Held together with tape: home recordings, proactive archiving, and memory in English-speaking Gaspé

This thesis explores the dynamics of memory and forgetting in a proactive archives that prioritizes digitizing, curating, and recirculating music first recorded on domestic analog audio tapes within the English-speaking minority from the easternmost sector of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula (Gaspé Bay). Leveraging insights from the broad and interdisciplinary scholarship of social memory, this thesis also seeks to reimagine the role of sound archives in ethnomusicology by proposing an applied methodology that considers slowness as a temporality for engendering more resonant and responsive memory-making during ethnographic fieldwork. The ethnography considers the researcher’s activities listening to home recordings with community members, appraising personal tape collections, and engaging with community organizations to contemplate and establish archival futures for analog home recordings and digital field recordings. This thesis’ archival and ethnographic work simultaneously document and interpret intersecting realms of twentieth and early-twenty first century musical culture and media practices in this community: The ethnography of listening uses a memory studies perspective to understand the appropriation of popular song repertoires and styles within local practice. The ethnography of tape collecting traces the domestication of reel-to-reel and compact cassette tape recorders by two prolific tape makers, exploring how their personal values and understandings, professional work histories, and gender shaped what was put to tape; how tapes reflected and shaped family and community; and what was eventually digitized and archived during fieldwork. The ethnography of archiving evaluates the institutional and structural potentials and limitations of the applied proactive archival methodology proposed in this thesis.