among others Advent songs, Christmas carols and pastoral Christmas songs, Lent songs, Easter songs, Marian songs, songs to the Heart of Jesus, Eucharist songs, songs to the Saints, funeral songs and narrative songs) collected. Folk songs from the “living tradition” fascinate with variety and authenticity of their transmission—hence for years they have been an invaluable source of multifaceted and interdisciplinary research for many generations of ethnomusicologists, hymnologists, folklorists and ethnolinguists. Analysis of this repertoire shows processes in the development of Polish religious folk songs as well as confirms its exceptional qualities and uniqueness.