In 2021, when I arrived in Paris to carry out a research internship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), I had the opportunity to meet the Malagasy guitarist and singer Charles Kely Zana-Rotsy, who had collaborated with Marc Chemillier, my research supervisor, on projects exploring the relationship between musical improvisation and artificial intelligence (Nika, Chemillier and Assayag 2016). In addition to Charles’s exceptional musicality, combining virtuosity with a remarkable ability to blend seemingly distant musical genres—which led him to coin the term Open Gasy to define his aesthetic proposal of opening Madagascar’s music to external influences—I was particularly intrigued by his position as a musician who had actively participated in the world music scene in France but, for some reason unknown to me at the time, had ceased to be part of it and was now pursuing his work independently.

World music, a problematic commercial category that encompasses everything from traditional orally transmitted music to appropriations of these sounds by European and North American artists (van der Lee 1998), occupied a prominent place in the French cultural landscape in the 1980s, to the point where Paris was considered one of its capitals (Winders 2006, 3; Kiwan and Meinhof 2011, 90). During the 1990s, world music still accounted for a considerable amount of record sales in France (Bensignor 1999), even when an increasingly hostile political environment towards immigration posed challenges for African musicians to stay there. At the beginning of the new millennium, although its novelty began to wane, world music still found strength primarily in the festival circuit (Winders 2006, 127), which was still sufficient to represent a promise for artists from the Global South to find recognition and dissemination of their music in Europe. This was the case with Charles, who moved in 2005 to Angoulême in southwestern France—not coincidentally, the city of Musiques Métisses, one of the most important festivals in the French world music scene.

The research that led to the film employed the subject-centered musical ethnography method proposed by Rice (2003). Besides the fact that I was working with a single musician, this approach was used because it was precisely motivated by recognizing the existence of deterritorialized and globalized musical practices in contemporaneity, such as world music. Furthermore, as explained by Marc Chemillier and me in a recent article (Chemillier and Prado 2023), it stimulated us to consider the hybridity of musical genres promoted by Charles from the dimensions of temporality (the chronological view of his career), locality (physical and imaginary spaces frequented or mobilized by him), and metaphor (the values and behaviors associated with hybridity). Thus, considering the co-utility of research products (Ranocchiari 2023), I saw in the making of a film about Charles the possibility of exploring new forms of ethnomusicological research on individuals (Stock 2001) that I had been developing in Brazil (Prado 2022; 2024), as well as an opportunity to study the world music scene not on a large scale, but from the perspective of a specific musician, an approach that, although advocated by Erlmann over thirty years ago (1993), is still underexplored. As for Charles, as he told me in one of our early meetings, the film could be a means to showcase an overview of his career, with the possibility of integrating it into his artistic portfolio.

In addition to recording Charles’s musical performances and using photographic and audiovisual archival materials, a fundamental aspect of the film production was gathering oral testimonies (Henley 2017) from him, focusing on aspects of his life story and aesthetic-musical conceptions. Thus, we discussed topics such as his process of musical enculturation (Green 2002) within his family which involved learning traditional Malagasy musical forms alongside modern genres of popular music; his path to professionalization through playing in Zana Rotsy, his family band; his entry into the world music scene as a sideman for the valiha player Rajery and the realization of the importance of his “transcultural capital” (Kiwan and Meinhof 2011, 8) which led him to attempt to achieve the complex balance between highlighting his Malagasy roots and embracing cosmopolitanism; his work as a professional musician in Europe receiving awards, recording albums, and performing at major festivals; the “experiential tensions” (Rice 2003, 170) arising from the contrasting perspectives between Charles and world music industry personnel regarding the hybridity of music genres with the latter perceiving it as a threat to the commercial viability of Charles as a “world musician”; and his progressive distancing from the world music scene, a particularly sensitive point for Charles.

In our early meetings, Charles avoided discussing this subject, only pointing out that 2015 had been challenging in his career. His reluctance, rather than being seen solely as an obstacle to the research, raised important ethical questions related to the practice of audiovisual ethnomusicology. After all, the relentless eye of the camera, which has the potential to make public what should be hidden, could give weight to Charles’s statements that possibly would not exist in an informal conversation. As time went by and our bonds of friendship and trust became more robust—the fact that I am a musician from a country in the Global South was a critical factor in our mutual identification—more intimate subjects emerged from our interactions, especially when the camera was off. Months after our first meeting, Charles told me he would like to finally explain on camera what had happened to him in recent years so that his audience would become aware of it.

While my interactions with professionals of the world music industry indicated that the economic crisis affecting this scene could be impacting the success of “world musicians” (Chemillier and Prado 2023, 132–133), Charles had a very personal interpretation of the difficulties he was facing, attributing it to sabotage by someone with whom he had briefly lived. Although it is fruitless to draw a line between reality and imagination regarding this point—as commonly observed in autobiographical performance where the construction of a “person-personage” plays a significant role (Gonçalves 2012, 26)—Charles’s case reveals that, despite musicians today having the possibility of producing their albums in their own homes, their relationship with technology is not always peaceful. In a context of solitary music-making (Killick 2006) such as that experienced by Charles, anxieties can arise about the difficulty of handling several pieces of studio equipment simultaneously; the lack of feedback from partners which can lead to extreme perfectionism; and the possible loss of recording projects in digital format. Let us also consider that artificial intelligence, with its potential for social alienation, will become increasingly present in everyday life. Therefore, we need to be attentive to the implications of technology on the work and well-being of the musicians we engage with.

The theme of perceived loss came up particularly strongly in our conversations and the film. World music, despite all its controversies ranging from cultural appropriation to the fetishization of exoticism, represented for Charles the possibility of earning a living through his passion, having an audience that celebrated his work even if only within the brief timeframe of festivals, and crafting a discourse that emphasized transculturality, a notion aligned with his aesthetic pursuits. To be away from this environment is, therefore, to lose something that had great significance for him­—hence his interest in returning to it. At the same time, as shown in the film, the footage from the 2022 edition of the Musiques Métisses Festival reveals that the capitalist machine never stops. In this highly competitive music scene, few people may feel the absence of a musician from the stage, even when that musician is as talented and capable as Charles.

As one might expect, addressing such personal issues was a challenging task. Only by conducting an ethnography that was highly sensitive to Charles’s words and feelings was it possible, during my limited stay in France, to build a relationship of trust strong enough to encourage him to openly discuss his experiences and hopes while being filmed. Therefore, beyond my initial aim of gaining a better understanding of the French world music scene through the perspective of a single musician, the film portrayed a rich and complex life story and worldview. The possibility of disseminating intimate stories like Charles’s and stimulating their emergence is precisely one of the strengths of subject-centered audiovisual ethnomusicology, of which the film Open Gasy seeks to be an example.

References

Bensignor, François. 1999. “Musiques du monde ou ‘World Music’, la revanche des ‘autres’?” Hommes et Migrations 1221: 56–68.

Chemillier, Marc and Yuri Prado. 2023. “L’hybridité vue à partir du sujet: le cas de Charles Kely Zana-Rotsy et l’open gasy.” Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie 36: 125–143.

Erlmann, Veit. 1993. “The Politics and Aesthetics of Transnational Musics.” The World of Music 35 (2): 3–15.

Gonçalves, Marco Antonio. 2012. “Etnobiografia: biografia e etnografia ou como se encontram pessoas e personagens.” In: Gonçalves, Marco Antonio, Roberto Marques and Vânia Cardoso (org.). Etnobiografia: subjetivação e etnografia. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras: 19–41.

Green, Lucy. 2002. How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Henley, Paul. 2017. “Modes of Oral Testimony in Ethnographic Film.” Vivência: Revista de Antropologia 50: 13–26.

Killick, Andrew. 2006. “Holicipation: Prolegomenon to an Ethnography of Solitary Music-Making.” Ethnomusicology Forum 15 (2): 273–299.

Kiwan, Nadia, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof. 2011. Cultural Globalization and Music: African Artists in Transnational Networks. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nika, Jérôme, Marc Chemillier and Gérard Assayag. 2016. “Guider l’improvisation musicale homme-machine: une synthèse sur le système ImproteK.” In Journées d’Informatiques Musicales (JIM) 2016, GMEA / Labri, Albi (France): 195–202.

Prado, Yuri. 2022. “Two Brothers: Devotion and Bahian Identity in the Caruru of Saints Cosmas and Damian.” GIS – Gesto, Image e Som – Revista de Antropologia 7 (1): e185831.

Prado, Yuri. 2024. “‘I make my own time’: Julio Valverde’s temporal agency through musicking.” IASPM Journal 14 (1): 38–57.

Ranocchiari, Dario. 2023. “Toward shared research practices on music. From an experience of music video production to the concepts of co-utility and transmodality.” TRANS 27.

Rice, Timothy. 2003. “Time, place, and metaphor in musical experience and ethnography.” Ethnomusicology 47 (2): 151–179.

Stock, Jonathan P. J. 2001. “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Individual, or Biographical Writing in Ethnomusicology.” The World of Music 43 (1): 5–19.

van der Lee, Pedro. 1998. “Sitars and Bossas: World music influences.” Popular Music 17 (1): 45–70.

Winders, James A. 2006. Paris Africain: Rhythms of the African Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Yuri Prado

Yuri Prado is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and was a visiting researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in Paris, during the 2021-2022 academic year. He holds a PhD in Musicology from USP, with a research internship in ethnomusicology at the Université Paris VIII. As a composer, he won the 1st prize at the 1st Composition Competition of the Orquestra de Câmara da USP (OCAM), the XIX Prêmio Nascente-USP and the 1st Composition Competition of the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo. As a filmmaker, he directed the documentaries A Step Towards Victory (2020), Two Brothers (2021), Open Gasy (2023) and Djazz (2024).