1.4. Sonic Traces: Analysis and Sound Recordings in Comparative Musicology

In my presentation I will deal with the history of music analysis in comparative musicology. With establishing the Berlin Phonogram-Archive and processing their wax cylinder recordings from all over the world, a group of researchers around Erich Moritz v. Hornbostel, Georg Herzog, Mieczyslaw Kolinski and others institutionalized the academic engagement with the musics of the world under the brand ...of “comparative musicology” in beginning of the 20th century in Germany. The analytical practices of Hornbostel et al. follow a positivistic and universalistic approach in line with contemporary evolutionary paradigms of anthropology, as they focused on transcriptions, tonal and frequency measurements, and large-scale comparisons of archived phonograph recordings. I will argue that with those practices of recording, archiving, dissecting, and comparing, recorded sound was utilized as sonic trace against the backdrop of Ginzburgian conjectural paradigm (Ginzburg 1989). In accord with medical semiotics the engagement with sound recordings as sonic traces enabled comparative musicology to establish specific listening practices as “privileged technique[s] of empirical examination” that made the “truth” about the musics of the world “audible” (Sterne 2003, p. 122) while the colonial entanglements of these recordings as well as their local ontologies were overlooked or ignored. I will introduce and discuss those practices in detail in regard to the following questions: What can we learn from revisiting those scientific practices regarding current analytical and archival practices in ethno-musicology? What taken for granted epistemologies of recorded sound are still at play these days?
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