Music
Sidney Robertson Cowell, the Songcatcher
Janet McTeer, plays an optimistic and driven woman in the 2000 film, the Songcatcher. Known as Doctor Lily Penleric, she is an intellectual musicologist who has just been rejected from a promotion solely because of her gender. Raged from the news, she quits her job and escapes to Appalachia where her sister endeavors to keep a rural school running. There she comes across the beautiful and preserved songs of ancient Scott-Irish ballads. From this extraordinary discovery, she gives the first heartbeat to her new career; the recording and preservation of music.
Like Doctor Lily Penleric, Sidney Robertson Cowell was a brilliant musicologist. She was born in the year of 1903 in San Francisco, California. At a young age, she took piano, violin, dancing, and elocution lessons. Also, in the summer, she would spend her summers in Europe. This enabled her to broaden her interests in world music, psychology, history, literature, and Romance languages and philology.
At the age of 21 in 1924, Sidney graduated from Stanford University in Romance languages and philology. In the same year, she married a philosophy major named Kenneth Robertson. They traveled to Paris together where he took classes with Jung and she studied piano with Alfred Cortot.
In 1926, when they returned to California, Sidney found a job teaching music at the Peninsula School for Creative Education in Menlo Park. Because the school accepted new ideas and culture, Sidney was able to teach and introduce Spanish and cowboy tunes and Irish and English songs she enjoyed.
Sidney and her husband eventually grew apart and divorced in the year of 1934. Later, in 1935, she moved to New York to organize social music in the community.
In 1936, while visiting her friends, Sidney went to the Archive of Folk Culture where she met Charles Seeger, the manager of the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration. She soon became Seeger’s assistant and this eventually led her to her passion of collecting and preserving folk music. In order to do this, Sidney moved back to California where she hoped to organize state-wide project that would ultimately become the original model for the collection of folk music across the whole country.
The WPA California Folk Music Project
Co-sponsored by the Music Department of the University of California, Berkeley, the WPA Northern California Folk Music Project was what was created from the results of Sidney’s efforts. This state-wide project became one of the earliest attempts at organizing a large-scale ethnographic survey of American folk music. The recordings were very diverse. One third of the recordings were in English and the other two thirds were in a vast variety of ethnic groups. They were mostly European, including Armenian, Basque, Croatian, Finnish, Faelic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Russian Molokan, Scottish, and Spanish.
Sidney’s main goal for collecting folk music in Northern California was to create an “objective” record of the music that would be studied and analyzed from a musicological perspective. However, she was also interested in how the music was performed and how it affected the community.
In order to get these songs, she simply asked people along the road what they were singing. For example, she found a man singing a ballad as he worked on changing a tire on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
What made Sidney’s collection unique was that the recordings varied in style and in origin. This differed from the strict folk music collecting guidelines which questioned if the songs were really considered “authentically traditional” or not.
This Northern California WPA Folk Music Collection project provides the world with numerous amounts of traditional and original songs collected in a specific time period. This holds a significant meaning because there are many traditions that are struggling to stay alive and this collection of music kept them from fading and will keep them living for many years to come.
How Sidney Robertson and the WPA Relates to the Grapes of Wrath.
A common trend in cultures throughout the world, I’ve noticed, is music. Music when you’re happy, music when you’re sad, when someone is born, when someone dies, when something important happens, or for just because. Not only is music a wonderful way to express yourself to the world and bring joy to others, it is also an informal way of documenting and preserving a culture. Music can both reflect and shape a culture in it’s own special way. Many times peoples are united by music, the truth in sounds and words bringing communities together in a way nothing else can…
Music is a very important aspect of our world. It doesn’t matter where you came from or what language you speak, because music is a universal language that can unite people together. People can express their emotions and their experiences through the music and songs…