A. Kori Hill
When you need to learn more about a topic, where do you go? Maybe you look up info on Wikipedia; maybe you go to your teacher and ask for recommendations; maybe you go to the library and check out some books.
But what if you have a question about the material that the author is talking about in the books you check out? What if, for example, you want to read all of Marian Anderson’s diary? What if you want to see one of Fanny Hensel’s letters she wrote to her brother, Felix Mendelssohn? These items aren’t readily housed in a museum for you to go and look at. They’re housed in another type of facility that we don’t often learn about until we’re an adult––archives.
Archives are a mixture of museum and library. They can be stand-alone institutions OR connected to a university or museum. They hold letters, diaries, photographs, books, posters, CDs, film reels, and other items that used to be owned by people from the past. Archivists are folks that make sure the materials stay safe, organized, and are handled properly: sometimes you need to wear gloves because the materials are so delicate, other times holding the items with your bare hands is better. Archivists often oversee or do the work of organizing the materials of a person’s collection; that way, anyone who wants to look at a specific part of a person’s collection knows the box and folder they should request when they visit the archive.
That’s the other thing––you can go look at this stuff! Some archives are very particular in that you can only visit if you’re a scholar working on a particular project. Others only allow adults unless it’s for a class field trip. Some, like the Library of Congress in DC, require that you get an ID card before you can visit certain divisions and look at specific materials. As a musicologist, I’ve been to the Performing Arts division, where they store collections of folks like Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, and more! They also have a recorded media division, where you can listen to recording technologies we don’t use anymore, like wax cylinders!
Another important archive is the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago. This one is part of the Special Collections Division of Columbia College; it was established and built by Dr. Floyd and has a TON of really cool stuff: recordings of all kinds of music from the African diaspora, on vinyl, cassette, and CD. There are newspaper clippings, program notes and booklets, and personal papers from major folks and organizations in Black music studies and classical music history, like the National Association of Negro Musicians, scholars Eileen Southern, Dominique-René de Lerma, and Doris McGinty, and so many more. Archives are important because this is where the information and materials that you read about in books is drawn from.
Now, it’s important to note that all materials that could be in an archive aren’t always stored there. Sometimes they’re owned by individuals; end up in thrift stores and pawn shops; sometimes they’re thrown away! Other times, information isn’t written down but passed to the next generation verbally, what we call oral tradition.
Because important materials from people’s lives aren’t always preserved or respected, we don’t have everything we could or should have saved to tell us everything there is to know about how people made and listened to music. But what we do have is still a lot, and it’s important to recognize that the books you read and the information you memorize and use are the result of scholars going in, looking through archives, and recognizing what information should be known by more people.
Check out if your local university, museum, or library has an archive. What collections are stored there? Are they accessible digitally or do you have to go in person to look at them? See what collections they have and which one’s you’d like to look at and share your idea with a teacher or parent.
