Carnatic music has been a late addition to the collection. Apart from a few isolated examples, books and magazines, audio and video records are available in abundance, but are poorly archived, incompletely curated, and often inaccessible. In recent years, technology has come to the rescue and made it possible to archive in a variety of ways. We have some reserves abroad like Harvard and Wesleyan universities that have done this. In India, digitization and uploading on public platforms occurs, but many questions regarding artists’ rights and copyrights remain unresolved. This article deals with the experience of digitization and archiving at the Music Academy in Chennai.
Digitization of a repository
The Music Academy has also served as a repository throughout its 97 years. First of all it has its own publications. Secondly, the Academy has a truly fascinating library dedicated to the arts, containing over 6,000 books. Thirdly, there is the recorded collection, which is sadly not extensive, but still quite large. In an effort to make all this more easily accessible, the Sangeet Akademi has launched digitization initiatives over the last three years. Progress has been slow but steady, and it is expected that there will be a large, well-curated collection online in the coming years, although whether for a fee or for free remains a matter of debate.
Academy Publications
The Academy’s print collection includes books, newspaper clips and photographs. Its annual magazines and souvenirs have been published since its inception. While the former is valued for his scholarly articles and detailed reporting of the proceedings of the Academy’s annual conferences, the latterVery popular for its musician profiles, detailed song lists and historical content – ​​featuring snippets on the Academy’s development through commercials and commercials that serve as a record of the corporate, retail and entertainment worlds of the past. Both of these have been damaged by repeated handling by Academy staff, researchers and during library shifts throughout the campus. To prevent any further damage, these have been completely digitized and made available for download on the Sangeet Akademi website.
rare books in library
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 26/11/2024: Sangeet Academy Tag Digital Archive in Chennai on Tuesday. Photo: R. Ravindran Photo Courtesy: Raveendran_R
The KR Sundaram Iyer Memorial Library of the Sangeet Academy has many rare books in its vast collection. These include the oldest surviving Carnatic music book – the Sangeeta Sarvartha Sara Sangraamu Veena of Ramanuja, which dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century. There are also several first editions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Academy acquired the collection of books of Sangeetha Kalanidhi Amber Vijayaraghavacharya, Professor P. Sambamurthy and Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu. Vinjamuri Varadaraja Iyengar’s collection was donated to the Academy by his daughter Sandhya Vinjamuri Giri. In recent days, more donations have come. Digitization exercise was started with the help of Rosa Muthiah Research Library and for this around 300 rare books were identified. These are now available for in-house research in electronic form, eliminating the need to touch/access the original copies.
photo collection
Similarly, the Sangeet Akademi’s photograph collection has over 5,000 prints. These include a photograph from the 1927 conference to several photographs from the 1980s. These have all been digitized and labelled, and as many as possible are being identified. The focus now is on retrieving the photos from the 1990s, which are in CD format and cataloging them by transferring them to cloud storage. Digital photos are available for free in low resolution formats and for payment in high resolution upon request. In the digitization of books and photographs, the Academy has benefited greatly from the assistance provided by its Consultant Librarian, Mysore K.Jagadeesh.
Seeing what the Academy has done, families of some musicians and scholars have come forward to share their book collections as well as some memorabilia. The Academy has now formulated an acquisition policy and accepts those which are in line with its principles.
building a music collection
Collecting music has been more challenging. The Academy has been recording concerts and academic sessions held under its auspices since the 1950s – sporadically in the early years and regularly since at least the 1980s. Unfortunately, the Academy had very limited storage and over the years, many of its records were lost – some of them are now on YouTube, uploaded by music lovers believing that these are Academy performances! Serious work on the collection began in 2008 when RT Chari, industrialist and renowned patron, and then committee member and later Vice President at the Academy, outlined the establishment of the Music Academy-TAG collection with a listening centre. He also donated his music collection. Yes. Along with other collections including Narasimhan’s collection The HinduMusic stored in spools, cassettes and CDs began to be digitized. As a policy the Academy focuses on concerts and events organized under its auspices and avoids collections with branded labels. A large archive of audio and video of Academy performances has also been created since 2005. These are not available in the public domain.
Digitization of exhibits
As digitalization progressed, technology left it behind. YouTube and other platforms proliferated and as a result, viewership at the listening center declined. This was followed by a focus on cataloging and preserving music with curation of content. Many spools had no description of what they contained, and those that did had many errors. A team led by musician and archivist Savita Narasimhan got involved in this work. With input from scholars like Rita Rajan, RS Jayalakshmi, Sriram Parasuram and Kanakam Devaguptapu and technical input from Harini Rangan and Lakshman as well as a young team of Academy staff, work on the music is more or less complete, now the focus has shifted to Used to be. to dance.
building a platform to be heard
During the process of digitization the Academy received valuable help from technical expert V. Suresh. A full platform was created specifically for the Academy Collection with Entermedia, an international communications media agency. Although this helped, the inherent requirements of Carnatic music and classical dance exposed the limitations when it came to classification, and it was decided that it would be better for the Academy to create its own platform with Suresh’s help. A pilot project was presented at the 2023 annual conference and work has progressed rapidly since then.
The organization has not yet come to a conclusion on how its recordings can be shared with the larger public. There are questions regarding copyright etc., which need to be resolved. Hopefully these should be resolved before the collection can be made accessible to all.
published – November 30, 2024 03:37 PM IST