Excavated Shellac: An Alternative History of the World's Music

Excavated Shellac is a Grammy-Award-nominated compilation of one hundred sound recordings produced in several parts of the world between 1907 and 1967. It includes a set of four CDs (with twenty-five selections in each CD) and a hardcover book with commentary for each song in the collection, songs’ lyrics and their translations (for languages other than English), a wealth of photographs and other captivating illustrations contemporary to the recordings, and an overall remarkable graphic design. This publication is a sample of a much larger digital project many years in the making and marked by discographic passion and research generosity: a website meant to make widely available hundreds of digitized versions of 78-rpm sound recordings with musics from all over the globe. Excavated Shellac, the warhorse title of both this publication and the larger project, is an apt designation of the accomplishment and of what is at stake with it: unearthing and salvaging sounds and stories otherwise faded into oblivion, not just for the sake of individual, institutional, or corporate ambitions but to preserve a wide perspective about the diversity of music cultures in the world and the global outreach of the sound-recording business.Excavated Shellac makes audible and visible an area of research still obscure to many scholars and the general public. If the compilation made for the book and the CDs is only a snapshot of the contents on the website, the whole project, notwithstanding its massive collection thus far, is but a snapshot of the sound-recording industry during the 78-rpm era. And so are all our scholarly ventures in that realm combined. There is still so much to excavate. But this project is definitively a step in the right direction. In a somewhat uncanny way, it provides great doses of encouragement to keep on digging for more sonic vestiges from the early twentieth century and to keep nurturing an area of knowledge otherwise buried in the past. Listening to the audio recordings in the collection while discovering all kinds of intellectual gems about them through the pages in the book is almost a kind of acoustemology of its own—an audiotopia of sorts when it comes to realizing how vast the musical diversity of the world is and how little our awareness of it can be sometimes.What kind of music is this and what shall we call it? That is a fundamental issue raised in the introduction of the volume—an issue that one gets to rehearse, inadvertently, by listening to the selections, time and again. Many labels have been suggested in the last century, each with its own series of implications and stereotypes: race records, folk music, ethnic music, international music, world music. Jonathan Ward briefly criticizes the limitations and inadequacies of some of them, emphasizing, for example, the othering, racism, cultural provincialism, xenophobia, fraught political motivations, and downright commercial opportunism that have tainted the use of words like “ethnic,” “world,” and “international” by academics and the music industry alike. Ward also points out the fact that, in practice, from a worldwide perspective, the “classical,” “popular,” and “folk” realms overlap much more than our scholarly classifications seem to appreciate. For that matter, and sensibly enough, he suggests “global music,” not so much on the basis of political correctness—although it appears to be “more sweeping”—but following the curating principles at the heart of Excavated Shellac: to grow “an egalitarian collection of music . . . to bridge entertainment with scholarship . . . to allow for readers to add information” and, more importantly, to make everything available online so that, “in theory, everything could conceivably be heard and read by everyone, not just rabid music fans in the Western world” (11–12).The volume's introduction is also attentive to the nuances of the global processes that fostered the making of these sound recordings as well as to the erratic, improvisatory nature of the business, its unevenness, racial and intercultural dramas, materiality, extractivist motto, and colonial character. Most of those issues, of course, are more hinted at than properly developed. To the seasoned scholar, the presentation may come across as a little vague, not doing justice to what this research field has produced recently, and, read between the lines, even complicit of technological determinism. But the engagement with these issues also reveals the broad familiarity of the author with a thriving scholarly arena still marred by unsolvable puzzles and many contradictions. The fleeting and subtle critique to Michael Denning's shallow historicity in Noise Uprising, for example, is a sophisticated gesture to anyone familiar with the epistemological stakes of current research in the world of early sound recordings.All things considered, the audio quality of the sound files is superb. Digitizing 78-rpm records is far from an easy endeavor. Transferring data from one medium to another demands the consideration of multiple technical challenges at once—not least of which is the fact that the actual rotation speed of the masters when making the recordings is hardly ever known so that playing back the original records for their digitization oftentimes requires a great dose of speculation and taste, not to mention the fragility of old shellac records. But, the sound restoration and mastering of the selections for this compilation was, for the most part, very well achieved, especially in the case of the oldest recordings, those from the acoustic era. Beyond these technicalities, however, this is no less than a great collection of sound recordings. Whether for the sake of scholarly interest or just as a means to discover “new” music, it is a rare opportunity to find otherwise hidden musical gems and to learn many things about each one of them. The 1930s is probably the decade with the largest representation, but almost every other decade, from the 1920s to the 1960s, follows closely, allowing the listener to appreciate differences and nuances in style and sound from one place to another, from one decade to another, and from one recording company to another.The diversity of musics represented may seem to be at times, as Ward himself puts it, a “cultural potluck” (10). But the selection criteria is well justified. Almost every region in the world is represented in one way or another, but the merit does not lie in the geographical extension alone but in the way in which the collection as a whole seems to provide a good clue about the consumption and popularity of these recordings at the time. In that respect, the written commentary about each selection is spot-on. It provides fascinating information about the historical, cultural, and recording contexts as well as about musical style, performance practice, music history, and even social and political matters related to the recordings or their larger music scenes. All in all, Excavated Shellac is a remarkable achievement and a most welcome addition to personal and institutional libraries alike.