Forever lost

I saw this recording before I heard it. At the Pitt Rivers Museum at the start of the project. The physical object: an original Edison wax phonograph cylinder from 1914. I was struck by how modern it seemed in some ways; the corporate branding on the label. I imagined it being purchased from a shop. 

Then I saw it was a recording made in Nagaland and I thought of my friend, Temsu, an artist from Nagaland. I thought of Nagaland: such a fascinating place, so rich in tradition and culture; megaliths, hills and jungle. Then I heard the recording, the voices singing rhythmically, a work song designed to make the hours pass and how the hours have passed – into years, decades, a century. I wondered about those people and how little I will ever know of their lives. And the voice that introduces the recording too, an anthropologist now just as lost to time as the singing Nagas, his world on the brink of being consumed by an industrial warfare that within a generation would reach Nagaland too in one of the biggest, most significant battles of the second war, now largely forgotten here. 

I thought of Vaughn-Williams and of Butterworth (he himself lost in that first war), I thought of their reinvention of folk music at that time and all of the periodic rediscoveries of folk music since. This led me to a work song melody with its purpose lost, morphed into a hypnotic repetition. The richness of individual lives melted down and boiled by time; all of it forever lost, only dust and ghosts scratched into wax. 

"Ishi no ghi sholu": agricultural work song reimagined by Jon Griffin.
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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds