For Future generations: Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music

For Future Generations: Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music was installed – as a traditional ethnography display using standard tropes to categorise and present information – in a chilly cavern of the Albany History Museum, Grahamstown. First presented at the Origins Centre (Wits University, 2010) and then more recently at the National Arts Festival, 2011, the exhibition showed a selection of work from Hugh Tracey’s sweeping field study of the fascinating lives of southern African music.

Composed of musical instruments and field recordings dating back to 1929, field equipment and notes, photographs, film footage, reference material, books authored by Tracey, the journal African Music (founded by Tracey and now housed at ILAM), the collection represents the work of an ethnomusicologist who, with enormous tenacity, diligence and gung ho, applied his wide range of skills to curating what is today arguably one of the more important collections of African music.

Then deeply enamoured by composition, sound and notation, Tracey today is still regarded as the pioneer of African music appreciation (presumably along with the African musicians themselves). Lauded as one of the early students of the complexities of African music, Tracey spent much of his time developing a system of classification of “songs for every occasion”. One of the information panels on the exhibition lists “marriage songs, circumcision songs, funeral songs, healing songs, curses, child songs, lullabies, riddles, fishing songs, cattle herding songs, drinking songs, nostalgic songs, songs for the ancestral spirits, personal laments, pounding songs with mortar and pestle, calls to prayer, regimental songs, love songs, party songs, grinding songs, a praise song for a bicycle mender, humorous songs, songs about poverty, songs which warn against European beer, paddling songs, mouse-hunting songs, songs which complain about venereal disease, songs for pulling canoes, group fighting songs, songs for marital trouble, African separatist hymns, songs about the sounds of unseen aeroplanes, songs about stage fright, songs about a mosquito overturning a lorry, dance songs, songs imitating the difficulty of the long-tailed paradise bird balancing in flight, about a baboon that dies after repeatedly somersaulting for joy at hearing the sound of drums”.

A second panel continues this exuberance with “school songs, bride’s songs, bridegroom’s songs, engagement songs, game songs, greeting songs, mendicants songs, famine songs, ploughing songs, reaping songs, bawdy songs, threshing songs, weaving songs, walking songs, riding songs, fishing songs, hunting songs, heroic songs, step dance songs, sweeping songs, farewell songs, historical songs, songs for feast after burial, boat building songs, street seller songs, songs for legends, war songs, pick and shovel songs, smelting songs, scandal songs, victory songs, praise songs for chiefs, feuding songs, songs for lifting loads, songs for a journey, songs for rock drilling, sentimental songs, mine dance songs, cattle raiding songs, marching songs, songs after fishing, songs for good behaviour, songs for good cheer, step dance songs, bow songs, barge songs, boat launching songs, songs after hunting”.

In the exhibition, the music is presented according to Tracey’s classification. It is clear from the wall panels, and in the arrangement of the audio clips, that Tracey created this classification schema based on his observation that African music was “functional”, and “often classified by Africans according to its social use”.

Nonetheless, Tracey was also deeply interested in the linguistic qualities of African music, likening aural relationships – between sounds, between compositions, between different instruments – to words, sentences, forms of communication and language.

Tracey had set the daunting task of not only finding and recording the music, mainly in situ, but also documenting the cultural life of the songs. He notes, in a 1965 transcript for the BBC, the importance of recording “inside knowledge of the arts associated with music, such as dancing, storytelling and ritual, with costume and instrument making.”

His field trips took him on numerous paths, sometimes as far north as Kenya. A typical expedition employed a professional team of four, and three vehicles: a recording van, a truck with a diesel generator trailer, and a caravan. (The noisy generator had to be set up out of earshot of the performance, with a cable linking this power supply to the recording equipment.)

Tracey adopted an intuitive approach to recording, moving around performers to capture the acoustic and emotive essence of the performance. This “feel” for the sound and its performance, coupled with diligent technical practice, resulted in the capture of acoustic files of the highest possible calibre that still, today, retain the evidence of significant milestones in ethnomusicology field recordings.

ILAM, established on analogue in 1954, is currently in the process of cataloguing and digitizing Tracey’s 952 original reel tape recordings. This is a laborious task that relies as much on digital proficiency as it does on a feel for the materiality of the magnetic tape (which, after more than half a century is now fragile, difficult to re-spool, and snaps frequently resulting in time-consuming repair stops). Digitization requires a sound engineer and assistant, a cataloguing librarian and a meta-data capturer.

Along with the photographic and film collections, ILAM is also currently cataloguing and digitizing its collection of print material, including books, journals and ephemera, and all of Tracey’s field-trip diaries, correspondence, lecture notes and radio show scripts.

More recent field work also housed at the institute includes Andrew Tracey’s mbira and Chopi xylophone recordings, the Dave Dargie field recordings of Xhosa and Zulu vocal music, the variations in South Africa mouth bow music, indigenized Catholic church music and compositions for marimba. These, and other miscellaneous items, are currently being processed into digital format. Once captured and processed, these files will be available online.

This is a good point to return to the problem Tracey had identified: “By 1946 it seemed clear that unless someone devoted more time and energy to appraising the social value of authentic African music it would go by default, and that at a time when the various countries of Africa were contemplating the introduction of full time radio broadcasting in African vernaculars with no recorded repertoires of local music and little comprehension of the complexities of the subject. The schools and universities of Central and Southern Africa, which one would have supposed would have been the first to undertake the study of the major oral art of the country, had failed, with minor exceptions, to give African music any permanent place in their disciplines.”

Notwithstanding Tracey’s disregard for the role of colonialism in sparking and exacerbating this potential loss, his words do serve to underline the urgency demanded by his vocation.

The exhibition was designed as part of the ILAM education and outreach programme, possibly intending to help popularise the collection, stimulate interest and encourage ongoing independent enquiry. However, it seems to have missed an opportunity to engage meaningfully with a collection of things that, by its nature, encourages a more tactile, interactive and playful approach to visitor participation. (I am not advocating fiddling with the ethnographer’s treasures, but reconstructions, for example could be useful.) A more effective curatorial approach may be one that stimulates a more complete range of senses and intellects, especially when the subject matter is so very hands-on.

However, because of the elegance of the exhibition installation mechanism – stackable, open-ended, layered boxes that can be adapted for different kinds of object or space – further iterations of this valuable collection may see the curatorial concept evolve to show a more contemporary importance of the vibrant field of ethnomusicology.

Brenton Maart is an Archival platform correspondent.

 

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