ReSounding the Archives

ReSounding the Archives

Bringing World War I sheet music back to life

In 2018, 4-VA awarded Dr. Kelly Schrum, Dr. Elizabeth Ozment, and Nicole Springer a grant to work on an interdisciplinary project to bring World War I sheet music back to life through recordings and live performances.

Students from GMU, UVA, and VT worked together to select, research, and record music, exploring history from new vantage points in partnership with the following departments:

• The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) and the College for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) at GMU
• The McIntire Department of Music and the Music Library at UVA
• The Department of History, the Department of English, the School of Performing Arts, and Special Collections at VT.

The result of the project is the ReSounding the Archive website, which provides digitized sheet music, historical context, and usable recordings of each song. Each piece of sheet music featured includes various entry points for educators, students, and researchers to engage with them in new ways: listen to live and studio recordings of each song, view the digitized sheet music, read student essays contextualizing the pieces, or read the transcribed lyrics.

The website also provides full metadata for each piece of sheet music along with a free, digitized version for download. The recordings are also available for download and are offered under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 4.0), making them available for use in classrooms, digital projects, or even for re-mixing.