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Mickey Hart
Former Drummer, Grateful Dead; Member, Board of Trustees, U.S. Library of Congress American Folklife Center
I first started listening to early world music recordings as a young boy, and the walls just disappeared for me. Those recordings transported me to distant lands and allowed my mind, spirit and imagination to fly. They changed my concept of what music is and can be. Listening to the Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest allowed me to step outside my culturally-bound community and see what was out there. Music is a direct route to the soul, and when people sing, facades fall away and we can express who we are at a deep level, both as individuals and as part of our own culture. Music is a badge of identity and a catalyst of group identity and solidarity.
Field recording started almost simultaneously with the beginning of recorded sound. This new technology sparked the imagination of a few adventurous souls who realized that the cylinder recorder could be as important to the world of sound as the camera was to the world of vision. In the remote places on earth, a small but hardy band of song-catchers captured music on wax, then later on wire, acetate, aluminum and tape.
The era of the digital domain is now upon us. I initiated a series of CD's in collaboration with the Library of Congress to begin the work of preservation and distribution of endangered music via recordings produced with state-of-the-art sound restoration computer systems and the most careful attention to professional recording and production values. The first principle of respect for traditional music is to listen, record and produce the best music with the best studio equipment our technology can provide. Over the years, far too many field recordings have been issued that were recorded on tourist equipment and produced with no attempt to achieve professional sound. This must come to an end now. Recording media of all types are impermanent, some more impermanent than others. As recorded material deteriorates, it becomes quickly more and more difficult to rescue its sounds. There are too many archive recordings around the world for it to be possible to preserve all of them, so some standard of selection is necessary in relation to the amount of money available.
Many musical cultures are in danger of imminent death due to external economic, social or political forces. We're talking about bringing in bulldozers, knocking down forests, building pipelines and so forth. This has a devastating effect on every aspect of an area's indigenous population. It strips them of their integrity, inventiveness and the ability to live independently. Aligning the status of certain music and cultures with that of endangered animal and plant species encourages a potentially important intellectual and political alliance. Every instance of thinning out biological diversity is connected to the real or potential thinning out of cultural, linguistic and artistic diversity.
Endangered music can refer to all music that is not self-supporting, which is essentially everything that is not pop or film music. This concept goes beyond conservation or preservation to promoting respect for autonomy and cultural activity, as well as empowering people by amplifying their voices throughout the world. The world is shrinking in terms of the number of languages as well as the number of different kinds of musical and artistic expressions available to us. Loss of diversity is a key form of impoverishment whether in biology or culture.
What do we do? There are three ground rules to start with. One, honor the music. Give it the best sound, packaging and promotion possible. Doing it at high quality is promoting musical equity. Two, return the money. Guarantee that in some appropriate way, the musicians or their community get the best percentage they can. There is no stronger statement or higher ethic. Three, create awareness. Broadcast the message that it's time to get real. Remember, it's not world music, it's the world's music. As Billy Joel puts it, "We didn't start the fire." We didn't create colonial cultural exploitation. We didn't write the copyright laws that cheat or ignore music in the old tradition. We didn't invent capital musical ownership or the greed of the music industry marketplace. Yet we must deal with and answer to every negative aspect of those things.
These days historical documents, letters and films can be made accessible via the Internet. No less important is the rich treasure trove of sound recordings held by many branches of the federal government. These are included in the Library of Congress's plans for a national digital library. The learning pages of the American Memory project, the first demonstration of the national digital library, are carefully designed for school use and introduce students to the surprising and unfamiliar world of primary source material - the real letters, documents, songs, photos, films of our history and cultures - rather than pre-digested textbooks that tend to insulate students from the often ambiguous, messy, but always fascinating, facts of history.
One of the major sources of music from the 1930s is the Library's gigantic archive of materials collected by recordists working for Roosevelt's New Deal WPA Project. These recordings are housed in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center - literally thousands of hours on cylinders, discs and tapes from people all over the world. Much of this material remains unstudied. A few collections are currently available online, but these are only a small fraction of the riches stored in their vaults.
The great collections of sound recordings contained in the Library of Congress are like time machines. They look into the past, present and future simultaneously. These voices give us a portal through time and allow us the opportunity to hear who we really were and are as a people. They are our arts, dreams, hopes and fears - all human emotions rolled into a lifetime of experience of joy and pain, of happiness and suffering.
As we enter the digital age, we are on a threshold of a new beginning. The prospects are limitless. For the first time in the short history of recorded sound, we can bring these timeless voices to life. The preservation and access plans of the Library of Congress are bold and visionary. Imagine children hearing their legacy and the sound of their forebears, the worlds of their grandmothers and grandfathers coming vividly to life and sound, to have and hold these precious memories forever.
