2.1. The Field of Samples
Early European ethnomusicologists understood “fieldwork” as an endeavor to collect core samples from different cultures. These samples were brought back, indexed, and analyzed. Objects went for display in museums. Myths and tales went for publication in anthologies. Recorded music was published in transcriptions and, as soon as records became affordable commodities, first on vinyl and later also on compact discs.
As a graduate student in ethnomusicology at the Paris Nanterre University from 2001 to 2006, I was a member of the Laboratoire d’ethnomusicologie (laboratory for ethnomusicology) of the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind).[5] The lab was hosted on the third floor of the museum in an aisle of the Trocadéro. Standing right in front of the Eiffel Tower, the premises were a testament to its venerable history and institutional prestige. The lab’s material organization also reflected the epistemic ideal that presided over its beginnings. The unit physically hosted a large collection of instruments as well as a large sound archive. The instruments were made available on demand to researchers and sometimes displayed for the general public in the museum. The sound archive, which comprised edited records and many unpublished field recordings, was available to researchers and graduate students. Until 2001, the lab also managed a dedicated collection of field recordings, which were sold to other libraries and institutions as well as to the general public. Next door was the laboratory for biological anthropology, which hosted skull and bone specimens from many of the same populations.
At the turn of the millennium, the laboratory’s team comprised around ten permanent researchers and another ten doctoral students. It would be misleading to say that the team was still engaged in the kind of colonial ethnomusicology that was practiced at its foundation in 1928. On the contrary, probably all of us were convinced that our activity could contribute to the defense of local populations and cultures against the alienating powers of nation states, capitalism, and globalization. It remained true, nevertheless, that most of us made field recordings (and listened to them) as documents meant to convey information not so much about a musical happening as about the people recorded.
In ethnology in general, the Herderian epistemic heritage had been amply discussed and criticized[6]; concepts like “folklore” and “authenticity” had fallen into disgrace along with references to the “primitive” and to the “archaic.” But the interest in “deep” structures remained. John Blacking (1973), for instance, drew on Chomskyan grammar to explain why two Venda songs were in fact renditions of the same “deep” harmonic structure.[7] Marxist theory of infra/superstructure was another explicit influence.
Music is not a language that describes the way society seems to be, but a metaphorical expression of feelings associated with the way society really is. It is a reflection of and response to social forces, and particularly to the consequences of the division of labour in society. (Blacking 1973: 104)
The same idea grounded Alan Lomax’s “cantometrics” project and Gilbert Rouget’s teaching that “music is always much more than music.” Blacking pushed Mantle Hood’s call to study music “in its own terms” even further:
We must recognize that no musical style has ‘its own terms’: its terms are the terms of its society and culture, and of the bodies of the human beings who listen to it, and create it and perform it. (Blacking 1973: 25)
While there is little reason to completely dismiss the idea that music is a “social fact,” this understanding also falls prey to the general critique that “we unwittingly claim to find evidence in the [acoustic] that in fact we have discovered elsewhere” (Pinney 2005: 260). For Pinney, this fallacy derives from the assumption that time is linear and that things that happen at a particular place and moment are bound by necessity to whatever else happens there and then. It makes little difference, under such premises, whether “field” recordings are understood as cultural samples or as indexes that reflect social causes. In any of these cases, they are not self-standing objects, and even the kinds of behavior of which they are supposed to be tokens (the musical styles, for instance) do not have “their own terms” according to which they could be understood.
As a student, I made desperate efforts to experience the deep truths that supposedly lay on the other side of these recordings. Beyond the acoustic surface was the promise of a non-discursive contact with how other people thought and felt about the world. It defined what they were. The sleeve notes were clear and confirmed by ethnomusicological writings: the acoustic trace reflected something essential about the Other’s culture and society. The narrative did not overlook the multiple decisions and mediations that went into the production of “good” field recordings. On the contrary, they were presented as scientific assets.
Three decades earlier, in a typically modern way (as opposed to a postmodern one), the leaflet advertising the Musée de l’Homme’s LP collection/series proudly stated: “‘Primitive’ music, peasant music, Oriental art music, in short, oral tradition music? Certainly! But provided the tradition is good, the performance of quality, the recording accurate, and the selection severe.”[8]
My translation here hopefully conveys the imperative and strict tone of the French original. This bill of specifications condensed expectations that had themselves been articulated two decades earlier by the International Folk Music Council (Western 2018). At the turn of the millennium they were still passed on as a goal (as an anxiety?) to new generations of ethnomusicology students.
- It had to be the “right” tradition. Recording amplified music, for instance, was deemed pointless, and even to study it remained a clear no-go area at the Laboratoire d’ethnomusicologie until the year 2000.
- The performance had to be “of quality”: music at its best, with the best available musicians in the best possible circumstances. This made a difference particularly for genres underpinned by hierarchical systems of competence. The “Oriental art music” alluded to was an example: under such conditions, one ought to record the masters, not the average performer.
- The recording had to be “accurate.” It had to convey the sound of music “at its best,” with all instruments clearly heard, in the best spectral and spatial resolution. The favorite recording position was amongst the musicians or right in front of them. Obviously, at large events, such as weddings and funerals, an “accurate” recording could differ significantly from what the average listener got to hear.
- The selection had to be “severe.” Severity was required to enforce the previous three requirements as well as others that the researcher might have considered important for the tradition at stake. Significantly, however, aesthetic considerations were kept out of the picture (and the leaflet’s text). The recordings proposed for publication were peer-reviewed by the members of the lab to ensure that the researcher’s personal sympathies did not interfere negatively with the requirements of Science.
There were many ways that field recordings could fail according to these standards. Conversely, “proper” field recordings that passed the test and went public acquired a special power: that of defining the Other’s culture. Roshanak Kheshti argues that “in the process of being recorded onto a phonographic cylinder, thus passing through modernity’s ear, the other is brought under a form of discursive control” (Kheshti 2015: 18). This use of the recording device outlived the need to domesticate the Other. Long after ethnomusicologists had committed themselves to anti-colonial discourses, their field recordings remained proud examples of sonic labor that used sound to construct relations between people, places, and identities (Western 2018). “The flipside of sound and representation is silence and exclusion,” summarizes Tom Western, and, indeed, the difference between “severe selection” and purification was mainly one of political perspective.