Playing the field

摘要

At the end of 2018, while the usual suspects battled to get their latest offerings to the top of the Christmas pop charts, the best-selling World Music album was a double CD of recordings made more than a half a century ago. Between 1954 and 1963, David Attenborough made a series of expeditions to find exotic animals for his BBC television series Zoo Quest. He also captured the music of the people he encountered, as you can hear on My Field Recordings From Across The Planet. As he writes, 'Back in 1960s there were still parts of the world where European music hadn't been heard; where the traditions which had been developed by human beings over centuries were still continued with no knowledge of the Western style of music, which since then has enveloped the world. So these sounds, which I captured with a clumsy tape recorder 50 years ago, do have a quality which you wouldn't be able to replicate today'.