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ITEM — Reel: AWM RL 16281 Identifier: AWM Spec Coll 98

Earliest recordings of Sakha music, 1902

Dates

  • Creation: 1902

Conditions Governing Access

None

Extent

1 collection (Original deposit: Sound recordings (22 acetate and polyester audio tape reels, 7 VHS PAL videocassettes); one folder of original reel boxes with notes in Russian.)

General note

Waldemar (Vladimir Il'ich) Jochelson (1855-1937), a political exile in Kolyma, was invited to participate in the Jesup North Pacific expedition of the American Museum of Natural History (New York). In 1902 he recorded shaman singing and fragments of olonkho “Ogho Tulaaiakh” (Orphan Child) performed by Ivan Petrov in the locality of Rodchevo near the village of Srednekolymsk. This is the very first phonographic recording of Sakha music. Four cylinders (Nos. 1185-1188) are stored in the Phonogramarchive of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), St. Petersburg. The copies were made and given to E. Alekseyev in 1963 by Boris Mikhaloivich Dobrovolskii, curator of the Phonogramarchive.

Repository Details

Part of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Repository

The Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library is the primary repository of musical materials at Harvard. The Music Library’s collecting mission is to serve music teaching and research programs in the Music Department and throughout the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In addition, it supports the musical needs of the broader Harvard community as well as an international scholarly constituency. We collect books, musical scores, serial titles, sound recordings and video formats, microforms, and rare and archival materials that support research in a wide variety of musical disciplines including historical musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, composition, and historically informed performance practice, as well as interdisciplinary areas related to music. The special collections include archival collections from the 19th, 20th and 21st century.

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