CHAPTER 5— ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC

← CHAPTER 4 — THE FOREST PEOPLE
→ CHAPTER 6 — A LIFE UNDER THREAT

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is one of the city’s most treasured institutions. Founded in 1884 to house the private collection of the pioneering archaeologist and ethnologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, its rows of wood-framed glass cabinets now contain some 500,000 curios from all corners of the globe. There are tribal masks, costumes, musical instruments, ceramics and weaponry, as well as a notorious collection of shrunken human heads from Ecuador and Peru, which are a principal attraction but the bane of the museum staff’s lives. The building itself, attached to the east side of Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, is an immaculate throwback to Victorian museum design: vaulted ceilings tower over mosaic floors, pillared galleries and the densely-stuffed cabinets. Many of the information labels on the shelves are still in the handwriting of curators of yesteryear and it can seem, in one employee’s words, more like “a museum of a museum” than an active concern, even though it remains the heart of Oxford University’s anthropology department and one of the most significant museums of its kind in the country. “The ground floor of the Pitt Rivers is an enchanting, crepuscular clutter,” the novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce wrote recently.

Louis Sarno’s influence at the Pitt Rivers is, for the most part, out of the public’s view. Cassette tapes don’t offer much to look at. But Dr Noel Lobley, who is in charge of the museum’s sound archives and who has become Sarno’s biggest champion and collaborator in recent years, believes the aural document from the Central African Republic and Congo is among the most valuable items the museum holds. “That’s the flagship [sound] collection,” Lobley says. “It’s the one that draws attention to everything else.” In April 2014, a film crew from CBS Television’s 60 Minutes came to the museum to interview Sarno about his life and work, and Lobley says it offered proof to the sceptics. “Things like CBS turning up really made people think, ‘Shit. This is something.’ I’ve been fighting that battle. I’ve been saying, ‘Look, you have one of the world’s most significant collections here.’”

In 2004, Lobley was a doctoral student with only a dim awareness of Sarno’s existence when he hauled from a storeroom on Oxford’s Banbury Road a tattered plastic suitcase wrapped in an old jumper. Inside, he found more than 450 cassettes and DAT tapes, containing more than 1,000 hours of recordings, that constituted a huge part of Sarno’s work. Although the labelling was poor and the tapes apparently forgotten, Lobley immediately realised upon starting to listen to them that they justified significantly greater attention than their lowly placement would suggest. In the mid-1980s, Sarno had approached the university for funding for his then-embryonic project among the pygmy musicians of the Congo Basin and struck up a relationship with Hélène La Rue, Lobley’s predecessor as curator of sound collections at the Pitt Rivers. (La Rue was also in charge of Oxford’s Bate Collection of Musical Instruments and a lecturer at the university.) La Rue was a keen supporter of trailblazing talents and recognised in Sarno the potential for a direct conduit to some of the world’s most sought-after musicianship. The funds were secured and La Rue offered the university as a safe repository for what became a rapidly-expanding collection.

The history of anthropological music collection pre-dates even the technology that truly makes it possible. Early explorers, struck by the exotic sounds of Africa or remote regions of the Americas, were known to jot in notebooks descriptions of what they had heard. After Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, however, the discipline took on a new dimension. Intrepid collectors of sufficient means could equip themselves with the new technology that would allow them to capture some of the extraordinary languages, songs and instrumentation and transport them home.

By common agreement, the most significant sound collector of the past 100 years is Alan Lomax (1915–2002), the ethnomusicologist whose most famous recordings through the American south introduced the wider world to some of the greats of the traditional forms. Lomax, who in the early days travelled with his father, took an organised, structured approach to his recording, receiving tips as to the finest exponents of blues, folk and Americana and dashing through rural communities, villages and even prisons. He discovered a guitar player named Huddie “Lead Belly” Leadbetter in Angola Prison Farm (now Louisiana State Penitentiary); visited the Mississippi home of McKinley Morganfield, later known as Muddy Waters; and was the first to make permanent recordings of the “Oklahoma Cowboy”, Woody Guthrie. “As a field recorder, especially from an American perspective, it’s the gold standard,” Lobley says of the Lomax collection, now expertly curated at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. “It’s not without its problems, but it’s unrepeatable.”

In careers that overlapped for their most prosperous periods, a British expat in South Africa named Hugh Tracey (1903–1977) undertook a similar recording project across Africa. Lomax is reported to have said that “Tracey has that covered” when asked why he did not visit Africa, and certainly Tracey’s work was similarly exhaustive, even if the music remains less known. Tracey first became interested in African music after hearing the songs of the workers in the tobacco fields in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1920s. Encouraged by his friends Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and inspired by Lomax, Tracey set out to map the musical landscape of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. His travels took him to remote jungles settlements and mining compounds alike, and he amassed a collection of 30,000 recordings that now reside in the International Library of African Music, which he established in Grahamstown in 1954.

Lobley insists that Sarno belongs in the same category as the great collectors Lomax and Tracey, although their methods and inspirations differ greatly. Sarno is the only one of the three with no institutional backing nor any realistic expectation that his work might be considered to be of academic merit. Sarno himself says, “It sort of mounted up very slowly over the years. It kind of amazes me to look at it now that there’s so much, so many recordings. It is kind of a lifetime’s work, so I guess it’s not that surprising. But I never set out, that wasn’t my goal to make some kind of huge collection.”

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Sarno continued to send back his tapes to La Rue in dribs and drabs, either in the luggage of his occasional visitors, or during his own trips out of Africa. They were dutifully stored but rarely saw the light of day, save when Sarno himself sporadically returned to them during visits to see friends in the country. He was never in Oxford for more than a few hours at a time, however, and principally revisited his collection to dig out cherished recordings to put on compilation CDs to sell. Lobley says it is not uncommon for collectors to be consumed by their task, continuing to amass more and more content long after it can have any obvious utility. Sarno admits now that he does not often listen to some of his old recordings, even though the Ba’aka themselves are keen consumers of their old work.

La Rue, who was also Lobley’s PhD supervisor, died suddenly in 2007, without having managed to do much more with the collection than continue to encourage Sarno to build it and ensure its safekeeping in Oxford. But she was also able to encourage Lobley to invest his time in it, an endeavour that quickly became his own odyssey. Lobley, who is 40, is a lifelong music obsessive with a fascination that encompasses all genres, from cutting edge electronica to archaic field recordings. As an undergraduate student, when I first met him, he would record John Peel’s radio shows in order to re-listen time and again to the music. He latterly became friends with the DJ, working for a period amid the vast archive of music at Peel’s house in Suffolk. Few people have Lobley’s passion for sound recordings: he was once involved in an accident in which the car he was driving ended up on its roof in a field, and an observer remembers watching the dazed driver emerge in one piece, but then dive back through the window in order to rescue the cassette that had been playing in the car stereo.

With the all but untouched cache of Sarno’s recordings having fallen into his lap, Lobley hatched plans to use the work as a centrepiece of his PhD research. Although the plans did not come to fruition (Lobley instead moved to South Africa to study Hugh Tracey), he did not lose enthusiasm for one day mining this unlikely source for its true significance. Returning to Oxford and eventually taking over at the Pitt Rivers, Lobley set about listening to the collection in its entirety — a process that took more than a year. Lobley estimates that his infant son Zakir has heard more Ba’aka music than any other child outside of Africa.

Lobley and Sarno gradually began to communicate with one another via email and eventually Lobley secured funding for Sarno to spend a month in Oxford in spring 2012, where the pair set about processing the trove. They expanded the perfunctory notes Sarno had made at the time of recordings and also analysed photographs to identify musicians and singers, as well as audience and context. In short, they attempted to bring the collection up to the standards expected of a museum collection, while Sarno also gave seminars to enraptured anthropology and music students. During the latter part of his visit, a new cache of tapes arrived: some 400 hours of recordings from an expedition to northern Congo, which had been stashed beneath a bed in the spare room of Sarno’s mother’s house in New Jersey. “They’re an important piece of the jigsaw,” Lobley says.

***

Museums curators, particularly those whose institutions have resisted modernisation since the Victorian era, can often struggle to generate engagement among their potential visitors. They become subsumed by a continual struggle to demonstrate the relevance of their collections, whose artefacts enter a peculiar, precarious stasis the minute they are deemed worthy of inclusion. However, when I visited the Pitt Rivers for the first time one evening in November 2012, it promised to be anything but a stuffy affair. As a part of a nationwide “Night at the Museum” initiative, the museum’s galleries would be plunged into near-darkness and its visitors handed torches with which to explore the collection. The prospect of shining a light into a cabinet and coming face to face with a fossilised toad, an Egyptian burial shabti or a horse-bone ice-skate proved immensely popular. Young people found themselves happy to be prised away from the dinosaur skeletons of the adjoining Natural History Museum and time in the galleries had to be rationed to prevent overcrowding.

Unbeknownst to many of the visitors, the soundtrack for the torch-lit trail came from the Central African Republic. This was the Sarno collection’s official debut in the UK. As a projection of the rainforest canopy was cast across the roof, the visitors were guided by a selection of the handclaps, chanting, multi-layered polyphonic singing and complex tapestry of beats and rhythms that Sarno has recorded throughout the years. Nathanial Mann, then the museum’s composer in residence, selected four hours of recordings to create an immersive experience. None of the visitors seemed to acknowledge their participation consciously, but many were altering their step and dancing in time. I asked one woman what had inspired her to shimmy along the full length of one cabinet, and she denied that she had been dancing at all. In fact, she been shaking both fists as though playing maracas, nodding her head as she shuffled along.

Even for the uninitiated, listening to some of Sarno’s recordings is an exhilarating, transportive experience. For Ba’aka, music is the lifeblood of the community and central to it; some studies have suggested that the music’s balance between rigour and freedom “reflects perfectly the social organisation of the pygmies…perhaps not by chance.” Even Unesco have recognised the significance of Ba’aka music and in 2008 inscribed the polyphonic singing of the pygmies of Central Africa on its “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”. More recently, Herbie Hancock and Madonna are among those either to sample or admit influence from pygmy music, while the Belgian artist Zap Mama “mixes African vocal techniques with European polyphony” in successful commercial recordings. According to Michelle Kisliuk, the author of Seize The Dance!, the eminent Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson “suggests that the yodel of the forest people ‘leavened the blues’. Sarno’s work is simply without peer as a source document in the contemporary world.

In one recording, entitled “Out in the Forest With BayAka hunters” for example, we are traipsing through the forest in search of prey; we hear the hunters’ footsteps through the undergrowth and their voices discussing their strategies for the laying of nets. In the background, several other Ba’aka imitate animal sounds, the screeching of primates, the beating of chests. All of a sudden, something, probably a duiker, darts from the undergrowth and the slow trudge of footsteps gives way to an explosion of activity: voices, screams and, most infectiously, a series of gleeful laughs of the satiated hunter. There is no music, but we are immediately immersed at the centre of a unique world.

In other recordings, we hear both the sensational musicianship of the Ba’aka and their exquisite voices: they growl, they hum, they whistle and sing in polyphonic layers. They sometimes here too break down into conversation and laughter, but at other times, Sarno has captured sustained vocal feats or what, in another environment, might be called virtuoso performances. For instance, there are extended sessions of a late master geedal player named Balonyona, who became Sarno’s friend and remains the finest exponent he has ever heard. Sarno has also captured long passages of music from the mbyo flute, an instrument that is now effectively extinct after the last of its players died and left a younger generation uninterested in learning how to play. Ever since he had more regular access to his collection, Sarno has continued to take back examples of his recordings and reintroduced it to the community members whose ancestors produced it. He hopes in some way to be able re-educate younger players with some of the techniques that have fallen away.

The process of digitising his collection has transported Sarno back to the moments he made the recordings, reintroducing him to old friends and different times in the forest. “When I listen back, I usually remember even the recording session itself,” he says. “It triggers a lot of memories of those times. I think about the people who are gone now, and how times were a bit different back then.”

Sarno returned to Oxford in June 2014 for another three weeks, as he and Lobley took a first look together at the stash of recordings from northern Congo and continued examination of Sarno’s photographs. I sat in on one of their processing sessions, in an office attached to the Pitt Rivers, in which the collection of tapes appeared deeply unremarkable in four plastic crates. Sarno had taken to wearing a corduroy jacket and a fedora with a feather in its band during his visit to Oxford and, at least by day, struck the dashing figure of a visiting academic. He placed the hat on top of a filing cabinet, beside eight stacks of cassettes, and joined Lobley hunched in front of the computer screen to flick through a folder of photos. The static from the hat left his sparse covering of hair standing on its end.

“Can I put that one in?” Lobley said, looking at a photograph of Sarno mugging to camera standing beside a man on stilts. “Is that for ejengi or anything?”

“No, we’re just messing around,” Sarno replied, leading Lobley to read the caption aloud as he typed it, “Makouti on stilts.”

They looked at a picture of the sunset over the Sangha River (“You can see why Rod loves it there.”); then a selection in the abandoned sawmill in Bayanga (“That’s where the people from Oka! used to eat their meals.”). Sarno stumbled a couple of times in the attempt to identify the location (“I don’t think that’s my house. I don’t know whose house that might be. Yeah! That’s my house. It’s not worth putting that photo in.”) and they squabbled as to the relevance of a picture of a green jumping spider. (Sarno: “Don’t put that in.” Lobley: “I like it!”) It was a painstaking process, flicking between a never-ending spool of photos and an Excel spreadsheet, documenting location, date and any personnel in the picture, plus context. Lobley was also recording the audio of all their interactions, and conversation often focused more specifically on anthropological concerns. They talked about the life expectancy discrepancies among men and women (“Men ruin their bodies with alcohol,” Sarno said) and then, moving on to some recordings, attempted to identify jungle sounds. (“In 97, you heard these monkeys all the time, but they’ve been decimated.” “It’s a weird owl cry. I thought it was a crocodile at first, but it turns out it’s an owl.”) Lobley captioned one forest soundscape as: “The woodpecker song. Distant monkeys going ape-shit.” The pair then chuckled in reminiscence of one of Lobley’s favourite recorded moments: at the end of a particular sound clip, its recorder can be heard to mutter, to no one in particular, “Fucking sublime.”

Part of Sarno’s immersive collection, especially in comparison with the likes of Lomax and Tracey, owes itself to the progressions in recording technology. While Lomax carried around expensive acetates and Tracey reel-to-reel recorders, Sarno began working with cassette tapes prevalent in the 1980s, before progressing to DAT. Although, like his predecessors, he employed some degree of on-the-spot editing, conscious always of dwindling battery supplies and finite tapes, his materials allowed him many more hours of recording time. He was exceptionally thorough. Many of the Ba’aka ceremonies last entire nights, hours during which they pass through various stages of symbolism and the music (and musicians) undergo great changes. The compulsion to record led to Sarno either sitting awake often for days on end, or otherwise setting alarms to wake himself up to change tapes. The duration of his study is also unique. He is also the only one to stay among the same community for what amounts to more than one generation, which permits close analysis of musical development among the same subjects. Lobley often uses the word “unprecedented” to describe Sarno’s work.

“The most significant difference is the permanent immersion,” Lobley says. “There’s nobody who has ever done that, to my knowledge, unless you’re from that community. Whatever your trainings, your skills or your shortcomings are, if you’re around for that amount of time, you know what you’re looking for. You know what’s going to happen, you know what’s going to change. You can’t possibly know that if you’re just moving through somewhere quickly.”

Sarno has also amassed recordings of almost unprecedented authenticity. As any journalist, anthropologist, film-maker or sound recorder will know, the presence of a third party, and in particular his or her Dictaphone, notebook, camera or microphone, will prompt changes in a subject’s behaviour or output, even perhaps subconsciously. It is particularly marked when recording musicians, who may abandon their freewheeling spontaneity in favour of more formal, practiced and safer ground. But Sarno’s immersion with the Ba’aka afforded him the great privilege of being ignored entirely. At times, particularly during hunts in the forest, where singers can be stretched across many miles, his microphones were probably unseen by the people he is recording. It is a position that to some anthropologists transgresses an ethical boundary, but which has given Sarno’s collection extraordinary value.

Lobley and Sarno interrupted their work to talk about Sarno’s travel plans back to Africa, as well as some shopping he had to do before his return. He needed a memory card for Samedi’s PlayStation Vita, and also had his eye on what had been described on the BBC World Service as an “indestructible football”. Would be sportsmen in the rainforest tend to be thwarted by the deficiencies of their equipment, and soccer matches end in punctures and tears. The prospect of bringing back an indestructible football had filled Sarno with great anticipation. “We’ll see how it does with the Ba’aka,” Sarno said, belying little confidence.

The vast majority of Sarno’s recordings are now digitised and catalogued, ensuring their continued availability to students and researchers, as well as the general public, who can find large sections of the music on the museum’s website. Lobley says he is in the early stages of planning another collaboration with the Oxford Contemporary Music Orchestra for next year, in which a number of high-profile artists will be offered access to the collection and invited to interpret it as they wish. He says that some household names are already showing an interest and their presence will likely raise the profile of Sarno’s work to new heights. Sarno is enthused by the prospect of his collection’s continued airing. He tuned in as best he could (via uncertain video link) to the nights at the museum, and he is invariably amenable to its continued exposure.

“I love the Ba’aka and I don’t want them to just disappear without a trace,” he says. “I want them to have some input into the future, that’s how I think of it. With all this music, if it’s in the sound cloud and it’s on the internet, it becomes accessible. It will give them an input into the future and that makes me happy. I’m really glad about that.”

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