Says Margaret Pleasant Douroux, HMF's founder and one of gospel's leading composers and music educators: "[Gospel] music has passed through African-American culture without benefit of pen and pencil. Now it can be documented as the truly American art form that it is."

Among the project's key activities, says archivist John Vallier M.A. '00, M.L.I.S. '03, UCLA's principal investigator for the partnership, is the planning for Gospel House, which will become the physical core for gospel in Los Angeles and home to the GALA archives.

GALA also will expand upon Los Angeles-based gospel and related music collections in the UCLA archive and at HMF, Vallier says. With the help of UCLA students and members of the broader community, GALA will make both audio and video recordings of gospel and gospel-related performances in and around the greater Los Angeles region. Preserving invaluable gospel collections will be another of the project's components. The archive will assist HMF and others with gospel collections to preserve and increase access to already existing recordings that document gospel music in Los Angeles. In addition, the archive will host a Web server to make digital copies of gospel recordings available to members of the gospel and broader communities.

"This partnership is a great opportunity," says Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje M.A. '72, Ph.D. '78, director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive. "As Dr. Douroux has often said, 'Western classical music has Carnegie Hall; country music has the Grand Ole Opry; and rock music has its Hall of Fame. Gospel has nothing.' "

With GALA, however, gospel music could one day have it all in Los Angeles.

— Susan Chapman

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