Musics Lost and Found (English Edition) ibook

This book is a piece of serious musicology by a man who has worked as a
song collector himself, but his erudition is lightly worn.This ground-breaking book is the
first-ever study of the role played in musical history by song collectors. It examines their
often extraordinary lives, how they set about their task, and the music they collected. In
detailing thepressures which have driven them to travel and explore, it reflects movements
in cultural and political history. This book is a musicological and biographical study by a
man who has worked as a song collector himself; his aim isto address a general readership,
as well as an academic one. In some respects this is the sequel to his previous book The
Other Classical Musics, which Boydell published to critical acclaim in 2015. In this new
book, Michael Church begins with an overview of song collecting's development, from
pencil-and-paper in the seventeenth century through to the age of recording. He devotes
major chapters to Komitas, Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger, and Bela Bartok, and to John and
Alan Lomax who collected songs in Mississippi penitentiaries; he examines the history of
field-recording in Russia, Central Asia, and China. One of his most colourful chapters looks
at throat-singing in Tuva;another follows the trail of gamelan in Bali, while yet another
investigates song collecting among the Pygmy communities of Central Africa.BR> The
development of recording technologies is chronicled here, as is the dawn ofethnomusicology.
Church follows the growth of the great sound archives - the Berlin Phonogramm Archiv and its
counterparts in Vienna, London, and Washington; he looks at the role of the record industry
- big in the mid-twentiethcentury, but now waning to almost nothing - in 'capturing'
indigenous musics. Church casts a critical eye over the so-called "e;world
music"e; boom, and over well-meaning musical-conservation schemes, but he concludes
witha stark warning. He shows how globalisation, urbanisation, and Westernisation are
leading to an irreversible erosion of the world's musical diversity: in this respect the
book aligns itself with the Extinction Rebellion movement.Church suggests that we may be
seeing 'the end of history' for folk music, with old forms dying as the conditions for their
survival or replacement disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical
culture. Disappearing folk-music traditions mirror what is happening with spoken languages,
as their multifarious richness dwindles to a few privileged and pervasive tongues.