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THE JIKJI PRIZE

The Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (PhA) is the UNESCO Jikji Prize Winner 2007. In the application for the prize, PhA has stated that the prize money, USD 30.000.-donated by the City of Chengjiu, Korea, will be used to contribute to safeguarding an audiovisual collection, more preferably from a country with developing economy. PhA particularly identified the Jose Maceda Collection (JMC) at the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology as a worthy recipient.

José Maceda (1917-2004), composer and ethnomusicologist, National Artists of the Philippines, was the pioneer of ethnomusicological research in the Philippines and South East Asia. From the 1950’s onward, he has recorded systematically traditional music in the region, thereby building up a collection of recorded sound documents, comprising around 2.000 hours of recordings on reel to reel tapes and cassettes. This collection is the main holding of the University of the Philippines (UP) Center for Ethnomusicology, which Jose Maceda himself founded in 1997. Because of its universal significance, the collection was inscribed in the International Register of the Memory of the World Program in 2007.

Upon its inscription in the UNESCO Memory of the World Heritage in the same year, the JMC was able to generate an initial allocation from the Philippine government to start implementation of its long-standing plan to rehabilitate and digitize the sound archive, which has reached the end of its analogue life-span and which is in an endangered state of deterioration. In view of the international importance of the collection and is inherent instability, mainly due to the prevailing adverse climatic conditions, the Phonogrammarchiv has decided to use the Jikji Prize money to contribute to the safeguarding of this collection. Because the prize money of 30.000 USD would not cover the entire costs of safeguarding the collection, a constitutive factor for this decision was the fact that UP was able to raise additional funds, sufficient to secure the entire digitization process, including the commitment from UP to take care, after termination of digitization process, of the further maintenance of the archival and access files of the collection.

As partial counterpart, the donation of the Jikji Prize came at an opportune time in supplementing the local resources, especially to defray the cost of procuring custom-built analogue machines and accessories, as well as the training of professional sound engineers in the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna and the project supervision by Dr. Dietrich Schueller.

The initial activity that launched the digitization project of the sound archive was held at the unveiling of the permanent marker of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register at the University of the Philippines College of Music which housed the UP Center for Ethnomusicology. At the occasion, Dr. Schueller gave a lecture on the latest information and techniques in audio-visual archiving, attended by IASA members, the local UNESCO officials, officers of the Southeast Asia-Pacific Audio-Visual Archivists Association ( SEAPAVAA), and local practitioners. It was this time that the donation of the Jikji Prize was officially announced during the re-launching of the Musika Jornal, one of the major activities of the event.

Since its actual awarding from the UNESCO Office in Paris to the Austrian Academy of Science, the Jikji Prize has enabled the Academy to train to Filipino sound engineers – David Guadalupe and Mark Laccay to travel to Vienna and undergo a week-long intensive training on preservation and digitization of audio collections under Dr. Schueller and Nadja Wallaszkovits, resident sound engineer of the Phonogrammarchiv. After the training, two Studer A 807 analogue tape recorders were acquired and modified to suit the playback requirements of the variety of open reel tape recordings in the sound archive of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology. The machines, together with various accessories, have been shipped and received in good condition at the Center on 3^rd week of September.

On 12-15 October, the Center organized the Laon-Laon: Meeting of Experts in Music Research Centers in Asia, attended by representatives from Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and various archive and library institutions in the Philipppines. The main objective of the Forum was to create a regional networking and embark on collaborative field researches and other preservation activities on Asian musical traditions among the major stakeholders, sharing capabilities on the different technologies that each center has developed to address their individual research objectives. After the workshop conducted by Dr. Schueller and the Digitization Team, there was a consensus that the Jose Maceda Collection and the UP Center for Ethnomusicology, appear to be one major center of sound archiving in the entire region, having started in the early 1950’s and has accumulated an extensive and the only collection of recorded music from some 80 language groups from the Philippines and Southeast Asia. The Laon-Laon Forum also featured an exhibit of vintage tape recording machines which had been used by Jose Maceda and his team of researchers in storing the vast collection of musical data. Because of its recognized value to humanity, the use of modern technology in the preservation of the Jose Maceda collection comes into central focus, of which the 2007 Jikji Prize plays a significant role in its realization.