Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music - Hardcover

Mickey Hart; K.M. Kostyal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 079224107X ISBN 13: 9780792241072

Publisher: National Geographic, 2003

Synopsis

For 30 years now, Mickey Hart has been on a quest&#!51;to search out and record the wealth of different musics in the world, many of them little known. He’s also been fascinated by the recordists who came before him, themselves pioneers in the sound-capturing field, and the extraordinary technological developments that have made their work possible.

Songcatchers looks at our universal appreciation of music and the reasons why, over the past century, technology and curiosity have carried the shamanic chants of Siberia, the dying folk music of isolated European villages, and the ecstatic gamelan sounds of Bali to music lovers all over the world.

The personal tales of the songcatchers are full of romance, derring-do, and intrigue: some of them were scholars, others adventurists, and a few full-fledged spies. The machines that made their work possible progressed from the early treadle-powered phonographs that allowed sound waves to imprint wax cylinders to magnetic tape that captured sound in iron oxide particles to the digital domain of today.

Hart ventures across time and continents in following the songcatchers and their machines, and throughout it all he celebrates music and its ability to transcend the mundane and transport the human spirit.

About this title

From Booklist

For some time now, Grateful Dead drummer Hart has been a songcatcher, a collector of the originally noncommercial music popularly called traditional music. Many anthropologists, musicians, political and labor organizers, composers, social workers, and others were songcatchers before him, and it is their collective story that he and professional writer Kostyal tell in this engaging book. They discourse a little on music's many purposes, then leap into songcatching via sound recording. The first field recordings were of American Indian music, and the late-nineteenth-century phenomenon of world's fairs spurred the capture of Asian, African, and Pacific Island music. Meanwhile, young Anglophone composers combed the British Isles for their peoples' songs. Hart and Kostyal note major figures and events in field recording down to the present, at which point Hart relates his own experiences. Historic photographs magnificently illustrate Hart and Kostyal's accessible overview of a subject that, despite its intrinsic attractiveness, has usually been written up only in turgid academic tomes. A book for every popular library. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 079224107X
• ISBN 13: 9780792241072
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192