The collection of Helene Stratman-Thomas, a field researcher on the Universty of Wisconsin and Library of Congress's Wisconsin Folk Song Recording Project, is housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and documents the music of over 20 indigenous and migrant groups present in Wisconsin during the 1940s (Janik 2010; Leary 1987, 1998, 2015; Peters 1977). The collection also records Stratman-Thomas’s considerable, although under-researched, additional interest in the music and culture of immigrants from Cornwall, UK, who came to southwest Wisconsin during the 1830s and 1840s to farm and work in lead and zinc mines. My initial survey indicates that the breadth and depth of Stratman-Thomas’s Cornish research positions her collection as one of - if not the - most significant bodies of material relating to the music and culture of Cornish migrants anywhere in the world. In this paper, I first give an overview of Stratman-Thomas's Cornish-focused research of 1944 and 1945, discussing the range of primary and secondary sources she amassed, and examining the correspondence surveys completed by her participants. I then focus on her unique collection of handwritten 19^th century music manuscripts, which are particularly relevant for understanding the development of Cornish Christmas carolling practices from church music into a contemporary genre of folk repertoire and performance. I conclude by exploring the significance of, and opportunities presented by, Stratman-Thomas's work for further research on Cornish migrants' music cultures, particularly considering the UK government’s recently announced intention to ratify the 2003 UNESCO convention on the safeguarding of ICH.

Historians documented thriving communities in Japan where people have played American vernacular music such as Country, Bluegrass, and Appalachian Old-Time Music, since the end of the Pacific War. However, these narratives emphasized the Japanese musicians’ temporal “pilgrimages” back to America and ignored Jappalachian immigrants’ negotiations with American folk music. Asian Appalachian musicians are left behind from ongoing projects on music of multi-cultural America, for example, another music legacy of the U.S. bases: Filipino/ Japanese jazz on the coastal areas, Hawaiian guitar, or Japanese Californians’ traditional Taiko. To address this erasure of Asian diaspora music practices and history in Appalachia, I will share my exploration of making and reconnecting with a community to keep playing music as a fiddler and a first-generation Japanese immigrant to North Carolina. How could we play with Appalachian music and Japanese music to claim one’s own aesthetic space in America? What are the motivations and struggles of Jappalachians to continue music? I will introduce my collaborative oral history project with fellow Jappalachian musicians of several generations, which highlights complex differences between American and Japanese music communities related to authenticity and participatory characters. The presentation includes my performance of fiddle tunes which I learned by ear from my mentor in western NC. The online format of SEM 2024 helps my collaborators and music mentors with travel restrictions to join the conversation. This will be the first study of Asian music traditions in Appalachian and contribute to the debate of community-based American vernacular music’s enactment by reclaiming accessibility.

This presentation explores how experimental archival methodologies might help researchers re-sonify performance practices that have been rendered silent by the historical record. During the 1930s, many Japanese American youth in Los Angeles performed military band arrangements as part of their local scouting activities. Although observers widely documented their appearances in regional parades, national veteran conferences, and international scout festivals, only a few audiovisual recordings of these ensembles exist, primarily in community-based archival collections. How, then, might one “hear” these sounds of Japanese American musicking and community-building? The notion of “re-sounding” archives continues to motivate historical researchers across music studies, with many writers noting the crucial role sound archives play in postcolonial and feminist scholarship (Burnett, Johnson-Williams, and Liao 2023; Sundar 2023; Wheeler and Eyerly 2019, Câmpeanu and Mărăcinescu 2019, Mitchell 2015). What remains to be further investigated, however, is how the researcher’s self-reflexive “listening to the archive” (Birdsall and Tkaczyk 2019) might transcend audiovisual modalities of engagement. In this paper, I propose that researchers might imaginatively re-interpret past soundings using a methodology I term “archival sonification.” I theorize archival sonification as a multimodal process in which the researcher intentionally places sound back into the archives to promote an acoustic (and imperfect) empathy between themselves and those whose sounds have been dampened by the historical record. By sonifying the newspaper reports, material objects, and embodied practices of these Japanese American drum corps musicians, I subsequently argue that archival sonification redresses their symbolic annihilation (Caswell 2014) from histories of US-American military music-making.

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress maintains the largest traditional music archive in the United States. The Center is part of the federal government’s national library, with a mandate to “preserve and present” traditional culture. Since 2015, the Center has been facilitating “Archive Challenges,” in which musicians are encouraged to learn a song or musical item from the archive, create their own arrangement or interpretation, and perform the result. The model has been successfully applied eight times at Folk Alliance International, a music industry association that includes traditional music in its mandate. Musicians sign up, work with a reference specialist at the archive to select an appropriate item, arrange it, and perform it in a showcase in front of an audience from within the music industry with an interest in traditional music. The performances are recorded as videos and posted to the Library of Congress website, giving the artists additional publicity. The model has been adapted for formal concerts, in which invited artists select items from the archive with the help of reference librarians and perform them in a concert. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we created an At-Home Archive Challenge: artists learn an item through self-directed research, adapt and perform it for a recording device, and post the resulting audio or video to social media with a hashtag. The presenters will discuss these different iterations of the archive challenge, suggest ways that ethnomusicology archives can create similar programs of their own, and provide tools for doing so.