Musics Lost and Found: Sound Collectors and the Life and Death
of Folk Tradition
by Michael Church (Music 781.62 Chu)
There hasn’t been much writing
about the role of song collectors in music studies, although their collective
work has given us much of the recorded material used in studying early strains
of music from around the world. Song collectors were early adopters at using
portable recording devices, taking them all over the world to document forms of
music they found interesting, that were at risk of disappearing to
modernization and globalization, or that were being actively suppressed in some
cases. Some learned to play the music themselves, or incorporated elements of
it into their own music. Their work ties together music history,
ethnomusicology, folk and classical music traditions, technology, and a measure
of sociopolitical navigation that often ties these issues together. We have a
great new book that documents the work and history of song collecting called Musics Lost and Found: Sound Collectors and the Life and Death
of Folk Tradition by Michael Church, and it might be one of the
most interesting books you can find in the Polley Music Library.
Of course, song collecting is a
culturally complicated affair, too. Those collecting the songs are sometimes
said to be “saving” these sounds of faraway lands, or those of our own
yesteryears before they’re lost to modernity — but are they saviors, or is
their arrival in an exotic locale the harbinger of gentrification or western
imperialism at the door? Author Michael Church attempts to take an unflinching
look at a number of song collectors throughout history, where we’ll look at the
good and the bad, and reflects some of the musical traditions considered
endangered or nearly extinct today.
In a way, this book acts as the
sequel to Church’s previous book The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions, which
you can also borrow from Polley. In that book, as you might gather from the
title, he examines 15 musical traditions from around the world that are
typically not referred to as “Classical” music by those of us raised in the
Western musical tradition. To us, these are forms of “folk” music, or “world”
music, or some kind of “other” that somehow doesn’t carry the intellectual
gravitas ascribed to our own classical music tradition. But in a book like The Other Classical Musics, if you analyze these traditions
using similar kinds of criteria as we do with our own Western classical music,
such as the development of the music across eras of time, music theory, formal
considerations and performance practices that can be gleaned from the music,
the development of instruments and technique, etc, you have to consider these
traditions “classical” in a similar sense.
Church is a bit of a song collector
himself, having released several CDs of field recordings that he made in
Central Asia and along Russian borderlands. With that background, Musics Lost and Found functions as a combination
of music history, particularly the development of ethnomusicology, and
travelogue, surveying musical forms from all over the world and some even in
our own back yards. Some of the pivotal moments in the book happen very literally
in our own back yards, as anthropologist Alice Fletcher endeavored to
transcribe the music of the Omaha tribe, as well as songs from the Dakota,
Otoe, Ponca, and Pawnee tribes, in the 1890s.
The writing style leans a little
toward the academic, but these are still quite readable narratives. The book is
broadly divided into sections that focus on periods of history in song
collecting, and within those, each chapter considers a specific song collector
or musical tradition. There is very little actual notated music in the book, so
the contents should be understandable for the widest possible range of readers.
There is perhaps a more significant
issue behind the lack of notated music in the book that I should mention as
well: our system of notation is designed to capture music made in the western
European tradition. To transcribe the music of many cultures using that system
is itself a reductive process that doesn’t represent the music accurately in
many cases. There are meters, rhythmic phrases, ornamentations and long forms
that don’t fit nicely into our notation. There are microtones and temperaments
that don’t follow our 12 notes to the octave system of pitch subdivision. Our
key signatures sometimes fall short accounting for these other kinds of modalities.
And we’d simply miss the particular sounds and timbres of instruments made in
other cultures. Considering these limitations, the work of song collectors who
have made recordings of these unique musical traditions makes even more sense —
we can all hear these unique musical attributes presented in their full and
natural state, rather than trying to shoehorn them into notational systems that
weren’t designed for their unique needs.
The book starts with some examples
of proto-song collectors, if we consider “song collecting” to be a relatively
modern act that involves audio recording. Before the advent of recording,
Church looks at a few examples of folks who were trying to document either folk
traditions of their own nearby environment, or music of other lands they’d
contacted. A few examples are Joseph Ritson’s “Select Collection of English
Songs” from 1783, or the 18th century French Jesuits who documented many
aspects of Chinese culture, including music.
Our own Nebraska example of Alice
Fletcher working with the Omaha tribe turns out to be quite significant in the
development of song collecting, in that her time documenting native musical
traditions overlapped between music transcription and recording. The technology
in the late 1800s was limited to wax cylinder recording, which is fairly low
resolution and also limited to very short passages, typically less than a
minute at a time, but it was the beginning of the more modern iteration of song
recording. Francis La Flesche accompanied Fletcher during some of her travels,
and the recordings he made on these trips are essentially the beginning of the
modern era of musicology, with field recordings to supplement transcriptions
and written narratives. We have two of Fletcher’s books on Native American
music here in Polley if you’re interested in learning more about her studies,
by the way: A Study of Omaha Indian Music and Indian Story and Song from North America.
Song collecting really started
cooking by the 1930s, and continued to grow every decade. A lot of this growth
is directly related to evolving technology, both in the obvious arena of
recording devices, but also in the ease, efficiency, and cost of travel. One
can look at the case of the Lomaxes to see both of these factors in action.
John Lomax and his son Alan are among the most important of American
musicologists, folklorists, and song collectors, and together their efforts
spanned most of the 20th Century. Between the two of them, their work
documenting and sharing songs has weaved through almost every conceivable
format. John’s first book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published in
1910, containing tons of songs represented with transcribed melodies and lots
of lyrics. We have a later edition of this book that was expanded by Alan here
at Polley. In the teens and 20s, John Lomax continued to record songs
throughout the country, at the time using an Edison recorder. By the 1930s,
Alan was working with him, and they stayed on top of recording technology,
switching to an aluminum disc recorder in the mid-30s, and eventually to a
succession of tape-based machines.
John died in 1948, but Alan
continued similar lines of work, eventually traveling around the world to make
recordings, producing radio programs, commercially released recordings, and
contributing to national archives. In the last decades of his life, he was
devoted to an ambitious project that he called the “Global Jukebox,” which was
intended to harness the power of computers and the internet to create a
multimedia resource of the sounds and sights of the world for anyone to access.
The project remained incomplete at the time of his death in 2002, but the
Association for Global Equity that he founded continued the work, and the
project is now live at theglobaljukebox.org
for anyone to access.
If you think of the historical
narrative of the book as a story, the Lomax section is probably the climax,
since they were responsible for so much activity. The rest of the book focuses
on song collecting on a smaller scale, and transitions to a world music focus
rather than on Western folk music. But you’ll still find lots of fascinating
information here. Perhaps many folks don’t know that novelist Paul Bowles as an
avid song collector in his second home of Morocco, for example. And much of the
international song collecting takes on more political overtones than the
earlier portion of the book: there are chapters on the music of Russia,
Afghanistan, and China, for example, all countries that at different times have
exerted political pressure on their musicians to discourage or outright ban the
playing of traditional musical styles. There is a brief but significant chapter
on the significance of sound archives around the world, who aim to preserve and
share all of these recordings, and for the need for such places to stay ahead
of media format obsolescence, which is likely the biggest threat of all to
long-term preservation. And towards the end, we get a fascinating discussion of
the UNESCO list of “intangible cultural heritage” materials that are at risk of
disappearing, which includes musical traditions.
All told, this book is a wonderful
overview of what has amounted to multiple races against time to preserve
historical musical traditions, as they come under threat from a variety of
social, political, and even technical pressures. Although the work of these
song collectors is always incomplete, their collective efforts have given us
the extraordinary gift of ourselves, living and loving in different times and
places.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions by
Michael Church, A Study of Omaha Indian Music and Indian Story and Song from North America both by Alice
Fletcher, or Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads by John Lomax.)
( official Michael Church
blog site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff
Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that
page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog
individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the
reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the
Polley Music Library,
located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th
& "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians,
books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs,
music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out
Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and
follow them on Facebook!
Posts
