FROM BOOKER T, ARETHA, AND LITTLE RICHARD TO SLAVE SPIRITUALS AND CLASSICAL CONCERTOS, BLACK MUSIC SCHOLARSHIP IS ALIVE AND WELL
Columbia College Chicago's Center for Black Music Research Gets Boost with Two Major Grants
Grammy Foundation and NEH Lend Support to Archive/Access Projects
Chicago, IL - Squirreled away on the sixth floor of one of Columbia College Chicago's thirteen South Loop buildings is a resource known to ethnomusicologists, scholars, and researchers world wide. A product of the dedication of founding director Dr. Samuel Floyd and the vision of Columbia's founding president, Mike Alexandroff, the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) is a facility unlike any other in the world.
The Center is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of materials related to the black music experience throughout the world. Under the current leadership of Executive Director Rosita Sands, a staff of nine stewards a collections that represents the mother lode of international scholarship on music of the African Diaspora. The collection includes more than 4,000 books, periodical titles and dissertations, approximately 7,500 recordings, 400 archival tape recordings, nearly 2,000 manuscript scores, approximately 3,000 musical scores, and more than 6,000 items of ephemera.
'CBMR is one of the jewels in Columbia's crown,' says Warrick L. Carter, Ph.D., president of the arts and media college. 'The value of the scholarship being done there is immeasurable and the resources being preserved for the ages are incomparable. We owe a debt of gratitude to the founders for having the foresight to bring the Center to Columbia and the college has a profound commitment to its work.'
Now, thanks to two recent grants, CBMR staff will be able to preserve, archive, and create public access to four diverse research collections that have been donated to the Center.
Grammy Foundation Targets Sue Cassidy Clark Pop Music Collection
Clark, a music journalist and photographer who specialized in soul, gospel, and rock music during the late 1960s and 70s, gifted CBMR with her collection of 131 audio interview tapes conducted with African American popular musicians and singers including Booker T and the MGs, Jerry Butler, Al Green, Isaac Hays, The Isley Brothers Gladys Knight and The Pips, Patti LaBelle, Little Richard, The Spinners, the Staple Singers, Sly Stone, Bill Wither, Stevie Wonder, and a host of others. The collection also includes research files and photographs.
The $19,500 Grammy Foundation grant allows CBMR to create digital backups for each interview and catalog and index the archive by subject (e.g. 'Stevie Wonder discusses the influence of Jerry Butler,' 'Gladys Knight talks about the challenges faced by African American women artists') ' allowing researchers to hone into their specific area of investigation across the entire collection.
'Through her interviews, Ms. Clark captured invaluable biographical data on some of American pop culture's most important figures,' says CBMR Director Sands. 'These interviews will be of interest and value to students and scholars of both music history and cultural history and we are thrilled that the Grammy Foundation has provided us with the assistance necessary to make this rich resource accessible to the public.'
NEH Funds Preservation of Research Collections of Groundbreaking Women Scholars
The extensive research collections of Eileen Southern, the mother of black music research; Dena Epstein, who established the scholarship on the music of slavery and the antebellum period; and Helen Walker-Hill, the foremost scholar on black women composers will now be accessible to students, scholars, and researchers through the generosity of a $94,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The collections are comprised of approximately 63 linear feet of research notes, correspondence, newspaper clippings, obituaries, reviews, editorials, manuscripts, programs, resumes, promotional materials, and other ephemera, as well as music scores and 130 audio tapes. The project is expected to take 12 months.
'This is exciting on a number of levels,' says Sands. 'Not only will the preservation and appropriate archiving of these collections provide incalculable resources to those working in the field of musicology, cultural and social history, and women's history, these particular collections represent the seminal work in the field, and provide exemplary models of the scholarly method. The fact that these scholars are all women, and had to overcome both gender bias as academics and embedded cultural bias around their subject matter, makes the body of work even more valuable and provocative.'
Eileen Southern (1920-2002) was on faculty at Harvard University during the 1950s. She is an acknowledged pioneer in the development of black music research as a humanities discipline. Her voluminous research and methodology set the standard for subsequent scholars and her publications continue to provide the groundwork for new research and serve as the most widely used teaching resources in black music history. Among her publications are The Music of Black Americans (1971), Readings in Black American Music (1971), and Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians (1983). She was founding editor of the scholarly journal The Black Perspective in Music.
Dena Epstein, a past president of the Music Library Association, is a retired music librarian at the University of Chicago. Her groundbreaking study of primary source materials led to her monumental work, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (1977; reissued in 2004), which documents black music in the United States from the beginning of slavery through the antebellum period. Her work to identify the African roots of black music as it developed in the U.S. during the 18th and 19th centuries has served as the basis for almost all subsequent research that has been done on slave songs and spirituals and was among the first to identify the African origins of the banjo.
Helen Walker-Hill, a concert pianist and independent researcher, is the foremost scholar on black women composers and her publications are the primary sources used to study a body of musical literature that has been largely overlooked. Walker-Hill's publications include Piano Music of Black Women Composers (1992); Music by Black Women Composers: A Bibliography of Available Scores (1995); From Spirituals to Concert Halls: African-American Women Composers and Their Music (2002); and two anthologies of piano music by black women composers.
CMBM Library Database Online
Of particular note to students, educators, and scholars is the news that the first portion of the CBMR Library Database is now available online at www.cbmr.org. Using STAR database, a sophisticated, searchable database software system, the staff is in the process of expanding its web site to help make the scholarship on black music and the black music experience more accessible.
'It has always been our dream to provide access to our collections to everyone, everywhere,' says Sands. 'Now that dream is becoming a reality. Our collections include archival materials dating back as far as the sixteenth century and spanning the globe. To know that a student in South Africa or Trinidad or Tokyo will be able to explore our holdings in Chicago at the touch of a button ' or the click of a mouse ' is simply wonderful.'
In addition to their central mission of research and preservation, the Center for Black Music Research presents public lectures, performances, and symposia throughout the year, as well as hosting international conferences and publishing two scholarly journals, a monograph series, a number of newsletters, and a book series with the University of California press. For more information call 312-344-7559 or visit http://cbmr.colum.edu.
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