Department
of Ethnomusicology Sponsors "Year of Archiving"
To celebrate
the 40th anniversary of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and to
acknowledge the importance of archives in our lives, the Department of Ethnomusicology
has declared the 2001-02 academic year the "Year of Archiving."
As reported in previous issues of The EAR, the Fall Quarter featured a 40th
Anniversary Symposium with two days of speakers and a gala concert called
"A Celebration of World Music." During the Winter Quarter, Anthony
Seeger and Louise Spear team taught a new course for the Department of Ethnomusicology
titled "Audiovisual Archiving in the 21st Century" (Ethnomusicology
197/290). Attending were graduate and upper-level undergraduate students from
the Departments of Ethnomusicology and Information Studies, the American Indian
Studies Center, and the Latin American Studies Center. Two faculty members
from the Department of Ethnomusicology also joined the class. As described
in the course syllabus New Materials for the Don Ellis Collection
Audiovisual archives
played a key role in the establishment of Ethnomusicology, in the formation
of theory and method in the field, and its development over the decades.
The recordings deposited in these archives can also play important roles
in community self-determination, the preservation of cultural heritage,
and both the revival of older traditions and the creation of new ones.
Individuals and communities around the world are making new recordings
with little thought about how they can be organized, preserved, and used
in the future. This course provides the documents and information to turn
disorganized collections into activist archives–places filled with
the joy of discovery and creation.
The course dealt with
central issues of ethics, copyright, contracts, fieldwork, preservation, and
access, as well as with nuts and bolts issues of technology, space, budgets,
and staffing. In addition to readings and classroom discussion, the class
took two field trips–one to the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF)
on the northwest side of the UCLA campus and one to the UCLA Film and Television
Archive in Hollywood.
SRLF is
a high-density shelving facility for little used and rare library materials
of all kinds, including film and sound recordings. The 228,000 square-foot
building includes a reading room, space for processing, and a stack core with
a capacity of 7 million volumes. The stack core is maintained at a constant
temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of 50% in order
to create the best possible environment for preserving library materials.
In addition to the chilly temperature, the class was impressed by the earthquake-proof
construction.
The Film
and Television Archive holds one of the largest and most renowned collections
of media materials in the U.S. Its vaults contain approximately 200,000 motion
picture and television titles and the entire Hearst Metrotone Newsreel collection.
The class learned much about the ongoing conservation efforts of the Archive
and was especially intrigued by the video presentation of exploding nitrate
film, followed by a visit to the nitrate film storage vaults.
Lectures
A special
part of the class were five visiting faculty and archivists, who gave "Year
of Archiving" lectures to the class and the general public. Here is just
a brief description of their lectures. For those who are interested, videotaped
copies of the lectures will be available in the Ethnomusicology Archive.
Ankica
Petrovic — "The Significance of Archives in Eastern Europe, with
Emphasis on Former Yugoslavia: A Personal Perspective"
Ankica
Petrovic grew up in the former Yugoslavia and became interested in the folk
music of her country. Unfortunately, folk music was not considered worthy
of scholarly pursuit at her university. Leaving her valuable collection of
field tapes at the radio station, she left to pursue a doctorate in ethnomusicology
with John Blacking at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Upon returning
to Yugoslavia, she found that the radio station had re-used the tape to record
classical music. Heartbroken, but undaunted, Petrovic continued her work with
folk music–only to have many additional recordings lost by war, bombs,
and fire. In some case the tape boxes, filled with valuable documentation
written on them, were used to build fires for heat.
The audience
felt hopeless…until Petrovic told of recently going to a movie shown
at a theater in a nearby shopping mall. The movie, No Man’s Land, was
filmed in Bosnia and had just won the L.A. Film Critics Award for Best Foreign
Film. In the opening of the film, Petrovic heard a lullaby she recorded and
taught to her student! How wonderful to find the song preserved in a film
shown in Los Angeles! Since then, No Man’s Land has won the Academy Award
for Best Foreign Film.
Valmont
Layne — "Establishing the Archives of the District Six Museum, Capetown,
South Africa"
Everyone
was happy to welcome Valmont Layne, who lives and works in South Africa. His
story of the District Six Museum touched everyone. District Six, located in
Cape Town, was one of the most visible and contested of the forced removals
in the Apartheid era in South Africa. Communities all over South Africa were
forcibly removed and each has a story to tell. The District Six Museum is
committed to telling the stories of forced removals throughout South Africa.
The need for an archives in the Museum became apparent as individuals came
forward with their stories and their songs, all part of a rich cultural past.
John Bishop — "What to Save and What Not to Save"
John
Bishop teaches video production at the Department of World Arts and Cultures
and the Center for Digital Arts at the University of California Los Angeles.
He has produced ethnographic and cultural documentaries on grants and under
contract to a wide range of clients. As a free-lance cameraman, he has filmed
in Africa, the Himalayas, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, and the United
States. The subject matter has ranged over computer technology, rock video,
monkey play, contemporary jazz, Tibetan ritual, modern drama, and traditional
American craft and performance.
But in
his presentation, John Bishop mused about the impossibility of preserving
everything–which requires untold space, time, and money. It is also difficult
for others to make use of your valuable materials if they are not properly
organized and identified. It might be wisest to select a part of your work
to document and preserve for future generations.
Gordon
Theil and Stephen Davison — "Digitizing Archival Collections of
American Popular Music"
Gordon
Theil, Head of the UCLA Music and Arts Libraries, and Stephen Davison, Music
Librarian for Special Collections, spoke about some exciting new projects
in the UCLA Library. For the California Digital Library, available on the
web, they have begun scanning their extensive collection of sheet music. In
conjunction with the Chicano Studies Research Center and with funding from
Los Tigres del Norte Foundation, they are working with the Arhoolie Record
Company to digitize Arhoolie’s vast collection of 78-rpm records of Mexican
and Mexican-American music. Available on the UCLA web site will be the music
via streaming audio, scans of the record labels and other documentation, and
indexes by title, performer, record company, and genre.
Robert
Winter — "Looking Back, Peering Ahead: Archives and Music Discourse
in a Digital Age"
A professor
in the UCLA Department of Music, Robert Winter is a Beethoven scholar, but
he has also become an articulate international spokesperson for the role of
content and the arts in a digital world. In 1989 he was invited by The Voyager
Company to create the first commercial CD-ROM title–an exploration of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Its publication aroused considerable interest
and praise in the national press. Between 1990 and 1996 the Beethoven CD-ROM
was augmented by four additional titles–Stravinsky’s The Rite of
Spring, Mozart’s "Dissonant" Quartet, Dvorak’s New World
Symphony, and the Calliope title Robert Winter’s Crazy for Ragtime.
Robert
Winter talked about the rapidly changing world of technology, the changing
meaning of the word archive, and people’s changing expectations of technology
and archives. His earliest CD-ROM can no longer be played on classroom computers.
Other Contributors
Among the other people who made major contributions to the Archiving class
was Nick Bergh, who brought historical recordings and recording machines for
the class to see and hear–including a cylinder recorder, disc recorder,
and wire recorder. One of the class members, a professional singer, sang into
the cylinder horn while Nick recorded her song on a wax cylinder. Nick also
recorded Professor Seeger singing a Suya Indian song. The class also watched
a 78-rpm disc being cut. Maureen Russell, sound recordings cataloger for the
Ethnomusicology Archive, talked about the theoretical and practical aspects
of cataloging field and commercial recordings.
And Dr.
Panicos Giorgoudes, who was visiting from Cyprus, discussed and demonstrated
his Ethnomusicology Online Archives of Cyprus. The web site, at http://www.ucy.ac.cy/research/ethno,
provides access to music from field recordings from Cyprus and is indexed
by geographical regions, genres, and many other categories.
Final
Projects
As a final
project, students in the class designed their own archives. Oral presentations
were given, and everyone enjoyed hearing about the variety of archives their
colleagues planned. Here is an intriguing sample of the archives and presentations
—
* Revising
the Tradition, Preserving the Past: The Establishment of an Audiovisual Archive
of Lebanese Traditional Music
* Native
American Music Archive
* CEASE
(The Center for Electronic and Electro-Acoustic Study and Experimentation):
An Electronic Music Center for the Pacific Northwest
* Archivo
del Carnaval Dominicano
* The D.I.Y.
(Do It Yourself) Archives: A Blueprint for an On-line Archives
* Russian
American Music Association: Archive and Cultural Center
* What
is the Los Angeles AudioVisual Archive (LAAVA)?
* The Marci
K Music Archive (which features and follows the music and videos of the singer,
songwriter, and performer, Marci K)
* Top Star
Archive of Korean Popular Music
* An Archive
of Archives: A Proposal for a Network of American Archives with Field Collections
Navigating the System (A 3-dimensional model of an Iranian musical recording
searching for a home)
* An Archive
of Music for Ice Skaters
Who knows?We
may see some of these archives in existence one day! Next Quarter The Year
of Archiving continues during the Spring Quarter with another series of lectures.
Watch for a description of those lectures in the next issue of The EAR.
