World Music Ethnomusicology

And Field Recordings

World Music

World music is a phrase that describe styles of music from non-Western countries, including quasi-traditional, intercultural, and traditional music. World music's inclusive nature and elasticity as a musical category can make it difficult to give a fixed definition.

It can also be described as a global music that comprises specific diverse cultures in different communities around the world. Songs are mainly composed in the native language and can also be characterised by unique diverse cultural practices, traditions or customs.

The term "world music" has been credited to ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, who coined it in the early 1960s at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he developed undergraduate through doctoral programs in the discipline. To enhance the learning process (John Hill), he invited more than a dozen visiting performers from Africa and Asia and began a world music concert series.The term became current in the 1980s as a marketing/classificatory device in the media and the music industry.

Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts of musical behavior, in addition to the sound component. Within musical ethnography it is the first-hand personal study of musicking as known as the act of taking part in a musical performance.

Field Recordings

Field recording is the term used for an audio recording produced outside a recording studio, and the term applies to recordings of both natural and human-produced sounds. It also applies to sound recordings like electromagnetic fields or vibrations using different microphones like a passive magnetic antenna for electromagnetic recordings or contact microphones.

"Field recordings" may also refer to simple monaural or stereo recordings taken of musicians in familiar and casual surroundings, such as the ethnomusicology recordings pioneered by John Lomax.

Field recordings can be understood as ethnographic representations of places (Drever, 2002; Rennie, 2014). It is often claimed that they generate a deeper awareness and knowledge of the world, and sometimes that they offer a means by which to renew human connections with more-than-human life that have been eroded by modernism.

(Source Wikipedia and M. Gallagher Manchester University)

Charles Duvelle

Born in 1937 in Paris, he spent his childhood in South East Asia, and returned to France to study piano at Conservatoire De Paris. In 1959 he began work at Pierre Schaeffer's Société De Radiodiffusion De La France D'Outre-Mer or SORAFOM, a colonial broadcasting service that worked across Francophone Africa.

Duvelle had previously recorded classical and jazz, but in the early 1960s he worked outside Europe for the time, with a recording trip to Niger. Later expeditions to Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Madagascar followed.

In the mid-1970s Duvelle moved to the US, before later returning to France, and in 1998 undertook a new series of archive recordings from Benin, Papua New Guinea, Niger, Mauritania, Congo, Burkina Faso and elsewhere under the title Prophet.

There are 8 collections of music available

* Charles Duvelle - Prophet World Music Collections

* The African, Caribbean and Roots Dub Collections

* The SOAS CD Series: Ethnomusicology Collection

* Little Axe Records: World & Folk Music Collections

* An Additional Mix of Musics from Around the World

* UNESO Collections of World Music - Orient Series

* Black America Field Recordings: Document Series

* James Koetting Collected Ghana Field Recordings

Consisting of more than 250 separate music albums with more detailed listings in the folder and additional bonus material. These collections span a vast and diverse range of cultures from around the world.

All content is intended for preview only for educational and research purposes as highlighted in the policy and is copyrighted to the owners.

Books:

World Music - A Global Journey by T Miller

Dub: - Soundscapes and Shattered Songs

Research Paper:

Field Recording & the Sounding of Spaces

Journal:

Recording African Music in the Field by H. Tracey

Related Links:

The Field Recording Contribution Project UK

Sahel Sounds Records - Field Recordings from the Sahel

Sound Fields Adventures in Contemporary Field Recording

World Music and Field Recording Collections

(MP3 Googledrive Access)