Historical sound sourced: a fragmentary and unfinished knowledge. The case of Tierra del Fuego Recordings

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

Viena

Conferencia; 19th Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Historical Sources of Traditional Music; 2012

ICTM and Austrian Academyof Sciences

Historical sound sources offer us a kind of knowledge that can be defined as fragmentary, unfinished, as well as ideological and aesthetically oriented. Moreover, this knowledge is always open to a wide range of interventions: new classifications, digitalization, links to other sources, fresh and maybe provocative interpretations, etc. Usually, collectors and researchers with different interests, epistemological perspectives, and technologies are responsible, in both conscious and unconscious manners, for all these characteristics that knowledge achieves. In addition, several disciplines often converge in the study of sound recording collections, transforming them into multidisciplinary objects. This presentation focuses on these issues, especially on the never-ended distinctiveness of knowledge coming out from sound sources. In order to discuss my argument, I will take into consideration the recording collections made by researchers Charles Wellington Furlong, Martin Gusinde and Wilhem Koppers in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile) between 1907 and 1923. These collectors gathered round 76 recordings using a phonograph and wax cylinders that were sent to the Phonogramm-Archiv of Berlin for preservation and study. It is noteworthy that these recordings were analyzed by researchers coming from diverse countries: the German musicologist Erich von Hornbostel, the Argentine ethnomusicologist Jorge Novati, the American folklorist Alan Lomax, and French musicologist Gilbert Rouget. The different theoretical approaches used by those authors, constrained by their disciplinary contexts of origin and by the historical moments in which they carried out their analysis, provide us excellent examples to discuss how one recording or collection can originate different kinds of knowledge.