The GRAMMY Foundation® Grant Program announced today that more than $200,000 in grants will be awarded to 15 recipients in the United States to help facilitate a range of research on a variety of subjects, as well as support a number of archiving and preservation programs. Research projects include a study on memory retention through music in patients with Alzheimer’s disease; and the benefits of music training in strengthening the ear to prevent noise-induced hearing loss. Preservation and archiving initiatives include a project to preserve more than 650 rare interviews with country music performers and professionals spanning 1959–2000; and the preservation of more than 250 original transcription disks of the historic radio series “The Goldbergs.” 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 2015 cycle will be available beginning May 1 at www.grammyfoundation.org/grants.
“Over the course of its history, our GRAMMY Foundation Grant Program has awarded more than $6 million to more than 300 worthwhile initiatives,” said Neil Portnow, President/CEO of The Recording Academy® and the GRAMMY Foundation. “Our grantees are noteworthy for the range and ambition of their endeavors, and this year’s group includes such varied initiatives as the preservation of 400 recordings of innovative performances by pioneer composers and performers of jazz, world music and new music to a project that will be the first to identify how music can facilitate stroke patients’ abilities to understand everyday speech. We are proud that the GRAMMY Foundation Grant Program can be a philanthropic leader in the areas of archiving, preservation and scientific research.”
Generously funded by The Recording Academy, 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 assistance grants for individuals and small- to mid-sized organizations to aid collections held by individuals and organizations that may not have access to the expertise needed to create a preservation plan. The assistance 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
Country Music Foundation, Inc. — Nashville
Awarded: $10,810
The project will help preserve 650 rare and historic interviews with country music performers, songwriters, and industry personnel recorded between 1959 and 2000 by transferring existing CD-Rs to WAV files. Interviews address country music’s transition from its folk roots to a commercial idiom and from rural to urban settings; its adaptation to media; the social diversity of country music performers and audiences; and changing sounds and styles.
www.countrymusichalloffame.org
Creative Music Foundation, Inc. — Woodstock, N.Y.
Awarded: $11,600
The goal of the CMS Archive Project is to finalize the restoration of historically and artistically important audiotapes from the Creative Music Studio’s archive of more than 400 recordings of innovative performances by pioneer composers/performers of jazz, world music and new music. The CMS Archive of recordings is unique in its artistic breadth and depth. The archive will be housed at the Columbia University Library in New York City for research and educational purposes.
www.creativemusicfoundation.org
New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture — New York
Awarded: $20,000
The New York Studio School’s extensive, historically significant lecture archive captures intellectual currents and cross-currents over 50 years with audio and video recordings of artists, musicians, poets, critics, historians, and scholars. The goal of this project is to digitize the audio portion of the archive, which spans 25 years and includes 790 lectures on audio reels and cassettes, in order to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility of this unique cultural resource.
The Regents of the University of California — Los Angeles
Awarded: $19,350
UCLA Film & Television Archive holds 600 original transcription disks of the historic radio series “The Goldbergs.” More than 250 of these disks contain rare, culturally important episodes not available online or at any other institution. Currently, these disks are in need of preservation and thus inaccessible.
Special Collections and Archives, Albertsons Library, Boise State University — Boise, Idaho
Awarded: $11,747
Idaho is underrepresented in the history of Western music. Special Collections and Archives has a collection of 225 acetate discs and reel-to-reels of Ione Love Thielke’s recordings of her taking regional poetry and putting it to her music, her radio programs, and recording local musicians. By digitizing and making the recordings freely available online, researchers and the public will have access to a portion of never-before-accessible Idaho music.
library.boisestate.edu/special
Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience — Seattle
Awarded: $13,114
The Wing will preserve 251 Chinese opera tapes recorded from 1960 – 1975. Several operas were recorded in one of the oldest Chinese opera clubs in the country, Seattle’s Luck Ngi Musical Club. The tapes will be cataloged and digitized, enhancing their permanent collection by enabling the museum to better depict the history and culture of the Chinese-American community through this classical art form via their exhibitions and research. www.wingluke.org
Preservation Assistance
Corporacion de las Artes Musicales/Pablo Casals Museum — San Juan, Puerto Rico
Awarded: $5,000
The Corporacion de las Artes Musicales/Pablo Casals Museum will identify deterioration factors in this unique musical documentary collection and design strategies to safeguard and preserve the musical heritage of Latin American and Puerto Rican symphonic composers and musicians from the Casals Festival and the Puerto Rico Symphony, founded by maestro Pablo Casals, in 1956. These measures will allow the collection to be accessible to researchers, music students and the general public and put Puerto Rico at the forefront of musical conservation along the Caribbean.
Genesee Valley Council on the Arts — Mt. Morris, N.Y.
Awarded: $5,000
Since 1976, ethnomusicologist and State University of New York Geneseo Professor James Kimball has conducted extensive recording and fieldwork of traditional music and musicians in New York State. The resulting archive contains approximately 900 hours of unique audio and video recordings of master folk musicians. The project will focus on the description, cataloging and stabilization of the recordings, in preparation for a long-term preservation project with SUNY Geneseo.
Jim Metzner — Kingston, N.Y.
Awarded: $4,992
The goal is to prepare a sound archive for preservation, focusing on DATs, which are most at risk. Preparation involves organizing, labeling, cataloging, stabilizing and refining an existing database. The collection includes music and ambient sound field recordings from around the world since the ’70s. Jim Metzner has produced LPs, CDs and several award-winning radio series with recordings from Boston, Brazil, Cuba, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, San Francisco, and Turkey .
Texas Folklife — Austin, Texas
Awarded: $5,000
Texas Folklife has an archive of audio recordings of Texas folk and traditional arts performances, field recordings, and interviews dating from 1984. With this phase of the project, they will hire consultants from the University of Texas School of Information Sciences for the planning, assessment, and preparation of their archive holdings. Ultimately, they hope to make this archive available for researchers, folklife enthusiasts and the general public alike.
Scientific Research
Arizona State University Foundation — Tempe, Ariz.
Awarded: $19,464
Stroke is the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the United States, and more than 1 million Americans currently have language impairments (i.e., aphasia) due to stroke. This project will be the first to identify how music can facilitate stroke patients’ abilities to understand everyday speech. These findings will provide new avenues for aphasia rehabilitation and for effectively communicating with stroke patients with aphasia.
University of California, Davis — Davis, Calif.
Awarded: $20,000
Recent studies suggest that Alzheimer’s disease patients retain memory for music from their past, despite poor performance on standard assessments of memory function. Research methods that can explain this apparent sparing of memory remain lacking. This project will validate, in adults with memory loss and age-matched controls, a semi-structured interview method for quantitatively comparing music-evoked and traditionallycued autobiographical memories.
atonal.ucdavis.edu/projects/memory_emotion/index.shtml
University of California, San Francisco — San Francisco.
Awarded: $19,636
Musical rhythms serve to focus attention at select time points by forming expectations for future events. This ability to anticipate stimuli is a fundamental feature of cognition, resulting in optimal perceptual and memory performances, which are known to decline in elderly adults. This project will assess rhythm training as a means to mitigate age-related declines in anticipatory attention, perception, and memory.
University of Maryland, College Park — College Park, Md.
Awarded: $20,000
This project will explore why musicians show advantages in second-language learning as adults, particularly in learning the sound structure of new languages. It will investigate how “low-level” advantages in auditory processing and “high-level” advantages in sound category learning are related to musical training and speech sound learning. This work has implications for musical instruction, second-language learning and our general understanding of auditory cognition.
University of Memphis and the University of Memphis Research Foundation — Memphis, Tenn.
Awarded: $20,000
This project will examine the potential benefits of musical training in strengthening the ear and preventing noise-induced hearing loss. Minute sounds produced in the cochlea, otoacoustic emissions, will be used to noninvasively measure hearing health and physiological function. Comparison between musician and non-musician listeners will assess whether long-term musicianship can change the ear’s vulnerability and/or susceptibility to acoustic trauma.
The GRAMMY Foundation was established in 1988 to cultivate the understanding, appreciation and advancement of the contribution of recorded music to American culture. 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. In recognition of the significant role of teachers in shaping their students’ musical experiences, The Recording Academy and the GRAMMY Foundation have partnered to present the Music Educator Award. Open to current U.S. music teachers in kindergarten through college, the first Music Educator Award was presented at the Special Merit Awards Ceremony & Nominees Reception during GRAMMY Week 2014. For more information about the Music Educator Award, please visitGRAMMYMusicTeacher.com. For more information about the Foundation, please visit www.grammyfoundation.org. For breaking news and exclusive content, please like “GRAMMY in the Schools®” onFacebook, follow the GRAMMY Foundation on Twitter(@GRAMMYFdn), and join us on Instagram (@GRAMMYFdn).
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