Loeb Music Library

Andrea Bohlman, a doctoral candidate in Historical Musicology in the Harvard University Department of Music, works on socialist and post-socialist music cultures, European popular song and hymns, musical media, and music in politics. In this guest post, she describes some of her discoveries in the stacks of the Harvard libraries, and their importance to her research:

by  covilha

Though the bulk of my dissertation research brings me to archives housed in basements of private homes, government organizations, and academic institutions across Poland, generous support from the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Houghton Library, and the Music Department at Harvard has helped to make some of the most unusual materials available on this side of the Atlantic: a selection of rare cassette tapes. The digitization of these materials, which were collected among members of the Polish opposition in the 1980s, makes radio programs, audiobooks, news montages, and more available to any user at Houghton Library. The creative sound documents recorded on the tapes had previously been inaccessible because of their fragile media. Now we have the opportunity to listen to the sounds of organized dissent and to understand the significance of music for Polish activists.

The Solidarity Collection itself (to which these tapes belong) is unique outside of Poland. It contains a variety of materials assembled from private collections of Polish-American supporters of the independent Solidarity trade union (Solidarnosc), and other dissident organizations from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War. Members of Polish opposition depended on a variety of means of communication to organize meetings, discuss their demands, critique the ideologies behind the Peoples’ Republic of Poland, and create a culture of dissent. In scores of news bulletins and written documentation of organizational matters, “dissident culture” supported the publication of literature censored by the government and promoted its own agenda through stamps, posters, and other iconographic media.

The Solidarity Collection, because it represents not the record of a single organization, but the collections of individuals invested in the movements’ politics, speaks volumes about the way in which documents printed by the Polish underground presses—Polish samizdat—were actually disseminated and received. The Solidarity Collection offers a snapshot into the diverse means of expression at the heart of the Polish opposition, the local efforts in what came to be a nationally triumphant political party.

My dissertation concerns music and activism in Poland during the 1980s. It was when I was perusing the Solidarity Collection for songbooks that I noticed a reference to 38 cassette tapes. When I inquired about them, a Houghton librarian, Joseph Zajac, was kind enough to take me into the bowels of the stacks, where I got a sense for the richness of the sound materials. I began to talk with Richard F. French librarian Virginia Danielson about listening access, since Houghton has neither the digitization facilities nor the audio technology of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library.

The tapes represent the bulk of the output of two major underground presses. From 1983-1990 these presses used cassettes as a primary means of disseminating political cabaret, political anthems, and audiobooks (such as George Orwell’s 1984), as well as editorial essays read by their activist authors. Cassettes not only recorded the sounds of the opposition, they afforded journalists, workers, and literary figures the opportunity to create a sound object. The digitization of these tapes has made the material more accessible and has transformed the nature of my work with the cassettes: I can return to listen to interviews and audio montages repeatedly. But, most importantly, engagement with their form and content can alter historians’ understanding of music in the Polish opposition by underlining the vitality of sound and music at a crucial moment of Cold War history in Poland.

- Andrea Bohlman

Notes: David Ackerman, Bruce Gordon, and Darron Burke, of the library’s Audio Preservation Studio, digitized the tapes, which are stored in the University Library’s Digital Repository Service, a state-of-the-art permanent digital storage facility.

The Music Library acknowledges the continued, valuable support from the Andrew W. Van Houten Audio Preservation Fund for our work with rare and unique electroacoustic and ethnomusicological recordings.

Some of you know that the Music Library has a state-of-the-art audio preservation studio but you may not know much about it or even where it is. It’s located on the third floor at 8 Story Street; David Ackerman is the lead engineer. Recently he produced this 3-minute video about Audio Preservation Services (APS). Take a look, you’ll like it:

In addition to the conducting the day-to-day preservation work of the studio, APS staff contribute to international standards for audio collections and, as part of the joint Harvard and Indiana University Sound Directions project, developed the Sound Directions Toolkit, an open-source software suite to allow audio engineers to automate some of the routine,  repetitive tasks of digitization

Explore the library’s archival collections to hear some of the recordings preserved by APS (some sound files are available only to the Harvard community):

• The Eduard Alekseyev Fieldwork Collection of the Musical Culture of Yakutia, 1969-1990
• The Stephen Blum Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān at Harvard University
• The Laura Boulton Collection of Byzantine and Orthodox Musics
• The James Rubin Collection of Indian classical music, 1957-1989
• The Marie-Thérèse, Baroness Ullens de Schooten Collections at Harvard University

Coincidentally, today is UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, a day to celebrate the cultural significance of recorded sound and video and to raise awareness of the urgent need for its preservation. Visit the Coordinating Council of Audio-Visual Archives Associations for a list of events planned by archives and heritage collections around the world.

- Virginia Danielson and Kerry Masteller

A new finding aid from the Archive of World Music provides the opportunity to explore and listen to the music of the Yakut people. It features freely available online audio content with the download of RealPlayer.

Bruce Gordon and Eduard Alekseyev at work in the Audio Preservation studio, 2009

The Eduard Alekseyev Fieldwork Collection of the Musical Culture of Yakutia, 1969 – 1990 contains audio and video that documents traditional religious and ritual cultural expressions. Sakha (Yakutia) is the largest sub-national entity in the world. It is a circumpolar region, half of which lies above the Arctic Circle. From the 1960s through the 1980s, publication of materials about the rituals of indigenous cultures was suppressed, due to the Soviet policy of the times. The Yakut language is part of the northern Turkic linguistic family, and is considered a “vulnerable” language, according to the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

Eduard Yefimovich Alekseyev (b. 1937, Yakutia) resides in Boston and is a well-known ethnomusicologist and researcher of traditional Yakut music. He is the author of more than 100 publications in Russian, including such books as A Study of the Origins of Modality with Regard to Yakut Folk Songs (1976) and The Pitch Nature of Primitive Singing (1986).  Alekseyev worked very closely with Ghilyana Dorjieva (another scholar of indigenous musical culture in Russia, in particular, of the Kalmyk people) to identify and describe the materials in the collection.

Khomus by
Nathan Hamm

The collection includes original field recordings made by Alekseyev between 1969 and 1990; most were created in a fieldwork setting, but some were made during concerts, or at festival events of Ukrainian people in Kiev and Crimean Tatars in Simferopol. The main genres found in the collection are the olonkho (epic song and recitative), ohuokai (round dance), shamanic ritual and mystery performances. Frequently heard musical instruments are the khomus (jaw or jew’s harp), the diungiur (shaman’s drum), and the bayan (button accordion).

In this video, Eduard Alekseyev speaks about the olonkho genre and its transformative purpose as well as its change as a genre over time.

Audio Preservation Studio engineer Bruce Gordon has worked closely with Alekseyev to digitally preserve the polyester and acetate audio reel tapes in the collection — the end result of their work is the streaming content available in the finding aid, such as this recording of Vasiliy Osipovich Karataev performing the “Song of the Horse” from the olonkho “Erbekhtei Bergen.”

- Donna Guerra