CSUN Awarded Grant to Save, Digitize Music

Cal State Northridge was among 12 recipients of a National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences grant announced on Monday.

The $10,000 grant will be used to preserve and digitize the journals, guitar music scores and sound recordings that make up the Vandah Olcott-Bickford and LaurindoAlmeida collection, held by CSUN’s College of Arts, Media and Communication.

“Vandah Olcott-Bickford really was one of the premiere collectors of guitar music in the United States,” said Faye Ainsworth, a fund-raiser for the college. “And Almeida, who was from Brazil, had an amazing collection of his own music and was one of the founders of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.”

Ainsworth said rapidly degrading sheet music, sound recordings and other items will be restored, preserved and transferred to CD-ROMs and other digital media. Eventually, CSUN will make most of the material available to an international Internet audience.

The last component of CSUN’s plan is what made their grant proposal stand out, said Michael Greene, president of the academy.

“We are slowly trying to use the grant program to encourage institutions to preserve, archive and always, always to make music accessible,” he said. “It’s one thing to preserve, but it’s quite another to make it accessible to the public.”

The academy has provided such grants for 12 years and presented $200,000 this year. UCLA’s Archives of Popular American Music also received a grant to inventory all of its pre-LP discs.

CSUN received a grant last year for a proposal to study the effect of music therapy on children with autism.