Musical and Sonic Sustainability Online

Ethnomusicology Forum

ISSN: 1741-1912 (Print) 1741-1920 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/remf20

Noel Lobley

To cite this article: Noel Lobley (2014) Musical and Sonic Sustainability Online, Ethnomusicology Forum, 23:3, 463-477, DOI: 10.1080/17411912.2014.959880

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2014.959880

Published online: 09 Oct 2014.

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Download by: [University of Connecticut] Date: 30 December 2015, At: 07:32 Ethnomusicology Forum, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 3, 463–477, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2014.959880

REVIEW ARTICLE

Musical and Sonic Sustainability Online

Sustainable Music: A Research Blog on the Subject of Music and Sustainability Written by JEFF TODD TITON, 2008–present http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com

Smithsonian Folkways: The Nonprofit Record Label of the Smithsonian Institution Produced by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC, 2014 http://www.folkways.si.edu

Association for Cultural Equity Produced by the Association for Cultural Equity, New York, 2001 www.culturalequity.org

The London Sound Survey Produced by the London Sound Survey, London, 2014 http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk

Musical and Sonic Sustainability The relationship between music, sound and sustainability is not new, but key ideas

Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 and buzzwords are currently surfacing with a renewed and quietly sounded urgency. How might scholars and activists develop ecological and ethical methods to best sustain the continuity of expressive audible traditions, and how might music and sound manage to sustain people? In this review article I examine the relevance of four websites and research blogs that all link practical sustainable projects with online and community engagement: Jeff Todd Titon’s ‘Sustainable Music’ research blog, and the websites for Smithsonian Folkways (SF), the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) and the London Sound Survey (LSS). The increasing profile and impact of both applied ethnomusicology and the newer field of ecomusicology are expanding the critical discourses linking music and sustainability. Ecomusicology, the intersection of music and ecocriticism, develops at 464 Review Article pace, productively exploring the relationships between music, materialism and the environment.1 The forthcoming volume Ecomusicology: A Field Guide, co-edited by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, will be an important statement for the field in which central questions have already been pertinently posed by Allen. In an age when most of us ‘witness the impacts of climate change, species loss, deforestation, pollution, and resource exploitation’, Allen urges us to ask some big questions: is musicology part of the problem or part of the solution? What role does musicology play in the welfare and survival of humanity? How does nature inform music, and what can the study of music tell us about humans, other species, the built environment, the natural world, constructed ‘nature,’ and their connections? … Is the environmental crisis relevant to music—and more importantly, is musicology relevant to solving it? (Allen 2011a: 391–2) Socially aware and often activist, the theoretical, intellectual and communicative challenges of ecomusicological criticism involve ‘pushing musicology beyond the comfortable confines of the concert hall and library and into an often messy, definitely polluted, world of existential threats and complexities’ (Allen 2011b: 418). Two recent and diverse special journal issues for Musicology Australia (2013) and World of Music (2009) present important cross-cultural contexts for music and sustainability, both drawing attention to the importance of achieving sustainability for the musicians who produce culture. ‘Sustainability and Ethnomusicology in Australasia’ presents ‘innovative responses to sustainability pressures that move away from a deficit discourse of cultural loss towards proactive attempts at cultural maintenance and renewal, often involving the application of new technologies’ (Bendrups, Barney and Grant 2013: 154). Brunt and Johnson, for example, argue that an iGamelan contributes to music sustainability by helping to ‘move cultural knowledge into contemporary digital and interactive media’, and by building knowledge and playing experience into an expanded resource that complements real gamelan instrumentation (2013: 234).2 In the same volume, Treloyn and Emberly explore the potential uses of two different archival collections held in Australia—a collection of Junba public dance-songs recorded in the Kimberley region of Australia from the 1960s to the present day, and John Blacking’s Venda recordings held at the Callaway Centre at the University of Western Australia. They argue that the future sustainability of both collections involves accepting the responsibility for imagining

Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 new relationships between archival collections and communities (Treloyn and Emberly 2013: 174–5). ‘Music and Sustainability’, a 2009 special issue of World of Music edited by Jeff Todd Titon, brings together a range of approaches analysing diverse musical communities and practices that are all deemed in one way or another to be in

1For a useful bibliography, see: http://www.ecomusicology.info/resources/bibliography/ (accessed 18 August 2014). 2The iGamelan is an interactive gamelan developed in 2010–11 by researchers, computer programmers, educators and sound and film technicians in the Higher Education Development Centre at the University of Otago, in collaboration with Dunedin resident and Javanese gamelan expert Dr Joko Susilo. Ethnomusicology Forum 465 some state of revitalisation (Titon 2009b). Authors variously highlight the importance of individual fiddle players (Faux 2009), community participatory music-making (Turino 2009) and state attempts to redistribute music profits from payola practices in New York City (Wilcken 2009). Woven within strong ethnographic examples are broad critiques of the potential and problems of achieving music sustainability. Favouring participatory music-making as the essential opposite of ‘capitalist usefulness’, Thomas Turino reminds us that ethnomusicology’s responsibility is to open its audiences up to new models for music-making and living (2009: 96). He argues that rather than striving to preserve and sustain music forms such as BaAka polyphony and polyrhythm, we should instead first carefully learn their musical models and principles and then teach and emphasise their connectedness to the present. Arguing for a re-thinking of ethnographic recordings as future resources rather than as historical documents, Janet Topp Fargion advises the next generation of fieldworkers that they will need ‘to have planned ahead of time for their eventual uses—gotten licenses for a range of uses, documented all performers’ names—made the people visible’ (Topp Fargion 2009: 86). Jeff Todd Titon points out that ‘field recording itself may be becoming endangered’, if we do not carefully think through future uses of the resources we create (2009a: 12). Referencing his own earlier work with the Old Regular Baptists in the Indian Bottom Association in south-eastern Kentucky, during which he explored the role that cassette recording played in the transmission of songs among youths and helped produce CDs for SF, he argues that we should move our conservation discourses away from heritage to sustainability so that we can ‘step outside of ownership and ask instead “Who are the stewards of culture?”’ (Titon 2009b: 135). Critiquing the value of top-down and often remote heritage proclamations such as UNESCO’s Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, he argues that the root problem in sustainability lies in the concept of cultural heritage itself, which tends to package heritage as a commodity, often missing the dynamic and organic textures of cultural ecosystems and what they need in order to live, breathe and thrive. Catherine Grant’s(2014) recent work, some of which emerges from the ‘Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures’ project,3 draws on international models for protecting endangered languages to develop a Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework that identifies 12 key factors affecting the vitality of music genres. Assessing factors Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 such as insider and outsider interest and influence, media and government policies, and intergenerational transmission, she constructs a comparative and replicable framework between language and music in order to help gauge the actual levels of endangerment or vitality of music genres. Arguing for wider understanding of the consequences of cultural endangerment, she hopes the Music Vitality and Endan- germent Framework will be used by ‘policy makers, community-based cultural

3‘Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: Towards an Ecology of Musical Diversity’ is a partnership between the International Music Council, the World Music & Dance Centre, the Music Council of Australia and six universities. The project seeks to identify mechanisms that affect the longevity of specific music styles and genres. 466 Review Article workers and culture bearers themselves’ (Grant 2014:xi–xii). Much work remains to be done, however, as Grant notes that ‘our understanding of the possibilities for supporting endangered [music] genres is incipient compared with the knowledge and experience gained through the concerted, international effort that has taken place to try to keep endangered languages strong’ (2014: 3). So how might music and sound be sustainable and sustain people, and should it matter? Perlman (2014) polemically warns us of the danger of loosely applying ecological environmental studies to musicology, noting that to his knowledge ‘no one has explained exactly what “future, unforeseen advantages” musical diversity might provide’. Acknowledging that ‘ecomusicological findings might possibly recruit music-lovers to the environmentalist cause, or inspire them when they become discouraged’, he foresees that ‘beyond that, it’s not at all clear what the activist implications of ecomusicology might be’ (Perlman 2014).

Sustainable Music: A Research Blog on the Subject of Sustainability and Music Sustainable Music is Jeff Todd Titon’s research blog on sustainability and music.4 Actively flowering since April 2008, the blog now contains over 130 separate entries that progress from the shorter and punchier ideas introduced in 2008 through to fuller-bodied essays. Powered by Google’s Blogger.com, the free communication service, it also has a distinctive sister blog Apples from the Island—Thoughts from a Small Island in Eastern Penobscot Bay, Maine,5 a blog rich in observations from organic farming, nature and the environment. The aims of Sustainable Music are clearly identified as being ‘to theorize various ways that music can be thought about as a human biocultural resource’, and to ‘critique the currently prevailing sustainability strategies aimed at encouraging musical diversity by embracing economies through commodified products.’ Instead, Titon favours ‘community partnerships encouraging collaborative, small-scale, amateur, face-to-face music-making without mediation or display’, and intends to incorporate ‘insights from applied ecology and from organic gardening’.6 Sustainability’s relationship to music, he reminds us, is inchoate, distant and unheard in comparison with other disciplines such as ecology and economics. Titon’s credentials for discussing and speculating on the relationship between Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 music and sustainability are excellent; a pioneering applied ethnomusicologist, and a natural naturalist, he constantly searches for links and analogies with music in the lived world of dairy farming, Fukushima Nuclear accidents and disturbances in caribou migration routes. Sprinkling lyrical observations from environmental writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Garrett Hardin, in this engaging, colourful and clearly argued series of thoughts, Titon expands some of the ideas that he first introduced in his book Worlds of Music (Titon 1984), including the notion that a

4http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com (accessed 18 August 2014). 5http://folklife-ethnomusicology.blogspot.com (accessed 18 August 2014). 6http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2008/04/welcome-to-sustainable-music.html (accessed 18 August 2014). Ethnomusicology Forum 467 music culture functions as an ecosystem. Titon also periodically applies insights from his earlier research, such as the importance of traditional fiddle jam sessions for ecological sustaining of melodic forms, and from the extensive ‘Powerhouse for God’ project, which explored the relationships between Appalachian farming, food production, linguistics and expressive religious performance (Titon 1988). Sensitive to emerging trends and ideas in unexpected places, this heavily text- driven blog blends a series of sketched personal ideas, summaries of keynote lectures and observations from the news and from the land, and reads as a smoothly coherent resource that also points outwards towards the emerging networks and discourses constituting ecomusicology and music sustainability. By revisiting ideas that he has been brewing for years, Titon manages to remain historical, precise and original. He summarises and critiques ethnomusicological approaches to sustainability into three broad phases. The first, archival salvage ethnomusicology, ‘does not sustain the musical cultures but instead preserves the music as a dried flower is pressed between the pages of a book or a butterfly is pinned to a mount in a glass case’.7 The second phase—displaying musical cultures at heritage sites—usually means the construction of ‘a particular repertoire and style for the tourists at these heritage sites, often in response to the ethnomusicologists’ requirements of tradition and authenticity’. This approach also suffers from the problem of ‘stage-readiness’, which ‘prevents certain musicians and groups, some who do not perform or consider what they are doing as performance, from transferring their activities easily to the festival stage’.8 Third, and most recently, ‘ethnomusicologists have partnered with governmental and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) and with community leaders to try to sustain the musical cultures directly in their home communities’.9 Reading the entire body of this research blog brings the working development and occasional erasure of ideas into a sharp and linked focus. In his second blog post, having noted that ‘thinking about sustainability usually involves resources’ in so far as ‘sustainability refers to a process that can continue indefinitely’, Titon asks whether it is even ‘useful to think of music as a renewable resource?’10 The idea of ‘resource’ is then steadily critiqued throughout the blog; for example, in comparison with the ‘Problem of American Parks’, wherein a seemingly strong environmental idea can easily lead to cultural and economic displacements. Titon asks ‘When heritage and Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 cultural tourism are the outcomes of musical and cultural conservation movements, must heritage organisations inevitably exploit resources? How are those resources constructed and given value, and in what would their exploitation consist?’11 Alert to the ills of exploitation, Titon explicitly argues that:

7http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2009/11/sustainability-and-music-china-lecture.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 8http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2009/04/stage-readiness-and-heritage.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 9http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2009/11/sustainability-and-music-china-lecture.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 10http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2008/04/music-as-resource.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 11http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2010/02/americas-best-idea.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 468 Review Article it is time to abandon the term ‘sustainable development’ and look for others, such as continuity, whose meanings are more congruent with the dynamics of tradition. Otherwise sustainability, in music as elsewhere, will become captive to the destructive idea that music cultures must grow in order to sustain themselves.12 Reluctant to classify art as any kind of commodity, Titon develops these critiques by applying them to the more corporate proclamations of WIPO and UNESCO. He does, however, acknowledge that ‘there is no denying that without legal ownership of their cultural heritage, indigenous peoples have been/will be exploited for their music, medical knowledge, etc.’13 Titon experiences and offers some intriguing new models. His participation in a cultural sustainability symposium in August 2013 at Sterling College in Vermont—in effect, a working educational farm with the motto ‘Working Hands, Working Minds’—inspires him to argue that the Sterling model combining environmental study, activism and work on the college farm ‘has a better shot at sustainability than the liberal arts one’ he is more familiar with ‘as both student and professor’. He even predicts that because of rising costs and increased competition ‘in fifty years most universities like Brown will be able to exist only as living history museums’.14 Given that Titon is here arguing for an entirely new interdisciplinary framework for sustainability studies and projects, Sustainable Music would be very well served with a fully embedded and interactive multi-media interface that would bring extra sensual layers to this already very engaging read. However, Titon has presented such multi- media admirably elsewhere,15 and as an exercise in organising and experimenting with his thoughts, this blog is a seminal historical and contemporary resource for an increasingly important field. Titon’s most recent line of argument moves towards a wider framework for viewing sustainability that he argues should be commons, or non-privately owned resources, to be ‘broadly understood as a resource commons where resources are not only material but also intellectual, ethical, and cultural’.16 Here a strong thread of consistency can be tied right back to his earliest work studying communal ownership of Appalachian Baptist sermons and folk art for the Powerhouse for God project, and his studies of musical transmission in the lived communities of traditional music jam sessions. The progress of the commons idea in practice will provide a vibrant counterpoint to the more privatising impulse of cultural heritage initiatives to date

Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 and to come, especially if equitable and tangible economic benefits can be guaranteed to the musical communities most in need.

12http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-sustainable-development-must-be.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 13http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2008/11/sustainability-and-property-law.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 14http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2013/08/cultural-sustainability-in-sterling.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 15Titon has produced an interesting range of films and documentary recordings. See, for example, Powerhouse for God (Titon 1989), and Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined-out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky Vol. 1 (1997) and Vol. 2 (2003). 16http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2014/07/sustainability-sound-commons-and.html (accessed 18 August 2014). Ethnomusicology Forum 469 Smithsonian Folkways: The Nonprofit Record Label of the Smithsonian Institution Writing in the Sounding Off section of Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, Titon argues that ‘a sound commons, where all living beings enjoy a commonwealth of sound, embodies the principle of sound equity, encouraging free and open sound communication’.17 SF—‘the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States … dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound’18—remains one of the few record labels in the world actively committed to sound ecology and repatriation. Founded by Moses Asch in 1948, Folkways was one of the first record labels to begin to develop a depository of the full range of the world’s sounds and music. From its inception, Asch wanted the label to reflect social values—for example, in documenting the Civil Rights Movement—and to publish uniquely varied artistry and cultural expressions rather than showcasing overly engineered production values. Asch doggedly ensured that all published titles remained in circulation regardless of the statistics of demand and sales, and this commitment to record publishing as something more than a quantifiable economic resource remains today: as a condition of the acquisition, the Smithsonian agreed that virtually all of the firm’s 2,168 titles would remain ‘in print’ forever—a condition that Smithsonian Folkways continues to honor through its custom order service. Whether it sells 8,000 copies each year or only one copy every five years, every Folkways title remains available for purchase.19 The unusual business practices of Asch and Folkways have been well covered elsewhere, reminding us that even idealistic and socially aware labels are subject to regular economics for viability and longevity (Olmsted 2003). Folkways benefitted from arriving at the emergence of the more economically viable LP format, and its predecessor, Asch Records, benefited ‘not only from the dearth of ethnic (particularly Jewish) recordings, but also from the considerable consumer income that was still available prior to the United States’ entry into World War II’ (Olmsted 2003: 184). The SF website and its umbrella social media sites are excellent models for the sustainable circulation and recycling of ethnographic recordings, demonstrating

Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 practical commitment to maximising both general access and community engagement through a variety of original strategies. The SF catalogue is a continually expanding and diversifying legacy that currently comprises over 3200 albums and 45,000 tracks, and all recordings and most liner notes are very easily searchable via a well-designed search engine. A notable strength of the website is the variety of ways in which recordings are themed and re-used to expand and re-design contexts,

17http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2012_fall_winter/sounding_off.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 18http://www.folkways.si.edu/about_us/mission_history.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 19http://www.folkways.si.edu/about_us/mission_history.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 470 Review Article placing people and communities squarely at the centre of the website. For example, since 29 April 2014 the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music LPs that were recorded between 1961 and 2003 in more than 70 nations are currently being republished at the rate of two per week for an entire year.20 Dedicated to documenting a myriad of global sound expressions for more than half a century, the material readily lends itself to thematic re-invention, as evidenced in the content-rich Folkways Radio, Playlists and Podcasts section. For example, a recent playlist explores American history on the 200th anniversary of the Star Spangled Banner, and ‘Soccer Traditions: 32 Nations in Song from Smithsonian Folkways’21 presents cultural and athletic traditions from all the nations competing in the recent 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Cameroon, for instance, is represented by a beautiful recording of Baka water drumming and singing. Although it could easily be debated how representative such a recording is of contemporary Cameroonian popular culture compared with urban stars such as Numerica, Pit Baccardi or Inorie Fotso,22 the fact that SF has an active SoundCloud account—with over one million followers at the time of writing, despite its inchoate state—as well as a very active presence on Facebook, You Tube, tumblr and Pinterest, means that even the most esoteric recorded content is now more likely to be heard by broader popular audiences. The website’s Podcast section also features excellent re-excavation of archival material.23 ‘Sounds to Grow On’ presents 26 one-hour radio programmes hosted by Michael Asch, Moses’ son, on the CKUA Radio Network, reframing original recordings within broader social and political themes such as ‘Work Songs’, ‘The Harlem Renaissance’ and ‘Black and White’ on the evils of segregation.24 Another radio series, Sound Sessions,25 re-presents the archive alongside out-takes, interviews and new material. For example, an episode devoted to Ella Jenkins, the GRAMMY- winning ‘First Lady of Children’s Music’, includes an interview with the now 90-year- old musician and educator speaking about her family histories, living on welfare and the value of learning harmonica music by ear in order to imitate poetry.26 The SF website also features a wide range of educational resources intended to promote music and cultural sustainability. For example, the spring 2014 issue of Smithsonian Folkways Magazine is devoted to South Africa, with a lead article entitled ‘Anti-Apartheid Songs Then and Now’ by anthropologist Tayo Jolaosho.27 Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 The issue, timely after the death of Nelson Mandela on 5 December 2013 and

20http://www.folkways.si.edu/unesco (accessed 18 August 2014). 21http://www.folkways.si.edu/radio/soccer_brazil_playlist/index.html (accessed 18 August 2014). 22http://www.okayafrica.com/audio/cameroon-hip-hop-artists-to-watch/5/ (accessed 18 August 2014). 23http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/podcasts.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 24http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/sounds_to_grow_on.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 25http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/sound_sessions.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 26http://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/audio/podcasts/sound_sessions/sound_sessions_14_EllaJenkins.mp3 (accessed 18 August 2014). 27http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2014_spring/cover_story.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). Ethnomusicology Forum 471 ongoing political instabilities within the country, includes a section full of links to lesson plans aimed at high school choral students and others.28 SF remains a pioneer in sound repatriation, dedicated to collecting and paying royalties to musicians and holding them in escrow where named individuals are difficult to trace. As a label and website committed to increasing access to, and circulation of, most of its recordings, further issues of cultural ownership and resources are likely to arise. Reddy and Sonneborn argue that rather than viewing sound repatriation through the lenses of owned cultural property or of individually authored artistic expression, ‘seeing repatriation and returns as a set of cultural rights moves the discussion in a different direction toward the category of inalienable human rights’, to which they add ‘the complementary notion of museum responsibility and cultural obligations of stewardship’ (2013: 129). Cultural rights, institu- tional responsibility and stewardship here also potentially move recorded musical and sonic heritage into the same commons direction that Titon proposes for cultural expressions.

Association for Cultural Equity ACE was founded by Alan Lomax to explore and preserve the world’s expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement. It was registered as a not-for-profit charitable organisation in the State of New York in 1983, and is housed at New York City’s Hunter College. According to its website, the mission of ACE ‘is to stimulate cultural equity through preservation, research, and dissemination of the world’s traditional music, and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage’.29 Lomax’s visionary work is widely known, celebrated as ‘a global vision for protecting small-scale cultures in the face of the ravages of centralized corporate power and greedy media and entertainment monoliths’ (Baron 2012: 280). For Lomax, cultural equity meant that rights to traditional cultural expressions should be equated with the other rights protected by governments. The ACE website contributes to cultural sustainability in three major ways: in digitally preserving and making very accessible the entire Lomax collection; through sound repatriation programmes; and via its Global Jukebox Song Tree designed to bring an earlier computerised geography of song, speech and dance into the twenty- Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 first century. ACE now maintains the digitally reformatted surrogates of Lomax’s recordings and papers, and administers the rights to the use of the collections. In 2012 ACE decided to make available its entire online archive, including 17,000 songs, 5000 photographs, 400,000 feet of film and 3000 videotapes. Additionally, under a ‘Still in Need of Preservation’ section, an appeal is made for donors to help digitise the major Dance and Movement Film Collection assembled by Alan Lomax, Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay in approximately 600 cultures between 1962 and

28http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2014_spring/south-africa-free-at-last.aspx (accessed 18 August 2014). 29http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_index.php (accessed 18 August 2014). 472 Review Article 1994, and also ‘Field Recordings by Pioneering Collectors’ that include, for example, the archives of Radio Moscow, the Australian Broadcasting System and the State Archives of Romania.30 There is already a wealth of listenable audio on this website, very easily accessible and searchable. A simple media player without any real visual interface places the focus heavily on listening. However, searching the rich Alan Lomax Archive You Tube channel unearths a wealth of ethnographic footage including more than 400 hours shot throughout the American South and Southwest between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS series ‘American Patchwork’ that aired in 1991.31 Although some videos are simply shots of album covers to accompany audio-recordings, watching close-ups of Napolian Strickland’s diddley-bow medley,32 Belton Sutherland’s board-tapping blues guitar workings or Ray Hicks’s ‘Reuben Train’ on vocal and harmonica remains mesmerising.33 The bleached but intimate nature of the raw footage presents people and their stories sharp and alive in their own homes, adding layers of personalities to the music more commonly known through their audio recordings. To be sustainable, wherever possible sound archiving should document and connect with ongoing contemporary music-making and sound-making in order to place recorded heritage within wider and increasingly modern changing cultural frameworks. Accordingly, with ongoing music repatriation programmes in the United States, Spain, Italy and the Caribbean, the ACE website gives examples of a range of strategies to encourage full use of the materials, including their integration into school curricula, museum collections and radio programming, and advice to help implement such cultural feedback strategies.34 The most vibrant repatriation section is the 2013 ‘Mississippi Repatriation’, during which ACE took part in ‘All Our Friends Hill Country Blues Celebration’, held in Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi, from 5 to 12 October 2013.35 At the centre of these celebrations was ACE’s repatriation of Lomax’s Tate County audio, video and photographic collections to the Senatobia Public Library, and the unveiling of a Blues Trail Marker in honour of Hill Country multi-instrumentalist Napolian Strickland. This programme effec- tively marries the archival with the contemporary. Lomax’s recordings of Sid Hemphill and others in 1942 were the first-ever recordings of Hill Country’s fife- and-drum music.36 The repatriation process included local musician Martin Grant demonstrating how to make and play the cane fife, and the forging of relationships Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 with relatives of many of the musicians Lomax recorded, such as Hal Reed, grandson of Lucius Smith, the Hill Country’s last black banjo player. Also featured were education initiatives, such as lesson plans developed by Dr Patricia Campbell, Professor of Music of the University of Washington, and offered for kindergarten

30http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_in_need_of_preserving.php (accessed 18 August 2014). 31https://www.youtube.com/user/AlanLomaxArchive (accessed 18 August 2014). 32https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-6JsVx30AU (accessed 18 August 2014). 33https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyQ9fX1eG4E (accessed 18 August 2014). 34http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_dissemprogram.php (accessed 18 August 2014). 35http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/repatriations/MS/index.php (accessed 18 August 2014). 36https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTjA1a1CjQs (accessed 18 August 2014). Ethnomusicology Forum 473 through adult levels as step-by-step experiences for developing listening and vocal and instrumental skills, as well as a means of promoting awareness and pride in local musical traditions.37 It would be valuable to see video footage and hear more local responses to this repatriation, which is an extensive collaboration between ACE, the American Folklife Centre at the Library of Congress, several public libraries and other foundations. Such cultural feedback material is included for an Eastern Caribbean repatriation programme, which constitutes the bulk of the content for ACE’s own You Tube channel.38 In 1991 Lomax returned to Carriacou, East Grenada, for what would be his last field trip, attending the stone feast of revered musician Sugar Adams who had died ten years previously. Lomax’s return to Carriacou was almost 30 years after he first recorded there and he took with him copies of his 1962 recordings to share with participants. In one video, East Grenadan drummer and painter Canute Caliste and his wife listen with pride to recordings Alan Lomax made of him and a wake group performing quadrilles, chanties and cantiques in L’Esterre, Carriacou, in July 1962. Similarly, 18 videos clocking in at 57 minutes document the Big Drum Ceremony in Carriacou in 2012, a religious and social ritual dating back to the seventeenth century that unites diverse African ethnicities. Made at the invitation of Winston Fleary, local musicologist and Cultural Ambassador for Grenada, these films document descendants of the people Lomax originally recorded in 1962. The videos are vibrant and musicians are identified, and Fleary provides full translations, explanations and interpretations of songs.39 A statement on the You Tube channel explicitly invites ‘the participants and their communities to join the conversation about their creative heritage and become part of the cultural feedback loop’.40 Unfortunately, at the time of writing there are very few comments uploaded and the discussion section is empty. This in itself might question the efficacy of web-based channels for communities whose access to, and use of, the Internet for musical transmission might either be limited or simply different. However, ACE’s building of relationships with repatriation partners is commendable: many sites are listed and more pending, including as yet unidentified sites in Russia, Morocco and the post- Soviet states.41 The strength of the ACE contributions to musical sustainability, as with SF, lies in the repeated attempts to update the relevance of archival methods and content. For Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 example, the Global Jukebox, developed since 1961 at Columbia University and later at Hunter College, New York, was an early music information retrieval system designed by Lomax and others to isolate, codify and then map and interrelate myriad features within expressive performance to measure how performance systems link the world’s cultures. This was, and remains, an ambitious attempt at musical and cultural

37http://culturalequity.org/rc/ce_rc_teaching.php (accessed 18 August 2014). 38https://www.youtube.com/user/CulturalEquity (accessed 18 August 2014). 39https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9DD16824C0E3BA56 (accessed 18 August 2014). 40https://www.youtube.com/user/CulturalEquity/about (accessed 18 August 2014). 41http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_partners.php (accessed 18 August 2014). 474 Review Article sustainability by mapping and making virtually interactive the measurable features of song and dance across the globe. Lomax and colleagues aspired towards creating a global map based on musical affinities, rather than political or geographical boundaries. ACE’s first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign now aims to complete the Global Jukebox Song Tree, turning it into a free online resource containing over 5900 songs from more than 600 cultures in time for Lomax’s centennial in 2015.42 The application of new technology to a pioneering but now dated approach may prove to be an excellent model for sustainable sound archiving, bringing archival content and modern online interfaces together for very close analysis of a large sample set of traditional songs. Whether the resource ultimately functions more as another top-down cultural heritage site, or as a genuinely equitable method of sharing insights from performances across cultures, may depend a lot on how the voices and responses of musicians and performers from different traditions can continue to be integrated within archival and online content.

The London Sound Survey The LSS, a sound mapping project founded by field recordist Ian Rawes in 2009 and a ‘growing collection of Creative Commons-licensed sound recordings of places, events and wildlife in the capital’,43 is an excellent and highly original example of the online potential for preserving, measuring and presenting urban sounds and soundscapes across time and place. The popular LSS SoundCloud account—which at the time of writing has over 40,000 followers—contains over 1500 recordings of London life, ranging from urban foxes scratching and scrapping in nocturnal play-fighting, to a Guinean busker playing his flute on the Thames path at Blackfriars. Part salvage sonic ethnography, part literary archive of sonic references in novels, diaries, statutes and autobiographies, and wholly serious scientific investigation into what sound can tell us about boundaries, centres, social history and interactions, the LSS organises its extensive range of sound content in a series of very clear layers. Deliberately avoiding Google Maps, which ‘aren’t needed for something the size of a city’,44 Rawes brings maps, sound and history together to tell or suggest stories and forge new links. The Waterways sound map, for example, is an ‘auditory tribute’ to Harry Beck’s iconic Underground map, and locates and presents a series of sounds collected along Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 London’s canals and smaller waterways.45 At the heart of the site is the ‘All-in-One London map with historical layers and sound recordings’.46 This combines recordings from other sound maps, and a ‘Sound Actions’ section defined as ‘sounds designed to have an effect on others’—such as

42https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alanlomaxarchive/the-global-jukebox-song-tree (accessed 18 August 2014). 43http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk (accessed 18 August 2014). 44http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/ear-room/london-sound-survey (accessed 18 August 2014). 45http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/waterways/ (accessed 18 August 2014). 46http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/london_map/intro/ (accessed 18 August 2014). Ethnomusicology Forum 475 auctions, beggars and muezzin calls.47 A present-day street map can be overlaid with three other maps: land utilisation in the 1930s, Booth London poverty in 1898 and Ordnance Survey First Series (1805 onwards). The design allows the user to click on grids and play spatially located recordings while the economic or historical context shifts depending on the chosen map frame, inviting the user to listen to and re-imagine each sound anew across time. The most ambitious section is ‘Twelve Tones of London’.48 Rawes explains that his aim here is ‘to describe variations in sounds across London within the limits of having only enough time to record in a few of the city’s innumerable streets, parks and other public places’.49 Deploying a social science sampling method called cluster analysis, Rawes uses statistical analysis to select 12 out of London’s 623 council wards (not counting the City of London) in the hope that their sound profiles can be generalised across relatively large swathes of the capital. Rawes lays out a series of assumptions and hypotheses behind his method, explaining that despite the homogenising effects of modernity on how public spaces sound, ‘more insights should arise from examining likely patterns of difference around the city than seeking commonalities’.50 He explains that, ‘over the next couple of years it’s hoped that each ward will end up being represented by several dozen recordings, with attempts to balance time of day, day of the week and annual season between them’. The results will ‘appear as dated batches displayed on sound maps for each of the 12 wards’. ‘Eventually’, he continues, ‘it should be possible to put on a more rigorous footing in the sense that different sorts of neighbourhood, be they rich or poor, suburban or inner city, must sound distinct to one other in varied yet often predictable ways’.51 At present this section is represented by data and analysis rather than sound samples, but as an attempt to link sounds and soundscapes to social and census data that can be mapped across time it is an intriguing framework. In future, such approaches could be applied to other attempts to survey musical traditions such as the Global Jukebox, or ACE’s sound repatriation programmes. The strength of the LSS website is its open-ended design—Rawes prefers the term ‘survey’ to archive or map—that allows the work of sound ethnographers to be located historically, geographically and socially. Rawes has applied insights from differing mapping systems—as well as taking advice from blind people on how they organise their responses to sound—and the integration of sound samples into various Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 07:32 30 December 2015 land-use systems and demographies gives layers of context for recordings that would otherwise float free of any spatial, geographical or historical contexts and remain much more ephemeral.

47http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/soundacts/ (accessed 18 August 2014). 48http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/projects/12_tones_intro/ (accessed 18 August 2014). 49http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/projects/12_tones_intro/ (accessed 18 August 2014). 50Ibid. 51Ibid. 476 Review Article Conclusion The four websites reviewed here all contribute importantly in different ways to how we might think about what it means for music and sound to be sustainable and how they might sustain people and communities. Jeff Todd Titon and Ian Rawes of the LSS show the value in commons or Creative Commons licensing, treating music and sound as far as possible as cultural expressions in the public domain of co-ownership. SF and the ACE are both non-profit organisations, but have established important models for copyright and authored ownership through recording, at times enabling individual and community rights and royalties to be respected and returned. As developments in music delivery platforms, file-sharing and even illegal hacking continue at pace, the online presence for many music and sound traditions can still appear as surprisingly unimaginative and one-dimensional. It is often the case that websites hosting ethnographic sound, for example, do not reflect the designs, styles and usability preferred by many people—especially youth—when they access music online. In future, in order to help re-imagine ways to present and historicise online music and sound in ways that grows communities, we might look to more innovative online sound installations such as the Sonic Memorial Project,52 an open audio archive of the history of 9/11, the World Trade Centre and the surrounding neighbourhoods. As each memorialised recording is tracked and heard by chasing an elusive moving line on screen, the sonic browser reveals an emotionally stunning audio array of soundscapes, observations and memories. It remains a beautifully growing testament to the importance of patiently engaged listening.

References

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52http://www.sonicmemorial.org/sonic/public/index.html (accessed 18 August 2014). Ethnomusicology Forum 477

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Discography/Filmography

Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined-out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky, Vol. 1. 1997. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. SF 40106. Compact Disc. Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined-out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky, Vol. 2. 2003. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. SF 50001. Compact Disc. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1989. Powerhouse for God. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Video.