The text below is a pre-publication draft of a chapter published in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon (London: Routledge, 2018), 46-54.
Introduction
Like any scholarly discipline, musicology is a dynamic entity that has been understood in many different ways over the course of its history (see Duckles et al. 2017). So many approaches, agendas, processes and objects of study have been connected to the study of music that one might be forgiven for wondering whether the terms ‘musicology’, ‘musicological’ or ‘musicologist’ have any remaining value. Nevertheless, these terms continue to designate a territory broadly defined as the academic study of music rather than its practice (by which is typically meant performance and composition). If what is meant by ‘musicology’ and its related terms has shifted with time, so too has the relationship between musicology and history as connected disciplines. It is difficult, and arguably undesirable, to distinguish too heavily between historical and musicological approaches given the reliance that musicology has traditionally had on history, yet there have been strands of musicology – systematic musicology, for example – which have made claims to non-historical ways of understanding music. Taken to an extreme, such thinking posits the availability of an ahistorical musical ‘object’ as ‘pure’ sound or ‘music itself’. As Philip Tagg (2013) has argued, notions of absolute music faced major challenges from scholars working in the fields of ethnomusicology, the sociology of music and semiology, all of whom required music to be situated in social, cultural and/or historical perspective to determine meaning. So too with the advent of popular music studies, for which ‘a key theme … has been a concern to place a politics of pop practice in opposition to the apparently quasi-religious inventory of iconic classical objects’ (Middleton 2010, p. 59). Arguments against music as an object or thing include Christopher Small’s (1998) influential notion of ‘musicking’, where the doing of music is seen to be more important than its products.
If such approaches have offered a necessary counter to the idea of ‘music as music’, they have also occasionally contributed to unhelpful binary distinctions between what Evan Eisenberg (2005, p. 69), borrowing from funk music, calls music ‘as thing’ and music ‘as thang’. I find Eisenberg’s more dialectical approach useful in that I believe that the rejection of music’s objects (and of music as object) purely to highlight music’s processual aspects too readily assumes that objects are static and unchanging. Against such assumptions we might consider the position forwarded by Alfred North Whitehead, as summarised by Steven Shaviro (2014, p. 4): ‘the world is never static, never closed, never completed. Each process of becoming gives rise to novelty: it produces something new and unique, something that has never existed before’. For me, this is where history comes back into play, for it would be impossible to think of music as object or process without the understanding of precedent and the dynamics of change that historical inquiry provides. One way to think about this is to consider the nature of musical work. Tagg (2010) notes the different uses of the English word ‘work’ to refer to labour (process) and the outcome of labour (thing). While he notes the general usage of the second meaning when referring to ‘the musical work’, it is worth considering how musical works continue to do various kinds of work, escaping fixity for ongoing and open-ended careers. The historian can trace such careers and, in doing so, combine musicological objects with musicological processes. Musical moments, instances and objects can be recognised in their apparent historical fixity and heard through an ongoing historical narrative which demands that they be subject to new understandings, newly formulated recognitions and processes of intertextuality that Middleton (2010) describes as ‘work-in(g)-practice’.
Taking sound recording as an exemplary musical object affords us an insight into the challenges and opportunities that musicologists encounter when doing popular music history. One challenge emerges from the gap between the historical and social contexts of the ‘original’ moment(s) of recording and the moment(s) in which we are researching, writing or otherwise performing historical work. Here we would do well to bear in mind Lee Brown’s (2000, p. 363) observation that ‘Works of phonography are sound-constructs created by the use of recording machinery for an intrinsic aesthetic purpose, rather than for an extrinsic documentary one’. As such, they may deploy what Patrick Feaster (2015, p. 145) calls ‘phonogenic’ voices and sounds which were ‘posed’ deliberately in the aesthetic moment of recording. What did the musicians being recorded think they were doing? What did record producers and record label executives think they were doing? What did the listeners think they were hearing? What do we hear now, and what do we want from the sounds we are hearing? To what extent can we detect phonogenic voices and sounds – those to whose poses we find ourselves responding – and what do we think were the phonogenic voices and sounds of the time? We may not be able to answer all of these questions but they are still worth asking in order to encourage critical reflection on time and distance in the mediation and remediation of musics from other places and eras (see Bolter and Grusin 2000, Roy 2015).
As a way of approaching such questions, I here consider three strands of historical practice in relation to popular music and sound recording, taking an international perspective. One strand examines recordings of the past as ways of illustrating broader scholarly concerns, for example the relation between music, nation, empire and postcolonial struggle. A second engages with the nature of sound recording or phonography, posing questions about fidelity, authenticity and representation. The creative practice of those involved with phonographic archaeology – the crate diggers, collectors, DJs, producers, compilers and reissue labels – constitutes a third strand, which may welcome or reject historical musicology yet which still offers a way of doing history sonically. After discussing these strands, I reflect on the role of storytelling in musicological work.
The Global Gramophone
The phonographic era, generally dated from Edison’s successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877, introduced many changes to the ways in which people related to music. In an influential study of the effects which recording technology had on music, Mark Katz (2004, pp. 8–47) outlined seven ‘defining traits’ of the phonographic era: tangibility, portability, (in)visibility, repeatability, temporality, receptivity and manipulability. Taken together, these traits describe how music became subject to new relationships (between musicians, retailers and owners of recordings), new restrictions (created by the time limitations of the new media and the kinds of sounds that record well), new uses (affecting music pedagogy and listeners’ expectations), and new creative possibilities (among the most influential of which would be turntablism and sampling).
One of the consequences was the creation of a historical archive of recordings that has enabled later scholars to access the sonic past. Even when focussing only on the first half of the twentieth century – the period associated with 78rpm gramophone discs – we are dealing with a vast number of examples. The more than one million recordings made during this time, in Pekka Gronow’s (2014, p. 32) estimation, ‘could be said to constitute the largest archive of historical recordings in the world’. As Gronow’s work has shown, the recording industry was an international undertaking from its earliest days (Gronow 1983, Gronow and Saunio 1998). This was especially notable in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the period between the introduction of electrical recording and the onset of the Great Depression. Michael Denning has studied the global recording boom of this period as ‘a herald of decolonization’ (2015, p. 136), arguing that the availability of vernacular musics in locally specific languages and dialects offered colonised populations the chance to hear themselves and gain a sense of identity necessary for anticolonial action. It was not so much that vernacular musics were mobilised in support of anticolonial activism – for, as Denning notes, many of those identified with such movements viewed such music with elitist disdain and/or as evidence of the exoticising tendencies of imperial powers – but rather that sound offered a mirror to local, regional and national identity and to an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991):
These vernacular phonograph musics not only captured the timbres of decolonization; the emergence of these musics – hula, rumba, beguine, tango, jazz, samba, marabi, kroncong, tarab, chaabi – was decolonization. It was not simply a cultural activity that contributed to the political struggle; it was somatic decolonization, the decolonization of the ear and the dancing body. (Denning 2015, pp. 136–137)
If, for the musicians involved in recording them and the local audiences who bought and listened to them, these global vernacular musics performed ‘an improvisation of a postcolonial world’ (Denning 2015, p. 167), they also represented, for other listeners, a source of fascination and even a problem to be solved. One of the most obvious results of sound recording was the potential for music to be decontextualised, removed from its original world of meaning and deposited into others. Accompanying whatever meanings global musics had for their intended local audiences, therefore, we can detect another strand of history in which outsiders to these traditions attempted to understand, curate, and translate them to new audiences. Music has always had its explicators and critics, those entrusted (or self-appointed) to take on the role of placing music into context. For recorded music, this resulted in a range of writings which initially focussed on hardware (record players, needles, records) but which inevitably shifted to reviewing the music on the recordings. The record reviewer emerged as a new kind of expert, one granted the authority to speak knowledgeably and evaluatively about musicianship, genre, style, history, social context, recording technology and whatever else might be deemed appropriate for the discerning listener.
One issue that often arose in early reviews was fidelity, whether that related to recordings being true to the material or to the ‘best practice’ of the medium, a practice that was emerging and being shaped under the watchful eyes of the reviewers themselves. In the reception of foreign music, the truth of the material was often explored through the notion of authentic otherness, an otherness that the expert critic could translate for his or her (normally his) readers. European otherness was most clearly heard in recordings of ethnic or vernacular musics. In a 1931 review of Portuguese fados, for example, the British diplomat and folklorist Rodney Gallop presented a problem and solution with which we are still familiar today. The problem was that most of the music being released was too familiar and dull; the solution was to hear music from elsewhere (Gallop 1931).
In the early months of 1933, the BBC broadcast a series of radio programmes entitled ‘Strange Music’ in which various travellers ‘described – with gramophone illustrations – the characteristic music of the countries they [had] visited’ (Listener 1933, p. 623). The areas covered were Spain, China, Japan, India, Egypt, Central Asia, Persia, European Russia, South Africa and Northern Africa. The texts from the programmes were subsequently published in The Listener, the journal created to act as a reflective space for BBC broadcasts. The recordings used in the broadcasts were not listed and, as the programmes do not appear to have been recorded, we are now left with only the written texts, accompanied by photographs. That some of these illustrations are taken from the British Museum, the Imperial Institute and printed accounts of expeditions underlines the extent to which the programmes could be heard as colonial exercises and the tone of the texts is often paternalistic, essentialist and othering to a contemporary reader. Listeners, and subsequent readers, are repeatedly asked to imagine themselves in the locales being depicted and the details provided range, depending on the presenter, from attempts to understand and justify the sonorous strangeness to fantasies which mix anxiety and desire in classic Orientalist fashion.
The coverage of international recordings gradually increased in British magazines such as The Gramophone in the years leading up to the Second World War. One of the early categories used in reviews was ‘operatic and foreign songs’; later there was greater regionalisation and the term ‘continental records’ was introduced to describe music from elsewhere in Europe. These terms appear mostly to have been taken from the categories used by the recording companies in their catalogues. A 1937 review of Parlophone’s ‘Special Continental Records’ series presents itself as a kind of guided tour of Europe, making an explicit connection to travel agencies. By the 1950s the ‘continental’ section was a well-established part of the magazine, helped no doubt by the growth in international travel. While the fascination with the strange and the exotic would persist, a shift can be detected in the response to foreign musics from a broadly colonial understanding of the world to an emerging sense of globalisation. In this way, the popular music historian examining the discourse around music can trace the ways in which music reflected or sometimes led changes in understanding of broader social issues.
Listening across time and space
In a 1928 Gramophone review of Greek music released by HMV, Rodney Gallop wrote ‘If you want to hear what a Greek inn sounds like on a Saturday night, get “Livadia” (A.O.193). It is an acquired taste, I admit’ (Gallop 1928, p. 27). In the fado review cited earlier, Gallop described the students he had observed singing and playing in the night-time streets of Coimbra and noted that Lucas Junot’s 1927 recordings ‘will remain a permanent memory of one such experience’ (Gallop 1931, p. 173). In these and other reviews Gallop displays his expertise, asserts his familiarity with the texts and contexts of European musics, and makes recommendations to his readers. Additionally, though, he suggests that recordings allow direct experience to the things they represent, such as the sound of the taverna or the sight of university troubadours on moonlit nights. Whether in memory or imagination, recordings are understood to transport listeners to other times and places.
This notion is of relevance to the historian of popular music, who, in embarking on their own journey of discovery, has the tantalising prospect of a direct link to other times and places via the recorded archive. Certainly, by listening across time and space, we can hope to catch something of the ‘original singers whose voices are recorded with all the subtle inflections and mannerisms of performance without which folksong loses so much of its value and charm’ (Gallop 1931, p. 173). At the same time, the careful historian will be wary of imagining that this sonic connection is enough. For all the auratic thrill of hearing the then-and-there in the here-and-now – a thrill which can be further enhanced by listening to a 1920s recording on a 1920s gramophone – it will not be enough to give a sense of what the music meant to listeners in the past. For this, additional layers of mediation are required, such as the reading of reviews (like Gallop’s) and other accounts of musicking that have been left to us in various media.
Rather than direct communication, it might be more accurate to say, as Mark Smith (2015, p. 55) does, that we are only ever able to catch echoes of the sonic past. Smith’s work examines how we can know the sounds of the past in the pre-recording era, which is to say when sounds were recorded via written texts (see Smith 2001). Yet even when staying within the comparatively recent history of the phonographic era, as I am doing here, we should be suspicious of the direct connection to original experience that sound recording promises. As Smith (2015, p. 56) asks, ‘Does the reproducibility of a sound, either on record, on tape, or electronically, make that sound more accessible for the historian?’ This inevitably leads Smith to wonder whether the history of sound can better be served by print than by sound recording. It is a valid question, though one which harbours its own potential deceptions. While there is no question that printed sources of the past can offer invaluable help when placing the sounds of the past in context (how sounds were made and heard, what meanings were given to them), they can only do so when we understand the reasons for producing any recording, whether textual or phonographic. Any such recording can betray bias, whether it be the quite different intentions of field recordists and commercial record producers or the potential for poetic license in written descriptions of sound. Furthermore, why should we believe that the way writers wrote for readers in the past can be directly understood by contemporary readers? Language changes and historical texts are always in need of contemporary translation. Rather than thinking of whether print provides better context for the sonic past than does phonography, we would do well to consider how any and all additional context can enrich the historian’s knowledge of past musicking.
Smith’s scepticism concerning what we can know from the sounds of the past remains informative and useful for the historian. As Brandon LaBelle (2010, p. 108) notes in his reflection on Smith’s work, ‘The question becomes not so much to seek the original sound, in pure form, but to hear it within history, through an extended ear, as a significant phenomenon, material, and shared experience participating in the movements of history’. We should also consider what it is we are listening for when we visit the sounds of the past, and to what extent what we find there reflects our own desires and needs. Recent trends in phonographic archaeology are illustrative here. By ‘phonographic archaeology’ (and its related term ‘vinyl archaeology’), I mean the practice of searching out obscure sounds of the past to present them to new audiences, whether through compilations, DJ sets, samples, remixes or the adoption into contemporary performance practice of temporarily and spatially ‘other’ musical styles learned from records. I am thinking in particular of compilations released by labels such as Yazoo, Strut, Analog Africa, Finders Keepers, Dust-to-Digital, Soundway, Soul Jazz, Revenant, Honest Jons, Vampisoul, Hot Casa and Awesome Tapes from Africa. These compilations may be broad-ranging or may be focussed on a specific time, place or genre. The Secret Museum of Mankind, an example of the former tendency, was a series of albums compiled by Pat Conte in the 1990s which brought together a global selection of ‘ethnic music classics’ released between 1925 and 1948. By contrast, Hot Casa’s more recent Ivory Coast Soul compilations draw a tighter net, focussing on funk and soul music recorded in Abidjan between 1972 and 1982. In the narratives which accompany these releases – whether in liner notes, interviews, or critical features – several recurring themes can be identified, such as accidental discovery, quest, obsession, challenges faced, problems of translation, intercultural exchange, and records as resources. Archaeological metaphors abound – digging, mines, seams, unearthing, uncovering – while sites and sources often remain secret or semi-secret. For some compilers, it is important to provide historical, social and musical context for the newly presented sounds; others, meanwhile, emphasise the strangeness of the past and the foreign and express the desire to present collections ‘unburdened of musicology’ (Ainley 2008).
As Micol Seigel (2016, p. 120) notes, ‘Music from somewhere else offers a Rorschach blot of the highest order’. It can be used as evidence for more or less anything one might wish to argue. Ian Nagoski, compiler of many collections of early ‘ethnic’ recordings, has titled one of them Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics. Seigel’s and Nagoski’s metaphors are compelling in their suggestion that we may go to historical artefacts to encounter contemporary desires. Against such tendencies, Seigel places the necessity to consider historical and social contexts and the fields of possibility that mark the hard lines of difference between music and musicians and in their places and times. Similarly, Brent Hayes Edwards challenges the anachronistic critique levelled at the African field recordings produced by Hugh Tracey in the 1940s. Rather than wishing to find Tracey guilty of colonialist misrepresentation, Hayes Edwards posits a ‘counterarchival’ approach that can be launched against the cultural misunderstandings of the past, based as they inevitably were on particular historical, imperial and essentialist positions. Instead of negating the blunders of past perspectives, there is the opportunity ‘to ask whether an archive devoted to the sedimentation of the “traditional” can be used or abused to trace a history of transformation’ (2016, p. 272). Is it possible, Hayes Edwards (2016, p. 272) wonders, ‘to excavate from Tracey’s archive of African music a counterarchive of anticolonialism in sound?’ More than Rorschach blots or black mirrors, the traces left by the music from spatial and temporal elsewheres may continue to inform as much as reflect.
Songs and Storytelling
Having discussed the three strands of musicological endeavour identified at the outset, I now make a partial return to the first strand by focussing on the use of recordings to create musicological narratives. Here I’m interested in the recorded past as an ever-expanding archive and the opportunities and challenges that creates. As an example of opportunities, let us consider the tracing of trajectories once a piece of popular music has been released into the world as a recording. These trajectories might include the critical response which greets a track, its commercial success, the way it is interpreted by listeners, the role it acquires in a person’s life, and so on. One trajectory that I have been drawn to in my own listening, reading and writing is that encountered when a track is recorded by many different artists. Scholarship on the Great American Songbook often takes this approach, perhaps not surprisingly given that to consider a song a ‘standard’ is already to be aware of multiple versions of it. Will Friedwald’s (2002) Stardust Melodies, defined in its subtitle as a ‘biography of twelve of America’s most popular songs’, offers analysis of the ways in which different versions of the songs tell us about the composers, lyricists, arrangers and performers involved, as well as how the songs themselves have been understood over their long and varied histories. In my (2014) study of ‘holiday records’ and nostalgia, I use the case study of ‘April in Portugal’, a song that started life in the 1940s as a Portuguese fado entitled ‘Coimbra’ and subsequently became an international hit in the mid-1950s and a mood music staple in the following decade. Tracing the song’s journey across regions and languages allows for insights into the ways in which music publishers operated in the mid-twentieth century and offers a comparative example to place alongside other regional songs which underwent the ‘universalising’ practice of being made into English-language versions, which in turn helps to tell the story of the dominance of Anglophone popular music. It also offers a consideration of how songs are worked into different musical genres, the gaps created by re-presentation, and what gets lost in translation during the process. Furthermore, tracing the many versions of the song entails engagement with an array of artefacts – recordings, record covers and labels, magazine articles and advertisements (especially useful in this respect are the archives of trade magazines such as Billboard) – which help to tell other stories related to the materiality of music (Roy 2015).
Another way in which scholars, musicians and musicians’ representatives have used the ongoing life of covered songs is as a way of claiming (or reclaiming) authorial rights and financial reward. Steven Feld (2000) has told the story of how the lullaby known as ‘Rorogwela’, recorded in the Solomon Islands by ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp in 1969 and released on a record in 1973, was sampled by the French electronic music duo Deep Forest for the 1992 hit ‘Sweet Lullaby’, then surfaced a few years later as ‘Pygmy Lullaby’ on an album by Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Feld traces the various ethical issues arising from the uncredited appropriation of Zemp’s recording and considers the implications for understanding world music and globalisation more generally. Timothy Taylor has explored similar issues using the case study of the song ‘Return to Innocence’ by German band Enigma. The song’s most seemingly original element was a sample from a drinking song performed by the Taiwanese farmer and musician Kuo Ying-nan, which had been released on an album of aboriginal Taiwanese music. Hearing himself years later as the voice of Enigma’s hit song spurred Kuo to legal action (Taylor 2001, pp. 117–35).
Unlike the examples from the Solomon Islands and Taiwan, ‘Mbube’ by the South African musician Solomon Linda was recorded with commerce immediately in mind. A 78 was released in 1939 by the label Gallo and became popular across Africa and among South Africans living in Europe. In 1952, a version was recorded for the American Folkways label by The Weavers, having become ‘Wimoweh’ through Pete Seeger’s ‘translation’. Many more versions followed, including those by Jimmy Dorsey, Yma Sumac, Karl Denver and The Kingston Trio, establishing the song as a staple of the American folk music revival. As with ‘Coimbra’, which became ‘April in Portugal’ when the music publisher Chappell asked songwriter Jimmy Kennedy to produce an English-language version, producers for the RCA label sensed further crossover appeal in ‘Wimoweh’ and hired George David Weiss to help them write an English pop version. The result was ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, credited to Weiss and the producers Luigi Creatore and Hugo Peretti and released by doo-wop group The Tokens in 1961. Not only was no credit given to Linda, but the producers further muddied the authorial waters by retaining elements of Paul Campbell’s arrangement for Yma Sumac’s 1952 version of ‘Wimoweh’. ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ subsequently enjoyed massive international success and many further covers, eventually appearing in Disney’s The Lion King. The story was told by journalist Rian Malan in a Rolling Stone article in 2000 (reprinted in Malan 2012, pp. 57–86) and by filmmaker François Verster in the documentary A Lion’s Trail in 2002, eventually resulting in a cash settlement for Linda’s descendants. In order for this to happen, it was necessary to attend to the music as music, in other words using the insights gained from a musicological approach.
Conclusion
Histories of popular music take a variety of forms: book-length accounts predominantly written by journalists, critics and academics; more fragmentary texts written for exhibitions and online platforms; audio-visual texts such as broadcasts, podcasts and documentaries with cinema and DVD releases; the stories told by musicians in interviews, concerts and published memoirs; those told by fans as they relate the role played by music and musicians in their lives. The emphasis placed on explanatory detail or sonic example will often depend on the medium chosen for framing the history. In thinking about the ways in which musics of the past continue to have relevance and meaning in the present, it might be useful to imagine a model in which a contemporary listener is connected back to a moment of sonic production by listening to a recording. The importance of understanding history can then be determined by the extent to which the listener feels able to understand that sonic moment. The act of listening may create the illusion that there is a direct connection to the original performer – and indeed this may be enough for some listeners – but it is also likely that the listener requires some other form of mediation, and this is where historical narrative and musicology can be mutually informative.
To study is to grasp, meaning both to understand and to hold. Popular music history is important not only because it allows us to understand the precedents, developments and causes of contemporary issues in popular music, but also because we can learn more about what is meant by ‘popular music’ as a descriptive term. Although it has not been the purpose of this chapter to work towards a definition of popular music, I would argue that such definitional projects need to be historically informed and that attending to historical developments within and across popular music genres helps us to understand the shifting nature of the ‘popular’ (Lipsitz 1990, 2007, Middleton 2006). And musicological approaches to popular music history remain just as vital in accessing the momentarily discrete iterations that make up the ongoing flow of musical history. Music is more than a thing or object but its processual vitality is made manifest through objects such as songs and recordings, objects upon which we can alight, however provisionally, in our attempts to map sound’s changing shapes.
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Late Voice 