Recording Reviews 377

This is primarily an educational and anthropological resource rather than a

recording to be listened to for entertainment, but the performances are often very
moving. The recordings are very intimate, with extremely close miking, which
captures the singers’ breathing and occasional coughs. They also include a lot of
incidental sound such as cockerels crowing, the nighttime throb of cicadas, and
children moving and talking in the background, reinforcing the environmental
nature of the recordings. A number of photographs of people in the areas where
recordings were made, as well as some of the featured musicians, also help to
provide a sense of context.
The level of detail makes these recordings ideal for close analysis of musical
detail. The CD is suitable for classroom use and useful for transcription, as well
as exploring issues of vocal production, timbre, ornamentation, and variation
within repeating forms. Comparisons could also be made between the analyses
provided in the notes and students’ own perceptions and assessments of the
pitches and intervals involved in order to investigate the power of frameworks
of notation to structure and affect hearing.
As a diverse collection of pieces from a range of cultural groups, this record-
ing piques interest rather than providing an in-depth understanding of individ-
ual genres. It is a useful addition to the body of recordings of traditional musics
from Indonesia and is particularly important in providing access to forms of
music that are small-scale, personal, and domestic in nature, rather than those
forms that are public or commercially popular. The decision to exclude the more
heavily recorded areas of Indonesia is perhaps regrettable, given that music of
this intimate and private nature is equally invisible within the recorded corpus of
either Balinese or Javanese musics. The liner notes make explicit links to two of
the Smithsonian Folkways recordings made by Philip Yampolsky, which are rec-
ommended as sources for further information for the genres on tracks 13 and 16,
and this CD sits very comfortably alongside that twenty-volume set. Although
there are some issues with the material in the liner notes, as mentioned above,
this is fundamentally a very well put together CD, one that is aurally stunning
and presents some fascinating music with plenty of contextual information.

Jonathan Roberts Cardiff University

Music of Morocco from the Library of Congress. Recorded by Paul Bowles.

2016. Dust to Digital B01BRFSHZ6. Four compact discs. Booklet (120 pp.),
with notes by Philip Schuyler, field notes by Paul Bowles, and an introduc-
tion by Lee Ranaldo.
Most of us know Paul Bowles as the author of important midcentury fic-
tion set in Morocco. Fewer know of his early career as a composer and his deep

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378 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2017

interest in the traditional musics of Morocco. In 1959, at the behest of the Library
of Congress and funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Bowles trav-
eled throughout Morocco recording and documenting its traditional musics. As
Philip Schuyler’s erudite liner notes illustrate, this collection represents not only
a broad survey of mid-twentieth-century traditional music of Morocco but also
the particular interests of Bowles as a musician, composer, and musical curator.
For this reason the collection will interest not only scholars and aficionados of
North African musics but also anyone interested in the life and work of Bowles.
This is not the first set of recordings taken from the Bowles collection.
In 1972 the Library of Congress released Music of Morocco, a two-album set
with twenty-six examples spanning just under two hours. Then in 2000 Edwin
Seroussi introduced us to Bowles’s recordings of Moroccan Jews with a two-CD
set, Sacred Music of Moroccan Jews, also recorded on the 1959 trip. The current
collection, assembled in an attractive box set, including the original liner notes
and photographs, a new introduction by American musician Lee Ranaldo, and
Schuyler’s extensive notes, brings together an expanded selection of 30 tracks
from the larger corpus of 250 recordings, made in 22 locations. Similar to the
original Library of Congress recordings, this set is organized geographically and
topically into two categories: “Highlands—the Berbers” and “Lowlands—Influ-
ent Strains.” Due to limitations of space, the 1972 release featured only selec-
tions from the full recordings, but this collection reproduces them in full and
features four tracks that did not appear on the earlier release but that, with one
exception, were all approved by Bowles himself. Schuyler notes that this binary
organization reflects Bowles’s understanding of Moroccan society and music.
While the former focused on what Bowles and many Moroccans understand to
be the more authentic traditions, the latter includes anything that is in Arabic or
that could be traced to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, or the Middle East. While
this latter category would be the vast majority of Morocco’s musical culture, in
Bowles’s ears it represented a source of cultural contagion.
The recordings themselves have been digitized and remastered, and as a
result the audio quality is much improved over the original release. Of course,
Bowles faced many limitations in his excursion: a cumbersome recording device
(an Ampex 601), irregular availability of electricity for the recorder, and his own
desire for convenience. As a result he had to record mostly in towns and villages
near the main roads, often having musicians brought to him. He was also limited
by the political situation and sometimes the indifference, or interference, of the
Moroccan government and hence was unable to record in many areas of the
country, such as the southeast. Although he was not scholarly in his approach
and recorded on the fly, even opportunistically, Bowles did compile extensive
commentaries on his six-month trip. However, they offer little by way of musi-
cal or ethnographic detail. Schuyler notes that Bowles himself saw his task as

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 Recording Reviews 379

capturing the sounds and leaving later scholars to make sense of them. For this
reason, Schuyler’s extensive notes and commentary on the recordings elaborate
on and contextualize Bowles’s often incomplete (or biased) information and
interpretations. They not only offer engaging reading but make the collection
into a vital scholarly source on Moroccan music, something Bowles himself
was not able or willing to do. Ethnomusicologists and scholars of North Africa
and the Middle East will find useful information, as well as several beautiful
recordings of sounds that give a sense of the enormous diversity of Morocco’s
musical cultures, which did not disappear under the juggernaut of modernity
as Bowles feared but remains vibrant, if changed, today.

References
Music of Morocco. 1972. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center FS L63–64.
Sacred Music of Moroccan Jews, Paul Bowles Collection. 2000. Rounder 82161-5087-2.

Jonathan H. Shannon Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

The Flowing Waters: Guqin Music of Liang Mingyue. Performed by Liang

Mingyue. 2007. Lyrichord Discs Inc. LYRCD 7453. One compact disc. Notes
in English (5 pp.).
Chine: “Le pêcheur et le bûcheron”: Le qin, cithare des lettrés (China:
“The Fisherman and the Woodcutter”: The Qin, Zither of the Lite-
rati). Performed by Sou Si-tai. 2006. Recorded by Miller-Lacombe, Stu-
dio Axis, Geneva. Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire, Musée
d’Ethnographie VDE-GALLO 1214. One compact disc. Booklet (23 pp.)
with notes in French by Georges Goormaghtigh, English translation by
Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff, and photographs by Maryam Goormaghtigh.
The qin, or guqin, a plucked string instrument, is still hardly known in the
West and the larger world outside of China. In its home country, the instrument
and its music have been written about for over two millennia, rhapsodized by
poets, portrayed by painters, interpreted and debated by musicians, theorized
by philosophers, and invoked in popular narratives and operas. During its long
history, the instrument has changed very little in its construction and playing
technique, in its repertoire, in its musical notation, and, until the early twentieth
century, in the role it plays in the life and society of the privileged literati class.
The qin surpasses any other musical instrument in China in the abundance
of archaeological records, words, icons, lore, and musical notation; so much
information has been generated that it would take a person several lifetimes
to sort it all out. In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed qin music one of twenty-eight

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