Conference – Music Archives in Southern Africa. Challenges, Opportunities, Innovation

16 November 2021 – 9.00-16.30
Dibuka Library at the Alliance française JHB

Worldwide, and for several decades, archive centres have received, classified, preserved, and promoted sound and audiovisual sources from public administrations or private collections. However, when it comes to music archives and collections, very few institutions in southern Africa are dedicated to such collection, preservation, and curation. Many collections in private care are at risk of being lost or thrown away. The archives that do preserve this heritage face increasing challenges to look after their collections and make their material available for users. Not only is material carriers becoming increasingly obsolete —think about reel-to-reel tapes or a VHS tape— but the cost of digitizing and making that material available is still relatively high. This poses a real challenge to music archives as users are no longer accessing material “through the projection of a film or the listening of a cassette,” but “audiovisual archives are revealed, analysed, communicated” through digitized files. Similarly, Sandrine Gill notes that for “natively digital audiovisual archives, the issues of communication, dissemination and perpetuation are posed in other, equally complex terms: although they are in digital form, these archives call upon their own cognitive and memory faculties. One does not view an archive document or listen to a recording in the same way as one reads a written document.” This presents a variety of challenges to archivists, curators, and researchers, but also opportunities for innovation. 
 
The conference organised by IFAS-Research aims to address these challenges in a southern African context by inviting researchers, curators, and experts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to discuss these issues during a day-long conference. The conference will be organized in three sessions: 

1. Challenges and opportunities of curating music archive in southern Africa
2. Digitality and the cost of taking music archive online
3. Finding and using music archive in the global South.

 
Participants will be invited to offer their views on the (re)discovery of musical sources and their methodological reflexion on the curation and conservation of such archives. What are the questions they ask when deciding what is musical heritage and what is not? What to preserve and what not?  What are the challenges of conserving music archives in relation to copyright legislation and digital costs; what are some of the uses of these resources by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and social scientists?  We hope to engender a lively discussion that will benefit both archival professions, researchers and curators involved and interested in the care and use of southern Africa’s music heritage. 

RSVP REQUIRED. If you wish to attend the conference via Zoom, please send us an email (comm.research@ifas.org.za) to receive the link.