ABSTRACT
Contemplating the career of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax makes you think of Walt Whitman’s declaration “I am large, I contain multitudes.” A pioneer in field recording of traditional music and one of the founders of the Library of Congress Folk Music Archive, Lomax often characterized his mission as bringing the best recording technology to the world’s traditional singers and musicians, so that their art could take its rightful place as an equal beside the best classical and commercial music. His exquisite taste and a flair for eliciting great performances led to recordings of intense vitality, many of which are now available on more than 100 CDs issued by Rounder Records. His important collections include secular and sacred music of the American South, the Caribbean, Italy, Spain, and the British Isles. While living in England in the 1950s, he compiled album series of world music for the BBC and Columbia Records. Feeling that performance style was deeply embedded in culture, he worked with Victor Grauer and Roswell Rudd (musicologists), Conrad Arensberg, Edwin Erickson, Barbara Ayres, and Monika Vizedom (anthropologists), and Norman Berkowitz (computer programmer and statistician) to develop Cantometrics-“a method for systematically and holistically describing the general features of accompanied or unaccompanied song. With the cantometric system the listener can evaluate a song performance in ways that supplement the conventional measures of melody, rhythm, and harmony.”1
