1.2. Ambivalent Relations to Recordings
Gadjo Dilo’s ambivalent relation to recordings has deeper cultural roots. Reflecting on the historical relations between ethnomusicology and the music industries, Stephen Cottrell observes as early as the 1970s a “subliminal but ongoing discomfort with the […] reification of musical practice that recordings inevitably represent” (Cottrell 2010: 13). The idea that music should be studied as a social fact was advocated by an increasing number of scholars. In France, Gilbert Rouget is famous for the phrase “music is always much more than music”[3], which was taught to generations of ethnomusicology students (myself included). In a paper titled after Rouget’s credo, Bernard Lortat-Jacob offers an exegesis:
This means that, on both the producer’s and the listener’s side, any musical fact stems from intellectual and emotional processes, from representations and conceptions that are sometimes personal, sometimes commonly shared – the latter being of most interest for ethnomusicology –, and sometimes from intentions that far exceed the signals that can be recorded, or those transcribed by an expert hand. (Lortat-Jacob 1997: 179)[4]
This assertion was, however, intended as a mere warning for those involved in later stages of musical analysis, not as a critique of field recording as such. In parallel with writings about music as social fact that far exceed what could be recorded, Rouget, Lortat-Jacob and many others proudly published their field recordings. In these recordings, one would be hard pressed to hear anything “more than music.” On the contrary, all care was taken to ensure that “unwanted” sounds of the various recording contexts did not make it into the recordings. As we shall see, this extended to “unwanted” music as well.
Ethnomusicology, then, had something of the schizophrenic character of the Gadjo Dilo movie: at the level of discourse, an active critique of the fixation and objectification of music; in practice, an active participation in the fixation and objectification of music through published recordings. Something similar happened with artistic narratives of field recording, which often presented the practice as a matter of listening rather than recording. For example, when Cathy Lane asked Peter Cusack “What aspect of the activity of recording are you most interested in?”, Cusack replied:
Listening, definitely. If you’re a field recordist then you get to listen very intently to where you are recording; that develops your listening all the time, but you need to work at it. […] That’s a great pleasure, and I think it would be nice to stop there; there’s no reason for doing anything after that point. But I think that the act of recording really helps to focus on listening, and switches it into a more intense mode. (Lane and Cusack 2013: 192)
In this narrative, the act of recording is presented as little else than a personal technique of listening differently. Once the desired “intensity” in listening is reached, one could just as well bury the recordings, as did Stéphane in Gadjo Dilo. But, of course, Peter Cusack is not interviewed for his buried recordings. Nor is he interviewed for his ability to listen intently. In the gap between the question about recording and the answer about listening, the “field” is installed.
Artistic narratives of field recording neither overlook nor downplay the recordist’s agency. Unlike publications of scientific field recordings, which typically relegate the recordist’s name to a small footprint on the back cover, artistic ones present the recordist as author. Authors also tend to make clear their editing interventions – selecting, cutting, layering, filtering, adding voice-overs, etc. But unlike other artistic narratives committed to ideas of “creation” and “novelty,” those about field recording typically mention these effects as ways of “exaggerating the recording/listening experience” (Lane and Westerkamp 2013: 116). For Westerkamp, they “highlight the musical quality of a sound or soundscape like a caricaturist highlights a face, so that people are drawn into the musicality of the sounds” (Lane and Westerkamp 2013: 116). This “pedagogical” role sets field recording apart from other genres of composed music. According to this narrative, the point of field recording is to convey a way of listening to the world. Taken to its extreme, once the lesson is learned, the record could be discarded.
To summarize, scientific and artistic narratives of field recording present the record as an imperfect reflection of something that lies beyond it. That “something” is set as the listener’s ultimate goal. “For field recording,” warn Lane and Carlyle (2013: 9), “how the field is defined is at least as important as how the recording in itself has been accomplished.” One should add that how the field is defined does not necessarily describe how the recording was done nor how the listener will manage to relate to it. These discrepancies are worth exploring to understand how “field” emerges at the junction between an acoustic trace and an act of the imagination. Failure, more than success, reveals the frame of reference and its limits. I will survey three meanings of “field” which I take to be most common and general. My perspective is that of a listener as well as an ethnomusicologist. The next section briefly relays my own experience with making (and failing) “field” recordings.