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In this Issue
Newsletter of the Mills Music Library
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Edited by Steve Sundell
with generous assistance from
Geri Laudati, Ryan Sedgwick
and David Dies
Published twice yearly in the Fall and Spring Semesters
Mills Music Library
728 State Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1494
(608) 263-1884
music.library.wisc.edu
Email Mills Music Library
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Web Design by Nicole Saylor
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Future of Folk
April 14-23, 2005
By Nicole Saylor
 The "Future of Folk," a 10-day celebration of folk culture held throughout Madison April 14-23, offered a chance to highlight many folk music gems housed at Mills Music Library. The third biennial, co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, featured a mix of national and local live music acts, scholarly lectures, and panel discussions aimed at exploring issues of authenticity, ownership, and the nature of old and emerging traditions.
Mills staff participated through an exhibit on Midwestern fiddlers (see related article) and a panel presentation covering Wisconsin Folklore Resources on the Web. During the April 15 panel, Mills Director Geri Laudati gave the public its first peak at the forthcoming, greatly enhanced online catalog of folk music recordings collected by UW faculty member Helene Stratman-Thomas in the 1940s. The current online catalog (see link) offers citations for the 1940s recordings by Helene Stratman-Thomas. Soon it will be expanded to include digitized sound recordings, musical scores, and photographs of the performers. Laudati provided a presentation highlighting the site, which is being developed by the Digital Content Group, a division of the General Library System. Laudati demonstrated how each of the almost 800 citations will include clickable icons that launch streaming audio files of the particular song or tune from the Stratman-Thomas collection. Other icons will link to roughly eighty folksong transcriptions created by UW music student Matt Bishop. Many of those scores include critical commentary gathered by ethnomusicology student Katie Graber. Digital versions of more than eighty photographs of the performers housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society will be accessible, too.
Janet C. Gilmore, an assistant professor in Landscape Architecture and Folklore, also presented during the web forum. She showcased a batch of forthcoming collection guides of publicly funded folklore collections in the Upper Midwest. One such guide describes Mills’ Robert Andresen Collection, a large body of recordings, radio, shows, scores, and regional music research. A searchable collection guide that will point users to several folklore collections housed in repositories throughout the state is expected to be live this summer.
While the festival has ended, a related exhibition, Person to Person: Communicating Identity through Wisconsin Folk Objects, is still viewable at the Wisconsin Historical Museum through June 24, 2006.
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