Properly Identifying the Music for the Top 100

 

In ethnomusicology it is nothing short of best practice to record the name of the performer(s), date and and place of recording, the language of the lyrics, and to identify the appropriate cultural or ethnic group the performer(s) belong to. There's nothing new to this practice but a half a century ago the data are often sloppy, especially concerning material shared to a broader audience beyond the academic field. The Folkways Records label, founded in New York City in 1948 by Moses Asch, set out to "record and document the entire world of sound." [folkways.si.edu] Recordings on the Folkways label have been one of my main sources for music and knowledge of music history for many years. After Moses Asch's death the Folkways collection was bequeathed to the Smithsonian Institute in 1987. The Smithsonian honored Asch's wish for the availability of all titles at all times. My own record collection contains many Folkways discs and my collection of songs in digital format bought from the Smithsonian Folkways website (where all titles are available) is rapidly growing. I've come to depend on the information provided by this website to correctly identify the recordings I'm interested in. I've come across several instances now when the provided information isn't all that accurate, and I've learned that anthologies and compilations on the Folkways label are not a reliable source for information. An error on Anthology of Central and South American Indian Music for example, caused me to misidentify a certain song in the Top 100 2020. I'm leaving the Top 100 2020 list intact, including errata, but I change data in my archive when I uncover a mistake. Number 73 from the 2020 list comes from that Indian Music Anthology and is called Yekuana Fertility Chant, a song, according to the liner notes, about the yucca planting ceremony of the Yekuana. The materials on anthologies are often abbreviated from the original record and often a different, more generic, title is used. The fertility song is referenced by number FE 4104 which is the identifying number for the album Music of the Venezuelan Yekuana Indians. That record has indeed a number of songs that involve a (yucca) fertility ceremony. None however match the mp3 file I purchased at the Smithsonian Folkways website. I finally have identified the music as one several Social Dance Songs that appear of the record Music of the Jivaro of Ecuador. Another one of those Dance Songs appears higher up the same Top 100. I was revisiting the Jivaro record in preparation to paint the Shuar Ujaj song by a chorus of women for the Top 100 2021, which is identical to the Social Dance Dance Song by the Jivaro in the Top 100 2020. I learned from the French, very well documented Voices of the World 3cd-set, that the source of that recording is actually a French disc called "Jivaro" rather than the slightly younger Folkways disc. I learned the song was recorded by Philippe Luzuy in 1956. The Smithsonian Folkways website does not credit Luzuy but rather Michael J. Harner. Upon carefully reading the liner notes for the Folkways album  that were written by Harner it turns out he does not actually take credit for the recording, just for the writing and the photographs, also from 1956. I've gotten myself into a big tangled mess of ethnomusicology data that do not match. It seems trivial to untangle this mess, but to me it's essential to the concept of the juxtaposition of recorder and recorded for the 2021 series. I could not find a photograph of the performance that was recorded in 1956 and neither could I find an image of Luzuy. I've painted Harner before and used pretty much every image from the Folkways record in earlier paintings. The one who recorded the song that is now now in the top 100 for the third consecutive year, was not Harner anyways but Luzuy. I chose to use the cover for Luzuy's "Jivaro: Indiens Shuar, Cayapa, Otavalo" (the original source of the recording) for the painting that you see above. The cover photograph was taken by Pierre Allard. As a substitute for not having an image of Luzuy, I decided to use the cover of the book Faces of Bronze (Visages de Bronze) by Luzuy that appeared in 1960 and is pretty much the only thing that can be found on line about Philippe Luzuy. The photograph again was taken by Pierre Allard who is listed as co-author for the book. The Shuar, by the way, is the more specific name currently used for the Jivaro peoples of Ecuador. For the 2020 illustration of the wrongly labelled Yekuana Fertility Chant that you see below, I used a photograph by Theodor Koch-Grünberg from 1912. A historic recording of a Yekuana shaman by Koch-Grünberg was used by Walter Coppens to include in his Music of the Venezuelan Yekuana Indians. The spelling for Yekuana has now morphed into Ye'kwana.