Abdal Ali is singing a death lament, yet no one has died. His voice — deep, bracing, and liquid — wavers unaccompanied. Melodies climb on top of other melodies, and notes are stretched, pulled, and bent, sustained into sadness. The singing is as much crying as it is music — raw grief and eulogy translated by tremor and tone.
In Turkey, where Ali lives, the death song is usually sung in a burial house just after the passing of a member of the local community. The song’s cries are usually echoed by the cries of other mourners. But this particular version was performed in 1902 in an area far from the burial house on a day when the singer had experienced no loss. He was singing into the horned mouth of an Edison phonograph that took his song and wrote it into a sheet of wax wrapped around a rotating cylinder.
Instead of a community of mourners, Ali — a worker on a German excavation site — was joined only by the excavation’s lead archaeologist, Felix von Luschan, who had decided to sonically document and transcribe the traditional music of the area. But von Luschan’s efforts to capture Ali’s song in totality failed; clouding Ali’s voice was an unexpected, incidental instrument: the phonograph itself, which produced waves of thick static hiss. Ali’s voice was present, but in the end not fully available for Western capture. The machine that Edison had invented just 24 years earlier in his New Jersey research lab that was to guarantee the complete " record " of a musical event had become the very machine that foiled the recording. Sound technology could capture, but it could never own — something would always evade its mechanical grasp.
Von Luschan’s recording was one of the first stored in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, and it’s included in the archive’s new four-CD anthology Music! The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000 (WERGO). Music! compiles a century’s worth of the archive’s recordings of world music — from Micronesian breadfruit dance songs to Bolivian pan-flute ensembles — and follows the evolution of recording technology from wax-cylinder phonographs to more portable tape recorders and DAT machines. The archive began with what the invention of the phonograph made possible: the capture of " other " cultures’ music for study by Western scholars, or as one of the archive’s founders, Erich von Hornbostel, put it in 1905, " fixating the musical expression of all the cultures of the world in an indisputable, exact way. " But there is little that is indisputable or exact about the wax-cylinder recordings that fill Music!’s first CD. All the performances are, like Ali’s, co-authored by the machine meant to document them, haunted by the warm noise of a needle digging into wax.
In Music!’s nearly 300 pages of track-by-track liner notes, we learn that the original goal of the archive was to " map the music of the world. " But as demonstrated by the selected recordings and the accounts of the ethnologists and anthropologists who made them, the result is something altogether different. It’s true that recordings of the Yangtze boat song, for example, preserve music that is no longer sung (Yangtze boat towers were soon phased out by industrialization), yet Music! is really a document not of non-Western culture but of the West’s fascination with the non-Western. Contrary to the archive’s official statements, the recordings are as much about the white men who traveled to remote jungles and islands to make them as they are about the musicians of Africa, Asia, and South America.
Take three of the photographs included in Music!’s notes: groups of musicians from New Guinea and Toma sit around an Edison phonograph or a Butoba tape recorder looking confused, amazed, and even frightened as they hear their own music playing back at them. Though in each photo the Western traveler is left out of the frame, they are all examples of what critic Michael Taussig once called " the white man’s fascination with Other’s fascination with white man’s magic. "
The scenes these photographs make visible, while obvious in the archive’s noisy wax-cylinder recordings, become harder to imagine when you’re listening to the tape and DAT recordings. Music!’s compilers claim that advances in sound technology lead " towards a truer image of sound reality " when in fact they lead to a falser one. With less and less hiss, the recording machine becomes more and more obscured, and it is easier to forget that someone is there doing the recording, that people are singing into horns and microphones. The wax-cylinder recordings may be harder to listen to, but they are more honest, documents not of one culture performing itself, but of two cultures performing for each other.
