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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside This Issue George Handy’s Bloos by Benjamin Bierman Bukharian Jewish Music in Queens by Evan Rapport American Hymn Tune Index by Gayle Sherwood Magee Composing Queer, review by Howard Pollack Nine Hours with Jelly Roll Morton, review by Jeff Taylor Alvin Lucier, review by David Grubbs |
New Folk Music Resources
Unknown Fiddler from Southern US Field Trip, 1959 Photo by Alan Lomax, courtesy of the Alan Lomax
Collection ISAM Newsletter readers
interested in American folk and world musics will be pleased to learn about
two new resources in Washington, DC: the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library
of Congress and Smithsonian Global Sound.
We invited the directors of the American Folklife Center and
Smithsonian Recordings to comment on the projects. The American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library
of Congress, home to the magnificent field recordings collected by John and
Alan Lomax during their tenure at the Library (1932-1942), acquired the
remainder of Alan Lomax’s collection (1942-1996) in March of 2004. The complete Alan Lomax Collection
is unique in that it comprises more than six decades of traditional music
documentation by one person who was blessed with an infallible ear for
excellence. Alan Lomax began his
career at the Library of Congress at the age of eighteen, assisting his
father, John Lomax, at what was then known as the Archive of American Folk
Song. The father and son team made
their first fieldtrip for the Library in the summer of 1933, driving their
Ford station wagon that had been modified to carry a 300 pound
“portable” disc recorder that could run off the car battery in
rural areas. The Lomaxes would
immortalize the songs and music of Texans that summer—spirituals,
hymns, work songs, ballads, field hollers and blues laments. This was an auspicious start for the
legendary work of Alan Lomax who, while working
for the Library, would go on to record such musical legends as Huddie
“Leadbelly” Ledbetter, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton,
and McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield. In 1942 Alan left the Library of Congress and continued to
collect and record the music of America
and beyond, including extensive documentation of regional British, Scottish,
Irish, Spanish, and Italian folk styles during the 1950s, and an array
of Caribbean traditions during the 1960s. The Lomax collection
contains a vast sampling of music, dance and narrative. Included are over 5,000
hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of movie film, 3,000 videotapes,
2,000 scholarly books and journals, 5,000 photographs, and uncounted letters,
manuscripts and ephemera. Archivist
and collection curator Todd Harvey is working to make the collection
accessible to researchers this year.
In addition, Lomax’s non-profit organization, the Association
for Cultural Equity in New York City, is continuing to digitize Lomax’s worldwide collection of
recordings and films used for his cantometrics (folk song style) and
choreometrics (folk dance style) projects.
These materials, gathered by ethnomusicologists from across the globe,
will be added to the AFC’s archive in the coming months. Scholars who visit the Center to work with
the collection also benefit from research assistance from Harvey and the AFC
reference staff. To find out more
about the Lomax and other AFC collections, visit www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/ —Peggy A. Bulger American Folklife Center * * * Smithsonian Global Sound, a digital download
service that the New York Times has dubbed “the ethnographic
alternative to iTunes,” was launched in June 2005. In addition to 35,000 tracks of world
music, the project offers prodigious liner notes, feature articles,
multimedia shorts, and powerful search tools. The nonprofit, self-sustaining
endeavor had been in the making for five years, with the support of the
Rockefeller Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, and several university and
archival partners. The aims of the
Smithsonian Global Sound website are several: to provide a powerful
educational tool about and through music from around the world; to partner
with ethnographic archives in making their music more widely accessible; and
to encourage local musicians around the planet through international
recognition and the payment of royalties.
Its features include over six simultaneous “radio
streams,” spotlights on artists with short videos, brief articles on
special topics such as African Music in the United States, and cultural heritage
resources marking Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Native
Heritage Month, and Women’s
History Month. Smithsonian Global
Sound audio may be downloaded as open files in MP3 or FLAC, a high-quality,
lossless audio format. Its search
capabilities include browsing by geography or instrument and searching by
culture group, genre, instrument, and language. Currently, Smithsonian
Global Sound draws from the holdings of its three archival partners: the
Archives and Research Centre in Ethnomusicology (ARCE) in India, the
International Library of African Music (ILAM) in South Africa, and the nine
record labels of the Smithsonian’s Folkways Collections. As ARCE and ILAM mine their collections for
additional content and as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings produces twenty new
releases each year, the holdings continue to grow. In addition to
downloads, most priced at ninety-nine cents each, a library subscription
service, Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, was launched by another
partner, Alexander Street Press (ASP), based in Alexandria, Virginia. ASP specializes in making a range of
academic content available to college and public libraries in the United
States and thirty-eight other countries via internet streaming. All of the features and content of
Smithsonian Global Sound are available to the student and library populations
of participating institutions. Visit
www.smithsonianglobalsound.org, and explore Radio Global Sound, Global Sound
Live, and Artist Profiles for an introduction. Listen to 35,000 thirty-second samples of
audio. Browse the liner notes (via PDF
file) from 3,000 albums. Smithsonian
Global Sound is still in a formative stage, and your feedback would be much
appreciated to help make it the music library of the future, giving teachers,
students, and scholars direct access to original recordings and support
documentation form all corners of the globe. —Daniel Sheehy Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ISAM home Who we
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