Skip to main content

Rare Arabic 78 RPM Records Enter the Public Domain

Public Domain Day is not just about the famous works that get released—-this year Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises were the best known-—but the archives that suddenly open up when any potential argument over copyright bypasses its sell-by date.

For example, Harvard’s Loeb Music Library has just released a selection from its 600-volume 78rpm collection of Arab and Arab-American music from the early 20th Century. The Library’s collection spans roughly 1903 to the 1950s and is not just a record of the aesthetics and the time of the Nahdah Era (the Arab Renaissance), but it also serves as a history of the still-young music industry. Among the RCA, Columbia, and Victor labels, you will also find many independent (and bootleg!) labels.

Harvard’s website notes:

Arab record companies, such as Baidaphon and Cairophon, are only a few among many other American (Columbia, Victor), European (Odeon, Orfeon), and Arab-American companies (Al-Chark, Alamphon) that recorded and released these notable Arab voices. Songs and performers from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Al-Maghrib exhibit the rich tradition of Arabic musical forms, namely the art of al-maww?l (vocal improvisation), qa??dah (sung poems), muwashsha? (Andalusian sung poetry), ?aq??qah (pop songs) and taqs?m (instrumental improvisation. Religious chants are also an important piece of the Arabic musical tradition. The collection includes Qur’anic recitation of Al-shaykh ??h? Al-Fashn? and a rare record of a woman reciter Wad?dah Al-Minyalaw? alongside Christian hymns of Father Gigis ?Az?z Al-Jizz?n?.

A selection of recordings are available here for both online listening and download, using the Aviary Platform.

All this is happening due to the Music Modernization Act of 2018, which differs in its public-domain release dates by a few years compared to print and film. According to Citizen DJ, a website we told you about several years ago, “all sound recordings published before January 1, 1923 entered the public domain on January 1, 2022.”

The trick of course is getting access to all of these recordings. The Library of Congress runs a site called The National Jukebox, with access to thousands of 78rpm records from Victor and Columbia labels. That allows you to listen but not download.

 

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections also has a page noting “Ten Notable Pre-1923 Recordings”, which benefits from its curation. It features important early works like Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” one of the most popular “race records” (i.e. vocal blues sung by Black performers) of 1920; Enrico Caruso’s “Vesti La Giubba,” which features the tenor at the height of his career; and Vess L. Ossman’s recording of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which helped popularize the composer. Also see our recent post: 400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain.

Related Content:

What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Rises, Winnie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Comedies & More

Meet the Oud, the “King of All Instruments” Whose Origins Stretch Back 3500 Years Ago to Ancient Persia

The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/6MyCqF1Wa
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more