Cantos Lucumí a los Orichas
Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2012 6:49 pm
Cantos Lucumí a los Orichas
I finished the book Cantos Lucumí a los Orichas in 1998 after three years of transcribing songs from private and public recordings. At the next Frankfurt music fair, I tried to offer it to several publishers, all of whom rejected my work. The German shekere maker Uwe Schmidt was a friend of Bruce Polin, the owner of Descarga.com, and after he had showed him my book, in 2000 Bruce decided to sell it on the Descarga site. As I was too slow to deliver the books to cater to the sudden demand, I gave Descarga the license to re-print copies on their own in 2001. Later, other retailers in the U.S., like David Brown’s FolkCuba, ordered their copies from Descarga, while I sold and delivered in Europe.
Descarga’s first re-printed batch was already revised by me for the first time. I revised the book at least one more time, but I forgot when.
(The enigmatic publishing address “oché books” was created by myself. I intended to preserve this name for possible future publications and optional legal registration. Oché (Spanish spelling), besides being an odù (oracle sign) of the Dilogún, is the name of Changó’s double ax. I have used it’s stylized symbol for many years.)
Soon I received positive response from all over the world. I should say, 95 percent of the response was appreciative and 5 percent ugly, due to an alleged profanisation or violation of secrecy. The first person to review the book was none less than Amanda Villepastour (then Amanda Vincent), who then wrote for the British magazine “Straight No Chaser”. To this day, the book is still recognized by people from Arturo Martínez Cabrera to John Amira. However, in spite of the praises and the persistent demand, I decided to discontinue the production of the book and asked Descarga to stop the printing in 2009. By now, Cantos Lucumí should be commercially unavailable. Over all, the book had been on the market for 9 years. What made me stop the production?
In the nine years of it’s market presence, a lot of changes and actual development has taken place in my life, on the media market, and in ethnomusicology as well.
While in the inception of the project I made every effort to provide accurate material open for secular folkloric vocal ensembles (like my own) that was also musically appealing (in Western aesthetical categories), suddenly I found myself in the middle of a rapidly evolving, international dialogue between serious scholars and priests in the religion. Over the time, I not only gained more and more experience in scholarly working methods, but also made the transition to become an initiate in Añá (2005) and in Ocha (2007) myself. From this newly gained point of view, eventually my book did not correspond to my own demands and intentions anymore.
Compared to other songbooks on the market, Cantos Lucumí may still be one of the most accurate resources, but – sorry – that does not say a lot; I feel that I had made too many mistakes, and, above all, I had made the wrong mistakes. The book has ceased to be a work to express my intentionality, my interest in research, or my religiosity: These are the categories that presently supersede the innocent musical enthusiasm of my past. If I wanted to write this book today, it would come out considerably different. First of all, it would involve extensive fieldwork; secondly, it could be based on a much broader range of recordings (such as the Abbilona and Orisha Aye series); thirdly, there is so much literature to evaluate today; I could even afford being more selective. It would be too expensive in the production, but it would keep up with all the marvellous scholarly works that have cited my book, and each single song would be flawless in text and in melody. Probably I would not write the book at all. (This also answers questions for a new edition.)
After all, it was only consequent for me to stop the sales. The authorities that I earned were not worth the feeling that there was something in my life that related to my past and thereby held me back in a way. While the contents of my book have always been public domain, I now declare the written pages of my book and the work that had gone into it as free material, too.
Thomas Altmann
I finished the book Cantos Lucumí a los Orichas in 1998 after three years of transcribing songs from private and public recordings. At the next Frankfurt music fair, I tried to offer it to several publishers, all of whom rejected my work. The German shekere maker Uwe Schmidt was a friend of Bruce Polin, the owner of Descarga.com, and after he had showed him my book, in 2000 Bruce decided to sell it on the Descarga site. As I was too slow to deliver the books to cater to the sudden demand, I gave Descarga the license to re-print copies on their own in 2001. Later, other retailers in the U.S., like David Brown’s FolkCuba, ordered their copies from Descarga, while I sold and delivered in Europe.
Descarga’s first re-printed batch was already revised by me for the first time. I revised the book at least one more time, but I forgot when.
(The enigmatic publishing address “oché books” was created by myself. I intended to preserve this name for possible future publications and optional legal registration. Oché (Spanish spelling), besides being an odù (oracle sign) of the Dilogún, is the name of Changó’s double ax. I have used it’s stylized symbol for many years.)
Soon I received positive response from all over the world. I should say, 95 percent of the response was appreciative and 5 percent ugly, due to an alleged profanisation or violation of secrecy. The first person to review the book was none less than Amanda Villepastour (then Amanda Vincent), who then wrote for the British magazine “Straight No Chaser”. To this day, the book is still recognized by people from Arturo Martínez Cabrera to John Amira. However, in spite of the praises and the persistent demand, I decided to discontinue the production of the book and asked Descarga to stop the printing in 2009. By now, Cantos Lucumí should be commercially unavailable. Over all, the book had been on the market for 9 years. What made me stop the production?
In the nine years of it’s market presence, a lot of changes and actual development has taken place in my life, on the media market, and in ethnomusicology as well.
While in the inception of the project I made every effort to provide accurate material open for secular folkloric vocal ensembles (like my own) that was also musically appealing (in Western aesthetical categories), suddenly I found myself in the middle of a rapidly evolving, international dialogue between serious scholars and priests in the religion. Over the time, I not only gained more and more experience in scholarly working methods, but also made the transition to become an initiate in Añá (2005) and in Ocha (2007) myself. From this newly gained point of view, eventually my book did not correspond to my own demands and intentions anymore.
Compared to other songbooks on the market, Cantos Lucumí may still be one of the most accurate resources, but – sorry – that does not say a lot; I feel that I had made too many mistakes, and, above all, I had made the wrong mistakes. The book has ceased to be a work to express my intentionality, my interest in research, or my religiosity: These are the categories that presently supersede the innocent musical enthusiasm of my past. If I wanted to write this book today, it would come out considerably different. First of all, it would involve extensive fieldwork; secondly, it could be based on a much broader range of recordings (such as the Abbilona and Orisha Aye series); thirdly, there is so much literature to evaluate today; I could even afford being more selective. It would be too expensive in the production, but it would keep up with all the marvellous scholarly works that have cited my book, and each single song would be flawless in text and in melody. Probably I would not write the book at all. (This also answers questions for a new edition.)
After all, it was only consequent for me to stop the sales. The authorities that I earned were not worth the feeling that there was something in my life that related to my past and thereby held me back in a way. While the contents of my book have always been public domain, I now declare the written pages of my book and the work that had gone into it as free material, too.
Thomas Altmann