Traditional Musics and Ethical Considerations of Knowledge and Documentation Processes

This paper describes ethical considerations surrounding traditional music knowledge and documents, both from the author's experiences as apprentice to a renowned Irish fiddler, and from other music practitioners. Frohmann's (2004) informativeness of documents, Turner's (2007) oral documents, and writings of Briet and Otlet provide the theoretical underpinnings necessary to argue for and describe alternative documents: memory, metaphor, and storytelling. Examples of these alternative types of documents from the Irish music tradition and other world music traditions provide a basis for examining knowledge and documentation practices in traditional musics. Additional challenges for knowledge organization and traditional musics are related to attribution and ownership, as well as secrecy and privacy. What might be termed an "ethics of evidence" unites these traditional music knowledge and documentation issues into a single challenge for knowledge organization.