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.
