Cootje van Oven Collection (Music of Sierra Leone)

Bio

Jacoba (Cootje) van Oven was a music teacher and musicologist, was born in 1920 in Dordrecht, The Netherlands. In 1960, she became a music teacher in Freetown, Sierra Leone. There she was struck by the indigenous music traditions and decided to spend her weekends and holidays to record and describe local music styles, songs and instruments. This she continued to do until 1978 and all in all she collected a corpus of some 450 songs.

She published several educational books on this material for local use, as it was always her intention that what she collected and researched should be handed back to the local populations. Her recorded material offers a unique and detailed view of Sierra Leone’s musical history in the 1960s and 1970s. Van Oven was the author of what remains the authoritative book on Sierra Leonean music, 'An Introduction to the Music of Sierra Leone', published in 1981.

In 2010, Bernard Kleikamp worked extensively with her, digitizing her photographs and system cards with notes on her recordings and making a selection of these to be eventually published as a CD on Pan Records in 2011. Pan Records will continue to make her legacy available to the Sierra Leonese people and to the world. PAN Records releases (non-commercial) music from traditional and ethnic origins in a broad context.

The ethnomusicological sound archive of Cootje van Oven has now been added to the www.sierraleoneheritage.org digital resource. You can listen to over 200 original sound recordings of traditional Sierra Leonean music recorded by Cootje van Oven between 1964 and 1977.

NLLeiden, Netherlands

Contact

+31651827188
Cootje van Oven Collection
Profile added by Teclaire Dina EKEDI on 02 Sep 2015
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