Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Review: Taking the World for a Spin in Europe: An Insider's Look at the World Music
Recording Business
Author(s): René van Peer
Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1999), pp. 374-384
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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Recording Reviews
Taking the World for a Spin in Europe: An Insider's Look
at the World Music Recording Business
When scholars began using sound equipment at the end of the nine-
teenth century to make ethnological music recordings, their goal was ini-
tially to facilitate the work of musical transcription.After transcribing,schol-
ar-recordiststypically deposited their recordings in the archives of national
museums, libraries, research institutes, and universities. Over the years,
many of these institutions not only stored the recordings, but also released
them on disc, often in collaboration with private record companies. Since
the 1960s, when interest in traditional music and its offshoots began a
modest expansion, privately owned labels have become more active. Now,
at the end of the century, the European world music business has evolved
into a complex amalgam of private labels, national institutions, and inter-
national organizations that all produce recordings of ethnic and "world"
music. The boundary between government-sponsored and private record
producing is not always clear. For example, a single company may encom-
pass both sponsored and commercial labels. Private labels may undertake
"non-commercial"projects while state-sponsored firms aim for commercial
clout. The world music market place is a crowded one in which a motley
band of vendors vie for the attention of patrons who are no less diverse.
Government Support
Not all European labels have the same urge, or need, to compete. The
French labels Ocora and Inedit are state-funded (through Radio France and
the Ministry of Culture, respectively) and evidently do not have to make
decisions based on current fashions. Ocora was founded in 1957 as a facil-
ity to train technicians from Africa for work in national broadcasting ser-
vices in the emergent post-colonial countries, and Africa is still well-repre-
sented in its catalog. These days, "A&R"(artist and repertory) decisions at
374
Recording Reviews 375
Museum Collections
Museums and academic institutions have also been active in promot-
ing recordings of traditional music. The Museum fir V61olkerkunde in Ber-
lin and the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva both produce collections of
traditionalmusic records. The Mus&ede l'Homme in Parispublished a huge
body of albums, a task that was transferred in the 1970s to one of the re-
search groups in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS),
which operates separately from the museum itself. The collections pro-
duced by these three museums are extensions of their sound archives. The
Recording Reviews 377
Berlin archive was started in 1900, and initially led by Erich von Hornbos-
tel. It belongs to the department of Musikethnologie, which, beginning in
the 1960s, has produced a variety of publications, among them the twenty
albums in the Museum Collection series. Mainly field recordings, they fo-
cus on a specific theme or ethnic group. Particularlynotable are four al-
bums with music from countries that were a part of the Ottoman Empire
(one is devoted to Eastern and Western influences in music from this re-
gion), and a six-CD set of music from IrianJaya.
The AIMP(Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire) in Geneva
were founded in 1944 by the Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin
Brailoiu. In 1928 Brailoiu had established the Folklore Archives of the So-
ciety of Composers in Bucharest, which still exists under the auspices of
the ICED, the National Romanian Institute for Ethnology. By the time of
Brailoiu's death in 1958, the AIMPhad released more than eighty 78-rpm
discs in three collections which included recordings from all over the world.
The largest of these was the World Collection of Recorded Folk Music, the
first series to be published with the cooperation of UNESCO.After Brailoiu
died the archives remained dormant for twenty-five years. In 1983 Laurent
Aubert was appointed by the Genevan Ethnographic Museum to revive
them, and his first act was to reissue two of Brailoiu's collections on LP:
the World Collection and the Swiss Series. These were followed by a set
of three CDs with recordings that Brailoiu had made in his native Romania
between 1933 and 1943. During the fifteen years of Aubert's stewardship
AIMPhas released over forty CDs, most of them through the Swiss label
VDE. The releases consist primarily of field recordings, often of ethnic
groups or musical styles not yet represented on disc, such as the Kayap6,
Enauene-Naue, and Nhambiquara tribes of Brazil.
In 1946 the Mus&ede l'Homme in Paris started to publish a series of
ethnographic recordings under the direction of Gilbert Rouget, first in a
limited edition of fifty copies solely intended for museums and sound ar-
chives. Two years later, in cooperation with the label Boite ~ Musique, it
produced three discs with field recordings from the Congo aimed at a larger
audience. In 1953 it produced the first LP, which also marked the start of
the Collection Musde de l'Homme. The Collection began a new series in
1969 in collaboration with the French label Vogue. In the mid-1970s the
role of Rouget's CNRSresearch group in making these albums was formal-
ly acknowledged when the collection was relaunched under a name that
mentioned both the museum and the research institute. Since 1975 this
collection, in which albums focusing on polyphonic music styles are par-
ticularlynotable, has been released exclusively through Le Chant du Monde.
Tran Quang Hai, a longstanding member of the CNRS-Mus&e de l'Homme
research team, noted that the group has a mandate to do research record-
378 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1999
ings anywhere in the world except in France, and that members of the
research team are the only ones who can publish recordings in the CNRS-
Mus&ede l'Homme series.
In Greece, the ethnomusicologist Nikos Dionysopoulos releases CDs
through Crete University Press. He is working on a series that should en-
compass the various regions of his native country. Some of these albums
are studio recordings that focus on one particular musician. A double CD
with music from the island of Lesbos and a forthcoming album covering
Epirus, in the northwest of Greece, consist of field recordings. As Dionyso-
poulos produces these releases virtually single-handed, they do not come
out at a very fast rate.
Although the institutions and organizations discussed above are rela-
tively free to choose the music they want to present, they do depend on
the budgets made available to them. The recordings in the Berlin Museum
Collection clearly show the care with which they are made, but the col-
lection includes in all only twenty titles-an average of not even one per
year. Publicly funded cultural institutions are subject to political whim, and
with the current European drive to reduce national budget deficits, state
spending is liable to be cut. The least popular funding categories come first,
and culture ranks high among these.
ning with volume 4); and one with music from Kalimantan,a continuation
of the Southeast Asia anthology. Label director Rainer Kahleyss in turn
stopped his involvement in the Musicaphon UNESCOcollections; he as-
sured me he will reissue on CD the twenty albums in the series on South
East Asia and Oceania at a rate of perhaps one per year.
Auvidis recently reissued three albums from the African anthology.
Their spokesman Philippe Pinon could neither confirm if the label will in-
deed take the responsibility to make the other titles in that series available,
nor give any information whatsoever about what will happen to the anthol-
ogy of Oriental music. The fate of both invaluable series is still uncertain.
Another organization that sometimes supports series of traditional
music albums is the Ford Foundation, which currently sponsors Philip
Yampolsky's Music of Indonesia series, published by Smithsonian Folk-
ways. In Europe, the Ford Foundation supported a series of twenty-five LPs
of Greek music produced by the Society for the Dissemination of National
Music (SDNM), all but four of which consist of field recordings made in the
1970s that cover the entire country. The albums are now being reissued
on CD, but without Ford's support. This series is still the most comprehen-
sive representation of Greek traditions, which makes it even more a pity
that its liner notes are so scanty.
Greece
Greece is literally teeming with "world music" activity. Recordings of
music from village traditions and their urban offshoots are produced in
bewildering abundance, both by (often local) cultural institutions and com-
mercial labels. The list of albums of rembetika, an urban style that emerged
in Greek ports between the wars, seems to be endless.
MusurgiaGraeca is a conglomerate of three companies, Orata,Lyra,and
Kinesis, which together "explore the treasuresof Greek music from the fifth
century BC up to contemporary trends." Oratahas archives of scores whose
provenance ranges from antiquity to the nineteenth century, a recording
studio, and a department for designing and printing covers and inserts; Lyra
is the oldest Greek label to remain independent of international record
companies; Kinesis has an international distribution network.
The label FM Records covers much of the same region, but organizes
its releases more emphatically into series. Much of the music on these la-
bels seems to represent a contemporary take on older traditions, recorded
in city studios rather than in the field. A considerable number of smaller
labels are distributed through Nama, a company established to represent
382 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1999
wide range of variation all the same. For example, Inedit and the Berlin
Museum Collection have both released large sets, of Moroccan Andalusian
music and music from IrianJaya, respectively. The first is an integral ver-
sion of an enormous cycle of classical pieces recorded in a studio, the sec-
ond is a field document of rituals and songs from a tribal culture that has
been totally disrupted since the recordings were made. The Andalusian
cycle is accompanied by information so brief that it verges on the irrele-
vant, while the Berlin production contextualizes the music in prolific liner
notes which offer a detailed ethnographic background. Collector and se-
ries editor Artur Simon does not hesitate at some points to insert himself
into the text, thus showing his personal involvement. Far from being in-
trusive, Simon's presence makes the experience of this album even more
poignant and alive than it alreadyis, in contrast to the Moroccan box, which
I found a very long sit indeed-the music and singing go on relentlessly,
and without knowing Arabic, the listener hasn't a clue as to what the sing-
ers are so solemnly eulogizing.
It would be too simplistic, however, to suggest a consistent distinction
between scantly annotated, studio-produced "commercial"releases and field
recorded "non-commercial" releases full of thick musical description. La-
bels such as Ocora and Geneva's AIMPproduce high-quality studio record-
ings with excellent production values and strive to complement these with
well written and accurate documentation contributed by ethnomusicolo-
gists. By contrast, some recordings that seem for all the world like esoter-
ica destined for a small group of specialists nonetheless lack the sort of
information that specialists would find useful. I regret having to put many
of the productions of France's Buda Records in this category. For example,
the compact discs I have seen from Buda's Siberian minorities series give
only scant information on the background of the songs and the people who
sing them. Buda's The Orient of the Greeks, a reissue of 78-rpm discs with
wonderful urban music from Greek ports in the 1930s, is presented as rem-
betika despite that fact that in nearly all the tracks the music harks back
to Turkish origins: most of the musicians are Greek exiles from Turkey. For-
tunately, the quality of the music outweighs the rather inaccurate informa-
tion.
The "fusion"labels approach the music they present from the perspec-
tive of contemporary rock. This involves more than adding rock instruments
to traditional music, or superimposing different musical styles-it is also a
question of imposing sophisticated sound ideals and recording techniques,
typical for rock music. In comparison with some recordings released by
Inedit, the instruments on Piranha'sJourney of the Gipsy Dancer are far
more prominent, and their placement in the stereo image is far more dis-
tinctive.
384 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1999
Note
The Recordings Reviews section aims to provide reviews of specific selected recordings, but
also to offer more general and synthetic views of the world of sound recording production.
This article, the editorial achievement of Recordings Review Editor emeritus Ted Levin, is a
result of the latter initiative. Ted Levin wrote: "Withthe aim of both fleshing out the reasons
behind Europe's domination of the field and offering readers something of a road map of the
sprawling European world music recording industry, the author of the article at hand was
invited to contribute this essay to the Recording Review section." Submitted in October 1997,
this survey of European labels represents the situation at that time. The author and the editor
are aware of changes that have occurred since then but, to avoid further delay, decided not
to update the text.
Editor