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Society for Ethnomusicology

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

RENEVAN PEER / Tilburg, Netherlands

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

Ocora are made by an editorial committee of scholars and world music


connoisseurs. This does not mean, however, that production decisions bear
no relation to an audience. Serge Noil-Ranaivo, who as a member of the
editorial committee coordinates the production of the CDs, told me in a
recent interview, "We have noticed a small growth of the audience since
'world music' was introduced, but not a rush on our CDs-at least not a
significant increase. A good reason may be that the audience for 'world
music' comes from pop or rock fans who wish to change their habits-but
not too much: at the last recital of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Paris(at Theatre
de la Ville, 900 seats), half the audience was composed of young people
who had only heard Peter Gabriel'sversion of Nusrat's music. The program
was of course traditional qawwali, free from any 'world music' gimmicks.
These young people were surprised and unfortunately, clearly disappoint-
ed." Ocora was, by the way, one of the first outlets in the West for Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan's music.
The Inedit label is affiliated with the Paris-basedMaison des Cultures
du Monde, which presents concerts, theater performances, and exhibitions
of cultures from around the world. A significant part of its catalog consists
of recordings of in-house concerts (whose quality, unfortunately, can be
uneven). If Ocora has a historical bias toward African music, then Inedit's
is toward music from Islamic cultures, due, one assumes, to the personal
interests of its co-founders, Cherif Khaznadar and Frangoise Griind. Both
Ocora and Inedit demonstrate the commitment of France's largest state
cultural organizations to the role of music from around the world in enrich-
ing national cultural life.
Governments may also support a label to promote national music, as
is the case with the Swedish firm Caprice, which works with a broad range
of "non-commercial"music of Swedish origin. A major project has been the
release of twenty titles in a series called Musica Sveciae, which covers the
width and breadth of traditionalmusic in Sweden. A cooperative effort with
various cultural institutions (including public radio), it is supported by the
National Council for CulturalAffairs.More recently, Caprice has diversified,
recording and releasing CDs of music from such countries as Ecuador,
Uganda, and Vietnam.
In the nations of Central and EasternEurope, the major recording com-
panies were state-owned under communist rule, and for these nations folk
music was a sine qua non of national identity. During the Stalinera and well
into the period of cultural de-Stalinization that followed, the emphasis of
the state-owned recording companies was on adaptations and arrangements
of folk traditions by professional, usually urban, musicians organized into
state ensembles. In 1964, however, the Hungarian label Qualiton (a subdi-
vision of Hungaroton) released an LP with field recordings of Hungarian
376 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1999

music as an introduction to a series of three box sets, which, in the course


of time, was expanded to a sizable collection of lavishly annotated records
covering musical traditions related to Hungary and its cultural extensions
(such as the music of Hungariancommunities in Transylvaniain the north-
west of Romania, and music from Finno-Ugrianand Turkic peoples in the
Volga region of Russia, recorded in the field and studied by Hungarianschol-
ars who had hoped to find linguistic parallels reflected in music), as well
as bands which emerged as a result of a folk music revival that began in
the early 1970s. An anthology series that was to cover the entire Hungari-
an cultural area in at least seven boxes with five LPs each was abandoned
after the fourth had been produced. Recently, however, Hungaroton did
release a double-CD with field recordings that Bela Bart6k made of Turk-
ish music in 1936, and it reissued an abbreviatedversion of the Finno-Ugrian
box set on CD.
Field work by ethnomusicologists in socialist countries continued
through the years of communist rule, but much of the results did not be-
come publicly available until nearly the end of the communist era. For
example, in 1989-1990 the Soviet record company Melodiya released an
anthology series of Soviet musical traditions. Vyacheslav Shchurov, one of
the researchers who had collected materialwhich appears on these records,
now produces CDs with music from the Russian Federation on the com-
mercial Pan label from the Netherlands. With the privatization of state-
owned companies proceeding apace, cuts in government budgets, nation-
al economies still far from strong, and the political situation not yet stable,
it is an open question whether and under what circumstances record la-
bels in the various former communist countries will put their energy into
producing albums with traditionalmusic, or re-issuing vinyl albums on CD.
In 1992 Ferenc Kiss, the leader of the Hungarianfolk revival group Viz6nt6,
established Etnofon as a private enterprise exactly for that purpose. More
recently, private companies devoted to releasing traditional music have
begun to sprout up in Russia.

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.

Sponsorship by International Organizations


Other publications that don't have to contend too much with market
pressure are those sponsored by international organizations. UNESCO,af-
ter its involvement with Constantin Brailoiu'sWorld Collection, decided to
support two newly created series of traditional music: A Musical Antholo-
gy of the Orient, directed by Alain Danielou; and An Anthology of African
Music, under the direction of Paul Collaer. Both were carried by the Ger-
man firm Barenreiteron its Musicaphon label, which later co-produced two
separate series of music from Southeast Asia and from Oceania with the
University of Basel, Switzerland. Other UNESCOcollections were released
through two other European companies: Philips (Musical Sources) and the
Italian branch of EMI(Musical Atlas, Anthology of Indian Classical Mu-
sic). UNESCOpaid for the recordings while the labels took care of all pro-
duction costs. In 1987 the French company Auvidis took over responsibil-
ity for the UNESCOcollections from Philips and EMIand, during the past
decade, has re-issued the majority of older titles on CD as well as expand-
ed the catalogue. In 1994, Birenreiter halted its involvement in the Musi-
caphon series and sold the label to its next-door neighbor, Disco-Center
Classic, which has released four titles to date: three in the Traditional Music
of the World series (which was adopted by Smithsonian Folkways begin-
Recording Reviews 379

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.

Private Labels, World Music


"Wedo things we like," summed up Jaro's Ulrich Balss.Jaro, along with
GlobeStyle and Real World from the United Kingdom and Piranha from
Germany, are among the most active labels in releasing "real"world mu-
sic, that is, music which represents a fusion of traditional styles with ele-
ments of Western pop and rock. In its choice of music, GlobeStyle seems
to remain closest to traditionalpresentations, often focusing on urban music
and not afraid of ensembles that use amplified instruments. They do in situ
recordings, but don't shun studio techniques if appropriate-for instance
in their recordings of taarab music from Zanzibar.
Real World, founded in 1989 by pop music superstar Peter Gabriel,
invites musicians to record in their studios. The label pushes marketing to
new limits, producing a range of merchandise, such as clothing adorned
with the label's logo and a Swatch watch called Adam, which was "creat-
ed," to quote the rather curious wording in the catalogue, by Peter Gabri-
el in collaboration with a design team. They also produce a biannual news-
letter containing a sampler CD; a recent edition featured tracks of a Tibetan
female vocalist, a pop-inspired collaboration between English guitarist Sam
Mills and vocalist Paban Das Baul, and a spacey "FullWhack Dub" of mixed
material made by Afro Celt Sound System.
380 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1999

Jaro, which claims it "discovered the mysterious power and rousing


effect of archaic Bulgarian song," works with a clone of the BulgarianRa-
dio Choir, providing them with a hiphop and rap context in one project
(From Bulgaria with Love), and combining them with the Tuvan ensem-
ble Huun-Huur-Tuand Russian jazz musicians Sergei Starostin and Mikhail
Alperin in another (Fly, Fly My Sadness). "There is," says Ulrich Balss, "no
relation between [our] recordings and ethnomusicology as a scholarly dis-
cipline." Caveat emptor.
Piranha started out as a production bureau for musical events, organiz-
ing concerts and festivals of music from cultures that were little known to
the general public in Germany. They had such success that they decided
to establish a record label for "urbanworld music mixing traditional and
modern influences." Like so may other labels, they feature klezmer, Mid-
dle Easternstyles, and qawwali. Vite Perdite, one of their more radical CDs,
brings together religious choral music, Italian rap, Renaissance composi-
tions, and arrangements of Latin music-a veritable feast for musical om-
nivores.
With a background in classical music, the French company Auvidis first
acquired the UNESCOcollection, then started its own Ethnic series and pro-
ceeded to buy Silex. Now it covers a wide range of traditional music and
various departuresfrom it. Silex, for example, stretches from historic record-
ings to fusion projects that may couple a Ukrainianvocal trio with the Car-
ibbean percussion group Baron Samedi. By producing compilations on
specific themes, Auvidis tries to attract a new public to its existing catalog.

Private Labels, Ethnic Music


Pan Records from The Netherlands is an example of a label that, while
operating commercially, focuses mainly on ethnic traditions. It tends to
represent areas that are not well covered by other labels and has built up
series of recordings featuring music from the Pacific, the Caucasus, the
minority peoples of China, and Siberia, with particular attention to over-
tone music (both sung and performed on jew's harps). Pan's director Ber-
nard Kleikamp seeks out ethnomusicologists (he was trained as one him-
self) to do field recordings and write the liner notes. Pan also releases
recordings from the archives of the ethnomusicological department of the
Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, founded by Jaap Kunst.
Gilles Fruchaux, director of Buda Records in Paris, started his label out
of personal interest. "Mostcommercial labels for traditionaland world music
are small and independent, and they are run by people who have a passion
for this music-by necessity because you cannot be rich in this business."
Recording Reviews 381

Like Kleikamp, Fruchaux likes to work with ethnomusicologists, such as


Speranta Radulescu, who records in Romania, and Henri Lecomte, who
produce a CD series of the music of Siberian peoples. The Buda catalog is
a mixture of village and city traditions and non-Western classical styles.
Private labels may employ strongly contrasting strategies in order to
survive. While Pan put a halt to distribution activities, the British company
Topic Records (originally strong on English and Celtic folk traditions, and
famous for its International Series which presented the first recordings in
the West of music from communist Albania), set up a distribution service
in Great Britain which represents 300 labels with a broad range of popular
music.
The advent of the compact disc coupled with the advancement of dig-
ital sound technology has made it possible to reproduce pre-vinyl record-
ings with far better sound quality through the use of computerized clean-
up techniques. Many labels carry at least some historic recordings, while a
few labels have sprung up whose catalogs focus on such material. One of
these is Interstate Music, in the United Kingdom. Apart from blues, coun-
try, and "Spanish-languagemusic," Interstate features Greek and Portuguese
urban traditions. According to its director, Bruce Bastin, they have also is-
sued music from West Africa, "100 tracks from 78 mints all recorded be-
fore 1930." A CD of music recorded in Albania in 1930 is in the works.

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

independent productions of Greek traditional music. Most of the albums


in the Nama catalog are the result of field work conducted by scholars.

A Very Private Enterprise

Ethnomusicologist Wolfgang Laade from Switzerland should be men-


tioned separately. He released albums on the Folkways label between 1956
and 1977, then published compact disc recordings from his Music of Man
Archive through the Swiss label Jecklin between 1990 and 1993-record-
ings of musical traditions that were not yet documented. He produced some
of the first CDs of music from Corsica, where he did extensive field record-
ing, and also worked among indigenous ethnic groups from Taiwan. Laade
felicitously solved the problem of sponsoring organizations meddling in
artistic decision-making: his recording expeditions are all self-financed.

Constructing the "Commercial" and the "Non-Commercial"


All of the labels I discuss in this survey operate within the market niche
of "world music," a category that came into existence for the convenience
of record stores and their customers. Yet, as my modest survey shows, the
variety of music, production values, and presentation within world music's
tiny sector of the recording industry is enormous--perhaps the more so
because the concept of world music is itself so all-inclusive (or so nebu-
lous, depending on one's point of view). Perhaps because so many world
music labels, both private and sponsored, have the aura of boutiques, lov-
ingly nurtured by founder-managers or owners who bring a connoisseur's
taste and vision to their work, the field seems not entirely like a business;
or at least it seems like a special type of business-one infused with the
zeal of proselytizers and true believers, as well as, I'd have to admit, a few
sharks. Each label vies for a particular piece of the world music market not
only through the kind of music it presents, but also in the way that it does
so. Jaro's Ulrich Balss ("We do things we like"), producer of Fly, Fly My
Sadness, the Bulgarian-Tuvan-Russianfusion project that seems like an ex-
ercise in postmodernist extremism, comes across as the polar opposite of
Wolfgang Laade, who is no less outspoken about the music he puts on his
compact discs: "Salvaginghardly known traditions which are threatened
by extinction is still possible and necessary, and precisely this is my inten-
tion. This accounts for the partly austere and sometimes 'unattractive'music
on the discs. The records are not made for a big market, which indeed
makes publishing such material more and more difficult, no matter how im-
portant it is as source of information."
Sponsored labels can bring out challenging productions without the
financial problems that Laade encounters, but such productions display a
Recording Reviews 383

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

It is when the producers of these labels add Western instruments and


mix styles that one might start asking questions about what such treatment
implies for how they really view the music with which they are dealing.
On Ocora's Central Asian Classical Traditions CD, the music often tee-
ters disturbingly on the edge of a deep silence, prompting in the listener
an introspective state of mind. Real World has made an album with the Al-
gerian singer Abderrahman Abdelli whose art could perhaps attain such
depths. Producer Thierry Van Roy who, according to the liner notes, was
captivated by the beauty of Abdelli's voice, constructs a musical background
around him with South American and Ukrainianinstruments, adding saxo-
phones and keyboards. These additions may have made Abdelli's music
more palatable to the more adventurous segment of the rock music audi-
ence, but they have also smoothed over a characteristic roughness. Distract-
ing the listener from Abdelli's voice does not seem indicative of respect for
the singer. To quote Wolfgang Laade, "We have entered an age in which
business is everything and members of society are only considered useful
as tradespeople and customers. 'Ethnic' music is a commodity like 'ethnic'
religions, rituals, and clothing. On the other hand, records of world music
belong in every ethnomusicological archive and scholarly institution. The
music is there and should not be ignored. But it can only be appropriately
interpreted if the roots of the ethnic material are known."
I look at the piles of compact discs I have listened to for this survey (in-
cluding many produced by labels not mentioned in the text: WDR Network,
Wergo/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Playasound, Arion, Al Sur, Robi Droli),
and browse through the catalogs of labels from which I buy for my own
collection: scores and scores of jewel boxes. Pull one out, say it is the Uzbek
singer MunajatYulchieva, and what you hold is the result of her determina-
tion and years of training, the quality of her voice, her personal history and
religious feelings, and the persistence of a researcher to go to Uzbekistan
to record her. And with regret I realize that the sheer number of titles be-
ing produced must cause a devaluation of the significance of such music.

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

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