How to archive African music: a handbook for Hugh Tracey’s library of transcriptions
A practical handbook for the librarians of Hugh Tracey’s African Music Transcription Library, on how materials meant to preserve or transcribe recorded music were organized and used.
The story
In the twentieth century ethnomusicology, the study of music across cultures, was growing, and its researchers looked for orderly ways to gather performances, describe them and study them. Hugh Tracey’s African Music Transcription Library held materials meant to preserve or transcribe recorded music, and a library like that needs rules: how its holdings are arranged, described and put to use. This is the handbook for its librarians.
Read now, it is less a history of African music than a record of method: how one archive set about organising sound, and the assumptions of its time that went into the work. It was published in Johannesburg by Gallo (Africa); the record gives no date. This copy is about 24 centimetres tall, in black grained covers lettered in gilt.
Details
- Date
- undated
- Publisher
- Gallo (Africa), Johannesburg
- Binding
- black grained covers lettered in gilt
