The stack of discs stands waisthigh, big 16-inch transcriptions, some 100 hours of music, a recorded hullabaloo of wails, twangs, drumbeats and gong-whams. It is the biggest mass of raw material that U.S. musicologists and anthropologists have yet had from the East Indies and the South Seas.
The big collection of primitive music survived a shipwreck and an automobile smashup before it was brought home by a footloose familybronzed, youngish Bruce and Sheridan Fahnestock, and their plump, jolly mother.
Thanks to movies, phonograph, radio and missionary, the world's primitive music is fast dying....