http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1307 Papers by members of the PARADISEC project. http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/retrieve/5901 http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1307 Search the Channel search http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/simple-search http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5389 Title: THE LAST BIWA SINGER: A Japanese Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance<br/><br/>Authors: de Ferranti, Hugh<br/><br/>Abstract: This book concerns the traditions of Japanese blind musicians and ritualists who accompanied themselves on the biwa, as embodied in the music and identity of Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996). Yamashika was the last person to have earned his income from performing a repertory of musical tales, songs and rites with biwa (a four-stringed lute), and to many seemed like a twentieth-century apparition of the blind bards who first performed the Tale of the Heike and other canonical medieval narratives. Yamashika’s identity as a musician and individual was far more complex, but he became well known as "the last biwa hōshi" and was the subject of books, media programs, and a feature-length documentary film. An apparent living relic of a Japan long vanished, Yamashika even appeared in the New York Times in his last years. The author draws upon approaches from Japanese historical and literature studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology in an examination of history, which yielded on the one hand images of blind singers that still circulate in Japan and on the other a particular tradition of musical story-telling and rites in regional Kyushu, of representations of Yamashika in diverse media, of his experiences training for and making a living as a professional performer and ritualist from the 1920s on, and of the oral compositional process in performances made between 1989 and 1992.<br/><br/>Description: Item HDF1-YY46-A from the Paradisec archive - Yamashika performance of the second dan of the tale "Shuntokumaru", recorded March 7th, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1337 Title: The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: year one in review<br/><br/>Authors: Marett, Allan; Yunupingu, Mandawuy; Langton, Marcia; Gumbula, Neparrnga; Barwick, Linda; Corn, Aaron<br/><br/>Abstract: The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia was conceived at Gunyangara in Arnhem Land during the inaugural Indigenous Performance Symposium in August 2002. The symposium was funded by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation (YYF) as part of the fourth Garma Festival of Traditional Culture. Indigenous communities have used recording technologies to circulate and support the inter-generational transmission of their performance traditions for several decades now. Many Indigenous performers now keep recordings of their forebears’ past performances and listen to them for inspiration before performing themselves. In recent years, community digital archives have been set up in various Australian Indigenous communities. Not only can recordings reinforce memory and facilitate the recovery of lost repertoire, they can also provide inspiration for creative extensions of tradition. This paper reports on the outcomes of pilot studies undertaken in 2005 to develop and trial appropriate procedures and methodologies, and establish infrastructure requirements for the project. Ultimately, the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia hopes to aid Indigenous communities in sustaining cultural survival by stimulating lifelong interest in performance traditions through its serial recording and documentation initiatives, and the collections that it will deposit in local repositories for perpetual community access.<br/><br/>Description: Permission to archive granted by Lindsay Read on behalf of the Australia Council for the Arts, 4 December 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1332 Title: “An ample and very poetical narrative”: the vicissitudes of “La Pia” between the literary and oral traditions<br/><br/>Authors: Barwick, Linda<br/><br/>Abstract: In the nearly seven hundred years since Dante's Purgatorio first appeared, the story of “La Pia” (Purgatorio V, 130-136), a Sienese woman who died under mysterious circumstances in the Maremma region, has generated much speculation as to her identity and the possible reasons for Dante's having situated this courteous but cryptic soul amongst the negligenti of antePurgatorio. These seven scant lines, placed at the very end of Canto V of Purgatorio, continue to give rise not only to a plethora of commentaries, but also to a significant body of creative works that have expanded, elaborated and explored the fragmentary history of Pia. This paper concentrates on the circulation and dissemination of theatrical works drawing on the Pia story in the 19th and 20th centuries, with special emphasis on the Tuscan maggio, a form of sung popular theatre still performed in northwestern Tuscany today. There, La Pia is known to Maggio audiences, as indeed she was to Dante scholars until the end of the nineteenth century, by the name of “Pia de' Tolomei,” and her story unfolds over the course of about three hours. How have seven lines from Dante managed to expand to fill three hours of Maggio performance? The story is a long but fascinating one.<br/><br/>Description: Permission to archive from Diana Glenn, Flavia Coassin and Margaret Baker received 3 December 2006 http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1321 Title: Cybraries in paradise: new technologies and ethnographic repositories.<br/><br/>Authors: Barwick, Linda; Thieberger, Nicholas<br/><br/>Abstract: Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: <http://paradisec.org.au>). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age.<br/><br/>Description: Note: This is a postprint, with the pagination adjusted to match the published version for citation.Used with permission from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (30 November 2006). Visit http://www.erlbaum.com to purchase a copy of the book.