12 April 2013
Interviews with Ethnomusicologists now online!
You can now hear the recorded interviews of leading ethnomusicologists on the British Library “Sounds” website. These interviews were made by Dr Carolyn Landau from 2010 to 2012.
The interviews offer an insight into the researchers’ musical upbringing and education and what drew them to the field of ethnomusicology in the first place. The interviews also discuss the researchers’ perceptions of ethnomusicology as they began their careers and how the subject is viewed now.
Here’s a short clip of one of the interviews, from John Baily, originally a psychologist who studied under the late John Blacking at Queen's University Belfast.
In this clip, Baily talks about the influence of Blacking on his research into the music of Afghanistan. Baily goes on to discuss whether, for example, ethnomusicologists need to have “big ears” – in other words, whether they need the transcribing skills of the composer Béla Bartók (pictured). If you're interested in seeing handwritten examples of Bartók’s transcriptions, some of them can be found in the Milman Parry Collection, Harvard University.
As well as hearing the interviews, you can also hear the recordings that some of these ethnomusicologists deposited with the British Library. For example, Peter Cooke made recordings of Ugandan music and Donald Tayler & Brian Moser made recordings in Columbia.Tweets by @BL_WorldTrad
15 February 2013
Kalahari San [Bushmen] music online
Over 1000 recordings of music recorded by John Brearley in Botswana, primarily among San or Bushmen people in the Kalahari, have been made available on the British Library Sounds website.
Recording of Oba playing the zhoma and singing.
John Brearley’s collection began with his first trip to Botswana in July 1982 to investigate and record traditional music, and to observe the extent to which the influence of radio and recorded music had interrupted the use of traditional instruments. In particular he wanted to learn about the music of the Basarwa (San / Bushmen) and so the collection includes recordings from a range of Bushmen groups including the !Kung, Nharo and Makoko, and features performances of healing dances, games, and instrumental tunes on a range of indigenous instruments. John returned to the Kalahari many times from 1982 to 2007.
Recording of women playing tandiri, 1989
During his travels in northern Botswana John came into contact with the anthropologist Hans-Joachim Heinz. Heinz had also made recordings of music and ceremonies, which he deposited at the British Library. These are also available online. Heinz also made films during his research in Botswana. Copies of these are in the British Library's collections as C312.
John wrote a report of his very first trip in 1982 which was published in Botswana Notes and Records (volume 16). This includes details of instrument tunings and musical transcriptions of brief extracts from the recordings.
28 January 2013
British and Irish traditional music online
150 hours of audio and almost 100 photographs from the Peter Kennedy Collection have been made available this week via the British Library Sounds website.
Sheila Gallagher talks and sings
Peter Kennedy (1922 – 2006) was one of the most important collectors of music traditions from the British Isles. Picking up from work begun by Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams in the first decades of the twentieth century, he started recording in the early 1950s with his aunt, Maud Karpeles (founding member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, along with Sharp and Peter’s father, Douglas Kennedy), work that instigated the presentation of folk music and traditions on the BBC. He was greatly inspired by Alan Lomax, wishing to demonstrate that the folklore tradition was alive and well in Britain and Ireland. In just over 50 years he amassed a collection of audio and video recordings amounting to approximately 1500 hours, plus several hundred photographs and many cabinets of papers including correspondence, notes and song texts. The recordings now made available represent a small portion of the field recordings Peter Kennedy made during the four decades from the late 1940s in which he was most active "in the field”.
Peter Kennedy is in good company on the website, with an additional 20,000 recordings of songs, tunes and interviews mainly from the British Isles recorded by Bob and Jacqueline Patten, Bob Davenport, Carole Pegg, Desmond and Shelagh Herring, John Howson, Keith Summers, Nick and Mally Dow, Reg Hall, Roy Palmer, Steve Gardham and Terry Yarnell.
Notes: Peter Kennedy passed away in 2006 and we acquired the collection in collaboration with Topic Records who have been drawing on the Collection for their new Voice of the People series of publications. When the photographs, papers and original tape recordings came to the BL in 2007, all Peter's commercial LPs and his book collection went to Halsway Manor. In March 2012 we received a grant from the National Folk Music Fund to catalogue the photographs onto the Library’s Integrated Archives and Manuscripts System. This online project was supported by the British Library Friends.
19 December 2012
Cataloguing and Processing the Ethnographic Wax Cylinder Collection
On 30 October 2012 the World and Traditional Music department started the final phase of cataloguing and processing numerous wax cylinder recordings made between 1898 and 1941. This involves taking previously digitised wax cylinder recordings and checking and updating the related catalogue information, and finally uploading this information onto the The British Library catalogue for public access.
These recordings, totalling around 3,000, were made by prominent anthropologists and ethnomusicologists such as Prof. William Baldwin Spencer and Arnold Bake, and in various locations around the world including Australia (Spencer), Nepal, India and Sri Lanka (Bake), Japan, China, Papua New Guinea, Africa and the Americas.
While steadily working my way through the first batch of around 1,000 recordings and related documentation (in the form of previous cataloguer’s comments, original recording notes and archival correspondences), several have stuck in my mind (for various reasons) and, I think, are worth sharing. Therefore, the following sample recordings represent a small selection of the digitised wax cylinder recordings housed at The British Library and are available (or soon to be available) for public access.
1) C6/1183, Baldwin Spencer Cylinder Collection. A recording of exclamations used at sacred ceremonies by men dancing round performers: "The emu will soon lay some eggs"; "The Dalhousie men are making rain today and the Creek will run tomorrow"; "The wild ducks are laying eggs"; "The pelican is too thin to eat"; "Fat snakes make us fat, thin snakes make us thin" etc. Recorded in Stevenson Creek, South Australia in 1901 by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen.
2) C624/963, Madras Museum Cylinder Collection. A recording of the song Bavanutha; Ragam – Mohanam – played by P. Sanjiva Rau (bamboo flute), accompanied on harmonium. Recorded in India in 1909 by Edgar Thurston and Kadambi Rangachari.
3) C675/317, Temple Cylinder Collection. Male vocal solo, with algaitas (West African oboe) and drum. Recorded in Nigeria around 1912 by Mrs Temple.
These early recordings, complete with crackles, pops and period charm, suggest that we can look forward to more interesting and unique musical gems in the next batch of 2,000 or so waiting to be processed.
Update, 2 April 2013: A new post is now available on this collection.
14 November 2012
World and Traditional Music collections on YouTube
The first four archive film clips to be launched on the British Library - Sound and Moving Image - YouTube channel are the results of a collaboration between the British Library World and Traditional Music and Moving Image departments, Dr Richard Widdess at SOAS and the Music Museum of Nepal. The digitisation, identification and editing of some of the film and non-synchronous audio material in the Arnold Adriaan Bake collection, C52, means we are now able to release some edited highlights from the Bake collection online. Furthermore each clip is specifically referenced in the summary of the YouTube clip to allow researchers to link directly back to the source material in the catalogue.
The first film begins with Bake's arrival in Nepal in 1931.
Title: Arnold Adriaan Bake: documenting music in Nepal. Indra Jaatra festival Kathmandu, 1931
Arnold Bake created a unique document of the religious music of Nepal through his films of the annual festivals which was where he found many of the musicians he would record for his research. In his films he also represented a changing culture and built landscape that would in part vanish in the earthquakes of 1933.
Many collections in the World and Traditional Music section hold a range of formats, reflecting the diverse nature of ethnographic field recording. Among these is C52, a unique collection of South Asian material recorded by Dutch ethnomusicologist Dr Arnold Adriaan Bake [1899-1963]. His collection spans not only many decades but also many formats of audio and visual material including wax cylinders, tefi-bands, reel-to-reel tapes and 16mm black and white and colour silent films, providing a complex and detailed document of music and ritual in South Asia from the 1930s to the late 1950s.
The collection itself is in many ways like a jigsaw. The recent digitisation of the 16mm film material by the Moving Image team enabled access to footage hitherto impossible in the British Library. This coincided with the digitisation of audio material from the collection. However the documentation, especially that of the films, was extremely sparse and in places non-existent. To add to the complexity the non-synchronous nature of the recordings means that although much of the audio and film footage is related it would not have been shot at the same time: in many cases Bake would record an event in film and then return to record the event in audio. The story could have ended there with a complex collection awaiting researchers to release its secrets………….
Excitingly the Nepalese material in this collection, which makes up at least half of the collection, became the subject of a repatriation project with the Music Museum of Nepal. With painstaking effort they honoured the exchange of knowledge by returning detailed documentation for the films to the British Library which has now been added to the catalogue and was the inspiration for the making of these short films.
Title: Arnold Adriaan Bake: documenting music in Nepal. Newar musicians, 1955-56
The second film introduces musicians from one of the main culture groups in Nepal, the Newar. Among the religious music performed by the Newar is Dapha, a form of hymn singing.
Title: Arnold Adriaan Bake: documenting music in Nepal. Matayaa festival, 1955-56
The third film illustrates the importance of ritual in Nepalese life. The Matayaa festival celebrates family ancestors with offerings at shrines. Musicians and devotees circumambulate the town making offerings.
Title: Arnold Adriaan Bake: documenting music in Nepal. Seto Machindranath festival, 1955-56
The final film allows a glimpse of one of the main features of the religious festivals in Nepal, the mobilisation of the chariots carrying the deities. This colour footage shows the dedication and worship related to the chariots and the precariousness as they are manually pulled through the streets during the festival. The mountains of Nepal can be seen on the horizon.
These represent only a small portion of the collection, with a great deal more digitised films to be released next Spring 2013, but we hope they will encourage researchers to come to the British Library to delve further into this and other collections.
25 July 2012
Unlocking historical musical resources
As part of the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music project, 'ECOLM III: Opening historical music resources to the world's online researchers', funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, we shall be holding a free one-day workshop at the British Library on Friday, 7th September 2012, 10.30-17.30, in the Foyle Suite, Centre for Conservation.
The ECOLM project, a partnership between Goldsmiths, University of London, the British Library and the UK Lute Society, aims to transform digital images from 300 of the British Library's 16th-century music books in the Early Music Online resource (www.earlymusiconline.org) into encodings which can be viewed on-screen or printed out in a variety of formats including modern score notation, listened to, transposed, analysed, searched and compared with other music.
To do this, it uses the latest techniques in optical music recognition adapted to the demands of 16th-century music printing. While most of the repertory in Early Music Online is vocal music such as masses, motets, chansons and madrigals, about 10% of the collection is printed in tablature for various instruments, mainly the lute, but also for keyboard and the diminutive renaissance guitar; this specialised and arcane notation demands a somewhat different, instrument-oriented approach for automatic recognition.
In this workshop you can learn more about the British Library's holdings of early printed music and their historical background, about the optical music recognition methods and the challenges presented by this material, about the musical repertory and how ECOLM could enable a deeper understanding of the musical relationships and influences within it, about the all-important online involvement of non-professional musicians in the process of correcting errors, as well as the potential impact of the approach on musicology and the early music scene in general.
Update, 5 Sept: This is the full programme for the workshop:
10:30 Doors open for coffee
11:00 Welcome (Richard Chesser, British Library & Tim Crawford, Goldsmiths)
11:15 Historical background to the Early Music Online (EMO) collections (Sandra Tuppen, British Library)
11:45 'Für die Jugend und anfahende dieser Kunst': the repertory of German printed tablatures (Stephen Rose, Royal Holloway)
12:15 What is Digital Musicology and what can be expected from it? (Frans Wiering, Utrecht)
12:45 Lunch break
14:00 The Electronic Corpus of Lute Music (ECOLM) and EMO (Tim Crawford & David Lewis, Goldsmiths)
14:30 Recognition of EMO vocal music with Aruspix (Laurent Pugin, Swiss RISM Office)
15:00 Automatic polyphonic transcription of lute tablature: A machine learning approach (Reinier de Valk, City University)
15:30 Tea
16:00 Optical recognition of lute tablature (Christoph Dalitz)
16:30 The online lute community, amateur & professional (Chris Goodwin & John Robinson, UK Lute Society)
17:00 Discussion
17:30 Close
The workshop is free, but booking is essential. Please email Sandra Tuppen if you would like to attend, at [email protected]
The workshop will be followed at 20:00 by a special evening concert, 'La Fleur des Chansons', at King's Place, London N1 9AG, conveniently close to the British Library, to be given by the Brabant Ensemble with a distinguished group of instrumentalists and showcasing musical highlights from the repertory under discussion at the workshop. Tickets for the concert can be purchased from the King's Place Box Office.
10 July 2012
Endangered dongjing archives
The following is a guest post by Lynda Barraclough, Endangered Archives Programme Curator.
In 2007 the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library received digital copies of music scores, lyrics and sutras documenting the Chinese ritual music known as dongjing. We also received audio and video recordings of recitals and interviews with performers and material relating to dongjing societies themselves, including correspondence, research notes and newsletters. The archives were copied from eight separate collections held by dongjing societies and private individuals in North Yunnan, China. In 2010 we received further dongjing scores and related material, this time copied from two privately owned collections in South Yunnan.
The original composers, authors and scribes of this material are largely unknown. Exact dates for most of the compositions are also unknown. The original documents and volumes date to the 20th and 21st centuries, but they contain copies of pieces that may be much older. For example, some of the texts recorded in volumes belonging to EAP209/1 Li Chun Collection on Dongjing Manuscripts are attributed to the Ming dynasty (14th century). The image below comes from EAP209/1/3 San yi za yue shang, thought to have been written by Li Hao during the reign of Emperor Hongwu in the early Ming dynasty.
Most of the scores are written in the jianpu notation, although other notations such as guche and gugin are also present. The image below shows a music score in jianpu notation. It comes from EAP012/8/1/30 Heqing ding jing yin yue. This script includes an introductory explanation to the piece, and comes from Heqing county.
The Endangered Archives Programme is funded by Arcadia. More information on the projects responsible for digitally preserving this material can be found on the EAP webpages:
EAP209 Survey on surviving dongjing archives in Jianshui, Tonghai and Mengzi
Copies of these archives were also deposited with the Institute of Historical Anthropology and the University Library at Sun Yat-sen University. The images received by the British Library are available via the Endangered Archives Programme webpages. Four complete manuscripts are also available on the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts pages (just type in “dongjing”). For information on how to access the audio and video material please email the EAP.
**
You can read more about the Endangered Archives Programme on Lynda's Endangered Archives blog.
28 June 2012
Original Purcell manuscripts digitised
Following the launch online of Handel's Messiah, we have now digitised three original manuscripts of Henry Purcell's music. The digitised Purcell manuscripts have joined Handel's Messiah and manuscripts of Bach and Mozart on our Digitised Manuscripts website. The easiest way to find these music manuscripts is to type the composer's surname into the keyword search box on the Digitised Manuscripts homepage.
Between them, these three Purcell manuscripts - all largely in the composer's own hand - cover most of his short career and many of the musical genres in which he worked, from the anthem and sacred part-song to the court ode, solo song, sonata and fantasia.
Two of the manuscripts (R.M.20.h.8 and Add MS 30930) are large score-books, into which Purcell copied music over a number of years. R.M.20.h.8 contains music written for use at the courts of Charles II and James II, with anthems at one end of the book and odes and welcome songs at the other. Add MS 30930 is very different: a collection of music written for use in the home, it contains sacred part-songs for between three and five voices at one end and instrumental music at the other end. The 'instrumental end' of the book includes Purcell's fantasias and In Nomines for viol consort, along with trio sonatas and his famous 'Chacony'.
The third manuscript (MS Mus. 1) is a small volume of keyboard music containing music by Purcell at one end and pieces by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Draghi at the other. The manuscript is believed to have been used for teaching purposes: the earliest piece in Purcell's section of the book is a very easy prelude for keyboard, and the pieces gradually increase in difficulty, suggesting the student was gradually improving!
We marked the launch of the digitised Purcell manuscripts with a Purcell Study Day at the British Library on Tuesday. This featured presentations on the three manuscripts and their music, and a performance by the viol consort Fretwork of three of the viol fantasias.
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