Association for Cultural Equity

"It still remains for us to learn how we can put our magnificent mass communications technology at the service of each and every branch of the human family." - Alan Lomax

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), housed at the Fine Arts Campus of New York City's Hunter College, was chartered as a charitable organization in the State of New York in 1983. It was founded by Alan Lomax to explore and preserve the world's expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement. Alan Lomax was a musicologist, writer and producer who spent his life capturing in sound, photographs, video and research what today is termed our "intangible heritage." The central value of his career was the promotion of cultural equity as the need for every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage, believing it should be recognized as a fundamental human right. His "Appeal for Cultural Equity" anticipated by decades UNESCO's 2003 declaration to safeguard intangible oral heritage.

MISSION

Our mission is to facilitate cultural equity. As custodians of a unique archive of world culture, our work rests on a deep foundation of observation, description, and documentation of expressive culture. From this stem two mutually reinforcing branches of activity: cultural preservation and advocacy, and scientific research. C.P. Snow talked of the disjunction between science and the humanities. The work of Alan Lomax and ACE bridges the gap between the humanistic project of musical documentation, description, and conservation, and its abstraction into patterns and regularities from which broad significance is derived.

GOALS AND ACTIVITIES

Much of the world's core culture is orally based and transmitted.  The 'haves' manage most of the world's resources, but millions more are tuned in to the 'genomes' of particular cultures. The digital revolution makes it possible to offer a vast array of world heritage materials to researchers, artists, local communities, and the general public. Over the next four years, we plan to expand upon Alan Lomax's collected works and research through breakthrough publications and exhibitions, targeted web dissemination of our archival holdings, and development of curriculum and teaching materials; and we will continue to seek out, recognize and compensate artists and heirs. We will promote cultural equity through the participatory repatriation of recordings, films and documentation to the communities where Lomax recorded them, and will join with local partners to creatively redeploy cultural documents at the grassroots. Our goal is to reinforce cultural identity and morale.

At the same time, we intend to collaborate with scientists to look for parallels between their findings on human populations and their movements, and the evolutionary and geographic taxonomies of Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and other studies of performance style undertaken by Alan Lomax. In the 1950s, Lomax began to apply his vast collecting experience scientifically, testing hypotheses he had developed over decades of listening to people sing and tell their stories. His efforts led to a collaborative research project whose aim was to decode the language of the performing arts, and to explore the ways in which expressive systems link the world’s cultures. ACE has reconstructed and cataloged the research materials of this monumental project, and is creating a graphics user interface (GUI) to interact with its datasets, analytic tools, and findings. In addition to the better known Cantometrics and Choreometrics, which describe characteristics of song and dance worldwide, the project generated a wealth of data and analysis on speech, instrumentation, vocal qualities, vowel distribution, and breathing in song, all of which were used to trace human history and prehistory.

HISTORY

From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, ACE served as an umbrella for Alan Lomax's research and media productions. As an anthropologist of the performing arts, Lomax developed methods for comparative study of music, dance and speech, working closely with musicologists, movement analysts, linguists, anthropologists, and other specialists. The results were compiled in the Global Jukebox, a cutting-edge interactive multimedia program for teaching and research far ahead of its time. They also informed American Patchwork, a television series on regional American culture produced by ACE and aired on PBS. After Lomax's retirement in 1996, ACE undertook the preservation, publication and dissemination of his legacy of documentation and research.

In 2004, after ACE organized them, the Library of Congress acquired Alan Lomax's original recordings and papers. ACE houses copies of key manuscript collections and all media collections and disseminates the latter to regional libraries where the documentation was made. These range from The Alabama Center for Traditional Culture to The Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin; other sites in the U.S., Spain, Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland and the Caribbean are listed on our website. We have developed free, searchable, protected multimedia online catalogs, and a growing roster of lesson plans in English and other languages. These resources serve students, teachers, researchers, and university faculty interested in the spread of culture from an artistic or anthropological viewpoint, or anyone wishing to research his or her heritage.

Wade Ward and Alan Lomax (right) listening to playback, Galax, Virginia, 1959. Photo by Shirley Collins.

As can be seen from the accolades for Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings and Alan Lomax in Haiti, our publications have broad appeal while maintaining high standards. ACE's most recent achievement, the release of a boxed set containing ten CDs, film and two books chronicling Alan Lomax's 1936 Haitian recording expedition for the Library of Congress, was reviewed in scores of print and online journals including the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and Afropop. Each volume showcases a specific style of music that Lomax encountered, discussed in Gage Averill's meticulously researched liner notes and Lomax's field diaries. We are convening with Haitian partners and NGOs who are helping us to repatriate these materials, documents of a proud heritage that Haiti has maintained despite decades of political and economic troubles.

The Association of Cultural Equity works with scholars, musicians, writers, filmmakers, institutions, and just plain folks, and shares its resources with those who support cultural equity through cultural feedback. It maintains collaboration with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress; the Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College, Chicago; the Rosetta Project of the Longnow Foundation; Newcastle University, UK; the Green Family Foundation of Miami, Florida; FastForward Haiti; FOKAL; FormaVision; and the Grenada Delegation to the United Nations.