At some point soon I’ll write a nuanced description of the
Sound in Early America exhibit that my grad students are curating. The team
includes the two first year grad students Amy Coddington and Gretchen
Michelson. We also have Courtney Kleftis,
Stephanie Doktor, Emily Gale and Winston Barham helping out. Winston is the resident expert on old
books. My official description will
explain the ways in which we have tried to remind everyone that Early America
was a noisy place and that we want to animate the archive by turning its
usually silent stacks into sonorous echoes of the past. After all it’s only we moderns who think of
Reading as a solitary and silent practice.
For now I’ll just say that I hope the chaos of today will be
delightfully invisible to the millions of visitors who will troop into the UVa
Special Collections Library when our exhibit opens.
Yesterday’s class project was layout. That means apparently that you turn layout
the goods on a mock display to make sure they all fit. It gets pretty punchy
when you’re in a windowless room with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
precious documents including a civil war era valentine, some printing tools
that look like toy soldier weapons, and a picture of the lovely Jenny Lindt.
Most rare books rooms only let you look at a few things at once, and they have
very strict rules about not talking, not sharing, etc. We had a good 36 items floating around. Old paper gets dusty fast and we learned that
all of us scratch our throats in unladylike ways that gross out our
boyfriends/husbands. And yes, other than
Winston who is holding down the man fort, we are all women—a formidable bunch
of women I might add. The whole process
works like corralling kids. I think I said “use your inside voice” at least
five times. (the room is not soundproof
and other people were actually doing SCHOLARSHIP) I’m also pretty sure there was throwing. I’m
not mentioning names, but those cute little bean bag things that hold pages
open definitely flew.
The first of six cases took us a good forty minutes to deal
with, which I’m pretty sure left the library wishing they’d never asked us to
do this. Petrina and Anne (the excellent
librarians who have been working with us) have been remarkably patient and
helpful. I, for example, have not had time to get my e-services password to
work, so any time I need a book I go old fashioned and write it on a paper
slip. I feel totally 1990’s. In terms of
the Music Department crew, I am thankful that Amy took over and acted as drill
sergeant and book gatherer. I think she was really hungry and thought if we got
it done she could get food faster… But
it worked. I realized about ten minutes into the process that I’m a terrible
person for this sort of thing; archival exhibits are completely inaccessible to
the visually impaired since they prevent my usual
stick-my-nose-quite-literally-in-the-book pose.
In addition, my lack of fine motor skills makes writing labels and
quickly moving around fragile things treacherous. Before Amy took over I heard phrases like “uh
oh, I think we just made something up.” And, again I’m not naming names, but
someone put a song from 1824 in the civil war section. We plan to upset (we
hope) some visitors by deliberately placing the Civil War in the Patriotism
section and presenting some of the more abhorrent Confederate materials as examples
of what happens when Patriotism goes wrong.
My low point during the initial warm up was picking up
Thomas Jefferson’s edition of Der
Freishutz and watching the title page fly off—yes, fly off. I’ve been drawn to this particular edition
for a few years. This piano reduction
has a beautiful cover illustration. It’s
a really simple reduction; much easier to play than most. And it doesn’t really fit in with anything
else in TJ’s collection. Jews believe
that if you drop a Torah you have to fast for forty days, and I’m sure the
retributions for dropping anything Mr. Jefferson put his hands on are harsher
around here. I promise that part of my Decentering of TJ project does not
involve consciously dropping his stuff. (though
in my opinion we could all stand to rough up a little more of his stuff…)
It got pretty brutal down there as we had to make choices
about which documents would actually get to spend some time in the display
cases instead of languishing in the bowels of the library. The most crushing
omission was probably the tiny books. We
all fell in love with these little miniature books that measure about three
inches. You could easily fit three of them
in your jeans pocket. After oohing and
awwwing every time, we were finally informed by the librarians that “they are
cute but...” As in, “Get over it ladies. These things are too small even for people
who can see.” We also ran into space
problems and had to evict Jenny Lind. The sweetish nightingale became famous in
the States after an extremely successful concert tour organized by PT Barnum in
1850. It felt a little like a cross
between a sorority and a job search as we had to eliminate her because she
simply did not meet our needs and her delightful little program was falling apart
and decrepit. With her, unfortunately,
went Willa Cather’s Song of The Lark. As
someone said “we gave her the boot even if she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer
prize or something like that.” We had to
move all kinds of things around because the precious wax cylinder is considered
a security risk.
We’ve divided the exhibit into six major categories. I’m not going to write them here because I
want EVERYONE TO COME SEE IT, and I know that you are all dying to know exactly
how we’ve organized the goods. We’ve
been most fascinated by, and had the most trouble with, the sections of the
exhibit that deal with musical representations of Native Americans and African
Americans. We first categorized this as “stuff white people like to transcribe”. That seemed not quite right, so we moved onto
a Guyatri Spivak style “can the subaltern sing?” We settled on musical ethnographies. Wordplay
aside, writing about Race is always hard, and it’s particularly vexed at UVa,
which has its own ugly history of racism; a history that is with us today in
countless ways. That means that, in
addition to Frederick Douglas’s speeches, we have a Steven Foster minstrel
song. Frederick Douglas was disgusted by
the idea that the songs of enslaved people reflected their happiness and
insisted that they told a “tale of woe in tones loud, long and deep.” And
minstrel songs stand as an egregious example of a white celebration and
appropriation of the Black Culture it attempts to oppress. And we also have the
earliest printed collection of music of the enslaved people published in
1867. We also have “Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” from
1786 that claims to be “An original air, brought from America by a Gentleman
long conversant [sic] with the Indian Tribes, and particularly with the Nation
of the Cherokees.” The gentlemen that
brought back those original airs also participated in a process of genocide. These are very tricky issues for graduate
students to navigate in two sentences of text.
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