Music from Tierra del Fuego. Rethinking researcher’s epistemological and aesthetic approaches

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

St. John’s, Newfoundland

Congreso; 41st World Conference of International Council for Traditional Music; 2011

International Council for Traditional Music

The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv holds 78 wax cylinder recordings of Alakaluf, Selk´nam and Yagan aborigines of Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile), made by Martin Gusinde, Wilhem Koppers and Charles Wellington Furlong between 1907 and 1923. The sound recordings were made in situ, and were sent to the Archive for preservation and to be studied by Berliner musicologists. Some of these cylinders were analyzed by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, who published the outcomes of his research in two articles -“Fuegian Songs”, American Anthropologist, 1936, and “The music of Fuegians”, Ethnos, 1948. These sound recordings are the earliest testimony of the music and language of three ethnic groups who could not survive the harshness of colonization and the indifference and blind-eye of the rulers. The study of these recordings and attached documents allow us to attain two different kinds of knowledge. On the one hand, they are relevant to unveil the epistemological framework adopted by the collectors and musicologists, as well as to understand how human sciences in the early 20th century validated their knowledge and portraited people alien to European cultural universe. On the other hand, since the recordings involve not only technical procedures and theoretical approaches, it is possible to find out collector’s aesthetic choices by revisiting primary sources -both sound and written- within a contemporary ethnomusicological perspective. The main goal of this presentation is to show how Gusinde, Koppers, Furlong and Hornbostel built up their objects of research and how they helped to outline the otherness in the European imaginary.