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Mission Statement
My intention with this project is to record, for the
sake of cultural preservation, elders singing songs from their childhood.
My focus is
not recording professional musicians, but ordinary people who hold
in their memory the songs from everyday life of 50 or more years ago.
This project extends in the scope of time beyond the life of elders
alive today, in that often people have memories of what their parents
or even grandparents sang. There is the potential in the project to
preserve songs and musical styles from as long ago as 100 to 150 years
ago from the first-hand experience of individuals alive today.
Capturing these songs offers a way to save, for future generations, part of the
past richness of a culture. Music is one area that expresses not only a mood
and feeling of a people at a particular time, but within the tempo, rhythm, and
word choice of a song there is the expression of the subjective reality of a
people.
Working on this project I have found two elements particularly powerful: the
awareness that the world of the subjects youth has passed and is no more, and
the
fondness
for
memories that they hold for that that earlier time. These two facets work
together so that when elders sing these songs it is with both a sense of celebration
and of lament.
In most cases these songs are no longer sung by those who knew them as children--they
only exist in memory. In this way these songs are already dead and the process
of resurrecting is what I call audio archeology. This points to the underlying
reason and a great benefit of this approach: it adds to the collective memory
of a culture by retrieving traditions that would otherwise be lost. |
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