New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ ARChive of Contemporary Music) The ARChive of Contemporary
Music (ARC) announces the launch of Brazilian World
Music Day. In collaboration with Columbia University Libraries at Columbia University, and with the support of Founding Partners Gracenote and the
Internet Archive, ARC will lead an online effort to celebrate Brazilian music and catalogue tens of thousands of recordings from around the world in a single day: Sept 7, 2012, Brazil's
National Day.
In 2011 the ARC launched the first "World
Music Day" celebrating Islamic music and culture (please see: www.muslimworldmusicday.com ). This online site was accessed by more than three million people worldwide on the initial date and still gets over 2,000 visitors daily. The project was awarded the prestigious "Innovative Use of Archives Award" by the Archivists
Round Table of Metropolitan New York.
Building on this success ARC will create the first Brazilian World
Music Day (BWMD). BWMD will be an online website to present, promote and explore the rich cultural heritage of Brazilian music of the past, present and future. Once again we will invite real-time global grassroots participation by artists, fans and scholars. BWMD will offer videos, histories, seminars, concerts, lectures, sound files, sheet music, album cover art galleries, essays, blogs, photos and links all highlighting the importance and beauty of Brazilian music as well as educate a global audience about it's many genres and facets. With Google maps ARC will create an interactive map that will pinpoint and link genres and artists by region.
A major component of BWMD will be the database describing ARC's Brazilian
Music Collection and Brazilian recordings held by all archives and libraries around the world. ARC is already the largest collection of Brazilian music outside of Brazil, with more than 5,000 recordings. Our goal is to grow this collection of 78s, LPs and CDs in partnership with a cultural institution in Brazil. Information on all Brazilian recordings in the world will be posted in a freely available online database for reference and research as part of the website.
The project director for Brazilian World
Music Day is New York based producer Béco Dranoff, known for his work with Bebel Gilberto, The Red Hot Organization (Red Hot + Rio projects) and the documentary Beyond Ipanema: Brazilian Waves in Global Music.
