Most of the twenty-seven chapters in this book focus on one or more collectors of folksong or folk music or on a major collecting project in some part of the world. These often-remarkable stories range from the 1600s to recent times. Some of the profiled figures will be familiar to many readers in the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology, such as Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger, Béla Bartók, John A. and Alan Lomax, Jaap Kunst, Colin McPhee, Paul Bowles, and John Blacking. Others are less well known though of equal accomplishment, such as Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, Francisco Salvador-Daniel, Dimitrie Cantemir, Komitas Vardapet, Theodor Strehlow, and Yang Yinliu. Author Michael Church, a British journalist specializing in literature and the arts, has himself collected songs in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and Georgia. Most of his focus is on collecting efforts in Europe, North America, the Near East, Asia, North Africa, and Australia. Sub-Saharan African music collecting is relatively neglected, featuring in only two chapters, and such important figures as Hugh Tracey, A. M. Jones, and Gerhard Kubik are nowhere mentioned, while Latin American song collecting is entirely absent. In fairness, though, it would have taken several books of this size to profile all of the great collectors and their stories.
If it is not an actual purpose of the book, at least one of its results might be that it inspires a young generation of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and amateur scholars to launch careers as collectors. It may seem strange that such inspiration is needed these days, and, while collecting has not vanished from these fields, it has in some academic circles become synonymous with hobbies like philately, with “collector” often preceded by the word “mere.” Collecting has become something to be done to fulfill a graduate school course requirement, something that can be accomplished in one’s own community or from friends and family, something to be gotten out of the way on the path to becoming a theorist. It is in the latter area where academic prestige and success are now measured, whereas not so many decades ago the “big names” in these fields had all made their marks as prolific collectors and compilers and were often engaged in it as a lifetime activity.
Church notes that most collectors have been inspired by colonial curiosity (sometimes tinged with guilt), national, ethnic, or regional patriotism, or a simple love of a particular sound, style, or genre, sometimes gained through a chance encounter or a fortuitous immersion in a culture different from one’s own. These motivating factors, combined with a sense that the music is disappearing, being forgotten, abandoned, or suppressed, have led to sometimes massive and lifetime collecting and preservation efforts. Some of these causes or motives are nowadays unfashionable, and a fear of being branded a colonialist, an oppressor, an exploiter, or simply “privileged” has discouraged cross-cultural and cross-class fieldwork and collecting, particularly in academia, where collectors as well as their informants are additionally burdened with paperwork governing research with “human subjects.”
Church’s survey, however, shows that collecting and its resulting publication in the form of books and records has mostly had benefits, and only occasionally negative consequences, for both the collectors and their institutions as well as for the communities and individuals who supplied the songs.
The chapters are organized in rough chronological fashion, illustrating a succession of trends in song collecting. The earliest efforts were largely concerned with documenting the seemingly disappearing song repertoires of a nation or an ethnic or tribal group. Following these broad surveys, interest began to turn toward specific song genres (e. g., work songs, blues, occupational songs), single communities, and eventually single informants or ensembles with large repertoires or outstanding performance abilities. The latter interest was fostered by the use of portable recording equipment, so that by the 1930s folk performers such as Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) and Woody Guthrie could be held up and presented to a broader public as exemplars of particular folk traditions. Collectors of songs have increasingly become collectors of performers, and some have become performers themselves in their adopted traditions and styles or have organized and promoted ensembles that maintain a specific tradition or repertoire. Collecting has thus moved from saving dying traditions from extinction to attempts to give them new life. Collectors have become more vocal as advocates for the genres, styles, communities, and individuals they have collected from, working with government agencies, commercial record companies, and tourism and concert promoters. Church also notes the long tradition of composers from fields such as classical music or jazz, who have made collecting efforts in order to find material for inspiration in their own compositions, or to create arrangements that would “elevate” or “refine” the raw folk product and make it acceptable to a broader or an elite audience. In more recent decades, such collectors have also often engaged in collaborative performances and recordings with folk singers and musicians.
Other themes featured throughout the book are the establishment of archives, major interpretations and theories arising out of field collecting, folk music revivals, and record companies and their agents as collectors. While maintaining an overall positive view of collecting, Church does not avoid certain negative aspects, such as the prickly personalities of some collectors, Grainger’s racism and preoccupation with violence, Bartók’s disparagement of Gypsy musicians as contaminators and perverters of pure Hungarian folk traditions, Paul Bowles’s romanticism, anti-Semitic and racist themes appearing in some traditions designated by UNESCO as “Intangible Cultural Heritage,” and the encouragement of homogenized and “official” versions of songs by government agencies in some countries, or even the active suppression by governments of some types of traditional music.
This book would be well worth reading by aspiring professionals in the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology and would make an excellent textbook for courses in fieldwork and field methodology. Prospective fieldworkers need encouragement and inspiration, and they will find both here. While many musical traditions and repertoires in Western countries have become extinct or largely unproductive for further collecting, or have fully entered a revival stage or become part of the spectrum of international popular music, there are still musical traditions in many parts of the world that are thriving or at least surviving and that await the efforts of collectors and advocates.
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[Review length: 1043 words • Review posted on April 1, 2022]