It had taken months of planning to corral five charismatic bards for a Christmas recording session in the snow-bound Kazakh city of Almaty, but things went well. Some tracks they wanted to re-record, others I wanted redone, but finally we were all satisfied, and toasted our communal triumph. Then the singers dispersed to their villages, to start their traditional New Year week of non-stop inebriated revelry.

I went for a walk in the snow, to mull things over. Back in my hotel room, I settled to listen again to the products of our labour, and turned on my machine …

Nothing! The digital tape, which two hours earlier had been full, was blank. I called my producer in London, who said I must have walked through a magnetic field, maybe under a power cable, which had wiped the tape. These were pre-mobile days, and by now the singers were God knows where. Lost beyond recall, as was their wonderful Kazakh music.

Throat-slitting moments like this will be familiar to all collectors of songs in the wild: such mishaps come with the territory, but it’s a territory which acts on its denizens like a drug, even on part-time bit-players like me. But there’s no uniformity in the compulsions which have driven the collectors in this book, in which ‘song’ can denote a style as well as a melody. The reasons for their chosen path reflect everything from simple patriotism to convoluted personal psychology, and quite often pure chance.

When the French Jesuit priest Joseph Amiot set sail for Beijing in 1751, he surely had little idea as to what he might do there, beyond learning enough Chinese to save some souls for Christ: the massive tome he compiled on Chinese classical music over the next forty years, which scholars still consult today, was an unplanned by-product. When the teenaged Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir was imprisoned in Constantinople as a political hostage in 1689, no one could have predicted that he would put down roots, fall in love with the arcane intricacies of Ottoman music, and become its chief exponent and chronicler.

Colonial curiosity, sometimes tinged with guilt, drove song collectors visiting the beleaguered Native Indian communities of nineteenth-century America, but most found their music bewildering.