This week I observed the ‘Archive of popular American Music’, which is a collection of American music that dates back to the 1790’s with over 62,500 musical recordings and 450,000 sheets of music. UCLA’s particular musical archive is known for their large selection of theatrical music, motion pictures, radio and television.
You can search the archive through simplistic measures as just a keyword search or you can do a more advanced keyword search with multiple keywords and a range of dates. If you do not know exactly what you are looking for you can search from an extended list of artist names, titles, covert art, or date.
On the main homepage there is 9 albums covers from early 1920’s. The album covers all shared a similar theme of masquerade type font, jazz, love and dancing. This archive is called the archive of popular American Music yet the main page with the visual album covers only contains music from the early 1920’s and one album from 1919. I would take this to mean that the 1920’s are when America hit a stride in music. If I were to write a paper on this archive I would write a story on the 1920’s as being a turning point in America’s culture dependent on dancing, parties and music. The archive portrays the 1920’s filled with jazz, dolled up women dancing, extravagant hats and masquerade balls.
I cannot tell from this archive why the home page is only albums from 1920’s and no other time period is represented on the initial home page. I think that this would infer that this was America’s time period of their most significant music, during a time when America was in time of a booming economy and flourishing pleasure advancements with theater and music.
The archive might want to visualize on their home page a lively representation of America during the ‘roaring 20’s’ when the US was flourishing, instead of a time of turmoil. The first album on the home page is from 1919, which is the year after WWI ended. Then in 1929 the Great Depression hit America, which is why I would remedy that they chose the image of “America’s Popular Music” to be cover albums from the early 1920’s because it brings attention to a time when people were not stressed with external factors like war and unemployment. People could spend time and money on focusing on these luxurious activities like writing and producing music.
Wow, what a cool archive to go through! Being able to search and look at the album covers would have made it easy to browse and find what you were looking for (… or even if you didn’t know what you were looking for). Based on your description of the collection, I think you would have a lot to discuss in the narrative or story, especially with so much history and social/ cultural change. You made some great points about the archive and I enjoyed reading your post! Now, I want to check it out.
This archive sounds so cool! It’s pretty interesting to see how you noted that the archive contained only music from the 1920’s on the homepage, and it would definitely be something worth looking into. Looking at all of the pieces, it would be cool to see how interest in different genres changed over time, and there is definitely a lot to be drawn from this archive.
Great post! I really enjoyed your perspective and hypothesis as to why they chose this period of music, especially in context of U.S. history. It’s crazy to think that UCLA has such a massive archive of history, especially in music and theater. I recently took a film class and we were able to see original works and films which I wouldn’t have been able to see otherwise. Anyways, I think you did a good job incorporating the data of the finding aid and your take on the narrative it tells.