The originality of our project is to produce a work based on field material collected by Jaime de Angulo. His notations of Achumawi music often do not fit in with the traditional solfeggio. Angulo innovates by creating graphs that are more appropriate to Achumawi music that is non-tempered and non-standardised in relation to occidental frameworks. We suggest a sensitive presentation of this material, in order to give spectators-listeners a sense of the altered nature with which these witness notations confront us. The open scores we have collected encourage us to follow a number of hypotheses, and to emphasise living recreation.

This project stems from an experiment carried out with C Barré during the “Palimpseste” musical walks project in 2022. We will be developing it further with third-year students at the University of Aix-Marseille, as part of a CAR project in 2023-2024. Our aim is to create a concert lasting about an hour, with three instruments from the Ensemble C Barré (saxophone, clarinets, percussion) and a small choir. The music will be woven around texts by Angulo. We will explore the links between Angulo’s perception of these societies and a sound creation that is both respectful of ethnomusical sources and inventive.

What is fascinating and motivating about Angulo’s legacy today is the absence of any watertight boundaries between erudite work (he was linked to the scientific teams of Franz Boas, founder of the ethnological collections at the Museum of Natural History in New York), collections and literary creations. Far from creating confusion, these different levels create the richness of “participatory ethnology”. That’s why his surveys provide living material for a reflexive process of re-creation and bolstering, nourished by precise sources that are open to contemporary reinterpretation.