Musics Lost and Found: Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition, by Michael Church

Music writer, critic and collector Michael Church describes this often engrossing book as an informal rather than formal history of song collecting. Certainly, its chapters range beguilingly if sometimes randomly across the globe and the centuries.

Church celebrates often colourful and hugely learned characters driven by an almost religious zeal to record little known and endangered music. Here are Jesuit priests in ancient Beijing and the Moldavian “polyglot polymath”, Dimitrie Cantemir, taken to Constantinople as hostage but becoming a renowned expert on Turkish music. There is the doughty Alice C Fletcher championing Native American music in the late 19th century, as Béla Bartók unearths Hungary’s village music riches.

Some met tragic ends, such as the

Armenian priest Komitas, admired by the likes of Debussy, whose archive and life were destroyed amid the Turkish genocide; or

France’s first musical Arabist, Francisco Salvador Daniel, who died at the barricades of the Paris Commune.

Important English collectors feature, such as Sabine Baring-Gould and particularly the dominant if sometimes contentious figure of Cecil Sharp, who collected thousands of songs, while

successors included the ineffably weird composer-collector Percy Grainger.

Church’s conclusions, however, smack of “last leaves” syndrome, despite the revivals flourishing here and elsewhere, as he enumerates the real threats to global indigenous music – ubiquitous westernisation, the advent of radio, the death of village culture and too many brutal political regimes.