Wisconsin Music Archives

The Wisconsin Music Archives are a part of the Mills Music Library, housed within the Memorial Library on the campus of University of Wisconsin, Madison. According to their website, the archive offers strong collections of “published sheet music, folk and ethnic music, scores by contemporary Wisconsin composers, recordings issued by Wisconsin labels, and of performers associated with Wisconsin.” As is common with archives, collections are continually being processed so its holdings will continue to expand. Check their website for most up-to-date listings. 

Accrual of folk music in the Wisconsin Music Archives is a part of the American tradition, pioneered by the Lomax family in the 1930s-60s, to record and preserve American musical cultural traditions. Father and son duo, John and Alan Lomax, respectively, traveled throughout the southern United States recording the songs sang in prisons and work camps. Alan Lomax later continued recording folk music in many places, traveling to the Caribbean and Europe in his later years. 

Ruth Crawford Seeger and John Lomax had a professional relationship in which she would take the recordings made by the Lomaxes and transcribe them into sheet music for playing or teaching. Seeger became instrumental to the development of early music education through folk music as the basis of the music. Her music is still used today in K-12 settings and her contributions to keeping American folk music are invaluable. 

The teaching and preservation of folk music is instrumental to the preservation and longevity of marginalized or changing cultures. Just as we preserve physical maps of cities throughout decades to observe changes and cultural shifts, so too do we compare local music styles throughout decades to see shifts in culture and track the diaspora of those cultures. Archives like the Wisconsin Music Archives provides the opportunity to study and track folk music trends from the 1850s through the present. There is valuable knowledge of the Wisconsin settler population, about where they are from, who they displaced when they arrived, and how their origin countries still influence music and culture of today.

The ongoing preservation of folk music has led to folk music revivals throughout North America and Europe during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The revivals’ access to culturally relevant materials serve as a link to people’s own cultures and those outside of familiarity, continuing the tradition of musical innovation and development across genre and geography. It is truly a link to an authentic sense of self and community identity and collective memory.

Of particular interest in the archives are the audio recordings that the archive holds. Transcription of folk music is imperfect, ink cannot accurately express the proper rhythms or techniques. Often, folk music is from populations that are not trained in an academic music environment, so their music does not follow the prescribed conventions of written traditions. There is no way to accurately reproduce folk music without the audio recordings which need special attention to ensure that they are properly stored, transferred, and accessible. 

If you would like to visit the archive to see its collections, contact the library via email. Some services may only be available to active students at The University of Wisconsin, Madison. 

Marontate, Jan. 2005. “Rethinking Permanence and Change in Contemporary Cultural Preservation Strategies.” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 34 (4): 285-305.

Parrish, Michael. 1996. “Alan Lomax: Documenting Folk Musics of the World.” Sing Out! the Folk Song Magazine, Nov 1995-Jan 1996.

University of Wisconsin – Madison. n.d. “Wisconsin Music Archives.” Accessed December 1, 2020. https://www.library.wisc.edu/music/home/collections/wisconsin-music-archives/. 

Watts, Sarah H and Patricia Shehan Campbell. 2008. “American Folk Songs for Children: Ruth Crawford Seeger's Contributions to Music Education.” Journal of Research in Music Education, 56 (3): 238-254.

Young, Michael A. 2020. “Hi-Fi Heritage: Recording Technology, Audio Engineering, and the Mediation of Authenticity in the Polish Revival of Traditional Music.” Journal of Folklore Research, 57 (1): 33-71.