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Re: arsclist Ayala Cuban Sound Archive Donation
Here you go,, Joe....
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by davidham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
A Collector Bequeaths His Huge Archive of Cuban Sound
October 24, 2001
By BEN RATLIFF
SAN JUAN, P.R. - To build his huge music library, it has
taken Cristóbal Díaz Ayala 25 years, countless missed
family vacations, much of his savings and every skill he
has learned in a multifarious life.
His collection includes about 25,000 LP's, 17,000 78's, wax
cylinders, sheet music and a trove of books encompassing
all of Latin American music, though its strongest area by
far is the music of Cuba, Mr. Díaz Ayala's native country.
The Fundación Musicalia, as the collection is known, is
thought by experts to be the largest collection of Cuban
music in the world.
But Mr. Díaz Ayala, who has used his success in the
construction business to finance his personal interests, is
now 71. And supervising the Fundación Musicalia, in a
two-story house on a quiet residential street in the
Santurce neighborhood, has become burdensome. His latest
acquisition, 5,000 78's bought from a Puerto Rican
collector, is stacked horizontally on metal shelves; it is
taking him longer than usual to catalog it.
Quick to smile and exhibiting a wide- ranging curiosity,
Mr. Díaz Ayala has graduated from the collector's anxious
hunger to deep contentment. "I've spent such good times
here," he said, relaxing in the air-conditioned top floor
of the Fundación. And so it is with some sadness that he
has decided to give up the collection. Over the last five
years, he has sought a suitable home for it, and in June he
made his decision: Florida International University, in
Miami, the largest university in South Florida. Over the
next three years, he will donate the entire collection,
with the provision that the university finance the final
stages of cataloging it - in other words, cover the
operating costs, which include new computer software,
electricity, water, air-conditioning and Lysol. (The
greatest enemy of most North American record collectors is
temperature change; in the tropics, where the heat holds
fast, it is mildew.)
"There is an old proverb which I learned reading Lin
Yutang, the Chinese philosopher who was educated at
Harvard," he said. " `You must learn to get old
gracefully.' You have to say goodbye to some things. I'm
not going to have the collection anymore, but on the other
hand, I know that many people will get to use it."
The bequest of the Díaz Ayala collection, recently
appraised at $825,000, is more evidence of increasing
interest in Cuban studies. Now that the mania sparked by
the album "Buena Vista Social Club," or what Mr. Díaz Ayala
calls "Cubanitis," has subsided a bit, there are clear
tasks for musicologists, collectors, producers, writers and
people like Mr. Díaz Ayala, who is all of those.
The Smithsonian's traveling exhibition on Latin jazz, which
is to tour 12 cities, will be unveiled next fall. Alejo
Carpentier's fundamental study, "Music in Cuba," published
in Spanish in 1946, is finally available in an English
translation from the University of Minnesota Press. Two
volumes of field recordings made in the late 1950's by
Lydia Cabrera, who captured Yoruban music as it was played
by Cuban religious elders, have just been released by the
Smithsonian-Folkways label. And A Cappella Books, an
imprint of the Chicago Review Press, is scheduled to
publish Ned Sublette's sweeping, still untitled history of
popular music in Cuba, which will help provide
English-language readers with a historical context for
Cuban music.
Mr. Díaz Ayala spoke to representatives at the Smithsonian,
Miami University (in Florida) and the Conservatory of Music
in Puerto Rico, who were all interested in his collection.
But he chose Florida International University for several
reasons: its plans to transfer the collection to digital
form immediately and to his satisfaction; it was closer
than Washington; and Miami seemed the most central location
for those interested in Latin music.
Giving the collection to Cuba, he said, was unthinkable; he
explained that valuable items were known to disappear from
its museums, and that waiting to see what happened after
Castro is a risky venture.
"You have to be practical," he said. "At my age, you don't
know how long you're gonna live. And besides, I'm not
leaving a collection - I'm leaving a system."
The Fundación Musicalia is a matrix of research as well as
a music collection. With the help of his wife of 48 years,
Marisa, and one assistant, Mr. Díaz Ayala has cataloged his
holdings by performer, songwriter and song; gathered an
archive of newspaper articles about Latin music; answered
10 queries a week from international researchers; and drawn
up discographies of Cuban music from 1898 to 1960.
In the process he has become an expert on missing links,
and there are many in the history of 20th-century Latin
American music. The Victor record company, for example,
lost a huge cache of mechanical prototypes for all the
Latin music it recorded from 1904 to some point during
World War II. (According to one widespread theory, the
company gave them to the armed forces to be melted down for
munitions.)
In the early years of the century, Cuba had a rich
recording history: Zon-o-phone, Victor, Edison and Columbia
had made 500 recordings in Cuba by 1905, Mr. Díaz Ayala
estimated. Some are now in the hands of a few collectors;
most no longer exist. There is no telling how many of those
records could be crucial to understanding not only the
development of Cuban music but also all that was related to
it, including Mexican, Colombian and Argentinian music and
jazz, he said.
Those gaps bedevil him, and they have also forced him into
the realm of philosophy and logic to answer basic
questions, like who invented mambo and what is the earliest
recorded example of Afro-Cuban jazz. And - this one's for
you, Ken Burns - what did jazz come from?
Mr. Díaz Ayala's hypothesis involves three elements: the
improvised trio portion of a danzón, played by danzón
orchestras as early as the 1880's, involving cornet,
clarinet and trombone; the music taken home by black
soldiers from New Orleans who went to Cuba during the
Spanish-American war; and the popularity of Cuban danzón
records in the United States during the first decade of the
century.
"Now let's go to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917,"
he said, turning professorial. "What do you have? The
rhythm part is completely different, but melody-wise, you
have the same combination: the cornet playing the melody,
and then the trombone and the clarinet playing with him.
Where did jazz get that?" He laughed conspiratorially.
Mr. Díaz Ayala's long history of collecting falls into two
parts. Growing up on the outskirts of Havana, he was a jazz
fiend who logged all his acquisitions in a three-ring
binder, decorating each page with pictures of musicians cut
from books. On family trips to America, he bought jazz 78's
released on independent labels. (In Havana, fans could buy
only Victor, Columbia and Decca.) In his late teens, he and
a friend had an afternoon slot playing records on a radio
station, and after he earned doctorates in both civil law
and social science (Castro was a law school classmate), as
well as studied journalism for three years, he wound up
practicing law and running a record store in Havana with
his wife.
A year after the revolution, Mr. Díaz Ayala fled Cuba
without his records. In San Juan he became a partner in a
construction company, eventually taking control of the
business. At the same time, he became even more interested
in Cuban music but found little research available to
compare with the discographies and nascent musicology that
focused on jazz.
"Cuban music was at a very low ebb," he remembered. "Salsa
musicians were using many compositions of Cuban composers
without putting their names on it. People were talking
about `tropical music' but not Cuban music."
In the late 1970's, Mr. Díaz Ayala approached Vicente Baez,
who had edited a major encyclopedia about Cuba that lacked
proper documentation of Cuban music, and asked if he could
write the encyclopedia's music entry for its second
edition. The answer, surprisingly, was yes, and he began
his work. After the publisher decided to abandon the second
edition, he pressed on anyway, writing "Música Cubana: del
Areyto a la Nueva Trova," a one-volume overview of Cuban
music history.
"When that book came out," said Mr. Sublette, the historian
of Cuban music, "there was no other book out there to tell
you this information." Mr. Díaz Ayala's books, all in
Spanish, are available from online retailers like
Amazon.com, or at Casa Latina Music Shop, at 116th Street
and Lexington Avenue, Harlem, (212) 427-6062.
Mr. Díaz Ayala then turned to compiling a discography -
drudgery, but the kind of drudgery that entire fields of
study rest on. "Although I had a lot of answers, I had more
questions that I didn't have answers to," he explained. "It
was like drinking a glass of water that never quenched the
thirst."
He came across the Latin-music volume of the
ethnomusicologist Richard Spottswood's "Ethnic Music on
Records," which organizes into discographical data the
music of other cultures recorded in America. Mr. Díaz Ayala
was determined to respond with a discography of Cuban
music. "Dick Spottswood is responsible for my craziness,"
he said.
What followed was 20 years of trips to Puerto Rican and
American libraries. Mr. Díaz Ayala stood in front of copy
machines for hours, pored over RCA's catalog information on
its history of Latin music recordings and pressed his whole
family into service.
"This is a martyr," he said, gesturing to his wife, who was
breezing through the office during another day of
cataloging. "I took a lot of the time that I should have
spent with my family - I have to recognize that." So he was
obsessed? "Yes," he said, considering the term carefully.
"That is the word."
Volume 1 of his discography, "Cuba Canta y Baila," spanning
1898 to 1925, was published in the mid- 1980's. He has
recently plowed through the rest of the 20th century and
has come to believe that his work should not be published
piecemeal. He is looking for a CD-ROM publisher to issue
its 3,500 pages.
Mr. Díaz Ayala isn't a musician or a trained musicologist,
and his research is usually based on discography. "I
believe in the recording," he said. "If you're a researcher
of Indian ceramics, all you have is doubts. You'll dig and
find some ceramic, and you'll call two other
anthropologists, and each of the three will have a
different opinion of what has been found - we can be
discussing it forever. But with a recording, it speaks for
itself. It tells its own story. It doesn't cheat you. You
don't have to say, `this might be' - no, no, you hear it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/24/arts/music/24AYAL.html?ex=1004942617&ei=1&en=bfd0ed182787ad5a
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At 04:44 PM 10/25/03 -0500, you wrote:
Could you post a summation of the article? I don't really want to sign up
for any more web sites so they can sell my address and I am not able to
access it now.
Joe Salerno
Video Works! Is it working for you?
PO Box 273405 - Houston TX 77277-3405
http://joe.salerno.com
joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Green" <sgreen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 12:14 PM
Subject: arsclist Ayala Cuban Sound Archive Donation
ARSC listers might be interested in this New York Times article about the
Cuban record collector, Cristobal Diaz Ayala, who has donated his enormous
collection to Florida International University in Miami. Perhaps this news
has already made its way through ARSC channels but as I wasn't at the
meeting this year, I hadn't heard it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/24/arts/music/24AYAL.html
Steve Green
sgreen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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