Explore The Beautiful World Of Music Anthropology
We’ve always felt united by music, it’s the one thing that makes us the same, whether it’s current pop music or the 1930s folk of the American south. One man dedicated his life to a theory he developed: all music is connected. Regardless of time period, geographical bounds or genre, Alan Lomax was convinced all music ever made was connected, and worked for decades to prove this, by creating an intricate global map of anthropological findings and recorded sounds. His was a true life purpose, like the focus of the print .Cent issue Sense of Purpose, it was originally published in s/s 2010, with guest-editor Keith Reilly. Here we discover the obsessive world of Alan Lomax and his Global Jukebox project.
Music collector
Some collectors are more ambitious than others. For every thousand accumulators of stamps or ceramics, there are a few whose aims are truly sweeping: who set out to amass the world in miniature, to accumulate vast stores of human data and uncover the secrets of human existence. Long before computers could work things out people did it.
“I am an obsessive collector of music. Records and CDs are the easy bit – you just have to find them and buy them. Archiving is where it gets tricky. Capturing complete recordings of things that are important to you requires much more determination and discipline. You need to be in a certain place and time and monitor the whole process. It demands a new level of dedication.“
Keith Riley, Founder, Fabric Nightclub, London. For the Sense of Purpose print issue s/s2010.
Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox
Marybeth Hamilton: Of those visionary, epic collectors, none are more intriguing than Alan Lomax. Born in Texas in 1915, he made a life’s work of documenting the voices of the impoverished and the obscure. A quest that began in 1933, at the age of 18, when he and his father, the song collector John Lomax, took a portable phonograph provided by the Library of Congress and made some 400 recordings of songs by black inmates in penitentiaries across the American South.
Popular music
Over time, his passion for celebrating unlettered singers would help change the face of popular music. He recorded ‘Leadbelly’ in a prison cell in Louisiana and ‘Muddy Waters’ in a shack in the Mississippi Delta; he broadcast the first folk music documentaries on American radio, and he conducted the first extended life history interview to be captured on record, in a ten-hour session with the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. His tireless promotion of vernacular music as a radical alternative to Tin Pan Alley, helped make folk legends of Woody Guthrie, Son House, and Big Bill Broonzy, and his collaborations with Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl helped generate folk revivals in the US and the UK.
by Brett Sayles
Music technology
I first became interested in Alan Lomax about ten years ago, when I began writing a book on the blues. What I found most compelling about him and his father was their extraordinary enthusiasm for recording technology, which far outpaced that of any previous folklorist, and their fear and abhorrence of commercially-recorded popular music, which their project of field recording was designed to combat. What interested me most were the tensions between the Lomaxes and the singers they discovered, who often proved restless with their roles as guardians of the pure spirit of folk music, and the tensions between Lomax and his father over the political implications of what they were doing.
The Modern Age
Lomax senior was a diehard conservative and defender of the southern status quo; he sought out the songs of black prisoners in the hope of finding, in his phrase: ‘uncontaminated’, Negroes free from the taint of the modern age. Alan, in contrast, was a Communist sympathizer, if not a party member. For Lomax junior, recording folk music was a radical quest to unearth and empower dissident voices that history had forgotten,and the mainstream media had ignored.
Still, in the end, I wrote a lot more about John Lomax than I did about Alan, despite the fact that it was Alan who had far and away the longer career. The main reason for this neglect was the direction that the younger Lomax’s work took. From about 1950 he threw himself into a project that I did not know how to begin to untangle; a project that seemed utterly dissimilar to what he’d done previously and that would obsess him until the end of his life.
It was a vast, sweeping exercise in collecting, collating, and decoding world music via a magical contraption that he called the ‘Global Jukebox’. A massive computer database of ethnographic recordings, cross-correlated with anthropological findings, it was meant to serve as ‘the world’s first intelligent museum’, discerning the hidden patterns and secret histories linking the world’s musical styles.
Users needed only to click on a map to find a new sense of global connection, via a computer programme that broke down all material to its underlying components, found the buried connections between them and tracked lines of descent, migration and influence. The result, Lomax believed, was a dynamic model of the cultural universe that contained and explained ‘all of human culture’, transforming the disparate sounds made by the world’s peoples into a musical map of the families of man.
The Global Jukebox had its beginnings in Lomax’s experience of semi-involuntary exile. In the summer of 1950, his name had appeared on an anti-Communist blacklist, which made it virtually impossible for him to work in the United States. In response, he sailed to London, where he had a few friends and hoped to do some broadcasting, but radio commissions came sporadically. The only steady project he had was a commission from Columbia Records to put together an anthology of ethnographic recordings.
So, for much of the next few years, he sat in his apartment in London listening to sounds he’d never before encountered – high-fidelity recordings of music from around the globe.
As he listened, he began hearing patterns, inexplicable similarities between songs sung by groups widely separated by geography. He heard links between Gregorian chants and the music of pygmies; between the high repining solos heard in the Orient and the keening wails recorded in Senegal. And he heard how within any single community even the most disparate songs somehow felt similar, something in the manner of delivery that didn’t come across in western notation, but could be picked up by the attentive ear.
His belief in these patterns intensified in 1954 when he made field recordings in Spain and Italy. He came to believe that what he was hearing was the emotional fingerprint of each society; an aural expression of its unique way of being, which sometimes bore traces of a hidden history of migration and contact. Once he returned to the United States in 1960, he found a team of computer experts who assisted him in writing a programme to untangle these patterns. With that, he believed he’d found a solution to his mystery. ‘It begins to answer all the questions that have haunted me for twenty years,’ he wrote to Margaret Mead in 1955. ‘I think I have found a highway to understanding, the key for which I have been looking since I was a boy.’
Over the last few years Lomax’s obsession has become mine, though I’ve been hard pressed to say why. Admittedly, for anyone familiar with Lomax as a folk music proselytiser, the Global Jukebox can seem, at the very least, puzzling. That this ardent aficionado of unamplified music should have given himself over to mainframes and punch cards, terms like ‘contoids’ and ‘vocoids’ and graphs illustrating the hip movements of Morris dancers and the vocal rasp among the Maasai and Zulu, has struck, even some of his admirers, as simply perverse.
In the end, the system that he saw as a ‘highway to understanding’ resulted in absolutely nothing. He never received the funding he needed to make his jukebox anything more than a bare prototype. Anthropologists, for the most part, found his musical coding system utterly risible and musicologists ripped apart its foundations. Though it obsessed Lomax for fifty years, though he thought of it as his magnum opus, his great contribution to human knowledge, when he died in 2002 none of his obituaries bothered to mention it.
Yet, for me, what is so compelling in Lomax’s endeavour is the sheer hubris, the scale of its romantic ambition. By amassing all the world’s voices, he sought to untangle ‘the emotional meaning of speech’, to pin down the secret subtext of music with the precision of a machine. It was a quest at once loopy and poetic. ‘The Global Jukebox was his magnum opus,’ as one of Lomax’s assistants put it. ‘And his Great White Whale.’
Some journeys don’t always lead to what we wanted, but the Global Jukebox remains a beautiful and ahead of its time concept. Even though people didn’t believe in Alan and his project, it’s important for us to always look at what makes us similar not what makes us different, both through music and in life.
Marybeth Hamilton is the author of ‘In Search of the Blues’, writes and presents documentary features for BBC radio and teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
If you enjoyed Explore And Be Inspired By The Beautiful World Of Music Anthropology, then why not read Music: Songs That Carry The Challenges Of The World here.
.Cent Magazine, London. Luxury Mindset
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