Cuba Music Week set for May 14-22 in conjunction with Cubadisco, Havana’s annual music conference and festival. In 2016 the focus will be on the dance and dance music, so should be fun. See you in Havana?
We’ve posted ways a contribute to Cuba Music Week and a chart of ideas, to help understand all the components making up our Weeks.
The ARC
ARC is the largest independent popular music collection in the world. We have more than three million recordings, and this is our 31st year. Here’s a timeline of everything that ever happened to us or we made happen:
B.George is the co-founder and director. The head archivist is Fred Patterson who’s been here more than ten years. Our archivist is Alex Curtin, who oversees our scanning projects and just about everything else. That’s it — plus an incredibly wonderful, ever changing cast of interns and volunteers.
We don’t do entertainment, and by that I mean we are not a presenting organization. We don’t have an acquisitions budget. And we don’t take city, state or federal funds. We get by through the generous support of our Boards, a foundation or two, music research fees and a sale we hold twice a year to get rid of our extra copies of recordings. Like Noah, we save two of everything.
What we do is preserve commercially released popular music, every genre and style, from every culture in the world. We do that pretty well. To grow our collection, and keep from growing dull, we launched a focused annual focus on music. The twist, the gist, is to ask a great many people to do just a bit, using the Internet to scoop it up.
Cuba Music Week is our fourth foray into detailed examination of the music of another culture. You can see our earlier Weeks here. Some of the material was time-based, so may no longer be available. When we’re done we hope that an academic institution will take over this site and keep it up to date. Next up: Scandinavian Music Week.
We’re not experts, but we’re plenty interested. So forgive our mistakes and correct them for us. We welcome your help and contributions.Send along info, metadata, releases and donations if you’re able.
Sponsors + Principals
Columbia University Libraries provided encouragement and funding. Thanks to Head of Libraries James Neal.
Open is design for people. They’re an independent design studio that creates rewarding experiences for people who look, read, and think. ARC wants to thank the inspired folks at Open who created the design, look and feel of the original website, and this version based on their design for the ARC’s main website. Wallpapers and logos have been created by Cat Kirk. Owner Scott Stowell was above it all. Open: art direction and design
Rockamedia licenses and produces content for all broadcast media. Founder Ed Steinberg has had a long history of video production, creating seminal videos for artist’s as diverse as Madonna, Gypsy Kings and U2. A frequent visitor to Cuba, Ed has been the Music Director of the Havana Film Festival in New York for 14 years and instrumental in introducing new Cuban visual artists to America. For this project Ed has made trips to Cuba easy and fun, and will be leading ARC’s tour to Cuba in May, 2016.
The Internet Archive preserves the Internet. They scan millions of books and save billions of sites, and they are very nice to ARC. They will be preserving all the versions of India Music Week in a dedicated space and all the URLs that passed through this project. If you loose them, you can get them back. Thanks to Brewster Kahle and everyone @ the IA.By the way, the IA has made possible the scanning of all of our music books here at ARC, including our Asian Indian ones.Thanks to all the other folks who helped out in various ways. They made Cuba Music Week possible.
• Paul van Pufflin + Jasmine – Sometime Commodore of the Coconut Grove Yacht Club who had a spare bed in Miami as we made our way to Cuba.