The prolific career of Hugo Zemp—his three books, forty articles, twenty-five LPs and CDs, twenty-one films and film study guides, reporting diverse research projects in West Africa, Melanesia, and Europe—surely ranks among the best known in francophone research in ethnomusicology. But one of the things that made Hugo unique in his generation of ethnomusicologists in France was his long and forceful presence in the professional worlds of visual anthropology and ethnomusicology in the United States. This presence included numerous visits to American universities for lectures, seminars, and film presentations, as well as regular participation as a presenter, juror, or speaker at documentary and ethnographic film festivals and conferences. It also included authorship of eight articles in English, published in the journals Ethnomusicology, Yearbook for Traditional Music, The World of Music, and Visual Anthropology. Five of these pieces, now read by generations of ethnomusicology and visual anthropology students and professionals, have been influential and widely cited. Hugo also became a presence in two American academic organizations, the Society for Visual Anthropology, and even more-so, the Society for Ethnomusicology. Indeed, in 2018, in recognition of his contributions both to the field and to the Society, SEM awarded him the society’s highest recognition: an Honorary Membership. Adding all of this up, it would not be an overstatement to claim that a great deal of what American ethnomusicology students and professionals know of the francophone research tradition is a result of Hugo’s American presence, participation, and collegiality. And most of all, it is the result of the continued presence of his films—all of them available with English subtitles, and distributed by Documentary Educational Resources, the leading North American distributor of ethnographic films.

From the time of his youth through his conservatory training as a percussionist, Hugo was a passionate enthusiast of American jazz, and he was comfortable in English due to a Swiss trilingual education in Basel. But his first serious engagement with American ethnomusicology dates to the later years of his Ph.D. research in Cote d’Ivoire (1961–67). His mentor, Gilbert Rouget, director of the music department at the Musée de l’Homme, introduced him to Alan Merriam’s 1964 book The Anthropology of Music. Excited by it, Hugo’s 1968 Ph.D. thesis, published as Musique Dan (1971), followed Merriam’s model for music ethnography, focusing on Dan instruments, song texts, categorization and conceptualization of musical forms, social roles of musicians, and the uses, activities and functions of music. There was one catch: Merriam’s tripartite model for music ethnography prescribed beginning with conceptualizations of music, proceeding to behaviors of musicmaking, and concluding with the analysis of musical sounds. But Hugo’s thesis and book had no analysis of musical sound! A “Volume II” devoted to musical analysis was promised, but it never materialized because the opportunity quickly arose for Hugo to begin work the next year in Malaita, in the Solomon Islands, among the ‘Aré’aré, in collaboration with the anthropologist Daniel de Coppet. Nonetheless, Musique Dan, and specifically the very positive 1973 review of it by Alan Merriam in the journal Ethnomusicology, brought Hugo’s work into view among American ethnomusicologists, especially Africanists.

I remember this 1973 moment well. At the time I was one of Merriam’s Ph.D. students. He loaned me his (heavily annotated) copy of Musique Dan and told me that I must read it and seek Hugo’s advice on my research during my upcoming student semester in Paris at the Musée de l’Homme. When I arrived and met Hugo in early 1974, he had already made several trips to the Solomon Islands over five years, and was deeply immersed in his new project. He had also published his first articles on ‘Aré’aré panpipe music, focusing on instrument construction and equiheptaphonic scales. He had additionally published three LPs devoted to ‘Aré’aré panpipe music, and he had just completed his first two films, each just nine minutes in length (“OK, Steve, now I have finished making mistakes!” he declared with a laugh when he showed them to me). At that moment Hugo was absolutely passionate about developing his filmmaking skills. I learned something about this each Thursday afternoon, at the Comité du Film Ethnographique séances convened by Jean Rouch. Afterwards Hugo and I always had a drink or dinner to talk further about film. In the course of our conversations he told me that as a non-native French speaker working in France, he was re-centering his research practice from academic writing to filmmaking, so that the camera could be his pen and he would no longer be concerned to attempt writing in the literary and eloquent French styles of his teacher Gilbert Rouget and his close colleague Bernard Lortat-Jacob. I came to understand at that moment that both filmmaking and Anglophone Melanesia created a certain liberation for him.

Hugo also told me about developing some new American connections. On his trips to the Pacific, passing through the US, he was making stops in Los Angeles and visiting Mantle Hood’s Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. There he was impressed that American students were developing a high standard of musical proficiency in different traditions through participation in music ensembles. He told me that this inspired him to gain as much proficiency as possible to play all of the different ‘Aré’aré panpipes. He said that he was convinced of the Hood “bi-musicality” concept because this musical proficiency both improved the accuracy of his transcriptions, and gave him a better understanding of polyphonic part interactions in ‘Aré’aré panpipe ensembles.

In Malaita, Hugo met the American anthropologist and linguist Roger Keesing, who had a long research history with the Kwaio people, neighbors of the ‘Aré’aré. Keesing became well known in the early 1970s for ideational and cognitive cultural theory, and the uses of lexical semantics to explore forms of indigenous knowledge. He told Hugo about the success of a variety of linguistic anthropology research projects in the ethnosciences, particularly ones concerning local knowledge of plants and animals.

With Keesing’s encouragement Hugo absorbed the theoretical and empirical ethnoscience literatures and began to explore their methodological application to domains of ‘Aré’aré musical knowledge. This led to two remarkable research essays published in Ethnomusicology, first “ ‘Aré’aré Classification of Musical Types and Instruments” in 1978, followed by “Aspects of ‘Aré’aré Music Theory” in 1979. By showing the systematic lexical and metaphoric connections between the semantic fields of “bamboo” and “music,” these essays definitively established that “music theory” was not specific to literate civilizations, indeed, that it can be discovered in a small-scale society of oral tradition. These essays also revealed how linguistic methodologies from ethnoscience could be of great utility for ethnomusicologists working collaboratively with local music experts to reveal the complexity of musical knowledge. Throughout this work, Hugo rigorously followed the instruction of his longtime ‘Aré’aré teachers ‘Irisipau, Warousu, Namohani’ai, and Tahuniwapu (Feld 2026).

That instruction, and its first-person presentation, is what connects these essays to the 1979 publication of his two-hour and twenty minute 16mm film Musique ‘Aré’aré, and its English language version, ‘Are’are Music, released in 1983, as well as another 1979 16mm film of thirty-five minutes, Tailler le bambou, released in 1984 in an English version as Shaping Bamboo. This last film received the Klaus Wachsmann Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for its major contribution to organology. It is fair to say that these two articles, coupled with the two films, truly placed Hugo in the center of many conversations in American ethnomusicology and visual anthropology in the 1980s. This work was ubiquitously present in the syllabi of ethnomusicology graduate study programs in the US throughout the decade and in several instances much beyond. This is also the period when Hugo visited the US most often, presenting this work at many universities and festivals. The films were considered so revelatory that the Society for Ethnomusicology directly intervened in their promotion by initiating an audiovisual publication series in 1993, and issuing ‘Are’are Music and Shaping Bamboo as its first publication, as two NTSC videocassettes accompanied by a seventy-two-page study guide.

Following Hugo’s ‘Are’are work, most researchers in the US were less aware of his new 1980s project concerning yodel in Switzerland. But one of the ethnomusicologists who Hugo came to know in the US was Robert Garfias, who started the ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington in Seattle where Hugo did several residencies. From 1985 to 1987 Garfias was the president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and following custom, the president selects a distinguished researcher each year to give the Charles Seeger Lecture at the annual SEM meeting. The Seeger lecture is the intellectual centerpiece of these annual meetings, and Garfias invited Hugo to make the 1987 presentation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had the pleasure of introducing him. After his opening remarks, Hugo presented the American premiere of the film Yootzing and Yodelling, followed by the World premiere of Head Voice, Chest Voice.

I doubt that anyone in the audience was aware that in the background here were two films that greatly inspired Hugo, the experimental collaborations of Gilbert Rouget and Jean Rouch, Batteries Dogon (1968), which includes automated transcriptions of drum rhythms, and Danse des reines à Porto-Novo (1971), which for the very first time demonstrated a method to keep image and sound synchronized at slow speed, with the sound kept at correct pitch, a major advance for musical and choreographic analysis.

Following the early experimental spirit of the Rouget and Rouch collaborations, Hugo’s presentation of sonographic animation demonstrated the power of film as an analytic research medium in ethnomusicology. This was revelatory for those who associated film strictly with the presentation of performances, or with showing techniques of making and playing instruments, or with the life stories of musicians.

The reception of Hugo’s Seeger “lecture” was extremely enthusiastic, and the next year, 1988, Ethnomusicology published the presentation as “Filming Music and Looking at Music Films.” This text, with its many photograms, is still perhaps Hugo’s best-known essay on the practices and potentials of film in ethnomusicology, and it has been widely read and appreciated. Following the publication of this essay, Hugo wrote two other discussions of film theory and method in his analytic experimental films. In 1989 The World of Music published “Filming Voice Technique: The Making of The Song of Harmonics.” This was followed in 1990 by “Visualizing Music Structure through Animation: The Making of the Film Head Voice, Chest Voice,” published in Visual Anthropology. I think it is fair to say that for anglophone readers, these three essays are classics in the history of theorizing cinematic ethnomusicology. They have most certainly been studied by several generations of American ethnomusicology students.

While Hugo’s later film projects of the 1990s and 2000s in West Africa, Switzerland, Georgia, and Italy are also standard in a variety of American ethnomusicology classes, it was an essay of 1996 that once again placed him in the center of some very critical debates in American ethnomusicology, debates about music globalization and the “world music” marketplace. In 1996, the Yearbook for Traditional Music published a quartet of essays on “the end of ethnomusicological innocence,” in the words of the journal editor Dieter Christensen. Hugo’s essay “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business” was a reflexive account by a very active recordist and record series editor of the new business realities of publishing traditional musics at a moment of heightened music industrialization, commodification, circulation, sampling, and copyright inequities. But Hugo’s essay took a further step, denouncing the appropriation of one of his Solomon Islands recordings by an imperious electronica group whose promotion additionally usurped his name (and misspelled it!). And just as important, he equally denounced the UNESCO bureaucrats who both allowed this to happen, and then refused to be accountable or proactive in restorative justice. Along with an earlier essay that Hugo wrote for Visual Anthropology about the ethics of ethnomusicological filmmaking, his YTM piece clearly positioned him as a researcher unafraid to speak truth to power. And the “Sweet Lullaby” story Hugo first told in 1996 has remained a prominent case study of ethical, moral, and legal contestation entangling indigenous musicians, ethnomusicologists, and pop stars (Feld 2000, Solomon Times 2026). The story is summarized powerfully in a recent film dedicated to Hugo, Searching for Afunakwa (Singmin 2026).

As always, when it comes to remembering a good friend of fifty years, there is very much more to say. But I hope this brief recounting makes clear how Hugo was unique in his academic generation in France in terms of really engaging with American ethnomusicology and visual anthropology. I remember him fondly for his energetic presence, enduring texts, and the innovative films that have made a substantial contribution to visual ethnomusicology.

References

Feld, Steven. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12 (1): 145–71.

———. Forthcoming. “Music Theory in Melanesia.” In Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, and Carmel Raz. University of Chicago Press.

Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Northwestern University Press.

———. 1973. Review of Musique dan: La musique dans la pensée et la vie sociale d’une société africaine, by Hugo Zemp. Ethnomusicology 17 (1): 139–41.

Rouget, Gilbert, and Jean Rouch, dirs. 1968. Batteries dogon. Musée de l’Homme. 16mm film.

———, dirs. 1971. Danse des reines à Porto-Novo. Musée de l’Homme. 16mm film.

Singmin, Matt. 2026. Searching for Afunakwa. Film. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zfZE5kU7Mw.

Solomon Times. 2026. “Malaita Woman Is the Voice of the World Hit ‘Sweet Lullaby.’ A New Film Finds Her Family and Deep Forest Names Her.” October 20. https://www.solomontimes.com/news/malaita-woman-is-the-voice-of-the-world-hit-sweet-lullaby-a-new-film-finds-her-family-and-deep-forest-names-her/13318.

———. 1971. Musique Dan: La musique dans la pensée et la vie sociale d’une société Africaine. Paris: Mouton.

———. 1978. “‘Are‘are Classification of Musical Types and Instruments.” Ethnomusicology 22 (1): 37–67.

———. 1979. “Aspects of ‘Are‘are Musical Theory.” Ethnomusicology 23 (1): 5–48.

———, dir. 1983. Musique ‘Aré’aré / ‘Are’are Music. Paris: CNRS Audiovisuel. 16 mm, 150 min. Filmed in 1979.

———, dir. 1984. Tailler le bambou / Shaping Bamboo. Paris: CNRS Audiovisuel. 16 mm, 35 min. Filmed in 1979.

———, dir. 1987a. Head Voice, Chest Voice. CNRS Audiovisuel and Ateliers d’ethnomusicologie. 16mm film, 23 min.

———, dir. 1987b. Yootzing and Yodelling. CNRS Audiovisuel and Ateliers d’ethnomusicologie. 16mm film, 50 min.

———. 1988. “Filming Music and Looking at Music Films.” Ethnomusicology 32 (3): 393–427.

———. 1989. “Filming Voice Technique: The Making of The Song of Harmonics.” The World of Music 31 (3): 56–85.

———. 1990a. “Ethical Issues in Ethnomusicological Filmmaking.” Visual Anthropology 3 (1): 49–64.

———. 1990b. “Visualizing Music Structure through Animation: The Making of the Film Head Voice, Chest Voice.” Visual Anthropology 3 (1): 65–79.

———, dir. 1993. ‘Are‘are Music / Shaping Bamboo. Society for Ethnomusicology Audiovisual Series 1. Film compilation.

———. 1996. “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 36–56.

Steven Feld

Steven Feld, stevenfeld.net, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, and Director of VoxLox Media. His films are distributed by DER, der.org/resources/filmmaker-bios/steven-feld/, and sounds by Bandcamp, voxlox.bandcamp.com/
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