ASP Awarded GRAMMY Grant

Staff Report

The GRAMMY Museum® Grant Program announced that the Armenian Studies Program was awarded a $5,000 grant for 2019-2020. 

The Armenian Studies Program was one of 15 recipients in the United States to receive a grant to help facilitate a range of research on a variety of subjects, as well as support a number of archiving and preservation programs.

The Armenian Studies Program project, “Preservation of 78-rpm recordings from the Armenian-American Diaspora, 1908-1960,” will focus on the inventory and cataloging of nearly 1,500 recordings on 78-rpm discs from the Armenian-American diaspora. The locally produced records document the early history of Armenians in the United States. 

The collection represents the voices of musicians whose social, economic, and political status forced them out of their homeland. It was thus only in the emerging cosmopolitan American music scene that most of these artists were first able to be heard. The records were collected over more than forty years.

Generously funded by the Recording Academy, the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program provides funding annually to organizations and individuals to support efforts that advance the archiving and preservation of the recorded sound heritage of the Americas for future generations, in addition to research projects related to the impact of music on the human condition. 

The grant will also provide for public lectures to present the results of the inventory.