Retrieving, restoring, and preserving historical field recordings of C. de S Kulatillake: A pioneering Sri Lankan ethnomusicologist

Abstract

C. de. S. Kulatillake (1926-2005) was a ground-breaking ethnomusicologist, researcher, and pioneer of Sri Lankan traditional music. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he began utilizing reel-to-reel audio tapes to capture Sri Lankan traditional music making by traveling to various villages. He used a Tandberg (mono) tape recorder in his early field recordings in 1970, and from 1974, he used an Uher 1400 machine with primarily 5" spool tapes at 3.75 speed and a few at 7.5 speed to capture the sound of performances. His goal was to record the songs of the peasants before they become irretrievable and lost as a result of modernization. Historic audio-visual content is at risk of being lost since it is preserved in deteriorated forms, and its access equipment is no longer made. The authors found 41 spool recordings recorded by Kulatillake and digitized to soundtracks. Kulatillake has noted (in English and Sinhala) the recording date, place, and information about the performers on most of the cassettes. After digitizing, the recordings will be described, processed, and cataloged for safekeeping, before being donated to the University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Sri Lanka. The objective of this paper is to journal the process of locating those recordings, restoring, and preserving them in digital archives for stakeholders to use in the future. The story of preserving will take the format of an oral narrative presentation.