How technology is aiding in archiving Carnatic music?

The Music Academy in Chennai is in the process of digitising its vast treasure of photographs, books, video and audio recordings

Carnatic music is somewhat of a late entrant to archiving. Beyond a few isolated instances, books and periodicals, audio, and video records are available in plenty but very poorly stored, imperfectly curated, and most often, inaccessible. In recent years, technology has come to the rescue and has enabled archiving in various ways. We have some repositories abroad such as the Harvard and Wesleyan Universities that have done this. In India, while digitising and uploading on public platforms do happen, several questions with regard to artistes’ rights and copyrights remain unresolved. This article deals with the experience of digitisation and archiving at The Music Academy in Chennai.   

Digitising a repository 

The Music Academy in its 97 years has also served as a repository. There are firstly its own publications. Secondly, the Academy has a truly enviable library dedicated to the arts, with over 6,000 books. Thirdly, there is the recorded archive, sadly not comprehensive, but still sizeable. In an effort to make all of this more easily accessible, the Music Academy has in the past three years or so, embarked on a digitisation initiative. Progress has been slow but steady, and hopefully, in the years to come there will be a substantial, well-curated collection online, though whether for a fee or for free remains a matter of debate.  

Academy publications 

The Academy’s print collection comprises books, newspaper clips and photographs. Its annual journals and souvenirs have been published from its inception. While the former is valued for its scholarly articles and detailed reporting of the proceedings of the Academy’s annual conferences, the latteris much sought after for its musician profiles, detailed song lists and historical content – by way of snippets on the Academy’s growth and also advertisements that serve as a record of the corporate, retail and entertainment world of the past. Both of these have suffered from repeated handling, by Academy staffers, researchers and during shifts of the library across the campus. To prevent any further damage, these have been entirely digitised and made available for download on the Music Academy’s website.  

Rare books in the library 

The KR Sundaram Aiyar Memorial Library of the Music Academy has in its vast collection several rare books. These include the oldest surviving Carnatic music book -- the Sangita Sarvartha Sara Sangrahamu of Veena Ramanuja, dating to the mid-nineteenth century. There are also several first editions of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The Academy acquired the collection of books of Sangita Kalanidhis Embar Vijayaraghavachariar, Prof P. Sambamoorthy and Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu. The collection of Vinjamuri Varadaraja Iyengar was donated by his daughter Sandhya Vinjamuri Giri to the Academy. In recent times, more donations have come in. A digitisation exercise was embarked upon with the help of the Roja Muthiah Research Library and around 300 rare books were identified for it. These are now available for research in-house in electronic form, thereby preventing the necessity to touch/access the originals.  

Photograph archive 

Likewise, the photograph collection of the Music Academy has over 5,000 prints. These range from a single photograph of the 1927 conference to several of those in the 1980s. All of these have been digitised and labelled, with as many of the people present as possible being identified. The focus is now to retrieve photographs from the 1990s, which are in CD format and transfer them to cloud storage and catalogue them. The digitised photos are available on request for free in low resolution format and for a payment in high resolution. In the digitisation of books and photos, the Academy has benefited hugely from the assistance provided by its consulting librarian, Mysore K. Jagadish.  

Seeing what has been done by the Academy, families of some musicians and scholars have come forward to share their book collection as well as in some instances memorabilia. The Academy has now worked out an acquisition policy and accepts what is in conformance to its principles.  

Building a music archive 

The archiving of music has been more challenging. The Academy has been recording concerts and academic sessions held under its auspices since the 1950s -- sporadically in the initial years and regularly since the 1980s at least. Unfortunately, storage at the Academy was quite porous and over the years, many of its records were lost – some of them are now up on YouTube, uploaded by music lovers acknowledging that these are Academy performances! Serious work on archiving began in 2008 when R.T. Chari, industrialist and noted patron, and then committee member and later vice president at the Academy, underwrote the setting up of the Music Academy-TAG archive with a listening centre as well. He also donated his collection of music. With other collections including those of G. Narasimhan of The Hindu, music stored in spools, cassettes and CDs began to be digitised. As a matter of policy the Academy focuses on concerts and events held under its auspices and avoids collections comprising branded labels. A sizeable archive has also been built up in audio and video of Academy performances since 2005. These are not available in the public domain. 

Digitising performances 

Even as the digitisation progressed, it was overtaken by technology. YouTube and other platforms proliferated and as a result, footfalls at the listening centre dwindled. Focus shifted thereafter to cataloguing and preserving music, with curation of content. Many of the spools had no details of what they contained, and those that did had many errors. A team under musician and archivist Savita Narasimhan got on with the task. With inputs from scholars such as Ritha Rajan, R.S. Jayalakshmi, Sriram Parasuram and Kanakam Devaguptapu and technical inputs from a young team comprising Harini Rangan and Lakshman, as well as Academy staffers, the work on music is more or less complete, with attention now shifting to dance.  

Building a platform for listening  

It was during the process of digitisation that the Academy got valuable help from V. Suresh, a technical expert. A full platform was built especially for the Academy archive with Entermedia, an international communication media agency. While this did help, the inherent requirements of Carnatic music and classical dance when it came to classifying, exposed limitations, and it was decided that the Academy, with help from Suresh would be better off building its own platform. A pilot was presented in the annual conference of 2023 and since then work has rapidly progressed.  

The institution has not yet arrived at a conclusion on how its recordings can be shared with a larger public. There are questions of copyright, etc, which need resolution. Hopefully these should be ironed out before the collection is made accessible to all.  

Published - November 30, 2024 03:37 pm IST