Curating ‘a repository of souls' (December 17, 2009)
For six months of the past year, University of Toronto Mississauga Vice-Principal Academic and Dean Gage Averill has led a second life, curating a collection of the oldest recordings of Haitian music and ceremonies ever made. "Starting in January, I'd spend half the day with my headphones on at my laptop, immersed in the Haiti of 70 years ago, and the rest of the time, I was reading spreadsheets and sitting through meetings, doing the dean thing," he says. The result of those long hours is Alan Lomax in Haiti, a 10-disc box set of audio and video released in November, which has garnered major media attention around the world and delighted fans of Caribbean music and scholars alike.
The recordings were made by Alan Lomax, who became one of the 20th century's foremost collectors of folk music. In 1936, at the age of 21, he accepted a commission from the Library of Congress to visit Haiti and record the music he found there. It was a time of social upheaval for the country, which was grappling with widespread poverty and the challenges of independence following 15 years of American occupation.
According to Averill, an ethnomusicologist who specializes in Caribbean music, Lomax never talked much about his time in Haiti upon his return, and his recordings were lost until a researcher working in Lomax's archives stumbled upon the collection of aluminum discs 10 years ago. Gage started his work with the 1,500 separate recordings at about the same time, having them digitally restored and preparing them for release. Unfortunately, the project's funding fell through, and it sat in limbo until early 2009, when Harte Recordings signed a deal to release the recordings as a high-end box set and asked Averill to curate it.
Averill's job was to listen to all of the recordings--more than 50 hours of sound and six films--and decide which were of high enough acoustic and aesthetic quality to release. He then had to decide how to compile the recordings in a way that made sense to listeners and go through Lomax's field notes, logs and diaries to prepare lyric translations, as well as notes for each disc and the collection as a whole.
Although Averill and his co-translator, Louis Carl St. Jean, are both fluent in Creole, he says there were some cases when they had to enlist the aid of "old heads," Haitian elders who are considered culturally rich. "We'd be calling them and playing these recordings over the phone, and they were having really interesting reactions," he says. "They'd say, 'No one has sung that song here in 50 years, I can't believe you have this recorded. No one plays like that any more.'"
Averill says Lomax was a voracious listener, so it's no surprise the box set includes a wide range of music, from children's songs and Catholic canticles to classical compositions and an indigenized style of Caribbean troubadour. "There were also old French ballads from the 17th century that persisted in Haiti about medieval themes," says Averill. "It's bizarre to listen to a group of old men in a small town in southern Haiti sing songs about jailed knights and the visits of damsels to their jail houses. It's amazing what Lomax heard."
The collection also includes film of a rare religious ceremony that hadn't been conducted in 20 or 30 years, since ceremonies involving becoming possessed or making sacrifices had been outlawed. "Now, you have to imagine, this family had disastrous things happening for 20 years, they finally have enough money to invest in this very important ceremony that had to be just right to placate the gods and remove the curse," explains Averill. "So, here comes Lomax with bundles of recording devices, and these people freaked. They imagined all these terrible scenarios, that the white American would anger the gods, but in the end, Alan contributed what I think was probably $20 to the ceremony, which was half or more of the cost, and they caved and he recorded this fascinating movie."
Averill says it's these sorts of rare recordings that he hopes will captivate anyone interested in Caribbean music and culture. Of all the potential audiences who may hear and see the collection, though, Averill is most interested in getting the recordings to Haitians themselves. Once, while working on the project, he had a chance to play some of the recordings for American dancer and writer Katherine Dunham, who did work in Haiti around the same as Lomax. "A comment she made about carrying around a repository of souls in these recordings sparked some thinking about this ethical obligation to guard well the creative product of a disappeared generation," he said.
To that end, Averill will repatriate the collection in Haiti in 2010 thanks to support from the Clinton Global Initiative and the Green Family Foundation. "We'll take the collection of 1,500 recordings and distribute box sets to cultural centres and libraries across the island," he says. "I think it will have some interesting effects, and some of the fun will be just watching people listen to them."
By Bruce Gillespie
