Resumen de Producing Ethnomusicological Audiovisuals in Current Educational Contexts
This text is an updated English version of an article published in Spanish on the relationship between ethnomusicology, educational, and audiovisual communications (Cámara de Landa 2012), including a discussion of relevant documentaries. The purpose of this study is to address the following questions (which were also proposed to conference participants): Is it possible to bring together, in an AV ethnomusicological project, aspects of the three types of work classified by D’Amico (2012) according to their respective purposes (scientific, didactic, or informative)? Is it possible to achieve this goal while respecting principles of flexibility, versatility, compatibility with written materials, quality of content and format, capacity for distribution, trouble-shooting for errors and security weaknesses, and epistemological issues? Which of the principles specified by Baily in his seminal text of 1989 are suitable, which are necessary and which are essential? Is there a correspondence between objective, target audiences, and audivovisual formats in ethnomusicological production? Have current conditions of creation and reception brought about the obsolescence of certain formats? What are the most appropriate formats for fulfilling current audiovisual production objective in ethnomusicological fields? The answer to all these questions would require a much larger space than this paper. My point is simply to emphasize the importance of keeping in mind some general principles (mentioned in the second question above) with regard to some materials recently produced.
