Boulton, Laura, 1899-1980

The music collector Laura Boulton, or musical anthropologist, as she was known in the early days of her fieldwork, recorded some 30,000 musical examples in the course of her 81 years. During a career which took her from hidden corners of the globe to urban centers alike, from royal palaces to tribal huts, she embarked on expedition after expedition at a time when such journeys were considered exotic, dangerous, and beyond the reach of the average traveler.

Born in Conneaut, Ohio and educated at Denison University (from whom she also received an honorary doctorate), LB pursued additional studies at the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and in London. Trained primarily in vocal performance and music theory, she entered the musical world as a singer although she went on to pursue university graduate work in musicology and anthropology. In 1929 at the invitation of Mrs. Oscar Straus, she joined the Straus Central African Expedition under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Though she accompanied the traveling party as collector of botanical and ornithological specimens, her primary interest was to record whatever music she could on the trip and thereby launched a lifelong career as collector of the world's "unknown and exotic" musics.

What followed were almost yearly expeditions in which she captured the folk and liturgical music of the world's cultures via increasingly modern audio technology . LB lectured and taught both at home and abroad, embarked on trips under the auspices of foreign governments, foundations, and universities, and became a sought-after raconteur and teller of tales from faraway places. At 60 years of age she undertook a near-ten-year research project for Harvard University's Center of Byzantine Studies, at Dumbarton Oaks. The fruits of this project comprise the core of the Laura Boulton Collection of Byzantine and Orthodox Musics at the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library of Harvard University: recordings made in the churches, monasteries, seminaries, and convents of the Greek and Eastern Orthodox world. Return trips throughout the 1960's, and 3 separate excursions to Ethiopia to record folk music and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church liturgy complete the field recordings of the Collection. From the early 1960's LB was affiliated with Columbia University as lecturer. Her collection of recordings and numerous musical instruments was deposited in the Music Department and later, in conjunction with her appointment as director of research programs in world music was housed at the School of International Affairs. Her book, The Music Hunter: An Autobiography of a Career , was published in 1969. From the early 1970's she taught at the University of Arizona at Tempe, where the collection was relocated. Laura Boulton died on October 16, 1980 while in the planning stages of her next expedition, a return to Arctic Canada. Only one year earlier she had returned from what was to be her final expedition, a journey to the South Pacific.

From the guide to the Collection of Byzantine and Orthodox Musics, (Archive of World Music, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library)