Tag Archives: World music

by | May 28, 2010 · 7:43 am

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

An initiative of the Department of Special Collections of the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project presents digital remasters of nearly 8000 cylinders that are catalogued according to standard library rules for sound recordings. The collection may be searched by keyword, author, title, subject, year, or call number, or it can be browsed by genre, instrument, topic, or language. The recordings can all be heard and downloaded for free; the project is happy to receive donations of further recordings and financial support.

Among the collection’s rare gems are 225 recordings of pre-1902 popular music, including cylinders of Sousa’s Grand Concert Band.

Related article: John Philip Sousa, violinist

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by | May 15, 2010 · 1:28 pm

The pure drop

Produced under the Australian government’s Broadband Production Initiative, Ether Multimedia’s The pure drop is a free online resource that describes itself as “an exploration and celebration of traditional and world music”.

The site is organized around eleven short videos—all under six minutes—that explore topics such as instruments, lyrics, and transmission; links to further information about the specific topics in the videos are provided, and study guides, maps, a hyperlinked index of persons, and other supporting materials are included.

While this resource is clearly intended for use in secondary schools, and is so used throughout Australia, it is available to anyone interested in video interviews, performances, and mp3 audio by traditional, neotraditional, and popular musicians such as Billy Bragg, Värttinä, and Yothu Yindi.

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by | March 24, 2010 · 3:21 pm

English dance & song

Published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, English dance & song has appeared at least four times a year since it was launched in 1936. The magazine presents festival listings and other news, interviews with current English traditional and neotraditional performers, and reviews of current publications, as well as brief research-based articles that explore historical documents and current practices.

The Society, which was formed in 1932 by the merger of the Folk-Song Society (founded in 1898) and the English Folk Dance Society (founded in 1911), also publishes a scholarly periodical, Folk music journal.

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by | March 22, 2010 · 3:11 pm

Association for Cultural Equity

 

Founded by Alan Lomax in 1983, The Association for Cultural Equity‘s mission—“to facilitate cultural equity, the right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage”—is realized through several projects that use and expand upon Lomax’s research, including the digitization and dissemination of his field collections.

As a part of this service, ACE supports a free online research center that includes an archive of Lomax’s collections; the sound recordings are indexed by place in ACE’s Lomax Geo-Archive, which provides excerpts from the recordings along with the full details of each recording session. Through cooperation with ACE, the American Folklife Center houses Lomax’s physical collection.

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Filed under Ethnomusicology, Resources, World music

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by | February 8, 2010 · 12:28 pm

EVIA Digital Archive Project

The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative peer-reviewed digital archive of ethnographic field videos for use by scholars and teachers; it is also an infrastructure of tools and systems supporting scholars in the ethnographic disciplines, including ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology.

Since its founding in 2001, the project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan. There is no charge for access for educational purposes. Above, the videographer James B. Weegi assists the ethnomusicologist Ruth M. Stone with materials that are now part of her EVIA collection.

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Filed under Africa, Ethnomusicology, Resources, World music

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by | February 2, 2010 · 12:53 pm

Program notes

Like souvenir books, program notes may be considered ephemera, but often they are the best sources for information about important productions, festivals, and other events. Some, like Playbill, are issued as numbered periodicals that libraries and individuals subscribe to. Others include original essays by distinguished scholars—for example, the program book for the Smithsonian Institution’s 1997 Festival of American Folklife (above) included articles by the ethnomusicologists Angela Impey, Joyce Marie Jackson, and Jeff Todd Titon.

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by | November 16, 2009 · 3:12 pm

Album covers

fela-zombie

Record album covers comprise a genre of music iconography that shows how musicians wish to be perceived—or how their producers wish them to be perceived. This type of iconography makes no claim to objectivity; rather, it explicitly presents images meant to arouse specific associations with the recorded music inside.

For example, the cover of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s 1977 album Zombie shows him brightly dressed, singing and gesturing defiantly, facing images of Nigerian soldiers: the zombies of the scathing title song, which satirizes these enforcers of the military government. The singer appears as a vibrant, strong leader, while the soldiers are depicted in a jagged, grey collage—as dehumanized and sinister as the zombies of horror fiction.

Below, Sahr Ngaujah and the cast of Fela! perform Zombie on Broadway.

Click here for more on music iconography.

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Filed under Africa, Iconography, Politics, Popular music

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by | October 27, 2009 · 4:07 pm

Etnoumlje: Srpski world music magazine

Etnoumlje: Srpski world music magazine (ISSN 1452-9920) has been published quarterly by the World Music Asocijacija Srbije since the summer of 2007.

The magazine provides insight into the Serbian world music scene through interviews and profiles of members of Serbian bands and reviews of recordings, events, and publications, as well as regular features on Serbian traditional music.

Its editor, Oliver Đorđević, defines it as a periodical for “theory, history, aesthetics, and criticism of world music, with the aim of promoting and advancing Serbian world music.” Etnoumlje also collects information for a future Web-based register of Serbian world music bands and artists.

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by | October 7, 2009 · 8:48 pm

World music magazines

World music magazines such as fROOTS, Etnoumlje, and Sing out! are largely devoted to profiles of current performers and groups whose repertoires fall within the fuzzy boundaries of world music, a nebulous marketing concept that covers almost any ethnic tradition, from sea shanties to sacred Buddhist ceremonies to Afropop. These articles go beyond the information in the artists’ press releases, often including interviews that provide biographical details and illuminate the historical roots of the music that they perform.

Occasionally these magazines publish research-based items, such as a survey of the current state of a particular genre, or articles of historical interest, such as the commercial recording of ethnic traditions in the early twentieth century.

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