"The isolation which had preserved their ancient customs was in the process of breaking down. It was the beginning of a development which contained the germ of a complete change in their mode of life."
--Per Host
What the World Showed Me: My Adventures from Arctic to Jungle
In 1949 the Norwegian filmmaker Per Host journeyed into the rain forests of Panama's Darien Province with conflicting feelings of hope and imminent loss.
Host had heard tales of the Embera Choco Indians of the upper Sambu River Valley, mountain dwellers who had hidden themselves from the outside world since a smallpox epidemic in the 1920s wiped out a large part of their population. His hopes of filming a sequestered forest society were mixed with fears that the completion of the Pan-American Highway would hasten an invasion of industrial and trade interests into the region, setting in motion the machinery of irrevocable change.
After making his way to the secluded mountain valleys of the Choco, Host shot more than 10,000 feet of film and recorded a number of songs on magnetic tape, including a spellbinding fever- curing chant sung by a renowned shaman named Gajego.
One year later, when Host returned to Darien to shoot additional footage, his fears were confirmed: The Panamanian government had granted a large concession to a timber company to extract mahogany from the region, and soldiers had been dispatched to put down any possible resistance. Many of his Choco friends had succumbed to tuberculosis brought to their village by Christian missionaries. Gajego's traditional medicine, so effective against spirit-caused afflictions, was no match for the diseases brought by foreigners. Death usually came within a few weeks.
Per Host probably never thought that his field recordings, safely stored in the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Culture, would be heard by a worldwide audience. But for the past three years, his work, and that of four other collectors and several dozen performers, has been the focus of the Endangered Music Project, a public-private cooperative venture between the American Folklife Center (AFC) and 360-degree Productions, the California-based production company of Mickey Hart, percussionist for the rock group the Grateful Dead.
The purpose of the project is to select Archive field recordings of cultural traditions that are threatened, digitally remaster them using state-of-the-art sound processing equipment and release them on compact disc. Proceeds from the project will help support the performers and their communities and will help produce future releases.
The first title in the Endangered Music Series, "The Spirit Cries: Music from the Rainforests of South America and the Caribbean" (Rykodisc CD 10250), was released March 15 in conjunction with a Folklife Center symposium at the Library called "Music and Cultural Conservation."
Symposium participants included Mickey Hart; AFC Director Alan Jabbour; Aluku Maroon musicians Aleina Apalobi and Sephiro Mais; filmmaker Diane Kitchen, who premiered "Roots and Thorns," her new film on the Ashaninka of Peru; ethnomusicologists Kenneth Bilby, Steven Feld, James McKee and Thomas Vennum; and Jason Clay of Cultural Survival. Discussion focused on such topics as the relationship between destruction of ecosystems and the loss of cultural diversity, and the strategies for preserving the oral traditions of culturally threatened peoples.
An evening reception celebrating the release of "The Spirit Cries" was hosted by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in the Library's Great Hall. Guests included Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart and Bob Weir; Don Rose, president of Rykodisc; Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.); and Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Calif.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Vic Fazio (D-Calif.), Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), Tom Lantos, (D-Calif.), Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), Norman Y. Mineta (D-Calif.), James P. Moran (D-Va.), Lewis F. Payne (D-Va.) and Del. Robert A. Underwood (D-Guam).
Coproduced by Mr. Hart and Dr. Jabbour, "The Spirit Cries" contains music from six collections recorded from 1949 to 1987. Some of the disc's highlights: -- From the Per Host Panama/Choco Indian Collection (1949), an Embera healing ritual performed by the shaman Gajego, who shakes a palm frond over a man to drive feverish spirits from his body; -- From the David Findlay Suriname Wayana Collection (1952), a pair of Wayana songs recorded in a Dutch Consulate office during an impromptu session in Paramaribo; -- From the Enrique Pinilla Folk and Indian Music of Peru Collection (1963-64), the striking imitative polyphony of the Ashaninka Indians; -- From the Kenneth Bilby Jamaican Maroon Collection (1977-78), two possession-trance dances from the Kromanti Play, one of the most purely African of the Caribbean musical-ritual complexes; -- From the Carol and Travis Jenkins Garifuna Collection (Belize, 1981), a variety of religious and dance music, including the bawdy social commentary of the punta dance and the strikingly beautiful abaimahani and arumahani songs, created while the composer is dreaming or in a trance; and -- From the Kenneth Bilby Aluku Maroon Collection (French Guiana and Suriname, 1981-84), ritual and social-dance drumming, popular music and solo game-songs accompanied by the agwado, a three- stringed bow unique in the New World.
What is endangered music? To most people, "endangered" brings to mind images of tamarins, tree sloths or undiscovered miracle plants in danger of perishing as 32 million acres of rain forest are destroyed worldwide each year. In Central and South America, however, uncontrolled deforestation has also had devastating effects upon cultural groups whose lives are traditionally tied to the rain forest.
In the past several decades, tropical forest cultures of the Americas have seen game resources depleted, lost vast tracts of land to expanding agriculture and witnessed the demise of hundreds of plant species used in healing and ritual. For many of these peoples, losing the forest is synonomous with losing a primary source of spiritual power.
To view tropical forest cultures as threatened only in an environmental sense is to ignore the array of 20th century social, economic and political forces that have conspired against them as well. Government colonization programs, tourism, drug trafficking, guerrilla warfare, Western political structures and educational systems, missionary initiatives and mass media have hastened the decline of indigenous languages, the loss of social and political autonomy and the dwindling of skilled practitioners of cultural traditions such as music and dance.
Each of the groups featured on "The Spirit Cries" has been threatened in recent decades. The Embera and Wounan Choco -- who have fared better than most Indian groups because of Panama's efforts to establish semiautonomous geopolitical units (comarcas) -- are threatened by rapid deforestation to clear land for cattle ranches.
The Ashaninka have been forced from their homelands as a result of Peru's campaign to resettle Andean peoples in the eastern forests, initiatives for industrialized agriculture and conflicts with the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
The Jamaican Maroons of Moore Town have seen the decline of the Kromanti Play dances because of missionary proselytization, and rapid development of Jamaica's North Coast threatens the remaining forest in the Blue Mountain region.
Because of the stagnation in local economies, the Garifuna of Belize have increasingly abandoned their traditional beachside settlements to seek employment in the cities of their native country as well as Honduras and the United States. Those who remain are isolated from their kin abroad.
The imposition of French-style local governments has marginalized the Aluku Maroons and Wayana communities of French Guiana.
Anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Kenneth Bilby, who recorded two collections featured on the disc, contends that cultural assimilation is often a prelude to ecological disaster: "When people are rapidly deprived of the cultural understandings and modes of expression that give meaning to their lives, their capacity to resist domination and guide the direction of future change is gravely impaired. The social and cultural fragmentation that results opens the way for opportunistic commercial exploitation from outside, thus hastening ecological destruction."
While the Grateful Dead has promoted environmental causes through benefit concerts and activist spokesmanship over the past 2 1/2 decades, drummer Mickey Hart has quietly developed his own brand of musical conservation. His CD series The World -- which comprises more than 17 releases ranging from collaborations with Airto Moreira and Phillip Glass to the sound track for "Apocalypse Now" -- provides a popular forum for musical traditions that may be considered endangered.
For example, the songs of the Sudanese Hamza El-Din, a master of the oud (a musical instrument of the lute family) who is heard on the album Eclipse, and the Nubian music featured on Music of Upper and Lower Egypt document the cultural disruption that followed the completion of the Aswan High Dam. The Gyuto monks of Nepal, heard on the album Freedom Chants from the Roof of the World, were forced to flee Tibet after many of their brothers were killed or jailed by the communist Chinese.
Mr. Hart's twin commitments to musical and human rights and his pursuit of audio perfection find their best expression in Voices of the Rainforest, an astounding "soundscape" of music and daily life among the Kaluli people of the Bosavi Rain Forest in Papua New Guinea. The Kaluli, who in the past 20 years have experienced profound social changes as a result of oil exploration, intensive logging and an ever-expanding network of roads, have also experienced the disastrous effects of these "developments" on musical and ritual life.
Mr. Hart arranged a six-week trip to Bosavi for Steven Feld, the Western Hemisphere's foremost authority on Kaluli music, who recorded music, bird calls and insect noises, exploring different height zones of the forest canopy. Mr. Hart then spent more than four months in the studio mixing the component tracks to re- create the "spatial" sound central to Kaluli music.
Mr. Hart's collaboration with the Library of Congress began in 1989, when he made a visit to the American Folklife Center looking for photographs to illustrate Planet Drum. Over the course of several meetings, he and Dr. Jabbour began planning a disc featuring collections from the Archive.
"I knew that you were holding these tapes, and it's always been my dream to open up these vaults, these archives, and bring them into the private sector, said Mr. Hart. "We had a couple of meetings and we formed this alliance, and now it's coming to fruition."
Bringing "The Spirit Cries" to market required painstaking effort. During the summer of 1990, prompted by Mickey Hart's initial inquiry, the American Folklife Center hired Kenneth Bilby as a consultant to identify collections in the Archive containing rain forest-related recordings from the tropical Americas. He identified eight Archive collections with such recordings, comprising more than 90 hours of music.
Next, this writer joined the project to make reference copies of the "study collection" and to develop a narrowed-down selection to facilitate intensive listening. I selected eight hours of music strong enough to warrant further consideration. While keeping in mind the need to provide a representative picture of each collection, and the need to balance accessibility with musical representativeness, my goal was to assess each collection's strong points and choose the selections that best represented those strengths. My selection criteria were different for each collection. There was so much good material that much of it had to be left out.
Copies of the eight hours of audition tapes were given to Mickey Hart, who made the second cut: "My selection process was mostly earplay." He said. "I didn't want it to be an ethnography specifically of the area, I wanted it to be a popular work. I would listen to them over and over ... in different environments, on the beach, in the house, in the car . ... I would listen in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, and the selection revealed itself to me."
Mr. Hart made his final selection in January 1991 while on the Hawaiian islands, in the Kona region. Known by the project team as the "Kona Edit," these 37 pieces from six collections were the foundation of "The Spirit Cries."
Although most of the original recordings were made on what was then state-of-the-art equipment, their sound quality does not match today's audio standards. Mr. Hart's next step was to digitize, remix and remaster the Kona Edit. Engineer Mike Donaldson from the Library's Recording Laboratory transferred the recordings from Library preservation tapes to digital audio tape (DAT), supervised by Dr. Jabbour and Mr. Hart during his March 1991 visit to the Library. The DAT master was then sent to Mr. Hart's studion in Northern California, where he and his longtime engineers, Tom Flye and Jeff Sterling, began the restoration process.
Mr. Flye's goal was to create "a new environment for each piece to live in," and each piece presented unique problems requiring a unique restoration strategy, he said. All the recordings were "bathed" with Sonic Solutions, a computerized noise-reduction system that removes tape hiss, microphone bumps and other disturbances. Some of the tracks were treated with electronic reverberation; on others, an ambient effect was created by rerecording the music as it played through a pair of large loudspeakers positioned in a meadow behind Mr. Hart's studio.
He compares the restoration work to that done on Old Masters and stresses that his aim was to allow the luster of the original to shine through: "It's sort of like the Sistine Chapel -- you can only go so far before you hit the paint. We [drew] back before we took away the original intent of the music."
Meanwhile Kenneth Bilby and I were busy writing the liner notes. The fax machines were rarely silent as drafts bounced back and forth between the East and West coasts, with Dr. Jabbour, Mr. Hart, editor Caryl Ohrbach and production manager Howard Cohen making suggestions and revisions. It was also my job to look for photographs. At the Smithsonian's Human Studies Film Archives, I discovered documentation of the Ashaninka of Peru, collected by filmmaker Diane Kitchen for her documentary of Ashaninka life, "Before We Knew Nothing."
Thumbing through the file, I found more than 20 4-by-5-inch black-and-white Ashaninka portraits, daily scenes and a shot of canoeists set in stark relief against the shimmering surface of the Tambo River and dwarfed by the intricate chiaroscuro of the rain forest rising behind them. I immediately knew that this was our cover photograph.
Ms. Kitchen, a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, readily agreed to let us use the photograph and a portrait of two men playing panpipes.
For many listeners the eclecticism of "The Spirit Cries" will shatter monolithic notions of what rain forest music should sound like. African-influenced drumming, call-and-response singing and chordophone traditions are interspersed with Amerindian- influenced monophonic chants, two-part polyphony and Western- influenced popular music. The powerful syncretism of Garifuna music, the product of a now-coastal group of African slave descendants who absorbed Amerindian and Hispanic elements as they made the transition from an island/rain forest culture to a mainland beach culture, perhaps best illustrates the adaptability, tenacity and dynamism that characterize these rain forest cultures as a whole.
As Dr. Jabbour observes: "What we see here are rain forest communities that have encountered African-American imports, runaway slaves and freedmen who found their own life in the rain forest. Therefore, you find in the rain forest not solitude and sequester but creative interchange, and this CD captures the energy and magic of that interchange."
Despite the wide range of musical styles and the broad geographic, cultural and historical differences among the groups, "The Spirit Cries" displays a thematic coherence. One common thread is the "transformational" function of the music, which is heard during activities such as birth, initiation, healing, divination and death, often accompanied by the use of rain forest plants and the conjuring of elemental spirits.
For Mr. Hart, the ephemeral nature of these liminal experiences imbue the music with an elusive quality that takes priority over the mechanics of performance:
"There are two ways of looking at music," he said. "There's a technical way, which has nothing to do with the spiritual, and then there's a spiritual way, which has nothing to do with technique. The spiritual way you tune yourself into this music when you are making it has nothing to do with technique, it has to do with the transformational moment. It has to do with creation, not re-creation. These are individual moments that were made specifically for that moment, never to be repeated. Of course, technique doesn't hurt, but it's not necessarily the prime ingredient for this kind of music."
We are now distributing copies of "The Spirit Cries" among the communities in which they were recorded. Cassettes and CDs were given to Aluku musicians Sephiro Mais and Aleina Apalobi on their return to French Guiana, where they will give them to friends and fellow musicians. Radio airplay among the Aluku is also assured: one CD copy of "The Spirit Cries" has found its way to TRM, a low-wattage radio/TV station on the Lawa River in the heart of Aluku territory.
In Jamaica, Kenneth Bilby has delivered copies to the Maroon musicians of Moore Town and to Jamaican radio stations. We are now making plans to send copies of "The Spirit Cries" to Belize, Panama, Peru and Suriname; and Mickey Hart and Folklife Center staff are already discussing the next release in the series.
The Endangered Music Project deals in amplification (by using the same technologies that sometimes threaten these musics to make them accessible to all), reflexivity (by providing cultural groups with the means to examine their distant and recent pasts) and legitimization (by giving oral traditions the status in their communities that flows from recognition by national institutions and contemporary media). By restoring and repatriating these musics, and by rewarding the performers for their efforts, the Endangered Music Project seeks to provide traditional peoples of the world, threatened by ecological and cultural compromise, with a newly restored glimpse of their collective past to carry into the next century.
References
Hart, Mickey, and Alan Jabbour. Interview with Anne McLean of LC's Music Division; Nov. 23, 1991.
Host, Per. What the World Showed Me: My Adventures from Arctic to Jungle. Translated by Katherine John. New York: Rand McNally, 1955.
