La escuela ¿una herramienta de corrección de las desigualdades de origen?

We talk about sound recordings as the norm of the preservation side of ethnomusicology, but of course films and videos and DVDs now accompany and may begin to replace them; and recordings are also accompanied—and were preceded by—still photographs. But preservation was first accomplished by the production of transcriptions published in large numbers in grand collections. There are hundreds of relevant publications, but as almost random examples, let me mention only the monuments of German folk music (Erk 1893–

94, Deutsches Volksliedarchiv 1935–74); the many volumes of Hungarian and other eastern European folk song produced as a result of the collecting activities of Bela Bartók and Zoltan Kodály (e.g., Bartók 1959; Corpus 1953; Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1992);

the collections of English folk songs found in the various states of the United States and in part stimulated in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration (see, e.g., Cox 1939; for discussion, Canon 1963; Library of Congress 1942:2–3;Wilgus 1959:186–87), and the multivolume collection of Norwegian violin and Hardanger fiddle music (Gurvin 1958–67). The two forms of preservation, recording and notation, differ fundamentally in various ways. For one thing, collections of transcriptions undergo far more filtering; they are in effect collections of recordings processed, organized, and actually preserved selectively in the way transcription is selective in what is chosen for representation. Also, record archives might include materials recorded by amateurs who had no scholarly intent, and by anthropologists whose interests were not specifically musical, while the printed collections required musicianship for transcribing and making decisions on classification and order. The students of folk music were certainly interested in preserving a heritage they felt was slipping away, and this feeling of imminent loss was a powerful stimulus for more specifically ethnomusicological inquiry. The point is that these collectors often sought what was specifically old, partly because it was disappearing but partly, one feels, also because what was old was in a sense good. If today’s disc jockeys defensively announce “oldies but goodies,” many folk music collectors insisted that the oldies were ipso facto the goodies. Certain scholars who made

truly enormous contributions with their insight into musical and cultural processes, such as Bartók and Sharp, were intent upon extracting from modernizing and urbanizing villages and small towns that which was ancient. To be sure, this attitude was not limited to printed collections but includes initiatives such as the resurrections of older recordings in catalog form (e.g., the listing of old field recordings at Indiana University by A. Seeger and Spear 1987), reissues of older recordings (Hornbostel’s Demonstration Collection of the 1920s) and energetic recording projects (as in Feld 2001). Some collectors even went out of their way to prove that what they collected was indeed old.

Preservation characterized the early history of our field, but it continued as an important facet even while the value of contemplating the present came more to the fore, and in the late twentieth century, it came back to claim a greater role again. The publication of comprehensive collections of national folk music came to be characteristic of musical scholarship in eastern Europe after 1950. In the study of non-Western music, the idea of comprehensive collecting never attained the same importance—with notable exceptions, such as the hundreds of North American Indian songs published by Frances Densmore—and to some, at least, the idea of holding fast to early materials was not so much a consideration as was the very discovery of what was then a new phenomenon. Students of Western folk music, on the other hand, were no doubt affected by the movement in historical musicology to publish series of “monuments” of national music history. Beginning with the German Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (1892) and the more prestigious Austrian Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (1894), various national series were begun—

the most recent, Music of the U.S.A. (MUSA), being published under the aegis of the American Musicological Society—and much of the energy of music historians in the first half of the twentieth century was directed to the publication, in authentic form, of hundreds of often obscure but “historically” important works. In the end, one would in a sense “have” the materials of art music of a given country. Surely the tendency to publish large folk music collections with attention to their authenticity and to the inclusion of good and perhaps especially old versions and variants was similarly motivated. Folk music scholars and folklorists were interested in the preservation of the most important stories, songs, melodies of the rural societies of Europe and eventually the Americas. I am not sure whether much thought was

given to the eventual use of such collections. As in the case of the classical monumenta, performance was at least sometimes considered.

It was assumed, one suspects, that large-scale, artifact-oriented, multipurpose collections would satisfy a number of future needs, historical, ethnographic, and practical. It doesn’t always seem to have worked out so.

While the collections grew, the scholars who after about 1960 were concerned with increasingly specialized problems in ethnomusicology tended to decrease concern with comprehensive collecting, and there seemed to develop something of a split between them and those we might label professional collectors. Having recognized that music in oral tradition is subject to constant change, that songs, styles, repertories are in a state of flux, we may wonder why so many individuals devoted themselves to collecting largely for the purpose of preserving what was in a sense a piece of ephemera.

Early in the twentieth century there developed an approach to preserving that one might include among the activities of “applied”

ethnomusicology. Practical publications to be used for teaching, the development of records for promulgating what could be of interest to the amateur, the idea of urging people in various communities to continue the older practices of music and dance, finding government support for encouraging them and indeed in some ways improving their practice, all these seem to involve preservation in a different sense, holding materials for practical use by peoples thought to be in danger of losing their heritage. This kind of preservation is not a practice always resulting in unmitigated benefit. Much of it, especially in the 1930s, was to take on political and in some cases stridently nationalistic overtones: It also meant that the collector would intrude, trying to persuade people not to change their ways, insisting that it was incumbent on them to retain preindustrial practices. One senses resentment on the part of societies wanting social change and believing that it must be accompanied by musical change. As seen in my discussion of the roles of insider and outsider, the ethnomusicologist’s lesson about the place of music in culture is one that indigenous societies have learned very well. There are interesting examples of conflict. Australian aborigines living in the countryside who did not wish their material to be preserved because the tape recorder would invalidate rituals were opposed by other aboriginals living in cities who felt that they had been deprived of their tribal

heritage by their removal to a different setting, and wanted to have these recordings.

In the 1950s there developed a movement within the field of anthropology appropriately labeled “urgent anthropology,” involving the recognition of the imminent destruction of societies, cultures, and artifacts by modernization. It emphasized the need for concentrating anthropological resources upon their preservation. In the case of archeology, this might involve the exploration of areas shortly to become inaccessible by the building of dams or roads; in social anthropology, it might be addressed to the forced movement of peoples and the dispersal of once homogeneous populations. For the historian, such preservation was obviously of paramount importance.

For the social anthropologist, who studies change as it occurs, it did not outweigh the study of kinds of change constantly occurring;

extinction of cultures was, so to speak, an everyday event. So it turned out that the thrust of “urgent anthropology” was mainly the study of the out-of-the-way, with the purpose of gaining insight into human exceptions.

Ethnomusicologists, coming out of a long tradition of looking for the exceptional while often virtually ignoring the readily available, might sympathize with this approach. Some, such as Wolfgang Laade (1969, 1971a), participated in the “urgent anthropology” movement in publications and letters noting cultures and musics in danger of extinction. But while we may be bemused by those who wish to exclude all but the exceptional, it is of course true that during the past few centuries many musical cultures, belonging to the weak end of power distribution, have in effect gone out of existence. This is relevant to scholars working in the Americas or Australia, areas of gradual social change, but even more in nations where culture change has been dramatic, such as Israel or parts of Central Asia and western China, for here, obviously, once highly heterogeneous populations appear to be on the way to thorough homogeneity. No doubt, then, much ethnomusicology has been motivated by a sense of urgency.

Recognizing that the principal owners of any music ought to be the people who created and performed it—or their descendants and relatives—ethnomusicologists began, in the 1970s, to encourage the development of music (and other cultural) archives in such institutions as local museums, or on Native American reservations, and in places relevant to the societies involved. The 1980s saw the growth of a process sometimes called “repatriation,” which is, mainly, the

development of archives in and for the cultures that produced the music, and particularly, then, the “return” of early recordings and artifacts such as instruments. It began, according to Frisbie (2001:

492) around 1960, and in the United States it was closely associated with the legal expansion of Native American rights to grave sites and human remains as well as intellectual property. A number of institutional and personal initiatives undertook to distribute material from large archives to ethnic and tribal repositories. Most notable is the Federal Cylinder Project (1984;see also Frisbie 2001: 495), which copied and disseminated the earliest collections of Native American music. The archives of Native American and First Nations communities, often very comprehensive, often contain material that may be used for the reconstruction of ceremonies and rituals whose content has been lost. The Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center have deposited collections, sometimes with considerable ceremony, on Native American reservations.

One of the scholars who most emphasized the central role of ethnomusicologists as helpers in the preservation process was the Australian Catherine Ellis. The “Aboriginal Music Centre” that she helped to establish in Adelaide contained a large collection of tapes that aboriginal people living in the city, who claimed to have lost all traditional knowledge, could consult for a variety of purposes, including the reconstitution of older ceremonies or their adaptation to urban life. Meeting with a group of aboriginal users of this archive who told me that in their quest for some knowledge of their musical traditions they were having to start from a position of total ignorance, I found that they considered their visits to it important aspects of their lives, and that they welcomed the help of white ethnomusicologists.

But small indigenous societies are not the only ones benefiting from the use of archival resources in their quest for reconstitution of their musical cultures. The large archives of folk music, such as those at Indiana University and the Library of Congress, were important resources for the musicians who led the twentieth-century revivals of Anglo-American folk song.