The Un-Chaplain
June 07, 2011
The USC Alumni magazine Tojan Family recently featured Music Preservation Project Director, Varun Soni.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
In a related project with USC communications scholar Josh Kun, Soni hopes to bring to USC several privately held music collections, including the largest reggae music archive in the world, an outstanding Sufi music archive, a rare collection of anthropological and ethnographic recordings from across Latin America and Africa, and a collection of field recordings of Buddhist chanting and Balinese rituals from the 1960s and 70s.
The current state of musical preservation in the United States is dismal, says Kun, noting that last fall the Library of Congress released a comprehensive study showing that major areas of America’s recorded sound heritage are disappearing. Only 14 percent of pre-1965 commercial recordings remain publicly accessible, the study found. As vintage record stores close and record labels go out of business, the race is on to salvage the physical back catalogues of LPs and master tapes.
“Varun and I are both big music fans and very eager to see what USC’s role can be in pioneering forward-thinking archival steps to make sure these valuable collections don’t get lost,” says Kun. “We’re here in Southern California, the hub of the music world, and we think we can play a really important role.”
