Thanks to Graeme Vanderstoel's catching the online archiving of his 1960s (!) KPFA interviews with Nikhil Banerjee on ragas and Mahapursh Misra on talas, attention turns to RadioOM, the great Other Minds/KPFA archiving project.
I reported on the beginning of the Other Minds/KPFA project nine years ago, and it's time to look at the achival treasure in full bloom. Says über-Other-Minder Charles Amirkhanian: "RadiOM.org is a view of the world of Western avant-garde and contemporary music through the perspective of San Francisco and KPFA's program producers between 1953 and 1995."
He adds: "We have a list of the funders who have supported this work since it began in 2000." That was the year after the acquisition of 4,000 KPFA tape reels by Other Minds.
What are Amirkhanian's own favorites in this torrent of history?
- Speaking of Music interview with Elliott Carter: Carter surveys his music in front of a live audience at the Exploratorium, 1983
- Interview with Quarter-Tone composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky: Discussion with one of the great, little-known figures of experimental music, 1976
- John Cage in Conversation with Morton Feldman: Remarkable for its long pauses and inhaling of cigarettes as well as its enlightening and probing discussion, 1966
- Pierre Boulez' first U.S. radio interview: Boulez dukes it out with Andrew Imbrie, Arnold Elston, and the UCB faculty in his first American radio interview, 1958
- Nicolas Slonimsky at the Berkeley Piano Club: A hilarious romp through 20th-century music history with lexicographer Slonimsky, who conducted parts of the Ives Symphony No. 4 as early as 1927; interview in 1971
- Anna Halprin: Furniture Mix: Choreographer Anna Halprin asks the audience to rearrange their living room furniture in time to increasingly raucous music; a call-in at the end divulges how many vases were spilled and lamps destroyed, 1969
- Radiovisions: The New Consonance: Produced at WFMT in Chicago by Charles Amirkhanian and surveying the dissolution of chromaticism and emergence of tonal music through the minimalist movement of the late 1960s.
And 3,993 more ...
Photo by Carol Law
OM Archives Project Director Adrienne Cardwell says this has been a full-time commitment for the organization for the past 13 years:
I've been working on the project since 2006, along with librarian Stephen Upjohn. We have a team of trusty engineers for analog-to-digital transfers, as well as generous consultants and volunteers over the years.We have also been lucky to receive support from a statewide program known as the California Audiovisual Preservation Project, which helped us preserve a number of video recordings from early OM festivals, as well as the audio from the very first Other Minds fest in 1993.
Our collections are mostly audio, but we also have video, some film, and a good amount of photographs, and other printed materials. The collection that got this whole project started was the KPFA-FM Music Dept. archive that got transferred to OM in 2000, but it also includes the organization's programming history, and various materials donated to us from individuals or artists' estates.
A lot of time goes into maintaining a comprehensive catalogue: researching and cataloguing for descriptive information; tracking each item, its progress from an analog to digital state, or its various digital states; file locations and their backups; keeping eye over a digital storage system and its changing IT needs, monitoring equipment and data integrity; working with consultants and advisors to learn about and share tools that aid the archiving process; providing public access to these materials via a website which also needs maintenance.
Of course, all this requires financial assistance, hence our most recent fund-raising appeal you may have received.