The Lomax Legacy

“The lifework of the late legendary American folklorist Alan Lomax has been acquired by the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress… Lomax, who took his first folkloric steps at the library in the 1930s, recorded and collected indigenous music, dances and stories from this country and others. He was especially fascinated by the idea that a culture’s music or way of dancing speaks to its very core. He marveled at the relationship of one people’s music to another’s and he tried to break down musical expression into what he called ‘cantometrics,’ a quantifiable set of attributes such as tones, beats, phrasings.”