Freedman, Ho, la Cépède, Blum, Hill
Boston punk/rock cassette tapes, recorded by Arthur Freedman
In the late 1970s, Arthur Freedman (b. 1957) began to record musical acts in the clubs of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. The resulting collection comprises over 720 hours of local punk and rock music performances, some with accompanying material such as set lists, tickets, and technical or performance notes, and many otherwise unrecorded. This audio archive is joined by another 2000 hours of performances filmed by Freedman, housed in Harvard's Film Archive. Revealing the rich spatial ecosystem (coursing through hubs like Kenmore Square and Allston) and youthful energy behind the city's vibrant "hardcore punk" scene, these collections are a testament to the unmatched electricity of live music. Shown here are cassettes from four of the gigs Freedman attended.
The Loeb Library is continuing to work to preserve and digitize the fragile magnetic media in the Freedman audio and film collections. In the course of this work, librarians are also searching for permission from band members to stream audio and footage online, and for any information or materials from either band members or attendees to help reconstruct the stories of these performances. Learn more about the Freedman project's search here, and contact librarian Peter Laurence at laurenc@harvard.edu with any information, pertinent materials or questions.
Fred Ho, Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors
Chinese-American composer, baritone saxophonist, activist, and Marxist Fred Ho (1957-2014) fused jazz with traditional Chinese and African-American music, in compositions that are inextricably connected to his radical politics. Ho was the youngest person as well as first Asian American to receive the Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; in 2009, he was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.
After graduating from Harvard College in 1979, Ho moved to New York and founded the Afro Asian Music Ensemble in 1982. The avant-garde jazz opera Warrior Sisters (1998), written with librettist Ann Greene, imagines a time-and-space bending rescue mission by three feminist revolutionaries—Fa Mu Lan, Nana Yaa Asantewa, and Sieh King King—who arrive in the 1970s to rescue the jailed Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur.
As the playbill from a 2001 Arizona State University production describes it, Warrior Sisters is "...designed to appeal to not only traditional opera lovers, but to contemporary popular music lovers, too. WARRIOR SISTERS features authentic Chinese martial arts, combines both European-classically trained and American multicultural popular singing styles, and features womyn of African and Asian descent as principals. The music blends African-American and Asian American heritages. The stage direction pushes opera staging to the edge. WARRIOR SISTERS shatters the sexist image of womyn characters as tragic femme fatales and docile virtuous leaders. Oh, we spell "womyn" to take out the men."
Shown here is the holograph full score for "Black Revolutionary Love is Forever," from Act 2, Scene 2 (a duet between Shakur and fellow BLA member Sundiata Acoli) and a publicity photograph of the opera's characters taken by Rainer Fehringer.
Excerpts from Warrior Sisters, performed at The Kitchen in 2000. More materials related to this performance of Ho's opera can be found here.
"Black Revolutionary Love is Forever," from the 1999 recording of Warrior Sisters. The excerpt from the score above begins at 4:18.
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M. le comte de la Cépède, La poétique de la musique
In La poétique de la musique, a 700-plus page treatise on aesthetics first published in 1785, French naturalist and amateur composer La Cépède discusses the origins of music and musical effects in both vocal and instrumental works. La Cépède uses the heart of the work to set out his theories on emotional expression and musical-poetic unity in opera, using examples from tragédies lyriques and the works of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Niccolò Piccinni, and other contemporary Parisian composers. Chief among his conclusions is that "true" music gives voice to the foundational human experience of loss, inexpressible through language alone, and so compels listeners to sympathize with that experience. Some of the treatise's ideas would impact several later composers, including Hector Berlioz.
This abridged edition was published in 1787 in the Bibliotheque universelle des dames, a subscription series intended to provide well-to-do women with a general education appropriate to their gender and role in society. La Cépède’s treatise is the only work on the arts in the 156-volume set, joining 52 volumes devoted to travel, geography, and history, 15 on grammar, logic, and rhetoric, 37 of literature and drama, 21 covering the sciences (astronomy, physics, botany, chemistry, biology, agriculture, and home medicine), 17 philosophical treatises, 9 mathematics texts, and 3 guides to domestic management.
Shown here are the treatise's title and series information, as well as an excerpt in which La Cépède introduces the "recitative" in opera. Noting that not all situations in lyric tragedies demand a full aria pouring out the character's soul, but that these tragedies demand continuous music to transport their spectators, La Cépède details how un-measured recitative fills the dramatic gaps in between the arias.
Stephen Blum, recordings from Iranian Khorāsān
This collection of fieldwork from the northern part of the Iranian province of Khorāsān contains recordings made by Stephen Blum in 1968-1969 and 1972, with an emphasis on sung poetry in three languages: Persian (Farsi), Khorasani Turkish (Torki), and Kurmanji Kurdish. Musical genres present on the tapes include both lyric songs (chārbeiti, ghazal, and gharibi) and narrative pieces (naqqāli, dāstān, and others), performed as solos or accompanied on instruments such as the ney, a kind of flute, the kamānche, and the dotār, both types of lutes. The performers are the subjects of Dr. Blum’s Ph.D. dissertation, Musics in Contact: The Cultivation of Oral Repertoires in Meshhed, Iran (1972). In a 1974 follow-up article surveying folksong genres in Mashhad, Blum discusses how the songs reflect urban-rural relationships, class distinctions associated with literacy, and other ethnic groups' access to Persian culture.
Following the Revolution of 1979, Dr. Blum was unable to return to Iran until 1995, when he donated copies of his earlier recordings to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and made additional recordings in Khorāsān as well as in the city of Qazvin, northwest of Tehran.
Pictured here are labels for a cassette featuring recordings of four men performing songs and improvised poetry, made at Blum’s house in Mashhad in January of 1969.
This song, young tailor Mahmud Gaffāriān's "Vakilābād," shares its name with a major prison in Mashhad (a theme also found in another song from his session, "Shabi be gusheh-e zendān"). Blum notes that Khoarasani folksong texts frequently reference such social and personal issues, with the act of singing them possibly allowing one to step outside of and critique the social order.
Hear the recordings of Ebrāhim Eqtesādi, Mohsen Hasanzāde, and Hossein Nazari here.
Hear more recordings of Mahmud Gaffāriān here.
(Click on a link under "contents" until reaching the page for a particular recording, then click on the link under "digital content" to access the audio file.)
Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Classic Crates, a collaboration between the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute (HARI) and the Loeb Music Library, assembled a set of standards: 200 albums selected for their importance to the hiphop community by DJ and producer 9th Wonder, preserved beside copies of the original records used in their samples. The collection began in 2016 with four albums—Illmatic by Nas, To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill, and The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest.
Lauryn Hill’s first solo album after the 1997 breakup of The Fugees debuted at number 1 and spent over 80 weeks on the charts, going 8x platinum in the U.S. and (to date) selling over 19 million copies worldwide. Hill was the first hiphop artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, and first woman to win five Grammys in one night. In 2014 Miseducation was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recordings Registry, in recognition of its historical and cultural significance to American society. According to singer-songwriter and producer Dionne Bennett, through intertwining R&B and hip-hop to an unprecedented degree, Miseducation legitimized hiphop both as essential to Black musical heritage and as a rich medium for exploring love and freedom in all their forms.
Bennett, in her liner notes on the album for Classic Crates, writes, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill made room. It made room for women in Hiphop music and culture, and for women and men to perform emotional freedom through Hiphop. Miseducation made room for the African Diasporic living legacy of oral poetry, Soul, Reggae, R&B and Jazz….It made room for Hiphop in the world of what would become, in part because of its influence, the new 'mainstream' music and made it impossible for mainstream culture to move forward without Hiphop as one of its most powerful and defining flows aesthetically, culturally, and economically. Miseducation made room by issuing a call to the world, and the world’s response was to move—to move minds, bodies and souls into the room Miseducation made into a home.”
Read Bennett's full liner notes on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill here. From this site, you can also view annotated lyrics for each track; five prominent samples used in the album; and an enormous digital archive of articles, interviews, performances, images and more materials related to the album.
Music video for "Everything is Everything," from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
View the full item record for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.