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.
09 November 2012
Boxing day
Barely a day passes when there is not another delivery of packages from record companies containing the latest releases to add to the BL collection. A constant stream of sturdy, anonymous brown boxes arrive at my desk, labelled only by the distribution company, with little external clue as to their contents. Even after many years of receiving such deliveries there remains a thrill of anticipation as to what the boxes might contain – Christmas Day every day, as a colleague has described it.
But yesterday this arrived:
We are used to receiving boxed sets of records to add to our collections – in fact the revival in the fortunes of vinyl means we are seeing more and more such deluxe reissue packages – but custom-made stickers on the box proudly announcing the contents have not been done before as far as I can remember.
So the ‘what’s in the box?’ anticipatory moment was denied but on opening we found a 16-LP set of Beatles albums on 180 gram audiophile-quality vinyl with a lavish 250-page book describing the albums and the remastering process.
This is an extravagant set which many will covet and, given the likely price, few can obtain. Only 50,000 copies are to be available worldwide so we are lucky and appreciative that EMI have donated the set. Like many of our holdings it will probably become a collectors’ item, so in a departure from normal practice we are likely to keep the delivery box with the one-off sticker in addition to the set for the benefit of future Beatles completists.
Oh, and the records sound pretty good too.
25 October 2012
Music research archives in India
The American Institute of Indian Studies, Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), Delhi, hosted the 43rd International Association for Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Annual Conference from 7 - 11 October.
The World and Traditional Music collection at the British Library comprises both published and unpublished recordings. Within the sphere of sound and audiovisual archiving, the unpublished holdings bring us into the realm of the “research archive”, as defined by IASA and in contrast to Broadcast Archives or National Archives. The distinction is quite fine, of course, because all archives are used for research broadly defined. However, one way to think of a research archive is as one containing primarily unpublished materials made by researchers, for example, by musicologists during fieldwork. And one tends to find too that people leading research archives are themselves researchers who know the discipline and its research concerns and trends. There are many such archives around the world – the American Folklife Centre of the Library of Congress, the Ethnomusicology Archive at University California Los Angeles, the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Research Centre for Ethnomusicology at the CNRS in Paris, the Archives of Traditional Music in Bloomington, USA, the International Library of African Music, the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies - all represented at the conference.
The conference theme was “In transition: access for all”, an apt one for a nation on the rise, but relevant throughout the world as we aim to transfer the results of ethnographic research over the past century into digital form so that communities, musicians, scholars and the general public can have access. Of concern to research archives is that access is provided fairly and ethically. Many papers were thus about preservation and access projects and there were several formal papers and led discussions on issues of intellectual property rights and ethics. In particular it was hugely interesting and inspiring to hear from colleagues in some of the research archive centres in India, such as the Travelling Archive, the Sangeet Natak Academy, the Archive of North Indian Classical Music in Kolkata, Naadsaager Archives and Documentation Society for South Asian Music, Samvaad Foundation in Mumbai.
22 October 2012
Independent Labels
Despite many stories of the decline of the traditional record industry there seems to have been a growth in the number of Indie labels and self-released recordings in the UK of late. It is gratifying to see this reflected in a marked increase in the number of donations from Independents in recent months, largely due to the efforts of my colleague Jamie Tugwell who is contacting labels on a regular basis and explaining about the BL’s collection of sound recordings.
So this week I was pleased to meet Rachael from Stolen Recordings who came to the library in person with a wonderful collection of releases that we had not previously acquired.
Stolen were voted Small Independent Label of the Year last year and are on a bit of a roll at the moment so to receive some of their rarer recordings in hand-made sleeves and a variety of formats was timely.
Another arrival this week was a package from Allsorted Records based in Norwich. Allsorted’s Dudley had contacted me earlier in the year to ask about registering the label’s recordings with the BL. I was happy to point out that there is no registration process – just send us your records and they will be processed and added to our collection.
We don’t have the benefit of compulsory legal deposit for sound recordings so have to rely on donations. There are long-standing arrangements with the major record companies and we receive almost daily deliveries from them, but it is more time-consuming to track down smaller independent labels and make arrangements with them so we are always trying to play catch-up.
One label that is very familiar with the BL’s collection of recordings is Public Information, whose co-founder Alex Wilson is Video Manager in the BL’s Sound and Vision department. Alex brought in the two most recent releases in their catalogue this week and we now have a complete run of their output.
We hope to further increase the acquisition of recordings from Independent labels over the forthcoming months so if you are involved in a label you may well hear from Jamie or myself. Alternatively you can e-mail [email protected] to tell us about your label and we will happily arrange to receive your recordings.
21 September 2012
SHO-ZYG at Goldsmiths
Today sees the launch of a week-long exhibition and events programme of experimental sound installations at Goldsmiths, University of London. The exhibition takes its inspiration from some of the invented instruments of Hugh Davies, who established the Electronic Music Studio at Goldsmiths College in 1967 as the first facility of its kind at any British institution.
Hugh Davies died in 2005, and much of his archive is now held at the British Library: his correspondence and research papers chart the history of electronic music from its birth, while his own compositions are now comprehensively listed on our Sound and Moving Image Catalogue. Some of his invented instruments are on display at the Science Museum, and this exhibition allows us to see several more.
The Shozyg uses a combination of household objects and electronic pickups to create a wide range of extraordinary sounds. The display includes a film of Hugh Davies in 1991, from which this excerpt is taken, culminating in a virtuosic performance on a cheese-slicer:
Hugh Davies occupies only one room of the SHO-ZYG exhibition, which seeks to explore the rich tapestry of sound practice at Goldsmiths, both past and present, with selected works from over 50 artists from the 1950s to the present day. A varied programme of related events accompanies the exhibition, which runs until 27 September at the newly-renovated gallery in St James's Hatcham Church, New Cross, London SE14 6AD.
06 August 2012
Delius in 2012: an international celebration
The composer Frederick Delius was born in Bradford on 29 January 1862 and to mark his 150th anniversary, the British Library will be hosting a symposium devoted to his music in association with the Delius Society on 22 and 23 September.
With a packed programme comprising talks, a round-table discussion, live music and a screening of the recent BBC4 film ‘Delius: Composer, Lover, Enigma’ by John Bridcut, the Symposium will also provide the opportunity for delegates to speak with renowned experts in the field.
Speakers will include: Bo Holten (composer and conductor of the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra); Dr. Lionel Carley (Delius scholar); Professor Tim Blanning (Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University); Digby Fairweather (jazz composer and musician); Dr. Jérôme Rossi (Delius scholar and author of the first French biography of Delius); and Anthony Payne (composer).
Live music will include a recital by Paul Guinery (pianist and BBC Radio 3 broadcaster), song and violin recitals by the winners of the 2011 Delius Performance Prize Competition, Natalie Hyde and Dominika Fehér, and a UK first performance of the winning entry of the 2012 Delius International Composition Prize Competition, composed by Michael Djupstrom.
The British Library holds the bulk of Delius’s manuscripts (presented to the Library by the Delius Trust in 1995) and a large body of correspondence relating to the composer, as well as numerous sound recordings charting the performance history of his works, making the Library the focal point of research concerning his life and music.
To book for the Delius Symposium, see the British Library events page.
Tickets are £20 per day. Each day must be booked separately.
For further details, please download the pdf flyer.
The full programme is also available at the Delius Society website.
20 July 2012
Maltese Music Collection
Collected in early 2011, a unique video collection of Maltese għana folk music is now available to view on-site at the British Library through the Listening & Viewing Service. Largely privately filmed by practising musicians and aficionados between 1985 and 2010 in Malta, and its diasporic Australian communities of Sydney and Melbourne, this collection features influential singers and guitarists in a variety of private, public and television performances. Contained within the 140 hours of material are examples of għana spirtu pront (improvised verses on antagonistic themes), għana tal-fatt (ballads), għana bormliża (a rarely-performed, high-pitched melismatic vocal song style), prejjem (instrumental guitar music with a virtuosic lead guitarist), and a number of other traditional Maltese vocal styles. Other than Manuel Casha's recording collection held in the National Library of Australia, this is the only other collection of Maltese folk music that is publicly available. Although it is only possible to view the videos on-site at the British Library, the collection is fully searchable via the Sound and Moving Image catalogue with the collection code C1479. Users can search this archive by any number of keywords such as location, genre, name of performer(s), year, etc, and can glean much information from this alone: common ensembles, the frequency with which particular musicians perform, popular performance locations, etc. As well as being a collection that is of great use to Maltese and Mediterranean studies in its own right, it also represents an exciting emerging branch of archival activity that collects, documents and disseminates private collections recorded by 'insiders' to a tradition, thus presenting an insight into judgments of quality, of motivations for recording, and representations of a tradition by those who know it intimately.
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