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| Columbia Partners With ARChive of Contemporary Music A vast collection of sound recordings, books, photos, films, and music-related memorabilia will assist future research and help further integrate the arts into the University's educational experience, thanks to a recent agreement between Columbia University Libraries, the Arts Initiative at Columbia, and the ARChive of Contemporary Music, the world's largest archive of popular music. Founded in 1985, ARC collects popular recordings from around the world made since 1950. "Every style of music, two copies of each, " says ARC founder and director, Bob George, "except for classical-era Western art music, " such as Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, which he says other libraries already excel at collecting. ARC has more than 2 million sound recordings, including a 50, 000 disc world music collection and the Keith Richards Blues Collection, endowed by Richards, the famous Rolling Stones guitarist, which recently acquired a very rare original 78 recording of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues"/"Little Queen of Spades." The collection also contains some 3 million books, photos, press kits, videos and other musical ephemera. ARC is supported by a remarkable board of advisors that includes a number of artistic luminaries: David Bowie, Jellybean Benitez, Jonathan Demme, Ellie Greenwich, Jerry Leiber, Youssou N'Dour, Lou Reed, Keith Richards, Nile Rodgers, Todd Rundgren, Fred Schneider, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon and Mike Stoller. One of the first projects to be undertaken through the new partnership is a user-friendly, online version of ARC's catalog, which George says, "will work more like Google and Amazon, as opposed to LEO or CLIO, " the standard online library catalogs. In terms of ARC's vast collection of music, Damon Jaggars, Columbia's associate university librarian for collections and services, says, "Our first step is to make sure that our researchers, and researchers across the world, know what's there and that they can get at it." He describes ARC as a "deep collection" with "a lot of energy" which will help support future research as well as current research and teaching at the University. The Columbia Arts Initiative will also work with ARC to develop and implement public programming, such as concerts and exhibitions, as well as some unique events. George envisions projects that will engage the entire University community, like day-long cataloging marathons, concerts and seminars all focused on a certain kind of music—for instance, Muslim music or Cuban music. Although much is still open for discussion—right now a faculty advising group is being formed to consult in the ARC collaboration—Arts Initiative Director Gregory Mosher sees the archive as "a vast and potentially powerful way to reach into the both extracurricular and pedagogical mission of the University, " from providing students researching the Depression with the lyrics to dust bowl ballads to staging performances and events that would involve the local community. "Where this is all headed, we hope, is toward the creation of the first Center for Popular Music, " Mosher says. While the idea for such a center is still in its infancy, Mosher feels "you can easily imagine Columbians and New Yorkers coming together in this place to experience music and to learn more about music and musical history." Just what qualifies as popular music, meanwhile, is open to interpretation at ARC. "We have no interest in quality, whatsoever, " says George. In fact, unlike other music collections, George says ARC was the result of "collecting information about sound recordings that no one else was interested in, " like punk rock and rap singles, which twenty-five years later are considered culturally significant. The collection began with 47, 000 records that George acquired in the 1970s as a DJ and record producer, which he then attempted to donate to libraries in the early 1980s unsuccessfully. "Most of them were reggae, hip hop, punk, art and experimental—sort of exactly what pop music is today, a blend of all those things—and nobody wanted the records, " he says. "People wanted the stuff that had some caché behind it." It was George, says Mosher, who "understood before anybody else understood how this music was able to reveal culture, both American and world culture." write your comments about the article :: © 2009 Jazz News :: home page |