Happy 2018, fellow ethnomusicologists and music scholars! I am excited to continue as the Editor-in-Chief for Volume 22 of Ethnomusicology Review. We have maintained our push towards translation projects; we publish non-English articles, we haveour articles translated into other languages, and a new Sounding Board section will focus on providing English reviews of non-English books and articles. We want to thank theAscidiacea Collective for translating a number of our book reviews for French readers and to the French site, nonfiction, for hosting the articles.

This year we will continue our busy reviews section, features, and announcements as well as accept submissions for the Journal Volume.

Volume 22 will go to press in November. The deadline to submit is April 2nd. 

Our Sounding Board also accepts shorter pieces on a rolling basis, contact the section associate editor to submit.

A special thanks to Rosaleen Rhee, our outgoing Managing Editor of Sounding Board!  Thank you for all your time, knowledge, and energy. Ethnomusicology Review is better because of it. I also want to thank our outgoing associate editors, Pablo Infante-Amate (Bring the Noise), Molly Jones (Space is the Place), and Gabriel Lavin (Historical Perspectives), and welcome our new editors, Lucas Avidan, Amy Brandon, and Alfredo Rivera. I will introduce them and our continuing editors below.

Otto Stuparitz is the Editor-in-Chief of Ethnomusicology Review and a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology. He is a Chicago native and received his B.A. in music history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focusing on the aesthetics and distribution networks in the Urbana-Champaign recording studio community. His M.A. described the pedagogical methods of Balinese gamelan gong kebyar musicians and the relationships of time, economics, and value. His dissertation project explores the history and contemporary practice of Indonesian jazz.

Tyler Yamin is a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology. He holds a B.F.A in World Music (’10) and an M.F.A in Balinese and Javanese Music and Dance (’12) from the California Institute of the Arts, and is artistic director of the University of San Diego Balinese gamelan ensemble. Inspired by the recent anthropological turns towards ontology, multispecies relations, and animism, his research emphasizes ethnographic accounts of musical practices that complicate the notions of human exceptionalism so fundamental to the advent of our current Anthropocene predicament.

Lucas Avidan is the Managing Editor of Sounding Board and a graduate student in the UCLA department of Ethnomusicology. He received his B.A. in Music and English at Middlebury College. His research interests include popular music and hip hop. He is currently focusing on a form of popular music from Dar es Salaam Tanzania called bongo flava. He also plays trombone in the Mingus Ensemble at UCLA. 

William Matczynski is the Reviews Editor and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. He holds a B.A. in music, anthropology, and African studies from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. His research interests include theory and history of anthropology, political economy, popular culture, and media in West Africa. His current research focuses on the informal music economy in the Ga-Mashie community of Accra, Ghana, tracing the intersections of ethnic minority, urban space/gentrification, and the Ga Homowo Festival. As a percussionist and guitarist, he performs traditional music from Ghana and Nigeria and studies highlife and soukous guitar styles.

Associate Editors of Sounding Board

Holding degrees in jazz guitar performance and composition, guitarist Amy Brandon is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD in music cognition at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has performed in Canada, the USA, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and at festivals including ISIM, BeAST FeAST and NYCEMF. She has received commissions to write for Canadian and international ensembles including SNIM (Austria), Caution Tape Sound Collective (CAN), Black Sheep Contemporary Ensemble (USA) and Vox London Collective (UK). Awards include the National Sawdust Hildegard Competition (Honourable Mention), nominations for Music Nova Scotia and ECMA awards for her jazz-electroacoustic album 'Scavenger', and the Roberta Stephen Award from the Association of Canadian Women Composers. In addition to performance and composition, she writes and presents academic work concerning music cognition, virtual reality, improvisation and the guitar. She has presented her work at Berklee College of Music and conferences in Australia, USA, Switzerland, Hungary and the UK.

Ben Cosgrove curates Ecomusicology. Ben is a multi-instrumentalist and touring composer/performer whose work focuses on the human experience of landscape and place. He graduated from Harvard College in 2010 and has held fellowships and residencies with the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, Middlebury College, and the Schmidt Ocean Institute. More about him can be found at www.bencosgrove.com.

Andrea Decker is a Doctoral Candidate in Ethnomusicology at UC Riverside. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in music performance and political theory and an MA in ethnomusicology. She is currently conducting fieldwork in East Java, Indonesia, investigating gendered responses to sense in dangdut music. When not at concerts and karaoke clubs, Andrea enjoys street and portrait photography and textile crafting.

Sophie Frankford is the editor for our popular music column, Bring the Noise. She is a graduate student at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. She holds an undergraduate degree in music from King’s College London and a master’s degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford. She is interested in popular music of the Middle East, and her current research focuses on contemporary music in Egypt.

Samuel Lamontagne curates Notes from the Field. He obtained his Anthropology master from EHESS, Paris, and is now a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at UCLA. His researches focus on the hip-hop and electronic music scenes in Los Angeles, and on audio-technology in its relation to musicians' creative processes.

Alfredo Rivera curates Historical Perspectives and is a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology. He is a native Angeleno and received his B.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of California Los Angeles. For his master’s thesis, he wrote about the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Randy Weston and Pharaoh Sanders collaborative work with Gnawa musicians from Morocco. He is currently working on an oral history of musicians in the Los Angeles jazz scene from 1992 to the present. You can find out more about Alfredo at https://sites.google.com/site/ariveratop/.

Maureen Russell is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology, specializing in audiovisual archiving and information literacy and research skills.  In addition, Russell is Head of Cataloging and Archivist at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, one of the largest and oldest ethnographic audiovisual archives in North America.  She has written two critically acclaimed books about television and film (Highlander: The Complete Watcher’s Guide. New York, New York: Warner Aspect, 1998 and Days of Our Lives: A Complete History of the Long-running Soap Opera. Jefferson, North Carolina:  McFarland, 1995.)  Currently, she is the editor for Music Reference Services Quarterly’s“Off the Beaten Path” column (MRSQ is a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor and Francis) and the editor for Ethnomusicology Review’s“From the Archives” column.

Does Non-Western music sound more familiar under the label of “psychedelic”? Does the label become less efficient once applied outside of the original realm of the 60's California counterculture? While widely used by music critics, it isn’t risky to say that “psychedelic” has become an equivocal term. But equivocal doesn’t mean ineffectual. This paper focuses on Thai music media labeled as “psychedelic.” By media, I mean an artifact through which music is mediated, mainly through the process of commodification – be it on a large scale or not – such as CDs, tapes, records, but also digital files.

In December 2015, Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, a Thai marching band, was invited to play the Transmusicales de Rennes Festival in France. In 2011, after posting a self-made promotional video on YouTube, the band was introduced to a network of American record diggers and music enthusiasts. Ensuing video posts of parades in which the troupe covered “Zombie” by TheCranberries later instigated Josh Marcy, a sound engineer from Los Angeles, to come to Thailand in 2014 and record the band’s first album.

Video 1: Different footages of Khun Narin Sin Phin Prayuk parades, the band starts to cover “Zombie” by the Cranberries at 3'00 - video by Beer Sitthichai, Phetchabun Province, 2012

When they came to France, the band gave several interviews. I was there with Peter, a friend who knew the band before they visited Europe. We were supposed to help with translation from French to Thai and from Thai to French. During an interview given to the French newspaper Ouest-France, Khun Narin Electric Phin Band was asked the following question: “When people talk about your music, some say that it is something psychedelic, do you agree with that?” As there is no word for “psychedelic” in Thai, we asked them if they knew what “psychedelic” meant. Peter offered to give the following definition: “psychedelic is a kind of art associated with people who take medication, medication that dazzles your mind” (“psychedelic pen style silapa thi khon thi tit ya, ya bep, ya hai mao”). Totally surprised and a bit offended, Narin, the manager of the band answered the question with another question “Before playing music?... in my band, nobody takes drugs.” As I translated Peter's explanation to the journalist, she suddenly felt embarrassed and said: “oh no, no, I am not asking them if they take drugs,” while pointing at the album cover that the band didn’t get to choose. “…it's just that, how can I say, on the cover...”

Whether their music sounds druggy or psychedelic is part of a long-standing debate, which emerged in the comment section of Khun Narin’s first video post on Dangerous Minds’ website, under the title “A Mind-blowing Psychedelia from Thailand.” It is surely not very accurate to define psychedelic music as drug-induced music, but drug-enhanced or not, the band claims to have nothing to do with psychedelia.

One night of 2015 in a hipster coffee lounge in Bangkok, I thought I found some evidence of psychedelia. I was chatting with Pam, the bass player of a famous Northeastern Thai style revival band, who was also touring around the world. We were attending a DJ session and I was casually talking about psychedelia, when Pam reacted referring to a notion of “true Thai psychedelia.”

I felt totally dazzled by his answer. I had just been fruitlessly looking for an emic conception of psychedelia for more than a year, and it turns out, I could have simply asked the members of the upcoming Thai revival music band about it. I dared to ask Pam for more evidence, such as what kind of bands he was thinking about. Pam was not so sure and simply said that a Swedish guy had compiled such stuff on a record called Thai-Beat A Gogo (2004). As Maft Sai, the owner of the bar, stated in the booklet of a compilation of Thai 60's and 70's music:

“It's possibly a misnomer to label music recorded outside of the USA or Europe with terms such as 'psyche' or 'surf' as it is often just a stylistic innovation based on exposure to foreign records via the radio or music stores. It doesn't necessarily chime in with any of the social shifts or changes that accompanied the music's development in the West.”

Video 2: After it was first published on YouTube, this video of the band quickly became viral among music enthusiasts of the Western blogosphere - video by Sumeth Yahkham, Phetchabun Province, 2011

While it is hard to find evidences of a local style of psychedelia in Thailand, why does the word psychedelia stand as a gimmick for the diffusion of Khun Narin’s music?

In order to answer this question, I will focus on the production of a Black Sabbath cover song by Khun Narin. My aim is to show that the production of new media labeled “psychedelic” in Thailand is itself rooted in the circulation of older media. To that extent, I will argue that the production of psychedelic-like artifacts challenges the ways World Music used to promote Non-Western music as radically different. Finally I will conclude with some considerations about the role of media in this process.

I. Producing a cover of Black Sabbath:

After his visit in 2014, Josh Marcy came back to Phetchabun in 2015 to record a second album. The first album was successful, critically and commercially speaking, for such a small independent music label as Innovative Leisure. But this time Josh wanted to go a step further, so he came back to Thailand with a more personal request. Aside from the project of recording a new live session, Josh wanted the band to record three covers among which was a song by Black Sabbath titled “Planet Caravan.” From an artistic point of view Josh was totally at ease with his personal motivations and preferences: “selfishly it's something I would like to hear... I mean, you know it's hot stuff, sure unlike those other things that we get from them, but the point is... that you have to trust taste.” As I already knew the band, and as Josh was looking for a translator, I was there trying to help Khun Narin and Josh understand each other. According to Josh “[the band] just [had] to borrow the bass and the structure, then they just [had] to do their riff!”

The bass player easily got the rhythm as Josh, who is also a bass player showed him the pattern on his instrument. The lead musician Aob, who plays a string instrument called the phin, had a more difficult time because the phin has a shape slightly different from a guitar. Aob and Josh managed to find the scale on the instrument. When they did, Josh became very enthusiastic. While Aob was practicing the guitar pattern he had just learned to play with his phin, Josh showed everyone a picture of Black Sabbath on his smartphone crying out: “that's who we're paying tribute to [...] Black Sabbath, 1970, Ozzy Osbourne ... that's rock!”

Photo 1: Josh showing Black Sabbath pattern to Beer on bass guitar – Photo by E. Degay Delpeuch, Phetchabun Province, 2015

The band then brought out the sound system: a 600kg iron tower made of heavy bass speakers and a bouquet of eight mid-range and high-frequency speakers on the very top of it. The machine impressed Josh. I was there, sitting by the scene waiting for what would happen next as Josh declared: “Oh, it's gonna work so fucking well.”

Josh said “you've got to trust taste,” but since taste is subjective, it doesn’t offer an objective explanation for why an independent music producer from L.A. came to Thailand to record a local band covering a Black Sabbath song. To understand the production of this new media, one has to understand that it is folded into the production of older media. Indeed, Khun Narin had already broadcast covers of Western popular songs on the Internet, such as “Zombie” by TheCranberries.

Thai musicians such as the popular luk thung singer Sroeng Santi already recorded a cover of Black Sabbath “Iron Man” under the name “Khuen khuen long long.” It was recorded in the late 70’s and has been reissued in 2011 on the compilation album titled Thai? Dai!, which was assembled by record diggers Andy Votel, Chris Menist, and Maft Sai.

Video 3: First Thai cover of Black Sabbath hit “Iron Man” has been reissued on Finders Keepers Records in 2011

II. Production of New Media folded in the Production of Older Media:

Thai? Dai! (2011) was released during a resurgence of compilation albums that also featured Non-Western pop music from the 60-70’s. All orchestrated by a rather small network of record diggers, vinyl collectors, publishers and DJs, who have had a significant role in putting the term “psychedelic” in circulation. To some extent, this small network is involved in what David Novak describes as “a recent intervention into the circulation of ‘World Music’.” This intervention is “based in the redistribution of existing recordings of regional popular music – most of which already bear a strong formal and technological relationship with Western popular culture – as a ‘new old’ media.” (Novak, 2011: 605).

Ben Tausig, ethnomusicologist and author of a critical study about music and the broadcast environment of Thailand's Red Shirt movement and occasional music critic of Dusted Magazine (2011), gives us the following insight about the Thai? Dai! compilation album:

“[...] When Sroeng Santi’s “Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng” leads off this comp by launching unapologetically into the riff from “Iron Man,” [...] you’re being flattered [...]. Just as the heavy bass and fuzzy guitar will remind you of indigenous European psychedelia, you’ll hear in these musical citations confirmation that the appeal of early metal [...] was as universal as you suspected. But the truth is that Thai listeners, while frequently charmed by Western music, are not necessarily listening in ways or to the things you might expect. [...] Thai? Dai! is not so much a retrospective of a forgotten Thai musical past as it is a report from a thriving but ultimately small cosmopolitan present, from a scene that’s had to filter through a lot of records to find the songs that fit its prefigurations of taste.”

Both Sroeng Santi's cover of “Iron Man” and Khun Narin’s music convey a significant shift in the way Western music enthusiasts are now listening to Non-Western music. The radical difference that characterized how World Music was introduced to Western listeners is no longer working as a source of interest for them. To some extent, if Western listeners were looking for World Music as an authentic source of alterity, now they are looking for media as an authentic source of World Music. Indeed, figuring ourselves in a world strongly ruled by the market economy, the commodification of music now gives the ultimate proof that this music has not been produced in the West for us, but elsewhere for somebody else. Paradoxically, by looking for media as an authentic source of Non-Western music, Western listeners find out that music produced elsewhere in the world might not be so different from their music.

Ben Tausig talks of “a scene that’s had to filter through a lot of records to find the songs that fit its prefigurations of taste.” Indeed, if media is now working as a mechanism that guarantees the authenticity of music, authenticity itself is relocated through select media.

III. Make it whose own style?

I would like to give a final insight about how authenticity is finally relocated under the case of Khun Narin. From the point of view of Josh, reproducing an identical replica of Black Sabbath was not really satisfying. The band needed to make it “their own style.”

When I asked Aob the luth player to play Black Sabbath in their own style, he confirmed by reiterating: “You want the Khun Narin's style, but with this song, right?” “Ok, so it will go into hip-hop,” Aob hummed a hip-hop rhythm “toop, top, toop, top.” The band rehearsed several times the first four bars of “Planet Caravan” introducing small variations such as a distortion effect and a hip-hop rhythm, while stopping at every step to ask Josh for his consent. “Could we introduce molam (Lao traditional music)?”, “could we introduce a disco step after [the] hip-hop [section] and before molam?” Josh listened to each proposition but did not really feel satisfied with the molam pattern Aob played. Moreover, just switching from one rhythm to the other did not really meet Josh's idea of the band doing their “own thing.” While Josh was listening to Aob repeat the first four bars of “Planet Caravan,” he pointed out that “it would be nice if he took a solo and did his own thing, you know what I mean? … like on the song, there's the bass line and just take a solo on this.”

But the more I asked the band to play “according to their own style” the more I realized that everyone was getting more confused. Josh commented that “I just want them to play ‘Planet Caravan’ in their own way … you know what I mean, rather than a medley … they can just do that song—I don't know how just to describe [it] to him—you know, just do a solo, [and] start playing his own melody all over that.” Listening to Josh's request, I felt embarrassed finding the words to translate it. How could I communicate what Josh meant by a “solo”? The word “solo” did not sound unfamiliar to the band, but for them the word suited for any specific sequence of fixed notes that might introduce variations in the long sequence of songs that composed their medley, such as a molam introduction or the first four-bar of the Black Sabbath song. In other words, while I was deliberating the word “solo” in order to lead them to produce an original melodic variation, the band just wanted to switch from one fixed sequence of notes to another. The idea that asking the band to play a “solo” would then lead them to improvise was not obvious. Even more confusing was the idea that “their own way” was something else than a medley.

Photo 2: Khun Narin II recording session, Narin at the control panel – Photo by E. Degay Delpeuch, Phetchabun Province, 2015

Conclusion: Discovering a missing link: Short-circuiting the feedback

Neither Josh Marcy nor Innovative Leisure ever made the assumption that Khun Narin was influenced by psychedelic or heavy metal music. Unlike some of the simplistic understandings of Khun Narin’s music, Josh once stated the following in Newsweek (2014), after the first album of the band was released:

“I don't believe that they were influenced by psych rock as we would think of it. … It just happens to have turned out in a way that sounds familiar, in that vein, to us. They'd never heard the Grateful Dead or things like that.”

However, after the rehearsal session and without any real satisfying solo to record, Josh came back to me pointing out a missing link that made the cover of Black Sabbath so difficult:

“you know [...] the missing link in the heritage of their music [...] is the Blues, [...] you play a melody, you sing a melody and then you solo [...] and you play it different every time, there is a way maybe you've worked it out [...] but it's funny without a reference of the blues, as like a starting point, it's hard, you know, you can't go back to any sort of bedrock [...].”

Given that Thai musicians have created wonderful pieces of music that sound familiar to psychedelic music lovers, the circulation of a specific selection of older media also leads to the assumption that every psychedelic-sounding music in Thailand, such as Khun Narin's music, might be hiding deeper musical connections. But the illusion of Thai guitar heroes just lies in the distance.

To some extent the international circulation of Thai music under the label of “psychedelia” works as a “feedback” from West to East, then East back to West. To that extent there is no place where “Thai psychedelia” is produced, except in the international circulation of select media. While in the topic of “feedback,” I would like to refer here to David Novak's recent study on Japanoise in which he describes a musical phenomenon similar to “Thai psychedelia”; the notion of a musical identity that lies in the distance but vanishes in proximity:

“[...] for two decades, Japan was where Noise stuck—not because Noise was invented there, but because it was driven home in transnational circulations that continually projected its emergence back onto Japan. [Japanoise] I argue, could only have been produced through this mediated feedback between Japan and North America.” (Novak, 2013:16).

Photo 3: Khun Narin II album cover design - Innovative Leisure, 2015

Media allows the circulation and communication of a musical phenomenon without this phenomenon needing to be understood within its cultural context. Media can operate through labels such as “Japanoise” or “Thai psychedelia,” because nobody needs to put their tastes to the test with the musicians in the way Josh did.

Indeed, the feedback works as long as no “test”, no convergence happens, which might bring to light the fact that psychedelic sonorities are not hiding psychedelic heroes. Thus, when convergence happens, missing links are discovered and function as short-circuits. Therefore the absence of convergence is the essential key to understand the way a word such as “psychedelic” might determine the international circulation of cultural references.

Bibliography:

Fader, L. (2014). Khun Narin's Electric Phin Band: The Psychedelic Rock Band Discovered in a Remote Village in Thailand. Newsweek, [online]. Available at: http://www.newsweek.com/khun-narin-phin- sing-psychedelic-rock-band-discovered-remote-village-thailand-266649  

Menist, C. and Sai M. (2010). The Sound Of Siam: Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam In Thailand 1964-1975. [booklet] Soundways.

Novak, D. (2011). The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media. Public Culture, 23(3), pp. 6-7.

Novak, D. (2013). Japanoise, Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tausig, B. (2011). Dusted Reviews, Thai? Dai!: The Heavier Sound of the Luk Thung Underground. Dusted magazine, [online]. Available at: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/6356.

Edouard Degay Delpeuch is a Ph.D candidate in anthropology of music at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, Paris. His research makes a special ethnographic case of a Thai marching band internationally known as Khun Narin Electric Band. From Thailand to the World, his research focuses on processes that create music through circulations and renegociate cultural boundaries through music. Edouard Degay Delpeuch is a member of the Georg Simmel Research Center and an associated member of Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE).

Paisaje Cubano Con Tristeza, de Leo Brouwer, faz parte de uma série de obras de título Paisaje Cubano. A série compreende seis peças, sendo três delas escritas para violão solo (Paisaje Cubano Con Campanas, Paisaje Cubano Con Tristeza e Paisaje Cubano Con Fiesta). Em Paisaje Cubano Con Tristeza está presente o elemento da improvisação, a ser executada na forma de cadenzafuriosa, entre os compassos 49 e 50. Será apresentada a seguir uma proposta de estudo da peça, utilizando ferramentas normalmente aplicadas em obras escritas, no intuito de trabalhar o improviso desde os estágios iniciais do estudo, de forma integrada com o restante da obra. As ferramentas escolhidas para para desenvolver os exercícios são: note grouping, de James Morgan Thurmond, sistema numérico de Marcel Tabuteau e a proposta de criação de gráficos, de John Rink.

O estudo da improvisação é algo incomum na formação do violonista clássico. Este fator deixa o violonista despreparado ao lidar com peças como a de Brouwer, ou ainda numerosas obras de instrumentação livre que utilizam a improvisação como elemento principal. O termo “cadenza” está relacionado, por tradição, ao virtuosismo. As cadenzas, muitas vezes escritas pelos compositores, são momentos de alto nível técnico, geralmente com passagens melódicas rápidas e de ritmo livre, que exigirá muito preparo do performer. Para isso, segue abaixo uma possibilidade de estudo da improvisação em conjunto com o estudo da obra, utilizando as mesmas ferramentas. Desta maneira, o violonista que nunca estudou anteriormente a improvisação poderá fazê-lo com elementos presentes na obra e em seu estudo diário.

Note grouping

O note grouping, de James Morgan Thurmond, é um sistema de estudo da performance focado no fraseado de linhas melódicas. No caso de Paisaje Cubano con Tristeza, o note grouping pode auxiliar tanto no estudo dos motivos que formam a peça (figuras 1 e 2), que se apresentam por vezes sobrepostos (figura 3), quanto nas frases melódicas (figura 4) e no estudo da improvisação (este será tratado no tópico 1.4).

A aplicação da ferramenta consiste em fazer agrupamentos de notas, sendo que eles devem começar nos tempos fracos e terminar nos tempos fortes dos compassos, pensando no direcionamento da frase de arsis para tesis (tempo fraco para tempo forte), evitando acentuações indesejadas em tempos fortes e dando direcionamento às frases. Pequenos grupos são formados e, posteriormente, esses grupos são unidos, formando grupos maiores, que também devem ser unidos até formarem uma frase (figura 4).

Figura 1: compasso 1			Figura 2: compasso 10

Os grupos formados correspondem às células no qual a obra irá se desenvolver e irão ser utilizados no estudo da improvisação.

Figura 3: compasso 4

Figura 4: compasso 23 e 24

Na figura 4, os grupos representados pelas letras f, g, h e i serão unidos, formando os grupos maiores j e k, que representam as frases musicais. É possível, ainda, unir os grupos j e k, formando uma frase maior. Cada passo do estudo deverá ser feito evitando acentuações exageradas nos grupos.

Os números de Tabuteau

O sistema numérico de Marcel Tabuteau é uma forma de estudar elementos musicais através do uso de números, que servem como medida para a execução de exercícios. Estes números podem tanto auxiliar na definição de parâmetros para diferentes tipos de sonoridades, como para medir aspectos como dinâmica e andamento. Em trechos com grande variação de elementos, utilizar uma unidade de medida para criar exercícios que sigam uma ordem progressiva, visando alcançar o domínio de cada aspecto presente na obra a ser trabalhado, tais como velocidade e dinâmica. Um exemplo é utilizar números para cada mudança de velocidade (v1, v2, v3...), como mostra a figura 5.

Figura 5: compassos 21 e 22

As mudanças de andamento (figuras 6 e 7) também podem ser estudadas através do uso de números como medida de variação, para que o intérprete tenha uma noção da diferença de cada novo tempo em relação ao anterior e mais domínio das variantes na execução.

Figura 6: compaso 23			Figura 7: compasso 33

Gráficos de Rink

John Rink sugere a criação de gráficos para observar aspectos específicos da obra musical, como sua dinâmica e andamento, o que é chamado por ele de “análise para intérpretes”. Embora seja possível observar mudanças de andamento ou dinâmica na partitura, criar um gráfico específico de cada aspecto torna possível observar em uma única imagem, como essas mudanças se dão ao longo da obra, assim como as partes que tem mais mudanças em geral. Observando as variações de cada aspecto a ser trabalhado, é possível fazer um planejamento de estudos que acompanhe cada um deles e suas variações no decorrer da obra.

Figura 8: gráfico de dinâmica

Estudando a improvisação

A proposta é que o intérprete crie pequenos exercícios e organize-os em medidas progressivas. A criação dos exercícios se dará nas seguintes etapas: primeiramente, será feita a seleção de pequenos trechos de diferentes partes da obra, escolhidos dos pequenos grupos do note grouping (ver figuras 1, 2 e 3). Depois de selecionados os grupos, organizá-los de maneira progressiva, observando os gráficos feitos (figura 8) e seguindo a variação de material que a peça apresenta. Em seguida, utilizar o sistema numérico de Tabuteau para criar medidas de execução dos exercícios, assim como v1, v2, v3, para velocidade, ou i1, i2, i3, etc., para intensidade. Uma vez que os exercícios com pequenos grupos forem estudados, formar frases musicais com estes grupos e tocá-las. Posteriormente, criar novas frases musicais, retirando alguns dos grupos dados e acrescentando notas improvisadas. Retirar progressivamente trechos e improvisando novos até criar frases totalmente improvisadas. Estudar as frases em velocidade progressiva.

A escolha de criar os exercícios para a improvisação com o material e as ferramentas utilizadas foi feita com o intuito de que o performer possa não só criar uma improvisação que esteja relacionada estruturalmente com a obra, mas também com a própria fase de estudo e preparação, para criar conexões entre o material sonoro escrito pelo autor e o criado pelo performer, desde as primeiras etapas de estudo da obra.

Figura 9: exemplo de montagem

Referências

ANNALA, H.; MÄTLIK. H. Handbook of Guitar and Lute Composers. Pacific: Mel Bay Publications, 2007.

JACOBS, A. A New Dictionary of Music. Harmonsdworth: Penguin Books, 1967.

MACGILL, David. Sound in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

RINK, J. Musical Performance: a guide to understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

THURMOND, James Morgan. 1991. Note Grouping. Lauderdale: Meredith.

Translation (English):

Paisaje Cubano Con Tristeza, by Leo Brouwer, is part of a series of works titled Paisaje Cubano. The series comprises six pieces, three of them written for solo guitar (Paisaje Cubano Con Campanas, Paisaje Cubano Con Tristeza e Paisaje Cubano Con Fiesta). In Paisaje Cubano Con Tristeza, there is the element of improvisation, to be performed in the form of a cadenzafuriosa (furious cadenza), between the 49th and 50th bars. This paper examines approaches to improvisation, using tools normally applied in written works, in order to integrate the improvisation with the rest of the piece. The tools chosen to develop the exercises are: note grouping by James Morgan Thurmond, Marcel Tabuteau's numerical system, and John Rink's graphing proposal.

The study of improvisation is something unusual in the formation of the classical guitarist. This factor leaves the guitarist unprepared in dealing with pieces such as Brouwer's, or numerous works of free instrumentation that use improvisation as the main element. The term "cadenza" is traditionally related to virtuosity. The cadenzas, often written by the composers, are moments of high technical level, usually with fast melodic passages and free rhythm, which requires much preparation from the performer. However, it is possible to study the improvisation along with the rest of the piece, using the same tools. In this way, a guitarist who has never previously studied improvisation can do so with elements present in the work and in their daily study.

Note grouping

James Morgan Thurmond's note grouping is a performance study system focused on the phrasing of melodic lines. In the case of Paisaje Cubano con Tristeza, note grouping can help both the study of the motifs that form the piece (Fig. 1 and 2), which  sometimes appear superimposed (Fig. 3), as well as in the melodic phrases (Fig. 4) and in the improvisation study (this will be discussed in topic 1.4).

The application of the tool consists of making groups of notes, wherein they should start in the upbeat and end in the downbeat, thinking about the direction of the musical phrase from arsis to thesis (upbeat to downbeat), avoiding undesirable accents on the downbeat and giving a direction to the phrase. Small groups are formed, and later these groups are joined, forming larger groups, which must also be joined together to form a phrase (Fig. 4).

Figure 1: Bar 1			Figure 2: Bar 10

The groups formed correspond to the cells in which the work will develop and will be used in the study of improvisation.

Figure 3: Bar 4

Figure 4: Bars 23 and 24

In Figure 4, the groups represented by the letters f, g, h and i will be joined, forming the larger groups j and k, which represent the musical phrases. It is also possible to join groups j and k, forming a larger phrase. Each step of the study should be done avoiding exaggerated accentuations in the groups.

The Tabuteau’s numbers

The numerical system of Marcel Tabuteau is a way of studying musical elements by the use of numbers, which serve as a measure to practice the exercises. These numbers can either assist in setting parameters for different types of sonorities, or to measure aspects such as dynamics and tempo. In sections with large variation of elements, use a unit of measure to create exercises that follow a progressive order, aiming to reach the domain of each aspect present in the work to be studied, such as speed and dynamics. An example is to use numbers for each change of speed (v1, v2, v3 ...), as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Bars 21 and 22

Changes in tempo (Fig. 6 and 7) can also be studied using numbers as a measure of variation, so that the performer could sense the difference with each new tempo in relation to the previous one and have more control of the variants while playing.

Figura 6: compaso 23			Figura 7: compasso 33

Rink Graphics

John Rink suggests the creation of graphs to observe specific aspects of the musical work, such as dynamics and tempo, which he calls "analysis for interpreters". Although it's possible to observe changes of tempo or dynamics in the score, creating a specific graphic of each aspect makes it possible to observe in a single image, how these changes occur throughout the work, as well as the parts that have most changes in general. By observing the variations of each aspect to be worked, it's possible to make a planning of studies that accompany each of them and their variations in the course of the work.

Figure 8: Dynamics graphic

Studying improvisation

The proposal is for the interpreter to create small exercises and organize them into progressive measures. The creation of exercises should take place in the following stages: firs, to select small cells of different parts of the work, chosen from the small groups of note grouping (see Fig. 1, 2 and 3). After selecting the groups, to organize them progressively, observing the graphs made (Fig. 8) and following the variation of material that the piece contains. Then use the numerical system of Tabuteau to create measures to play the exercises, such as v1, v2, v3, for speed, or i1, i2, i3, etc., for dynamics. Once the exercises with small groups have been studied, to form musical phrases with these groups and play them. Afterwards, create new musical phrases, removing some of the small groups and adding improvised notes. Gradually withdraw stretches and improvise new ones until you create totally improvised phrases. Study those phrases in progressive speed.

The choice of creating exercises for improvisation with these material and tools was made with the intention that the performer could not only create an improvisation that is structurally related to the work but also to the stage of study and preparation itself, creating connections between the sound material written by the author and the one created by the performer, from the first stages of study of the work.

Figure 9: Example of improvisatory phrases

References:

ANNALA, H.; MÄTLIK. H. Handbook of Guitar and Lute Composers. Pacific: Mel Bay Publications, 2007.

JACOBS, A. A New Dictionary of Music. Harmonsdworth: Penguin Books, 1967.

MACGILL, David. Sound in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

RINK, J. Musical Performance: a guide to understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

THURMOND, James Morgan. 1991. Note Grouping. Lauderdale: Meredith.

Introduction

In 2016, the popular song “Dununa Rivesi” featured prominently during elections in Zambia. Newspapers and other print media published numerous articles about the song. Radio stations blasted the song on the airwaves, and kids and grown-ups, regardless of their political affiliation, danced and sang along to the song in a variety of spaces. The song was originally a political theme song for the governing Patriotic Front party, but in addition to being performed at Patriotic Front (hereafter PF) campaigns, “Dununa Rivesi” was also heard at parties and nightclubs.

A cover of the song, titled “Dununa Forward” and sponsored by the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND), was also released. Zambians in the United States, Poland and beyond performed and uploaded choreographed versions of the song to YouTube. No single song has had such massive appeal in the history of Zambian political music.  

Drawing on fieldwork, interviews with popular musicians, music fans, political leaders, and literature on Zambian music and politics, this paper examines what led to “Dununa Rivesi” becoming one of the most popular songs in the history of Zambian popular music. I argue that nostalgia evoked by “Dununa Rivesi” is one of the main factors that propelled the song’s popularity, enabling politicians and PF supporters to mobilize publics during Zambia’s August 2016 elections.

“Dununa Rivesi”

“Dununa Rivesi”

The Patriotic Front party was founded by Michael Sata in 2001 after he expelled himself from the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) government. The PF’s women’s choir, founded exclusively in order to compose and perform campaign songs as a way to mobilize publics for the PF, composed “Dununa Rivesi.” The PF Entertainment Committee, which was entrusted with the duty of facilitating the production and circulation of a campaign song for the 2016 elections, paid for studio time at Shenky Sugar Sounds Studios now in Lusaka, and sub-contracted singers Jordan Katembula (one of Zambia’s most celebrated pop musicians, also known as JK), Kayombo, Felix, and Wile to produce a pop rendition of the song (Christopher Linenga, personal communication, 2017).

Figure 1: Jordan Katembula (JK) [Picture courtesy of Fortress]

The song “Dununa Rivesi” is an example of Zed Beats, one of Zambia's most popular music genres. Zed Beats (colloquial for “Zambia’s beats”) blends traditional Zambian music with R&B, reggae, rap, and hip-hop. The genre is primarily popular among lower-middle-class youth. However, the “Dununa Rivesi” Zed Beat transcended age, social class, national boundaries, and politics.

“Dununa Rivesi” is not the first political theme song to have taken over the soundscape during moments of political transformation in Zambia. For example, music was at the center of the struggle that led to the country's independence from Britain on 24 October 1964 (Sardanis 2003a:11). Njekwa Anamela, Vice President of the opposition United National Independence Party (UNIP), has also observed that Zambians used chachacha music as a rallying point to fight against colonialism (personal communication August 2017). In Africa: Another Side of the Coin: Northern Rhodesia’s Final Years and Zambia’s Nationhood, Andrew Sardanis (2003b:91) narrates the origins of Zambia’s chachacha:

A lot of property, including government offices and even schools, was damaged. The chachacha had started. The chachacha had since been immortalized as Zambia’s independence struggle. It took its name from the Congolese Afro-Cuban r[h]umba music song “Chachacha Independence” which in 1960 celebrated the end of Belgium rule in the Congo. In typical Zambian folk humor, it portrayed the people of Zambia dancing chachacha and “shaking the colonial government out of office.”

The Zambia's 1950s and 60s chachacha music was mostly sung acapella, although drumming and later Western instrumentation accompanied the singing.

However, the direct use of popular music in Zambian politics is a relatively new trend. The 1991 election, which transformed Zambia into a multi-party state, was the first time political parties used recorded popular music in their campaigns and jingles. UNIP, the ruling party at the time, produced an album on cassette that included the track “Keep the Flame Burning,” a song that UNIP supporters and sympathizers danced and sang along to.  Since then, popular music has become an important part of political propaganda and campaigns.

For example, musician Wesley Chibambo's “Donchi Kubeba” (“Don’t Tell Them”) mobilized publics to vote for the PF, and arguably contributed to their success in the 2011 presidential election, when they displaced the MMD who had been in power for twenty years. However, “Dununa Revisi” represents something new in the Zambian political scene. It was the first time that a political campaign song became popular in multiple spaces among multiple publics. In "Politics and Counterpublics," Michael Warner (2002:50) defines a public as "a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space as with a theatrical public." I draw on Warner’s definition and use the word “public” to refer to collectives that share visible and/or virtual spaces, and “Zambian publics” to refer to such collectives that identify themselves as Zambian.

I contend that “Dununa Rivesi” changed the way people hear politics. As Zambian journalist Nkweto Mfula (2016) writes, “One thing is true, this election campaign will go down in history as one where musicians stole the show. JK et al’s ‘Dununa Reverse’ has been at the peak of the Patriotic Front campaigns.” In the following section, I will elaborate on some of the factors that led to the massive appeal of “Dununa Rivesi.”

Factors that Led to the Appeal of “Dununa Rivesi”

Use of familiar musical elements, famous Zambian musicians, and local dialects are some of the factors that enhanced the appeal of “Dununa Rivesi.” The song features Nyanja, Bemba, and Lala languages. Nyanja and Bemba are the main languages spoken in the urban regions where most of the electorate is concentrated. Lala is perceived as a phonetically humorous language by most Zambians, especially those in urban areas who associate the language with rural life. According to Milimo Muyanga, a Zambian reggae musician, "there is something about the intonation in the Lala language that makes it sound non-serious. Lala is liked by people because it is a bit funny sounding...even when he [singer Wile] is talking about a very serious thing...it still sounds as if he is joking" (personal communication, August 2017). English is the official language of communication in Zambia, and one would expect political songs to be sung in the Queen's language as was the case with UNIP's “Keep the Flame Burning.” However, the PF has always claimed that it is the party for the marginalized lower-middle class. Therefore, the use of local languages in the song can be understood as a deliberate effort to reach out to the lower strata of society that is mostly semi-illiterate and communicates primarily in local dialects (Bemba and Nyanja) as opposed to English. Zondani Banda, a Pittsburgh denizen who migrated from Zambia over fifteen years ago explains: “I don’t support the PF, but I liked the song because it was a good song and it was sung in a language I speak [Nyanja]. I don’t think the song would have had the same impact if it was sung in English" (personal communication, 20 April 2017). Although Banda is literate and does not live in Zambia anymore, he asserts that use of local languages made the song appeal to him.

The text of the song is comical and mostly makes fun of the opposition. For example, Wile’s rap in Lala:

“…under five politics nebo nshitite fyamusangowo”

(“I don’t do stuff like under-five politics”)

In Zambia, infants and children under the age of five are routinely immunized against polio and measles among other diseases. The mortality rate in under-fives is higher in comparison to the mortality rate in children older than five years (Ministry of Community Development Mother and Child Health 2015:10). Therefore, it is assumed that children five years and older have a stronger immunity against disease and their lives are not as fragile as the infants’ and under fives’. Wile here is implying that Lungu, the PF candidate, who is far stronger [politically] than the candidates in the opposition, is not in the same league as his weaker rivals.

The next few lines are specifically directed at Hakainde Hichilema, the opposition UPND presidential candidate, who had run for the four previous presidential elections before 2016, winning none, with “Dununa Rivesi” guaranteeing Hichilema’s fifth defeat:

“Webo chimo nomwana wandi Saulos webo wapona grade seven seventeen times per hour. Five times ulepona chabe? Chita retirement webo”

(“You are the same as my child Saulos who failed his grade seven exams seventeen times…Five times you have failed. You should retire [from politics]”)

Rhythm also played a role in making “Dununa Rivesi” appeal to a broader audience. Most Zambians easily related to the familiar rhythm section of the song, a 4/4 generic drum pattern colloquially known as bustele among Zambian music fans. The bustele style which was popularized by musician Moses Chipimo, aka Mozegator, in the mid 2000s has its roots in sporting events, particularly soccer, where supporters sing at the events as a way of cheering for their teams.  Bustele performances involve singing and dancing and participation is open to everyone in attendance. The bustele style sometimes makes use of recycled rhythmic patterns from previously released Afropop songs.  Use of call and answer is a common feature in bustele and Zambian folk music.  The transcription in Figure 2 shows the text and melody of the chorus in a call and answer style:

Figure 2: Call and answer in “Dununa Rivesi”

       Call:                 Dununa, dununa iyee (Kick it, kick iyee)

 Response:        Ayee dununa iyee (Ayee kick it iyee)

             Dununa rivesi (Kick it back; reverse)

The Zambian public, as Zondani Banda observes, was drawn to the song because they understood the lyrics and could easily sing along (personal communication, 2017). These elements were central to the song’s appeal.

Chidunu and Nostalgia

However, alongside these musical features, I argue that the main factor that enhanced the song’s appeal was the sense of nostalgia it evoked. “Dununa Rivesi” contains a reference to Chidunune, a variation of hide and seek, a game most Zambians played in their childhood. “Rivesi” is a local dialect pronunciation of the English word “reverse.” Dununa, the root of Chidunune, means to kick the chidunu [a container that is used to play the game] away from the seeker. To dununa-rivesi on the other hand suggests kicking the container back to the seeker. Although the lyrical content in “Dununa Rivesi” is not related to the Chidunune song sang when playing the game of Chidunune, the song relies on the space in which Chidunune was performed. In “Dununa Rivesi,” Zambian publics “were kicked back” into these spaces in which they could experience the good old days of Chidunune in their imagined realities. S.D. Chrostowska observes that when nostalgia is at play, “the past is re-imagined along with the past's uncertainty about the future...A past exerts a pull on us because it is an open door to (real and imagined) possibilities” (2010:55). During the 2016 elections, the Zambian public relived the past of Chidunune in re-imagined spaces. In reality the past could only be relived if the incumbent president Edgar Chagwa Lungu could be dununa-reversed (kicked back) to office. This promise of experiencing a moment in the past associated with chidunune, mediated by “Dununa Rivesi,” was enough to convince the Zambian electorate to re-elect the incumbent president Lungu back into office in the 2016 elections. Cliff Jere, another Pittsburgh resident, observed that “most people voted for Lungu not because of what he stood for but because of “Dununa Rivesi”” (personal communication, 2016).

Figure 3: President / PF member Edgar Chagwa Lungu

Conclusion

Musicians in Zambia played a significant role in mobilizing and influencing publics during the 2016 elections. To mobilize support amidst contestation, the PF drew on musical resources to popularize its agenda and mobilize its supporters. I argue that the nostalgia evoked by “Dununa Revesi” in the Zambian populace was one of the main factors that propelled the song to become a hit, motivating politicians, PF supporters and non-PF supporters to use the song to construct spaces in which to communicate their politics.

References

Chrostowska, S.D. 2010. “Consumed by Nostalgia?” SubStance 39(2): 52-70.

Electoral Commission of Zambia. 2016. https://www.elections.org.zm/elections_faq.php (accessed 13 April 2017).

Engel, Steven T. 2005. “Rousseau and Imagined Communities.” The Review of Politics 67(3): 515-537.

High Commission of the Republic of Zambia in India. 2015. http://www.zambiahighcomdelhi.org/news_detail.php?newsid=15 (accessed 15 April 2017).

Koloko, Leonard. 2012. Zambian Music Legends. Lusaka, Zambia: Lulu.com.

Mfula, Nkweto. 2016. “‘Dununa Reverse’ Captivates.” Zambia Daily Mail, 10/07/2016.

Ministry of Community Development Mother and Child Health. 2015. “Introduction of Inactivated Polio Vaccine in the Routine Immunisation Schedule in Zambia.” UNICEF, Lusaka, Zambia.

Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory, 17(3): 333-348.

Pistrick, Eckehard. 2015. Performing Nostalgia: Migration Culture and Creativity in South Albania. Surrey, England: Ashgate.

Sardanis, Andrew. 2003a. Zambia: The First 50 Years. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Sardanis, Andrew. 2003b. Africa: Another Side of the Coin: Northern Rhodesia Final Years and Zambia’s Nationhood. New York: I.B. Tauris.

Sedikides, Constantine, Tim Wildschut, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge. 2008. “Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(5): 304-307.

Sheffer, Gabriel. 2003. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Thomas Ryan. 2015. Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Tembo, Benedict. 2016. “About ‘Dununa Reverse,’ Power of Music in Politics.” Zambia Daily Mail, 10/08/2016.

Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture, 14(1): 49-90.

Biography

Mathew Tembo is pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, US. His research interests focus on the impact of 1990s economic liberalization and changing technologies on Zambian popular music. He has directed two documentaries on Zambian music (“Sing Our Own Songs” [2007] and “Music of the Bwile People” [2015]), and also maintains an active performing career, touring and recording music all over the world.

Gavin Lee is Assistant Professor at Soochow University School of Music in China. He completed his doctoral studies at Duke University on avant-garde music in Singapore, and his core research interests include postcolonial theory, affect theory, queer theory, global modernity and modernism, and the Sinophone world. Lee’s research is published in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis (forthcoming), and in his edited volume, Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music (Routledge 2018).

It was not always obvious to me that I was going to able reach the point where I am in my scholarly trajectory. I have spent the past few years developing my dissertation, which focused on avant-garde music in Singapore, into a monograph project that conducts a comparative study of the contemporary music scene in Singapore and China, exploring the core issues of globalization, modernity, race, and musical hybridity. Framed using concepts drawn from the writings of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the project allows me to do the kind of deeply committed intellectual work I love best. I am lucky in that my position at Soochow University (Suzhou, China) allows me access to research materials such as musical scores of contemporary Chinese avant-garde composers (thus allowing me to expand beyond my dissertation work on Singapore), as well as the time to conduct interviews and ethnography in the city of Suzhou.

An early version of my book project, which was closely related to my dissertation on Singaporean avant-gardism (and did not touch on China), sparked the interest of the music editor of a highly prestigious British university press, but was ultimately rejected because it was deemed to have too small of a market of interested readers. This was possibly because the vast majority of the music publications of the press focus on Western art music, which is conceptually organized around North America and Europe, as well as composers from those milieus. The creation of Western art music (WAM) so far outside of the Western heartland was possibly considered to be of little interest to the musicological public, not to mention the general public. (Examples of non-Western WAM include works such the Yellow River piano concerto, which is in the style of common practice era music, as well as avant-garde music, by e.g. Tan Dun’s contemporaries in China, such as Ye Xiaogang.)

At many turns, I’ve faced this kind of disciplinary rejection from musicology. I’ve enquired about a job position for Western music, and received a polite reply that my specialty in Western music in Asia is not considered to be appropriate for the position. I’ve been informed by a journal editor that I might publish my work in the home country of the composer I write about, where there might be more interest in the music I discuss. I’ve gone through arduous editorial revisions where readers emphasized the methodological import of my articles (framed using Deleuzian ideas) to the extent of completely overshadowing the actual composer and music being discussed. This is a situation which I find highly questionable: Can we really leave vast swaths of the e.g. racist or orientalist repertoire unstudied once musical academia decides that its time to move on to a more innovative paradigm?

Outside the musicological world, I have not found a home in ethnomusicology with ease, even if my research interests in Singapore and China would appear to be in accord with the usual non-Western geographical ambit of ethnomusicology. Further complicating the issue is the problematic social ascription of appropriate research areas to me based on my Chinese ethnicity, such that my research and I are either “too Chinese” or “not Chinese enough.” Conventional assumptions were evident when I described my research interests in the Western art music of Singapore and China to one of the top musicologists in the field, and he queried, “That’s ethnomusicology, isn’t it?” But how many articles on global (Japanese, Egyptian etc.) composers in the genre of Western art music have you seen in the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM)? Not so long ago, I heard a member of the top leadership of SEM declare that “we” must continue to push back against Western art music. It would appear that composers like Ye Xiaogang in China or Joyce Koh in Singapore are positioned at the margins of legitimate ethnomusicological research at best. Even when my research papers are located safely within the boundaries of conventional ethnomusicological concerns, such as Chinese audiences’s global imagination, I am faced with another wall between the vast majority of researchers on the music scene in China versus the handful of researchers on Singapore (a Chinese-majority nation in Southeast Asia). I have had my knowledge of Chinese music “tested” on one occasion, when I politely recited my Chinese music syllabus to my interlocutor. I’ve been called laowai in China, a derogatory term normally used for white Westerners, which applies to me because the literal meaning is “foreigner.”

Ethno/musicological tensions aside, my work on music analysis of avant-garde music from Singapore has led to various forms of rejection from musicology and ethnomusicology. A musicology journal found that the extended music analysis in my article does not fit with its state mission. Some ethnomusicologists see me as “the theorist.” On the plus side of things, I am sometimes seen as versatile: I was a job candidate for a position that required the teaching of courses in ethnomusicology and music theory, and have taught anything from music aesthetics and Schubert’s Lieder, to Chinese opera and musical globalization, to form and analysis in my current position. At other times, however, I am pressured to “Pick one!” among musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. I’ve been questioned on the level of expertise I can develop across such a varied range of topics, each with its dedicated literature. (“Well, you’re going do it by working really hard!”—was the response from an encouraging colleague.) Is it so difficult to conceive of research in a particular soundscape, such as that of the global Sinophone world of Singapore and China, as requiring a multitude of methodologies including historiography, ethnography, music theory, hermeneutics, and philosophy? Complicating the problem of my scholarly marginality are troubling interpersonal issues. How do I deal with the inevitable awkwardness with North American colleagues who are on the most part unfailingly polite but for whom my otherness renders me somehow beyond the boundaries of natural camaraderie? Or am I just paranoid? I’ll never know for sure.

Working at the site of disciplinary boundaries means that I’ve had to make a home of my own at the margins, cobbling together willing colleagues from multiple disciplines to form support networks and platforms for interdisciplinary intervention. In the past 4 years, I’ve collaborated with 50 scholars across musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory in conferences and conference panels that I organized. At a broader scale, I’m heartened by evidence of society-wide and cross-society disciplinary realignments among the major scholarly organizations. There is an emerging global consciousness within both the American Musicological Society (AMS) and Society for Music Theory (SMT), which makes me hopeful that in the future, researchers who study the history and theory of Western art music from the non-West, or even all genres of traditional and popular music around the globe, may find a home within these societies. The recent founding of the SMT Analytical Approaches to World Music interest group and SMT Global New Music interest group (of which I am co-chair) are promising, as are the existence of the Ibero-American and Jewish Studies groups of AMS and plans for the formation of the AMS Global East Asian Music study group. Ethnomusicologists are establishing alliances across music societies, as seen in the activities of the SEM chapter of the research group on Analytical Approaches to World Music, as well as cross-society collaboration in the Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship symposium of 2016 among the LGBTQ groups of AMS, SEM and SMT. I have been inspired by scholars who have led the way in conducting research that reconfigures dominant paradigms by crisscrossing the music disciplines—a partial list includes Lawrence Kramer (hermeneutic windows that are located at structural pressure points), Fred Everett Maus (explication of music theory practices in terms of sexuality), Georgina Born (ethnography of IRCAM), Michael Tenzer (theory and analysis of gamelan music), Jonathan McCollum (historical ethnomusicology), Reinhard Strohm (global music history), and Barbara Mittler (“global new music”[1]). I believe that musicology and ethnomusicology are at the cusp of an imminent convergence due to the critical mass of interdisciplinary research that is about to burst the disciplinary levees, much as musicology and music theory became intertwined in what was known as New Musicology in the 1990s.

I continue to ponder the disciplinary investments of vast swaths of musical academia. These rigidly fixed boundaries and attendant gate-keeping have been devastatingly at times, but also energizing at others. I’m one of those people who want to do something all the more if you say it can’t be done. Living at research interstices has meant that I’ve had to smoothen virtually every single surface I have come into contact with using conceptual saw files. In the endeavor of crafting a personal space, I was lucky in that I found a job position in China and developed research interests in the music scene here, because I think it is quite possible that “Singaporean avant-gardism” would have remained at best insignificant to many people—and, at worst, incomprehensible. There are certain phrases which still have not quite clicked into place academically: “Western art music composers in the non-West,” “theory and analysis of non-Western music,” “Singaporean music”—is “Singaporean” an ethnicity? (It’s not. Singapore is an island-nation in Islamic Southeast Asia, with a Chinese majority and large Malay and Indian minority groups.) In this context, I have enjoyed the advantage of being able to utilize the heavy rhetorical and material weight of China in the context of the comparative work that I’m doing on Singapore and the Chinese city of Suzhou. I also lovingly remember the multiple interdisciplinary platforms that I’ve built for myself, across Chinese music studies, global music history, global avant-gardism, queer studies, and affect theory, and the hard work that I’ve done developing expertise in a multitude of fields because I had to.

To you, the reader, I would make the case that each of us should stop saying “This is not musicology,” “This is not ethnomusicology,” or “This is not music theory,” and instead embrace a multitude of methodologies and musical genres. I’m suggesting that we remember the criticisms of each discipline that has been made in the past while moving forward in an interdisciplinary fashion that preserves the insights afforded by each methodology, whether we are examining archives, sounds, or social worlds. It is possibly by engaging everything that we might best avoid the trappings of each discipline, trappings that have been variously described as “elitist,” “formalist,” or “too focused on the contemporary and on small-scale communities.” Let’s see where this will take us.

The Aman Folk Ensemble had its roots in a UCLA student dance group called the UCLA Village Dancers. In 1963, the campus group was re-conceived by Anthony Shay (Associate Professor of Dance at Pomona College) and Leona Wood (painter and dancer), as Aman. Aman became the first Los Angeles based dance company to perform at the Los Angeles Music Center and gained an international reputation for the scope of its programming and the versatility of its performers. “Aman's eclecticism is a reminder that America is a nation of people from many nations," wrote Jack Anderson in a 1979 New York Times review. "Moreover Aman implies that national traditions should be cherished, rather than scorned. And by making its programs so varied, it expresses the hope that different cultures may exist harmoniously." Los Angeles Times music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer put it more simply, calling Aman "one of the finest ethnic companies anywhere. Repeat: anywhere."

Aman also had a connection to UCLA Ethnomusicology.  To quote from a 1972 oral history interview with Mantle Hood: 

MILLER: What is the connection between the Aman group and the Institute of Ethnomusicology?

HOOD: We have been, several of us on the staff of the institute, oh, Boris Kremenliev and I, at least those two, perhaps David Morton at one point, individually [are] faculty sponsors of Aman, which is required in order for them to have any kind of UCLA affiliation ... this year [1972] for the first time we are now officially sponsors of Aman, the Institute, and this with the blessings and, in fact, advice and guidance of one of the vicechancellors. And I think it's a good thing, because I've watched that group build and develop and, knowing it from the very beginning when it first started and then seeing what they've done recently at the Music Center, I think it's an amazing growth and accomplishment in really a relatively short time and, so far as I'm aware, totally financed by their own bootstrap operation. By now it's quite a company, and we think at this point—and are delighted that we might be able to help a little—that university affiliation in a more official way will help them in a number of ways. It will probably attract outside financing, which they badly need, and can further their research base. As you know, they have stressed this from the beginning, so that any numbers they put on are prefaced by a lot of digging and research to be sure the costumes are right and the dances and song texts and so on, so that we hope this now rather official affiliation will be of some benefit.

Alas, the legendary Aman closed in 2004, 41 years after its founding.  In 2005, members of Aman donated a collection of audiovisual recordings to the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.  20 titles from that collection are now online as part of California Revealed (formerly the California Audiovisual Preservation Project.)  I thought I would highlight several of the recordings.

Aman Folk Ensemble, Making of "Light," 1993.  Aman Folk Ensemble's first work in modern dance/folk fusion, collaborating with composer-choreographer Laura Dean. The 24-month project was funded by Phillip Morris, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. The finished work, "Light," was a special commission made to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Los Angeles-based Aman Folk Ensemble. In addition to choreography, Dean is credited with costume design and music, co-composed with Aman's John Zeretzke. "Light" made its Los Angeles premiere in June 1994 at UCLA.

Aman on KCET, 1977.

Madame Xu Shuying with Aman,1981. Madame Xu Shuying was an expert on minority folk dances from China. Madame Xu called dance a kind of international body language and described Chinese ethnic dances ranging from the shoulder-twitching Mongolian style (suggesting the horseman's life) to Han "flower" dances or the suppressed Korean minority's relatively constrained movements. She said the challenge is to find ways to "maintain and develop and pass on" dance traditions (and those of all art forms) yet "still maintain the characteristics of the minorities." Madame Xu toured the U.S. as part of the Dance Exchange Program and visited several U.S. cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Nihon Odori: Gasa Odori; Oni Odori (technique) by Miyoko Komori, sensei, 1970s.  Rev. Mas Kodani of Senshin Buddhist Temple (Los Angeles, Calif.) credited Miyoko Komori (d. 2011) for helping to create the communal spirit of Obon (Ullambana) dancing that exists today. In the 1970s, the reverend asked Komori to choreograph dances for the Buddhist churches in an effort to revive a communal folk style of dancing. “Komori is the person who changed the Bon dancing from a performance to participation. Rather than showing, dancing without one’s ego is the basis of Buddhist dance. The Bon dancing that Komori has choreographed is the dance everybody can master and enjoy. Without her, we would not have this Bon dancing style today,” said Kodani. She also started choreographing Bon dances at the Nishi Honganji temples where various summer festivals took place. “It is amazing to know that the dances that my sister choreographed are still cherished among Japanese Americans.” Nakamura Komori said. In 2007, the BCA (Buddhist Churches of America) Southern District temples recognized Komori’s contribution to restoring Obon dancing to its traditional roots, and Komori received a City of Los Angeles Certificate of Recognition presented by Councilmember Jan Perry. According to the BCA, “Komori-sensei’s dances have stories, so they are easy to learn and fun to dance.” As a dance instructor, Komori started teaching at East Los Angeles College in the 1970s and taught there until her death in 2011.

To view all the Aman recordings currently online.

Top image:  Don Sparks, artistic director of the Aman Folk Ensemble at the Japan America Theatre, Los Angeles, 1984.  From the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive. Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Many Americans have potent memories of their early years in music classrooms, squeaking out the melodies to patriotic tunes or outdated popular music hits on a plastic recorder. Even as a musician who studies music education as the subject of my Ph.D., most of the particulars of elementary school general music class have faded from my memory. However, I do vividly recall learning how to play “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic in sixth grade—an activity that was intended as a treat for us after studying the recorder for at least a year, but which most of us found painfully embarrassing. Even though my classmates and I loved music (many of us were involved in orchestra, band, or studying other instruments on our own), playing recorder was not a cool musical activity, and we, or at least I, resented every time we were asked to pull out our plastic whistles.

As it turns out, it’s not only American schoolchildren who are mandated to study the recorder; the instrument has been used in schools throughout the world since at least the 1960s (Brehaut 2017, Gordenker 2001). In some countries, the recorder appeared in schools as early as the 1930s, soon after composer Carl Orff published his Orff Schulwerk, which emphasized the importance of music teaching that relied on rhythm and creative thinking above memorization and encouraged the use of instruments that mimic children’s vocal ranges (Nosowitz 2015, Lasocki 2001). This year, upon beginning my fieldwork in Central and West Java, Indonesia, I was surprised to find a plastic recorder displayed in the home of my advisor, a professor of dance education at the Indonesian University of Education (UPI). After inquiring about it, I learned that many Indonesian schoolchildren throughout the last few decades have learned recorder in their elementary music classes.

A plastic recorder compared with a Sundanese suling. Photo by Rendila Restu Utami.

Most people I talked to played the recorder for two or three years, usually in late elementary school or middle school. Most had grown up on Java, the most populated Indonesian island. However, the recorder also reaches other Indonesian islands when schools have enough resources to teach the required skills. Although I couldn’t find a precise time for when recorder instruction began in Indonesia, it’s been happening at least since the mid-80s, according to one of my informants. Other informants guessed that while perhaps not directly brought over during the Dutch colonization period (from the early 1800s to 1942) or the three years of Japanese colonization (1942 to 1945), the ubiquity of the recorder may have had something to do with lasting influence from the Dutch and the Japanese.

This book of regional songs may be used to teach singing or simple melodic instruments like recorder. The book includes Western notation and number notation. Photo by the author.

It makes as much sense to use the recorder in Indonesia as it does in Western countries: the instrument is affordable, difficult to damage, and easy to store and carry. Students can purchase their own instruments for one to ten dollars, depending on quality, and carry the instruments with them, negating the need for the school to purchase large or expensive musical equipment that takes up schools’ limited space. The recorder has also been praised for its accessibility and use as a tool for child development and the democratization of music education (Chazanoff 1970, Rubinoff 2011). Another musical instrument often used in Indonesian schools, the melodica or mouth organ—often referred to by the most common brand name, pianika—also meets all of these requirements, and is even easier to play than the recorder. Several of my informants told me that although they learned the recorder, they much preferred playing the pianika because the recorder exasperated them. One of my informants, Azis, didn’t have fond memories of learning the recorder: “We needed to grab the recorder with two hands, then play with our fingers to close and open the holes properly…it was frustrating!”

But why choose the recorder (or the pianika) and not another instrument that meets the same criteria? Many regional cultures of Indonesia, including the populous Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese ethnic groups, have their own traditional flutes made of bamboo, all variants of a similar instrument that can produce the different traditional scales of the region. These flutes are also affordable, sturdy, lightweight, and easy to procure, and it can be argued that using recorders instead of traditional instruments abstracts the cultural context of music learning, even if students are taught traditional songs (Pieridou-Skoutella 2007). So why not use traditional flutes instead of foreign imports?

Most of my informants didn’t seem to have strong opinions on this issue and felt that the recorder offered good opportunities for music learning. Although recorders used in Indonesia are tuned to the Western scale, they can still be used to play many different types of music. My informants recalled learning Western tunes, Indonesian one-hit wonders, traditional tunes from Java and elsewhere in Indonesia, and patriotic and national tunes.

“Kepompong,” a one-hit wonder from the early 2000s, was the song of choice for one of my informants’ music class in Surabaya.

This helpful video instructs the viewer how to play “Edelweiss,” a song which still haunts one of my informants from his recorder-playing days in elementary school.

Astrid, who learned the recorder in the early 1990s and is now coaching her young son on the instrument as he studies in school, mentioned that she actually thought it was an Indonesian instrument because she was studying Indonesian music on the recorder. She told me the recorder was often referred to as suling, the same word for any flute, traditional or otherwise, in Indonesian. Astrid also said that for her, “music is universal—it can use traditional or Western instruments and we can play Indonesian and Western music with them. [Playing the recorder] broadened my horizons.” A similar sentiment was expressed by a teacher at an Indonesian language school in Yogyakarta, who said that for her, playing the recorder was an intimate way to connect with her regional identity. By using her breath, mediated through recorder, to play the traditional songs of her region, she embodied her identity as a Javanese person in a way she said she hadn’t ever experienced before.

Another informant, Berlin, suggested that it was more popular to use Western instruments because they appealed to students and teachers, whereas traditional instruments were not as “cool.” Berlin suggested that one reason for this is that “some traditional instruments need to be played with others to make the music sound complete. You can’t play angklung on your own.” Angklung, a set of pitched bamboo rattles tuned to the Western scale, is used in many schools throughout Indonesia for kindergarten and young elementary school students, but for upper-level music learning, schools still turn to instruments that students can practice and perform with on their own.

Because of their necessarily communal nature, traditional instruments like the angklung are described as useful for teaching good character more often than Western instruments. This focus on character education is particularly evident in the new curriculum, introduced in 2013, which stresses moral behavior and allows more time for classes devoted to local knowledge (Schoenhardt 2013, Wang 2015, Widarsa 2013, Masunah 2008). In angklung ensembles comprised of beginners or young children, each player is responsible for one (or perhaps two) pitches and must interlock to create a flowing melodic line or complete harmony. It is difficult and unsatisfying to play angklung alone, and so its study promotes cooperation, listening skills, and teamwork, according to music teachers. Although the angklung is from West Java (and associated with the Sundanese ethnic group), it has now spread all over Indonesia and is widely used for education, entertainment, and representation of Indonesian culture at embassies, ceremonies, and other celebrations.

This video demonstrates the interlocking nature of angklung in a performance of Indonesia’s national anthem.

Mita, who learned recorder in Yogyakarta in the 1980s, suggested that the reason for studying Western instruments such as recorder and pianika was because of the relative universality of the Western scale. In order to play Indonesian national songs (or Western songs, or popular songs, or songs from other regions in Indonesia), one needs an instrument tuned to the Western scale. In this light, the Western-imported recorder is a tool of diversity. Some of the people I spoke to, however, took issue with the wide use of Western instruments such as the recorder and the pianika in Indonesian schools. My most interesting conversations took place with two professors at UPI who teach Western music. Henry, who teaches guitar lessons, described himself as a korban globalisasi—a victim of globalization—because when he was younger, he didn’t respect his local Sundanese traditions and only cared about learning more popular Western instruments. As a result, he is an expert on the guitar but knows very little about Sundanese music. I pointed out to him that it’s never too late to learn, and that he’s in a good place for it, since UPI employs several experts on Sundanese music and Henry shares an office with some of them, but he told me that his schedule doesn’t allow for the time it would take to really learn the traditions in the way he’d like to.

A few days later, I had a similar conversation with Dodi, who teaches composition at UPI. He too identified with the phrase korban globalisasi and bemoaned the lack of knowledge both he and his students had about the local culture. He thinks it’s a shame that students are learning the recorder and the pianika when they could just as easily learn the Sundanese suling, and he’s developing a project with a Sundanese gamelan teacher, Pak Engkur, to build a gamelan out of bamboo. Dodi stressed that Pak Engkur was the brains behind this operation, since he was just a beginner, but he was proud of his effort to resist remaining a victim of globalization.

After hearing these educators describe their experience so regretfully, I wondered what others might make of this phrase, and if people who had studied the recorder but were not deeply entrenched in musical culture might also feel that they had been victimized by the influence of Western culture. I didn’t find any reactions as strong as those of Dodi and Henry, but several others expressed a certain level of identification as a korban globalisasi. My informants often linked Western culture—or just non-Indonesian culture—with a “coolness” that Indonesian culture couldn’t achieve, a common enough reaction for young people in any country. Berlin told me, “I feel a little bit like a korban globalisasi, because I thought that Western cultures were cooler than my culture. I felt like Indonesia sucks, other places are cooler. But now, I wish I knew more about traditional culture…maybe I just hated it because I was young. I really liked Japanese comics that were based on Japanese history, and I thought it was interesting, but later, I realized that it’s all the same. I realized this lately and tried to read some books about wayang [Javanese shadow puppetry], because I felt that as a Javanese person, I should know it.” Mita expressed a similar sentiment; she says that she feels sorry that many white foreigners can play gamelan better than Javanese people. For many Javanese people, though, there aren’t many chances to play traditional music unless they do it themselves—and not all people are able to study it themselves, Mita told me.

In a music classroom in Central Java, a set of angklung takes its place next to an electric guitar. Photo by the author.

Wes, a Surabaya native in his 20s now living in Yogyakarta, felt that the phrase korban globalisasi didn’t fully reflect the complex entanglements Indonesia has had with foreign powers throughout its history as a nation. “My parents had at some point in their education also learned pianika and recorder,” he told me. “At that point, the term was ‘colonization,’ not ‘globalization.’” Wes felt that although the methods of Dutch colonization weren’t ethical, Indonesia wouldn’t exist as a nation without colonization. For him, describing oneself as a victim of globalization ignores the possibilities for interconnection that are available in a modern Indonesia and that helped shape the nation in the late colonial period.

Foreign popular culture often influences street art in Yogyakarta, Central Java: here, the Incredible Hulk is reimagined as a pengamen, or street musician, with a Javanese face. Photo by the author.

Elvis and Marilyn Monroe enjoy traditional Indonesian foods in a mural at a martabak manis stand in Jakarta. Photo by the author.

As conversations about foreign influence—both from the West and the Middle East—grow louder in Indonesia, it’s possible that curriculum reform will lead to changes for recorder use in classrooms. I haven’t seen any evidence that the recorder is going away anytime soon, but the newest curriculum does allot significant resources for “local knowledge” classes, particularly in the arts. These classes stress flexibility, rather than standardization, across schools in different provinces. The measures allow schools to emphasize the types of lessons that are most relevant for their students and which draw on the resources that are easily available. It remains to be seen whether curricular reform of this nature will lead to traditional instruments replacing Western imports, but the possibilities are never far from educators’ minds.  

As a result of my brief investigation on the recorder in Indonesian music education, I found a range of complex perspectives on globalization, curricula reform, and identity. I will conclude with Wes’s summarizing statement: “We are the results of modernization, not the victims.”

Gillian Irwin is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. She is currently in Indonesia on a Fulbright Student Research Fellowship conducting fieldwork on character education and regional identity in music classrooms in Yogyakarta, Central Java. Gillian is a member of the Indian Ocean Worlds Mellon Research Cluster and enjoys performing with UC Davis’s Javanese karawitan and viola da gamba ensembles. 

Works Referenced

Angklung Eindhoven. 2016. Angklung Festival – Indonesia Raya. Accessed March 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JESYnaRuWw

Brehaut, Laura. 2017. “Back to School: Why so many of us can remember playing that same plastic recorder (and all the same notes).” National Post. <http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/music/back-to-school-why-so-many-of-us-can-remember-playing-that-same-plastic-recorder-and-all-the-same-notes>.

Campbell, Patricia Shehan et al., eds. 2005. Cultural Diversity in Music Education: Directions and Challenges for the 21^st Century. Australian Academic Press.

Chazanoff, Daniel. 1970. “The Recorder Goes to School.” Music Journal 28 (9): 60-63.

Doddy Irawan. 2008. Kepompong – Sind3ntosca (music video). Accessed March 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdZVi2m27Q

Gordenker, Alice. 2001. “Every child gets to be a musician here: schools starting young maestros off early with the keyboard harmonica.” Japan Times. <https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2001/12/14/lifestyle/every-child-gets-to-be-a-musician-here/#.Wqn-O5NuaRs>.

Jorgensen, Estelle R. 2007. “Songs to Teach a Nation.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 15 (2): 150-160.

Lasocki, David. 2001. “Recorder.” Grove Music Online. <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561692630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000023022.>.

Made. HOW. 2018. Cara memainkan Edelweiss di recorder. Accessed March 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2kLiUvFANE.

Masunah, Juju. 2008. A Case Study of the Multicultural Practices of Two United States Dance Educators: Implications for Indonesian K-9 Dance Education. Dissertation, The Ohio State University.

Nosowitz, Dan. 2015. “Why Every Kid in America Learns to Play the Recorder.” Atlas Obscura. <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-every-kid-in-america-learns-to-play-the-recorder>.

Pieridou-Skoutella, Avra. 2007. “The construction of national musical identities by Greek Cypriot primary school children—implications for the Cyprus music education system.” British Journal of Music Education 24 (3): 251-266.

Rubinoff, Kailan R. 2011. “Cracking the Dutch Early Music Movement: the Repercussions of the 1969 Notenkrakersactie.” Twentieth-Century Music 6 (1): 3-22.

Schoenhardt, Sara. 6 January 2013. “Indonesia Envisions More Religion in Schools.” The New York Times. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/world/asia/in-indonesia-science-may-give-way-to-religion.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&>.

Temmerman, Nita. 2005. “Children’s participation in music: connecting the cultural contexts—an Australian perspective.” Social and Cultural Studies in Education 22 (2): 113-123.

Wang, Juiching. 2015. “Games Unplugged! Dolanan Anak, Traditional Javanese Children’s Singing Games in the 21st-Century General Music Classroom.” General Music Today 28 (2): 5-12.

Widarsa, Avina Nadhila. 29 July 2013. “New 2013 Curriculum for New School Year in Indonesia.” Global Indonesian Voices News. <http://www.globalindonesianvoices.com/8813/new-2013-curriculum-for-new-schoolyear-in-indonesia/>.

Ethnomusicology Review is seeking to expand its circle of reviewers for books, films, and album/sound recordings. We extend an invitation in particular to music scholars and graduate students in Ethnomusicology, Musicology, Sound Studies, Jazz, and Popular Music Studies to submit a book review to our journal.      

If interested, please contact the ER Reviews Editor, Will Matczynski, with your contact information and a brief note that includes your academic background and research interests. The reviewer will receive a complimentary copy from the publisher and the appreciation of our professional community. A list of available books for review can be viewed here:    

Available Books for Review:

2018

Alonso-Minutti, Ana R., Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid, eds. Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America.

Borge, Jason. Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz.

Briain, Lonán Ó. Musical Minorities: The Sounds of Hmong Ethnicity in Northern Vietnam.

Lau, Frederick and Christine R. Yano, eds. Making Waves: Traveling Musics in Hawaii, Asia, and the Pacific.

2017

Bidgood, Lee. Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe.

Chávez, Alex E. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño.

Fiol, Stefan. Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility.

Fiol-Matta, Licia. The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music.

García, David F. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins.

Guillebaud, Christine. Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound.

Harris, Robin R. Storytelling in Siberia:The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World.

Jones-Bamman, Richard. Building New Banjos for an Old-Time World.

Karush, Matthew B. Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music.

Maliangkay, Roald. Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea's Central Folksong Traditions.

Miszcynski, Milosz and Adriana Helbig, eds. Hip Hop at Europe's Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change.

Ramnarine, Tina K., ed. Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency.

Weintraub, Andrew Noah and Bart A. Barendregt, eds. Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities.

2016

Biancorosso, Giorgio. Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema.

Braggs, Rashida K. Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris. 

Bruenger, David. Making Money, Making Music: History and Core Concepts. 

Brusila, Johannes, Bruce Johnson, and John Richardson, eds. Memory, Space, Sound. 

Crowdy, Denis. Hearing the Future: The Music and Magic of the Sanguma Band.

Gabbard, Krin. Better Git It in Your Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus.

Gidal, Marc. Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries.

Gilman, Lisa. My Music My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Glasser, Jonathan. The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa.

Huseynova, Aida. Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera. 

Hutchinson, Sydney. Tigers of a Different Stripe: Performing Gender in Dominican Music. 

Levin, Theodore, Saida Daukeyeva, and Elmira Köchümkulova, eds. The Music of Central Asia.

Luker, Morgan James.The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency. 

Narayan, Kirin. Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills. 

Okigbo, Austin C. 2016. Music, Culture, and the Politics of Health: Ethnography of a South African AIDS Choir.

Plastino, Goffredoand and Joseph Sciorra, eds. 2016. Neapolitan Postcards: The Canzone Napoletana as Transnational Subject.

Sullivan, Jill M. Women's Bands in America: Performing Music and Gender.

Zhuo, Sun. The Chinese Zheng Zither: Contemporary Transformations.

2015

Banfield, William C. Ethnomusicologizing: Essays on Music in the New Paradigms. 

Briggs, Jonathyne. Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities and Pop Music, 1958-1980.

Davis, Ruth F. Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diaspora. 

Dorr, Kirstie A. On Site, In Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina.

Leymarie, Isabelle. Del tango al Reggae. Músicas Negras de América Latina y del Caribe. 

Levine, Victoria Lindsay and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. 2015. This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl.

Pettan, Svanibor and Jeff Todd Titon, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. 

Pieslak, Jonathan. Radicalism and Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants.

Rivera-Rideau, Petra R. Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico.

Shannon, Jonathan Holt. Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean.

Wang, Grace. Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance.

The Gabriel family, with their roots in New Orleans and a strong foothold in Detroit, has seen six generations of musicians anchor and pioneer the musical styles of New Orleans. Like their ancestors, who were musically active before jazz was a household word, the current generation carries on the family legacy, not only upholding New Orleans traditions but also branching out into other areas of music. Gabriel family members currently belong to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as well as lead the Detroit-based Gabriel Brass Band. In addition, they run festivals, publish books, and lead music businesses and non-profits, as well as continuing to provide music for church services, weddings, funerals, and other joyous and sorrowful events that require music.

I had the chance to sit down with three musical rocks of the Gabriel family: Dameon Gabriel, Marjorie Gabriel-Burrow and Larry Gabriel, in March of 2018. Trumpeter Dameon Gabriel currently leads the Gabriel Brass Band, which includes family members as well as other Detroit-based musicians. Building renovations have begun for the opening of Gabriel Hall, a new home for New Orleans music and food in Detroit. Journalist Larry Gabriel acts as grand marshal of the band, having written a book about the Gabriel family called Daddy Plays Old-Time New Orleans Jazz, as well as performing a one-man show about New Orleans legend Robert Charles. Marjorie Gabriel-Burrow, a pianist and organist, acts as music minister of St. Augustine-St. Monica Catholic Parish in Detroit. In 1984 she produced the first African-American Catholic hymnal, Lead Me, Guide Me: The African American Catholic Hymnal. In addition, she runs 'Jazz on the Lawn', an annual jazz festival in Detroit – and with Dameon leads the Gabriel Music Society, a charitable organization providing free instruments and music workshops to students in Detroit.

As there are so many accomplished Gabriel family members, I’ve chosen to focus on these three musicians’ personal experiences of music within their family. A full family tree can be found in Daddy Plays Old-Time New Orleans Jazz, and an overview of which can be found at gabrielmusicsociety.org.

LEGEND:

L - Larry Gabriel

M - Marjorie Gabriel-Burrow

D - Dameon Gabriel

J - Molly Jones

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

J: I would like to hear each of you talk about your first musical memory.

L: An enduring memory in my mind as a child is my father’s bass. It sat in our living room, in the corner, and nobody was allowed to touch it but my father, because that was what my father used to go out and earn money. That was his tool, and he was a worker. And that’s really my attitude as I grew up with music: it was a skill, and musicians were workers. It was literally, go out and play music, bring the money home for the family.

M: My first memories of playing, my grandfather had a little bitty white piano. I used to go over on Scotten [ed: the family home] and play because we didn’t have a piano. My father bought a piano when I was about six or seven.  It was from Grinnell Brothers, it was a brand new Wurlitzer. When we got that, I’d already started taking piano lessons from a neighborhood lady. My grandfather watched over me, and I didn’t get that discipline that he gave to his brother, but he did watch me. And every time I came over I had to play whatever I was learning. When I started being able to read chords, he pulled the books out. He was trying to show me how to play that New Orleans music. It was like reading a foreign language. I really couldn’t get the hang of it for a long time, but I tried anyway. He’d get his clarinet, and we played together for many years, since I was a kid.

D: My youngest memory of music is probably my dad holding a horn up to my lips and getting me to blow into it. I heard a story; I’m the youngest of the generation, me and Marjorie are first cousins, while Larry’s up there in the generation above us. My grandfather was able to see all of his grandkids before he passed, and I must have been two years old when he passed, but my uncle said Dammit, this one’s going to play music. So I would get lessons. My dad’s primary instrument was trumpet, but he played multiple instruments. It really wasn’t until after he passed where I started taking the stuff that he taught me a little more seriously, but it wasn’t until even way later that I understood the history. Even though I would hear stories here and there, your grandfather did this, your great grandfather did that, it just went in one ear and out the other.

M: I grew up around a lot of music. My father was a composer. My father composed music that was popular music, and he was very good, he was very gifted.  My uncle Charles will tell you, Dad could write up a song in a few minutes. He’s a real creative mind.

J: Are the songs your father wrote still things you play?  Do you have the music he’s written out for them?

M: I have a couple of pieces. One of them was recorded by John Lee Hooker. It’s on one of his albums. Dad said when John Lee Hooker did his song, he didn’t even recognize it anymore. He said, “I didn’t even know that was my song.” My Uncle Charles has some of his music, because he was thinking about putting it on one of [Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s] newer recordings, when they do another recording.

L: You know, we are resting on a bed that our older generations...people call us up, because we’re Gabriels! Somehow that Gabriel name has stuck with them as the people to call. Sometimes I’ll get calls from people, and they’ll say, well I called up such-and-such musician, and he said you gotta get the Gabriels to do this. But I started playing music when I was nineteen years old. Had never touched an instrument to play it before. I was at college and started hanging out with people who were into jazz. And they’d be talking about jazz people here and there, and I’d be like, I heard Daddy say something about that person, or, I heard Daddy talking about that before. Stuff that I just didn’t give any account to. That’s when I realized, oh, you know, I got the hookup. So I told Daddy, I said, Daddy I want to learn how to play bass. Blew him away, because I had shown no interest in music previous to that. I literally took the semester, I was in the Honors College at Michigan State, so I was able to arrange an independent study learning things from my father. I came home, went down in the basement, and Daddy...

D: Whooped you into shape?

L: I was reading music. What I didn’t do that I have suffered from only more recently is playing with records. The way it was taught to me was like, here’s the music on the page, read it.

M: My father had five brothers and we had my grandfather, they’d all come over to my house at the same time and they’d all be watching me. I was playing classical music, and I thought I was doing really good. The music was there, but I was playing it by heart, and my uncles started discussing the fact that I wasn’t reading the music. And I didn’t understand what the big deal was about me not reading music, because I’d learned it and I’d memorized it. They got into the biggest argument about this. Their discussions turned into arguments; they got very, very lively with their discussion. ‘SHE AIN’T READING THAT MUSIC!’ They got loud, and I’m a little kid, so that really scared me. That put a fear in me that has prevented me from being able to remember music now. I always need my music in front of me, even if I’m not reading it, I need it in front of me, because that was a really traumatic experience. Now if you go back to that article my grandfather has from that New Orleans magazine, you’ll see how much emphasis he places on reading the music.  He really stresses it, so he imparted that in me. He bought me books, he’d give me sheet music, he hand wrote all kinds of fabulous music for me, and he wanted me to READ the music. I still have the music he wrote for me.  It wasn’t until he had died, about a year later, all that New Orleans music that he was trying to show me how to play, it was all still so foreign to me.  Well one day at church, I was playing it. And in the middle of the song I said [gasp]: This is what my grandfather was showing me! I got it. It wasn’t until he was gone that I could really feel it.

J: It’s interesting because so many narratives about jazz music are, it’s by ear, you don’t write it down.

D: Well I think they had a hangup, because a lot of stuff they probably learned by a little bit of both. Nonetheless, I think they ranked people’s musicianship to if they could read music, ‘Aw man, they can’t even read music.’ So I think they also wanted to instill in their kids, yes to be able to play, but to read music. I think they ended up going overboard on being able to read music.

M: My grandfather was a historian, and he worked with lots of those musicians down in New Orleans. If I had realized what he was teaching me, I would have been taping him all the time. I always got a history lesson. I couldn’t just come to watch TV. I came over, I’m the musician, I had to learn. So he pulled a book out all the time, and he’d open the book up and he’d tell me stories about all these people in the book. I mean, real life stories about, these are famous musicians, but I didn’t know that at the time. Then we practiced. That’s what we did. And a lot of the cousins wouldn’t come over, because he tried to teach a lot of them.  Most of them didn’t want to hear it. I would listen because it was interesting, but I wish I had retained all these stories he told me, because he shared a lot of information. It was fabulous.

L: Actually, even with Uncle Manny, you guys took pictures. That’s one of the things that Walter Payton told me, when he saw my book, he’s like, You got pictures! And most of those pictures came from Uncle Manny’s family line, not the rest of the family. For some reason, they got a camera and liked taking pictures. They got a lot of pictures.

M: There’s a picture of my grandfather, it’s unlabelled, but there’s a picture of him in one of those old anthologies, those New Orleans books. He was playing drums at the time, Ma Rainey was the singer, Thomas A Dorsey was the piano player. And there’s a really nice picture, I have to find it.  That’s before he started playing clarinet and saxophone.

L: My uncle on my mother’s side was a drummer. He left New Orleans with Ma Rainey 1915. Uncle Dave! Frank’s father.

M: Oh wow!

L: He was on the road with Bessie Smith; when Bessie Smith had the accident and was killed, he was the bus driver. She was driving separately in a car with her husband, but he was the bus driver for the band. He played the last of the tent shows, the travelling blues tent shows, like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, he played on that circuit when he was first getting out. And he was the first teacher for Earl King, the drummer who created the famous New Orleans backbeat. Earl King was the session man. He was a dancer in one of the old tent shows, and his mother was my uncle’s girlfriend, so my uncle was the drummer, and he was teaching the kid how to dance with the beat, and that later became the drummer Earl King. He was on numerous sessions, Little Richard, many of the great sessions. But that’s on the other side of the family.

J: How did you feel about being part of this family where people contact you because your family is at the center of all of these movements?  That seems beautiful but also like a lot of pressure.

L: Yeah.  For me, there was always pressure because before I’d even hardly done anything I’d meet people and it’d be like, oh, Gabriel, you’re a great musician, and I’d be like, well I haven’t done anything yet. I met Jay McShann the piano player, Dad used to be on the road with Jay back in the 40s, and in the 90s he came to Kerrytown Concert House, and I went there, and I started talking to him and said I’m Percy Gabriel’s son, and the first thing he said was, well what instrument do you play?  So that’s kind of the thing. They have this expectation.

M: Dameon’s keeping it going.  He’s carrying on the tradition, which is really important.

J: What are some of the things you consciously think about when you think about how to pass things on?

L: You know, for me, Marjorie has done church music.  And she’s like a rock with that. You’re very solid and wonderful person with that music.

D: And really made tracks in doing that.

L: She put together the black Catholic hymnal.

M: That’s the first one, actually, in the world.

D: And all-black Catholic choir, right?  And they’ve done some pretty substantial things, like playing for one of Mandela’s celebrations, one of the Popes.

M: We’ve done a lot of things.  I’ve been kind of a pioneer for that.  I’m one of the elders now. When I started playing in church, it wasn’t because I picked to play in the church. My pastor, Father Charles Moffatt, he lives in Boca Ridge, Louisiana, he’s still alive; he walked over one day and talked to my father, unbeknownst to me.  He asked my father if it’d be okay if I played at church. I was about fourteen. ... I did start playing, and then I got a little choir together, I figured we could do some better music, and so I always started working on getting us more soulful music in the church.  When I left from there I went to kind of a diverse choir, but when my uncle came home, I asked him to come play with me. He’s been watching me all these years, he’s waiting for me so I can be his musician on the road.  Well I was like Dameon, I never saw anybody making a lot of money. Sometimes they were paying us with beer and popcorn, playing for college. We wanted to play so bad, but you come home at three in the morning and you’re a college student, you’re dragging through classes, and I said, I don’t know how I’d make a living with this.But when I started working for the church and this opportunity came up for the first black Catholic hymnal, they had done a whole year’s study before I even began. And I was in on that because I was the administrator for the Office of Black Catholics. When we had that first meeting they thought we were going to do everything in one weekend. [laughs] I said, I think your ambitions are a little bit too high. It took us about three years to get it done. .. It came out in June 1987. It’s like the first and only baby I ever had. It’s over thirty years old now. The shock, it’s over thirty years old.

D: You see it everywhere, too.

J: To wrap up, if you could each talk about something you think is important for people who are learning the music to keep in mind.

D: I think the secret to learning anything is...people act like there’s some magic way or a magic shortcut, but it’s time.  It’s time with your craft, time with your instrument. Now that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be Wynton Marsalis. I think true genius happens when you have those people who are just naturally gifted and talented and when it meets that time put into it, then you have those special people like that.  But if you want to be proficient and good, time with your instrument, and something a lot of musicians don’t learn until later, the sensitivity. It’s like 80% listening when it comes to being good and not showboating, and knowing how to blend and play-with vs. it all being about yourself.

M: I agree with that.  Practice. Practice is key.

L: And with this New Orleans music, you actually have to listen to New Orleans music.  For me, New Orleans music isn’t Louis Armstrong after 1925. It’s basically the cats who were in New Orleans playing what was New Orleans traditional.  Louis Armstrong didn’t play New Orleans traditional after he went to Chicago and had the Hot Five and Hot Seven. It’s basically a regional folk music, and you have to listen to it.  You can look at a chart and see, yeah these are the chords and these are the notes of the melody, but you don’t have a feel for the way those people played it.

D: And if you don’t feel it, it ain’t right.

Introduction 

Trap is a music genre (or sub-genre) in high circulation since 2012, when its presence in social networks and the rise of scenes or communities around the world became evident.[1] Its origins can be traced to the suburbs of Atlanta, in the United States.

The few press articles commenting on the phenomenon—usually based on the notoriety reached by some bands, and always linked to shocking discourse or events involving the artists—describe it as “nihilistic, sexual and narcotic rap” or, referring to the generational profile of its followers, “the music parents hate.” The only academic work that takes trap as its object of study is Alexandra Baena Granados’ doctoral dissertation (2016) on the trap scene in Barcelona. 

Trap is a slow-tempo music, with a stable pulse. Its base is programmed from the sounds of an 808 (a 1980s beatbox deemed obsolete due to its artificial sound quality, in contrast to subsequent models) and completed with a strong bass line, effects, sampled fragments and different layers conceived as modules; combined, overlapped or silenced throughout each song.[2] The voices of singers are added, often heavily manipulated by the producer, who stands out as the real driver of the whole process, using filters and adjustments.

A trademark of the trap genre is how it is consumed, produced, and broadcast. Similar to rap, but differing from it musically and conceptually, trap sustains itself outside of the commercial market as bands choose to operate underground, using social networking websites and online platforms for music and video circulation. Most of those who make and listen to trap find in the internet not only their main source of information and music storage, but also a way to obtain music production software, promote their own music, and carry out collaborations, without the need for travel. The producers and/or singers are in charge of circulating their songs via Facebook, YouTube or Soundcloud, where they can also get in touch with each other and receive support or critique. A “do it yourself” ethos and a conflicting relationship with the recording industry are clear features of the genre.

Our research focuses on trap in Spanish, including artists from the northern hemisphere (such as Los Santos [formerly Pxxr Gvng], Cecilio G., Pimp Flaco, Fuete Billete and Anuel AA), and from South America (such as Malandro Malajunta, Trap Drillers, Lastre, Zeta Drew, Lil Jer, Nueve9tres, Pvblo Chill-E, MC Guime, and Cachorro Gordo).

In this post, we describe the scene and offer some preliminary observations about the relationship between trap music, social processes, and contemporary youth identities. We will begin by exploring vocal style in trap; we will then note the lyrical content of trap songs, commenting on the use of sampling and quoting; and finally, we will discuss the marginalized position of trap artists.

“Los pobres” by Pxxr Gvng

Voices: How Lyrics Sound

According to interviewees, trap music has its roots in the use of certain drugs, their effects and the environment they condition. As one interviewee, a member of the band Nueve9tres told us:

It also has to do with using drugs. What makes trap different is that you make it inside your room. Trap’s what happened to hip hop artists once they tried certain drugs and got into their home with a computer to make music. Codeine’s used, a lot. Everything becomes slower and voices are distorted. When the effect wore off and they wanted to keep listening in the same way; when trying to achieve that, trap came about.[3]

Lyrics and videos brim with references to rejected practices, such as drug consumption and dealing, misogyny and sexism, and the display of wealth and theft, among others.[4] At the same time, trap is enriched by challenges between artists—threats and the exchange of messages through songs. These themes are not entirely new or, at least, they are present in other genres, such as Mexican narcocorridos, cumbia villeraor gangsta rap. But, unlike the aforementioned examples, trap seems to be exclusively devoted to them; they seem to constitute its backbone. 

Figure 2: Singer Khaled, displaying brands and jewelry.

Trap vocals are heavily artificially modified. The most commonly used filter is Auto-Tune. Its original function was to correct a singer’s tuning while recording or performing live, but heavy use changes the tone or “color” of the voice. Such is Baena Granados’ claim in her study of trap in Barcelona: “Auto-Tune has gone from being an effect used on someone’s voice to a music style, a sound in itself and the watermark of a musical genre” (2016:60). 

The filter gives amateurs the opportunity to make music and sing. Facundo (Joven Mannson), of trap group Nueve9tres, told us:

I’d never sung before; I didn’t have any musical phrasing at all. We said “dude, let’s do it”, half joking, half seriously and really got going. The other guy and I are party buddies; we started listening to music together, and he turned me on to trap. We said, “if there’s people doing that and they’re young guys just like us, we can do it...” and it worked.JXY3RX [artistic name of Cristian Gualpa]handles production; that’s why it sounds like that, or else, it would suck.[5]

Distorted voices and different intonations embody narratives of outlaw or the “street” experiences.

“Drink & smoke” by Trap Driller$ 

Lyrics: What Is Said

The ostentatious show of wealth (dollar bills, jewelry or high-end cars) is one of the strongest trademarks of trap. Both the desire to be rich and the satisfaction of having money are conveyed in numerous trap songs. In both situations, the fundamental counterpoint is embodied by poverty. The fact that one comes “from the slums” and achieves economic success surfaces as the very basis of trap’s narrative. Pvblo Chill-E’s “Empezamos de cero,” for example: 

Having money’s what I want / Travel abroad / Want bills of twenty / Want gold on my teeth / Want a house on the beach / Want my sound in all continents / Wanna drive my Ferrari up front / Speakers blasting my songs 

“Empezamos de cero” by Pvblo Chill-E

The attainment (real or desired) of that wealth is often shown as a result of survival strategies such as drug dealing or petty crime, as seen in Zeta Drew’s “Trabajo en el descanso:”

I came from the slums and now just chill / I found a shortcut to count my stacks / What others say / I don’t give a shit / I chill at work and work at chilling

This last reference by Zeta Drew—accompanied in the video by a fictitious scene of drug dealing in a slum—serves as a link to another favored topic in trap: belonging in a neighborhood and being in the know of its codes.[6]

Another dichotomous pair posed by trap is being “real” or “fake.” The matter of first-hand experience in the situations sung about or shown in videos becomes central to legitimacy or rejection within the scene. 

The point of view established regarding life in the neighborhood and the possibilities it offers differs from other genres, which have approached the same topic from a different perspective. For example, hip-hop and conscious reggae lyrics include critical references to the police, injustice and the destruction of the planet, but also include proposals for unity and awareness-raising concerning these issues (Caldeira 2010, Bravo 2016). Trap moves away from these stands; it seems to mistrust these messiahs and spokespeople nobody appointed. Trap artist Joven Mannson makes this very important point: 

There is a generational issue which makes conscious rap old, aging. Do not tell me what’s right or wrong, because it’s bullshit. Some hip-hop guys insult us because they say, “This is not ‘hood’” ... That social message with no fundaments, because it is ok to sing about it, but if you do not put it into practice, you’re an asshole.

Songs often mention well-known figures: drug lords like Pablo Escobar or Chapo Guzmán are highlighted as paradigmatic figures in a lifestyle outlined as an aim. Diego Maradona is also mentioned in some songs, both as being associated with cocaine and because of his straightforward attitude, which reinforces the notion of being “real.” 

Although the coherence between what is said and what is done cannot be ascertained, it is worth mentioning the internal coherence of this particular discourse, reinforced by images. Likewise, the topics mentioned coexist with other kinds of references, such as love for one’s mother or friends, loyalty, and video games or anime characters. It is also possible to identify instances or cases of references to less controversial issues, such as loneliness and lack of love or future prospects. 

Sampling and Quoting in Trap 

Unlike rap or electronic tango, which feature samples of recognizable sources (Greco and López Cano 2015), seeking to vindicate an artist, movement, or state a point of view, samples in trap are not usually identifiable.[7] Music journalist Diedrich Diederichsen distinguishes three temporal levels in hip hop: the “individual and linear history of sung rap, the circular time of groove and, finally, the single’s fixed reference point, i.e. the quote conceived as history” (2005:119). The first level makes reference to hip hop’s narrative time, mostly in the early 80s, where a poem or manifesto’s organization style is evident, with a beginning, a middle part and an ending. This time opposes the time of the groove, which is circular instead of linear. On the third level, musicians incorporate selected excerpts of speeches by leaders of civil rights or integration movements for black people. According to Diederichsen, samples and their origins were not hidden, but treated as a historical source and epochal sign to be reappraised.

On the contrary, everything seems to be about the here and now in trap. How should we analyze this? One possibility is to conceive samples in trap music as "quotes," as Brazilian sociologist Renato Ortiz poses, within the notion of “international-popular memory:”

Asserting the existence of an international-popular memory is to acknowledge the fact that, within consumer societies, globalized cultural references are built. The characters, images, situations, carried by advertising, comics, television, cinema, become the substrates for this memory. Everyone’s memories are inscribed in it. (Ortiz 1997:173)

By not appealing to referential figures for support, trap artists seem to respond to the generation’s own perception of their music as something new. Both in interviews and lyrics, "old" means 1990s "conscious" rap. Discursive and musical references to "retro" refer to that decade. There does not seem to be an interest in expressing a genealogical line but rather in opening intra-generation dialogues.

Those who study late modernity often discuss how time is experienced. Rosa Hartmut (2016:25) describes temporal acceleration as a "contraction of present." While the past is "that which is no longer sustainable/valid," the present is the period of time coinciding with "experience spaces and expectation horizons" (ibid: 26). As part of the many consequences entailed by these changes, Hartmut points out the evident moving from "an intergenerational rhythm in early society to a generational rhythm in classic modernity and an intragenerational rhythm in late modernity" (ibid:27). We suggest that sampling in trap reinforces a temporality set in the present that serves, above all, as a tool for communication among peers.  

Tentative conclusions

We have argued here that trap is a recent musical phenomenon with some connections to other musical genres and styles, but that it differs from them both in the images it conveys (lyrical or visual) and in the fact that it exists mainly on social networking websites, as opposed to the commercial recording industry. Trap performers are usually part of marginalized youth groups, marked by poverty, discrimination or problematic drug use. They are unified in the representation of these realities, based on the exacerbation of stigmatizing or politically incorrect elements according to today’s common sense and the canons imposed by the media.

One of the most important features of trap is the stigmatized identity profile its performers embrace. Instead of refuting or rejecting these labels (being poor, marginal or linked to crime), trap artists embrace them.

The lack of recognition from the mainstream music industry and commercial circuits represents another way in which trap artists are marginalized, but this has largely been solved by self-management and the use of social networks and internet music platforms as a guarantee for existence. In others words, paradoxically, the exclusion from commercial and recording circuits seems to also allow for trap’s sustainability and development in its own terms.

Although there are continuities within the music produced and consumed by young people in low-income sectors around the world, at discursive, aesthetic and ultimately, conceptual levels, there is also evidence of some ruptures that require further research.

Trap is a phenomenon that can be heard as echoing punk’s do-it-yourself attitude, from the bid for self-management to the way it pushes boundaries, creating something new not only at the level of discourse but also in its sound. At the same time, stances on money, crime and women suggest a certain conservatism. Trap is, ultimately, (self-)defined as a music scene that serves to express the current marginality of its practitioners.

References

Adaso, Henry. 2016. “The History of Trap Music. Remember crunk?”. Thought Co, May 12th, http://rap.about.com/od/genresstyles/fl/Trap-Music.htm. [Accessed 28 September 2017].

Baena Granados, Alexandra N. 2016. “I’m in the fucking Krakhaus, fuck you bitch!” La escena trap de Barcelona. Dissertation thesis, Universitat de Barcelona. 

Bravo, Nazareno. 2016. “Rieles de acero en tiempos de caos: El reggae rasta en la Argentina neoliberal y la construcción de identidades juveniles”. InPensamiento Alternativo en la Argentina Contemporánea; Derechos humanos, resistencia y emancipación (1960-2010), Tomo III, compiled by H. Biaggini and G. Oviedo,457-475. (Buenos Aires: Biblos).  

Caldeira, Teresa. 2010. Espacio, segregación y arte urbano en el Brasil.(Buenos Aires: Katz).

Diederichsen, Diedrich. 2005. Personas en loop: ensayos sobre cultura pop. (Buenos Aires: Interzona).

Greco, M. Emilia and López Cano, Rubén. 2015. “Evita, el Che, Gardel y el gol de Victorino: Funciones y significados del sampleo en el tango electrónico”. Latin American Music Review36: 1, 228-259. 

Hartmut, Rosa. 2016 [2003]. Alienación y aceleración. Hacia una teoría crítica de la temporalidad en la modernidad tardía. (Buenos Aires: Katz). 

Ortiz, Renato. 1997. Mundialización y cultura. (Buenos Aires: Alianza). 

How can we approach the sensory dimensions of musical and dance experience as cultural anthropologists? What methodological tools can we use in our empirical research? What does happen when teachers experiment with these tools within the classroom, turning it into a field? (1)

Our anthropology of music and dance collective seminar based at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 2009 has been dedicated to exploring these issues for the past three years. With Kali Argyriadis, Julien Mallet, Nicolas Puig, and Gabriel Segré, the seminar has been a place to reflect on various field methods within the realm of perceptions, body sensations, and emotions inseparable from an anthropological approach to music and dance. Rather than covering the ongoing academic discussions related to these issues, our goal has been to discuss the various modalities of the restitution of knowledge through field experiences. Our discussions included the involvement of our own body as fielworkers, our experience of music and dance as practitioners ourselves, as well as the approach of sound studies to describe and analyze sound perceptions.

In 2017, my own research (Sara) about the therapeutic uses of mindfulness and hypnosis led me to invite a hypnotherapist and a juggler who demonstrated their collaboration using hypnosis as an artistic resource. This experience triggered further discussions about the incorporation of 3 labs within our 2018 seminar, with the intention of offering methodological tools through practice by "doing," rather than through a focus on theory and discourse. The idea was to develop a critical perspective through our own embodied experience, with the hope of refining perceptions, descriptions and analysis for our students as well as for ourselves. Assuming that we seldom take into consideration the act of perceiving in our everyday life, in public and private environments, and within academic constraints, we felt ready to take up the challenge in bringing perception to the foreground, in the legacy of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "Objective thinking ignores the subject of perception. It views the world as the field of all possible events, and treats perception as one of these events" (1945: 251). The rehabilitation of the body in cognitive science and social science in the second half of the 20^th century led to a new understanding of cognition where the act precedes language, a change of paradigm that includes the development of the notion of “embodied cognition” (Varela et al., 1991). Within French anthropology, David Le Breton emphasized throughout his work, "communication [as] a multi-channeled process of which language does not have the prerogative" (1998: 41). In fact, communication as a system includes body movements such as gestures, mimics, posture, speech tone, distance of interaction, gaze, facial expressions, etc. 

Reflecting here on these labs gives us the opportunity to raise questions about somatic practices as potential field research tools for cultural anthropologists. By actually doing and feeling in their own body some basic somatic experiences, by paying attention to their own senses, could we introduce students within the space of the classroom to the heuristic potential of the sensory dimension of music and dance practice? Could it give them access to another modality of understanding their social dimension? This project was far from consensual from the start, emphasizing various positioning and sensitivities within our long-term collaborative research team. Some of us were drawn by this experimental dimension and ready to test intuitions; others were much more circumspect if not uncomfortable with the educational value of these experiences. Our (Sara and Christophe) various practices and interest in somatics  (meditation, hypnosis, contact improvisation for Sara; tango instruction, and contemporary dance for Christophe) made us particularly eager to get on board.

Let's first return to the frame of these three "field" situations. All were focused on our embodied experience without any preliminary theoretical presentation or details about the type of practice considered. 

The first lab involved a psychiatrist, Dina Roberts, who practices hypnotherapy and has been working with a juggler, Guillaume Martinet, from the Defracto company. The classroom was rearranged so that the juggler could have the space needed to perform, with the psychiatrist standing on the side. Although we were in the position of an audience, we actually attended a rehearsal as opposed to a performance. We could ask questions at any moment. Guillaume showed us some short figures that they had worked together, sometimes using recorded instrumental music as rhythmic support. Dina was watching him carefully from a short distance, making occasional brief suggestions. After watching Guillaume practicing for a moment, we went from exchanging with him and Dina to more practice, then going back and forth between observation and practice. Echoing its goal as a therapeutic technique to "set the patient back in motion," hypnosis, according to Dina, supports Guillaume’s body work. Rather than talking about the benefits of a hypnotic state, she refers to a process that helps induce and enact receptivity and presence. Presence to body sensations as well as to the environment (the audience, noises, moves, feedback, etc...). Guillaume talks about her as a coach. Since they've been working together, he says, his skills have improved tremendously. Her assistance includes techniques that they practice together and that he can also appropriate as self-hypnosis: since he spends a lot of time flying while touring, he rehearses his performance in his mind. As a result, half as many balls fall afterwards. Referring to scientific research that has established that imagination is a precondition for physical action (Jouvent, 2009), Dina reminded us that "imagining is doing.” More broadly, Guillaume emphasizes her essential role in his performing and learning ability. A single juggling sequence of 1 minute involves 3 weeks of collaborative work where "she erases discouragement and weariness, she reboots me." Dina elaborates further on this process of "starting over." "It's a matter of intention and state, rather than technique (...). I assist him in something that I don't know how to do." Although Guillaume was loquacious, he admitted struggling with putting words on his experience. "It's about doing more than talking." 

Two other labs involved somatic practices. Last December, I (Christophe) had us - including students and teachers - focus on what we could sense alone and in contact with others. The idea was to experiment with the three-part process « perceiving, sensing, categorizing » with an emphasis on the first two parts. This idea was drawing inspiration from Danis Bois, a researcher in somatic-psychoeducation at the forefront of a new field of research based on the paradigm of the sensible: « Philosophy of the sensible interrogates the body before affect, emotion and representation, in order to access a pure subjectivity beyond individual interpretations." (Bois, 2001: 31-32).

I offered a few basic exercises: massaging ourselves for body awareness ; working in pairs for a massage from the top of the neck to the lower back;  breathing together while embracing one another; experiencing weight and counterweight in pairs, in trio... At the end, we took turns standing alone facing the group and staying still and silent for one minute. This practice allowed us to become aware of the impact of our presence in a given context of interaction, as quiet, subdued and understated it might be. Through our bodily behavior, dress and gestures, we communicate signs that can be given various interpretations. After each exercise, I left some time for feedback. The goal was to put our sensory experiences into words. In my view, the workshop gave the students the opportunity to build a space for experimentation and discussion and grasp the sensory dimension of their presence. As teachers, we were for once placing them in a situation where they could link their bodily experience to an analytical perspective.

In February 2018, we invited  Matthieu Gaudeau, a French teacher of Alexander Technique and contact improv whom Sara had met by attending some of his classes. Contact improv could be described as an improvised dance form between two bodies based on the physics of touch, weight, gravity, momentum, balance and flow. We first met Matthieu to explain our intentions. Matthieu draws much of his inspiration from Hubert Godard, a French dancer, instructor and researcher in somatic practices. During the workshop, we were introduced to some of the basics of contact improv: touching, giving/receiving weight, inhibiting the reflex of protecting oneself when something is thrown at us (pic 1 and 2 “giving/receiving weight” + 3 “inhibition: receiving an object thrown at us. Matthieu Gaudeau demonstrates both exercises”). Matthieu occasionally made theoretical arguments that fueled his approach and heightened the content of the practice.

Photo 1 and 2: Giving/receiving weight (exercise demonstrated by Matthieu Gaudeau)

Photo 3: Inhibition: Receiving an object thrown at us (exercise demonstrated by Matthieu Gaudeau)

In our view, these labs were an attempt to address and question the intersection between theory and practice. Experiencing the suspension of logos was a common theme. Communication was not associated with a signified, echoing the experience of fieldwork where observant participation and embodied experience stand at the foreground. Our work was not based on language, which remains the main tool of academic education. In fact, as noted by the French sociologist Dominique Memmi, Pierre Bourdieu approaches "the lettered inclination to disembody the world as social disposition: a disposition from those who have the freedom to distance themselves from urgency and necessity."(2009: 78).

Could these labs encourage our students to explore further the field of somatic practices as an additional toolbox? It seems to us that they were an opportunity to approach a few concepts through feelings and body sensations. Let's keep in mind that for the purpose of this essay, we restricted most of our references to French authors. Further discussion would require situating them within a much broader bibliography. 

- Embodiment: A student noted that she felt uncomfortable with some of the exercises involving touch, which brought back some of her personal history. Conceptualized in particular by Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, the notion of embodiment was directly experienced through various emotions like discomfort, ridicule, or on the contrary ease and pleasure. Some of the students realized how their body carries out social meaning and results from a process of socialization formed throughout childhood. 

- Body scheme: Basic movements like massaging each other, embracing each other and giving weight involved the strength of acquired dispositions. This embodied experience enacts our ability to open up to others when picking and touching a partner and to give our trust when giving our weight. We were interrogating posture as the result of an entirely conscious process. Paul Schilder defines body scheme as "the picture of our own body that we form in our mind, that is to say the way in which the body appears to ourselves (...). The term indicates that we are not dealing with a mere sensation or imagination." (1968: 35).

- Gesture as feeling: Students referred to the gesture of embracing each other by the term "hug," which in France is strongly tied to an affectionate feeling (and is not used as a greeting practice). This spontaneous association between gesture and feeling gives substance to the idea that our emotions are socially informed, that social interactions of everyday life involve specific gestures and situate themselves within a "social ritualization of communication." (Le Breton, 1998: 37). At times, students expressed their emotions ("I liked the feeling of his/her body heat against me," "the contact of our chests made me uncomfortable"). Some other times, they skipped this description, giving an analytical view of the situation ("it was very intimate"; "I realized differences in our bodies"). The distinction between these two phases (perception/analysis) was not obvious to them. Experiencing through basic exercises how emotions inform social interactions led to question the idea of objectivity and to bring awareness to internalized habits of movements, sensations and emotions. 

- Inhibition: As one of F. M. Alexander's foundational concepts, inhibition is a way to release our biased patterns of moves and perceptions. Practicing inhibition with Matthieu Gaudeau through the exercise of receiving an object thrown at us enabled us to broaden the scope of our vision and to suspend the objective analysis of the situation (in terms of threat, object, distance, reaction). Matthieu made us experiment what Hubert Godart named "blind gaze": a sub-cortical, spatial sight against an objective sight, extending this sensory dissociation, this double movement, to other senses. Here lies the ability to both touch and be touched. Which in the case of hearing involves first being touched by the sound (of speech, or of an instrument) and its vibrations on our bones before paying attention to its meaning and interpretation. 

This extension of the notion of perception can be helpful as field research method. It breaks with normalized interpretative schemes. It opens up states of consciousness or simply states of presence and receptivity in which can be situated new motivations. By putting rational projections in the background, it focuses the attention on what actually happens.

- Synchronization: One of the various techniques of induction used in hypnosis is synchronization. The limit of this lab was that we were exposed to a single rehearsal that was the result of a considerable amount of work and collaboration. Yet this technique is critical in order to tune up the bodies of the therapist and the client. This process can be achieved through the adjustment of body movements, of the sound or the flow of speech, which the therapist learns to modify intentionally, for example to match the respiratory rate of the client. Guillaume emphasized this process of synchronization that is a given in his relation with Dina, an unfailing support to the reorientation of his attention that benefits his learning skills and as a result, his ability to perform. His goal is to extend this synchronization to the audience as a modality of communication. 

Food for thought...

What lesson can we learn from these experimental labs within the classroom? 

Reflexivity is central to the approach of somatic practitioners. For many of them  (F. M. Alexander, F. Delsarte, M. Feldenkrais) the development of their practice and theoretical reflection originated from their own wounds. This dialectic between practice and theory is particularly obvious in Hubert Godard's itinerary, and acts as a driving force in the collaboration between artists and researchers. Hybrid research projects provide a rich opportunity for engaging in reflexivity and renewed field methods. Our hope is that this approach through embodied experience and practice can broaden the perspective of our graduate students, if only through a taste of research fields often unknown of them.

As several ethnomusicologists have noted, learning and understanding music involves not only the act of observing and collecting but also experiencing. In fact, Jeff Todd Titon, argues for “an epistemology of fieldwork based in musical, rather than linguistic, being-in-the-world » and asks « what it is like for a person (including ourselves) to make and to know music as lived experience » (2008 : 38 ; 25). The development of Emile Dalcroze pedagogy is one example of this approach in the realm of music education. Exploring somatics as a possible resource for exploring lived, embodied experience of music – either by playing, dancing, or through any other modality of participation - contributes to this discussion on field methods in the anthropology of music and dance. However, the different nature of embodied experience between dancers and musicians would require further investigation.

As for the reception of our labs, despite the unusual and peculiar experience in which the students were asked to participate, they stroke us as very engaged. Although they did not express their reservations or frustrations for obvious reasons, they definitely shared interesting feedback. Of course, the phenomenological perspective of fieldwork is not restricted to the anthropology of music and dance. Feelings, sensations and more broadly the involvement of the body act as a medium for understanding the social worlds we study, regardless of the object of research.

Attempting to reflect on these experiences only reaffirmed the uncertainties of our approach and its experimental nature. We definitely feel like we only scratched the surface. Our impression is that we have been either too ambitious theoretically, covering too many notions within one lab, or too cautious practically, dedicating insufficient time to our labs. 

Initiating students within the classroom to the suspension of interpretation by focusing on body sensations and proprioception (the perception of movement) does not mean that we were necessarily able to demonstrate the heuristic value of this process. However, we hope it expanded their representation of ethnographic methods through bodily modes of learning. We strongly believe that the links between field methods in the anthropology of music and dance and somatic practices are worth exploring.

(1) The English writing of this article was carried out by Sara Le Menestrel.

Bibliography:

Andrieu, Bernard (eds.), 2010, Philosophie du corps. Expérience, interactions et écologie corporelle, Paris, Vrin. 

------2015, From Phenomenology to Emersiology : The birth of living body in the philosophical research in France among 1990, "Study on Arts and Principles of Body-Mind Transformation," number 4.

Berthoz, Alain, 2000, The brain's sense of movement, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bois, Danis, 2001, Le sensible et le mouvement. Essai philosophique, Paris, Editions Point d’Appui.

Candau, J. & Halloy, A. (2012). « Autour du geste : Entretien avec le Professeur Alain Berthoz (Collège de France) ». Anthropologie et Sociétés, 36(3), 27–56. doi:10.7202/1014164ar 

Rolnik, Suely, « Regard aveugle. Entretien avec Hubert Godard », in Lygia Clark de l’oeuvre à l’événement. Nous sommes le moule. A vous couper le souffle, Nantes, Editions du Musée des Beaux-Arts de 

Le Breton, David, 2004, Les passions ordinaires. anthropologie des émotions, Paris, Payot. 

-----------2017, Sensing the World. An Anthropology of the Senses, Bloomsbury Academic.          

Mauss Marcel (1999) [1950], Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

Memmi Dominique, 2009, « Pierre Bourdieu. Le corps dénaturalisé », in La tentation du corps, Paris, Editions de l’EHESS, p. 71-94.

Merleau-Ponty Maurice, [1945], Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard

Schilder Paul, 1950, The image and appearance of the human body. International Universities Press, 1950

Jouvent, Roland, 2009, Le cerveau magicien. De la réalité aux plaisirs psychiques, Paris, Odile Jacob.

Titon, Jeff Todd, 2008, “Knowing Fieldwork”, in Shadows in the field: new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 25-41.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, 1991, The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge : MIT Press.

Christophe Apprill is a sociologist and associate researcher at the Centre Norbert Elias of the EHESS, at URMIS (Université Paris 7-Diderot)  and at the  Observatoire des Publics, des Professionnels et des Institutions de la Culture (Oppic). His research explores the social processes at work in the world of amateur and professional dancers. His publications include  Sociologie des danses de couple (L’Harmattan, 2005) and Tango. Le couple, le bal et la scène (Autrement, 2008) and Le goût du corps (Mercure de France, 2017).

Sara Le Menestrel is a cultural anthropologist and a research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is the author of Negotiating Difference: Categories, Stereotypes and Identifications in French Louisiana Music (University Press of Mississippi, 2015) and coordinated a team-authored book, Des vies en musique. Parcours d’artistes, mobilités, transformations (to be published in English by Routledge). In 2005, she extended her research interests to the antropology of disaster through post-Katrina and -Rita Louisiana. Since 2015, she has been working on the multiple appropriations and circulation of mindfulness between therapy, scientific research, spiritual practice and politics. 

Harmony is the Mother, Rhythm is the Father and Melody is the Offspring

-Hermeto Pascoal

My first 15 years as a full-time musician were spent in Hermeto Pascoal’s Grupo in Rio de Janeiro. This ensemble was the core of what became known as ‘The Jabour School’, named after the neighborhood in Rio where Hermeto and all the musicians in his ensemble lived in the 1980s and 1990s. I was the pianist, flutist, record producer and road manager for the band. The experience of intense rehearsals for 30 hours each week, plus the hundreds of concerts and recordings we did together, allowed myself and my colleagues (Itiberê Zwarg (bass), Carlos Malta (woodwinds), Marcio Bahia (drums), and brothers Pernambuco and Fabio Pascoal (percussion)) a direct pathway to the self-taught and intuitive musical genius of Hermeto, and to observe how he conceived and explained to us the musical entities of harmony, melody and rhythm, in addition to being a consummate artist on piano, flute, saxes and a wide variety of artisanal instruments, such as kettles, tubes, sewing machines and much more. In our rehearsals and concerts, we also witnessed how Hermeto would use different methods to describe a single musical concept to the six musicians of our ensemble, each of whom with different musical backgrounds and training. During those years with Hermeto I learned practical ideas which shaped my own musical growth which I hope I can use to inspire others. In this article I will describe the basics of Hermeto’s universal approach to harmony, with some practical ideas for individual development of the harmonic sense.

On the first day I met Hermeto in 1977, he gave me a sheet of music paper with written chord symbols. Those were the changes to his theme ‘Campinas’, [Figure 1]. Over the course of several years, this piece was used almost on a daily basis as the material over which we practiced the art of improvisation. The first thing that Hermeto taught us when improvising over chords to ‘Campinas’ was to write above each chord symbol a number of triad options. So, if a chord was a C major 7th, we would write the symbols for G, E minor, D and B minor. These triads are components of the C Lydian mode. If a chord was a C minor 7th, we would write the triads Eb, Bb, D minor, F.  These are components of the C Dorian mode. For each chord type there are between 2 and 5 triad options to be explored. However, instead of having us learn linear scales and modes, Hermeto would inspire us to create simple, intuitive melodies based on those triads. He also remarked that there was not a simple hierarchy of triads, no sequence or order of importance. So, we could be playing an E minor or a D major melody over the C major chord, which blurred the more traditional aspects of the harmony, in which hierarchy is a given premise.

FIGURE 1:

For me, with a then limited knowledge of music theory and hardly any experience improvising over chord changes, this was a completely new approach. It meant I did not have to engage in linear thought processes, leaving space for my intuition to operate while dealing with simple melodic figures. Prior to joining Hermeto’s Grupo, I had studied biology and was accustomed to the logical, Cartesian approach of the scientific method. Learning music with Hermeto and the Grupo proved to be one of my biggest challenges to overcome. Over time, the members of our ensemble became so familiar with this concept that we no longer had to write the triad options over the chords. The whole process became instantaneous and directly connected to the quick flash of reflex. Not the automatic, mindless reflex of habit, but the mindful, creative reaction that came to us organically when moving over a changing harmonic landscape. Hermeto’s harmonic language that he used in his compositions, arrangements and improvisations provided us with ample material with which to practice. His use of chord progressions was always inspiring, surprising and innovative.

After moving to the US in 1993, I saw how most schools and music instruction books focus almost exclusively on the linear approaches of scales and modes as gateways to improvisation. These approaches tend to result, in my opinion, in mechanical solos that fail to connect with a musician’s intuition. What I hear is a lifeless and flat flow of notes without melodic coherence. Traditional harmonic studies often describe wide intervals, such as ninths, elevenths and thirteenths, but if intervals can be imagined in orbital shapes rather than linear distances, we can then visualize the same long intervals as inversions of shorter steps, which come in pairs: second/seventh, fourth/fifth, third/sixth. This system brings the intuitive perception of intervals and chords to exist within the human hand, without the need for any quantity greater than five. We use our hands to play instruments, and it is intuitively possible to connect our 10 fingers as interval and chord builders, even if you are playing a melodic instrument. The way to harmonic conscience is built on intuitive major and minor triads. They exist in our mind’s ear as gestures and notations which have voices, just as easily recognized as the voices of our friends and family. Even though we tend to treat chords as individual entities or motionless objects, in reality they connect to and inform all the musical material surrounding them, so it would be more appropriate to consider chords as verbs, (which denote actions), rather than nouns, which denote objects. We can then visualize any chord as a cloud of possible musical actions, with an ‘atmosphere’ of triads surrounding it. I found it convenient to use three dimensional images as a visual aid to enable the multi-sensorial perception of harmony.

Music, being the art of placing sounds over time, is of course a four-dimensional sensory experience for both musicians and listeners, but the point is that, by employing three-dimensional objects as images of reference, we are one dimension away from the flowing nature of the musical experience, rather than the two-dimensional degrees that separate the linear objects of scales, modes and arpeggios from the immersive musical universe. Furthermore, I find that even better than using abstract Platonic solids as sources of imagery for musical reference, we can instead focus on shapes commonly found in Nature. Trees, for instance, can very effective models for conceiving harmonic entities. As land-dwelling beings, we think of trees as stationary objects, but somewhere in the inner core of our brains, we can still visualize trees as stations along a pathway of travel like our canopy-dwelling ancestors.

My ‘Arboreal Concept’, in which you can use images of trees as visual representation of chordal entities, holds potential for all students of harmony, because imagining trees is easy for most. Like trees, chords have roots, the notes which ground them to a spot which acts like a gravity well, pulling other possible notes to the root’s sphere of influence. The type of chord is indicated by the third and seventh intervals from the root, and this can be considered a trunk. For our purposes here, we can recognize six basic types of chords:

• Major (major third, major seventh)
• Minor (minor third, minor seventh)
• Dominant seventh (major third, minor seventh)
• Seventh with a suspended fourth (perfect fourth, minor seventh)
• Diminished seventh (minor third, diminished seventh)
• Half-diminished seventh (minor third, diminished fifth)

If we imagine the sensations which each of these chord types elicit, we can define their organoleptic properties: their aural impressions, their tactile properties (which gestures musicians employ to produce their sounds), and their visual representation (how we notate and read the chords, either by conventional notes or by chord symbols). Some of those will be unique to each individual, others will be easily shared with other musicians.

Of course, there are more chordal varieties beyond these basic six, but they can be heard as subtypes of the basic forms and can easily be represented by the use of the slash, which is the equivalent of a hinge in harmony. For example, a C major seventh with a raised fifth - Cmaj (#5) - can be felt and written as an E triad over a C root (E/C). This chord can be perceived from the bottom root (C) up, as it is in traditional harmonic studies, or from the top down, using the canopy triad (E) as a source of melodic creativity. [Figure 2]

FIGURE 2:

The important factor to keep in mind is that of the three basic characteristics of chord sensations (aural, tactile and visual), the aural one is by far the quickest and most direct. Our perception of sound can distinguish subtle variations that happen within 1/300th of a second, while our visual acuity is limited to 1/25th of a second. The speed of our response to tactile sensations sits between the aural and the visual. The neural pathways that lead from the ear to the brain are much more direct than the ones connected to our eyes. Even though we are primarily driven by vision, our sense of hearing remains as the most basic universal way to connect to the world around us.  As musicians, being aware of the environment inhabited by music entities as a vibrating field of acoustical energy is crucial for our growth as performers, composers and arrangers.

This awareness is what I call ‘The Tool’: an intuitive response that composers and improvisers develop by developing the coordination between their ears, touch and vision. Some only have one or two of these skills and never develop the other(s), but to be considered a universal musician in the sense that Hermeto Pascoal teaches, these three skills need to be constantly undergoing further questioning, study and refinement, for the lifetime of a musician. The harmonic deployment of triads, or triangle-shaped sound objects, leads to the inner building of three-dimensional patterns, which can assume the most varied shapes, geometrical, symmetrical, organically arraigned like leaves sprouting from a stem. This tool can be used as a means to create spontaneous melodies over chord changes, but also, in an inversion of its shapes, as a method to harmonize or re-harmonize melodic lines.

Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. By Alex E. Chávez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. [440 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-7018-5].

Reviewed by Larissa A. Irizarry / University of Pittsburgh

In Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño, Alex Chavez asserts that huapango arribeño, a vernacular music derived from the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosi, respatializes the lives of Mexicans living north and south of the border, due to this particular music’s improvisational practices between performer and audience, and the creation of a dialogic space that forms transnational pathways of “moving bodies and bodies of musical and poetic discourse” (6).

"Black Music and Musicians in Los Angeles" is a collection of oral history interviews with Bette Yarbrough Cox, Richard Anthony Dedeaux, Margaret Pleasant Douroux, Albert McNeil, Evelyn Freeman Roberts, and Don L. White.  The project, originally titled, "Documenting Black Music in Los Angeles," was funded by the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture Artsforum and the Office of the Chancellor (a collaborative project between the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, the Department of Ethnomusicology, and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies) in 2006-2007.  Professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje was the Principal Investigator and then graduate student Karin Patterson was the Interviewer.

Bette Yarbrough Cox was a music educator in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, the founder of the BEEM (Black Experience as Expressed through Music) Foundation for the Advancement of Music, a Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Los Angeles, and a longtime friend of former Mayor Tom Bradley. As she recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 1995, the school district first accepted the teaching of black history in the late 1960s, a seismic shift from her UCLA undergraduate days in 1938.  To enhance her classroom curriculum, Cox looked for books about the black history of music in Southern California.  Her search through the usual channels – library shelves, newspaper clippings, etc. – came up mostly empty.  Cox decided to do something about this lacuna and spent the next 20 years unearthing the untold history behind the music of black Los Angeles.  Her publications include "Central Avenue--its rise and fall, 1890-c. 1955: including the musical renaissance of Black Los Angeles."

 Richard Anthony Dedeaux (1940-2013), Otis O'Solomon, and Amde Hamilton were the founding members of the spoken word poetry group the Watts Prophets. Formed in 1967, the Watts Prophets® is a group of poets and musicians from Watts, Los Angeles, California. Like their contemporaries, The Last Poets, the group combined elements of jazz music and spoken word performance, making the trio one that is often seen as a forerunner of contemporary hip hop music.

Margaret Pleasant Douroux, the founder of The Heritage Music Foundation, is an internationally acclaimed author, educator, and the composer of such Gospel classics as "We're Blessed," "Rivers of Joy," "If It Had Not Been For The Lord On My Side," and "What Shall I Render."

Albert McNeil (1922-) is a native Californian, born in Los Angeles. He earned Bachelor and Master degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles, and did his doctoral studies at the University of Southern California, the Westminster Choir College of Princeton, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California at Davis, where he was Director of Choral Activities for 21 years and headed the Music Education Program. Simultaneous with the Davis period, he taught Ethnomusicology at the University of Southern California for 12 years. The McNeil Jubilee Singers ensemble is his creation, and he has dedicated himself to upholding a choral tradition of excellence with the presentation of the concert spiritual and the ever-increasing contributions of African American Composers of Concert Music, Opera, and theatre music. Under his direction, the group, now in its 50th year, has performed in over 70 countries, including Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and North and West Africa.

Evelyn Freeman Roberts (1919-2017) and her husband Tommy were the founders and directors of the Young Saints Academy of Performing Arts and Skills at Second Baptist Church (Los Angeles), a children's group that showcased the music and dance routines of American jazz and gospel composers. In 1970, the Young Saints performed for Richard Nixon in the White House. She was also one of the original members of the "Wings Over Jordan" which was featured on CBS radio from 1939 to 1950. In the late 1950s, the Evelyn Freeman Orchestra released "Let’s Make a Little Motion."  In 1960, she released "Sky High," a new album, and in 1962 released "Didn't It Rain."

Don Lee White (1926-2010) was born in Los Angeles and attended Los Angeles City College, California State University, Los Angeles, the University of Southern California and completed additional graduate work at Stanford University. For over 38 years he was organist/director at Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church, Los Angeles. For 27 years he was also a professor of music at California State University, Los Angeles, teaching organ, piano and choral music, conducting and music appreciation.

June is African American Music Appreciation Month.  As the Presidential Proclamation (2014) explains in part: 

Our country is home to a proud legacy of African-American musicians whose songs transcend genre. They make us move, make us think, and make us feel the full range of emotion -- from the pain of isolation to the power of human connection. During African-American Music Appreciation Month, we celebrate artists whose works both tell and shape our Nation's story ... The influence of African-American artists resounds each day through symphony halls, church sanctuaries, music studios, and vast arenas. It fills us with inspiration and calls us to action. This month, as we honor the history of African-American music, let it continue to give us hope and carry us forward -- as one people and one Nation.

In light of teaching her first quarter at UCLA in spring of 2018, assistant professor Katherine Lee sat down with Ethnomusicology Review to talk about her background outside and inside academia. We were interested to know the journey that led her through Ethnomusicology, the public sector, and politics within music. In this interview, Dr. Lee also talks about her new publication in 2018, Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form, and future courses that shed light on the understudied topics of East Asian music within Ethnomusicology.

_{Photo by Nicholas Yoon}

Dr. Lee’s new book Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form (Wesleyan University Press)

ER:     OK, first question. Could you tell us about your educational background and how it influenced your research interests?

KL:      Sure. I majored in piano performance and musicology at the University of Michigan. Originally when I entered U of M— the short name for the University of Michigan— I was pretty serious as a classical pianist (I studied with Anton Nel). But it was my first year at Michigan during this core musicology sequence that I took a World Music class, which was required for all music majors or performance majors. It was very interesting to me at the time; it was taught by Lorna McDaniel. I just remembered all of the listening examples, and just being fascinated by these different cultures. But I was still very much dedicated to the piano. But then in my sophomore year, I took a class with Professor Judith Becker; she was running the Javanese Gamelan ensemble there. In that particular year, 1995, there was a resident artist by the name of F.X. Widaryanto, who was teaching the class at Michigan. So, I had this opportunity to be in the gamelan and learned how to play all the different instruments and then there was a big performance at Hill Auditorium in that academic year. I think that was my first entry point into the idea of ethnomusicology, and then I just kept taking more and more ethnomusicology courses, and musicology courses as well, at Michigan. But I was still practicing and still very much a piano major at the time.

I think it was my fifth year of Michigan-- five years instead of four... I took a proseminar in ethnomusicology with Judith Becker and it was at that stage when I decided what to do after my undergraduate degree. I decided not to pursue classical piano at the master's level, but to go into ethnomusicology. So, I applied to graduate programs in ethnomusicology and I ended up getting into the University of Washington in Seattle. I was there for two years, and it was kind of a rigorous introduction to ethnomusicology: history, theory, and method. I took two solid years of coursework and then also was involved in many performance ensembles.

After that, I took a long break because I had been in school for a quite a while, and I felt that I needed to learn the Korean language if I was going to study Korean music and culture. Then I really needed to acquire some language proficiency because I did not grow up speaking Korean. I received the grant, called the Blakemore Freeman Foundation Fellowship, and I was able to study in Seoul at Yonsei University for a year and a half, just doing language. But in the afternoons, I always made sure to try to take some kind of music lesson or explore the city. And it was really a gift to be able to spend that much time studying language and just exploring because I had that kind of familiarity with ethnomusicology as a discipline. But that was really the first encounter that I had with learning how to perform some of the instruments and getting to know some of the musicians.

After that language program ended, I ended up working for Kim Duk Soo’s Samul Nori Hanullim ensemble and I was the overseas coordinator. I ended up corresponding with non-Korean presenters and I was trying to help and create events, gigs, tours or things like that. Also, there were performances in Korea that involved invited foreign guests, Then, I would serve as the translator or the guide for many of these people. I was in arts management in Korea. I kind of stumbled into it, and it wasn't something that I initially planned to do.

After that, there was another year kind of freelancing, I worked for UNESCO in Korea as a freelancer and worked for a magazine called Seoul, and a Buddhist newspaper as well. All in the copy-editing realm, editing English publications, but then checking the Korean as well... the Korean translation into English. 

In 2005, I entered the doctoral program at Harvard University, and that was another two years of coursework, I taught there, and then I went to Korea to do my fieldwork in 2008 and 2009. I studied with Kay Shelemay there. It was a very intense experience for me. I learned a great deal, but it took me a while to feel comfortable there as a graduate student. I did my fieldwork in South Korea and it was supported by Fulbright, and the topic of study was samul nori-- the South Korean percussion genre. It connected to the experience that I had in the arts management company because I was essentially interviewing and observing many of my former coworkers and people that I used to work with. That was an interesting kind of experience that led to my research--being in arts management, and then ending up working with the group that I was a staff member for.   

ER:     After taking a glance at your CV we saw that you worked in the public sector before entering into your Ph.D. program. Could you tell us about that period? How did these experiences shape your decision to go to grad school?

KL:      I learned so much when I was working for Samul Nori Hanullim and also the larger arts management company called Nanjang Cultures. There were many Korean musicians and kugak musicians who needed representation of some kind, and it’s an interesting thing to enter this world and then also try to mediate with foreign presenters who don't know much about Korean music or Korean traditional music. I tried to use some of my background in ethnomusicology acquired at the master's level to provide insightful information to presenters and to what they were going to hear or what they could expect. It's tricky in between the two worlds, but I learned so much about Korean music scenes, kugak-- traditional Korean music scenes.

Managers are serving both the artists and the presenters that they are working with. Experienced managers or experienced coordinators know how to accommodate both parties. That was very interesting for me to learn. Anytime I present or host a Korean music performance, I always try to think from those perspectives. Because now I'm more on the presenter side, and just to think what the artist needs to get out of this particular event, and how would they feel comfortable, how can an explanation help the audience to understand what is going on. I don't want the music to be presented completely out of context, or disembodied. I like for there to be some kind of educational moment so that people understand something from the local perspective, but maybe there are some points of entry for these audiences as well. 

ER:     What were your positions when working at the UNESCO and the art management company? 

KL:      Those were two completely different types of jobs. The arts management position that I had was a full-time job that I had for about a year. Working in an office in Seoul but then also going to sites where there were festivals or events going on. And then I also served as tour manager for Samul Nori Hanullim in 2003 in Denmark for a three-week tour (Ethnography of the Transnational). That was more like a full-time job. And then UNESCO: I was the rapporteur for two conferences on intangible cultural heritage, preserving and documenting heritage, and that was more event based. I just went to those events and transcribed the proceedings as a rapporteur. That was very much a freelance gig. 

ER:     How does your experience here differ from your time in other ethnomusicology programs at different institutions?

KL:      I have been at a lot of different institutions. At Michigan, I would say I was more in the School of Music as a piano performance major but took a lot of ethnomusicology courses. My first real experience as an ethnomusicology student would be at the University of Washington followed by Harvard. And then for the past five years, I was teaching at UC Davis. All of these institutions are quite different from UCLA. UCLA is the only Department of Ethnomusicology, and that feels quite different in scale. Because there are so many ethnomusicologists and faculty, and it has the long legacy of ethnomusicology as well that is connected to all of the institutions that I mentioned. Not necessary in an obvious way, but I feel everyone is connected to that early history of ethnomusicology and the first graduates of the program who then went on to establish ethnomusicology programs at the University of Washington, or UC Berkeley, or the University of Hawaii, so everything comes back to UCLA in some way.

Let's see the previous institution where I was at, UC Davis, was a department of music. That's a pretty different kind of structure from what we have here at UCLA. It was about fourteen faculty, ladder rank faculty, who were in musicology, composition, ethnomusicology, and conducting. So, a very small department, but the sub-disciplines of music, I think, were very conversant with one another at UC Davis. For instance, I often attended many of the concerts that were linked with the composers, or I attended the musicology talks. It was a small department, but it was more integrated than some other places that I have studied at.

ER:     You were saying that you were active in the music ensembles at University of Washington and also UC Davis. So which ensembles did you play in exactly? And do you have any plans to participate, or even create - or I should say resuscitate - the ensemble for Korean music?

KL:      At the University of Washington I was so excited about all of the performance ensembles, and I took a performance ensemble almost every single quarter. I'm trying to remember what I was in: Philippine kulintang, the Tibetan Buddhist Music ensemble that was led by the Venerable Phursang Kelak Lama, Ashanti Drumming with Koo Nimo - I was very lucky to study with him - and actually oud with Professor Münir Beken (now at UCLA) who happened to be a visiting artist at the time. I loved all of those performance opportunities because I had never had that opportunity to do - other than the gamelan at the University of Michigan - I just never had a chance to do non-Western music before. And in my second year at the University of Washington I started commuting to Morning Star Korean Cultural Institute (in Lynnwood, WA) to start taking lessons in Korean drumming, Korean changgo. That was the first time I had really had encountered Korean music, because my background is really in classical Western music.

After University of Washington - as I mentioned I had taken many music lessons in Korea - so I took kayagum lessons for about three years, which is the Korean zither, and then the Korean drumming, and dabbled even in p’ansori the Korean vocal tradition, and went to workshops of various kinds. So, when I started at UC Davis I actually began the - or rather established - the Korean percussion ensemble there, and I was able to acquire the instruments with my research funds. To be honest I had not led an ensemble like that before, but I had played in an ensemble [at MIT]. It was a lot of learning by trial [chuckles], but I offered this course nearly every single quarter. And I would encounter different kinds of students, many of whom had no musical experience. By the end of the quarter the final goal was to perform a piece that they had learned just through the drumming syllables - no written notation just oral transmission. And all of the classes I had were all successful! Some of the quarters I had another event planned, sometimes they would perform at Mondavi Center, or at the new Pitzer Center as part of a noon concert. So that was really a great learning experience. 

And as for Korean music at UCLA, I'm not sure if I will teach Korean percussion in the same way. But what I would like to do is to present a variety of different Korean music genres because there's much more than the drumming. There could be one quarter of kayagum ensemble, one quarter of p’ansori singing, one quarter of some wind instrument. And I think that might be more interesting for me and also for the students. Certainly, you know, I think that percussion is very important, samul nori, but there is a student group that does that. I'm still thinking about the best types of genres to present, and of course it's also linked with potential musicians and artists who can be in-residence. But I would like to present more of a variety of different Korean music genres.

ER:      Excited to see that! Ok, so what classes do you hope to offer in the future?

KL:      Right! This coming academic year, so that would be 2018 and '19, I'm going to be offering a graduate seminar called Interrogating Sound, Music and Politics. I think this is going to be a very broad course, where people from different sub-disciplines even, can participate: musicology, ethnomusicology, even composition if they're interested. Just to think more carefully about how political music can be ascribed, or political meaning can be ascribed to music. But also how music can...or music or sound can lead to political action as well. And this is a class I've taught once before at UC Davis and I enjoy the larger conversations that we can have using a variety of different case studies, not just from ethnomusicology but from, you know, opera. For instance, we looked at The Death of Klinghoffer to think about the political response to that opera. And we studied the score and looked at the opinion pieces that were generated by this, and the protests surrounding the operatic production. I'm interested in thinking about political, or music and politics in a variety of different ways. And that connects, I think, to my research, too! Just having a fascination with that theme. 

And then another class I'll be teaching is a graduate seminar on the Cold War in Asia...and music and sound in relation to the Cold War. Because often times, Asia, I feel like there's not as much discussion about the Asian component of this historical period, but yet the Korean War, 1950-1953, was kind of the first major event of the Cold War. And thinking about the major ideological divisions in the world. And even to this day when you think about what's going on in North Korea and the United States, there's still Cold War resonances. So, this is an area that I am very interested in and I feel like this could be an interesting seminar topic. 

And then I'm going to be doing an undergraduate course on Korean music, which I never have had the opportunity to do so, because most of the courses I taught before are either "large musics of the world" survey courses. Or I guess I taught musics of East Asia - I had a two-week unit on Korea. And of course, I did the Korean percussion ensemble, but I've never had the chance to just do a singular class on Korean music. So that'll be exciting! And I think it'll be chronological, and I can also engage with the popular music traditions, K-Pop, but also thinking about the earlier genres of music: classical or traditional Korean music, and court music as well. That's what is in store for next academic year.

ER:     Awesome! Alright so last question, unless there's a follow-up. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about yourself that we haven't covered so far?

KL:      Well I would just say that I'm really excited to get to know the students, all the graduate students, and undergrads as well. I just started a Fiat Lux seminar this past week and that's a really interesting group of students. And, you know, they're non-music majors who are studying critical K-Pop this quarter. I guess I'm just interested in meeting a lot of students from different backgrounds. And of course, getting to know the ethnomusicology graduate students, everyone has such interesting projects. And I have to admit I learn so much from the conversations with graduate students, and that was certainly the case at UC Davis. And that’s a real privilege, so come talk to me!

Classes Dr. Lee is offering the 2018-19 year:

Introduction

In Lebanon, and in Beirut particularly, Brazilian music and dance is practised, performed and listened to in diverse and multiple settings, from Brazilian zafeh entertainment at flamboyant Lebanese weddings, to energetic performances of música popular brasileira (MPB) in small, independent music venues. Bossa nova emanates from jazz clubs, and the Bahian carnival sounds of Bloco Rubra Rosa entertain festival crowds. Other manifestations of Brazilian music and culture in Lebanon include the growing popularity of samba dance and capoeira classes, and the humanitarian use of the latter as a therapeutic activity for Syrian refugees living in camps.

In this article, I will give a brief overview of how the presence of Brazilian music and dance in Lebanon can broadly be attributed to three interlinked factors. Firstly, Lebanon and Brazil share a long history of migration and cultural exchange, and bountiful financial remittances from the Lebanese diaspora in Brazil have helped to ensure Brazil’s positive reputation in Lebanon. Secondly, the country’s best-loved singer, Fairouz, and her son Ziad Rahbani, recorded and arranged multiple cover versions of classic bossa nova tracks by the likes of Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfã; a mimetic process that has resulted in a distinctly Lebanese style of bossa nova (Toynbee & Dueck 2011:10). Thirdly, the global spread and commodification of primarily Rio de Janeiro-centric Brazilian dance and music genres, notably samba and bossa nova, has also reached Lebanon. These processes have resulted in the reification of exoticist stereotypes of Brazilian culture, and the widespread practice of auto-exoticisation by Brazilian performers; a phenomenon that has been well-documented in regard to other contexts (Gibson 2013; Pravaz 2011). The demand from the cosmopolitan Lebanese middle and upper classes for varied and novel forms of entertainment is reflected in the wide variety of international restaurants, themed bars and live performances present in Beirut and across the country, and thus the prevalence of Brazilian cultural practices in Beirut is also symptomatic of Lebanon’s increasingly cosmopolitan, neoliberal modernity.

Figure 1: Bloco Rubra Rosa at the Brazil-Lebanon Cultural Centre

Migration and Remigration

Although geographically far apart, and often perceived as culturally opposite, Lebanon and Brazil share a long and rich history of migration and cultural exchange. The first significant groups of Arab migrants left for the Americas from Ottoman Greater Syria—present-day Lebanon and Syria—in the 1880s (Lesser 2013), and by 1933, the total number of Lebanese migrants in Brazil reached around 130,000 (Truzzi 1997:13; Lesser 2013:130). Lebanese migration to Brazil continued throughout the twentieth century, and Brazil became home to the highest number of citizens of Lebanese descent residing outside Lebanon. Today, the number of Brazilian citizens with Lebanese heritage is estimated at between seven and ten million.[1]

Patterns of migration and remigration between the two countries have also resulted in thousands of Brazilian citizens living in Lebanon. Thiago Oliveira, Head of Culture and Education at the Embassy of Brazil in Beirut, estimates the total number of Brazilians, meaning Brazilian passport holders, living in Lebanon at 17,000.[2] Of these, a significant proportion are Lebanese Brazilians: Brazilian-born descendants of the original Lebanese migrants.[3] These dual-heritage citizens are often known colloquially as ‘Brasilibanêses.’ Others are Lebanese citizens who left for Brazil during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), obtained a Brazilian passport, and then returned to Lebanon the 1990s. Some are Brazilian women who met and married Lebanese men in Brazil, and moved to Lebanon after their marriage. Others still are Brazilians with some Lebanese heritage, who moved to Lebanon for work, an adventure, an interest in Lebanese culture, or a better security situation.

Brazilians live all over Lebanon, although there are larger populations concentrated in particular areas. For example, in the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, there are villages where up to 90% of the inhabitants speak Portuguese. The distinctive red-roofed houses were built with financial remittances from the Lebanese diaspora in Brazil, and the local shops have names such as ‘Copacabana Mercado’, and sell Brazilian snacks and drinks like pão de queijo and Guaraná.[4] Interestingly, despite the strong Brazilian presence in the Bekaa, there is little live Brazilian music to be found. This is partly due to its rural, remote location far from Beirut, and partly due to its social conservatism. Most of the residents of these villages are Brazilian-born descendants of the original Lebanese migrants, and the majority are Sunni Muslims.

Figure 2: Street sign in Kamed Il Laouz, Bekaa Valley 

Fairouz, Ziad Rahbani and Lebanese Bossa Nova

Over the course of the twentieth century, a few prominent Lebanese musicians visited or lived in Brazil, including Wadih al Safi, who lived in Brazil for four years, and Najib Hankash, who moved to Brazil aged 18 and stayed there for several decades. The legendary singer Fairouz undertook several South American tours, including dates in Brazil in 1961, 1970 and 1981, performing to a rapturous crowd of Lebanese expatriates.[5] However, Brazilian-influenced music only first entered the Lebanese mainstream in the late 1970s, via the musical plays and albums of Fairouz’s son, Ziad Rahbani, one of Lebanon’s best-known and popular musicians and composers. Often referred to simply as Ziad, he is well known for his outspoken, and often controversial, political views, and for his innovative musical style. His early solo material was marked by experimentation with jazz harmonies, complex arrangements and musical influences from a range of international genres.

At some point in his youth, Ziad heard and fell in love with the music of Brazilian bossa nova pioneers João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim. A clear bossa nova influence, in terms of rhythm, instrumentation and melody, can be heard on his solo albums, musical theatre productions and arrangements he produced for his mother and from the late 1970s to the present day. For example, the main theme of one of his most famous and successful plays, Bennesbeh la Bukra shu? (What About Tomorrow?) (1978) is a clear example of this. The main theme, simply titled “Intro Instrumental 1,” or “First Musical Scene,” is clearly indebted to bossa nova. The opening flute melody that recurs in various guises throughout the soundtrack is highly reminiscent of the introductory flute melody of Jobim’s “Corcovado,”[6] and the drum kit and the guitar “comping” patterns adhere to typical bossa nova conventions of the 1960s. The lush instrumental arrangements are reminiscent of early Jobim: the genre conventions that Ziad favoured were popularised on such classic albums as João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s 1964 collaboration Getz/Gilberto, and Jobim’s The Wonderful World of Antônio Carlos Jobim (1965).[7]

Ziad Rahbani—“Intro Instrumental 1”

Later on in his career, Ziad also arranged classic bossa nova compositions for his mother Fairouz to sing, with Arabic translations of the original Portuguese lyrics. An example of this is his arrangement of Luiz Bonfã’s “Manhã de Carnaval" (1959) for Fairouz’s 2002 album Wala Kif.[8] Ziad maintained the original melody, but rewrote the lyrics in Arabic, naming it “Shu Bkhaf” (“How I Fear”), and completely changed the meaning of the song, from a romantic and wistful tale of the first morning of carnival, to a paranoid narration of sleepless nights and lost love. Although on first listen the song appears to follow bossa conventions, the rhythmic characteristics of bossa nova are significantly altered. Ziad only uses one ‘side’ of the bossa clave, effectively simplifying the rhythmic structure of the piece, and the melody is sung with much less syncopation than the Brazilian version.[9]

Fairouz—“Shu Bkhaf”

The Lebanese bossa nova style became so popular, and so clearly associated with Fairouz and Ziad Rahbani, that “Shu Bkhaf” has become a Fairouz classic in its own right. It has spawned its own cover versions across the Arab world, and like many of Fairouz’s arrangements of pre-existing music, the original has remained widely unknown in Lebanon, and the song became ‘hers.’[10] However, despite Ziad’s sustained engagement with Brazilian bossa nova for over forty years, he is not particularly well-known within the Brazilian community in Lebanon—aside from professional musicians. I spoke to several Brazilians living in Lebanon who were surprised to hear that he covered music by Brazilian artists, possibly because he hasn’t branched out much further than canonical bossa nova repertoire. Likewise, some Lebanese fans of Ziad I spoke to did not know that the songs and plays they loved were either cover versions of Brazilian classics, or were composed in a bossa nova style.

However, Ziad has played, and continues to play, a significant role in the promotion of Brazilian music in Lebanon, especially amongst professional musicians. He created a unique, mediated and distinctly Lebanese bossa nova style, which has been highly popular and influential: many Lebanese artists including Tania Saleh, Salma Mousfi and even Julia Boutros have recorded Arabic-language bossa nova that appears to be indebted to his idiosyncratic style. He has also played an important role in supporting Brazilian artists, and regularly features in his live shows musicians and dancers working in the Brazilian cultural sphere. 

Tania Saleh—"Shwaiyet Souwar” live at Beirut Music Hall, 2013. This video features several musicians who regularly play with Ziad Rahbani, Xangô and Bloco Rubra Rosa.

Brazilian Music in Beirut

One night in 2008, Ziad went to a now-closed venue in Beirut called Razz’zz to watch Xangô, a Beirut-based band who play Brazilian music. After watching their performance, Ziad asked several of the band members to collaborate with him, as he loved how they played Brazilian music; a partnership that continues to the present day. Guitarist and founder Adel Minkara is Lebanese, but has family in Brazil, and spent many years studying music there. Naima Yazbek, the lead singer and a professional dancer, is Brazilian, of Lebanese heritage, and moved to Lebanon from her home city of São Paulo in 2008. They are joined by a revolving collective of Lebanese jazz musicians, including drummer Fouad Afra, bass player Bashar Farran, Lebanese-Armenian jazz pianist Artur Satyan and Kevin Safadi, a Lebanese percussionist who specialises in Brazilian music. Fouad and Kevin have also performed and recorded with Ziad Rahbani, who especially chose them to collaborate with him because of their expertise in Brazilian music.

Xangô’s repertoire is solely Brazilian: they play bossa nova, MPB, choro and samba, as well as styles from the North East of Brazil including forró and samba-reggae: all cover versions, and no original compositions. Xangô are unique in Lebanon, as they are the only band with a pop or jazz instrumental line-up who play this repertoire.[11] They play at a variety of venues, mainly bars, small music venues and restaurants in Beirut and its affluent coastal suburbs; typically in venues that would usually host rock, pop or hip hop bands, although they often perform in bars and restaurants and at more corporate events that usually book jazz musicians, adapting their repertoire and line-up to suit the crowd. 

Figure 3: Xangô live at Metro al Medina, Hamra

The first time I watched Xangô perform live was at Salon Beyrouth in Hamra, West Beirut. A glamorous space of marble and glass, converted from an old Lebanese house, Salon Beyrouth is a relatively upmarket whiskey bar and restaurant that regularly hosts live music events, including jazz jams and tango nights. Many bars and venues like this have opened—and closed—in recent years, in response to increasing demand for eclectic entertainment options in Beirut. In general, the patrons are middle class or affluent young Lebanese, who have grown up in an increasingly globally-connected Lebanon, and tend to have strong international links through friends and family living in the diaspora. Although Lebanon’s economy and nightlife scene was almost totally destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), the city centre was rapidly rebuilt in the 1990s.[12] The dividends from the reconstruction boom and subsequent economic recovery benefitted the middle and upper classes, but considerably widened the wealth gap between rich and poor, which remains the case today. These factors have led to the emergence of a thriving, competitive nightlife scene, although the recent economic downturn has led to the frequent closure of venues, and a situation of precarity for musicians and venue owners.

Through interviewing the band members and watching several of their performances in very different venues and contexts, I was made aware of the issues and tensions surrounding the performance of Brazilian music in Lebanon. For example, several band members remarked pointedly on the tensions they felt between authentic performance and commercial gain. The band often had to sacrifice elements of their ‘authenticity’ as a Brazilian group in order to obtain work. This sometimes meant changing their repertoire to include non-Brazilian music, and adapting their material to suit their audiences. I frequently heard musicians and dancers complaining that Brazilian music was often subsumed under the generic rubric of ‘Latin’, and conflated with salsa, Latin pop or even tango: often, Xangô were asked to include Latin pop hits in their set, which they either did or not did comply with depending on the gig at stake. This is especially true for freelance musicians and dancers who are employed to dance at corporate events and weddings, where for the most part, performances have to fit into a very narrowly-defined conception of Brazilian culture, based on clichéd images of Rio de Janeiro-centric cultural manifestations. Musically, this tends to mean that Rio-style samba and bossa nova are privileged over styles from elsewhere in Brazil, and visually, representations of Brazil found on event posters and online promotions often contain exoticist and clichéd images of football, beaches, carnival and mixed-race women in bikinis. 

Conclusion

Although most Brazilian musicians and dancers work hard to avoid imposed stereotypes, most have to auto-exoticise and adhere to a narrowly-defined conception of Brazilian culture in order to make a living. However, through the efforts of the artists mentioned above, and others including Roberta Meirelles, a dancer, choreographer, capoerista and bloco leader from Salvador, Bahia, plus the work of the staff at the Brazil-Lebanon cultural centre, broader representations of Brazilian music and culture are becoming increasingly visible, and increasingly popular.
 

References

Gibson, Annie McNeill. 2013. “Parading Brazil through New Orleans: Brazilian Immigrant Interaction with Casa Samba.” Latin American Music Review 34:1, 1-30.

Khatlab, Roberto. 2005. Lebanese Migrants to Brazil: an Annotated Bibliography. Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon: Lebanese Emigration Research Center (LERC), Notre Dame University.

Lesser, Jeffrey. 2013. Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil: 1808 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pravaz, Natasha. 2011. “Performing Mulata-ness: The Politics of Cultural Authenticity and Sexuality among Carioca Samba Dancers.” Latin American Perspectives 39:2, 113-133.

Racy, Ali Jihad. 1986. “Words and Music in Beirut: A Study of Attitudes.” Ethnomusicology 30:3, 413-427.

Ragab, Tarek Saad. 2011. "The crisis of cultural identity in rehabilitating historic Beirut-downtown.” Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 28, 107–114.

Stone, Christopher. 2007. Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation. London: Routledge.

Toynbee, Jason and Byron Dueck. 2011. Migrating Music. New York: Routledge. 

Truzzi, Oswaldo. 1997. “The Right Place at the Right Time: Syrians and Lebanese in Brazil and the United States, a Comparative Approach.” Journal of American Ethnic History 16:2, 3-34.

Biography 

Gabrielle Messeder is a PhD candidate in the Department of Music at City, University of London, supervised by Dr Laudan Nooshin. Her current research is concerned with Brazilian music and dance in Lebanon, and her wider areas of interest include music and postcolonialism, transnationalism and popular musics of the Middle East and South America. She also works as a music teacher and musician, and regularly performs Brazilian and West African music in London with TalkingDRUM.

Introduction

While the Mexican musical genre narco corridos has been subject to scholarly analysis (Ragland 2011; Simonett 2001; Wald 2001), the sub-genre known as movimiento alterado represents a gap in the present body of knowledge. It is unique for the way in which its musical stylings and marketing thrive off duplicity. Composition, distribution, and systematic popularization of narco-centric songs are not happenstance, but rather exhibit sinister qualities. In addition to examining when corrido style adulation became more murderously bombastic and shifted attention to those who not only broke laws and took risks but did so in an extreme and violent style, this post will discuss the ominous brand of “fanboyism” inspired by movimiento alterado. While originally a term that emerged in the online gamer community, the term “fan-boy” has spread to other cultural products and outlets, particularly those with a social media and internet presence. At its most basic, a “fanboy” or “fangirl” is “an excessively loyal fan of a product and/or its company who blindly supports every action without question or reasoning” (Meixsell 2013). I will begin by introducing the BuKnas de Culiacán (BuKnas), a musical group illustrative of this phenomenon. Next, I will discuss how fakery and fanboyism are trapped in a perplexing contest, suggesting that movimiento alterado corridos have become the chosen medium for real-deal and “wannabe” narcos alike to craft and perpetuate a celebration of rebelliousness. Finally, I will explore directions for the future of narco music.

Proselytizing

The band BuKnas was spotlighted in the 2013 documentary Narco Cultura, a film that offers a shocking glimpseinto a distressing aspect that has emerged from the millennial movimiento alterado iteration of narco corridos. 

The documentary splits time between following Richi Soto, a Crime Scene Investigator (CSI) for the Mexican forensic department in Juárez, Mexico, and Edgar Quintero, the lead singer of BuKnas, based in Los Angeles, America. The viewers’ first introduction to Edgar Quintero is in the midst of a commission request from a fan named “El Ghost” in which he details the specifics of what he would like to hear in a personalized narco corrido. Quintero dutifully obliges by delivering the song in person and performing a few stanzas a capella, which El Ghost proceeds to record on his cell phone (presumably to upload immediately after the meeting concludes, affording instant exposure for both).

Figure 1: “Nuestra Señora.” Image courtesy of elbatogato under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Thus begins a series of scenes in which Quintero and/or his cohort glamorize the narco lifestyle despite living on the U.S. side of the border and having spent very little time in Mexico. Guns of all shapes and sizes appear to be a permanent fixture in the imaginations of Quintero and the BuKnas and appear frequently on album covers and as part of stage costumes, an obvious influence from the '80s when narco singers were notorious for carrying a gun tucked into their pants at all times. The prominent capitalization of the letter “K” in their name denotes a sideways AK-47, iconography originally associated with The Komander, another popular movimiento alterado artist. More flagrant brandishing of narco-centric props is a main fixture of one particular show performed in El Paso, Texas during which bazookas are brought out on stage, and gunshot sound effects serve as song preludes. The merriness of the scene is sobering when paired with the garish lyrics that Quintero croons to the backdrop of a passionate and adoring crowd.

Previous corrido writing styles seem tame in comparison to what BuKnas have authored. Their message is riddled with scare tactics meant to dissuade one from encroaching on any aspect of their physical, familial, or financial turf lest they have a death wish. It is a glorification of the bandito lifestyle, espousing power (AK-47 and a bazooka); physical strength (need to chop off a head); moral liberation (bloodthirsty, crazy, and fondness for murder); comradery (traveling together in a caravan, never leaving one behind or alone); and invincibility (bulletproof vests). Smuggler characters in ballads of the '80s and '90s tended to express remorse for having been caught and for the life that they miss out on as a result, yet the characters performed by BuKnas seem to be incapable of remorse.  

In the film, as scenes of the bazooka-bearing, gunshot-rattled concert fade, the viewer is struck by the profound contrast afforded by the abrupt transition to the (real) blood spattered car windshield that had been riddled by (real) bullets back in Juárez. The continuous holding up of one versus the other gradually results in the BuKnas appearing more and more farcical. Assertions by their fans, managing parties, or even themselves that what they do by providing a physical and emotive space for regular people to go to a club and feel narco for that night is in any way principled or exemplar emerges as a radically flawed interpretation of the fame they have acquired, the music they write, and the narco characters they perform. The dichotomy achieved by Director Shaul Schwarz is perhaps most evident in these two scenes (the concert in El Paso and the early morning crime scene in Juárez) precisely because the all-too-real nature of the themes and actions that the BuKnas croon about become tangible, as do the suggested criticisms via imagery and editing in regard to their behavior and exploitative tendencies. 

Friends in Fakery

Still, many defend the BuKnas. Joel Vásquez, the promoter for the BuKnas’ U.S.-based record label Twiins, offers a vehement rationalization that narco and violence-centric music and performance, particularly of the movimiento alterado niche, are uprightly fulfilling the public call to perpetuate a much-needed rebellion by operating outside of the perceived corrupt and ineffective law. He praises the ability and willingness of narco bandits to “fight the man.”

What warrants examination is the moral dilemma posed by groups like the BuKnas and the deep effect movimiento alterado appears to have had on the millennial socio-cultural psyche of the northern Mexican and southern U.S. border regions. Deceptive is an apt term to apply to the BuKnas’ métier, at least insofar as the film portrays it. Quintero himself has spent little time in Culiacan, Sinaloa, or even Mexico. He acknowledges that he does not possess the same depth of local vocabulary and slang as a local sinaloense or mexicano, and flippantly surmises that a six-month vacation on the other side of the border would perhaps do him and his career wonders for the inspiration it would afford.

Figure 2: Image courtesy of Amber_Avalona under CC0 via Pixabay.

An underlying sense of artificiality further emerges when we note Quintero and the BuKnas’ extreme lack of proximity to the locale which they sing about, and the resulting dependence on second-hand information. Perhaps more startling than any other disclosure is that of the BuKnas’ near total dependence on YouTube and narco-centric blogs for their lyrical content. This is a reality that Quintero laments since “all Komander [and other Mexican-based alterado performers] has to do is walk outside” (Schwarz 2013), lending The Komander more credibility than Quintero. 

The rationale for such internet dependence is elaborated on by the BuKnas manager while he conducts a Google search and peruses the website “Blog del narco,” their go-to site, in search of song-worthy news. His defense of relying on the blog as a reputable source is curious. Reliance on internet searches for storylines to write and sing about distances the BuKnas from achieving the authenticity that they aspire towards since it emphasizes how much, in fact, they are not present as events transpire, and how much of outsiders they really are. This point is inadvertently reinforced by Quintero when he asserts that “anything I write in my garage in L.A. is just total bullshit” and “you have to experience the real thing to write about it” (Schwarz 2013). Additional disingenuous tendencies are unintentionally divulged when the opportunity arises for the group to visit Mexico: “It’s funny, BuKnas de Culiacán has the name Culiacán in it, but I’ve got to be honest, I really don’t know Culiacán” (Schwarz 2013). Seeking primary source material and eyewitness inspiration is not the point of contention with such an admission. Rather, it is precisely such exaggerated narco posturing, lack of authenticity, and overall sense of staging during the trip’s duration that makes such a statement standout to the viewer. Quintero is not an eyewitness to anything more authentic than their manager was able to plan and coordinate with on-site handlers and guides. 

Immediately after reflecting on how distant he feels from Culiacán, the documentary cuts to a scene in which Quintero and the BuKnas’ manager records a cell phone video, presumably to begin the social media campaign to publicize their “genuine” visit to Sinaloa. Standing in front of a black Ford F-150 truck while holding a bottle of beer and firing a handgun into the sky, they offer a bullet-filled tribute to the Culiacán ranchito behind them. This is highly illustrative of the BuKnas’ ploy to leverage social mass media and calculated communicative strategies to raise their own voice, to perform their own music, and thus to imagine and create their own version of the world, one in which they are rich, powerful, influential, and most importantly, all-Mexican and all-in for the homeland. They do not need to assimilate into the American musical mainstream in order to achieve a meaningful identity or narrative but are able to become extremely successful “because of their Mexincanness” - or rather, for the BuKnas, their effective representation of the Mexican narco badboy (Simonett 2011:319).

The cameraman makes sure to pan around so that the background landscape is clearly visible, most probably to authenticate their presence in the area. It is an effort to prove their “street” and sinaloense credibility yet is entirely staged which again only highlights how disconnected the BuKnas actually are from the community they claim to hail from. Taken together, it becomes difficult to see movimiento alterado “as anything but a shrewd business decision, a carefully plotted attempt to cash in on Mexican drug violence…and to do so at a distance – from within the relative safety of the United States” (Kun 2012). 

Imagining the next Narco narrative

Several complex questions arise with regard to the notion of socio-artistic responsibility, particularly during periods of conflict. Do the BuKnas simply re-stage reality, or are they actively fueling violence? Is the BuKnas catalog of narco corridos a catalyst for, or product of, social problems stoked by endemic violence? There are three socially and culturally damaging by-products: a muddling of reality, an impetus for others to engage in real-life action with real-life consequence, and a contribution to the creation of a generation of mislead youth who make decisions to act based on hyperbole, fakery, and/or fabrication. A consideration of the ethics involved with such sensationalizing of death, murder, war, and cartels is essential in suggesting that narco corridos have morphed into a type of “necro” corrido for the manner in which they both normalize the culture of death and violence and serve as an intoxicant in the psyche of listeners towards more extreme behavioral norms.

Figure 3: Image courtesy of djedj under CC0 via Pixabay.

It remains to be seen what lies beyond the current movimiento alterado variety of narco corrido. Nevertheless, other millennial performers such as Gerardo Ortiz appear to be offering a fresh niche within the genre, one that is perhaps more reflective and less inclined towards glorification of the macabre. His songs have taken a unique direction since a pivotal moment in 2011 permanently impacted his personal and professional trajectory: while leaving a concert in Colima, his truck was gunned down by a barrage of bullets that killed the driver and Ortiz’s manager, and very nearly ended his life as well. 

The impact of the attack was obvious on the album he released afterwards, “Entre Dios y el Diablo.” Breaking from prior compositional norms in which Ortiz had previously played the roles of “vicious cartel henchman,” proud and brutal torturer, and Sinaloa Cartel security accomplice, much of this album offers a profound (by comparison) reflection on death, violence, and the impact it has on culture, society, and ones’ self (Kun 2012). This is perhaps most evident in the song “Cara A La Muerte” in which Ortiz makes his biggest, and perhaps most important to date, alteration of the movimiento alterado style: he “switches from one side of the AK-47 to the other, narrating from inside of a coffin while lamenting the damages and wounds of his life” (Kun 2012). 

He yearns for the chance to be re-born into a new life where there is “no más sangre” (no more blood) and a collective sense of “ya basta” (enough already). This is the closest that “any [millennial] narco corrido has come to joining the protesters and the poets and the bereaved thousands” in expressing communal fatigue and satiation with the BuKnas (and others) style of posturing, pandering, propagating that perpetuates a narco centric existence as preeminent (Kun 2012).

Conclusion

The question arises when examining the trajectory of narco corridos as to whether the movimiento alterado iteration represents development or degeneration. Lyrical and behavioural styles and the reaction and consumption on behalf of the public suggest a socio-cultural need to reinterpret long existing narratives surrounding access to opportunity and socio-economic mobility. Music aids in this process of renegotiation, even when it veers towards nihilism and the macabre, because of its capacity to function as a “strategic site for production and negotiation” within in an overall environment of “contemporary economic and political marginalization” (Hugo Viesca 2004:726). Some might claim that Ortiz’s repertoire diverges from the track towards non-compromising social, political, and cultured vocality is his rejection of mainstream narconomics, and everything held therein, a type of ultimate self-realization; an ultimate re-casting of what was previously a stagnated narrative.

References 

Kun, Josh. 2012. “Death Rattle.” The American Prospect. http://prospect.org/article/death-rattle.

Meixsell, Jesse. 2013. “Understanding ‘fanboyism’: an overused and misconstrued term.” Venture Beat. venturebeat.com/community/2013/08/22/understanding-fanboy-ism-an-overused-and-misconstrued-term/, accessed August 25, 2015. 

Narco Cultura. Directed by Shaul Schwarz. Ocean Size Pictures: 2013, 2016.

Ragland, Cathy. 2011. “From Pistol-Packing Pelado to Border Crossing Mojado: El Piporro and the Making of a ‘Mexican’ Border Space.” In Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border, edited by Alejandro L. Madrid, 342-372. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

___ 2009. Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Simonett, Helena. 2011. “Re-localized Rap and its Representation of the Hombre digno.” In Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border, edited by Alejandro L. Madrid, 129-148. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

___ 2001. “Narcocorridos: An Emerging Micromusic of Nuevo L.A.” Ethnomusicology 45:2, 315-337.

Viesca, Victor Hugo. 2004. “The Cultural Politics of Chicano/a Music in the Greater Eastside.” American Quarterly 56:3, 719-739.

Wald, Elijah. 2001. Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas. New York: Rayo. 

Biography

Kaitlin E. Thomas, Ph.D., is a Lecturer of Spanish at Norwich University and for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. Her research delves into U.S. and Latino/a identities that are resulting from trans-border cultural and national fusion, (un)documented Latino/a immigration, and contemporary Mexico. 

In honor of the grand re-opening of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the World Music Center at UCLA and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Ethnomusicology presented a day-long symposium and evening concert honoring Professor Emerita Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje.1  The event was co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, the World Music Center at UCLA, the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music, the Mohindar Brar Sambhi Endowed Chair in Indian Music, the UCLA African Studies Center, and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. 

As Professor DjeDje said of the event:  What a wonderful event to celebrate the re-opening of the Archive!!! As I've stated before, I was deeply honored to be invited to participate. And I want to thank everyone for all of their efforts in making my participation a success. Please let everyone know my deepest appreciation for their contributions and hard work.

I thought I would share some of the many images we have from the event.

Introduction by Mark Kligman, Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music, Chair, Department of Ethnomusicology, Director of the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Welcome by Judith Smith, Founding Dean, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Supeena Adler (Adjunct Assistant Professor, UCLA, Ethnomusicology; World Musical Instrument Collection (WMIC) Curator; Director, Music of Thailand Ensemble – The UCLA World Musical Instrument Collection, African Music Collection and Its Use for Concerts.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

William Matczynski (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA, Ethnomusicology) – The UCLA World Musical Instrument Collection, African Music Collection and Its Use for Concerts. Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Birgitta Johnson (Associate Professor, University of South Carolina, Ethnomusicology, African American Studies) – Documenting the Sound of Light: Gospel Archiving at UCLA.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Lucas Avidan (M.A. student, UCLA, Ethnomusicology), William Matczynski – Oral Histories of UCLA Ethnomusicology: Lois Anderson and Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Lucas Avidan (M.A. student, UCLA, Ethnomusicology), William Matczynski – Oral Histories of UCLA Ethnomusicology: Lois Anderson and Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Hannah Davison (Development Editor, Adam Matthew Digital) with Aaron Bittel (Archivist, Adjunct Associate Professor, UCLA, Ethnomusicology) – Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Jesse Ruskin (Ph.D., Evaluation & Development Associate, Ford Theatre Foundation) – The Darius L. Thieme Collection of Yorùbá Music, 1964 to 1966: A Digital Archiving Collaboration.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Tyler Yamin, Otto Stuparitz.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

William Matczynski, Supeena Adler.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Lunch from Casablanca.  Photo courtesy Helen Rees.

Jean Kidula (Professor, University of Georgia, Music (Ethnomusicology) – A Night at the Morton: Celebrating African American Music in Athens, Georgia.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Scott Linford (Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music) – Recovering the Songs of a Senegalese Rain Priestess: Ethnography and the Colonial Archive.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Clarence Henry (Ph.D., Applied Ethnomusicology, Newark, New Jersey) – Archiving African Heritage at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Ray Briggs (Associate Professor, Music, Assistant Director of Jazz Studies, CSU Long Beach) - Reflections & Reevaluations: Thoughts on Ethnomusicology and Mentorship.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje keynote address:  The Fiddle/Violin in African-American Culture: Contradictions and Variances.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Back: Jesse Ruskin, Ray Briggs, Scott Linford, Clarence Henry / Front: Jean Kidula, Jacqueline DjeDje, Birgitta Johnson.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Professors DjeDje and Kligman cut the blue ribbon to officially re-open the newly renovated Ethnomusicology Archive.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Ethnomusicology Archive, past and present.  Back: Ben Doleac, Paul Humphreys, Aaron Bittel, Tyler Yamin, Tim Taylor / Middle: Jesse Ruskin, Wan Yeung, Stephanie Sybert, Xiaorong (Heidi) Yuan, Wanda Bryant, Maureen Russell, Will Matczynski / Front: Mei-Chen Chen, Jacqueline DjeDje, Shani Miller, Birgitta Johnson, Jean Kidula, Cynthia Tse Kimberlin, Louise Spear, Peggy Caton, Helen Rees.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Francis Awe, Will Matczynski.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Francis Awe, Will Matczynski, Omowale Awe.  Photo courtesy Helen Rees.

Francis Awe, Will Matczynski, Jesse Ruskin, Omowale Awe.  Photo courtesy Helen Rees.

Supeena Adler, Mei-Chen Chen, Xiaorong (Heidi) Yuan.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Kathleen Hood, Director, UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Jean Kidula, Ray Briggs.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Roberta King, Clarence Henry, Ray Briggs, Wanda Bryant, Steve Loza, Beto Gonzalez. Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Clarence Henry, Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Janise White.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Ray Briggs, Eddie Meadows, Clarence Henry.  Photo courtesy Helen Rees.

Birgitta Johnson.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Aaron Bittel, Callie Holmes, Matthew Vest, Maureen Russell.  Photo courtesy Shani Miller.

Members of the UCLA West African and Afro-Cuban Ensembles: Metebrafor Agindotan, David Castañeda, Juan Francisco Cristobal, Daniel Ferguson, William Matczynski, Marina Panzetta, Lorenzo Siciliano, Alfie Scott, Rachel Scott, Chloe Vaught, with special guest Francis Kofi Akotuah.  Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

Wondem: Kibrom Birhane, Randal Fisher, Matwiran (Rani) de Leon, Etsegenet Tadesse, Nadav Peled, Todd Simon, and Dexter Story. Photo courtesy Brian Runt.

• 1. *Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje was on the UCLA faculty for 34 years (1979–2013). She taught theoretical area courses in African and African-American music and was director of an African-American vocal ensemble. Much of DjeDje’s research has focused on performance practices as they relate to the one-string fiddle tradition in West Africa. In recent years her research has extended to the study of fiddling in African-American culture and its interconnections with Anglo-American music. In addition, she has conducted investigations on African-American religious music. She is particularly interested in how the dynamics of urban life give rise to change and other musical activity. DjeDje has conducted fieldwork in several countries in West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, and Senegal), Jamaica, California, and the southern United States (Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana). In 2013, her students and colleagues wrote and edited the Festschrift Resiliency and Distinction: Beliefs, Endurance and Creativity in the Musical Arts of Continental and Diaspora Africa. A Festschrift in Honor of Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje (edited by Kimasi L. Browne and Jean N. Kidula. Richmond, California: Music Research Institute). DjeDje’s most recent publications include Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures (Indiana University Press, 2008), Fiddling in West Africa (1950s–1990s): The CD Recording, and Fiddling in West Africa (1950s–1990s): The Songbook (UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, 2008). In addition, she is the author of Distribution of the One String Fiddle in West Africa, American Black Spiritual and Gospel Songs from Southeast Georgia: A Comparative Study, and Black Religious Music from Southeast Georgia (a recording with accompanying booklet). She is editor of Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music, a collection of essays published in conjunction with three Los Angeles museum exhibitions on African and African-derived music. Also, she is principal editor of African Musicology (two volumes) and co-editor of Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, Volume 5 and California Soul: Music of African-Americans in the West. In addition, she has contributed articles to a number of periodicals and reference publications, including Africa: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 1; The United States and Canada: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 3; The World's Music, General Perspectives and Reference Tools: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 10; The Cambridge History of American Music; The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia; and The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Music, Volume 5. DjeDje is former president of the Southern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology and second vice president of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Twice an award recipient from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has served as panelist for the Folk Arts Program of that organization. In 2009, she was awarded the Alan P. Merriam Prize, awarded annually by the Society for Ethnomusicology to recognize the most distinguished published English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology. In 2010, she was awarded the inaugural Kwabena Nketia Book Prize, awarded bi-annually by the Society for Ethnomusicology African Music Section to recognize the most distinguished book published on African music. DjeDje was director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, 2000 to 2007, acting chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology, winter and spring 2003, and chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology, fall 2005 to fall 2010.