Longing for the Past: The 78 rpm Era in Southeast Asia by David Murray (review)

Longing for the Past is an elegantly produced and copiously illustrated book-and-CD package. The four CDs contain digital transfers of commercial 78 rpm recordings made in mainland and island Southeast Asia, two-thirds of them before World War II. It is a very welcome Southeast Asian instance of the revived interest in recordings from the first half of the twentieth century, before field recording became a normal practice for anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. It is not clear, however, precisely what audience this collection is aimed at. On the one hand, it is a coffee-table book with audio, designed to be dipped into but not studied, and on this level it definitely succeeds, presenting unfamiliar sounds and images attractively. For listeners without access to a collection of 78s, nearly every track here is a treasure—a first opportunity to hear a wide variety of genres, classical and folk, urban and (in lesser quantity) rural, as they were performed 60, 70, even a hundred years ago. The transfer quality is always acceptable and sometimes excellent. On the other hand, the production is also targeted at—and largely written by—ethnomusicologists, and here it is less successful, though by no means a failure. In this review, I consider the value of Longing for the Past not for the browsing reader/listener but for the area scholars and ethnomusicologists who are the primary readers of this journal.

Here is the breakdown of recordings in the collection by country and by decade.

	Pre-WWI	1920s	1930s	1940s	1950s	1960s	Total
Vietnam		5	6	2	1	1	15
Cambodia		1	7		1		9
Laos		11	1				12
Thailand	1		3	4	7	2	17
Burma	3	3	6	1	2	1	16
Indonesia		3	5	2	3		13
Malaysia/Singapore	2		3	1	2		8
Total	6	23	31	10	16	4	90

The book begins with a seven-page essay (not counting full-page illustrations) by David Murray, the compiler of the whole collection, on the recording industry in Southeast Asia. This sketches the conditions in which the recordings were produced, emphasizing that recording was an industry, subject to pressures to repay investment and turn a profit. Aside from discographical commentary on particular tracks, David Murray turns the rest of the book over to six ethnomusicologists, specialists in the geographic areas represented by the selections. Jason Gibbs annotates the Vietnamese recordings; Terry Miller those from Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos; Kit Young those from Burma; Sooi Beng Tan those from Malaysia and Singapore; and David Harnish those from Indonesia. This was an astute move by David Murray, guaranteeing knowledgeable commentary without demanding that one writer be responsible for the entire region.

Following Murray’s notes on the recording industry, the ethnomusicologists give two- or three-page sketches of the history, ethnic composition, and principal music genres of each country or region. (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore are treated in a single two-page essay.) Then follow the commentaries on each track of the four CDs. These commentaries typically contain precise information about the instrumentation, the performers, the genre, and, in some cases, the musical features of the selection. But it is sometimes clear that the commentators did not themselves choose these selections. There is something dutiful about their annotations: they were assigned these recordings and had to find something to say about them.

This points us toward what I believe is the principal drawback of the collection: The selections were made through a combination of subjectivity and accident. They represent the compiler’s choice of his favorite tracks from his own collection and those of a small number of friends. (Four collectors besides Murray are named in the acknowledgments.) They are thus personal selections made from a random assortment of discs. (Apparently also they were sequenced...