The Western Australian New Music Archive: finding, accessing, remembering and performing a community of practice (original) (raw)
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What is New, Here? Locating an Art Form Within the Western Australian New Music Archive
Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association
• Due to the diverse nature of the community being represented in WANMA, it has been necessary to design the web portal in a way that facilitates this diversity in background and creative practice. • The activities and concerns of project partners can provide direction in regard to identifying and constructing the parameters of the collection items being sought for archive of this nature. • The interplay between real and digital collection items remains in constant flux and is in continual need of reappraisal as technologies change.
Archiving the new, for future users unknown: Western Australian New Music Archive
Associate Professor Cat Hope, along with colleague and collaborator Tos Mahoney, is one of Western Australia’s leading proponents of New Music, and the instigator of the development of the Western Australian New Music Archive (WANMA), that was launched on 20 May 2015, at the State Library of Western Australia. As co-curator of WANMA, alongside Mahoney, Hope is a key determinant of its contents. Consequently, Hope’s working definitions of new music and of the role and function of an archive are critical areas of interest and key to realising the communicative vision of this project which is also sponsored by Tura New Music, the State Library of Western Australia, the National Library of Australia and ABC Classic FM. Using guided reflection, this paper interrogates the principles and purpose of constructing a digital archive and the ways in which it is designed with future users in mind. It considers the challenges posed by an archive that captures and contains an art form which is often site-specific or ephemeral.
The Western Australian New Music Archive: Performing as remembering
2015
New music' refers to experimental, exploratory music. The definition adopted for the Western Australian New Music Archive (WANMA) is that used by the Australian Music Centre to define 'composition in sound'. It includes notated composition, electroacoustic music, improvised music (including contemporary jazz), electronica, sound art, installation sound, multimedia, web and film sound, and related genres and techniques. 1 The curation of WANMA is guided by, and confronts the challenges presented by, such a broad definition, with a focus on constructing a representative canon of Western Australian new music history from 1970 to the present day. A drawback of the Western Australian music collection at the State Library of Western Australia (SLWA), and indeed of many other Australian music collections (such as that at the Australian Music Centre and UWA's Callaway Collection)
New music is an area of creative practice informed both by Western art music tradition and the avant-garde's fluid notions of progress and structural transgression. This paper examines how improvisatory practices in new music repertoire impact the value and interpretation of collection materials contained in the Western Australian New Music Archive, a digital repository for Western Australian new music heritage items. The nature of improvised music practice affects the way that notions of immediacy, relevance and essentiality are performed and articulated in new music works. As a digital collection, the archive mediates these already mediated recordings of tangible performances significantly through its delivery. However, written and improvised approaches to music creation are also tethered to different performative modes that inform the perceived nature of a particular work. From highly conceptual pieces that utilise cutting edge technology and experimental notions of structure and form to push the boundaries of compositional possibility to the spontaneous performativity of improvised sound, new music presents itself as relevant through a set of codified performative structures. As a set of performances contained within a particular collection that is related to a specific community, the Western Australian New Music Archive also presents a mediated version of that community, presented and constructed with the assistance of that community. This paper seeks to highlight the ways in which improvisation and composed repertoire work with, around and against each other in various works contained in the archive.
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Should people working in early music be regarded as some sort of special category, apart from any type of professional musician? The question was posed in a recent discussion with ABC Classic FM producers, and it's a fair question that deserves some answers, especially if any statement about the health and future of historical performance in Australia is to be formulated. Put simply, does early music have to be a special case? And why a special online Directory for Early Music hosted by the Music Council of Australia? It is felt by some that Early Music as a concept lacks clear definition; even that it may have had its day, like a minority political party that has served its function, and outlived its purpose. How else to account for the fact that historical performance does not appear to have established a firm position in our tertiary institutions? Yet more and more CDs by 'historically informed' performers are coming on to the market; Sydney subscription concerts by t...
Australasian Sound Archive, 2018
This paper presents a case study on a small audio archive, that belonging to the School of Music, Australian National University and a project focused on its digitisation. The paper first introduces the collaborative nature of the audio archiving project before addressing the various challenges, implications and pedagogical opportunities presented. Currently stored in the Australian National University’s School of Music, the archive features more than twelve hundred recital and concert tapes. The archive features multiple recordings of historical significance, yet there are various issues surrounding its preservation. Ultimately, this paper addresses matters of history and heritage, storage and preservation, as well as research and pedagogical design in audio archiving.
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Between 2005 and 2013, film-music composer Trevor Jones donated around 1000 items relating to his film and television scores to the University of Leeds. The collection includes audio and video materials alongside associated paperwork, and some musical sketches and scores. In order to undertake research into the Trevor Jones Archive, the entire collection required digitization and cataloguing, both to facilitate navigation of the materials, and enable understanding of the relationships between them and the processes that they document. This paper considers the practicalities of working with the archive including matters relating to the digitization of a range of analogue and paper-based items, the creation of appropriate metadata and repository structures, and the prioritization of some parts of the collection over others. It is hoped that the lessons learned through this activity highlight some of the issues and considerations of working with archival audiovisual materials, and provide a roadmap for those working with similar collections.
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The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia (NRP) was conceived in 2002 and launched at the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land in August 2004. The primary motivations behind the NRP were as much philosophical as they were pragmatic. First, those of us who envisioned the potential usefulness of such an initiative were dissatisfied at the way that Indigenous communities were rarely able to access, within their own localities, the decades of recorded materials held in collections worldwide that documented their cultural heritage. So to encourage collectors to make their recordings immediately available to their source communities, rather than stockpiling them in shoeboxes under their desks as in many instances in decades past, we have since fostered a national network of interested people from academic, technical and Indigenous community backgrounds through the NRP, which is working collaboratively towards this end. Fundamentally, the NRP aims to develop a national digital repository through which all Indigenous communities in Australia will be able to store and access any existing and future recordings of their music and dance heritage from within their own home towns. Second, we seek to achieve this aim by sustaining a collegial network through which leading Indigenous cultural exponents can share information and shape new strategies for content delivery with recognised world leaders in the field of digital archiving and sustainable repositories.