Archive for the music of Africa

Archive for the music of Africa
Archive type	Music archive
Coordinates	49 ° 59 '32.8 " N , 8 ° 14' 34.3" E Coordinates: 49 ° 59 '32.8 " N , 8 ° 14' 34.3" E
place	Mainz
Visitor address	SB II ; Colonel-Kleinmann-Weg 2 ; 55099 Mainz
founding	1991
scope	approx. 10,000 sound carriers
carrier	Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Organizational form	Establishment of the Institute for Ethnology and African Studies
Website	www.ama.ifeas.uni-mainz.de

The Archive for the Music of Africa ( AMA ) was set up in 1991 by the Institute for Ethnology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz .

history

The archive was founded in the early 1990s with the purchase of 500 shellac records from Ghana . From 1991 to 2008 it was headed by Wolfgang Bender . Since the founder of the archive left in 2008, Matthias Krings was the acting head of the music archive until 2010. The ethnology lecturer Hauke Dorsch has been the director of the archive since 2010.

Duration

The AMA contains a collection of modern African music, unique in Germany, on sound carriers of various formats ( shellac and vinyl records , audio and video cassettes , CDs and DVDs ). The current holdings of the archive are approx. 10,000 sound carriers, some of which go back to the 1920s. Regional focal points are Ethiopia , Ghana , Cameroon , Congo , Kenya , Nigeria and Tanzania .

In addition, the collection includes holdings from almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa , which is still being built up through regular purchases. Most recently, the collection was expanded to include Malagasy music. Several thousand newspaper clippings are stored in the clippings collection sorted by country, musical style and musician. The articles, reports, interviews, record reviews, etc. offer a large pool of background material.

The oldest sound carriers in the archive are shellac records from Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. Some are from the 1940s. Vinyl records from Cameroon, Guinea , Central and South Africa are also collected. On the music cassettes you can find a. Ethiopian performers such as Aster Aweke .

The collection of the Frobenius Institute for cultural anthropological research from Frankfurt am Main has been part of the archive since 2018 . The collection consists of 481 sound carriers, including recordings such as the African-American co-production of the Mali-born singer Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder on guitar.