Vast numbers of historical field recordings are currently being digitised and disseminated online; but what are these field recordings-and how do they resonate today? This thesis addresses these questions by listening to the digitisation of recordings made for a number of ethnographic projects that took place in Britain in the early 1950s. Each project shared a set of logics and practices I call national phonography. Recording technologies were invested with the ability to sound and salvage the nation, but this first involved deciding what the nation was, and what it was supposed to sound like. National phonography was an institutional and technological network; behind the encounter between recordist and recorded lies a complex and variegated mess of cultural politics, microphones, mediality, sonic aesthetics, energy policies, commercial interests, and music formats. The thesis is structured around a series of historical case studies. The first study traces the emergence of Britain's field recording moment, connecting it to the waning of empire, and focusing on sonic aspects of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the recording policies of national and international folk music organisations. The second study listens to the founding of a sound archive at the University of Edinburgh, also in 1951, asking how sound was used in constructing Scotland as an object of study, stockpiling the nation through the technologies and ideologies of preservation. The third study tracks how the BBC used fieldwork - particularly through its Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952-57) - as part of an effort to secure the aural border. The fourth study tells the story of The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, produced by Alan Lomax while based in Britain and released in 1955. Here, recordings were presented in fragments as nations were written onto long-playing records, and the project is discussed as a museum of voice. The final chapter shifts perspective to the online circulation of these field recordings. It asks what an online sound archive is, hearing how recordings compress multiple agencies which continue to unfold on playback, and exploring the archival silences built into sonic productions of nations. Finally, online archives are considered as heritage sites, raising questions about whose nation is produced by national phonography. This thesis brings together perspectives from sound studies and ethnomusicology; and contributes to conversations on the history of ethnomusicology in Europe, the politics of technology, ontologies of sound archives, and theories of recorded sound and musical nationalisms.

<p>1. nowhere landscape, for clarinets, trombones, percussion, violins, and electronics</p><p>nowhere landscape is an eighty-minute work for nine performers, composed of acoustic and electronic sounds. Its fifteen movements invoke a variety of listening strategies, using slow change, stasis, layering, coincidence, and silence to draw attention to the sonic effects of the environment—inside the concert hall as well as the world outside of it. The work incorporates a unique stage set-up: the audience sits in close proximity to the instruments, facing in one of four different directions, while the musicians play from a number of constantly-shifting locations, including in front of, next to, and behind the audience.</p><p>Much of nowhere landscape’s material is derived from a collection of field recordings</p><p>made by the composer during a road trip from Springfield, MA to Douglas, WY along US- 20, a cross-country route made effectively obsolete by the completion of I-90 in the mid- 20th century. In an homage to artist Ed Ruscha’s 1963 book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, the composer made twenty-six recordings at gas stations along US-20. Many of the movements of nowhere landscape examine the musical potential of these captured soundscapes: familiar and anonymous, yet filled with poignancy and poetic possibility.</p><p>2. “The Map and the Territory: Documenting David Dunn’s Sky Drift”</p><p>In 1977, David Dunn recruited twenty-six musicians to play his work Sky Drift in the</p><p>Anza-Borrego Desert in Southern California. This outdoor performance was documented with photos and recorded with four stationary microphones to tape. A year later, Dunn presented the work in New York City as a “performance/documentation,” playing back the audio recording and projecting slides. In this paper I examine the consequences of this kind of act: what does it mean for a recording of an outdoor work to be shared at an indoor concert event? Can such a complex and interactive experience be successfully flattened into some kind of re-playable documentation? What can a recording capture and what must it exclude?</p><p>This paper engages with these questions as they relate to David Dunn’s Sky Drift and to similar works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Luther Adams. These case-studies demonstrate different solutions to the difficulty of documenting outdoor performances. Because this music is often heard from a variety of equally-valid perspectives—and because any single microphone only captures sound from one of these perspectives—the physical set-up of these kind of pieces complicate what it means to even “hear the music” at all. To this end, I discuss issues around the “work itself” and “aura” as well as “transparency” and “liveness” in recorded sound, bringing in thoughts and ideas from Walter Benjamin, Howard Becker, Joshua Glasgow, and others. In addition, the artist Robert Irwin and the composer Barry Truax have written about the conceptual distinctions between “the work” and “not- the-work”; these distinctions are complicated by documentation and recording. Without the context, the being-there, the music is stripped of much of its ability to communicate meaning.</p> / Dissertation

Review of Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946. 2015. Produced, compiled, and annotated by James P. Leary. Dust-to-Digital, CDs (5), DVD, DTD-43.

Review of Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947-55

Stephen Wade: The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed June 30, 2010). Additional advisors: Stephen A. Watts, Paul A. Richardson, John T. Tarvin. Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-38).

This paper provides an overview of the inspiration, research, and creative process involved in the composition of EverWind for orchestra and electronics. EverWind is based on field recordings from the American Southwest. The composition uses pitch material derived from spectral analysis of the recordings, and it incorporates a fixed media element using the field recordings that are then electronically manipulated to various degrees; this fixed media element is played alongside the orchestra. The paper also analyzes John Luther Adams' Dark Waves for Orchestra and Electronics and R. Murray Schafer's Music for Wilderness Lake in order to place EverWind within the broader musical context.

This thesis project aims to discuss the conditions and importance of water as a dynamic body in our environment, as water is affecting life on Earth on all levels. By focusing on the Baltic Sea, a sensitive body of water, I am exploring the acoustic characters of the sea dynamics through sound recordings at three bays in the Stockholm Archipelago. How can an acoustic exploration of the Baltic Sea dynamics mediate a sensitive relationship to our marine environments? Sound defines environments and gives indications of their current state. In this project, I intertwine an artistic approach involving our senses with scientific research of measuring to further an understanding of the relationship between humans and nature. The project explores water and sound in two parts, first as a method for listening to the sea, second as a spatial composition created for a sensory experience of the sea’s endless motion. It is my hope that my installation can stir emotions and create an understanding for the environmental challenges facing the Baltic Sea and inspire action towards prosperous natural environments where we live with and not apart from nature.