The big news this week is that the field recordings made by Alan Lomax are soon to be available to listen to in their entirety. This is, of course, fantastic, and is thanks to the hard work of the good people at the Association for Cultural Equity, at whose website you’ll be able to hear these recordings from March onwards. Making folklore available was one of Lomax’s central motivations (as evinced in his aptly-named article “Making Folklore Available”), so it is good to see digital facilitation and hard work enabling this on such a scale.
Here's a Lomax film of some Sacred Harp, Georgia, 1982:
Four months in, I think it’s time to start using this medium to chart my study endeavours. There’s a fair probability that it will only be interesting or of any use to me, although I hope that’s not the case. If nothing else, and provided I perform this act regularly, writing here should provide a means of keeping my ideas organised, diarising what I’ve read and thought, and serve as a platform for general intellectual discharge (I know, it sounds disgusting).
The timing seems right as I’ve recently returned from my first academic conference outwith the University of Edinburgh, and, as such, am beginning to feel like I’m finding my feet as a research student. The conference was ace; here’s the programme cover:
It was replete with interesting talks and people, and the two keynote addresses (the opener from Martin Cloonan and the closer from David R. M. Irving) were both fantastic.
Since my return to Edinburgh, I’ve spent much of the week ploughing through articles and essays mostly concerned with field recordings in ethnomusicology, covering a fairly diverse range of issues; I think it’s fair to say. Most interesting to me have been:
Jairazbhoy, Nazir A. (1977) “The ‘Objective’ and Subjective View in Music Transcription,” Ethnomusicology, 21: 2
Seeger, Anthony (1986) “The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today,” Ethnomusicology 30: 2
Stokes, Martin (1994) “Introduction,” in Ethnicity, Identity and Music, Oxford: Berg
Yates, Michael (1982) “Percy Grainger and the Impact of the Phonograph,” Folk Music Journal 4: 3
A number of threads and themes are beginning to reveal themselves. Most notably, the question of “objectivity” both in producing and analysing recordings resurfaces frequently. Coupled to this are the shifting attitudes and ideologies that are traceable through the literature. Synthesising these two issues begins to outline the aims of ethnomusicologists and song-collectors through the 20th century: from Sharp’s (in Yates) assertion that any attempt at objectivity is worthless, as the good collector – i.e. him – knows what the singer is supposed to be singing, and the consequent transcription is of greater worth than a recording; through Jairazbhoy’s focus on the movement to produce automated transcriptions of recordings, and the fallacy that such an endeavour could ever produce anything “objective”; into Seeger’s pronouncement that all field recordists are producers, and what we hear is entirely dependant on their interpretation of sound events as they were occurring.
This curve is of central importance to my own work, and I look forward to unearthing further attitudinal nuggets that will enable me to figure out what approaches to field recording prevailed in the 1950s.
