Chiya Bhiya Kathayat

Recording of a performance by the bard Camalek Bahadur Dholi, aged ~54, and two assistants. It contains the invocation and the first of 4 epics recorded on 4 November 1969 at the administrative center of Dandeldhura District, Nepal, by Marc Gaborieau and Mireille Helffer of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). This recording was made outdoors, on a Nagra recorder at 19cm/s and simultaneously on cassette. The digitalized version has been mounted from digitalizations of tapes archived under catalog number BM.1970.041.004 at the Centre pour la Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (CREM), Université de Paris-X, Nanterre, France (http://crem.parisson.com). The performance was simultaneously recorded on side A of a cassette labelled "HUDKIYA 1" (not currently archived). Mme Helffer notes that the end of the Nagra recording suffers from uneven speed. The sound file presented here is composed of two digitalized tracks end to end: #1 CNRSMH_I_1970_041_004_13_01; #2 CNRSMH_I_1970_041_004_13_02. (In the CREM online catalog, only 11 digitalized tracks, none containing an epic, were listed for tape BM.1970.041.004 as of Sept. 2010.) Regions (corresponding to the two tracks above): #1 00:00:00,000 to 00:08:15,270 length 00:08:15,270; #2 00:08:15,270 to 00:22:17,880 length 00:14:02,610; length (total): 22:17,880.