Working with the Bech Collection at the Archives of Traditional Music

Print-Through

It was August of 2011, on my first day as a fresher in the undergraduate program at Kathmandu University’s Department of Music. Professor Gert Matthias-Wegner, passionate as he is about all things Nepal and ethnomusicology, was telling us about ethnomusicological research that had taken place in Nepal since Arnold A. Bake’s visit in the 1930s. It is then that I first learned about Terence R. Bech, whose Nepali music collection is housed at the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at Indiana University.¹

In 2018, I joined Indiana University Bloomington to pursue my studies in ethnomusicology, a decision hugely inspired by Bech’s extensive fieldwork in Nepal and this collection, awe-inspiring and enormous in every sense of the word. During my time at the ATM from 2018 to 2020 as a graduate archival assistant (GA), my first assignment was to cross-check the names, localities, and other information in the Bech Collection.

Every day, I looked forward to “hanging out” with this collection, with its never-ending spreadsheets, stacks of accession-folders, picturesque images of a Nepal I had never seen, and songs I had never heard before. I was envious of Bech’s meticulous documentation of the travel routes, dates, festivities, and peoples he “encountered” in Nepal from 1963 to 1974. However, fieldnotes, maps, recordings—like everything else in the archives—are layered representations that allow readers to bring their own interpretive frameworks.

From 2018 to 2025, I worked at the ATM in various capacities, primarily focusing on the Terence R. Bech Collection. My experience has taught me that archival collections and archives themselves are dynamic sites replete with multiple layers of meanings. In the case of the Bech Collection, this allows for revitalization and recontextualization of Nepali cultural heritage. In the broader contexts of archives, my operationalization of the terms revitalization and recontextualization both mean to (re)visit archives from a critical angle to generate insights that contribute to a renewed understanding of archives, the artifacts and concepts within and surrounding them, and the results or consequences thereof.

Here, I critically reflect on my archival and emotional labor involved in assessing, accessing, and triangulating ethnographic variables of this collection and the ATM. This reflection sets the stage for my future research that advances a model of representation and recontextualization that supports collaborative engagement between scholars and communities in interpreting archival and ethnographic collections.

The Terence R. Bech Collection:

Terence Bech grew up in Spokane, Washington, and had an interest in mountaineering from a young age (Ridgeway 2014). Bech divides the period in which he traveled and documented cultures across Nepal into three phases: from 1964 to 1967 as a Peace Corps Volunteer; from 1967 to 1969 as a Fulbright-Hays research fellow accomplishing “the first ethnomusicological survey of Nepal”; and from 1970 to 1973 as a Ford Foundation grantee collecting “ethnographic life history studies of Nepali musicians and their families, which were completed for 17 ethnic groups” (Bech 1978).

Apart from being a Peace Corps volunteer and ethnographer, Bech was also a member of the 1978 American K2 Expedition (Wickwire 2018), and has sailed through Patagonia (Gurung 2011). Bech also served as the Director of the United States Education Foundation in Nepal at one point, as noted in a business meeting of the Nepal Studies Association Meet held in Wisconsin in 1983 (Upraity 1983). Nepali anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista recounts that in the early 70s, Bech and anthropologist Johann Reinhard (then at the University of Vienna) crossed paths as they happened to document the Raute Peoples of Nepal on the same day (Bista 1976).

In his “Collector’s Introduction” to the 1978 catalog compiled by Anne Helen Ross, Bech calls his collection, born out of extensive travel and ethnographic survey, “the world’s principal archive for the study of Nepalese and Eastern Himalayan Border area music traditions” (Bech 1978). The Bech Collection consists of “400 reel-to-reel tapes, 2,000 black-and-white negatives, 1,500 color transparencies, 120 musical instruments, 41 life history ethnographies, 7,500 song texts and 200 musical transcriptions in manuscript form” (ibid.).

The ATM and the IU Museum received the complete Bech Collection in 1974 (Bech 1978). Apart from what we have at the ATM, this collection also has 396 materials (227 objects of ritualistic or daily significance and 169 musical instruments) currently housed at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA), earlier known as the Mathers Museum of World Cultures (https://iumaa.iu.edu/collections/ethnographic-collections/ethnomusicology.html, 2023). Scholars hold Bech’s contribution to be “[t]he most astounding collection of Nepalese music recordings” (Wegner 2004), and “the richest Nepali musical resource anywhere in the world” (Upraity 1983).

I want to note that what I refer to as the Bech Collection in this article is officially named The Annapurna L. Bech Memorial Collection of Nepalese Music for Research and Education, in honor of Bech’s late daughter Annapurna, who was born in Nepal (https://libraries.indiana.edu/bech, 2023).

The Dynamic State of the Static Archive:

My experience as a GA at the ATM in the process of revisiting the Bech Collection seems contextually relevant here. Working with the Bech Collection was exciting, tedious, promising, and frustrating, all at once. Imagine me hunched over a desk, eyes straining, headphones on, spending hours upon hours, pausing and replaying, trying to decipher not just the many layers of instruments and voices in audio recordings but also the frames and figures in slides; or sometimes, seated on the floor (because the tables were not spacious enough) with multiple folders and browsers on laptop open, scratching my head trying to see what documentation connects to what audio (and where in that audio, exactly?), or triangulating Bech’s correspondence with the date he recorded something somewhere in Nepal. Needless to say, there were many ethnographic variables to consider, along with the contextual and cultural elements ingrained within a massive archival collection such as this! In opening/closing accession files, in pausing/rewinding audio files, in picking/connecting metadata across audio, image, and paper documents, I began thinking of what I knew about Nepal, its cultures, and historic events.

My experience of meticulously going through one digital file after another, alongside page after page and stacks upon stacks of accession folders could be aptly termed as Archival palimpsests. This of course is a direct nod to ethnomusicologist and sound studies scholar J. Martin Daughtry’s idea of “acoustic palimpsests” that “foreground the multiple acts of erasure, effacement, occupation, displacement, collaboration, and reinscription that are embedded in music composition, performance, and recording, as well as in acoustic experience more broadly” (2013, 9). As my ATM colleagues will agree, working on one thing at the archives always leads to another file, box, and shelf. Or as they say in Nepali, “लहरो तान्दा पहरो गर्जनु”, meaning, “I pulled a root, but the whole cliff thundered”. 

Building on my foundational work with the Bech Collection, from 2018 to 2023 I added Nepali language subtitles, corrected factual inaccuracies, and provided further metadata and contexts to about 1500 already digitized slides. In 2019, the Archives of Traditional Music tasked me with curating an exhibit on Bech’s ethnographic research, in which I summarized his ethnomusicological survey in Nepal but also provided a multimodal snippet of his massive collection. I also added time stamps to audio recordings, a process that involves adding time markers to an audio or video file to help users navigate or easily find specific moments in the content. This task remains incomplete, even though it was already begun by another Nepali ethnomusicologist, Dikshant Uprety, who graduated from the same program a couple of years before me. In the process of adding descriptions, missing information, and additional relevant information to the Bech Collection’s digital accession file, working at the ATM constantly provided me with an opportunity to better understand the context prevalent in Nepal when Bech was present, knowledge I then utilized to add multiple layers of contextual information and interpretations. I learned words no longer used in the Nepali language (which is my mother tongue), while also noting several linguistic errors despite the ethnographer’s working ability and comprehension of Nepali.³ His excellent photographs captured nooks and crannies of the country, from the high Himalayas to the flatlands in the south.⁴ To this effect, my work with the Bech Collection as a graduate archival assistant not only taught me more about my own country, but also how Nepal and Nepalis are represented. It also made me aware of how errors made during the process of fieldwork, documentation, and accessioning can creep into archival collections.

Daughtry argues that acts of “layered listening” (like the one I have done here) challenge the traditional idea of palimpsests being static or motionless, “obfuscatory” (2013). This argument seems pertinent in the current context, particularly when we consider that not only are music and sound in motion/mobile, but so are the traditions, cultures, and the meanings and contexts associated with them. The idea that archives are static and immobile is definitely not new (see Nettl 2015, Seeger 1986 and 1996), nor have archives, museums or institutional repositories ever been neutral in their processes, holdings, or meanings. For the Bech Collection, the contexts inherent within these archival collections have always been dynamic and mobile, as they are distant from the spatial and temporal realities of Nepal and its people today. In that sense, engaging with archival collections with renewed perspectives can be helpful in understanding disciplinary trajectories and representational histories.

There are cultural and political contexts surrounding Bech’s visits to Nepal to consider as well. Ethnomusicologists (Henderson 2002-2003, and Stirr 2017) and historians (Whelpton 2005, and Regmi 1958) have discussed in detail the state of culture in Nepal before, during, and after the Panchayat Rule. I will merely emphasize here that the Panchayat Rule, implemented in 1960—four years before Bech first entered the country and two years before the Peace Corps entered—promoted a “one nation, one culture” policy stressing monoculturalism. In parallel, the Nepali government and Bech were simultaneously focused on documenting as many cultures from across Nepal as possible. Nepali musicians/ethnomusicologists including Dharma Raj Thapa and Kumar Basnet, under the auspices of the Nepali government, traveled around Nepal to collect songs and music from different communities, with the goal of reproducing them for the state sponsored media (primarily radio and later cassettes) (Henderson 2002-2003). To his credit, Bech still meticulously recorded the individual, contextual, demographic, and geographical information about the sociocultural practices he was documenting, as best he could.

Like all ethnographic endeavors, despite his diligence and meticulousness, Terence Bech’s work only provides a partial picture of the Nepal he saw and documented. Nonetheless, it continues to inspire me. A renewed focus on contemporary Nepali contexts and collaborations between scholars, archives, and communities of practice will help further complement Bech’s orientation to Nepal. In the future, I aim to critically analyze how Nepal’s cultural practices have been approached and represented in ethnographic contexts by synthesizing:

• the ethnographer’s initial experience of the culture that is documented, archived, and exhibited;
• the archival or museum staff’s documentation (including but not limited to inventorying, cataloging, and interpretation); and
• the community’s and cultural experts’ recontextualization of the collection and how it has been understood across time and space.

Once again, forwarding Daughtry’s concept of acoustic palimpsests (2013), I am inspired to engage in acts of active listening that show us cultural dynamism against the assumed stagnation of archives. I have realized first-hand how researching, writing, reflecting, and contextualizing sparks an archival reawakening through memory, interpretation, and care. Academics and archivists can be as comprehensive and meticulous as possible in their work. But as cultural practices, attitudes, politics, and all of society are an ever-changing set of conditions, what they achieve can only ever be a snapshot of sorts. These snapshots help present-day stakeholders (like us) understand the specifics of what/how/when/why things have changed as they did, thus rendering archives and museums even more important rather than static and irrelevant.


Maybe someday I will write about this…

And when I do, my own writing or research—like Bech’s, or anyone else’s on the subject—will be another snapshot or layer, one that holds the potential for valuable illumination while also carrying limitations inherent in being fixed in time and space.

Acknowledgement: No archivist ever works alone. To my colleagues, ethnomusicologists, archivists, museum curators, librarians, musicians-activists, and culture-enthusiasts at Nepal Music Archive, Kala Kulo, Raithane Music, Kathmandu University Department of Music, the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, and Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology: You have my profuse gratitude for sharing my enthusiasm for the Bech Collection at a time when it seems most necessary for nurturing the discourse of Nepali ethnomusicology.

धन्यवाद ! Dhanyabād!

Notes:

1. Gert Matthias-Wegner, or Professor Wegner as his Nepali students call him, was instrumental in founding the Department of Music at Kathmandu University in 1996. To date, this is the only academic institution in South Asia to offer degrees in ethnomusicology at university level, which has trained and produced students who go on to be performers, archivists, and ethnomusicologists. ↩︎
2. From the recordings, it does seem like Bech spoke Nepali well enough to do fieldwork. The life histories of musicians collected by Bech are handwritten (with pencil) in Nepali using Devanagari script. However, I am unsure whether Bech himself was writing these or had help from the research assistant provided to him by Tribhuvan University in the early 1970s. ↩︎
3. I say this, fully knowing the risk of romanticizing the past. However, the reader would be advised to keep in mind that I came to the US in 2018 and was not able to go back to Nepal until 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic affecting my MA examination and application to the Ph.D. program. The Bech Collection was, effectively, my way of “staying connected” to Nepal and the Nepali language as an international student in the US. ↩︎

Resources:

Bech, Terence R. 1978. “Collector’s Introduction.” In Catalog of the Terence R. Bech Nepal Music Research Collection, by Anne Helen Ross, 1–2. Bloomington: Archives of Traditional Music, Folklore Institute, Indiana University.

Bista, Dor Bahadur. “Encounter with the Raute: the Last Hunting Nomads of Nepal”. Kailash 4, No. 4 (1976): 317-328.

Daughtry, J. Martin. “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening”. Music & Politics. Volume VII, Issue 1, Winter 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0007.101

Gurung, Ambar. 2011. “Songs of Our Past.” Nepali Times. http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=18795#.W7V8hBNKjBI

Henderson, David. “Who Needs ‘The Folk’? A Nepali Remodeling Project.” Asian Music 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2002–Winter 2003): 19–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/834420. 

Nettl, Bruno. 2015. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Regmi, D. R. A Century of Family Autocracy in Nepal. 2nd ed. Nepal: The Nepali National Congress, 1958.

Ridgeway, Rick. The Last Step: The American Ascent of K2. United States: Mountaineers Books, 2014.

Seeger, Anthony. “The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today”. In Ethnomusicology 30, no.2 (1986): 261 – 276.

._______________. “Ethnomusicologists, Archives, Professional Organizations, and the Shifting Ethics of Intellectual Property”. In Yearbook of Traditional Music 28 (1996): 87-105.

Upraity, Trailokya N. 1983. “Western Scholars’ Contributions to Nepal Studies.” Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: (3)1: 7-12. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol3/iss1/3

Wegner, Gert M. 2004. “Documenting Nepalese Musical Traditions.” In Archiving for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century, edited by Seeger and Chaudhury. 231–237. Kolkata (Calcutta): Seagull Books.

Whelpton, John. A History of Nepal. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Wickwire, Jim. 2018. “K2 40th Anniversary: Inspiration Through Generations.” The Mountaineers, September 6, 2018. https://www.mountaineers.org/blog/k2-40th-anniversary-inspiration-through-generations

Suyash Kumar Neupane earned his Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, with a minor in Food Anthropology, from Indiana University in 2025. Focusing on how embodied experiences and cultural expressions are negotiated in Nepal, his research employs sensory ethnography to explore the intersection of food, music, and the senses. His expertise and interests include: gastromusicology; culinary storytelling through autoethnography; sensory recontextualization of Nepali collections in audiovisual archives; and the resurgence of 1980s nostalgia in contemporary music scenes. In addition to his work with the Archives of Traditional Music, Suyash also serves as a part-time program assistant at the Asian Culture Center at Indiana University.