Ethnomusicology: Other Organizations & Institutions

Founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology is a global, interdisciplinary network of individuals and institutions engaged in the study of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts.

The International Council for Traditional Music is a Non-Governmental Organisation in formal consultative relations with UNESCO. Its aims are to further the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music and dance of all countries.

The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is a research and educational unit of the Smithsonian Institution promoting the understanding and continuity of diverse, contemporary grassroots cultures in the United States and around the world. The Center produces the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, exhibitions, documentary films and videos, symposia, publications, and educational materials. The Center conducts ethnographic and cultural heritage policy oriented research, maintains the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, and provides educational and research opportunities through fellowships, internships, and training programs. The Center also produces major national cultural events consistent with its mission.

The University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives Guide, or to Archives site holds over 15,000 items, including field recordings documenting music traditions of all kinds from most areas of the world. The following are additional US-based archives with extensive ethnographic holdings. For major international archives with a regional focus, see the “Sites by Region” tab of this Guide.

The Archives of Traditional Music is an audiovisual archive that documents music and culture from all over the world. With over 100,000 recordings that include more than 2,700 field collections, it is one of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the United States. Its holdings cover a wide range of cultural and geographical areas, vocal and instrumental music, linguistic materials, folktales, interviews, and oral history, as well as videotapes, photographs, and manuscripts.

The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress to "preserve and present American folklife" through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, exhibitions, publications, and training. Designated by the U.S. Congress as the national center for folklife documentation and research, the American Folklife Center continues to collect and document living traditional culture, while preserving for the future its unparalleled collections in the state-of-the-art preservation facilities of the Library of Congress.
The American Folklife Center Archive, established in the Library of Congress Music Division in 1928, is now one of the largest archives of ethnographic materials from the United States and around the world, encompassing millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation recorded from the nineteenth century to the present. These collections, which include extensive audiovisual documentation of traditional arts, cultural expressions, and oral histories, offer researchers access to the songs, stories, and other creative expressions of people from diverse communities.

Founded in 1961, the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive is one of the largest “world music” media archives in North America and includes traditional, folk, popular, and art musics from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific islands, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Here, the communities of Southern California, international researchers, and UCLA students and faculty can explore the rich variety of musical expressions throughout the world. As part of the University of California and as an institution located within the state, the Archive has a special interest in collecting and preserving the music of California and in collaborating with community partners. The Archive also hosts occasional lectures, performances and screenings from musicians and scholars.

First used in teaching at Wesleyan in 1953, the World Music Archives today contains well over 3000 original audio tapes (reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, digital audio tapes, and digitally-recorded betamax), approximately 700 discs (primarily 78 rpm commercial discs, but also a number of instantaneous disc records), and 100 videotapes in numerous formats, plus three four-drawer filing cabinets of accompanying notes, texts, and indexes.

Among universities, Wesleyan University has one of the largest and most diverse collections of world musical instruments. It contains three classes of holdings: daily-use instructional instruments and sets of instruments (e.g. gamelan, Ghanian drums, steelband); instruments brought to Wesleyan by students, alumni and faculty; and donated instruments.

The Archive of World Music, a collection of the Loeb Music Library, was established in 1976 by Professor John Ward and in 1992, with the appointment of Kay Kaufman Shelemay as Harvard's first senior professor of ethnomusicology, moved to the Loeb Music Library to become one of its special collections. It is devoted to the acquisition of archival field recordings of musics world-wide as well as to commercial sound recordings, videos, and DVDs of ethnomusicological interest.
The Archive quickly attracted major collections including the James Rubin Collection of Indian Classical Music (probably the largest collection of Indian classical music in the U.S.), the Kay Kaufman Shelemay Collection of Ethiopic Musics, the Sema Vakf Collection of Turkish Classical Music (probably the largest outside of Turkey), the Laura Boulton Collection of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Chant, the Eduard Alekseyev Fieldwork Collection of the Musical Cultural of Yakutia, the Stephen Blum Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān, and the Rubén Blades Archive. Collection development has focused primarily on the Middle East, Asia (broadly understood), and Africa.

The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. It is a public facility that promotes education in African and American traditional and popular music through its own activities and by supporting the activities of others. The GMA’s primary mission is to provide access to sound recordings and images of indigenous music from communities in Africa and the Americas. Founded in 2003 by Gregory Barz, Associate Professor of Musicology (Ethnomusicology) at Vanderbilt University and the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library, the GMA recently launched its first database in a series of databases, the Digital Collection of East African Recordings which consists of over 1,600 discrete musical performances recorded by an East African ethnomusicologist, Centurio Balikoowa.