Enchanted by a melody, he set out to discover its source
LOUIS Sarno, an American suburban romantic who abandoned his doctoral studies to devote nearly half his life to recording and preserving the vanishing music of pygmies in a remote Central African rain forest, died on April 1 in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. He was 62.
The cause was complications of liver ailments, his brother Steven said.
Sarno, who was neither an anthropologist nor an ethnomusicologist by training, was studying in Amsterdam when he was first smitten by the mesmerising melodies he heard one winter night in the early 1980s on the radio.
The announcer identified the music only in Flemish, sending Sarno to a music library and inspiring an odyssey that for 30 years would distinguish him as an outsider in an antediluvian jungle civilisation, where drums, bow harps, flutes, zithers, singing and dancing accompanied marathon ceremonies and even everyday activities among the hunter-gatherers over whom he towered.
“I was drawn to the heart of Africa by a song,” Sarno later recalled. “I boarded a plane that would take me into the equatorial heart of a continent where I did not know a soul, on a quest for a music that might have been nothing more than a state of my imagination.”
The music “seemed to stir in me a vague memory, something that might have come from a dream,” Sarno wrote in a memoir, Song From the Forest (1993), “voices blending into a subtle polyphony, weaving a melody that rose and fell in endless repetition, as hypnotic as waves breaking on a shore.”
But Yandoumbe, where Sarno immersed himself among the Bayaka clan, was no sub-saharan Walden.
The pygmies were bullied by other tribes and suffered from alcoholism and addiction. Poaching and logging encroached on their natural environment. The Central African Republic, where they lived – a landlocked country that ranks lowest on a global index of life expectancy, education and per capita income – was periodically ravaged by civil war and ethnic conflict.
Until they grasped Sarno’s deep appreciation of their culture, the Bayaka greeted him leerily, demanding money, cigarettes and alcohol and feeding him grubs.
Even as he evolved into their doctor, interpreter, educator and chief negotiator with outside buyers and suppliers, he often found himself in a paradoxical position: A Westerner committed to safeguarding the ancestral cultural traditions of a clan that was growing accustomed to modern comforts.
“Maybe I’ve damaged them in some way, that they’re unsatisfied with the traditional way of life,” he told Newsweek in 2015.
Critic Luc Sante, a friend, said of Sarno in an e-mail: “The encyclopaedic breadth of his recordings has its tragic aspect. Because of the much shorter average life spans of the pygmies, Louis outlived two generations of his friends, and the third, far more westernised, now attends to the rituals much more perfunctorily.
“The traditions appear doomed.”
Sarno amassed thousands of hours of cassette recordings, which provided the basis for his book.
He made two films: Oka (2011), a fictionalised biography, and Song From the Forest (2015), a documentary in which his 13-year-old adopted Bayaka son accompanies him to New York City. Another book, Bayaka: The Extraordinary Music of the Babenzl Pygmies, came with a compact disc. And an audio collection is being digitised by the Reel 2 Real Project at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.
Other researchers have studied the indigenous music of Central Africa. But Sarno’s devotion to recording the polyphonic singing and polyrhythmic drumming of the Bayaka people “is an unprecedented and unrepeatable ethnomusicological achievement,” said Noel J Lobley, a professor at the University of Virginia as well as a researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
The earthy natural and man-made soundscape is mesmerising. In his foreword to Song From the Forest, journalist Alex Shoumatoff wrote that the pygmies were “basically doing karaoke with the sounds of the forest.”
In 1993, the British newspaper The Independent wrote of Sarno and his research: “There is a problem with describing this ethereal music. He writes about its ‘intricacy, subtlety and profound emotional content’. But to get any real idea of what it actually sounds like, you would probably have to send off for a cassette. There is a risk in that, of course. Look what happened to him.”
Louis John Sarno jr was born on July 3, 1954, in Newark, New Jersey, to Louis Sarno, a professor, and the former Helen Dahar, a teacher. An aficionado of classical music early in life, he attended Northwestern University, where he befriended the future filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.
“I knew he was a very strong person, and I had a strong feeling he was going to live his life as he chose,” Jarmusch wrote. “He’s not someone who was going to find a job in an accounting firm or anything.”
Sarno transferred to Rutgers in New Jersey and graduated with a degree in English. He did postgraduate work in comparative literature at the University of Iowa, then moved to Amsterdam with his wife, Wanda Boeke, where she was a Fulbright scholar.
Sarno worked in a laundromat there, conducting research into ethnic music at the public library.
Within months of the epiphanous radio broadcast of Bayaka music, and after contacting the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, Sarno flew to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, then travelled almost 1 000km overland in search of the forest people (or pygmies, according to the colonial terminology), who average less than 1.5m tall.
He separated from his wife, remained in Africa more or less permanently beginning in 1988, was granted citizenship in 2005, married at least two local women and adopted two sons.
“He is eccentric, yes, definitely an original,” Shoumatoff wrote of Sarno.
“How many people would reinvent themselves as a pygmy (to the extent possible)? – but he is not a kook.” – New York Times