Art enthusiasts can attend an Art Walkabout in the company of a visual art specialist at this exhibition.

The exhibition, “For Future Generations” – Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music is a showcase of Hugh Tracey’s legacy to African music and how his work is carried on by the International Library of African Music. This research centre and archive that he founded at Rhodes University is now a national
treasure.

The International Library of African Music (ILAM) houses a rare and important collection of the musical heritage of sub-Saharan Africa – the Hugh Tracey Collection of sound recordings and photographs of the sub-continent, captured from 1928 through the early 1970s during 19 field excursions that took him as far north as the then Belgian Congo.

Founded in 1954, the centre remains a library, research center and repository for his field collections and commercially published recordings. In his years as Director of ILAM he established an ethos of respect for the music and culture of sub-Saharan Africa, preserving and documenting it with scientific precision, using the best available recording methods of the time. ILAM continues to publish African Music, the academic journal founded by Tracey, which remains the only journal devoted to research on African music in the world. ILAM has been successful in making its collections accessible over the past five years by conducting cataloguing and digitising projects that have made possible an on-line search capacity for audio and photograph collections via the ILAM website: www.ilam.ru.ac.za

This exhibition, comprised of instruments, images, publications and recordings, is funded by the Rand Merchant Bank “Expressions Fund”. The exhibition is the outreach and education component of a two year cataloguing and digitising project (2008-09) and it displays a selection of African musical instruments from the Tracey instrument collection and numerous features on Tracey’s field research, publications, films and audio recordings. Video stations offer footage
of South African mine dancing, Chopi xylophone orchestras, Shona music and story-telling, and on ILAM’s history and current projects.

A highlight of the exhibition is a 1939 Tracey film from a recording excursion in Zululand, projected on big screen. Six audio stations offer a vast array of music from Tracey’s field recordings to listen to, plus the Radio Broadcasting station gives the opportunity to listen to a Hugh Tracey radio show. Throughout the exhibit, stunning photos from Tracey’s field excursions bring his work to life and display the vibrancy of African music and culture. The exhibit is accompanied by
a richly illustrated catalogue containing a collection of articles and a CD with examples of music from Tracey’s field recordings for each of the 20 instruments featured in the exhibit. The exhibition, as its title implies, aims to educate and disseminate the rich heritage of African music that it was Hugh Tracey’s mission to preserve ‘for future generations’.

“For Future Generations” is presented at the National Arts Festival with support from the South African Post Office