Alert: Taking It All Back Home - Repatriating Sound Recordings

[CJB]

Taking It All Back Home

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075p6n9

British singer and song-collector Sam Lee explores how archives and
institutions around the world are looking to repatriate sound
recordings. In what sense can a sound be 'taken back'? And what is the
impact on the families and communities re-acquainted with the voices
of their past?

What does repatriation say for the future of ethnomusicology and
song-collecting? And what are the problems - legal and ethical - faced
by institutions seeking to reunite sound and source? A self-described
song-forager, Sam reflects on how digital technology and the opening
up of archives has impacted on the practices and ethics involved in
conserving and championing singing traditions and oral cultures.

Sam begins at home, London, and the archives of the British Library,
amidst wax cylinders and tales of the turn-of-the-century recordists
who strode out into the 'field' to document the world's oral cultures.
With lead curator Janet Topp Fargion he discusses the role of
recording technology in the work of salvage ethnographers and - more
recently - UNESCO-driven programmes aimed at 'safeguarding intangible
heritage'. The efforts of early ethnographers and enthusiasts have now
become important tools for new generations of scholars, educators and
musicians looking to reclaim their cultural heritage, as James
Isabirye explains.

For sound curator Noel Lobley, the most exciting examples of the
archive 'opening up' occur when the material is used in creative ways.
He describes one project in South Africa where sound repatriation has
taken on a more performative, public guise, with the Xhosa recordings
of British collector Hugh Tracey being made to resonate in new
contexts through the work of local DJs and promoters who took the
songs from the shelves of the archive to the sound systems of the
township streets.

'Taking it all back home' has come to mean something very personal for
Nanobah Becker, a Navajo filmmaker who, while studying at Columbia
University, discovered that the voices of her grandfather and
great-grandfather were contained amongst the collection of recordings
housed in the ethnomusicology department. Her knocking on the door and
asking for them back began a process of cultural celebration for her
whole family, and Sam travels to Window Rock in Arizona to meet three
Becker generations to find out how song has been crucial to their
relationship with their own history.

Release date:
BBC Radio 3
3 April 2016 - Sunday 18:45 (BST/DST)
45 minutes