Ethnic Armenians constituted a sizeable minority in twentieth century Baku, Azerbaijan. They were particularly prominent as instrumentalists, performing and recording with renowned singers in state-sponsored ensembles as well as informal settings. This community reached its peak in the 1970s, before ethnic tensions spurred mass emigration. The pogroms against the Armenian population in January 1990 ended the Armenian presence in the city. Members of this community, now living in a distinct diaspora within Russia, Armenia, and the United States, are currently involved in digitizing and archiving the musical culture of Armenian Baku through social media networks such as VKontakte, Facebook, and YouTube. In particular, the “Clarinet Caucasus” YouTube account has digitized recordings of well known members of this Armenian musical community, including many amateur home audio and video recordings of performances. Spanning nearly a century, these digital archives and musician-specific memorialization pages serve as a digital record of the Armenian musicking community in Azerbaijan. Considering these digital repositories and how members of the Baku Armenian diaspora experience these recordings, I explore how these digital archives enable acts of remembering and digital diasporic intimacy. Listening to these Armenian musicians of the past elicits karot, the particularly Armenian sense of loss and longing, but also of perseverance. A study of these digital memorialization projects, and the reactions these archives create, reveals the digitally mediated construction of homeland, the reification of a chronological and social place through preservation of sound and image.

While conducting research in Yale’s archive of Choctaw Historical Papers to answer long-standing questions of authorship, I found three original copies of Choctaw hymns by missionary Loring S. Williams that had been left aside and/or changed to such a degree that these early versions no longer exist in the daily usage or memory of the Nation. This paper connects one of these hymns, a Closing Conference hymn written for a meeting to address secular business that ended with all-night singing and prayer, to its modern counterparts for use in worship by the same composer. In doing so, I examine the evolving use and text of the Closing Hymn genre. As I argue, the gradual evolution of the structure, content, and use of this hymn demonstrates the changing purpose, function, and audience of hymns within the increasingly-Christianized portion of the Choctaw Nation. I draw on autoethnographic reflections as a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, in addition to Victoria Lindsay Levine’s history of Choctaw music (1990) and Sarah Eyerly’s historical documentation and understanding of music in Indigenous mission communities (2020). Additionally, I examine modern religious and social usage of Indigenous-Missionary music, drawing on Tara Browner’s work concerning Indigenous ownership of non-material culture (2000). Ultimately, this project explores how the changing identity of the Choctaw Nation from the first mission schools, through forced removal, to the revitalization of the Choctaw language, subtly shaped the construction of hymns within the Nation.

Discos Smith was a Peruvian record label based out of Lima that operated from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. In 1989, 500 master tapes from Discos Smith’s catalog were acquired by the American label Arhoolie Records, containing approximately 2150 individual recordings. These tapes were transferred to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings when SFR eventually acquired Arhoolie Records, and the tapes are now stored in a warehouse outside of Washington D.C. In 2024, I was able to examine roughly 20% of the tapes, documenting the potential contents through the marginalia on their boxes. This examination suggested that there is a rich historical record of the musical character of mid-20th century Lima contained on the tapes with repertoire spanning Andean folk dances, urban criollo musics, Afro-Latin genres from the Caribbean, and early Peruvian rock and roll. Only a fraction of these recordings have ever been released and without substantial restoration the tapes will literally moulder away in obscurity. However, there is no guarantee that these recordings are still viable or that the expense of restoring them would be justified or recouped. Consequently, the Discos Smith collection exists in an existential limbo, possibly containing a rich historical record but also possibly being too damaged to restore. Through this case study, this paper examines the obligations ethnomusicologists have to preserving historical records of musical practice, how commercial discourses around recordings of music define the value of their contents, and what ethical complications arise when considering the fate of the Discos Smith tapes.