Music
The Song of Felicca Lether (Winter 2025)
Ethnomusicological archives should question what should and should not be listened to. The goal of this project is to examine the morally dubious recordings of the past, more recent recordings made in response to those, and how I may interact with both. I will do this by listening to the non-musical aspects of old recordings made by Frances Densmore, programming various transcriptions, like those of Alice Fletcher, in MIDI and then placing the resulting audio within the soundscape of Densmore’s recordings. Influence is taken from Basinski’s Disintegration Loops and I am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier as these are both sound art pieces that treat the space around music with great consideration. The goal is to look for ways to listen to these recordings not just for the preserved music but for the medium itself. This will serve as a good starting point for other projects related to musical archives and instrument collections. Large repatriation projects have been done in the past, but perhaps sound art in this fashion can produce another route for interacting with archives that have an uncomfortable past, but not uncomfortable enough so that prohibiting access is a better option.