The British Library has recently acquired  a collection of field recordings made at the Skamba Skamba Kankliai Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania. The recordings were made by field recordist and composer Yiorgis Sakellariou with support from World & Traditional Music at the British Library and the generous guidance of Dr. Austė Nakienė at the Lithuanian Institute of Folklore and Literature in Vilnius. The following text, written by Yiorgis Sakellariou himself, details his experience at the festival and features audio excerpts from the collection:   

The Skamba Skamba Kankliai recording project is more so the documentation of an intense listening experience rather than the result of thorough ethnomusicological research. When I arrived in Vilnius I was mainly motivated by the curiosity to see how traditional Lithuanian music is presented and staged at a large-scale festival. My previous knowledge on the subject was fragmentary. I had recently lived in Lithuania for about a year and during that time I became interested in the country's folk music, however I never developed an organized method of collecting or documenting it. Nonetheless, it was easy to discover that there is a big variety of songs and dances and, furthermore, a long history of recording and archiving Lithuanian music.

Since 1973, Skamba Skamba Kankliai has been held annually in Vilnius, Lithuania and currrently it is organized by the Vilnius Ethnic Culture Centre. Every year the festival welcomes a large number of folk ensembles that present a wide and diverse range of traditional music. The festival also hosts international ensembles. In 2014, ensembles from Azerbaijan, Italy, Iran and Georgia assisted and performed folk music from their countries.

The concerts took place in several locations of the old town of Vilnius and many times they overlapped which made it impossible to record every single one. I tried to record music that was as diverse and representative as possible, documenting material on the basis of style, place of origin, instrumentation or age and gender of singers. Often the decision was purely practical (distance between stages, exhaustion, weather conditions etc.). The recordings attempt to capture not only the performed music but also the sonic atmosphere of the festival. The concerts took place in squares, parks, streets, alleys, theatres and churches and on several occasions the purely musical sounds are mixed with street and crowd noise or simply the recording location’s ambiance.

This collection can only document a small sample of Lithuania’s long musical tradition but hopefully the recordings will stimulate curiosity of listeners who are interested in world and traditional music. I do not consider the recorded material as a relic of a past that desperately tries to catch up with the present and secure a place in the future. These songs, which mostly originated in late 19^th century’s rural life, are filtered through the new ideas and experiences of the people that currently perform them and afterwards through me, an observer/recordist of the performances. The recordings themselves act as another filter, substituting the physical experience of actually being present at the performance. Yet, despite the multiple layers of filters, the core of the music remains intact. My impression, or perhaps even wish, is that its truthfulness can still deeply affect the listener of the 21^st century. 

Here are a few highlights from the festival selected and commented by Yiorgis Sakellariou.

Sasutalas folk ensemble performs Kas tar teka par dvarelį 

Listen here

The most significant form of Lithuanian singing is the polyphonic sutartinės (from the word sutarti meaning 'to be in agreement'). Each song includes short melodic patterns with few notes, which are sung independently following the polyphonic vocal music rules of heterophony, canon and counterpoint. On 1 June, the last day of the festival, Sasutalas folk ensemble performed a set of sutartinės at Adomas Mickevičius yard. A few children were playing games around the yard shortly before it started to rain.  

Toma Grašytė, Adelė Vaiginytė and Ieva Kisieliūtė perform Lioj saudailio, vokaro (sutartinė) 

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This sutartinė was performed by three singers at the opening of Nakties muzika (Night Music), a concert that was set in the atmospheric Lėlė theatre late on the evening of 30 May. A mesmerized audience of around forty people was in attendance.

Liucija Vaicenavičiūtė perform Vaikščiojo motulė po dvarų

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Earlier that day at the Lėlė theatre, Čiulba Čiulbutis (Little Bird Warbles), an event focusing on solos, duets and trios, took place. Liucija Vaicenavičiūtė is a member of the ensemble Vaicenavičių šeima (Vaicenavičius family). She sings a song about a mother who wakes her sweetest young daughter up and encourages her to go to the garden and look after their male guests.

Tatato folk ensemble performs Ar aušta rytas, ar diena?

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Tatato is the ensemble of the studio of the Ethnomusicology Department of Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy. The ensemble director, Daiva Vyčinienė, has been devoted to the spreading and teaching of Lithuanian folk music for the past twenty years. 

You can listen to more recordings from the Skamba Skamba Kankliai Recording Project in British Library Reading Rooms by searching for C1661 on our catalogue. The British Library also has several CD publications documenting Lithuanian songs and music from 1908-1941 which were kindly donated by the Lithuanian Institute of Folklore and Literature. In addition, Yiorgis Sakellariou has also deposited environmental field recordings made in Lithuania at the British Library which you can find on our catalogue under collection number WA 2014/019.

Listen online to more collections from World & Traditional music!

Jeremy Hegge is an Australian field recordist, based in Sydney, who has been recording the sounds of nature for just over a year. A new donor to the British Library's sound archive, a selection of Jeremy's recordings will soon be available in the Environment & Nature section of British Library Sounds.

1. When did you first become interested in recording the sounds of the natural world?

I guess I first started when I used to go for walks in the Royal National Park in my late teens. At the time I had been using my mobile phone to record my own lo-fi music at home and around that time, I think particularly because of the films I had been watching, ambient sound was starting to become much more important to me. So, I started recording the sounds of the forest with my phone, either just to listen to later or with the intention of putting them in between the lo-fi songs I had been recording, sometimes also incorporating them into the music too. I never released any of this music though! 

In my late teens I was becoming more and more interested in films, so I started to see a much larger diversity of films. One thing that annoyed me as I became more aware of the different aspects of filmmaking was the scores of the film, which I felt were unnecessary. I found that all they usually did was add melodrama and take away a lot of the sincerity and natural ambience of the moment. I also felt, and still do, that the ambient sound of a place is far more powerful than any musical score. I think 'Lancelot du Lac' by Robert Bresson was the first film I remember seeing without any score and seeing what a difference it made was probably quite influential. Eventually I decided I wanted to make films myself and when I did I knew how I wanted to make them. Long static takes, largely focusing on nature, and only using the ambient sound of the place and the imagery to give narrative to the films.

I made my first film 'Miluwarra' in late 2012, which I shot in a small pocket of rainforest in the Royal National Park. At first I intended to just use the internal sound of the camera but, after listening back, I realised the sound quality wasn't good enough. I wanted the film to have only the sounds of nature without man-made sound, but that made it too difficult to wait to shoot until the sounds of planes and cars were gone! At that point I bought an Olympus LS-5 and went into the forest over several weeks and gathered sounds for the film. Although the recorder was initially just to use for my films, I had started to listen to other field recordists sometime in mid-late 2012 and so eventually started to use it to record other sounds. For some reason on one night in April 2013, I decided to go out to my favourite part of the Royal National Park and went into the forest to record for a few hours. I remember setting up my recorder and standing in the dark, the full moon shining through the canopy of the forest; standing still, listening, then after a few minutes hearing one Southern Boobook (at the time I had no idea what was making the sound) starting to call in the distance and then another closer. I had never just stood in the darkness, in a forest, and just listened before. It was a really mesmerizing experience. After that I started to become addicted to field recording, in particular recording nature sounds.

 
 

2. Do you have a preference when it comes to recording subjects? Wildlife over atmospheres for example? 

I definitely don't have a preference in that sense. All that matters to me is if a sound moves me or not. I like a lot of mechanical/electrical sounds as well as biophony and geophony. I think I do have a preference to the more surreal sounds though and I probably prefer nocturnal sounds over diurnal ones. One of my favourite birds is the Tawny Frogmouth whose call sounds a bit like a car alarm, and I also love owls and nightjars. Possums can make some incredibly haunting sounds too!

Marley Lagoon At Night, Royal National Park

3. You’ve only been recording for just over a year. What do you think you’ve learnt in that time? 

It's hard to say. I've learnt most of the basic things about field recording by myself, from experience and experimenting, although every now and then I will ask other field recordists that I respect for advice. My editing technique is something I have been working on for a while now and I am really happy with my editing lately (which is normally quite minimal, usually just raising the higher frequencies by about 5db and occasionally editing out any sounds that I don't like or don't feel appropriate for the mood of the recording). Microphone placement is more important to me than when I first started, and also the quality of the equipment that I now use. When I first started I was using an Olympus LS-5 and now I use an AT BP4025 in a Tascam DR-680, along with two jrf d-series hydrophones and two c-series contact microphones. I'm planning to replace the BP4025 with two DPA 4060s within the next few months too.

Durations have become more important to me too, both in film and sound. When I first started recording I would usually record 10-15 minutes in one location but now I record at least 1-2 hours, and lately I have been getting recordings 12-15 hours long, usually releasing albums with just one recording from one location.

4. Australia seems like a recordist’s paradise, with so many wonderful wild spaces and incredible species. Do you have favourite recording locations and why do they resonate with you so much?

Australia certainly is but, since I don't have a driver's licence, I'm not able to explore much of it at the moment unfortunately! Since I'm only able to access a few locations by train, I feel like a kid in a candy store but I can only choose two or three of the hundreds of candies! I'm working on getting my licence at the moment, so hopefully by the end of the year I will have it. Australia is such an incredibly diverse country and, as you say, there is still so much wilderness left, though no "untouched" wilderness I might add, and I aim to spend most of my life mainly exploring and recording the Australian continent.

My favourite place that I have recorded in so far would easily be the Daintree rainforest in far North Queensland. I really loved the songs of the birds there, in particular the Black Butcherbird and Green Oriole, as well as the incredible variety of cicadas. Unfortunately I got some tropical flu while I was there, so was sick for half the time and didn't get to explore the jungle as much as I would have liked to. I am aiming to head back there sometime during the next wet season if weather permits (the Daintree can receive up to 8m of rainfall a year!), though last year when I went it was very dry, so you never know.

Daintree rainforest (Jeremy Hegge)

5. Are there any recordings in your collection that you’re particularly proud of? Why is that?

One of my favourite recordings that I've gotten since I started is a frog chorus I recorded last summer in the Royal National Park. I had stayed in the forest, about 30 minutes walk from the road, from late afternoon and recorded the transition from dusk until night for about an hour and a half (you would not believe how incredibly loud the cicadas were on that night!). About an hour or so into the night, I left my spot by the creek where I had been sitting for nearly 2 hours and went to pick up my recorder. After I had walked back to the road, I continued along it as I was still about an hour's walk from the entrance of the forest and, as I started to get close to a bridge which goes over the Hacking River, I could hear this amazing frog chorus, the most alive I had ever heard in the area. I set up the recorder right by the edge of the river, underneath the bridge, and left it for about 20 minutes. When you listen you can hear how close the frogs were to the microphone; some were almost next to it. Two of the frogs species have some of my favourite vocalisations as well (Litoria phyllochroa and Litoria peronii).

Nocturnal Frog Chorus Under A Bridge, Royal National Park

I also got some fantastic recordings in the Daintree. I got a really textural recording in the tropical mangroves there at 1am in the morning; you can hear all the fruit popping off the mangrove trees and falling into the water along with a quiet insect chorus, the occasional bat, a distant bird, and crustaceans. The dawn choruses up there were wonderful too! I hope my best recordings are ahead of me though.

Night By A Mangrove Swamp, Daintree National Park

Royal National Park valley (Jeremy Hegge)

Double Drummer Cicada, Brisbane Water National Park (Jeremy Hegge)

6. You’ve already published several albums, both independently and through labels such as Very Quiet Records. Is this something you would like develop further?

I certainly would and am. I'm pretty easy going with releasing albums and if I record something that I like then I will usually release it digitally for free. 

At the moment I have a digital release coming out in November on Gruenrekorder titled 'Marrdja', which features two approximately 30 minute recordings made in the tropical mangroves in the Daintree: the nocturnal one I mentioned earlier as well as the transition from dawn to morning. There's also a digital release coming out in December on Green Field Recordings called 'The Coast Of Cape Tribulation' which features four recordings from the coastal forests/mangrove swamps of Cape Tribulation, two above water and two under it.

Once I get my driver's license, I will be releasing a lot more recordings from other places throughout Australia, and I'm going to northern South Africa in November as part of Francisco Lopez and James Webb's Sonic Mmabolela residency, so I'm sure I will be releasing a lot of material from there as well!

Middle of the Night excerpt_VQR

7. Are there any wildlife sound recordists who particularly inspire you? 

I don't know if inspire is the right word (maybe it is) but there are few that have influenced me in one way or another. 

David Michael's long form recordings really struck a chord with me when I discovered them and he has given me some great advice about external batteries, as well as giving me the advice to leave the low frequencies in my recordings. I always used to edit out the frequencies below 100hz but when you do that you take out a lot of the depth of the recording. 

Tony Whitehead and his label Very Quiet Records has been very influential on my listening and appreciation of quiet sounds, something I didn't used to find very interesting before, and recently I have been trying to record sounds at the volume they actually are, and not amplifying in post either, largely because of this. I think listening to quiet sounds can offer a completely different type of tranquillity and is something so many of us are not used to in our busy, noisy urban/suburban lives. From my experience, nature usually is pretty quiet and is nowhere near as loud as the levels recordists usually amplify their sounds to, which I think gives an unrealistic documentation of the way natural habitats sound.

Jez Riley French's and many other recordists explorations with contact microphones and hydrophones has also been very influential on my way of listening.

8. Finally, with so many ways of documenting our surroundings we ask the question Why field recording?

I think sound is such a powerful, moving medium and that it will always resonate with people. Sound has been important to humans since the day we existed, as well as the primates that we evolved from. The sounds in our every day life strongly effects us in almost every aspect. I feel that listening to the sounds of the earth, whether "natural" or man-made, can give us a closer connection to and awareness of our planet and everything within it. Field recording has changed my life and it's always fascinating to be continually discovering how incredibly diverse the sounds of the earth can be, through my own and many other peoples recording.

Sounds and images all courtesy of Jeremy Hegge. Visit Jeremy's Bandcamp page here.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Coxhoe, Hartlepool and three discussions in Middlesbrough (one with a group of young friends, one with rival football fans and one with three generations from the same family). Together they constitute the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Radio Cleveland. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Coxhoe and the friends in Middlesbrough, also include a detailed description of the phonology and grammar of the speakers.

Teesside was the focus of considerable linguistic debate last summer when BBC business correspondent, Sophie McGovern, revealed she received regular complaints from viewers about her Middlesbrough accent. This followed reports earlier the same year that a Middlesbrough primary school had solicited parental support in addressing teachers' concerns that local dialect features were compromising children's formal written English. Personally I've always enjoyed the accents and dialects of the region and local celebrities such as Bob Mortimer (from Acklam, Middlesbrough), Vic Reeves (from Darlington, County Durham) and Mark Benton (from Guisborough, North Yorkshire) are extremely popular figures whose speech patterns are, I sense, an integral part of their appeal.

The backgrounds of these three entertainers hints at the competing cultural and linguistic influences in the area as Teesside straddles the historic counties of Durham and North Yorkshire - Middlesbrough itself was historically in North Yorkshire. Successive changes in administrative nomenclature (North Riding, North Yorkshire, Teesside, Cleveland) have been hotly contested locally as confirmed by this Middlesbrough family and this repeated upheaval underpins the study of Middlesbrough dialect by academic linguist, Carmen Llamas, who explores how local linguistic features reflect speaker identities across generations.

Intriguingly the Middlesbrough accent is frequently confused with accents further up the east coast in Newcastle upon Tyne and, perhaps more surprisingly, on the west coast in Liverpool. Similarity with speakers in Tyneside is most apparent in a shared tendency to glottalise the sounds <p>, <t> and <k> between vowels in words like happy, better and lucky. This distinctive pronunciation is a recent innovation on Teesside thought to be influenced by increasing identification - especially among younger speakers - with the North East. The equally striking pronunciation of word final <t> in words like it and that (pronounced as if it were a <h> sound) and the vowel sound used in words like first, bird and turn is probably more widely associated with English on Merseyside and thought to reflect the earlier influence of large-scale migration from Ireland to Teesside - and Merseyside - in the nineteenth century. All three phenomena can be heard frequently in the recording with former Middlesbrough schoolfriends.

What is also clear from this set of recordings is that the area remains lexically distinctive with examples of 'pan-northern' vocabulary (e.g. lass [= 'girl']), words shared with the North East (e.g. netty [= 'toilet'] and cuddy-wifter [= 'left-handed']) and with Yorkshire (e.g. mafted [= 'hot']) and iconic Teesside items (e.g. nick off [= 'to play truant']). The emergence in Middlesbrough of a second person plural form yous is also shared with other northern cities (notably Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow), while the recording in Coxhoe is particularly rich in typical local discourse markers:

0:07:31 by you're all proper from Cassop man

0:17:34 saying that mind [...] they certainly have interest when it comes round to the presentation evenings

0:19:56 you used to get great crack to them how but

0:35:33 that's just as old-fashioned as the hills like

0:36:48 why let them start their own clubs

The British Library has recently acquired  a collection of field recordings made in South Sudan which document Dinka song culture. Songs of the Dinka of South Sudan - Diɛt ke Jiëëŋ ne Cuëny Thudän - can now be accessed via our catalogue, by searching for C1580, and listened to online.  Dr. Angela Impey, one of the researchers on the project, has written the following text which contextualizes the research project and gives some general information on Dinka culture:

The songs in this collection were recorded for a project entitled Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song, which was conducted between 2009 and 2012 by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in collaboration with Dinka researchers in South Sudan. The academic aims of the project were, first, to understand the interplay between Dinka song structures and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of vowel duration, pitch and voice quality), and, second, to learn more about the song tradition and the ways it has responded to the intense disruptions caused by protracted civil war.  

Funding for the project was provided by the ‘Beyond Text’ programme of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Project participants included Bob Ladd, Angela Impey, Bert Remijsen, Elizabeth Achol Ajuet Deng, Peter Malek, and Simon Yak Deng Yak.

Photo credit: Robin Denselow

ABOUT DINKA SONG

Almost everyone in Dinka society will accumulate a repertoire of personal songs during their lifetime, and most dialect groups follow a similar compositional process. Individuals who lack the ability to compose good songs will approach a talented composer in the community and commission a composition in exchange for a cow or an agreed sum of money. Occasionally a composer will be considered a talented lyricist only, in which case a second individual, who has an aptitude for good melody making, will be brought into the process. Upon completion, the song will either be taught directly to the ‘owner’, or if the owner is not a good memoriser, via a group of relatives or age-mates, who will gradually pass it on to the owner.

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[In this ox song (C1580/59), Deng Jok Ajuoong, praises his ox, Mading, which he compares with an elephant. He sings about how he acquired his ox through hard work.]

Most musical structures in sub-Saharan Africa are based on highly repetitive, multi-part vocal and rhythmic interactions, and melodies are typically based on the hexatonic (six tones per octave) or equi-heptatonic scales (seven tones equally distributed across the octave). In contrast, Dinka tuning systems follow a standard pentatonic scale (five tones) and songs are composed in an extended series of linear, interconnected song-segments that follow a simple, regular or semi-regular pulse. Certain song types are accompanied by clapping, clapping sticks or a small double-sided drum (loor), and are performed either solo, in unison or in simple call-response format. The only melodic instrument played by the Dinka (apart from more recently introduced western instruments) is a 5-stringed lyre referred to as rababa. Marked aesthetic variations do occur across the dialect groups, which are likely to be the result of different social, economic, environmental and political circumstances.

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[This song (C1580/6) is performed by a women's group during the war in South Sudan. It is an encouraging song about Dr. John Garang and Koryom, a battalion of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The women start the song by singing “The Arabs said we are afraid, how can we be afraid while John Garang is strong?”]

Apart from one book (available in British Library Reading Rooms) published on song lyrics by Francis Mading Deng in 1973, no formal research has been conducted on Dinka music. Yet songs play a fundamental role in the lives of all Dinka people, functioning as individual and social chronicles of relationships, experiences and historical events. In fact, the Dinka boast an usually complex taxonomy of songs – praise songs, war songs, songs of initiation, cathartic songs, religious songs, to name a few – each of which is defined by discernible melodic, rhythmic and performative features. Woven through all song types, however, is the poetic allusion to the interconnection between self, cattle and land or locality. As one musician explained: If you know our Dinka songs, you will know the Dinka people.