A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan: Revisiting Historical Field Recordings

Extract

The writer of an article is often at a loss as to how to begin.

A. H. Fox Strangways

Of what practical use are historical field recordings? This article is a partial response to that question, one which struck me on many occasions while working with ethnographic wax cylinders at the British Library National Sound Archive (NSA). There are, I believe, at least three possible answers to the question. One is that historical recordings can (and indeed should) be returned to the societies from which they originated, for which they serve as valuable cultural documents — documents both of indigenous cultural practices and of the engagement of scholars and other collectors with those practices (often within a colonial context). Another is that they can be used in studies of musical continuity and change, a possibility exploited most extensively by the ethnomusicologist Nazir Jairazbhoy, who retraced the path of his predecessor and mentor Arnold Bake's Indian field trips, comparing his own findings in 1984 with Bake's in 1938. My third answer is that historical recordings, together with the publications based on them, can contribute to studies of the historical development of ethnomusicological method — of the ways in which music has been recorded, transcribed and analysed. This article pursues this last possibility, taking as an example one of the classical works of early twentieth-century comparative musicology, A. H. Fox Strangways's The Music of Hindostan. I consider the author's aims, methods and conclusions, their status in the light of subsequent research, and their significance for music studies today.