The Raymond Clausen Archive
Description:
Raymond Clausen was an ethnomusicologist who did fieldwork in the late 1960s on the Pacific Island of Vanuatu. Long before the western commercial music industry created genres like “world music” or “global fusion”, his fieldwork represents an early scholarly inquiry into the concept of music fusions; he was interested in how global music styles, such as Christian hymns, influenced traditional indigenous music systems. The collection includes over 200 hours of audio field recordings, originally recorded on reels. It also includes over 2,000 photographs that he took in the field, which support the recordings by providing visual context to the setting and environment he was recording in. Many of the recordings provide remarkable insight into the daily soundscapes of mid-century Pacific life. The collection is being published in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.
Material sourced from the Raymond Clausen Archive, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Copyright © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.