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  3. (1) Whoever wishes to collect from the mouth of the people should hurry; folk

(1) Whoever wishes to collect from the mouth of the people should hurry; folk

游客2023-10-28  14
问题    (1) Whoever wishes to collect from the mouth of the people should hurry; folk songs are disappearing one after another. Thus wrote Ludolf Parisius, a German song collector, nearly two centuries ago. Others have since said the same, for just as spoken languages can die, so too can musical ones.
   (2) A century ago song-collection was an important part of the study of musical languages. There were archives of "field recordings" in Berlin, London and Washington DC, which could express deep social truth; they were the heartbeat of humanity. They served other purposes, too. Like many of their contemporaries, Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok, two Hungarians who visited Magyar villages in the early 1900s, used the folk music they hoovered up to enrich their own compositions.
   (3) Meanwhile, the nascent record companies were also getting in on the act. But the British Gramophone Company and its German and American rivals had little interest in musicology. The songs and dances they recorded in Central and South-East Asia were for sale back to the people of those regions, who would, it was hoped, buy the expensive equipment needed to play them. It is a sweet historical irony that their shellac discs are now musicological treasures: some antique Balinese pieces are known solely because in the early 1930s a Canadian composer bought some of those records in a shop in Bali. The warehouse manager, angry that his wares were not selling, smashed the rest in a rage.
   (4) It was only in 1933, when John Lomax, an American folklorist, began making his marathon collection of recordings from the American South for the Library of Congress, that the significance of field recordings became generally realised. By the mid-1900s the world was being scoured by musicologists seeking to document and preserve, with ethnographic labels giving them altruistic support: Folkways in America, Topic in Britain and Ocora, set up by the French government initially to record the music of the French West African colonies as they moved towards independence. It was a measure of the prestige attached to field-recordings that, in 1977, one of the Nonesuch label’s recordings of traditional Balinese gamelan music was sent into outer space as part of the Voyager Golden Record.
   (5) The world music boom of the 1990s was galvanised by a best-selling Cuban album, "Buena Vista Social Club". Who could not be fired by the spectacle of some very old men and women (and their label) striking gold with forgotten music of irresistible charm? Record companies rushed to join the bonanza, but it lasted only a few years. The growth of digital media and the decline in the market for specialist CDs (and record shops’ increasing reluctance to stock them) turned boom into bust. This slump hit the ethnographic companies hard. Some closed down, and others abandoned CDs in favour of digital distribution. The long-awaited release of Dust-to-Digital’s box of Moroccan field recordings, made in the 1950s by Paul Bowles, author of "The Sheltering Sky", highlights another marketing ploy: with Bowles’s notes handsomely presented in a leather-bound book, the box is an art-object in itself. But Topic now survives on its backlist, and is no longer able to finance new field recordings; Ocora still bravely continues to produce them, though its director Serge Noel-Ranaivo admits the label’s future is "not assured".
   (6) Smithsonian Folkways is in fine fettle, in large part because of its unparalleled resources. The not-for-profit label of the American museum follows the policy of Moses Asch, whose company, Folkways, it acquired in 1987: every release should be kept available to the public, whether profitable or not. Smithsonian’s distribution is increasingly digital and it is expanding its collection by acquiring others, including 127 unreleased albums of traditional music that were made by UNESCO in over 70 countries. It still releases new field recordings, but its splendid ten-CD survey of the music of Central Asia was only possible thanks to a subsidy from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. A projected African series will not happen without similar help.
   (7) Professor Theodore Levin, producer of that Central Asian series, is a rare optimist. " Ethnographic recordings have never been easier to make and disseminate," he says. " Anyone with a Zoom recorder and a laptop can make digital field recordings and put them online. " He also points to the proliferation of cross-cultural fusions now being recorded.
   (8) But there are more reasons to be pessimistic. YouTube recordings are no substitute for the scrupulously curated products of Smithsonian and Ocora, and although some inspired fusions are being created in Central Asia, most come and go without a trace. Traditional music typically evolves slowly, and in a stable environment. If its ecosystem is destroyed, it can wither and die. New musical forms, rap included, continue emerging. But, as sound archives now recognise, local music is fading away. Parisius, the German collector of early song, was spot-on. [br] Why did record companies start to abandon CDs?
选项 A、Because they are in favour of specialist albums.
B、Because they are in favour of the best-selling album.
C、Because they are in favour of Bowles’s notes.
D、Because they are in favour of digital distribution.
答案 D
解析 细节题。原文第五段提到由于数码技术的出现，音乐发行方式发生变化，磁带和光碟被代替，因此[D]为答案。[A]、[B]、[C]都不符合题意，因此排除。
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