John Donald Robb’s Imperative to Collect: Toward an Archival Ethnography of the Robb Archive for Southwestern Music

Abstract

John Donald Robb (1892–1989) was a composer, music professor, and University of New Mexico administrator who for decades enthusiastically collected Southwestern folk music—in particular Spanish-language nuevo mexicano music. His correspondence as well as other archived documents provide fascinating glimpses into his methods of collecting music and establishing an archive. These glimpses, in turn, help us understand not only Robb and his overall oeuvre better but also, specifically, the way his music collection was assembled—a key endeavor since, as various scholars have argued, an archival collection’s degree of usefulness increases as users understand the way the archive was put together. This article is an exercise in “archival ethnography”: my aim is to explore and contextualize Robb as one individual involved in a wider academic culture of musical and cultural preservation through archival collections.