Music Archive Research Articles

Ghosts of the Popular: The Hidden Years Music Archive and the Interstices of South African Popular Music History

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 53, Issue 6 p. 1316-1334 Original Article Ghosts of the Popular: The Hidden Years Music Archive and the Interstices of South African Popular Music History Lizabé Lambrechts, Corresponding Author Lizabé Lambrechts lambrechts@sun.ac.za Search for more papers by this authorSchalk van der Merwe, Schalk van der MerweSearch for more papers by this author Lizabé Lambrechts, Corresponding Author Lizabé Lambrechts lambrechts@sun.ac.za Search for more papers by this authorSchalk van der Merwe, Schalk van der MerweSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 January 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12975Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume53, Issue6December 2020Pages 1316-1334 RelatedInformation

Computational phonogram archiving

A general approach to analyzing audio files makes it possible to re-create the sound of ancient instruments, identify cross-cultural musical properties, and more.

MAGIC: Manuscripts of Girolamini in Cloud

We describe a project, fully formalized, to create a “Service Center” for ancient books and manuscripts, in the “Biblioteca dei Girolamini” Library of Girolamini in Naples, Italy. This unique library hosts about 180.000 pieces, 500 of which are medieval manuscripts, 120 incunabulum, 5.000 editions of the 16th century – among others, as well as an ancient Musical Archive. The library is located in the heart of Naples, in a magnificent place where a series of initiative are already taking place, as a collaboration between the University of Naples Federico II and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. All these features make Library of Girolamini a rare case study in the field of ancient books. The project aims at a complete digitization of the books; however, the important part of the project is the creation of full sets of metadata with a complete history of the documents and of the studies about the document itself. The first books to be considered will be a set of 512 manuscripts of the XIII century, e.g. a fully illustrated Divina Commedia or Seneca’s tragedies with miniature paintings. There will be two main streams of work: a conservation and study of ancient books through the digitization in a proper file format namely the FITS Flexible Image Transport System; b grant the access to this information in the Big Data era using such technologies as Internet of Things and Machine Lerning in order to identify the ancient book and categorize it. This project will also allow to many young students to put in practice the studies within the “Scuola di Alta Formazione in Storia e Filologia del manoscritto e del libro antico”, formally started in the year 2018. The access to information will allow, for example, the extraction and classification of figures, and the automatic recognition of the device used pc, tablet, smartphone and its resolution.

What is at Stake in the Politics of Digital Music Archive Access Policies?

What is at Stake in the Politics of Digital Music Archive Access Policies?

SKIPPING DISCOVERY? MUSIC DISCOVERY AND PERSONAL MUSIC COLLECTIONS IN THE STREAMING ERA

In this paper, I use Spotify as a case study to investigate user experiences of music exploration and discovery using streaming services and recommendation algorithms. Following the framing of music discovery as an affective response which allows for the categorization and definition of music, I draw upon qualitative data from Spotify users regarding their ephemeral experiences when exploring music using streaming services. I identify user practices of music archiving and collecting as a strategy to mitigate these transient encounters by slowing down the pace of their music consumption and creating enduring connections between music and their individual histories. In this way, personal music collections were found to support instances of music discovery as they created a listening context and user mindset which was sympathetic the affective definition and categorization of new music content. This investigation of collecting practice also revealed longitudinal perspectives on music discoveries which emerge through sustained listening over time, drawing attention to listener’s social surroundings, friends and online communities as the impetus for choosing to give particular music content time to grow towards being discovered. The paper concludes with implications of the use of algorithmic recommendation systems in the delivery and consumption of music and other cultural forms.

Dreams, songs and letters: Sectarian networks and musical archives in eighteenth-century North India

Early modern poets conventionally began their compositions by praising and invoking the blessings of their higher authorities, be they their gods, gurus or courtly patrons. In the eighteenth century, North Indian society was particularly unstable, and the relationships between these different power brokers proved volatile. This article considers how intellectuals attached to religious households navigated the challenges of the period, particularly invading armies, religious reforms and forced migration. I examine the works of Vrindavandas (c. 1700–87), a Brajbhasha poet and lay devotee of the Radhavallabh Sampraday, and provide contextualised readings of two of his poems, concerned with recent history and the contemporary political climate. Vrindavandas was not a scribe or chronicler in a conventional sense; however, closer examination of his works reveals the porous boundaries between scribes-cum-recorders and other kinds of intellectuals. Here, I consider how Vrindavandas’ literary activity included copying archival sources, recording recent history, documenting dreams and emotions, and folding different senses of temporality into a single work. This article asks how far his poetic works gesture to a distinctively eighteenth-century mode of literary expression and reflexivity, and how performing these poetic archives through reading, singing, and musical accompaniment provided the sect with tools to navigate a turbulent political landscape.

How does music heritage get lost? Examining cultural heritage loss in community and authorised music archives

ABSTRACT While the mission of many community archives is often to exhaustively collect and preserve material of their topic area, it is inevitable that some heritage will not be recovered. Lost heritage impacts both public and academic communities where it results in incomplete histories, missing records and restricted access to precarious intangible and physical resources. Heritage will always get lost – but what processes lead to this? This paper outlines some of the ways in which heritage is lost on its journey through private possession, community archives, and institutionalised collections. Archives of intangible cultural heritage, such as music, face particular challenges in preserving the material past of an intangible heritage. This paper uses a case study to describe instances of potential and actual heritage loss found through a joint project between a community archive and an institutional repository working towards the preservation of local jazz heritage in Queensland, Australia.

El papel de la Biblioteca Nacional de España en la preservación y digitalización del patrimonio sonoro

La misión de la Biblioteca Nacional de España es conservar y difundir el patrimonio documental español en todos los soportes. Probablemente salvaguardar las grabaciones sonoras y la memoria oral sea la que plantea mayor número de problemas a las instituciones patrimoniales, que los custodian, pues no solo deben conservar el documento en sí, sino lo que en ellos se contiene.
 La colección de grabaciones sonoras de la Biblioteca Nacional de España asciende a unos 600.000 documentos, desde los antiguos rollos de pianola, cilindros de cera, cintas magnéticas, discos de vinilo, discos de pizarra, etc., hasta las más modernas grabaciones en soporte digital. La digitalización y preservación de las grabaciones sonoras musicales y Archivo de la palabra es uno de los objetivos prioritarios de la política de gestión de la colección, debido a la fragilidad de los documentos y a la obsolescencia de los aparatos que los reproducen. A ello se une el reto actual de asumir como biblioteca patrimonial la incorporación a sus colecciones de cualquier tipo de documento sonoro físico como virtual, además de la recolección y conservación de las páginas web, respetando el marco legal que les afecta. La colaboración con productores, distribuidores y plataformas digitales de distribución, permitirá que la BNE continúe su papel primordial de recopilar, preservar y difundir los documentos sonoros patrimoniales e integrantes indiscutibles del patrimonio cultural español. De ahí que la biblioteca participe activamente en los cambios propuestos en la nueva ley del Patrimonio Histórico Español, para que este tipo de documentos tengan un reconocimiento y protección más específico y amplio al amparo de la ley.

Fluorescent Flags: Black Power, Publicity, and Counternarratives in Go-Go Street Posters in the 1980s

Abstract This semiotic landscape analysis probes urban patterns of racial placement and displacement through an archive of music publicity posters. The music poster archive is a site to map the so-called “Chocolate City” of Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, explore its calendars, rhythms, textures, communication technology, history and movements of segregated black life. These posters advertising go-go music, the city's indigenous black popular music, asserted a territory of black economic, cultural and political power. They resisted the narrative of a sanitized “White City” designed for white tourists. The city's cultural entrepreneurs challenged false dominant narratives and public policies that marginalized black urban culture as dangerous and deviant. A crack-down on postering in the late 1990s was an early harbinger of gentrification.

DIGITAL MUSIC USE AS ECOLOGICAL THINKING: METADATA AND HISTORICISED LISTENING

In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming. Working from a theoretical foundation amalgamating digital music archives and metadata as environments the article discusses Georgina Born’s notion of musical assemblages alongside the concept of virtuality, and by letting these meet the article argues for a musical assemblage built from sensibilities of becoming rather than layers of mediation. The inner workings of digital music use constitute an ecology in which recorded music history moves and reconnects, and this makes the historicity of recorded music be fluid, thus turning listening into a historicised action. In exemplifying this, the article discusses some of the strategic programming of metadata on the digital music platform Diskoteket, and through an analysis of sampled music, the prospects of recorded music’s historicity are shown as affective capacities.

The becoming of an archive: perspectives on a music archive and the limits of institutionality

ABSTRACT The call on South African music departments to critically engage with their curricula in order to reflect the broader music landscape wherein they function has been ongoing for the past 40 years. While some departments did engage in strategies to transform their curricula, various scholars have pointed out that most of these institutions have to some extent remained fixed within conservative syllabi and ideological practices conceived to serve the previous dispensation. It is within this field of discursive engagement and political actions directed towards change that archives can play an important role in decolonising higher education institutions. While recognising that archives work to a slower historical beat than what is currently (often militantly) demanded in debates on decolonisation in South African universities, this article wishes to argue that this temporal differential is important in terms of long-term institutional and curricular reform. This article will consider these questions with particular reference to the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), an archive-centred music research project in the Music Department at the University of Stellenbosch. This article will posit that DOMUS’s collection practices and projects may serve as examples of active and radical strategies with the potential to affect change within conservative institutional spaces.

Provincializing Spotify: Radio, algorithms and conviviality

Focusing on early experiments with algorithms and music streaming at WFMU, the longest-running US freeform radio station, and the Free Music Archive (FMA), a curated open music website, this article shows how commercial streaming services have been indebted to independent, open music infrastructures but have then erased and denied that history. The article ‘provincializes’ music streaming platforms such as Spotify by focusing not on their commercial aims but instead on the ‘convivial’, collaborative practices and spaces that their software engineers and users inhabited. I analyse an experimental national telephone broadcasting service at WFMU in 1989, an algorithmic WFMU radio stream ‘The Flaming Robot of Love’ during the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the ‘Free Music Archive Radio App’ that recommended tracks on the FMA website from 2011 to 2016. The app worked with an application programming interface (API) from Echo Nest. Echo Nests’ algorithmic recommendation engine also powers most commercial streaming services today. When Spotify purchased Echo Nest in 2014 and took the start-up’s open API offline in 2016, it engaged in ‘primitive accumulation’ of open-access knowledge and resources for commercial purposes. The FMA closed in 2019 and now only exists as a static site. As social institutions, however, WFMU and FMA ‘recomposed’ – adapted to a new medium and a new political context – collaborative engineering practices of the early broadcasting era. The article argues that moments of oppositional ‘conviviality’ in media culture such as the FMA should be analysed as elements of a continuous struggle.

Digitalizacja archiwów folklorystycznych – kryzys tradycji czy nowe życie w sieci? Przykład zbiorów Adolfa Dygacza

Digitisation of Folk Archives: A Crisis of Tradition or the New Life on the Internet? An Example of Adolf Dygacz’s Collection The process of digitising archives, widespread in the previous decade, has not omitted musical resources, and offers their users new functionalities. These measures can improve researchers’ work, as digital material is easy to localise and access. However, a question still remains of the subject of oral history, which acts like audiovisual documents, of its value and durability, the present results and the consequences of the common access to the materials. It is also a question of the effectiveness of multidimensional grassroot initiatives, such as creating common virtual collections of materials. What possibilities have we got for the folklore musical archives currently being discovered? Will their digitisation make them suddenly valuable in the society? In this text, the author attempts to diagnose the problem of digitisation of musical archives as exemplified by the ethnomusicological collection of Adolf Dygacz. The author highlights the importance of local history that is typical for human studies, which has always been part of folklore studies, but has not been considered in the light of memory studies until recently.

What Does Musicology Have to Do With Archiving? Three Experiences of Engagement

Musical practices derived from post-1960s experimental music created heterogeneous musical materials and traces—including scores, preparations and instrument modifications, electronic instruments, custom-made devices, and recordings. The Romantic work concept on which most traditional musical archives are based is unsuitable to preserve this expanded apparatus of objects and concepts, and rethinking the musical archive is becoming urgent. This colloquy collected the experiences of three researchers, engaging with five institutions, three creators, and four countries. Yet the archival issues presented are eerily similar. These experiences involve David Tudor (paper-based archive at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, and the David Tudor Instrument Collection at Wesleyan University, Midtown, CT); Mario Bertoncini (paper-based archive at the archive of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and his object collection at the moment stored at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, Rome); Gayle Young (who still owns all her production).

Helfert’s Theory of a Music Museum (“Musical Archive”)

The article is devoted to one of the first modern conceptions of a music museum within the framework of Czech or Czechoslovak ideas on musical museology. This conception originated with the musicologist Vladimír Helfert. The article follows the development of Helfert’s conception, which was realised primarily in the form of the Musical Archive of the Moravian Museum. The article also identifies the constant features of that conception. Helfert conceived of a music museum (“musical archive”) as a basic institution facilitating work on musical historiography, meaning the compiling, cataloguing, and protecting of musical artefacts (especially two-dimensional artefacts), and their presentation of to the expert community.

Digital Performance and the Musical Archive of Slavery: "Like Running Home"

Digital Performance and the Musical Archive of Slavery: "Like Running Home"

НАУКОВА ПРАЦЯ ІРИНИ ДОВГАЛЮК У ЦАРИНІ ІСТОРІЇ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ЕТНОМУЗИКОЛОГІЇ

The article offers an overview of 30 years of scientific activity of Lviv ethno- musicologist Iryna Dovhaliuk in the field of history of Ukrainian ethnomusicology. The multifaceted creation of the researcher has been revealed in the main prob- lematic and thematic areas, taking into account the time dynamics of the studio deployment. Among the considered directions: a) musical and ethnographic activity of Ukrai- nian folklorist Osyp Rozdolskyi: b) history of publication of Ukrainian folk music; c) folkloristic activity of Filaret Kolessa; d) history of phonography of Ukrainian folk music; e) folk music archiving (phonoarchiving). Peculiarities of the research style of Iryna Dovhaliuk, theoretical and metho- dological and applied tools of her historical searches have been traced. Emphasis is placed on the scrupulousness and diversity of source studies of Iryna Dovhaliuk, the focus on maximum objectivity and provability of scientific conclusions; on meticu- lous attention to the smallest facts on the research problem in order to trace its de- velopment as fully as possible and on this basis to comprehensively understand the general tendencies; on a wide amplitude of historical and theoretical generalizations of the processes of formation and development of Ukrainian ethnomusicology in a broad comparative context with similar processes in the world music folklore studies. Special emphasis is placed on the active scientific and socio-cultural position of the researcher, and in particular on the unique projects of Iryna Dovhaliuk for Ukrainian science to preserve and introduce into scientific circulation the musical and ethnographic heritage of Ukrainian collectors, in particular valuable collections of phonorecords of Ukrainian folk music of the first half of the twentieth century. The review has been prepared mainly on the basis of printed publications of Iryna Dovhaliuk, as well as the analysis of her research and promotion projects and events.

Digitisation of Folklore Archives: A Crisis of Tradition or Its ‘New Life’ on the Internet? The Example of Adolf Dygacz’s Collection

The process of digitising archives, a universal trend in the last decade, also concerns music resources, thus offering new functionalities to their users. Its effects can facilitate researchers’ work since digital material is readily available and easy to locate. The questions that remain open concern the status of oral history contained in those audio-visual documents, its value and durability, the current results and possible consequences of making these materials accessible on a mass scale, as well as the effectiveness of multidimensional grassroots initiatives, such as cooperation on building virtual collections of materials. What possibilities open up for the musical folklore archives that are currently being discovered? Can digitisation suddenly make them more valuable in the eyes of the society? In this paper, I attempt to diagnose the problem of musical archive digitisation on the example of the ethnomusicological collection of Adolf Dygacz. I stress the importance of local history, which is a common subject in the humanities and has always been part of folklore studies but was not considered in the light of memory studies until very recently.

Te Deum-Vertonungen K 271 und L 35 by Johann Joseph Fux

Reviewed by: Te Deum-Vertonungen K 271 und L 35 by Johann Joseph Fux Janet K. Page Johann Joseph Fux. Te Deum-Vertonungen K 271 und L 35. Vorgelegt von Ramona Hocker und Robert Klugseder. (Johann Joseph Fux Werke, Serie A: Kirchenmusik, Reihe IV: Te Deum, Motette, Litanei und weitere Kirchenmusik, Band 1) Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2017 [Pref. in Ger., Eng., p. vi–vii; introd. in Ger., Eng., p. xi–xxxviii; images, xxxix–xlix; score, p. 1–101; crit. report in Ger., Eng., p. 103–45; abbreviations in Ger., Eng., p. 146–47. ISBN-13 978-3-99012-435-2; ISMN 979-0-50270-003-4. €189,90.] Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741), arguably the most important and certainly the most influential Austrian composer of the late baroque, served the imperial court in Vienna for over thirty years and was Kapellmeister there for well over a decade, from 1715 into the early 1730s. He was a notable teacher, and his Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) was an essential text for composers in his time and after. His more than six hundred works range from keyboard pieces and chamber music to operas and celebratory pieces supporting the magnificence of court ceremony. Yet only a small portion of this important and industrious composer's surviving music has been published. The Fux edition begun in 1959 (Johann Joseph Fux: Sämtliche Werke [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959–2008]) includes a selection of music from the composer's principal genres in its some thirty volumes, and several other volumes of his music have also appeared, including a revised edition of the keyboard music: Johann Joseph Fux, Werke für Tasteninstrumente, edited by Guido Erdmann and Friedrich Wilhelm Riedel, (Johann Joseph Fux: Sämtliche Werke. Serie VI, [End Page 495] Instrumentalmusik, Bd. 1 [Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 2012].) The new critical edition of the composer's works, begun in 2015, is described by the publishers as "currently one of the most extensive undertakings in the realm of Baroque music." The aim of the project is to allow Fux's music to "be comprehensively investigated, placed in its eighteenth-century musical context, and brought back to life through musical performance." (My translations; http://www.hollitzer.at/wissenschaft/programm/uebersicht/programm/johann-joseph-fux-werke.html [accessed 12 September 2019].) The edition is intended to be both scholarly and practical. Three volumes have now appeared, of which this is the second. As the publisher's homepage tells us, in the process of preparing the volumes of the edition, many new sources have been uncovered that are important both for the musical texts and for the reception history of Fux's works. Thus appearing in tandem with the edition is a new catalog: Thomas Hochradner, Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Johann Joseph Fux: Völlig überarbeitete Neufassung des Verzeichnisses von Ludwig Ritter von Köchel (1872) (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2016–). The volume under review contains two previously unpublished Te Deum settings. The first is K 271 (the number in Köchel's catalog; FuxWV IV.15.4 in the new catalog); its principal source, a set of parts from the collection of the Imperial court chapel, held in the Department of Music of the Austrian National Library, has the date 1704 on the cover. K 271, the earliest dated of Fux's six Te Deum settings and also his most widely disseminated, employs soli and ripieni vocal parts, strings and continuo, trombones and cornetti, and a full ensemble of trumpets and timpani (it has been recorded: Vienna 1700: Baroque Music from Austria, Armonico Tributo, cond. Lorenz Duftschmid, CPO 999919-2 [2002]). The second, L 35 (the number in Andreas Liess, Johann Joseph Fux: Ein steirischer Meister des Barock [Vienna: Ludwig Doblinger, 1948], 69; FuxWV IV.15.6 in the new catalog) is preserved in a unique source, a set of parts in the music archive of the Rytířský řád křižovníků (Knights of the Cross with the Red Star) in Prague. It is a magnificent double chorus setting with trumpets and timpani and oboes. The two works illustrate some of the creative possibilities in setting this standard text, which was used in situations of splendid ritual...

The Relation of Music Archiving and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Serbia

Speaking from an ethnomusicological standpoint, this paper elaborates on the use of recorded sound and audio-visual material for the purpose of documenting particular musical elements in Serbia, according to the concept of UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. There is a difference between contemporary field recordings for archival purposes, according to the ICH concept, and the employment of already recorded historical legacy. Through the example of music elements from Serbian national register of ICH, this paper will raise the questions of ethnomusicological politics of field recording and digitization of archived historical recordings, as well as analyze the politics of heritage management. Based on ethnomusicological and archival experience, the aim of this paper is to offer a model of application of sound archive for the future, which can effectively contribute to the concept of intangible cultural heritage in Serbia.