This collecting process actually started long before the early 20th century when Sharp was active. Some of them in fact originate on our own English doorstep, in the form of unnotated songs passed down the line of old, rural communities.Īnd they’re the musical equivalent of an endangered species – which is why people like Sharp have gone out with pen and paper, sometimes with cumbersome recording equipment, to “collect” and preserve them. But there are others, maybe less “developed” but still long-lived. To live in Europe is to be steeped in a musical tradition so pervasive, so apparently complete and all-encompassing, that it can seem to be the only one there is. Photo: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-107289 Piegan Indian, Mountain Chief, with ethnologist Frances Densmore, listening to a recording for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1916. And the clue to what both books are ultimately about is their bold use of a disarming plural. And as such, Sharp plays a starring role among the curious, combative, often quaint and sometimes questionable characters who fill the pages of a new book by the Islington-based ethnomusicologist and critic Michael Church.Įntitled Musics Lost and Found: Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition, the book is a successor to his previous trawl through sound worlds that exist outside the standard Western canon: an impressive study called The Other Classical Musics that won him a Royal Philharmonic Society award.

It’s the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), otherwise called Cecil Sharp House after one of the most celebrated figures in the modern history of folk song collecting. Russian pioneer folklorist Mitrofan Pyatnitsky and choir he founded in 1910Ī CHARMING paradox of life in cool and edgy Camden Town is that a short walk from the tube station is somewhere people go to dance in clogs and sing time-honoured songs about green willows and a harvest rumble in the hayloft.

Alan lomax recordings