A Musical Rescue Mission
All around the world, heritage music is endangered. Zack Youcha ’21 is helping communities save theirs.
In Zack Youcha’s ’21 grandfather’s house, piles and piles of tapes sit inside cabinets and boxes. Recorded with a reel-to-reel machine, they’re sound bites of Zack’s family. Conversations on the couch. Television programs. Holiday feasts.
A couple of tapes are mislabeled “morse code” and “cantor.” What they really contain are recordings of a Passover dinner from the mid-late 1970s. When Zack listened to them for the first time seven years ago, his heart stopped. Through the crackles of feedback, he heard a woman singing Presach songs: his grandmother’s mother, who had died before he was born.
“Here I am listening to my great-grandmother, who was a refugee from Istanbul, singing these songs she grew up with,” Zack says. “It was just so deeply moving. It was like, this is me. This is what was brought over. This is what was there.”
If it weren’t for his grandfather’s obsession with tape recording, Zack might never have gained access to that glimmer of his great-grandmother. In the grand scheme of things, he’s lucky—most people, unless they have written accounts or well-kept oral stories passed down, don’t know the lived experiences of their forebears: who they were, what they loved and hated, the music they listened to. For many, much of that may be forever gone. But, Zack says, perhaps not all of it.
Traditional heritage music around the world is endangered, at risk of being lost completely to time, pressure to assimilate, war, genocide, and climate change. The good news: some of it can still be saved. And Zack is ensuring that happens before it’s too late.
In early 2025, he founded Music is Culture, or MiC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people worldwide conduct and publish their own music preservation efforts—particularly works related to music of cultural significance that might otherwise be lost, destroyed, or forgotten.
The reasons why heritage music is being lost vary from culture to culture, but the motivations behind preserving it are mostly the same: To capture a time and place that no longer exists; to remain connected to one’s culture and ancestors; and to ensure that all can enjoy the traditional music tied to their family history.
MiC works with people around the world to revive their heritage music. Music instructor Anesu Ndoro ’21, whom Zack befriended at Reed, is working in southeastern Zimbabwe and central-western Mozambique to document traditional instrument-building processes and rhythms and melodies of indigenous Ndau music (see page 23). Stateside, musician Ara Dinkjian and community historian Harout Arakelian are cataloging more than 1,800 recordings pressed in the U.S. featuring Armenian musicians. Through MiC, the music from these projects will be published as digital databases and physical objects, like CDs, DVDs, and books.
Musical historians Fahad Harbo Kheder and Rênas Babekir came to Zack with a specific proposal: help publish cassette tapes to heal wounds from genocide. After surviving the 2014 Yazidi genocide, in which thousands of Yazidis were killed and trafficked by ISIS, Kheder sifted through the rubble of his hometown, Shingal, Iraq, and unearthed over 500 cassettes ISIS had attempted to destroy. Kheder is working with Babekir to digitize and catalogue these rescued tapes. MiC will host the recordings on its website as a digital archive, giving access to listeners worldwide.
Zack knows what musical loss feels like because it’s happening to him. When
Sephardic Jews, a diaspora population associated with Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula, immigrated to the United States, they had to choose which aspects of their culture to preserve. Music was not a primary concern, and religious music was considered more important to preserve than folk music. That means much of the latter, and its unique styles and dialectical ways of singing, has been lost.
Shortly after hearing his great-grandmother on those tapes, Zack was studying Russian at Reed, far away from his home state of Virginia and the bluegrass music he grew up with, but still singing, taking lessons in the music department, and playing guitar between schoolwork. On a trip to New York City in 2019, Zack watched a distant cousin of his perform traditional Sephardic music, sung in Judeo-Spanish. Zack says he “lost it,” crying at hearing the music of his ancestors live for the first time.
“These songs evoke a time and a place that doesn’t exist any more,” Zack says. “They tie me to a history I can’t access through my family. Music is this way to touch a place you can’t go. It’s a way of intergenerationally connecting to your family, to your community.”
But anywhere humans are victims, Zack says, arts and culture are victims, too, because the people who make them begin to disappear. “We’re staring down the barrel of global change,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot more musical endangerment in the future. It seems like an important thing to start figuring out how to address.”
Preserving traditional cultural music takes money, time, and care. MiC is an enabling force that provides support to people so they don’t have to worry about the money and time and can instead focus on the care—making the effort to preserve their heritage music so others can access it for free.
“Something should really be out there to do this kind of work,” Zack says, “to allow people to represent the music from their communities in a way that’s authentic and beneficial to the community, before it’s a commodity that anyone can buy.”
That’s precisely what he hopes MiC can continue to do. And Zack knows this work doesn’t matter just for the present, but for generations to come. “We’re enabling people to make educational tools, so their grandkids can look back and say, ‘Thank you, Grandma, you did this for me. I have my culture, I have my heritage,’” he says. “That’s the kind of future I want to build with this.”
Tags: Alumni, Books, Film, Music, Performing Arts, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, International