Hidden Years Music Archive

Last updated
Hiddenyears.jpg

The Hidden Years Music Archive is an archive and interdisciplinary research project dedicated to the preservation and study of alternative and popular South African music. Established by David Marks in 1990, the archive holds a collection of around 175 000 items, which includes sound recordings, photographs, posters, programs, documents, press cuttings, notebooks, and diaries... [1] The Hidden Years is a repository of urban folk tunes, township jazz expressions, country rock music, choir works, maskanda, and various traditional musics. In 2013 the archive was donated to the Documentation Centre for Music at Stellenbosch University and has since been managed by Dr Lizabé Lambrechts as the principal researcher and project leader. From 2017 the project has been hosted by the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University. [2]

Contents

History

The Hidden Years Music Archive Project was established by David Marks in 1990 in order to preserve, make accessible and share the music material he had collected.

Throughout his life, Marks was involved in the South African music scene as a singer-songwriter, sound engineer, producer and director of the 3rd Ear Music Company. The 3rd Ear Music Company was established in 1967 by Ben Segal and Audrey Smith as an independent record label to record, promote and produce music that was not considered commercially viable, or seen as too political by the major record companies and the State controlled broadcasting corporation. [3] Marks took over the directorship of this company in 1970 and started 3rd Ear Sound which was made possible by Bill Hanley who donated part of the sound system used at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair to David Marks [4]

Marks met Hanley in 1969 and was offered a job as part of Hanley's sound crew. During this time, Marks gained valuable experience while working on various tours and festivals including the Monterey Pop Festival, the Newport Folk Festival and the legendary Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. [5] Marks took photographs of these events and concerts. The photographs are preserved in the collection and became sought after in international publications.

In South Africa, Marks was soon immersed in the music scenes of Hillbrow, Johannesburg and Durban, producing studio recordings as well as recording live events and performances at the Jabulani Amphitheatre, the Totem at the Palm Beach Hotel in Durban, the Chelsea Theatre, the Ox Box, La Plaza, the New Troubadour, Mangles, and Le Chaim, Dorkay House, Bantu Men’s Social Club and the Market Theatre Café. Throughout his career, Marks amassed a collection of material that documents South African music from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s. The collection grew and today holds more than 3000 reel-to-reel tapes, 4000 cassette tapes, 6000 vinyl records, 28 000 photographs and many documents, posters, programmes and other related material.

Marks had a habit of recording whenever he was near the mixer, letting the tape run to record whatever was happening around him. This means that Marks’ recordings provide insight into the folk clubs, jazz restaurants, and music festivals in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and Lesotho during the 1970s and 1980s, he was involved with. Some of the musicians recorded in this collection includes Malombo, Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, Laurika Rauch, John Oakley Smith, Allen Kwela, Colin Shamley, Roger Lucey, Mike Dickman, Hugh Masekela, Spirits Rejoice, the Malopoets, and Richard John Smith [6] as well as African-American musicians including Brook Benton, Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Smith and Percy Sledge on their tours to South Africa in the 1970s. [7]

Funding and Support

The Hidden Years Music Archive has been supported by numerous institutions and foundations including the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), the National Lotteries Board (2001), the South African/Norwegian Education and Music Programme (MMINO, 2002-2004), and the National Research Foundation (2005-2008) for a project hosted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. [8] However, due to a lack of sustained funding and subsequent inefficient infrastructure and human capacity, the archive rapidly deteriorated.

In 2013 Marks donated the archive to Stellenbosch University where it is preserved at the Documentation Centre for Music. The project is managed by Lizabe Lambrechts, a Volkswagen Senior Researcher at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation. Funding and support for the project has since is donation largely been provided by the Volkswagen Foundation through a research grant, the Africa Open Institute and the Stellenbosch Library and Information Sciences. The project is also supported by Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator World Music at the British Library Sound Archive and Angela Impey, Music Department SOAS University of London.

In 2017, the name of the archive was changed to the Hidden Years Music Archive, abbreviated as Hidden Years. [9]

Notable Collections

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Album</span> Collection of audio recordings

An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on a medium such as compact disc (CD), vinyl (record), audio tape, or digital. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm recordss (78s) collected in a bound book resembling a photo album; this format evolved after 1948 into single vinyl long-playing (LP) records played at 33+13 rpm.

<i>Black Dots</i> 1996 demo album by Bad Brains

Black Dots is a demo album by the American rock band Bad Brains, released in 1996 by Caroline Records. It consists of one of the band's earliest recording sessions, which took place in 1979 at Inner Ear Studios with recording engineer Don Zientara. Black Dots features early versions of several songs that were later recorded for the band's first two studio albums, as well as songs that had never previously been released in any versions. The album showcases the band's hardcore punk origins, as well as their early foray into reggae with the song "The Man Won't Annoy Ya."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sound recording and reproduction</span> Recording of sound and playing it back

Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hugh Tracey</span> English Ethnomusicologist

Hugh Travers Tracey was an English ethnomusicologist. He and his wife collected and archived music from Southern and Central Africa. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Tracey made over 35,000 recordings of African folk music. He popularized the mbira internationally under the name kalimba.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Himalaya</span> Digital preservation project

The Digital Himalaya project was established in December 2000 by Mark Turin, Alan Macfarlane, Sara Shneiderman, and Sarah Harrison. The project's principal goal is to collect and preserve historical multimedia materials relating to the Himalaya, such as photographs, recordings, and journals, and make those resources available over the internet and offline, on external storage media. The project team have digitized older ethnographic collections and data sets that were deteriorating in their analogue formats, so as to protect them from deterioration and make them available and accessible to originating communities in the Himalayan region and a global community of scholars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Film and Sound Archive</span> Australias audiovisual archive

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), known as ScreenSound Australia from 1999 to 2004, is Australia's audiovisual archive, responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting, and providing access to a national collection of film, television, sound, radio, video games, new media, and related documents and artefacts. The collection ranges from works created in the late nineteenth century when the recorded sound and film industries were in their infancy, to those made in the present day.

<i>The Basement Tapes</i> 1975 studio album by Bob Dylan and the Band

The Basement Tapes is the sixteenth album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and his second with the Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records. Two-thirds of the album's 24 tracks feature Dylan on lead vocals backed by the Band, and were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, in the lapse between the release of Blonde on Blonde and the subsequent recording and release of John Wesley Harding, during sessions that began at Dylan's house in Woodstock, New York, then moved to the basement of Big Pink. While most of these had appeared on bootleg albums, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release. The remaining eight songs, all previously unavailable, feature the Band without Dylan and were recorded between 1967 and 1975.

Oral history preservation is the field that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials, whatever format they may be in. Oral history is a method of historical documentation, using interviews with living survivors of the time being investigated. Oral history often touches on topics scarcely touched on by written documents, and by doing so, fills in the gaps of records that make up early historical documents.

British Library Sounds is a British Library service providing free online access to a diverse range of spoken word, music and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive. Anyone with web access can use the service to search, browse and listen to 50,000 digitised recordings. Playback and download of an additional 22,000 recordings is available to Athens or Shibboleth users in UK higher and further education. The service was originally launched with funding by the Jisc.

Roger Lucey is a South African musician, journalist, filmmaker, actor, and educator. In the late 1970s and early 1980s his early career as a musician was destroyed by Paul Erasmus of the Security Branch of the South African Police, because the lyrics to Lucey's protest songs were considered a threat to the Apartheid State. Although already aware of his anti-apartheid songs, the South African Government's security apparatus only swung into action to destroy Lucey's career after he performed a radical song in a programme on Voice of America radio. The criminal methods used against Lucey formed part of the testimony given by Paul Erasmus in front of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

David Marks is a South African-born songwriter, singer, producer, music archivist, and publisher who has been a member of the South African music industry since the 1970s. He spent much of his early career mixing, recording, releasing, and archiving a broad cross-spectrum of South African music.

Marie Tapscott Slocombe (1912–1995) founded the BBC Sound Archive in 1936. Her keen interest in audio recordings and folk music have made her legacy important in the history of recorded sound.

The Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) forms part of the Special Collections Division of the Music Library within the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service and is located in the Music Department. Collections acquired through acquisitions, donations or bequests over more than 50 years form the main holdings and are mostly of South African but also of international significance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moses Asch</span> American record producer (1905–1986)

Moses Asch was an American recording engineer and record executive. He founded Asch Records, which then changed its name to Folkways Records when the label transitioned from 78 RPM recordings to LP records. Asch ran the Folkways label from 1948 until his death in 1986. Folkways was very influential in bringing folk music into the American cultural mainstream. Some of America's greatest folk songs were originally recorded for Asch, including "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie and "Goodnight Irene" by Lead Belly. Asch sold many commercial recordings to Verve Records; after his death, Asch's archive of ethnic recordings was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and released as Smithsonian Folkways Records.

Bill Hanley is an American audio engineer and is regarded as the "father of festival sound". He is most widely known as the sound engineer behind the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York in August 1969. He was also influential in a number of other festivals. According to Michael Lang, "I was trying to find someone who could do a sound system for Woodstock, and there was no one who had ever done something like that before. Then there was this crazy guy in Boston who might want to take a shot at it."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archives of Traditional Music</span> Archives by the Indiana University

The Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music holds over 100,000 individual audio and video recordings across over 3500 collections of field, broadcast, and commercial recordings. Its holdings are primarily focused on audiovisual recordings relating to research in the academic disciplines of ethnomusicology, folklore, anthropology, linguistics, and various area studies.

<i>Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive</i> 2019 live album by various artists

Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive is a live album by various artists, packaged as a box set of 38 CDs. It contains nearly all of the performances from the Woodstock music festival, which took place on August 15–18, 1969, in Bethel, New York. The CDs also include many stage announcements and miscellaneous audio material. The box set also contains bonus material such as a Blu-ray copy of the director's cut of the Woodstock documentary film, a hardcover book written by concert promoter Michael Lang, and a replica of the original concert program. It was released by Rhino Records on August 2, 2019, in a limited edition of 1,969 copies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephanus Muller</span> South African music scholar (b. 1971)

Stephanus Muller is a South African music scholar and writer who has written about South African twentieth-century composition, exile, archiving, language politics, music and apartheid and university institutional transformation. As the last chairman of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa, he was a founding member of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) in 2006. He also founded the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) in 2005 at Stellenbosch University, and the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at the same university in 2016. He received his BMus (performance) from Pretoria University in 1992, MMus (musicology) from the University of South Africa in 1998, and DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2001. Having studied with the writer Marlene van Niekerk, he also holds a MA in Creative Afrikaans writing from Stellenbosch University (2007).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation</span> Research institute

The Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to music studies. Founded in 2016 by the music scholar and writer Stephanus Muller, the institute provides supervision to postgraduate fellows from a variety of disciplines and functions as an independent research hub in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Its mission is to create an institutional space for scholars and artists that encourages experimentation and risk taking. AOI's community include postgraduate and postdoctoral fellows, extraordinary professors, research associates, composers, performers, sonic residents, archival and heritage practitioners and international partners.

Mhlahleni James "14" Shabalala was a South African Maskandi musician who came from Bergville in KwaZulu-Natal. He was part of the alternative music scene in South Africa. Shabalala was very popular as a result of his live performances at festivals and concerts throughout the country. He performed at the Splashy Fen festivals in the 1990s, and toured with musicians such as Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

References

  1. Lambrechts, Lizabé (2018). "Letting the tape run: the creation and preservation of the Hidden Years Music Archive". South African Journal of Cultural History. 2 (2): 1–23. hdl:10520/EJC-14fca9725f.
  2. Marks, David. "Hidden Years Music Archive". 3rd Ear Music. David Marks. Retrieved 13 July 2020.
  3. Lizabé Lambrechts,"The House where history ended up: Packing up the Ben Segal Collection", Fontes Artis Musicae, 62(3):166-182 and Alesha Bredell, "Scientific Analysis and idiosyncratic selections - A close reading of dust," 2015. Unpublished Master thesis, Stellenbosch University
  4. Lambrechts, Lizabé. "The Woodstock Sound System and South African sound reinforcement". herri. Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation. Retrieved 28 August 2020.
  5. Kane, John (2020). The Last Seat in the House: The Story of Hanley Sound. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 234–235.
  6. Lizabe Lambrechts, "letting the tape run", 13
  7. Ashrudeen Waggie,"'It's just a matter of time': African American musicians and the Cultural Boycott in South Africa (1970-1983)
  8. Lambrechts, Lizabé (2012). Ethnography and the Archive: Power and Politics in Five South African Music Archives. South Africa: Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Stellenbosch University. p. 149. Retrieved 13 July 2020.
  9. "Hidden Years Music Archive, preserving South Africa's music heritage". Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  10. Lambrechts, Lizabe. "Hidden Years". Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation. Retrieved 28 August 2020.