Musical Treasure Trove Unlocked

Musical Treasure Trove Unlocked

The first collection of recordings of New Zealand music that have come to light through SOUNZ’s Resound project, will be released to the airwaves on Radio New Zealand Concert’s Sound Lounge on Tuesday evenings over the next ten weeks.

Funded by NZ on Air, Resound is a joint project between SOUNZ, the Centre for New Zealand Music and Radio New Zealand Concert that aims to make a vast resource of recordings of New Zealand music available for broadcast and website streaming.

The very first recording to be re-broadcast is Jack Speirs’s Three Poems of Janet Frame, in a performance by Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich, in 2001.

“This is a really exciting time for everyone involved in this project”, says Julie Sperring, Executive Director of SOUNZ. “There is a treasure trove of recordings made over the past fifty or so years that has been locked away unavailable for broadcast - this project brings them back to life. A long and detailed process has seen 1200 hours of music from RNZ’s NZ Composer Archive safely preserved as digital files, and re-licensed for future use. The upcoming broadcasts are the first steps towards making this unique cultural resource publicly available online.”

Originally, recordings held in the NZ Composer Archive were licensed for two broadcasts only, so many of them represent the first and only performance of a work. A major re-licensing effort, which is part of the Resound process, has secured permissions from composers and performers for the renewed use of this rich resource.

The digitisation from tape, DAT and CD, is now all but complete, and the recordings are gradually being approved for broadcast through an ongoing auditioning and selection process undertaken by an expert panel.

SOUNZ, the Centre for New Zealand Music is also soon to make a sizeable amount of this collection, plus other audio and video recordings free for streaming on its new ‘Media on Demand’ platform, which will be launched over the next couple of months.

ENDS

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