Pygmy music

The Belgian Congo Records
Commodore Records, DL 30,005
Yonkers, NY

There's something in me that chooses authentic music above the less authentic. What is "authentic"? The meaning of the word is open for debate, it's the material of philosophy. I can not offer anything new to the debate, yet the word is key to my collecting habit. Some arguments about the authentic I'm familiar with through contemporary criticism lectures in art school. Some arguments rang more real to me than others did, some stuck. Despite the containment of the word author in authentic, I think that authentic, in discussing music, is precisely the opposite: a lack of authorship. It is not the work of some creative genius but the material of isolated peoples that was passed on through the years, decades, centuries, ages. For me the distinction is based on how untouched the music is by commercial civilization. I realize the hypocrisy and snobbishness of such a statement but the experience is real. Through empathy I recognize authenticity. Listening to the music of people from far away, long ago, and with such different agendas than mine, I am struck with awe (or fear) in the face of otherness. My heart beats a little faster when I find yet another example of an "authentic" recording in a thrift store. They're not rare; there are ample scholastic websites and archives on line where you can listen, and often download for free, historic recordings of extinct or vanishing musical traditions. Recorded often by musicologists with philanthropic ideals. But they don't have the same impact that finding records in a thrift store have, records that once belonged to the collection of, without a doubt, some intellectual philanthropic minded individual whose children or grandchildren decided after his (mostly his) death, to donate those records to the local thrift store.

Hypocrite too because some of my favorite music is precisely those of the individual genius, or hybrids of many styles, cultures, and what not.

Featured on the LP The Belgium Congo Records are recordings made during the 1935-36 Africa expeditions to the Congo by Armand Denis and Leila Roosevelt. On it are very early, but not the earliest, recordings of Pygmy music. My favorite track is a recording by a Pigmy orchestra of Kigali, (Rwanda) which is ironically filed under the heading of Royal Watusi Drums. (The Watusis–Tutsis as they are now called, are considered to be tallest people of Africa, Pymies being the shortest.)