Music Book Review: Musics Lost and Found by Michael Church

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

 

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