The EAR is an informal discussion of ethnomusicology archiving at UCLA and in the world. The EAR is issued four times a year, in the fall, winter, spring, and summer quarters. Contributions from readers are welcome and should be sent to the editor, Louise Spear, UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, 1630 Schoenberg Music Building, Box 951657, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1657; telephone 310-825-1695; fax 310-206-4738; email LSpear@arts.ucla.edu.
Vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 2001)
Table of Contents
UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive Turns Forty!
UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive Turns Forty!
-- 1961-2001 --
The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive will celebrate its 40th anniversary during the 2001-02 academic year. We invite everyone—founders and alumni, current students and faculty, archivists and ethnomusicologists from around the world—to celebrate with us!
Fall Quarter Symposium
The year will begin with a 40th Anniversary Symposium in Schoenberg Music Building on November 9 and 10, 2001. Professor Mantle Hood, founder and director of the UCLA Institute of Ethnomusicology; and Ann Briegleb Schuursma, founder and first archivist of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, will be among the featured speakers. International participants include Lligany Lomeli from Centro Nactional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical (CENIDEM) in Mexico City; Panicos Giorgoudes from the Ethnomusicology Online Archives of Cyprus; Kwabena Nketia from the International Centre for African Music and Dance at the University of Ghana; Don Niles from the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies; and Dietrich Schüller from the Phonogramm-Archiv in Vienna, Austria.
Panel topics include the History of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, University and Public Sector Archives, History and Issues in Archiving, Archiving Special Collections, and Archiving and Technology. For a complete list of speakers and paper titles, see the program printed on page 4. There will also be a patio reception and Archive open house on Friday evening and a concert on Saturday night. The concert, "A Celebration of World Music at UCLA," will feature music by the UCLA World Jazz Ensemble, former members of the Don Ellis Jazz Band, the UCLA Javanese Gamelan, and the UCLA Korean Samulnori Ensemble.
Winter Quarter Course
During the Winter Quarter, a seminar titled "Audiovisual Archiving in the 21st Century" will be taught by Anthony Seeger and Louise Spear, who, in a previous decade, were colleagues at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music! Several guest archivists will be on the syllabus. Graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students are welcome to enroll in the seminar.
Mantle Hood Plans for the Archive
Fieldwork, recordings, and archives have been at the center of the study of ethnomusicology from the very beginning. Likewise, the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive has been at the center of UCLA Ethnomusicology. When Mantle Hood submitted his "Proposal to Establish an Institute of Ethnomusicology (Comparative Musicology) at the University of California at Los Angeles" in February 1960, he included the following statement:
The services of a specially-trained bibliographer are required in connection with the acquisition of regular library materials and to supervise the classification and cataloguing of a large collection of non-Western musical instruments, the editing and dubbing of master tape recordings from the field and handling other special materials.
The following year, on February 28, 1961, Hood wrote to UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy requesting funds for his new Institute, and he reiterated
The services of a half-time bibliographer is one of the most pressing needs of the program in ethnomusicology. Peculiar to the field is a great diversity of materials which requires a highly trained and specialized bibliographer. The archive materials presently on hand, including a large quantity of field tape recording masters, make this a critical request. One-half of the necessary funds are being requested through the Department of Music and the other half through the Institute of Ethnomusicology.
Two months later, on April 19, 1961, Franklin Murphy replied to Mantle Hood, allocating funds to the Institute of Ethnomusicology for 1961-62, including $3,000.00 for a bibliographer (one-half time). Murphy went on to say, "No arrangements should be made regarding the employment of the bibliographer without the approval by the University Librarian of both the person involved and his relationship with the library."
Ann Briegleb and the Early Archive
While planning for the Institute of Ethnomusicology was underway, Ann Briegleb (now Ann Schuursma) was studying ethnomusicology and library science. She transferred to UCLA in 1954, the same year that Mantle Hood came to UCLA as a beginning instructor, and she was very impressed by something he called "ethnomusicology." Briegleb began playing in the Javanese gamelan study group and was Hood’s teaching assistant for a Western music history course in the fall of 1956.
In 1957-58, Briegleb attended library school at the University of Southern California. After receiving her master’s degree, she came back to UCLA and got a job as a librarian in the newly started College Library in Powell Hall. Mantle Hood’s wife, Shirley Hood (now Shirley Hawkins) was the UCLA theater arts librarian. One day she called Briegleb on the telephone and said, "You know, my husband is starting an institute of ethnomusicology, and he wonders if you’d be interested in being the librarian." Briegleb and Mantle Hood talked…and on October 1, 1961, Briegleb started work as the ethnomusicology librarian. The Ethnomusicology Archive was on its way.
The new Archive was located in the basement of Schoenberg Hall, in room B145. "The problem at the beginning," as Briegleb describes it, "was that the woman who played the carillon at noontime…had her console in the same room." Eventually the console was moved to a practice room.
The Archive started with four cabinets, one for commercial recordings and three for field tapes deposited by Mantle Hood (Indonesia), Robert Brown (India), and Robert Garfias (Japan).
Robert Brown and the Early Archive
Robert Brown’s memories of UCLA go back to 1953—when he was working at a temporary job in the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter and the Department of Music offered him a teaching assistantship. He recalls taking a couple of breaks to begin a teaching career, and returning for about three months of night-and-day dissertation writing so he could accept a post-doctoral grant to return to India. His dissertation, "The Mrdanga: A Study of Drumming in South India," was completed in 1965. Mantle Hood was the chair.
In a recent email to Archive Director Jacqueline DjeDje, Brown writes,
I gave the Archive copies of all my recordings from the two years (1957-59) that I spent as a Fulbright and Ford Foundation research fellow in South India. In the early years of the Archive, there was not the control that developed later on, and I was somewhat aghast when I discovered that people were copying my tapes. Indian musicians, for very legitimate reasons, are nervous about people recording their performances, and I had promised them that, other than the archive copies, I would not make copies for, or lend them to others. I think this incident may have alerted Ann and Mantle about the need to keep tight control over the use of the material. Maybe the chickens came home to roost when I [wanted to use and] had an access problem with the [Colin] McPhee material!
Robert Garfias and the Early Archive
Robert Garfias was at UCLA from 1955-58 and after his fieldwork in 1960. He remembers the following:
During the first years I was a research assistant attached to the archives, but there were virtually no archives as I recall, that is very few recordings. Most of the collection consisted of records in the Music Library. It was when mantle Hood returned from Java that the collection really increased and got started. Subsequent to that each of us returning from the field deposited recordings in the Archive.
The collection was at first housed in a converted practice room in the sub-basement…this is now 1960. That room was right across from the ethnomusicology office. By now the collection had grown considerably. There was also Mantle’s collection from Ghana. I was than again a research assistant in the Archive, along with, as I recall, Don Borcherdt and Michael Moore. I made a great number of recordings for the Archive—dubs of the original material, many dubs of 78-rpm records, notably of the McPhee collection. I continued to do this until I was hired at UCLA to teach the Music Cultures class in the spring of 1962. I left in the fall of 1962 to set up my own program at the University of Washington.
Ann Briegleb Organizes the Archive
In 1962, in order to get ideas about organizing the collection, Briegleb visited the Indiana University Archives of Folk and Primitive Music (now Archives of Traditional Music) in Bloomington, Indiana, and the Archive of Folksong (now Archive of Folk Culture) at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In 1966 she visited many archives in Europe. Her findings were reported in "Ethnomusicological Collections in Western Europe—A Selective Study of Seventeen Archives" in Selected Reports, Vol. 1, no. 2 (1968). Robert Brown remembers meeting Briegleb in Amsterdam, when she was touring the European archives.
Now armed with ideas about how to organize the field tape collections in the UCLA Archive, Briegleb developed a system, which she described in 1967:
A system of "archiving" original field recordings was begun in February 1967 whereby field tapes were dubbed onto Archive tape. Composite numbers consisting of the last two digits of the current year, the number of the collection, and the accession number of each item (e.g., 68.2-1 meant the year 1968, the second collection to be archived that year, and number 1 in that collection) were assigned to each selection and announced onto the tape before that selection was dubbed. Additionally, pertinent information about each selection was noted onto a stenciled sheet, 8" x 10" in size, with appropriate blanks for title, genre or type, etc. The first collection to be "archived" was that of Dr. David Morton, collected by him in Thailand in 1959 and 1960, consisting of over 250 individual items.
Developing Print Collections
Also in the 1960s Briegleb established the Kunst Collection, the Kunst Addition Collection, and the Oriental Collection (now called East Asian Collection) as part of the Ethnomusicology Archive. The publication of the third edition in 1958 of Jaap Kunst’s Ethnomusicology brought together in one work many important and basic informational works concerning the ethnography and music of the world’s peoples. To assist in research at UCLA, copies of many of the articles in Kunst’s work were photocopied, bound, and cataloged. Articles published after 1958 became part of the Kunst Addition (KA) Collection.
The East Asian Collection
The East Asian Collection consists of approximately 800 titles of written sources (originals or photocopies of manuscripts, musical notation, books, and articles) in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai. Notable among the Japanese materials are a number of custom-bound books of prints made from microfilms of gagaku manuscripts obtained in Japan by Robert Garfias. These were bound in traditional brocaded covers by craftsmen in the Japanese Imperial Household. In 1967 Tsun-Yuen Lui purchased a number of rare, string-bound volumes in Hong Kong to add to the Chinese materials. Korean acquisitions include photocopies of Thai court music manuscripts obtained by David Morton.
The Colin McPhee Collection
In 1973 the Colin McPhee Collection was donated to the UCLA Music Library and the Ethnomusicology Archive by Shirley Hawkins, executor of the McPhee estate. In 1931 McPhee, already recognized composer, first heard recordings of gamelan music from Bali. Fascinated by the music, he took an exploratory trip to Indonesia and stayed until 1939. He wrote Music in Bali, House in Bali, and other books and articles, continued composing, and took hundreds of beautiful black & white photographs.
Robert Brown wrote of going through the Colin McPhee Collection and trying to make his own sketch of the plans for the house in Bali.
I had a fantasy at the time of trying to reproduce it as a kind of tribute to Colin, a great influence for me. The collection was closely guarded and the result of my sketches of the plans, which were obviously the work of a Balinese artist, didn’t provide the needed impetus to actually build the replica. However, I have been busily engaged in making about 19 buildings of my own in Bali, as a center for workshop and cultural tour groups.
Never Enough Space
In 1969 Briegleb was happy to report that room B417, directly across the hall from the Archive, was given to her to use as an office, which "relieved somewhat the congested condition of the Archive. With the introduction of a reading table and two chairs, it is now possible for Archive users to remain in the room while consulting Archive materials." But by 1972, Briegleb lamented, "Storage space for recordings has seeped into the Archivist’s office to the extent that one can barely squeeze into it. Working conditions make it necessary to juggle working hours for Archive assistants so as to leave some space for patrons using the Archive." By 1974, the Archive had expanded to rooms B144, 414, 417, and 408.
Jacqueline DjeDje Remembers Those Crowded Years
DjeDje recalled the crowded space in the Archive, but remembers it fondly –
Although I was enrolled as a student at UCLA from 1970 to 1978, I was in residence only from 1970-72 and 1974-75. I remember that almost everyone had some contact with the Archive on Wednesday afternoons when we all attended the main seminar (Music 280). Whenever there was a break in the seminar, Mantle Hood and Charles Seeger (during my first year) would lead all of the students in a procession from B454 (room where the seminar was held) to the Archive. Although the Archive was in a small, cramped room in the basement of Schoenberg, I don’t think many of us seemed to mind. At that moment, we were more interested in mingling and discussing the latest trends in the field. For me, the Archive was like a magnet that held everyone together intellectually and socially because this was the place where students, faculty, researchers, and visitors went to "be in the know."
Water Disaster in the Basement
On January 25, 1979, disaster struck. About 1:00 a.m., a six-inch water main burst behind one of the faculty offices in the basement. The room, containing desks, file cabinets, and a piano, quickly filled with water to about three feet deep. Maintenance men discover the water leaking through the door cracks in the morning, but before they could find the exact break in the pipe and shut off the flow, the water burst through the back wall of the office and into the basement hallways. Soon it reached the Ethnomusicology Archive rooms. The residue of silt and mud showed that the water reached a height of five inches—high enough to soak nearly 1,000 tapes, photographs, microfilms, 78-rpm and LP recordings, office files, and equipment. The building was immediately closed, while firemen pumped water out of the basement and cleaning crews shoveled mud into wheelbarrows.
The Ethnomusicology Archive staff, led by Don Niles, who was serving as Acting Archivist while Briegleb was doing fieldwork in Romania, and the Music Library staff worked hard to clean and dry the water-soaked materials. An experimental application of a dry mount press to iron wet record jackets flat worked fairly well to save irreplaceable Japanese and Middle Eastern record jackets.
New Space at Last
In 1982 the Archive staff began moving to new space on the first floor of a new addition to Schoenberg Hall. On Monday, February 7, 1983, the UCLA Daily Bruin reported on the dedication: "To the beat of the marching band and with a crowd of hundreds looking on, the doors of a new addition to Schoenberg Hall were opened officially Friday after eight years of planning and construction." Chancellor Charles Young presented the keys to the building to Department of Music Chair Abraham Schwadron. "A celebration with refreshments, dancing and much music followed the ceremonies, while guests toured the building."
Nora Yeh, who worked in the Archive from 1978 to 1986, remembers the move from the basement to new space on the ground floor very clearly. "I was involved in the placement and arrangement of the furniture." Nora also lobbied to use the patio door, instead of the hallway door, as the front entrance to the Archive. The current staff can’t imagine the entrance any other way!
The Archive is still in this space, 1630 Schoenberg Music Building, with its suite of seven rooms and floor-to-ceiling windows facing an outdoor patio. Considered spacious in the 1980s, the Archive is once again overcrowded.
An Earthquake
When the Northridge earthquake struck the Los Angeles area in 1994, the Archive looked a mess but was spared any damage. Every book from every bookshelf was on the floor, resulting in piles of books four-feet high. All the desk drawers and file cabinet drawers were wide open. The plastic covers over the flourescent lights were hanging from the ceiling and would sway with each aftershock. But the recordings stayed in their locked cabinets, and not one broken record was found. A brand new 17" computer monitor was face down on the floor--but it was picked up and reconnected, and it worked for many additional years. Fortunately, the record cabinets and bookshelves were bolted to the walls and floors, which probably saved them from tipping over. After the earthquake, almost everything in the Archive was bolted down.
The Computer Years
In 1984 the Archive received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog field collections and commercial recordings on UCLA’s library database called ORION. Mark Forry was hired to do the cataloging under the supervision of Joan Flintoff LoPear and George Gibbs in the UCLA Libraries Department of Cataloging. After Forry left, Sandra Heft, and then Christina Porter assisted with the cataloging. In 1989 a public terminal and modem were installed in the Archive, giving users direct access to the online catalog. At first many students and faculty preferred the old card catalog, but soon the computer won them over.
The Digital Years
In 1998 the Archive received a second grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this time to begin digitizing field recordings from the 1950s and 1960s. A CD-R Lab was set up in the Archive, and Michael Robinson was hired to copy from analog open-reel tape to digital compact disc. Though the grant project is now over, both preservation copies and listening copies continue to be made on compact disc.
Staff Changes
Many UCLA students and staff have contributed to the growth and development of the Ethnomusicology Archives during the past 40 years. Mary Seavoy served as Acting Archivist while Briegleb was in Romania in 1968-69, and Etsu Garfias managed the Archive while Briegleb was in Romania in 1971-72. Cynthia Tse Kimberlin served as Assistant Archivist from 1974-77. Don Niles was Assistant Archivist in 1977-78 and Acting Archivist in 1978-79. Nora Yeh was Assistant Archivist from 1979-86 and Acting Achivist in 1985.
In December 1984, Ann Briegleb Schuursma retired from the Ethnomusicology Archive after 23 years of leadership and service and moved to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, with her husband, Rolf Schuursma, who is a former sound archivist at the Historical Institute of Utrecht University and founder and now honorary member of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives. Before his retirement he was University Librarian at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
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