ReSounding World War I—Music Library Helps Explore Context of Era’s Tunes

On Tuesday, April 24, from 5:30 p.m.–8:00 p.m. in the Garden Room in Hotel E of the Colonnade Club, the University of Virginia is hosting ReSounding the Archives, a concert and symposium that will feature the work of students bringing World War I sheet music to life. UVA music librarians Abby Flanigan and Winston Barham have been helping students from Dr. Elizabeth Ozment’s “ReSounding the Archives” course to select and research WWI era sources.

World War I ended nearly a century ago, and the unavailability of usable recordings has been a problem for scholars, and hopefully a thing of the past. Now it’s possible to hear the music without the recorded hiss and crackle of ancient phonograph discs, and to experience the songs from new vantage points—come to the Colonnade Club on Tuesday evening and get a fresh perspective on their social, cultural, and political uses.

The symposium is part of a larger project, which has brought together the University of Virginia’s Music Library and McIntire Department of Music; George Mason University’s College for the Visual and Performing Arts; and Virginia Tech’s History and English Departments, School of Performing Arts, and Special Collections to showcase student work and make available the digitized sheet music and recordings of each song on a website. ReSounding the Archives is sponsored by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) and funded by a grant from 4-VA Research.

The symposium is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served!

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