The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is located in Grahamstown, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. Its founder, Hugh Tracey (1903-1977) was born in England and emigrated to South Africa after the First World War to work on his brother’s tobacco farm, in what was then called Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Inspired by the music of the local farm workers, he followed in the tradition of the European folklorists and began to record African music from the 1930s (see Tracey, in Lucia, 2005:44). Over the years Tracey developed ambitious projects for documenting and researching traditional African music in sub-Saharan Africa, and what started out as a private research initiative developed into the African Music Research Unit in 1947, the African Music Society in 1948, and finally the establishment of the International Library of African Music in 1954 at a base in Roodepoort, outside Johannesburg (Lobley, 2011:419). Initially, Hugh Tracey’s field recording tours and the release of some of his recorded material was made possible through financial backing from the Gallo Record Company, and later support came from the mining industry (Tracey, 1973:4-5). Since its official establishment, ILAM has served as the headquarters of the African Music Society and is responsible for editing and issuing the annual journal African
Music, (the only journal dedicated completely to African music). The collection has grown to
include donations from ethnomusicologists such as John Blacking, Andrew Tracey, Dave Dargie and Diane Thram.
Hugh Tracey conducted several recording tours during his lifetime, spanning over four decades, in central, eastern and southern parts of Africa, building up a collection which includes over 25 000 field recordings, various instruments (most of them still playable), photographs and documents of the music he collected, as well as a library of books relating to African music. This material makes ILAM the largest single archive of sub-Saharan African music in the world. From his field recordings, Hugh Tracey published two major collections:
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the Sound of Africa series, consisting of 218 LPs, and the Music of Africa series, consisting of 25 LPs. He also published several books, and delivered international as well as national seminars and talks.1 After Hugh Tracey’s death in 1977, ILAM was moved to Rhodes University in Grahamstown and Andrew Tracey took over from his father as Director in 1978. He stayed in this position until 2005 when he retired and Diane Thram became the current Director of ILAM.
Figure 1: Photograph of ILAM’s interior displaying part of their instrument collection (Lambrechts, 2011)
ILAM is currently housed in a purpose-built building that includes a digitisation studio, a small library, a classroom, three offices for the director and assistants as well as a
temperature controlled storage room for the collection. An outside amphitheatre spans the front corner of the building and is used for music and dance performances. Walking into ILAM one is greeted by a dark ochre interior with African instruments adorning every wall: mbiras (in all shapes and sizes), pan-pipes, horizontal bow harps, wishbone lyres, antelope
1
See Chopi Musicians: Their Music, Poetry, and Instruments (1948); African Dances of the
Witwatersrand Gold Mines (1952); The Evolution of African Music and its Function in the Present Day (1961). Tracey also worked as the Head of Programmes for the South African Broadcasting
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horns, wrist bells, stamping tubes, rattles and flutes of all kinds which are suspended from the roof above a beautiful collection of drums and marimbas. Photographs of Hugh Tracey are arranged on one wall, along with a bronze bust, a commemorative plaque in honour of him and a photograph of his son Andrew Tracey.
Armed with my research questions, a theoretical background of reading in archival
management and practice, and an awareness of some of the challenges faced by archivists, I arrived at ILAM without knowing what to expect, or exactly what I was looking for. I had even more difficulty explaining what it was that I was planning to do at the archive for a whole week – hanging around is not a natural state of being or acceptable behaviour in an archive where researchers are usually working against the clock to find what they are looking for. These feelings of uncertainty gradually abated as I started to find my feet in the role of ethnographer, gathering material and conducting interviews. Closely observing, asking questions and getting to know how the archival systems had been set up and was being run made me realise that this archive does not allow for easy classifications (see Reflection above). Although other collections and projects form part of ILAM’s holdings, by far the largest part of the archive remains Hugh Tracey’s recordings. It is here that Hugh Tracey’s legacy and stature is most effectively disseminated worldwide, and ILAM has become a centre for Africanist scholars, teachers, composers and performers
internationally. However, apart from the reverence of those working at ILAM for Tracey’s legacy, his field recordings collected in colonial Africa and Apartheid South Africa are also the source of some ambivalence: on the one hand they represent the achievement of a “musical explorer”, “collector” and “conservationist”; on the other the collection is seen as evidence of an “imperialist exploiter of ‘Other People’s’ cultures, a colonialist, a puritanical preservationist” (Lucia, 2011).2
Furthermore, this archive does not only comprise a material reality that faces funding and preservation issues, but also exists of, and in, various other systems and organisations, including the bigger structure of Rhodes University and the Department of Music and
2
These remarks of Lucia formed part of a speech given by her in May 2011 at ILAM (Lucia, 2011) and palpably address some of the core issues at stake in exploring ILAM as a site of cultural production. For other engagements with Tracey’s legacy see Peek (1970), Pantaleoni (1971), Erlmann (1991), Agawu (2003, 2003a), Lobley (2010) and Coetzee (2011).
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Musicology where Diane Thram coordinates the undergraduate and post-graduate ethnomusicological degrees.3 It belongs to an international community of scholars interested in African music, but also has local community projects in various stages of completion. These projects, mainly steered by the three consecutive directors, have to a large extent influenced the direction of the archive and its function.
Hugh Tracey, for example, had the vision of creating textbooks of ‘authentic’ African music in his Codification and Textbook Project (1969) by documenting all the musics of sub- Saharan Africa and using these to produce teaching materials. This project is still being pursued by the current director of ILAM, Diane Thram, as part of ILAM’s Music Heritage Project.4 Thram also developed a Hugh Tracey exhibition project called For Future Generations (2011) that has travelled South Africa during the past year. Andrew Tracey
developed various projects to keep ILAM a ‘living archive’ through teaching, staging regular performances, research and workshop presentations. He initiated the Symposium on Ethnomusicology as an annual conference in 1980, that provided an important platform for ethnomusicological scholars during the Apartheid years. (Thram, 2010:16; Ballantine, 2010:96).5 Diane Thram set out to properly catalogue all of ILAM’s holdings and garner funding for a large digitisation project for ILAM’s holdings, including field recordings, photographs and documents (2008). She also launched the Eastern Cape Jazz programme (2009) in collaboration with the Red Location Museum in New Brighton outside of Port Elizabeth, which includes an oral history project that will in future become part of ILAM’s holdings (Thram, DT 16/02/2011). The varied nature of these projects clearly demonstrates the cultural, social and personal situatedness of an archive as an institution collected, maintained and produced by individuals with specific interests and focus areas.
3
With its current affiliation to the Rhodes University and specifically the Department of Music and Musicology, ILAM was ideally situated to initiate an ethnomusicological degree. Through the work of Diane Thram, who arrived in Grahamstown in 1999, and Andrew Tracey, an undergraduate and post- graduate degree in Ethnomusicology was established, coordinated by ILAM (Thram, DT 16/02/2011). 4
This project entails the development of material for the Arts and Culture Curriculum in South African schools from the archived recordings and images held at ILAM (Thram, 2010:17). 5
The Symposium for Ethnomusicology merged with the Musicological Society of Southern African in 2006 to form the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM).
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ILAM has grown in terms of projects, focus and function since its creation in 1954, but still the vision and mission that Hugh Tracey set out at the start of ILAM stands at the core of ILAM’s current vision namely “to discover, record, analyse, and archive the music of sub- Saharan Africa, with the object of establishing a theory of music making in Africa and assessing the social, cultural and artistic values of African music” (International Library of
African Music (ILAM)). Furthermore, Hugh Tracey’s collection, due to its sheer physical size
as well as its conceptual and musical importance to scholars and musicians and strategic importance in leveraging funds for the archive, remains a central part of the institution he founded.
As alluded to above, it is not an un-problematic collection and due to its prominence in the archive, it still infuses ILAM with its systems of classification, codification and arrangement. This is not an occurrence confined to ILAM, but a challenge faced in numerous archives that started out as personal or ethnographic collections that reflect the interest, aims and idiosyncrasies of their creators, a point I will engage with in more detail below. In this chapter I propose that an exploration of the methodologies of archive making could provide valuable insights into the complicities and complexities of a collection such as Hugh
Tracey’s, forming the core of one of South Africa’s most prominent music archives.These methods and processes are transformed into objects, catalogues, chronologies, criteria for value and projects that provide a material reality to interactions between the personal and the disciplinary in processes of power and control. In order to interrogate the
methodological mechanisms of the archive I will explore three of the core activities of the archive during Hugh Tracey’s time as director of ILAM – namely recording, cataloguing and repatriation – as instances of archive making that still lend a very distinctive character to the current functioning of ILAM.