Ben Houtman

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Benjamin Houtman (Julie Maness)

Ben has served as assistant archivist and consultant for WNYC and has helmed the archives' Leon Levy digitization project since January, 2021.

Ben was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but was nurtured in the art of sound. As a young man he followed the call of music to Austin, spending years as a touring and recording musician before "retiring" to attend the University of Texas. He graduated with highest honors with a baccalaureate in sociology in 2008, only to again heed his muse’s call, breaking his retirement almost immediately to return to the music scene he loves.

That love matured, as all true loves do, gradually manifesting itself as a desire to fulfill his spiritual debt to the history of recorded sound, and in 2013 Ben enrolled in UT’s School of Information, where he would focus on archives, copyright, and audiovisual preservation. During his time at the iSchool, Ben worked for the Historical Music Recordings Collection at UT's Fine Arts Library, one of the largest audio archives in the United States. He graduated from the iSchool with a Masters of Science in Information Studies in 2015.

Ben joined New York Public Radio in 2015 to work on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, appraising, reformatting, cataloging, and writing articles about archival audio from the New York City Municipal Archives’ WNYC collection. Beguiled by Terpsichore's turn to dance, Ben left to join the archives of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and Merce Cunningham Trust in 2016—partnering with Trisha on her turn to zeros and ones and seeing Merce's archives through a Centennial (and a pandemic)—before returning to WNYC in 2020 to lead their large-scale Leon Levy digitization program. He has also worked at the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) at Rutgers University where he guided the conservation of the Count Basie family papers and artifacts. At IJS, he has held in his hand a mixtape and hand-written letter from Louis Armstrong to Catherine Basie.

He lives in Brooklyn with his amazing wife Julie and their two cats. This is his Survival Kit:

1. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
2. Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch
3. Walter Gieseking - Preludes (Debussy), or Fats Waller's 1937 solo piano performance of "I Ain't Got Nobody"
   
4. Trisha Brown - Set and Reset
5. Dorothea Tanning - "Some Roses and their Phantoms"
   
6. Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler... or T Zero
7. A melodica (or a Casio SK-1)
8. A stack of New York Times acrostic puzzles
9. And one of these: The National - Alligator, Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes, Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, or Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, he can't decide which.