“Este é Ndau daqui mesmo [...] este é Ndau de Búzi” Echoes of a Listening Experience of Historical Sound Recordings from Mozambique, 91 Years Later

Abstract

The beginning of the 20th century is marked, in the field of comparative musicology, by the boom in the recording by European institutions of musical traditions in the non-Western world. Mozambique was one of the countries selected to “be recorded” and the 1931 expedition by anthropologists Günther Spannaus and Karl Stülpner signaled the first sound recordings from that region of the world. The expedition to Mozambique is part of seven extensive voyages funded by the Staatlich-Sächsschen Forschungsinstitut für Völkerkunde between 1926 and 1931, as part of a plan to develop some research institutes created and/or selected to become the most avant-garde institutions in the study of the humanities of the time. This paper intends, on the one hand, to contextualize the expedition to Mozambique within the scope of the general expeditions carried out by the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv at the beginning of the 20th century; on the other hand, it intends to share the results of the collective listening experiences, in 2022, of the sound recordings of 1931 with the descendants of the recorded voices. The experiences of collective listening are part of the methodological options of my doctoral research, aiming at the future repatriation of sounds to their place of origin.