Archivist in the Spotlight: Preserving Jewish Musical Heritage with Edoardo Marcarini

In the second of our Archivist in the Spotlight series, we speak to Edoardo Marcarini, an ethnomusicologist and audio cataloguer whose recent project with the Jewish Music Institute (JMI) involved cataloguing and conserving their vast and varied archive of Jewish music recordings and related materials. Here’s a look at his involvement in the project from the challenges of working with a shipping container to the joys of discovering rare musical gems.

From Academia to Archiving

I play bass and double bass and performed for over 10 years before going into academia. My path into archival work began with my PhD research on the musical practices of Iranian Jews. I’m an ethnomusicologist and my work is focused on lived cultural experience, identity, nostalgia, and multicultural identity.

My involvement with the Jewish Music Institute started during my master’s degree at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where I took modules with Dr Ilana Webster-Kogen who is chair for Jewish music and now one of my PhD supervisors. I was studying Persian music at the time and thought, what if I combined the two? That idea led to the PhD project that JMI supported by covering my fees and providing fieldwork grants.

While I was unfunded for two years, I found work at the British Library’s Sound Archive on their “Unlocking Our Sound Heritage” project. I was hired as one of 16 audio cataloguers and one of four that specialised in world and traditional music. The role was to help catalog some of the 400,000 recordings they were aiming for, so I was listening to and cataloguing thousands. It taught me a lot. 

On a practical basis, the British Library use their own cataloging system but it’s based on the MARC21 standard, a system used by many other archival and especially audio-archival collections including JMI.

But the role also gave me experience in the ways audio cataloguing is much less straightforward than item and paper cataloguing. There are lots of grey areas when you’re determining a lot of the aspects such as what culture does this belong to? How do we define that? How do we make sure we represent the cultural value of this item in the most significant way? How do we represent conflict and reflect that? For example, marking a recording made in Kashmir as Indian is problematic.

We had a lot of these sorts of discussions that I think resonated with the fact we were ethnomusicologists. In a sense, I think I was hired because of my academic expertise. We had plenty of discussions about colonialism, cultural representation, and how to make archives more inclusive as well as learning the skills I would take to the Jewish Music Institute.

Into the Container

After the British Library project came to an end and I did my PhD field work, the Jewish Music Institute asked me to look over the job description for their archivist role. Discussions turned into them offering the role to me and that’s how I started working directly with them on their archives. I brought in another former colleague from the British Library, Jim Hickson, to assist. The JMI archive was stored in a shipping container in Weybridge, where we spent over 30 days cataloguing more than 6,500 items, far more than the 3,000 we had anticipated. We worked with 105 boxes, mostly full to the brim with recordings. I tried to make my way through four or five boxes a day.

Working with the container brought its own challenges. It had to be moved using a forklift in the storage place and I worked on a folding table. Some of the boxes had specific information written on top about which collection they belonged to because some of these collections were personal materials belonging to Jewish British composers which their family had donated. Some of them were very well organised, some of them a little less. Some felt more like someone had simply emptied out a desk.

So for each box, I put the contents in order by type of material – vinyl, tapes, notes etc, found duplicates where I could and indicated that we had multiple copies. I cleaned the records but put the mouldy ones on the side and then gave them treatment at home. After assigning call numbers, it was a matter of creating a space that was good for photography. I took photos with Microsoft Lens and these are the ones used on the JMI website now. I saved everything to the cloud so Jim could work on Excel files. This was essentially the day-to-day.

The boxes included many different formats and items such as vinyl, cassettes, VHS tapes, prayer books, sheet music and handwritten notes. There were also shellac records – 78 rpm records made from a brittle shellac resin, popular from the late 1890s to the late 1950s. It was a slow process but among this wealth of recordings and scrap paper were treasures—rare compositions, concert recordings, and pressings.

Digitisation Decisions

One of the biggest issues was deciding what to digitise. I did this initially while going through the boxes, singling out any material which immediately struck me as obviously rare and relevant. Two Israeli curators also helped assess the collection, creating A and B lists of items to digitise. They went through our catalogue and photos, identifying what was valuable and what was already accessible.

We prioritised items not available anywhere else. For example, recordings from the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation are already on their website, so we didn’t want to duplicate that. 

Another is recordings by the cantor Joseph Sirota, made in England in 1924. Sirota died in the Holocaust and was a famous singer so there are many of his recordings available. While I recognised the records JMI have are rare pressings, we decided not to digitise them as they’re not essential to the archive’s purpose.

An example of records we are digitising is a large amount of religious recordings in Yiddish from the first half of the 20th century on 10″ shellac 78rpm. These are both rare and unique to the archive. It’s items like this, where they might be the only examples left, that we need to preserve digitally.

Personal Highlights

This project was more than just cataloguing. On a personal level, it was great to give back to the community and to the Jewish Music Institute who had partly-funded my PhD. I also discovered some incredible material with cultural connections to my more academic work. There were some vinyls featuring Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum who was a defining figure in Arab music and culture, and it was powerful to find her presence in a European (or British) Jewish archive.

Others appealed more to my idiosyncratic side. A standout was a record cover depicting Orthodox Jewish men dancing in a jungle with lions and tigers – a surreal image that captured the eclectic nature of the collection. It’s one of the craziest covers I’ve ever seen.

Looking Ahead

We’re now exploring a new home for the archive, one that includes conservation and digitisation facilities. We’re hoping it can also be a space for students to learn and contribute. As the digitisation continues, the JMI website will become a hub for accessing the materials and the catalogue. You’ll actually be able to hear the recordings which is fantastic. We have to make difficult choices about what to preserve but all of it is precious and gives a really unique insight into the diversity of Jewish music and culture. 

Through this work and my studies, I’ve been struck again and again by how music can be an incredibly immediate and intimate connection to people’s lives. Listening to and exploring the diversity in these collections have affirmed just how important it is to preserve and make this music meaningful for future generations.

JMI UPDATE:

Raphael Knapp, Education & Development Manager at the Jewish Music Institute writes about the changes taking place at the organisation to complement its archive project…

As JMI continues to celebrate and preserve Jewish musical heritage, its recent rebrand marks an exciting new chapter. The redesigned website – jmi.org.uk – now features a dedicated archive section with Watch, Listen, and Read resources, offering audiences unprecedented access to rare recordings, films, and writings. 

This renewed focus on the archive has inspired a series of events, including the JMI relaunch at Stone Nest  in May 2025, where Sound Artist Tai Rona presented a deep listening set drawn from archival treasures. You can listen back to the entire set on Soundcloud and in November 2025, the archive featured on BBC Radio 3Music Planet programme The Jewish Music Institute Archive in Three Tracks, featuring an interview with Tai Rona and three pieces from his Stone Nest performance.

A new three part documentary series about the archive will also shortly be available exclusively on the JMI website, spotlighting Tai Rona, JMI Archivist Edoardo Marcarini, and Archive Curator Yuval Wajima, underscoring JMI’s commitment to making its rich cultural resources accessible to all.

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