This is the third blog post in a new series featuring behind-the-scenes discoveries from the Ethnomusicology Archive & Lab at UT Austin’s Butler School of Music.
BY DIMITRIS GKOULIMARIS, PHD STUDENT
Welcome back to our exploration of commercial LPs found in the UT Ethnomusicology Archives. In Part I of this post, I examined the history of Nonesuch Records’ Explorer series in the context of the world music industry, and showcased two fascinating LPs.
As I continued to peruse the records of the Explorer series, I began to notice a pattern: many LP titles referenced a particular place — and I do not mean a mere location on the map. For instance, titles like Village Music of Yugoslavia and Turkish Village Music signify not only the country of origin of the recordings at hand, but also the sound’s rural origins, thus “placing” the listener in an imagined village.
Let’s explore three LPs from our Archives that construct an imagination of place: (1) Caribbean Island Music; (2) In the Shadow of the Mountain: Bulgarian Folk Music; and (3) Indian Street Music: the Bauls of Bengal. In these LPs, the producers of the Explorer series made use of titles, cover art, and liner notes to frame musical sound through a connection to place.
The liner notes for Caribbean Island Music demonstrate the producers’ attempt to represent the region beyond stereotypical “island sounds” such as steel pan and calypso music. Indeed, the LP contains a variety of styles from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. As the recordist John Storm Roberts claims, the sounds of this LP represent a wide range of musical expression, ranging “from rural to urban music and from the largely European to the largely African,” in his own words. The diversity of “island music” is also mirrored by the linguistic diversity represented in the LP, with song lyrics in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Jamaican Patois.
The producers place special emphasis on the Afro-Diasporic component of the islands’ culture, thus contributing to an imagination of the Caribbean as largely African in its ethnic and cultural heritage. This emphasis is given through both textual and visual elements — that is, the liner notes content, the album’s cover art, and the photographs on the back of the sleeve.
In the liner notes, the recordist Mr. Roberts provides some nuance regarding the diversity of African cultures from where enslaved Afro-Caribbeans came, distinguishing between peoples of the West African rainforest (Yoruba, Ewe, Ashanti, among others), the Muslim peoples of the “savannah belt,” and the Bantu groups of the “Congo-Angolan” region. He also attempts to ascribe to these various African cultural groups certain musical elements found within the collection.
Similar themes of heritage and diversity run through the textual framing of In the Shadow of the Mountain: Bulgarian Folk Music. The Pirin mountains of southwest Bulgaria are portrayed here as a “refuge for the spirit of tradition,” while the liner notes also allude to the mountains as literal refuge of the hajduks [pronounced “high-dukes”], mythologized freedom-fighters of Ottoman-ruled Bulgaria. The hajduks serve as a powerful metaphor for the spirit of the oppressed nation, safeguarded by the mountain. In drawing this equivalence between freedom fighters and folk music, both finding a safe haven in this imagined “shadow of the mountain,” the producers of this record echo the nationalist rhetoric of folklorists, who conceived of folksong as embodying the soul of the nation.
These nationalist undertones notwithstanding, there is some recognition of the region’s diversity through the inclusion of Pomak [Muslim minority] songs. Another hint of multi-culturalism appears in the lyrics of the penultimate track of side B, “Pusti bili Yane,” which laments the “bachelors of Soloniki” [Thessaloniki, my own home town] coming to the village to seduce the local women. Indeed, the framing of the Pirin mountains as home to some pure national tradition is rather limited, since the diversity showcased by the music and lyricism points to a cultural crossroads, a site of exchange, and not one of refuge.
The strong emphasis on vocal pieces in this record reminded me of the later fascination with Bulgarian singing, for instance in the world-famous Mystére de Voix Bulgares [mystery of the Bulgarian voices]. I wonder if records like these were precursors of a later fascination with the mystique of Balkan singing styles.
Finally, Indian Street Music engages in a similar construction of a mythic soundscape. The street is construed as the site where the Bauls, the minstrels of Bengal, channel their art, “carry[ing] with them from village to city the soul of Bengal, perhaps of India.” Once again, we run into the trope of folk song as “the soul” of a region or even an entire nation.
The liner notes here place a lot of emphasis on the unorthodox, syncretic belief system of the Bauls, which has been a factor in their marginalization. Hence, the “street,” imagined as the place where the Bauls perform, also stands metaphorically for the locus of the outcasted, misunderstood hero.
The street can also entail meanings of mobility and adjustability. Thus, imagining the “street” as emplacing the musical sounds in this LP can allude to both the Bauls’ literal mobility and, by extension, their role in cultural transmission, and the open-endedness of their belief system and lifestyle, one that pluralists in the West may idealize.
The “Indian street” is thus construed as an abstract space, more so than an actual place. It is imagined as a space where margins are contested and where sound is transmitted.
Overall, the manner in which these LPs contribute to an imagination of place is rather consistent with the spirit of music ethnography in the 60s and 70s. Folk music is romanticized, and its association to a particular place is privileged. Yet, not unlike responsible ethnographers, the producers of these records do justice to the internal diversity of the cultures that they represent, and to the external influences and permeations that shaped these musical sounds.
I can see now why this series of commercial LPs sits on the shelf of the Ethnomusicology Archives, even if it does not constitute ethnographic recordings or research data per se. The Explorer series by Nonesuch Records is indeed the product of the same ethnographic spirit, very much in line with an ethnomusicological praxis. Its flaws are a sign of the times, not dissimilar to the un-self-conscious limitations of our own scholarly field during that same era. The Explorer series has contributed to our knowledge of musical cultures of the globe as much as any music ethnography, and rightfully deserves a place in our humble archive.
