The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is presenting its “For Future Generations” exhibition in conjunction with the National Science Festival in the Albany History Museum's Transformation Gallery.
This will be the Eastern Cape premier of the well-received traveling exhibition, which had an extremely successful run at the Origins Centre Museum in Johannesburg last year.
The exhibition is open to the public from 6 May until 30 July 2011. For the duration of SciFest, there will be daily workshops on the acoustics of sound by Professor Emeritus Andrew Tracey.
Hugh Tracey pioneered research and dissemination of African music, preserving and documenting the music and culture of sub-Saharan Africa with scientific precision, making use of the best available recording methods of the time. He founded ILAM in 1954 as a research centre and repository for his field collections and commercially published recordings. It remains a research centre, library and archive engaged in on-going education efforts to make the vast collection accessible to the public.
This exhibit, “For Future Generations – Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music”, is the outreach and education component of a two-year cataloguing and digitizing project funded by the Rand Merchant Bank Expressions Fund in 2008-2009.
The project aims to tell the story of Hugh Tracey’s career as a pioneer in scientific research of African music and disseminate the rich heritage that it was Hugh Tracey’s mission to preserve for future generations of Africans.