Noel Lobley (Ethnomusicology, University of Oxford)
Recording the Vitamins of Music - Hugh Tracey's 'The Sound of Africa' Series and the International Library of African Music
This paper will examine the contemporary relevance of the archival practice of Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music, considering how ethnomusicological recordings from previous eras can be used to construct and circulate knowledge about music and societies today.
Ethnomusicologists have historically favoured the accumulation and collection of ethnographic field recordings, whether for transcription, analysis or demonstration purposes. However, to date there have been no ethnographies of these recordings, and academic presentations still privilege the written word over the audio. Consequently, sound archives and private collections of recordings can remain full of material that is often unknown and even unknowable. The current archival focus on digital preservation and Internet publishing often brings recordings to new and broader audiences, but it also frequently serves to further divorce sound recordings from the communities and contexts that made them. I will present an archival analysis of Hugh Tracey’s recording aims and methods and then consider the relevance of his recordings today to the changed social and political realities of the communities that were recorded. I will consider the validity of ‘sound elicitation’ work whereby recordings of Xhosa music from the 1950s were circulated among Xhosa communities in South Africa today, in order to gather responses. Local responses to an archival project may well offer new creative and ethical approaches to the construction, curation and circulation of sound recordings.
