The Archives of Traditional Music

05/22/2026

Don't forget! The ATM is CLOSED Monday, May 25th for the Memorial Day Holiday. Enjoy the extra long weekend!

For more details on ATM's hours, please visit: https://libraries.indiana.edu/archives-traditional-music

05/22/2026

Earlier this week the ATM had a surprise visit from Ruth Stone (left), IUB Professor Emerita, Ethnomusicology, and former ATM director (1988-95; 2000-1), and Louise Spear (right), former ATM associate director, who left Bloomington in 1985 to become director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive in Los Angeles. Both of our guests seemed to enjoy getting the chance to meet with Heather Sloan (center), Outreach and Public Services Archivist/Assistant Librarian, and other members of the ATM staff to learn more about what changes had been made to the Archives since its move in 2023-24 from Morrison Hall to the second floor of the William and Gayle Cook Music Library (located within the Simon Music Library & Recital Center building on the IUB campus at the corner of E. 3rd Street and S. Eagleson Avenue.) ATM staff are so grateful to have had the opportunity to become acquainted with such distinguished figures in both the ATM’s history and the field of ethnomusicology—very cool! 😎

05/07/2026

As finals week comes to a close, the ATM is highlighting yet another student employee from the 2025-2026 academic year to show our appreciation for the important work they do to help enhance our collections management efforts and facilitate public access to our valuable resources.

Please say hello to Casey Shreck!

Casey is working on interdisciplinary dual degrees pursuing both a Master of Arts (MA) in Musicology through Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and a Master of Library Science (MLS) through the Department of Information and Library Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.

In addition to assisting with the development of a Google Arts & Culture page for the ATM that focusses on the Berthold Laufer Collection (first ever audio recording made in China in 1901-1902), she also helped to process materials related to the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM) Collection by working with the collectors/depositors to determine the status of both analog and born-digital items held within the collection and consider what options are available to increase their discoverability and access.

More recently, she has been learning to catalog several types of commercial recordings for IUCAT that have been newly added to the ATM’s holdings and will be spending the summer doing an internship with the National Archives in Washington, DC, before returning to work for the ATM again in the fall.

05/01/2026

At last month’s First Thursday (on the arts plaza) Spring Festival event, ATM teamed up with IU’s Student Music Librarianship Group (SMLG) to celebrate and promote April as Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM).

In addition to offering activities to honor and create awareness of jazz’s significance as a distinctly American art form (e.g., coloring pages of famous jazz artists, jazz trivia challenges, a jazz in America timeline, etc.), SMLG used the opportunity to share more information on the value of music librarianship while the ATM shared more details on its jazz-related holdings—the Gennett Records Collection in particular.

Gennett Records studio in Richmond, Indiana, played a pivotal role in the early Jazz Age by giving Midwestern and Southern artists a viable outlet to make their music more publicly available. Jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, and Bloomington’s own Hoagy Carmichael all made their first recordings at the Gennett Records studio in Richmond, Indiana.

For a sample playlist* of early jazz Gennett-related recordings, visit: https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/playlists/6059

*If you’re not able to access this sample playlist, please contact the ATM (atmusic[at]iu.edu) to set up a special guest account with IU’s Media Collections Online (MCO) resource sharing platform.

Graduate students Josh Joy (left) and Lucy Rissmeyer (right), who are both pursuing Master of Library Science degrees specializing in music librarianship at IU's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, are pictured with Heather Sloan (center), Outreach and Public Services Archivist/Librarian for the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM).

04/29/2026

As the semester winds down, ATM is continuing to introduce and highlight its student employees by letting them share some details on all the amazing work they do to help us serve our patron’s varied needs and fulfill our mission to preserve and disseminate the world’s music and oral traditions. Please say hello to Alexandra Maynard!

As a second-year master’s student in violin performance at Indiana University, my work with the ATM has been an enriching extension of my degree, offering me perspectives on music and culture I wouldn’t otherwise encounter.

My largest project at the ATM has been processing and digitizing over 5,000 archival documents related to ethnomusicologist and archivist George Herzog, the founder of IU’s ATM. This collection spans newspaper clippings, invoices, photographs, personal correspondence, advertisements for gramophones, and even materials like 1950s cod cake recipes. For each document, I scanned and cropped files, catalogued correspondents and dates, and wrote detailed content summaries. In the end, this became a year-long project that allowed me to engage deeply with Herzog’s life and work, as well as with the broader history of archiving itself—one of the most rewarding undertakings in my time here.

In addition to Herzog materials, I’ve also had the privilege of processing a wide range of recordings for Media Collections Online (MCO), including interviews with Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Dorson’s field recordings from Gary, Indiana, and materials from the 1901–1902 Jesup North Pacific Expedition to Siberia collected by Waldemar Bogoras and Waldemar Jochelson.

As I wrap up my time at IU, I'll look back at my time in the Archives with a lot of appreciation for the depth at which I could explore the contents that make up such an astounding collection of materials and sound recordings.

04/14/2026

Wow, it is already mid-April! Spring Semester 2026 has proved to be an incredibly busy time for the ATM. Consequently, we are just now resuming our Facebook posts that we started last term introducing ATM student employees for the 2025-2026 Academic Year.

Now, without further ado, please say hello to our Graduate Assistant Iris Teeuwen!

As a PhD candidate in Folklore at IU, my research explores winter holidays, traditions, festivals, identity, institutional racism, and the decolonializing process. I specifically study the Sinterklaas holiday in the Netherlands.

Despite the rising temperatures outside, I spend part of my week bundled up in winter gear while working in the cold rooms at IU’s Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility (ALF), a modern and secure climate-controlled book and object repository. There, I have been processing and preparing ATM materials for long-term storage.

In addition to working at the ALF, I have been assisting with gathering relevant materials and information from Physical Object Database (POD), Media Collections Online (MCO), and physical files for a large request involving culturally sensitive materials as part of a single Indigenous group’s ongoing efforts to revitalize their native language.

For me, the ATM is where I learn the importance of archival work for academics and the general public, and how it assists with cultural revivals for cultural groups.

12/22/2025

Happy Holidays! Wishing you all the best in 2026… The ATM will be closed for the Winter Break Monday, December 22, 2025 thru Thursday, January 1, 2026. Regular hours will resume on Friday, January 2nd.

12/19/2025

Check out our latest blog post by Suyash Kumar Neupane, ATM Library/Graduate Assistant, recent IU Folklore & Ethnomusicology PhD graduate, and active member of The Society for Ethnomusicology, where he shares his experiences working with the Annapurna L. Bech Memorial Collection of Nepalese Music for Research and Education (aka the Terence R. Bech Collection)...

The Terence Bech Collection at the Archives of Traditional Music is the most expansive repository of Nepali music and cultural materials outside Nepal. Drawing on his many years of engagement with the collection, Suyash Kumar Neupane proposes archives and their holdings as inherently dynamic sites o...

12/11/2025

Continuing with our ATM student employee introductions… say hello to Niousha Eslahchi!

Over the past semester, my work in the Archives has played an important role in strengthening my dissertation research, developing my academic skills, and advancing my Arabic-language abilities. Spending time with a wide range of field recording collections has given me practical experience in archival listening, catalog review, ethnographic annotation, and the contextual interpretation of historical sound materials. These are foundational methods in ethnomusicology, and this work has directly supported my dissertation, "Symphonies of Resistance – Women’s Artistry in Iran’s Protest Music."

Academic and Dissertation Development:

My dissertation examines protest movements, diasporic musical practices, and the political work that songs do within communities. Engaging closely with archival recordings has allowed me to sharpen key scholarly skills, including careful listening and transcription, comparative musical analysis, and the ability to read performance settings within their social and historical contexts. Working across diverse collections has also helped me build confidence in interpreting sound as a form of historical evidence.

This archival experience has encouraged me to think more broadly about how protest music travels, adapts, and participates in political expression across different regions. Listening to materials from multiple traditions has pushed me to situate my dissertation within larger conversations about global protest repertoires and the circulation of sound in moments of upheaval.

Arabic-language Development:

Several of the collections I have worked with involve Arabic-language materials. Spending time with these recordings—listening repeatedly, discussing lyrics with native speakers, and identifying musical terminology—has accelerated my language learning in a meaningful way. I have been working with Arabic speakers from Kuwait to refine translations and clarify idiomatic expressions, and I have been studying قاموس مصطلحات الموسیقة الشعبیه المصریه (Dictionary of Egyptian Folk Music Terminology) to expand my technical vocabulary. This has been particularly valuable as I begin incorporating more Middle Eastern protest materials into my research.

Collections I Have Worked With:

"Palestinian protest songs" - I am currently analyzing several sets of Palestinian protest recordings, including cassette tapes that Dr. McDonald collected during his fieldwork. My work has focused on identifying performers, musical structures, instrumentation, and the historical and political contexts of the songs.

"Music of the desert Bedouins" - Although not a formal field recording collection, my work with Bedouin musical traditions has helped me study vocal practices, poetic improvisation, and the social functions of music within nomadic communities. This comparative perspective enriches my understanding of musical resistance across different cultural settings.

"United States, Ohio, Columbus; and Indiana, Bloomington, Arabic, 1958–1971(Egypt)" - For this collection, I collaborated with native Arabic speakers to work through linguistic nuances, terminology, and cultural references in the recordings. Using the Dictionary of Egyptian Folk Music Terminology has helped me identify stylistic markers and instrumentation more precisely.

"Le Chants des femmes: Women’s songs (VDE-Gallo, 1994)" - This collection resonates strongly with my dissertation’s focus on women’s expressive culture. Listening to these recordings has allowed me to think more deeply about how women use music to articulate identity, memory, and resistance.

Dr. McDonald’s "Palestinian protest song tapes" - I have been conducting detailed musical and contextual analysis of these tapes, examining themes of resistance, instrumentation, vocal technique, and the broader political landscape that shaped these performances. This work has strengthened the comparative component of my dissertation’s discussion of global protest song traditions.

12/05/2025

Say hello to Yun-Kiu Lo!

With the 2025 Fall Semester winding down, we thought it might be fun to let some of our student employees introduce themselves and share a few details on their work activities here at the ATM. We are so very grateful for all the valuable help they provide...

As a second-year Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at IU, my research explores popular culture, virtuality, identity, and East Asian culture.

In addition to my regular work preparing recordings for sharing via IU's Media Collections Online (MCO) platform, I am currently developing a Google Arts & Culture page for ATM, with a focus on the Laufer Berthold Collection (the first ever audio recording in China in 1901-1902!).

I am also compiling a Japanese finding aid for the ATM, in which I have to navigate several systems to figure out how we can present our relevant holdings as a holistic collection.

For me, the ATM is a space where I can apply my ethnomusicological training to hands-on practice that supports both academic research and public engagement through a range of exciting projects.