This session consists of 3 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:
➺ Kamani Samarasinghe - Safeguarding Sri Lanka's Musical Heritage: Restoration and Digitization of W. B. Makulloluwa's Historical Field Recordings (Short presentation)
➺ Filipa Magalhães - Contemporary Music in motion: an integrated methodology to preserve works including heterogeneous sources. (Short presentation)
➺ Alexander Waterman - Sobremesa: Archiving Performance, Performing Archives. (Long presentation)
**Abstracts:**
➺ Safeguarding Sri Lanka's Musical Heritage: Restoration and Digitization of W. B. Makulloluwa's Historical Field Recordings
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Kamani Samarasinghe (Short presentation)
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Renowned musicologist William Banda (W. B.) Makulloluwa (1922–1984) played a pivotal role in safeguarding Sri Lanka's rich folk music traditions. Recognizing the intrinsic value of village songs and the traditional Sinhalese singing style embedded within local communities, Makulloluwa traversed villages, meticulously documenting captivating melodic patterns that resonated with the hearts of the inhabitants. This paper focuses on the restoration and preservation efforts directed towards an obscure collection of Makulloluwa's field recordings. Collaborating with the National Archives Sri Lanka, the author meticulously restored spool tape recordings and digitized the soundtracks. Each tape underwent thorough examination, cleaning, and documentation, accompanied by the photographing of tape containers and associated notes. Upon successful digitization, the recordings were systematically cataloged, encapsulating a diverse array of songs and music. The collection includes Veddas' Music, lullabies, songs from the Catholic population, instrumental music, and compositions from folk rituals.
➺ Contemporary Music in motion: an integrated methodology to preserve works including heterogeneous sources.
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Filipa Magalhães (Short presentation)
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Most contemporary music creations composed from the 1950s onwards display a combination of diverse sources, idiosyncratic languages and unconventional performance techniques. However, their documentation is often scattered across various archives, both personal and institutional, posing significant challenges for archival preservation. These challenges not only affect the reproducibility of the works but also difficult user access. Without clearly established connections between these disparate sources, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the works becomes demanding. Moreover, many of these compositions incorporate recordings, such as magnetic tape, which have become obsolete over time. Thus, for archival purposes, it becomes imperative to trace the treatment given to each document as a thread guiding the historical narrative. Analysing archival practices and their context, along with information storage and use, provides insights into broader historical inquiries. Tracking the evolution of information over time enables addressing fundamental questions about the nature of these compositions. In this paper, I advocate for a novel approach to enhance practical usability, one that can seamlessly integrate into future digitization, organization, and documentation processes for contemporary music collections. My aim is to increase existing documentation with contextual information and explore methodologies for establishing interrelationships among various documents, thereby fostering a holistic understanding of the works. This interdisciplinary approach, drawing from musicology, archival science, and digital humanities, seeks to streamline the efforts of archivists while enhancing information accessibility for users.
➺ Sobremesa: Archiving Performance, Performing Archives.
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Alexander Waterman (Long presentation)
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Alex Waterman, archivist at The Kitchen in New York City, will present on the vast audio and video archive that he is stewarding and making more widely available to the public. Audio and video documentation of performances are never a full picture and are often terribly inadequate. Waterman will speak about current strategies and programs he has put in place to address the silences and limits of performance documentation. Alongside digital preservation efforts, Alex Waterman and his colleague Angelique Rosales Salgado, started two different series of radio broadcasts-- Off the Page, and Sobremesa: Archiving Performance, Performing Archives-- where they could spotlight histories in the archive and invite scholars and artists to discuss the questions around “performance archives” and what the limits of audio-visual documentation are. Off the Page proposed an act of translation beyond the “archival” document to engage in dialogues with artists, audiences, and researchers who have produced and supported experimental work. Sobremesa asks “What is a performance archive? What are its limits if any of a movement-based, time-based archive? What are the infrastructures and value systems within?” The Kitchen was founded as an artist collective in 1971, by Woody and Steina Vasulka, and was formalized as a nonprofit art space in 1973. It was among the very first American institutions to embrace the emerging fields of video and performance, while presenting visionary new work in established disciplines such as dance, music, literature, and film. The Kitchen Archive contains over 4000 audio and video recordings and 400 linear feet of posters, artist editions, and other ephemera.
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