African Music

Founded in 1954 by Hugh Tracey, ILAM is one of the world’s great repositories of African music. A research institution devoted to the study of music and oral arts in Africa, it preserves thousands of historical recordings going back to 1929 and supports contemporary fieldwork. The majority of its collections are digitised and accessible on its website www.ru.ac.za/ilam. Its journal, African Music, is into its seventh decade.

ILAM aims to preserve, record, analyse, archive, teach, publish and promote the music of sub-Saharan Africa, with the object of establishing a theory of music making in Africa and assessing the social, cultural, and artistic values of African music. ILAM collaborates with the Music Department at Rhodes University and coordinates its Ethnomusicology Programme which offers undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in Ethnomusicology. The courses include training in the performance of African music.

Based at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, African Art, Traditional and Popular Music is an online centre run by Pascal Zabana Kongo. The platform has a vast collection of audio recordings and sheet music of West African drumming. Kongo offers an online course via the website based on his teachings of West African drumming. Materials, whether audio or sheet music, are available for download on the website. The website also includes videos and DVDs that demonstrate some of his teachings. He is also a prominent lecturer at the University of Ghana and University of Education in Winneba. The drum music scores are generated in collaboration with traditional drum masters from the Ghana Dance Ensemble all of whom are experts from various ethnic communities of Ghana.

Founded in 2012 by musicologist Christine Lucia, African Composers Edition (ACE) is an online publication imprint for sheet music of African composers previously not extensively published in staff notation.

The most extensive discographic database on African and Caribbean music. Nearly 3000 artists and more than 8000 albums referenced, organized by musical styles, country, instruments, labels and years. Many links towards artists, labels, festivals sites.

Audio-Visual Africa is a research project sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Humanities Collaboratory..
Our project will necessarily combine assembling audiovisual content, digitize and describe appropriate portions of the combined collections, and create a shared access system that is aware of and can respond to the complexities of ethical cultural heritage management.
Our team is pooling selections from three audio-visual collections of African materials that are in various stages of becoming archives.

World musical heritage in sound and video collected between 1938 and 2009. Much content is online and public; some results will require you contact the center to establish a personal free account.

Content, which is highly varied but centered on documenting the heritage of the region, includes evidence and influence of African diaspora. This is a collaborative project primarily of regional institutions.

This portal pulls together cultural content, including media, in European archives and museums, much of it open access. A wide range of African-related source material (or links to its holding institution) can be found.

The Institute of African Studies (I.A.S) Audio Visual Archive represents both the I.A.S Audio Visual unit and the ICAMD audio visual archive. The collections held at the IAS Audio Visual Archive are perhaps some of the most valuable assets of Ghanaian traditions in the world and represent a tremendous resource at the Institute and the University of Ghana as crucial documents of the human record.

The Archive is one of the top four collections of African musical heritage in the world, and exceeds the others in its geographic and musical breadth. The heart and soul of the Leo Sarkisian Archive are the recordings that Mr. Sarkisian made in 38 African countries over a thirty-year period.

** Do not overlook this page of additional ** resources gathered by Stanford University