Short essay: The science fiction of traditional music

Posting in humanities since this essay is more about the relationship with traditional music, particularly for a Black man, than the music itself. This is an interesting essay that touches on how traditional music has become separated from its traditional way of spreading, with a focus on how that affects his experience as a Black musician.

According to the author, James Blount, recordings have largely replaced the old style of passing on a song or tune. Slight changes and personal deviations that occur when one player teaches a tune to another player are largely lost, since we can revisit recordings. Now, he asserts, there is now a science-fiction like quality when a player learns from a recording, as the player is essentially learning a machine's capture or recreation of a piece of music. Moreover, that recreation is usually one that a recording company has released, and thus record companies have effectively locked traditional music into a sound that they were selling, thereby separating it from its tradition. For Blount, this means that he's forced to learn banjo tunes from recordings, as opposed from his community, who has largely died without passing the tunes down.

I don't know what the Black experience in this regard (traditional American folk music and the erasure or record company release bias therein), but I have seen this struggle for new learners of the Cajun language. There's a massive generation that didn't pass the language down and it's been somewhat lost. Many new learners are reckoning with the fact that they're speaking a different French than their grandparents did, but are doing a good job of reclaiming it as their own.

As far as music goes, I am encouraged and excited by the new media outfits that do field recordings of mostly young folks/roots musicians. They're often great performers, but the performances are organic in a way that few studio albums achieve. The rawness, or sometimes lack of technical polish, is really what makes it feel like folk music. It's a feeling of home, or tradition, that is delivered in earnest.