More than 80 years ago Hugh Tracey made his first recordingsof African music and earned himself a reputation as a madman who sallied intothe bush with people playing drums. That was in 1929. Today his unique archiveshave been digitalised and used as teaching aids in two new school textbooks,realising his life dream of preventing the music from dying out.
The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is made ofup recordings on 78 rpm discs and magnetic tape. Its contents amount to arunning time of six months, gathered from southern and eastern Africa and theDemocratic Republic of Congo. The Tracey collection is housed at the RhodesUniversity campus at Grahamstown in South Africa and is the most importantarchive of its sort in Africa.
The thousands of hours of music include village ensembles,royal court music, drumming, voices of great beauty -- all saved from almostcertain disappearance during expeditions carried out until the 1960s inscarcely imaginable circumstances. "There was dust, there were mosquitoesthat would go under the tape," recalled Tracey's son Andrew, who has continuedhis father's pioneering work by preserving and transcribing the collection."He travelled around with three vehicles and used a diesel generator whichwas noisy and that had to be put 100 metres apart," said Andrew Tracey,himself an ethnomusicologist and teacher.
Now 78, he has passed on the work to Diane Thram, anAmerican who looks after the archive, entirely digitalised since this year, andthe 8,000 photographs in the collection. The public can have access to morethan 260 CDs (www.ilam.ru.ac.za), classified by region, instrument, decade --including royal music from Uganda, string ensembles from Kenya, Pygmy spiritualchants, miners' dances and colonial big bands to name but a few.
Hugh Tracey, who was born in 1903 and died in 1977, recordedearly jazz and guitar music hits in the 1950s, a decade when Africa startedundergoing the changes brought about by rapid urbanisation.
The latest products of the digitalisation are two schoolhandbooks published by the ILAM. The first, "Understanding AfricanMusic", is aimed at high school students and was presented at a worldconference of music teachers. The second will target younger children. Betweenthem they form an introduction to African music, the rules and aesthetics ofwhich are still little known, in spite of the success of world music."African music has never been fashionable," Andrew Tracey said."My father was regarded as an eccentric in the 1920s. People thought thatAfricans had no culture and they were despised.
