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African Music in the World and Traditional Music Section at the British Library Sound Archive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Janet Topp Fargion
Janet Topp Fargion*
Affiliation:
World and Traditional Music Section British Library Sound Archive
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Extract

It is widely accepted that the development of recording technology played an important role in the development of ethnomusicology as a discipline. For the first time, from the late nineteenh century, music could be recorded for use in scientific comparison and analysis. Jaap Kunst once wrote: “ethnomusicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented.” But the significance of recorded performance—the most objective way of capturing oral tradition—for the understanding of all aspects of culture must not be underestimated, particularly, but not exclusively, for nonliterate societies. “Oral tradition should be central to students of culture, of ideology, of society, of psychology, of art, and … of history.” And sound archives should be perceived as essential to research, “equivalent to libraries in other disciplines insofar as their importance in research is concerned.”

Almost immediately after the advent of recording technology in the late 1870s, sound archives began to emerge: the first in Europe was the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Science in 1899. Britain came late to the field: the British Institute of Recorded Sound was established with private funds only in 1947; it received its first grant-in-aid in the 1960s and in 1983 it became part of the British Library, known as the National Sound Archive.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 31 , 2004 , pp. 447 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2004

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References

1 Seeger, Anthony, “The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today,” Ethnomusicology 30(1986), 261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (London, 1985), xiGoogle Scholar.

3 Bruno Nettl quoted in Seeger, , “Role,” 262Google Scholar.

4 Manigand, Marie-Laure, “World and Traditional Music Section: A Historical Perspective,” International Music Connection: Newsletter of the British Library World and Traditional Music Section 1(1995), 3 (www.b1.uk)Google Scholar.

5 See Day, Timothy, “The National Sound Archive: the First Fifty Years” in Linehan, Andy, ed., Aural History: Essays on Recorded Sound (London, 2001), 41–64Google Scholar.

6 The Legal Deposit Libraries Bill, which will extend legal deposit to non-print materials, passed its Report Stage and Third Reading in the House of Commons on 7 July 2003, an important step in its becoming law. The Bill will now go forward for consideration by the House of Lords. At this stage, however, the Bill does not include sound recordings, though these are expected to be added in the not-too-distant future.

7 A collection of 100 cylinders recorded by the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898. The expedition members included: Professor A. C. Haddon, Charles Seligman(n), C. S. Myers, W. H. R. Rivers, W. M. Dougall, A. Wilkin and Sidney Ray. These recordings are held on long-term loan from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Sound Archive reference: C80.

8 Currently only some 48,000 of these are indexed on the catalogue, translating to approximately 127,000 recordings.

9 I use the term “recordist” because it reduces the risk of confusion between people and machines (i.e., a recorder can mean someone who makes a recording and/or the machine on which a recording is made). The Sound Archive uses “recordist” as a field title on our catalog. For a full list of collections, with brief descriptions, arranged by region see the World and Traditional Music Section web pages at www.b1.uk/collections/sound-archive.

10 Duràn, Lucy, “African Music at the Sound Archive,” African Research and Documentation 35(1984), 26–31Google Scholar.

11 There are only four cylinders in the Johnston Collection, with running numbers C107/1402 to C107/1405. However, the recording sound is of reasonable quality. The collection includes a praise song (C107/1404), in the BaGisa language, possibly in honor of Sir Harry himself.

12 There are three types of cylinders in this collection: original masters made by Thomas himself; pantographic copies; and moulded galvano copies (made only for the Nigerian trips). The galvano moulding process meant the destruction of the master cylinders, so where there are galvano copies, there is no master. The total number of items in the collection is 1,100,700 of which are discrete recordings.

13 Detailed articles on this collection and other can be seen on the World and Traditional Music Section: Collections: Africa web pages.

14 This is described in an interview with Klaus Wachsmann conducted by Lucy Duràn at his home in Tisbury on 1 December 1983 (Sound Archive reference: CA/66-67).

15 Pugh, Carolyn, “C105—Ken Gourlay Collection”, International Music Connection: Newsletter of the British Library World and Traditional Music Section 24(2003) (www.b1.uk)Google Scholar.

16 Information on all these recordings can be obtained from our catalog. Enter “C23 AND Cooke” as a search string.

17 “Tribal, Folk and Café Musk of West Africa,” shellac record WA 1-24 (1950; Sound Archives reference 1CS0024302) or compact disc Rykodisc RCD10401 (Sound Archive reference 1CD0212621).

18 For the Tracey recordings search for AMA TR on the catalog.

19 The BBC Sound Archive indexes are accessible in the Sound Archive's library and information service.

20 For details of these, sec http://www.b1.uk/collections/african.html.

21 Of note are the recordings made by the Sound Archive at the Royal African Society Conference, “Mediums of Change: The Arts in Africa” in London in 1995 (C727). This includes an opening address from Wole Soyinka, and discussions on the state of drama and theatre in Africa today.

22 Titles and recordings can be found easily on the Sound Archive's online catalog, CADENSA (Catalogue Access and Data Entry for the Sound Archive). CADENSA provides access to details of 718,082 works on 2,913,469 recordings and to the 979,830 products (1,302,860 product copies) on which those recordings are held. This does not represent the entire collection, and individual collection curators should be contacted for further assistance.