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Transcription: [00:02:00]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
I was thinking about teaching but the Smithsonian within a year or two of working seemed to me to be a good place to spend my career!
[00:02:08]
I got my 20-year button only last month.
[00:02:13]
Perhaps I have a few more years here but--anyway, the--
[00:02:20]
I was almost immediately put to work doing field work for the bicentennial festival, particularly since I spoke German.
[00:02:30]
We needed to have a certain amount of field work done in Europe among German-speaking countries specifically: Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
[00:02:39]
And I went over that summer with Ralph and we kind of met up.
[00:02:45]
He was doing some work in Italy, I believe, and France at the time.
[00:02:48]
But we were still making selections for the bicentennial and it was an extremely fruitful trip.
[00:02:56]
I also went to the Netherlands to try to see if there was anything in the way of folklife left there.
[00:03:03]
It's such a tiny country and it's so industrialized and you can drive from one end of the country to the other in a matter of several hours.
[00:03:10]
There's just very, very few folk traditions still living there.
[00:03:16]
I went up to an island off the North coast called Terschelling as I had been told that if there was any folklife left in Holland it was probably going to be there but I couldn't find too much.
[00:03:28]
But we did--as a result of my work, particularly in Switzerland, I made the acquaintance of Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser who is an ethnomusicolost but also an organologist which is what I am, specializing in musical instruments.
[00:03:42]
She kind of mapped out a fieldwork plan for me which was, took me throughout Switzerland and we put, the two of us put together a really wonderful collection of particularly folk music from all of the major--