Music, Songs and Stories: Archival Selections from India
  • The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) is a non-governmental organization established in 1982, with the aim of creating an integrated archive in India where recordings of Indian music and performance held in archives around the world could be made available through centralized mechanism. Today ARCE houses more than 25,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, including unique materials from all over India, ranging from the classical music genres to oral narratives. In 2016, ICHCAP supported the ARCE in digitizing around five hundred hours of analogue recordings through the Digitization Project of ICH-related Analogue Audiovisual Materials. Some of materials representative of Indian traditions were chosen and reproduced as [Music, Songs and Stories: Archival Selection from India], so they can be enjoyed by more people. The Indian collection consists of nine CDs that feature audio materials recorded between the 1930s and the 1990s. The CDs list seventy tracks, including songs of everyday life, oral epics, and tribal communities. The first and second CDs, in particular, feature tracks recorded by Arnold Adrian Bake (1899-1963), a Dutch folk musician. He recorded lullabies, work songs, and sounds of rituals and everyday life while he was traveling around India in the 1930s. Lullabies, work songs, and sounds of rituals and everyday life that he recorded while he was traveling around India in the 1930s are well presented here. This project is particularly important as it resulted in restoring analogue recordings at risk of permanent damage and digitizing them to enhance their academic value and public visibility. ICHCAP hopes that this collection will enable not just researchers in the relevant fields but also the general public to learn more about and become familiar with Indian ICH.
  • The indigenous tribal communities of India belong to various language families. This selection of music comes from the region of what was known as Bastar and its surroundings but is today divided into the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. This album presents some samples of the music of the Maria, Muria, and Pardhans. These subgroups are part of the larger Gond family. Gondi and the related languages belong to the Dravidian family. It provides a glimpse into the intangible cultural heritage of the tribes of Central India. These recordings were made between 1978 and 1982 by ethnomusicologist Roderic Knight. They provide a glimpse into the tribal communities, which are fast changing.

Audios