Takes you to the main page for this section

Elaine Bradtke

NEH & BAc Research Fellow

Elaine Bradtke is an American born and trained ethnomusicologist and librarian. She splits her working days between the James Madison Carpenter project, based at the Elphinstone Institute of the University of Aberdeen, and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Through her work as a specialist librarian she has developed a strong general background in British and American folklore and music as well as the preservation and dissemination of ethnographic field collections. Areas of specific interest include the traditional music and dance of England and its related customs, with a particular focus on the fiddle.

Previous posts have included the American Memory Project at the Archive of American Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, and freelance work as a music transcriber and editor for several publications of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

As part of the James Madison Carpenter Project team, she has catalogued photographs and transcribed cylinder and disc recordings of singers and fiddle players made between 1929 and 1935, leading towards publication of the critical edition. The project is funded by the British Academy and the National Endowment for the Humanities under the auspices of the American Folklore Society, and in association with the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Her MMus research focused on the use of traditional and popular music in the Walt Disney World theme park; work for her library degree included setting up a cataloguing system for the archives of the Department of Ethnomusicology at Florida State University; and her Ph.D. research was on the history and revival of Molly dancing in England and its spread to the USA. She has served on the Committee of The Folklore Society, and its Publications Subcommittee since 1999 and has recently become a member of the Editorial Board of the Folk Music Journal.

Current research includes:

Performance styles and repertoire of English fiddle players
Early moving images of English traditional dance and music
The relationship between ballad opera and theatrical music and nineteenth and twentieth century morris dance music.

Selected publications and papers:

2008 – ‘Fiddle Tunes from Under the Bed: Extracting Music from Carpenter’s Recordings.’ North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, 3-8 August.
2008 – ‘Sam Bennett – The Film Star’, English Dance and Song (Spring), pp. 28-29.
2007. ‘Two Collectors, One Informant, Different Results’, American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, Quebec, Canada, 17-21 October.
2006. Traveller’s Joy: Songs of English and Scottish Travellers and Gypsies 1965-2002,music transcription and editing(London: EFDSS).
2006 – ‘Sam Bennett and the Ilmington Tradition: New Evidence from the James Madison Carpenter Collection Cylinders’, Fiddle On Magazine, 20, 8-13.
2006 – ‘Sam Bennett: A Case Study in the English Fiddle Tradition from James Madison Carpenter’s Ethnographic Field Collection’, North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, Aberdeen, Scotland, July
2004 – Dear Companion: Appalachian Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection, music editor (London: EFDSS
2003 – The James Madison Carpenter Collection Online Catalogue (co-author) http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/carpenter/: The Humanities Research Institute Online Press
2002 – ‘Teetering on the Cutting Edge: Exploiting the Potential of Encoded Archival Description’ American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, Rochester, NY, 16-20 October
2001 – ‘Molly Dancing: A Study of Discontinuity and Change’ in Step Change: New Views of Traditional Dance, ed. by Georgina Boyes (London: Boutle).
2000 – Truculent Rustics: Molly Dancing in East Anglia before 1940 (London: FLS Books).
1999/2000 – ‘The Fiddle in Southern England’, Fiddler Magazine, 6, no. 4, 22 - 24, 26.
1997 – ‘Molly Dancing and the Seven Champions: Postmodernism and the Re-invention of Tradition’, PhD thesis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
1996 – ‘The H. Hurlbutt Albino Folk Music Collection (1913-38)’, Folk Music Journal, 7, no. 2, 205-15.

Page last updated: Monday, 25-Feb-2008 17:14:52 GMT

The Elphinstone Institute
University of Aberdeen · MacRobert Building · King's College · Aberdeen · AB24 5UA
Tel: 01224 272996 · Fax: 01224 272728 · Email: elphinstone@abdn.ac.uk
© 2005 Elphinstone Institute.

University Home · Prospective students · Prospectuses · A to Z Index · Search
Email & Telephone Directories · Contacts/Help · Maps · Privacy Policy & Disclaimer · Accessibility Policy