I Search for Ancient Music
 

LAURA BOULTON
 

Editor's Note: One of the most iniagination-co7npelling collections
to reach Columbia in recent years is that assembled by Mrs. Laura
Boidton, about which she writes so vividly in the folloiving article.
Comprising roughly 1^,000 musical items on discs and tapes, "The
Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music" has
been recorded from original sources on twenty major expeditions to
countries all over the globe. At Columbia it will be a working re¬
search collection, to be augmented by gift and exchange and by
further field work.

The acquisition of the collection was made possible through a be¬
quest of the late Alice Fries Levi, the wife of Julian Clarence Levi
(A. B., 1896).
 

ALWAYS the same question comes to me: "How did you
ever get started?" I created my career. Raised in a mu-
L. sical family (I sang my first solo in an operetta when I
was three years old), I was launched on a concert career at an
early age. The turning point came when I was invited on a big
African expedition. Since I had always been interested in the
music of other lands, I eagerly accepted.

When I began, there was no word for the specialization which
I chose, but now if you look in a new dictionary, you may find
the term "Ethnomusicologist." Aly interest has been, and still is,
centered in people and their music; not just to analyse the music,
but to see how it functions in their lives, the role it plays in work,
in worship, and in every emotional aspect of society, primitive
and exotic. Aly collection, said to be one of the largest private ones
of its kind, has become invaluable to students in all parts of the
world, because there is so much music and documented informa¬
tion in it which can never be recorded again.
 

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