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| The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax Volume VII Indonesian Music Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam Columbia Masterworks SL-210, 1954, Made in U.S.A. |
Academic style field recordings from all over the
world have been and continue to be the main focus of my record
collection. Within these
records I like the older ones the best, recorded and collected at a time
when there still was little influence of the Western popular music
styles onto the traditional music of a certain ethnic group somewhere on
this planet. A whole bunch of academic ethnomusicologists, as well as
hobbyists with high ideals, traveled around the world in the middle and
later parts of the 20th Century, to record and catalog the music they
thought of as a fast disappearing local cultural identity. One of the
most prominent collectors out there was Alan Lomax, who spent his life
collecting and recording the folk music of the most remote regions of
the world. He started documenting the various folk styles of the most
remote areas of the US but soon broadened his scope to the whole world.
His ambition was to have a giant library that collected all the
traditional musics from around the world. He was part of the Library of
Congress that focused mainly on the music of the US including all of the
various immigrant group's traditional music identities, and founded the
World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. All the music had to be
available to any and every person interested. The scope of that library
was broad and ambitious but only 18 volumes were ever compiled by the
Columbia label. All 18 of these are sought after and very hard to come
by. I just scored my second in a second hand record store in Miami: The Columbia
World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Collected and Edited by Alan
Lomax – Indonesia, Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam
is the full identifying title of the record in front of me. The record
is divided into four geographical sections: New Guinea, Moluccas,
Borneo, and Bali. The first song from this album to share here is an Ewa dance song and is from the Papua part of New Guinea,
it's a song by Roro natives, who live scattered in small villages along
the South Coast and on Yule Island. The song was recorded by Reverend A. Dupetrat of the Catholic Mission at Yule Island in 1951.The second exerpt from the album comes from Borneo and is a Rice song performed by a group of Land Dyak women. This was recorded by a team from UNESCO-UNO also in 1951.
