Apr 10, 2003 12:00 PM, Editors

The Recording Academy (Santa Monica, Calif.) announced that almost $550,000 will be presented to 27 organizations and individuals in the form of Recording Academy grants. This represents a 27% increase in funding and a 69% increase in the number of award recipients as compared to last year.

Now in its 16th year, the Academy grant program funds projects that advance archiving and preservation of America's recorded sound/music heritage, studies related to the impact of music on human development, and research concerning the medical and occupational well-being of music professionals.

"These grants will benefit of wide range of preservation and medical-research programs that not only protect our nation's rich cultural legacy but also benefit the health and wellness of musicians, children and the public at large," said Recording Academy president Neil Portnow. "The Academy is committed to supporting projects that document the educational and therapeutic effects of music. Music is a powerful force with the ability to inspire, to teach and to heal, and the goal of many of these programs is to enhance an individual's quality of life. We applaud the efforts of our grant recipients and others who endeavor to do the same."

Grant recipients are determined by the Academy's National Professional Education Committee based on criteria such as merit, uniqueness of project and the ability to accomplish intended goals. The deadline for each year's grants is October 1; applications are available at www.grammy.com/grant.pdf.

The following is a list of grant recipients:

Archiving & Preservation
American Music Center Inc. (New York City): restoration, reconstruction, recording, documentation and preservation of 11 unpublished musical works for big bands created by legendary jazz composer, arranger and performer Thad Jones.
Center for Southern Folklore (Memphis): to catalog music and the stories of blues greats, fife makers, fiddlers, country, jazz and gospel quartets, and others who have been recorded by the Center of Southern Folklore in performances or in interviews at the Center or in their homes.
City Lore Inc. (New York City): restore, archive and disseminate historic audio recordings embodying all of the concerts presented by the pioneering New York City organization Friends of Old Time Music.
Country Music Foundation (Nashville): transfer of 78 rpm recordings to archival CD-Rs and to .WAV or MP3 files stored on a server for public access.
Ginger Group Productions (New York City): create a searchable index of the existing filmed and videotaped appearances by the pioneers of American Music.
Haleakala, The Kitchen (New York City): preserve and modernize The Kitchen's extensive archival collection of historic audio and videotapes.
Library University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu): to develop a framework for a "Hawaii Music Archive." The archive will preserve Hawaiian music in all formats and provide public access.
Louis Armstrong House Archives (Flushing, N.Y.): to archive preservation tape copies of Louis Armstrong materials and to reformat the tapes on CD to make them available to researchers and visitors at the Archives.
Naropa University (Boulder, Colo.): reformat 200 hours of recordings focused on the connection between poetry and music.
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation (New Orleans): archive a re-recording of 274 oral histories. The interviews were conducted on the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival from 1995 to 2002.
Newark Public Radio/WBGO (Newark, N.J.): transfer tape recordings of WBGO live recordings to CD.
92nd Street Young Mens and Young Womens Hebrew Association (New York City): a multi-year project to preserve and digitize its archives.
Northwest Folklife (Seattle): to identify, preserve, index and provide access to more than 30 years of recordings from the annual Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle, the KBOO World Music Festivals in Portland, and field recordings of fiddlers and other musicians in the Pacific Northwest.
Pacifica Foundation/Pacifica Radio Archives (PRA) (North Hollywood): to undertake a professional preliminary appraisal and assessment of its collection, resulting in recommendations for best practices and actionable plans for preservation priorities, conservation strategies and improved access and descriptive documentation.
San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum (San Francisco): to clean, re-house and catalog 751 rare acetate instantaneous 16-inch discs of the Standard Hour, a radio program that broadcasts live performances by many of the greatest conductors, musicians and composers of the 20th century.
Sebastian Zubieta (New Haven, Conn.): digitize, edit and make available on CD and online recordings held at the archives of the Instituto Nacional de Musicologia in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive (Los Angeles): initiate the copying of the archives collection of Native American field recordings onto both analog and digital formats.
University of New Orleans/American Routes: archiving, preserving and preparing for CD production artist performance and interview recordings from the Folk Masters series now in the American Routes Library.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: preserve and provide access to the Goldband Collection in its Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) Manuscripts Department .

Research
International Foundation for Music Research (Carlsbad, Calif.): research will explore the question: Is there a correlation between enhancements in cognitive skills and structural brain growth due to music training?
Kenneth M. McGuire, Ph.D. (Tuscaloosa, Ala.): Research will answer the following questions: Is a preschooler's ability to remember songs affected by the type of song presentation? And does the level of children's involvement during the song presentation have an effect on their song recognition?
Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute (M.I.N.D.) (Irvine, Calif.): to evaluate, improve and modify the MST Math program before it is fully implemented nationwide during the 2003-'04 school year. The program is designed to help children learn to think, reason and create using their innate spatial-temporal skills.
Steven Brown, Ph.D./Research Imaging Center (San Antonio, Texas): Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of brain blood flow will be used to elucidate the psychological and neural processes underlying human aesthetic responses to music.

Health and Wellness
Denver Center for the Performing Arts (Denver): to explore the factors that cause musical theater performers, opera singers and chorus members to fatigue vocally.
Medical Program for the Performing Artists/Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (Chicago): to demonstrate that not only loss of voluntary control of certain hand muscles due to focal hand dystonia can be retrained, but that the underlying causative changes in the brain can be permanently reversed.
University of North Texas Health Science Center (Fort Worth, Texas): to develop an educational module for music instructors, music students, musicians and their health-care providers about proper practices to reduce the risk of occupational and potentially career-ending injuries.
University of Texas at Arlington, Human Performance Institute: pilot test to demonstrate a new task analysis/modeling methodology that quantitatively relates musician subsystem performance capacities to the level of performance that can be achieved in playing a musical instrument and identify which capacities are maximally stressed for a given individual.

For more, visit www.grammy.com/recipients.html.

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