Material World (of Sound)

The Historic New Orleans Collection's 2023 Antiques Forum presents New Orleans' music history through objects.

by

Picture it: an old Hohner accordion, squeezed and stretched by The Boswell Sisters trio back in jazz’s golden age. Yellowed dance cards left behind from a Mardi Gras ball, now decades past, still marked with pencil from the whirlwind night. A rare image of ragtime cornetist and jazz founding father Buddy Bolden—the only photograph of him remaining in existence. A 1944 recording of the George Lewis Trio’s 1940s hits “Burgundy Street Blues” and “I Can’t Escape from You”—pressed not into vinyl, but glass. A precious clarinet, once held to the lips of jazz great Sidney Bechet.

Each of these astoundingly-rare objects has had a life and story of its very own, an important part of the larger tapestry of New Orleans’s rich music history. This August, these items and many others will be carefully-yet-enthusiastically contextualized by experts as part of The Historic New Orleans Collection’s 2023 Antiques Forum—and brought out on display as part of the Backstage at the Museum(s) “show and tell” event the Thursday before the big weekend.

“Music is so important, obviously, to New Orleans and this region,”said Amy Williams, manager of programs at THNOC. “So we just thought it would be really fun to tell the history of music in our region, through the objects around music.”

[Read about how early New Orleans Jazz musicians invented the early drum kit here.]

THNOC is comprised of three parts: it functions as a publisher, a museum, and a research center—the latter includes “more than 30,000 library items, including books, pamphlets, sheet music, broadsides, theater programs, and periodicals; more than two miles of documents and manuscripts in over 1000 archival collections; a microfilm collection; and more than 500,000 photographs, prints, drawings, and paintings,” according to Williams. “It's the community's collection; we’re holding it for them,” Williams explained, noting that the collection is open to the public, and that anyone can come into the Reading Room with an appointment and access the objects stored there with the assistance of archivists, interpreters, and other staff.  But for the annual Antiques Forum, some of THNOC’s most important items are highlighted by scholars under a unified theme—a continuation of THNOC’s efforts to better connect their holdings to the community they serve.

“What we're doing is getting our curators to pick the things that they feel are most important to helping tell the musical culture of our city—pulling them all together at one time, which is a really rare opportunity for folks to be able to come in and see them all together with our curators talking about them, and explaining why they're so important,” Williams explained. “So as you can tell, I'm super excited about this.”

The slate of speakers have a broad range of backgrounds, from curators, to musicologists, to authors, to historians, to musicians—even anthropologist and American Routes radio host Nick Spitzer is on the docket. With so many perspectives on Louisiana’s musical legacy lined up, Williams said that the objects themselves provided helpful parameters for what stories will be told.

“We constantly had to remind ourselves and our speakers: ‘You have to tell the story through the items and the objects. People aren't coming to an ethnomusicology conference, they're coming to a material culture conference,’” Williams said. “So it was really fun, you know, to try to narrow down the stories that we could tell because of the objects.”

“Music is so important, obviously, to New Orleans and this region,”said Amy Williams, manager of programs at THNOC. “So we just thought it would be really fun to tell the history of music in our region, through the objects around music.”

Among the topics discussed will be major tenets of New Orleans music history, like its once-elaborate opera scene and parlor culture; alongside lesser-known facets of rural Louisiana music, like the Easter Rock tradition of a North Louisiana church that holds an all-night vigil the night prior to Easter.

"Easter Rock is this amazing tradition that the NEA just recognized and is dying, really,” Williams explained. “And it's just this glorious tradition that we didn't know a lot about, and wanted to be sure that we are sharing that when we're talking about the culture of music and our city.”

This year’s Antiques Forum will be different from years past, incorporating new types of media to illustrate and unpack the historical subjects covered. That includes a documentary hosted by Spitzer about Louisiana’s unique handmade vernacular instruments, like the diddley bow and cigar box guitar, titled Porch and Dancehall Culture: Louisiana’s Homemade Instruments. Another highlight, according to Williams, will be a talk with music and fashion author Holly George-Warren about early country and western costuming in the South. Grammy-winning Cajun musician André Michot, of Les Fréres Michot and Lost Bayou Ramblers, will also present a talk on accordion building, followed by a courtyard performance at Friday’s Champagne Reception.

“I can't even stop smiling,” Williams effused.

Find the full schedule of lectures, brunches, cocktail parties, and more at hnoc.org.