2000
Text downloaded from http://www.musicbox-online.com/hartint.html      

		Listen -- The Sound of the World
                               
       First Appeared at The Music Box, October 2003, Volume 10, #10
                                
                       Written by Douglas Heselgrave
                                
                                
   My grandparents kept their record collection in the basement. Battered
   old copies of Harry Belafonte's Jamaica Farewell and Louis Armstrong's
   Hello Dolly were part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Even now,
   whenever I hear a song from either of those records, memories of
   summer vacations spent shooting pool and running through the sprinkler
   with my grandfather come rushing back to me. Recordings, like
   photographs, remind us of times and places that have long since
   disappeared. They have a near-magical ability to evoke emotions that
   otherwise defy expression.
                               
   Mickey Hart's new book Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music is
   a fascinating account of the golden age of sound recording. Part
   history, part archeology and part grand adventure story, it is a
   coffee table book filled with rare and beautiful photographs of sound
   pioneers out in the field.  

   Hart, who spent over 30 years behind the drum kit for the Grateful
   Dead, knows his stuff when it comes to recording. In addition to being
   a "recordist" who never goes anywhere without his Nagra tape machine,
   Hart is also, by his own account, "probably the most taped musician in
   the world," thanks to the obsessive bootleg recordings made by his
   band's many fans.

   "Tapers" as they are called in Dead circles, form another, more
   contemporary aspect of songcatching. The practice of taping live
   concerts and trading the tapes has become widespread. Most major
   recording artists must contend with the fact that their concerts are
   posted online the day after the performance because the tools of
   songcatching are now available to everyone. While this threatens the
   mainstream recording industry, some bands, like the Dead, encourage
   the practice.               

   When Hart isn't out capturing indigenous sounds or pounding on the
   skins himself, he works as a trustee for the Library of Congress's
   Save Our Sounds project, a restoration initiative to preserve old and
   decaying music cylinders and recordings by transferring them to
   digital sound. Indeed, at 59 years of age, the wiry and fit-looking
   Hart presents himself more like a librarian than one of the world's
   premier psychedelic musicians.

   I met Mickey Hart at his hotel room in Denver recently, on a day off
   in the middle of a five-night run of sold out shows with the Dead
   (what's left of them) at Colorado's outdoor Red Rocks Amphitheatre. In
   spite of being a little tired and hard of hearing from drumming for
   three nights in a row, Hart became increasingly animated as our
   interview progressed. Songcatching, the art of musical field
   recording, is clearly a subject about which he loves to talk.

   Before anyone starts songcatching, Hart says, it's important to define
   what music is and where it can be located. "You can find it in a
   field, on the back porch, in the living room, the ocean, the sky,
   wherever the muse takes you. When the ear can identify the sound and
   it's pleasing to the ear, it calls it music. When it's inharmonic, it
   becomes noise." Above all, Hart says, music is about "romancing the
   ear."

   But in the early days of sound recording, there was no room for such
   esoteric ideas. The pioneers of sound technology were just trying to
   get their machines to work, and aesthetic considerations came later.
   In fact, when Thomas Edison first demonstrated his "sound machine" to
   a group of people in 1877, listeners vomited, fainted

   and called the machine "diabolical." Hart says, "Edison was really
   after the light bulb. He was amazed when the machine talked back to
   him. He drew a little picture of this talking machine and he gave it
   to his assistant to build. It was a very simple but elegant machine,
   and it worked."

   It wasn't long before people took Edison's machine out into the field
   and started to capture the world around them. "On March 15, 1890,
   Jesse Walter Fuchs made the first mechanical recording in the field,
   and he recorded Native American harvest and salutation songs. He
   recorded 36 cylinders over a three-day period. That started the
   revolution," explains Hart.

   The response was immediate, and the golden age of recording and
   recording technology began. "Emil Berliner developed the zinc disc
   which looked like a 45, so instead of wax and tin, it turned into a
   disc and the quality started to progress, but the machines became
   larger and larger," he continues.

   Transporting them "became more of a hardship." It is the recounting of
   these hardships that make up the core of Songcatchers: In Search of
   the World's Music. Throughout the book, Hart clearly delights in
   describing the pioneers' exploits, writing in a style reminiscent of
   great 19th century travel literature. Early songcatchers form a cast
   of colorful dilettantes, pirates, and rascally villains who traveled
   the world in search of exotic sounds.

   "In the old days the machines were very bulky and cumbersome, and
   that's part of the adventure. How did they take these machines and
   bring them to the four corners of the world? Hauling these machines up
   mountain passes at high altitudes with the banditos, the bugs, and the
   snakes were all really heroic efforts."

   The motives of the original songcatchers varied. Hart explains, "Some
   of them were pure ethnographers, scientists that for one reason or
   another thought that it was important to collect this music. Others
   were adventurers. Sometimes they were even spies. The Fonstocks worked
   for Roosevelt and mapped the harbors of Indonesia before World War
   II."

   In the early days, there were no "ethnomusicologists," per se. Hart
   explains that many of the early songcatchers "really didn't know where
   they were pointing their mics. They gathered any music they possibly
   could, or they went to the heads of the clan and found out who was
   singing the best songs. It was later, much later, that they were
   transcribed and understood. Some of them were transcribed at the wrong
   speed, so it's taken years, sometimes, for collections to be brought
   back to the right speed. Out in the field, it's a pretty dangerous and
   pretty random recording technique that you have to use, so many of
   these people `juiced up' the natives, as it were, or had parties in
   order to get the music."

   Over the years, songcatching has become more sophisticated, and a
   sociology of sound has developed. In the old days, "it was more a
   matter of luck of the draw in many ways. Some people knew what they
   were after and they went after it, but most just stayed with the
   culture for a while and learned the customs and then they were guided
   towards the real music."

   Hart began his own career as a songcatcher in San Francisco, recording
   Indian musicians who visited the city in the 1960s. He realized that
   simply pointing a microphone at a musician wouldn't give him the
   results he was hoping for. "When I go into a culture, I'm well versed
   in their music. I usually can play one of their instruments well
   enough to have a conversation with them."

   Songcatching requires both patience and tact, and it hasn't always
   been smooth going for Hart. Like the songcatchers of old, he has
   suffered for his art. While in Alexandria in 1978, Hart set out to
   record Bedouin music. "Well, it turned out that in order to really
   record those people they wanted you to be part of the music, so the
   ritual involved heroic amounts of hashish mixed with tobacco, and you
   k
10ff
now I'm experienced with hashish, but not in these quantities.
   Thankfully, I had set up the machines beforehand, but when it came
   time after five hours of smoking and they were ready to play, I
   couldn't walk. So, I crawled about 50 feet to the machine that was set
   there with the tape on it. I reached for it, and couldn't turn it on
   because I'd lost power of my extremities, so I had to turn it on with
   my teeth. By the time the reel was done, I had control again, and was
   able to change tapes throughout the night until the batteries ran out.
   I just passed out, and they were gone in the morning."

   Some space in Hart's book is devoted to a discussion of the ethics of
   sound recording in the 21st century, and how best to right some of the
   wrongs perpetrated in the early days. "War, economic, and social
   changes ripped away [many cultures'] music. The church was a major
   destroyer of the world's music. They `missionized' the people and gave
   them a new Bible and a new music, at no extra charge."

   Alan Lomax, the great American folklorist, is probably the most
   controversial songcatcher of them all. Equally worshiped and reviled,
   he captured some of the most essential American music of the last
   century, from Woody Guthrie to Leadbelly. His story highlights many of
   the ethical dilemmas of field recording.

   Hart explains: "He claimed credit, 50 per cent, with Leadbelly. You
   know, he was a product of his day and he believed that no black person
   would ever get copyright, which he was right on. So he figured that if
   he claimed 50 per cent, at least half of the money would make it back
   to Leadbelly. I knew Lomax when he was alive and he didn't live high,
   he really didn't. He was a pirate, but he was also an impassioned
   recordist and a lover of music, so it's a double-edged sword."

   Whatever one thinks of Lomax, the world would be a much poorer place
   without the music he preserved. As Hart says, "There would be no
   Grateful Dead, no Santana, no Paul Simon, no Rolling Stones, no
   Beatles, if there was no Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie."

   In spite of the questionable circumstances surrounding many of the
   early field recordings, the legacy that's been left behind is of
   incalculable value, and what to do with it is the one of the greatest
   challenges facing contemporary musicologists and historians.

   "We have to give credit back to the cultures that spawned the music.
   It's like repatriation to give these musics back and allow them to be
   practiced again -- brought back to their schools, their museums, their
   libraries, their local archives. There's no real reason to preserve if
   access is not given to this music."

   Finally, I asked Hart if the romantic tales of the songcatchers'
   exploits have distorted our assessment of some music's intrinsic
   value. Is a song necessarily great just because it is old or rare?

   "Remember, in every culture there's swill, there's music that lives
   off on the periphery that is of no consequence. Not all are Picassos
   and Renoirs. Just like, if you listen to our radio, our music, you're
   not going to find great music everyplace. What is the best music is
   impossible to define. Just because it's played by a virtuoso player,
   doesn't mean it's great music. It might not reflect the soul of a
   people, which is really my criteria for great music."

   Whether it's about great songs or trash, recorded music is a global
   commodity today, with songs targeted for every age and interest group.
   It's hard to believe that just over a century ago the only music a
   person ever heard was played live. Music was a public art that
   happened in real time. Every performance was unique, never to be
   repeated in the same way.

   Sound recording has completely changed how we listen to music, and
   altered the context in which we experience it. The ability to capture
   sounds from all corners of the earth, and then package, redistribute,
   and share them, has given us access to things that would have been
   completely out of reach just a few generations ago. Imagine what life
   would be if we couldn't listen to Inuit throat singing on the way to
   work in the morning.

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