Sound Fragments is a 218-page ethnographic tear-down of the work of English ethnomusicologist Hugh Travers Tracey (1903-1977), founder of the International Library of African Music, and a survey of contemporary alternatives-in-progress to Stacey’s archival methods. The term “ethnographic” here refers to both geographical and cultural subjects–itself a matter of considerable import for the broad, disputed array of sounds in Africa and the record Tracey (mid-twentieth century) and post-Tracey documentarians have created, ignored, and revived.
The story of Sound Fragments might have been told with a more straightforward analysis of Tracey’s body of 35,000 recordings—what they contain, what they should have contained, and perhaps what value if any they have for contemporary peoples. Instead, the author provides a relatively brief summary of Tracey’s work that is followed by a continued string of deprecations that extends through the rest of the text at the rate of one per page—an effect that undercuts many of the new ideas that must share creative space with accounts of Tracey’s sins. Since these “new ideas” are the ostensible subject of the book—and it is a brief text—the author’s continuing argument with the past curtails his ethnography, deferring many important matters to forty-three pages of excellent notes.
One additional impediment to the storytelling (ethnographic) style of Sound Fragments appears in its back-cover description as “an ethnographic study of institutional sound archives and the processes of creative decolonization.” I’ve already addressed the problem the author has in putting away Hugh Tracey. There is just one institutional sound archives under attack here. We all know what it is, and why it is bad. But “creative decolonization” opens the door to the creative present and, more importantly, the creative future, just about halfway. Then the whole multidimensional enterprise is swathed in the heaviest of ethnomusicological and political cloth. There is precious little description of music in these pages—a problem that might have been addressed by an accompanying CD or two, or even a gentle trim of the ideological weight these pages are made to carry.
Folklorists may be reminded of the life and legacy of Alan Lomax, folklorist and ethnomusicologist, who was born thirteen years after Hugh Tracey. Tracey-like, Lomax largely kept his field recordings to himself from 1942, when he left the Library of Congress, until he died in 2002. The recordings were subsequently donated to the American Folklife Center in 2004 for public use. Four years later, in 2008, Chris Cerf and Norman Stiles launched a public television show for children, “LOMAX: The Hound of Music.” With this veiled tribute, all was forgiven, and new field recording as well as the world jukebox carried on.
With your indulgence, I submit these and only these parallels between Hugh Tracey and Alan Lomax. My point is that creativity most often makes its own stage, and that an ethnographic account of the flowering of African musics could find a clearer path for these expressive forms to, well, express their expressive selves. Scholars engaged with African musics will want to consult Sound Fragments for proof of the past being conquered by the near-past and present. But Gambian musician Sona Jobarteh’s YouTube journey to fame may offer a brighter path for pilgrims to follow.
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[Review length: 539 words • Review posted on February 26, 2024]