Sound and vision blog

This week’s post comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds.

The Marsh Warbler (Acrocephalus palustris) is best known for its remarkable ability to imitate the songs and calls of other species. Its spirited song can contain, on average, imitations of over 70 different species, encountered in both its Eurasian breeding grounds and the densely vegetated areas of southeastern Africa where it spends the winter months.  The male in this recording is in fine voice, producing a rich, varied song that takes centre stage in this nocturnal atmosphere (British Library reference WA 2007/017/001/019).

Listen to Marsh Warbler singing in the predawn

Photo credit: Stefan Berndtsson on Flickr / CC BY 2.0.

The recording was made by Ian Christopher Todd in May 2005 during a recording trip to Hungary. The Marsh Warbler, a summer visitor to the country, was encountered in the valley of Bükkzsérc, situated along the southern border of Hungary’s Bükk National Park. In 2018 the recording was included in a 60 minute wildlife and environmental mix on NTS Radio, British Library Sound Archive – At the Water’s Edge.

In belated celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (February 11), this week’s selection comes from Emmeline Ledgerwood, Voices of Science Web Coordinator.

In 2005 the Athena Swan Charter was launched to encourage higher education and research institutions to support the advancement of women working in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine). This accreditation scheme is now recognised across the globe as a framework for organisations in all sectors to demonstrate their efforts towards addressing gender equality in the workplace.

The charter was the brainchild of the Scientific Women’s Academic Network (SWAN), a grouping of women scientists from across the UK who had first come together as a result of the Athena project. The Athena Project was set up in 1999 and worked in partnership with universities and leading professional and learned science societies to make a difference to women’s careers in science. Its early work focused on developing mentoring, networks and career development programmes for women scientists, followed by surveys of career progression.

In 2011, Professor Dame Julia Higgins was interviewed by Thomas Lean for the National Life Stories collection ‘An Oral History of British Science’. The full recording and transcript are available online at BL Sounds.

Listen to Dame Julia Higgins

Download Julia Higgins interview transcript

Higgins is a polymer scientist and physicist who pioneered innovative methods to study the structure, organisation and movement of polymers. As a young woman she held research posts in France before joining the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College, London, in 1976. Over the course of her forty-year career there, culminating in her position as Principal of the Faculty of Engineering, she also served as Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society and Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Above: Image supplied by Julia Higgins in 2011. 

In this clip, Higgins describes how her own career progression by the mid-1990s gave her a level of influence in the higher education sector that she leveraged to improve the careers of other women in science. The result was the Athena project with its far-reaching legacy for women working in STEMM.

Browse the Voices of Science website to find extracts from interviews with many other women scientists interviewed for National Life Stories at the British Library.

This week’s post comes from Charlotte James, Web Content Developer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

In August 1947, Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha learned about the Partition of India over his uncle’s radio. Gurbakhsh was a young boy living in a small village north of Delhi when officials announced that British India would be divided into India and Pakistan.

On 14 August Pakistan was created, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the country’s first Governor-General. On 15 August India became an independent country and Jawaharlal Nehru became its first prime minister. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, under the guidance of Lord Louis Mountbatten (the last Viceroy to British India), demarcated the boundary lines for the two new countries.

Listen to Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha

Download Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha transcript

In this clip from an interview with Kavita Puri in 2017 (British Library reference: C1790/20), Gurbakhsh discusses how many people were worried about Partition and how they learned about it. When Kavita asks how villagers got their news, Gurbakhsh replies that they mostly learned things through posters and literature that political parties published and distributed. Gurbakhsh remembers that around 50 people gathered at his uncle’s house to listen to the Partition announcement because he was the only person in the village who owned a radio. He recalls people worrying about where the partition boundary would fall and on which side big cities, like Lahore, would end up. Today, with our constant access to the news, it is difficult to imagine 50 people gathering around one radio to hear such an important announcement.

Learn more about Partition and listen to other oral testimonies surrounding this historic event on the British Library’s Voices of Partition online learning resource.

Audio and Image copyright: BBC.

This week’s selection comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist. 

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash.

In this 1991 interview from the collection ‘ICA talks’ (C95/795), the renowned artist and dancer Trisha Brown considers the experience and exploration of gravity in her works, and discusses the role of gender in improvised partnering performances. 

Listen to Trisha Brown

Download Trisha Brown transcript

Years ago I used to practice contact improvisation, a movement technique and art dance style that originated in downtown New York in the late sixties.

The central idea of contact improvisation is around finding the body’s balance in relation to the partner by sharing weight and touch; forms and movements are thus created when the bodies meet, initiated and transformed by the music or simply by vocal instructions.

Movement awareness is intrinsically related to how much information we can gather from other people’s bodies, through the constant dialogic sharing of touch points. There are no rules, only bodies listening to each other in their search for a shared centre of gravity.

Trisha was one of these pioneering artists who explored the idea of what kind of movement can be improvised in a dance.¹

An interesting point that Trisha considers is around the importance of physical strength and gender roles in this improvised dance: how much of the silent communication of movements is in fact created by the male partner?

Ultimately, it makes me wonder how much we are aware, in the process of making, of who is the final ‘creator’ of a performance.

---

[1] Nancy Stark Smith, 'Harvest: One history of contact improvisation', Contact Quarterly, The Place Issue, 32/2 (2006): https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/view/harvest-a-history-of-ci#$.

This week’s recording of the week was selected by Steve Cleary, Lead Curator, Literary and Creative Recordings.

Above: Image of Bob Cobbing from a scan supplied by Jennifer Cobbing in 2008. Photographer not known.

This is a selection from the personal tape archive of the British sound poet Bob Cobbing.

The archive comprises recordings of Cobbing - solo and with various collaborators - in live, studio and home settings. The British Library acquired it in 2005.

The Library is also home to Bob Cobbing’s manuscript archive.  And we hold copies of many of the publications issued by Cobbing’s Writers Forum imprint, as well as books about his artistic practice.

This particular piece, ‘WORM’, was recorded in 1966. It was among the tracks issued by the Library in 2009 on a CD compliation of Cobbing’s work called ‘The Spoken Word: Early Recordings 1965-1973’.

That CD is now long out of print and hard to find. Soon though, we will be making available - for free online listening - a selection of further treasures from the vaults. Our thanks are due to Barbara and Patrick Cobbing of the Bob Cobbing Estate, and also William Cobbing, for helping this to happen.

Keep an eye on our social media channels for news on the launch of our new ‘sounds’ web site.

Listen to Bob Cobbing

Download Bob Cobbing transcript

Note: The downloadable transcript is for the benefit of people with a hearing impairment. It is not intended as a guide to how the words should appear on the printed page. Cobbing published various treatments of the piece over the years. One published version has the words in horizontal lines from left to right, but also in four columns. Another visualisation sees the words printed off-register and arranged in wiggly vertical strings. The impression given is of worms on the ground, viewed from above.

Text and recording are copyright of the Bob Cobbing Estate, Used with permission.

This week’s post comes from Daisy Chamberlain, Preservation Assistant for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Chapelton, Jamaica in 1952. His mother, Sylvena, migrated to Britain just before Jamaica gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, and Linton followed three years later, aged 11. His first home in the UK was in Brixton, South London, an area he described as ‘an oasis of resistance and rebellion’.

Photo credit: Bryan Ledgard on Flickr / CC BY 2.0

In the following recording, Linton Kwesi Johnson recites his poem, ‘Reggae Fi May Ayim’ (British Library reference: C1532/14), written in memory of the Black German activist and poet, and his personal friend, May Ayim, at his birthday reception at Homerton College, Cambridge in 2012. May Ayim was the child of a German mother and a Ghanaian father, but was adopted by a white German family at a young age. She died on August 9, 1996, when she was only 36 years old.

Listen to Reggae Fi May Ayim

Download Reggae Fi May Ayim transcript

Though Linton Kwesi Johnson often works with a live band or backing track, this recitation of ‘Reggae Fi Ayim’ is performed without any music. His words have a rhythm and a musicality of their own, though, and the absence of any backing adds to the solemnity of his elegy.

From hamburg via bremen / den finally / Berlin

Ayim moved to Berlin in 1984, where the self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ Audre Lorde was working as a visiting professor in North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Ayim attended Lorde’s seminars while working on her thesis on the cultural and social history of Afro-Germans. Lorde soon became a close personal friend and mentor to Ayim, and the following year the pair co-founded the West Berlin Chapter of the Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (ISD), an organisation of Black Germans campaigning against racial injustice in Germany to facilitate bonds between Afro-Germans and create new cultural practices.

Photo credit:  Dagmar Schults / CC BY-SA 4.0

Afro-german warrior woman

The relationship between Johnson and Ayim was personal – the poem reveals that the pair met at a black radical book fair. It was also political – both Johnson and Ayim used poetry as a tool for inciting political change, and as a core component of their activism. Ayim’s own poetry dealt with the themes of classism, racism and feminism, and emphasised the potential of writing to build coalitions between Black Europeans and transform their social lives. As well as this elegy for May Ayim, Johnson has written poems for Blair Peach (‘Reggae Fi Peach’), a white teacher from New Zealand killed at a protest against the National Front in Southall in 1979, and George Lindo (‘It Dread Inna Inglan’), a Black man from Bradford who was wrongfully convicted of robbery despite a lack of evidence and a strong alibi. You can browse individual recordings of these poems in the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue.

Fallin screamin / Terteen stanzahs down

The opening stanza of ‘Reggae fi May Ayim’ sets the tone of the poem as a pained and emotional elegy for a close friend by highlighting the conspiracy between life and death to ‘shattah di awts most fragile diziah’ (shatter the heart’s most fragile desire). The lines ‘Fallin screamin / Terteen stanzahs down’ are a reference to Ayim’s tragic suicide in 1996. The poet jumped from the thirteenth floor of an apartment building after battling depression and a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

Before Ayim died, she received invitations from across the world to attend and speak at conferences about feminism, anti-racism and human rights. It was through her global activism and her commitment to Afro-diasporic coalition that Ayim connected with individuals like Linton Kwesi Johnson. ‘Reggae Fi May Ayim’ is just one of many tributes sent by her friends and colleagues following her death.

This week’s post comes from Hazem Jamjoum, Audio Curator for the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership Programme.

Rashīd al-Qundarjī (1886-1945) was one of the early recording artists of Iraq's Maqam repertoire. In musical contexts, the Arabic word maqam usually denotes melodic and rhythmic modes. In Iraq, however, the word is also used to describe a genre and form of musical suite that has come to be consecrated as the art music of Iraq’s urban centers, Baghdad in particular. In 2008, UNESCO added Iraqi Maqam to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Al-Qundarjī’s father was a bead-maker who died when the musician was still eight years old. The young boy, Rashīd ibn Ali ibn Habib ibn Hasan, apprenticed as a cobbler. Kundarji is the Turko-Arabic word for cobbler, and that is how the singer got the name by which he became famous. He studied Maqam with Ahmad Zaydan (1832-1912), one of the great masters of the Maqam tradition in Baghdad, and was reportedly chosen by Zaydan as his successor.

By the 1920s, al-Qundarjī was known throughout the city as a master in his own right, a status he held when this song was recorded in 1925. Such recordings only enhanced al-Qundarjī’s reputation, so much so that Iraq's King Ghazi (r. 1933-1939) became one of the singer’s great admirers. This admiration undoubtedly contributed to al-Qundarjī’s appointment as the official expert on Iraqi Maqam at Radio Baghdad from its inauguration in 1936 until the singer’s death a decade later.

Listen to Wayn tkhallīnī

Al-Qundarjī was widely regarded as a traditionalist amongst Maqam aficionados; he sang in the high-pitched register prized by nineteenth century listeners, and insisted on the use of the chalghi ensemble - composed of santūr (hammer-plucked zither or table harp), joza (bowed spike fiddle), and dumbak (hand drum) - for his accompaniment. He generally performed and recorded with the same chalghi accompanists we hear on this recording: ʻAzzūrī Hārūn on the santur, Sāliḥ Shumel Shmūlī on joza, Shāʼūl Hārūn Zangī on dumbak, as well as the pestaji (backing singer) Makkī al-Ḥaj Ṣāliḥ. In the 1920s, when this song was recorded, the chalghi ensemble came to be challenged by the takht ensemble (‘ud, qanun, and violin) favoured by Egyptian recording artists, and championed in Iraq by the Maqam moderniser Muḥammad al-Qubbānjī (1904-1989).

The era in which this recording was produced is significant in other ways. In the mid to late 1920s, record labels that had mostly concentrated their activities in Egypt and Greater Syria began trying to expand their operations in the Arab world to Iraq and the Persian Gulf. This recording is one of Baidaphon's early attempts at recording Iraqi artists to expand their reach into the Iraqi market. This and other recordings made around the same time were so successful that by the mid-1930s, many recording companies had set up recording studios in Baghdad.

Though Maqam specialists regard al-Qundarjī as a traditionalist, he did introduce new pieces into the established repertoire. Indeed, the choice to record this song is somewhat of an innovation in itself. The song is a pesta, a form that was not strictly speaking a central part of the Iraqi Maqam suite, but rather a piece sung near the end of the suite by a pestaji, the lead backing vocalist to the main Maqam singer. A highly melodic form, the pesta is sung in the same melodic mode as the Maqam suite itself, and would offer the lead Maqam singer a chance to rest his or her voice. On the recording, the pesta is delivered as a kind of call-and-response duet between al-Qundarjī and pestaji al-Ḥaj Ṣāliḥ, each singing a variant of the pesta’s simple lyric “wayn tkhallīnī, wayn trūḥ” (where are you leaving me, where are you going?). Given the length of a standard Maqam suite, and the very short duration possible to record on 78rpm shellac discs of the era (around 3 minutes), al-Qundarjī's choice of a pesta was a way of adapting to these technological limitations. It proved to be a pioneering one as more Iraqi artists recorded pestas, and many songs in that form have come to be known and loved as stand-alone musical pieces ever since.

This week’s post comes from Tom Jackson, Workflow Support Officer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.

Rooms above pubs have played a prominent role in the development of the UK’s free improvisation scene. The Horse Improvised Music Club began organising events above the Horse pub in Waterloo, before moving to the Dog House in Kennington and several other pubs in South East London until they established a concert series at Iklectik Art Lab. Between 2013 and 2016, Daniel Thompson ran Foley Street Improvised Music Concert Series above the King And Queen in Fitzrovia. While not technically rooms above pubs, special mentions should go to Flim Flam and Boat Ting, which have both been running for over twenty years, the former in a room below Ryan’s N16 in Stoke Newington, the latter on the Bar&Co boat at Temple Pier.

Rooms like these provide a vital space for improvisers to perform and develop their practice, offering an unparalleled intimacy between audiences and musicians. Operating alongside venues whose main activities include a platform for concerts (Hundred Years Gallery, for example), there’s always been something very special about these rooms, temporary spaces of activity existing sometimes for a few years, sometimes going on for decades. I think the history of this music would have been very different without these rooms above pubs.

In the 1980s, concerts were organised at the Priory Arms in Stockwell by Alan Tomlinson and at the Roebuck in Central London by Phil Durrant, Steve Moore and Gillian McGregor. The British Library has recordings from both of these concert series. ‘The Cut’ (British Library ref: C138) is a collection of recordings of the latter, featuring the following improvisers and poets: Clive Fencott, Phil Durrant, Mike Hames, Matt Hutchinson, Stuart Jones, Paul Hession, Roger Turner, Peter Cusack, Phil Minton, Gillian McGregor, John Butcher, Steve Moore, Hugh Metcalfe, Allen Fisher, Parny Wallace, Neil Metcalfe, Jim Denley, Philipp Wachsmann, Will Evans, Mark Sanders and Thebe Lipere. It’s a collection that provides ample evidence of the intensity and excitement of the scene at that time.

From 1984, here are three solos recorded at The Cut, from Paul Hession (26 September), Jim Denley (24 October) and Peter Cusack (12 September).

Listen to Paul Hession

Listen to Jim Denley

Listen to Peter Cusack

Special thanks to John Butcher for providing a copy of the flyer.