Several local projects are among the most recent recipients of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The federal agency is awarding $37.5 million for 240 humanities projects across the country, including projects at the University of Cincinnati, Earlham College, America's Packard Museum in Dayton, and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society in Lima.
A group from UC's College Conservatory of Music is getting $190,000 to create a week-long workshop called "Cincinnati Sounds: Exploring a Musical City’s Spaces, Places and Sounds."
"Our city has a long and very impressive, culturally rich, and quite diverse roster of musicians, musics and musicings (the art or process of making music)," explains Kristy Swift, assistant professor of music studies. "We'll experience and imagine how historical and modern people experience these sounds and musics and how the sounds and musics reflected and reflect identities and values, how sounds and musics informed and shaped them in these really important Cincinnati landmarks."
LISTEN: How Southwestern Ohio left its mark on bluegrass
The workshop — which will run twice in July 2025 — will be geared toward people from across the country who study various humanities fields. They'll then use the experience to create similar studies of music history in their own cities.
"It's important to study music in cities because we can learn so much about each other by the musics and sounds that we create, that we perform, that we listen to, that we experience, that mark really important highs and lows in our lives," Swift explains. "Music has such a profound impact and provides such deep ways that we connect with each other that it really lends a pathway (between people)."
Preserving gamelan music
In Richmond, Ind., Earlham College Professor of Music Marc Benamou also believes in the connecting power of music. The NEH is awarding a $199,960 grant to create an anthology and online database of Javanese gamelan music texts that have been translated into Indonesian and English.
Gamelan is a traditional form of percussive music or orchestra indigenous to parts of Indonesia like Bali and Java. A gamelan orchestra is composed of gongs, various tuned metal instruments, xylophones, and metallophones. The music is paired with the singing of free-floating words that fit the music's meter but don't necessarily follow a formal structure.
"This is an attempt to collect all of the words that were used on the classic cassette recordings of gamelan music ... basically 1960 to about the mid-1990s," says Benamou. "Our first step was to write down, just transcribe, all the words that we found on those recordings ... then we selected the most common ones to edit into an anthology and then translate into Indonesian and into English."
While Indonesian is the formal language of Indonesia, the various islands have their own languages, too. Benamou says translating the words from Javanese into Indonesian and English will help make the music more accessible.
RELATED: Wayne County, Ind., celebrates 100 murals
Benamou says it's important to document for several reasons, the first being simply that Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world. Secondly, the music has intrinsic, highly artistic and cultural worth, which thirdly, is worth preserving as gamelan falls by the wayside of more popular, contemporary music.
As part of the publishing deal, the anthology will be available online for free worldwide so everyone can have access to this piece of cultural heritage, Benamous adds.
"Gamelan musicians nowadays all over the world refer to these cassettes and sometimes they can't quite make out the words. Very often, when people present gamelan music, the audience wants to know what the words are about and usually the performers themselves don't even know, so it's a tool for performers and audiences as well."
Dayton and Lima
Two other regional projects receiving grants include America's Packard Museum in Dayton, and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society in Lima.
The museum, located in the Citizen’s Motorcar Company building, is getting $10,000 to complete a preservation assessment, buy collections management software, do an inventory, and train staff. The museum boasts the "largest public collection of Packard Motor Car Company automobiles and memorabilia in the United States."
Further north, the Allen County Museum and Historical Society will use its $350,000 grant to replace its heating and cooling systems and install a monitoring system to ensure its artifacts are stored in proper environmental conditions.
