On this site, you will find links to manuscripts, unique images, archival repositories and their finding aids, sound recordings, and more. Explore as much as your time permits. Start with the four “quantitative interrogatives”: who? what? when? where? Use these questions to guide your discovery.
— Dr. Melanie Zeck
W.P.A. California Folk Music Project collection (AFC 1940/001), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
This New Deal project was organized and directed by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell for the Northern California Work Projects Administration. Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the American Folklife Center archive), this undertaking was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-language folk music in one region of the United States. Cowell’s efforts preceded Rachmaninoff’s arrival in California by fewer than five years; as such, her resultant recordings offer valuable insight into the experiences of Russians there immediately prior to WWII.
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Pinelands Folklife Project collection (AFC 1991/023), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
The Pinelands Folklife Project collection represents the culmination of a three-year effort to identify and record the cultural traditions in and around the Pinelands National Reserve in the Pine Barrens region of southern New Jersey in the mid-1980s. The project includes recordings of a Russian Orthodox radio program from Dallas, Pennsylvania, and a Russian Orthodox Mass at Saint Mary’s Russian Orthdox Church in Jackson, New Jersey.
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Nicolas G. Schidlovsky collection of music of the Old Believers (AFC 1987/031), Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The collection is divided into recordings of the Old Believers of Moscow and the Baltic Regions and the Old Believers in America. Recordings include worship services, znamenny chant, solo intonation, congregational and choir singing, readings, and experimental performances. Topics for lectures include comparison of Greek and Slavonic (Old Believer) chant and the History of Russian Liturgical Chant and Lection. There are a few performances by the Ivanovo Quartet; Pro Musica Slavica; and Russian Chamber Chorus of New York.
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