POSITION PAPER: PRESERVATION OF MUSIC

The study of the preservation of music and archiving of the many different types of popular
music cultures is a large and developing field of study. Recent books, such as Preserving Popular
Music Past and Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, have highlighted
the efforts of 'DIY preservationists,' as Andy Bennett- an English singer and musician, best
known for his work with “Ocean Colour Scene”, describes them, to document, conserve, and
broadly disseminate the heritage of popular music. This community-led initiative's activist
involvement with archive practice stems from a recognition that popular music has historically
been overlooked in museum collections or used for exhibition and interpretation but not
collected. The urgency of documenting and collecting these items is heightened by industry
reports indicating that grassroots music venues (and consequently cultures) are constantly
threatened with closure.

Historically, preservation of printed music was largely neglected until the mid-19th century.
There is evidence that Australian librarians still do not regard preservation of music collections
as worthy of high priority. Music librarians encounter preservation problems identical with those
of other collections: acidic paper, brittle books, adverse environmental conditions and
problematic bindings. To these are added important differences, including international sources
of paper, storage and handling, varied formats and sizes, music notation, reformatting methods
and performance acceptability. Much of the more recent literature describes successful solutions
to some of these problems, and Australian music librarians are urged to work together to raise
consciousness of preservation issues.
Section 1 of the book covers methods for collecting and establishing connections with music
communities from the position of an institution. Andy Leach and Jennie Thomas discuss
preserving rock-and-roll history in Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, through the
NEO Sound project. They clearly highlight the intangible nature of music heritage, asking 'how
can you properly capture the history and influence of something that is over in three minutes and
30 seconds?' (3). This chapter highlights the importance of pre-existing community relationships
that can be grown and developed via strategic documentation and collecting projects. Useful
methods include the development of community advisory groups, utilizing branding and
marketing to establish a clear project identity, community scanning days to scope and acquire
digital copies of material, and employing curatorial staff with existing profiles in the local music
scene.

Rory Grennan, Katherine Nicols and Scott Schwartz discuss establishing a regional music
archive at the University of Illinois. Their approach involved the utilisation of a strategic
framework to 'evaluate what functions… [they] wanted to document and what potential
documentation might arise from these activities' (21). This approach acknowledges that
documentary practice or documentary records do not necessarily pre-exist in music scenes, but
sometimes need to be consciously co-created as part of collecting projects. As they write, 'gaps
in documentation are to be expected in any local survey and should, perhaps, be expected more
frequently in projects related to music. Rehearsal and performance of music do not naturally
create records, and many regional music careers have come and gone without any documentation
at all' (21). To counteract this, the authors undertook oral history work to fill documentary gaps.

Norie Guthrie writes about her experiences of building the Houston Folk Music Archive.
Choosing to avoid traditional methods (as adopted in the previous chapters), Guthrie built trust
with potential donors through working in local music spaces and becoming actively engaged in
the cultures she wanted to document. In her case, this included volunteering/working for a venue,
which enabled her to embed herself within a culture and also develop reciprocal modes of labour
that supported both spaces and archive services. Megan Fraser and Melissa Hadley’s chapter
explores building punk rock collections at UCLA. As well as musical heritage led by makers of
music, this chapter also draws on the importance of fan-based collections in musical heritage,
including fanzines and collections of ephemera collected by fans of punk in Southern California.

Section two covers leveraging archival materials in education, preservation and research.
Andrew A. Klein looks at the use of the Houston Folk Music Archive for teaching. This chapter
documents a fruitful collaboration between archivists, educators and musicians. In the following
chapter, Jessica Thompson explores the impact of audio preservationists in the process of
transferring original recordings to digital preservation-quality formats. She considers the noise of
physical formats as another way of document a recording’s provenance and use. As she writes,
'noise can be read as information about a recording, its history, the technological processes that
brought it to its current state, and how those processes modified the original content in relation to
the original recording as it corresponds to the original performance. Placed in that context, the
noise itself is a signifier of provenance and life span' (76-77). In creating preservation copies of
musical recordings, preservationists need to be critically aware of the significance of audio noise
and able to navigate transfer processes in a way which engenders the creation of authentic and
useful new recordings that preserve the sonic traces of the original.

Finally in this section, Jesse Jarnow looks at the personal collection of LSD and counter-cultural
artefacts related to LSD, owned and collected by Mark McCloud. This chapter draws attention to
the common instance of large collections of subcultural art and objects which are housed in
private residences. The case of the McCloud collection, which contains ephemeral and also
illegal materials, raises interesting questions about the ways in which collecting and legal
structures intersect. As Jarrow writes, 'in addition to being an ongoing act of legally recognised
archival civil disobedience and resistance, it is the most thorough collection of its kind in the
world, a skeleton key for other collections and necessary for a complete understanding of
decades of underground music and how it was listened to in its original contexts' (93). This
chapter also describes the archival functions of Grateful Dead fandom communities, particularly
the development of documentary practice through online communities and the Internet Archive.

Section three of the book covers 'outsider' modes of engaging with music archiving and
presentation. Anthony Kwame Harrison writes from the position of an academic, cassette
collector and potential archivist of a collection of underground Bay Area hip hop cassettes. This
article draws on a broad sense of archives to reposition a cassette collection as an emerging
archive of practice, community and networks. As Harrison writes, 'traces, such as security tags
and price stickers, provide potentially valuable clues about the ways in which West Coast
underground hip-hop cassettes circulated and were consumed' (116). Later in the same section
Jeremy Berg looks at reissue labels as archivists of sorts, who are motivated by the need to
preserve and make available lost treasures to new generations of music fans.

In another chapter, Scott Carlson writes about fan-made bootleg compilations as a method of
preservation. Bootlegs are 'made, distributed, or sold illegally' and 'are represented largely by
unauthorised releases that encompass concerts, live broadcasts, studio outtakes, rehearsals, and
demonstration recordings' (159). The makers of bootleg compilations can be situated as ''rogue'
memory workers'1, who construct archives and safeguard materials that are not normally
preserved in heritage institutions.

Nor Guthrie and Scott Carlson explore the impact of digital recording devices and storage on the
preservation of recorded music. Focusing on small and DIY record labels, they draw attention to
the precariousness of digital storage in this context, giving the case of 'one independent record
label owner [who] told us how he feared that his life’s work, spread out over a couple of hard
drives and an online backup service, could be lost swiftly and simply through a small fire or a
data back up failure' (125). In order to empower small record label owners to engage with digital
preservation, Guthrie and Carlson developed Indie Preserves, an outreach project that worked
directly with creating communities. Indie Preserves asked 'music creators to be more aware of
what they were creating and to be better stewards of their own work' (131-2) through the
development of shared resources and tools. The authors write about their intentions but also,
boldly and crucially, about the ways in which the project was not taken up by their desired

1 De Kosnik, A. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press: Cambridge,
MA, 2012, p. 2.
audiences. We need more such acknowledgement of project failures in academic scholarship, to
enable the profession to learn from others’ past mistakes.

The case studies and contexts in this volume clearly illustrate the diverse and innovative ways in
which music heritage documentation, archiving and preservation are conceived of and practiced.
From cassette collectors to archival outreach initiatives and institutional collecting projects, this
volume showcases a collective and activism-infused energy to ensure that the archival traces and
documentary evidence of music cultures and spaces are kept safe for generations to come.

Kirsty Fife, PhD Student

University College London, UK
k.fife.12@ucl.ac.uk

The study of the preservation and archiving of the many different types of popular music cultures is a
large and developing field of study. Recent books, such as Preserving Popular Music Past and Sites of
Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, have highlighted the efforts of 'DIY
preservationists,' as Andy Bennett describes them, to document, conserve, and broadly disseminate the
heritage of popular music. This community-led initiative's activist involvement with archive practice
stems from a recognition that popular music has historically been overlooked in museum collections, or
used for exhibition and interpretation but not collected. The urgency of documenting and collecting
these items is heightened by industry reports indicating that grassroots music venues (and consequently
cultures) are constantly threatened with closure. Preserving Music