Los Angeles Philharmonic Among 18 Organizations to Receive Grammy Foundation Grant
By: Harmony Wheeler Apr. 09, 2012
The GRAMMY Foundation® Grant Program announced today that $250,000 in grants to help facilitate a range of research, archiving, and preservation projects on a variety of subjects will be awarded to 18 recipients, in the United States, Canada, and the Dominican Republic. Research projects include a project that will use technology to enable parents of premature babies to have a presence at their child's bedside even when they are away from the hospital. Preservation and archiving initiatives include a Los Angeles Philharmonic project that will protect live recordings of such performers as Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Nina Simone, among others; and an effort to digitally transfer and provide access to an archive of fragile reel-to-reel recordings of live performances and related oral histories in the collection of the oldest continuously running folk music coffeehouse. A complete list of grant awards and projects is below. The deadline each year for submitting letters of inquiry is Oct. 1. Guidelines and the letter of inquiry form for the 2013 cycle will be available beginning May 1 at www.grammyfoundation.org/grants.
"For nearly 25 years, our GRAMMY Foundation Grant Program has been a leader in funding an extraordinary range of scientific research, archiving, and preservation projects," said Neil Portnow, President/CEO of The Recording Academy® and the GRAMMY Foundation. "We have provided support for research that seeks to help individuals with speech and movement difficulties, and for a project that will prepare a significant collection of African-American gospel and blues from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta for digitizing and preservation. Each year, we continue to build upon the impressive diversity and quality of our grant recipients, which makes us proud of the role that our Grant Program is playing in protecting our shared musical heritage, and enabling the medical and scientific advances of the future."
The GRAMMY Foundation Grant Program is funded by The Recording Academy. To date, the Grant Program has awarded close to $5.8 million to more than 300 noteworthy projects. The Grant Program provides funding annually to organizations and individuals to support efforts that advance the archiving and preservation of the recorded sound heritage of the Americas for future generations, as well as research projects related to the impact of music on the human condition. In 2008 the Grant Program expanded its categories to include planning grants for individuals and small- to mid-sized organizations to assist collections held by individuals and organizations that may not have access to the expertise needed to create a preservation plan. The planning process, which may include inventorying and stabilizing a collection, articulates the steps to be taken to ultimately archive recorded sound materials for future generations.
Preservation Implementation
Los Angeles Philharmonic Association — Los Angeles
Awarded: $16,560
This grant will enable the digital transfer, storage, and management of the Swedlow Collection of 1,500 analog tapes recorded on a 3-track tape machine between 1953–1960. The collection includes live recordings of such performers as Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Nina Simone, among others. www.laphil.com
Caffè Lena — Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Awarded: $19,691
Caffè Lena will clean, store, digitally transfer, and provide access to its valuable, at-risk archive of fragile reel-to-reels of live performances and field recordings (1960–1989), and related oral histories on audiocassettes. This unique historic collection sheds light on the New York music scene and its influence on the 20th century folk revival. The Library of Congress will serve as the final repository for these archives. www.caffelena.org
Carnegie Hall — New York
Awarded: $17,250
This project will preserve volumes 1–4 of the Robert Shaw Choral Workshop Collection of Carnegie Hall's Archives — a unique and irreplaceable series of tapes showcasing one of America's greatest choral directors leading the finest young professional singers through workshops and performances at Carnegie Hall. www.carnegiehall.org
Oklahoma Historical Society — Oklahoma City
Awarded: $20,000
The Oklahoma Historical Scoiety will archive Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys recordings from the '40s on lacquer discs, including U.S. radio broadcast transcriptions and 136 reel-to-reel tapes of '50s and '60s performances. Discs will be digitized and the project will create rich metadata for the collection to ensure long-term preservation of this unique cultural heritage material. www.okhistory.org
The Ravi Shankar Foundation — Encinitas, Calif.
Awarded: $16,420
This project will preserve, digitize, catalog, and provide access to historic live and studio recordings from two of the most prolific points in Ravi Shankar's career. These recordings are unavailable anywhere else in any format and are at risk of deterioration in their analog state. The result will be an accessible collection of Shankar's most important performances, greatly impacting scholarship and programming, both nationally and internationally. www.ravishankar.org
University of the Pacific — Stockton, Calif.
Awarded: $8,983
Guided by a preservation survey of the tapes funded by a GRAMMY Foundation grant, this project will stabilize and digitize 49 highly endangered reel-to-reel tapes of concerts, rehearsals and personal recording sessions by pianist/composer Dave Brubeck. These tapes offer unique, unreleased documentation of Brubeck's monumental contributions to jazz. www.pacific.edu/library
WGBH Educational Foundation — Boston
Awarded: $17,250
The goal of this project is to preserve and make available interviews from the landmark PBS television series "Rock & Roll." They will be available to the public through WGBH's Open Vault website and new radio pieces. The interviews are broadcast quality, and WGBH will preserve them in a digital format and make them accessible to the public. openvault.wgbh.org
Preservation Planning
Paul Anastasio — Shoreline, Wash.
Awarded: $4,000
This collection of Mexican violin music in Guerrero and Michoacán features Premio Nacional winner Juan Reynoso and 20 of his fellow violinists. This project will assist the copying, transcribing, collating, and indexing of this rare, beautiful and nearly extinct music. www.swingcatenterprises.com
Bowdoin International Music Festival — Brunswick, Maine
Awarded: $5,000
The Bowdoin International Music Festival, a renowned summer music school and concert series, will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2014. In advance of the anniversary, this project will catalog, transfer, and selectively
restore materials in its recorded archive. Included are performances by some of the world's top classical musicians and works by illustrious 20th- and 21st-century composers. www.bowdoinfestival.org
Louis Guida — Lexington, Ky.
Awarded: $5,000
This project will assess, prioritize, and prepare material from a significant collection of African American gospel and blues from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta for digitizing and preservation. The collection, housed at Indiana University Bloomington's Black Film Center/Archive, includes field recordings, film footage and photographs from a five-year project led by director Louis Guida that resulted in the international award-winning 1992 documentary Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.
Irka Mateo — Brooklyn, N.Y.; Santiago, Dominican Republic
Awarded: $5,000
Rare recordings of Dominican folk music played for popular religious events comprise primary source material that expands and continues on previous work done by Fradique Lizardo (1930–1997), housed at the Centro León. The goal of this project is to initiate preservation consultation efforts that focus on music recordings celebrating Liborio Mateo, a central religious leader and healer that lived in San Juan de la Maguana.
Northwest Folklife — Seattle
Awarded: $4,000
The Northwest Folklife Festival's collection of live audio recordings documents 40 years of the musical and cultural heritage of the Pacific Northwest. The project will assess the collection and design a multistage plan to stabilize, preserve and catalog those thousands of performances. Northwest Folklife's goal is to publicize the collection and make these historical records available to the public via its website and at regional repositories.
Scientific Research
Georgia Tech Research Corporation — Atlanta
Awarded: $17,250
Cerebral palsy is prevalent in one in 303 children in the United States. Approximately one-half sustain upper-extremity dysfunction. Using rhythmicauditory cues to improve upper-extremity function has shown promise with adult post-stroke patients. There is limited evidence of such music-based intervention in pediatric physical therapy. This project will investigate the effects of rhythmic auditory-induced interventions for children with cerebral palsy. humanslab.ece.gatech.edu
The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital — Columbus, Ohio
Awarded: $16,846
The goal of this project is to create a healing environment through auditory stimulation within the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit system that improves behavioral development and reduces length of stay in medically fragile babies. Through the use of technology, this innovative program allows parents to have a presence at their baby's bedside even when they are away from the hospital. www.nationwidechildrens.org
Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care — Toronto, Canada
Awarded: $17,250
This project will examine the potential benefits of musical training on speech processing in elderly adults. Brain imaging techniques will be used to assess neural activity at multiple tiers of the aging auditory system and its correspondence to perception during active speech listening. Specifically, the project will assess the possibility that musicianship counteracts the negative declines in hearing ability and speech understanding that commonly emerge late in life. research.baycrest.org
University of Miami — Coral Gables, Fla.
Awarded: $20,000
This project will explore and quantify infants' ability to entrain spontaneous movement with rhythmic auditory understanding of motor development, and inform therapeutic intervention for deficits in attention, speech, and extremity movement.
Western University — London, Canada
Awarded: $19,500
Despite the amazing level of shared neural machinery between humans and nonhuman primates, only humans appear to sense and react to musical rhythm. This ability has played a major role in the development of human culture for millennia. The aim of this project is to understand the neural processes that underpin our uniquely human ability to sense the beat in rhythmic sequences by comparing brain responses across species with the most advanced magnetic resonance imaging methods available. www.jessicagrahn.com
Benjamin Zendel — Montreal, Canada
Awarded: $20,000
As we age it becomes more difficult to understand speech in noisy environments because of changes in how the brain processes sound. It has been recently demonstrated that this age-related decline is mitigated in lifelong musicians, likely due to neuro-plasticity induced by musical training. The purpose of this project is to determine if music lessons in older adults can improve the ability to understand speech in noise by improving the way the brain processes sound.
The GRAMMY Foundation was established in 1989 to cultivate the understanding, appreciation and advancement of the contribution of recorded music to American culture — from the artistic and technical legends of the past to the still unimagined musical breakthroughs of future generations of music professionals. The Foundation accomplishes this mission through programs and activities that engage the music industry and cultural community as well as the general public. The Foundation works in partnership year-round with its founder, The Recording Academy, to bring national attention to important issues such as the value and impact of music and arts education and the urgency of preserving our rich cultural heritage. For more information, please visit www.grammyfoundation.org. For breaking news and exclusive content about our education programs, please like "GRAMMY in the Schools" on Facebook at www.facebook.com/grammyintheschools and check out www.grammyintheschools.com.
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