Musics Lost and Found: Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition

This ground-breaking book is the first-ever study of the role played in musical history by song collectors.

This is the first-ever book about song collectors, music's unsung heroes. They include the Armenian priest who sacrificed his life to preserve the folk music which the Turks were trying to erase in the 1915 Genocide; the prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who secretly noted down the songs of doomed Jewish inmates; the British singer who went veiled into Afghanistan to learn, record and perform the music the Taliban wanted to silence. Some collectors have been fired by political idealism - Bartok championing Hungarian peasant music, the Lomaxes bringing the blues out of Mississippi penitentiaries, and transmitting them to the world. Many collectors have been priests - French Jesuits noting down labyrinthine forms in eighteenth-century Beijing, English vicars tracking songs in nineteenth-century Somerset. Others have been wonderfully colourful oddballs.

Today's collectors are striving heroically to preserve endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world's musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk music's 'end of history'. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.

This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author's award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.

Author: Michael Church
Publisher: Boydell Press
Published: 10/15/2021
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.30w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781783276073


Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2022

About the Author
Church, Michael: - MICHAEL CHURCH has spent much of his career in newspapers as a literary and arts editor; he is a former television critic of The Times, and since 2010 has been the opera critic of The Independent. From 1992 to 2005 he reported on traditional musics all over the world for the BBC World Service; in 2004, Topic Records released a CD of his Kazakh field recordings, and in 2007 two further CDs of his recordings in Georgia and Chechnya. He is the editor of The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions (Boydell Press, 2015), winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Award for Creative Communication.