Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions and feedback from scholars working on music from all disciplines.

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This month, our contributor is Nancy Jakubowski. Nancy holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design (Class of 1984) and has worked at the Brown University Library since 1991. She splits her time between the Gifts Department of the Rockefeller Library, and the Orwig Music Library, where she is a Senior Library Specialist. I am pleased to have her featured in Crossing Borders, and welcome other librarians, archivists, designers, and researchers to contribute to this section of Ethnomusicology Review.

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The idea to do an exhibit on the Chinese Cultural Revolution was inspired by some uncatalogued records tucked away in our Music Library. The collection was a mix of recordings from across Asia. The visual contrast between them was striking - red album covers with men and women dressed alike, posing heroically versus sleeves sporting groovy graphics, bouffant hairdos and miniskirts. The social disparities behind the kitschy iconography, however, were even more extreme.

[Image 1. Photo of exhibit case]

The 1960s and '70s were turbulent decades. Post-WWII prosperity morphed into discontent with the status quo. Youthful idealism fueled political protests in the United States and around the world. China was no exception to this period of unrest and 1966 ushered in an era known as "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", aka "The Cultural Revolution", a decade of brutal repression, terror and atrocities visited upon the populace. Radical political and social changes were orchestrated by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party, as part of a long term strategy to transform the "People's Republic" into a Communist utopia. The process began with Mao’s ascent to power in 1949, through the failed “Great Leap Forward”, a plan to rapidly industrialize the largely agrarian economy, which resulted in the deaths of millions through famine, purges, executions, forced labor, imprisonment and torture. Ostensibly the Cultural Revolution that followed was about rooting out "the four olds" - outdated ideas, customs, culture and habits - but the reality was far from innocuous. Political leaders manipulated a budding student movement, the Red Guards, into helping cleanse the country of perceived threats from intellectuals, Capitalists, and anyone else deemed dangerous to the Communist ideology. People were not the only targets of this campaign – “questionable” art and cultural objects were sought out and destroyed, including sheet music, records and musical instruments. Ironically, after a short time, the Guards themselves were seen as a threat to order and put down. Unfortunately, repression, intimidation, violence, and killings sanctioned by the State continued against the population. Musicians, artists and other creative professionals, or "Cultural Workers", had to conform or risk punishment, and many suffered under a regime that co-opted the arts for political ends.

[Image 2. Photo of Chinese Opera Recordings and Librettos]

Music was an important means of propaganda and political agitation even before the Cultural Revolution. Mao felt that art, music and literature should be used to educate workers, peasants and the army, so composers and artists were urged to go out amongst the people for inspiration. In 1956, Mao even drafted a talk to “Music Workers”, which cautioned against letting Western influences and training compromise Chinese culture. Music in service of the State goes back even further in Chinese history however, with Confucius espousing the notion of “good music” being necessary for a stable society.

During Mao’s reign, music was used to promote his rule and to support the aims of the Revolution and the Communist Party. However, due to a shortage of professional musicians, peasants, students and others received basic songwriting training in order to churn out tunes for the cause. Along with subjects celebrating the Revolution, the Red Army, etc., Mao’s own writings and poems were set to music and known as “yuluge”. The English titles of many of these pieces seem stilted, and in some cases, inadvertently humorous, with their heroic language and revolutionary fervor, but these albums represent a frightening reality – they contained some of the only sanctioned entertainment available to a populace of over 800 million people during the decade of the Cultural Revolution.

In stark contrast was the musical revolution going on in the US and the rest of the world. Young people were turning to rock ‘n roll, folk, jazz and other genres to express their dissatisfaction with politics and society. Many Asian countries developed thriving music industries based on their own talent, although Western rock and pop artists were also popular. Asian singers traveled throughout the region and many performed in multiple languages, including English, Malay, Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin. The latter two evolved into specific genres – Canto-pop and Mando-pop. The Hong Kong movie and tv business also made use of homegrown pop music and many singers also worked as actors.

[Image 3. Photo of Asian pop records]

One of the most beloved vocalists in Asia as well as in the People's Republic of China was Teresa Teng (aka Deng Lijun). She started out in Taiwan in the mid ‘60s but her career really took off in the late ‘70s. As restrictions on music in the PRC eased somewhat under Deng Xiaoping (who came to power after Mao's death), Teng was one of the first artists to become a hit there. Her music was banned briefly for being too bourgeois, but it stayed a staple on the black market until the ban was lifted. She was as well known as China’s new leader, whose surname she shared. A popular saying was “Old Deng rules by day and Little Deng by night”. (This link will take you to a video of one of Teresa Teng's most famous songs, "The Moon Represents My Heart".)

Aside from Chairman Mao, the person with the most impact on music during this period was his third wife, Jiang Qing. She had been an actress with very little musical training but in her new role as head of the Ministry of Culture, she launched an ambitious scheme to remake Peking opera. Under her direction, eight “model revolutionary theatrical works” were developed, although all were reworkings of existing pieces. Ten more “model” works were created by the end of the decade. Gone were the "emperors, kings, generals and ministers, scholars and beauties" from traditional Chinese opera.  Instead, heroes would be heroes (of the Revolution, of course – workers, peasants and soldiers) and the villains could be any one of a cast of characters targeted by the Communist Party – landlords, Capitalists, the Japanese, Kuomintang “bandits”, etc. Surprisingly though, Western instruments were not banned completely – Madame Mao thought they made opera sound more heroic and even Mao had condoned them in his writings.  However, there were some restrictions - no tubas, trombones or bassoons (!) and percussion instruments were muted - and of course, no Western compositions could be performed. These “model” pieces, especially the original eight, became the only approved musical entertainment aside from the revolutionary songs and yuluge settings. They appeared on stage, radio, tv, and in the movies. Traveling companies performed them throughout the country, with the same scripts, costumes and sets for every production. Even today, people of a certain age can sing the songs by heart, whether they wanted to learn them originally or not, since that was all anyone heard or saw performed for a decade. In an era when we can access practically any piece of music with the click of a mouse, such a limited sonic landscape, especially one that lasted ten years, is unimaginable!  According to a New York Times article from 2000, some model operas were still being performed across China, evoking nostalgia in their audiences but distaste in the minds of others, appalled that these works were still popular, despite their dark history.

Unfortunately, repressive regimes around the world still try to erase history by destroying cultural objects - the giant Buddhas in Afghanistan and museum objects in Mosul are recent examples, and music is still used to manipulate, e.g. the “hate” songs of the Rwandan genocide and white power music in Nordic countries. However, as current events have shown, what distinguishes freedom of expression from a tool of oppression can be open to interpretation. That the arts are a powerful means of expression is undeniable.

While “Jazz Rap” and the practice of utilizing jazz samples fell out of popularity and came to be viewed as outdated, the relationship between jazz and hip hop never truly stopped. Pressing the fast forward button about twenty years or so, we are now living in a time period when hip hop would have been an ever-present part of a younger jazz artist’s soundscape. And like their predecessors, young musicians continue to root their music in the tradition while exploring and adapting the popular music of their time and embarking upon paths of their own.

Around 2006, Revive Music Group (RMG), first branded as Revivalist and Revive da live, was founded by Megan Stabile, who has since risen to much well-earned acclaim as a successful and groundbreaking entrepreneur. Revive Music is an online hub presenting both rising and established jazz artists to new and younger audiences. RMG is currently the jazz extension of Okayplayer, a leading online community for hip hop artists and audiences since its inception in 1999. The almost familial relationship between RMG and Okayplayer is a digital manifestation of the continuing interrelatedness between jazz and hip hop. It demonstrates a keen awareness of musical kinship and a sense of community amongst artists, producers, supporters, and audiences.

Revive’s impact is illustrated by its mission statement, which asserts, “By illuminating the renewal of retro and classic music with that of new emerging genres, we are the center of a cultural resurgence of live music” ("About"). While there is much innovative and exciting content available online, the question of what is happening offline remains. What’s become of New York’s jazz scene of yesteryear? In a time when a great many jazz venues in New York City have closed or changed formats entirely, RMG has become a leading presenter of distinctive live performances that re-imagine jazz in a contemporary sense and create entirely new music in New York and globally. Every week in Greenwich Village, RMG hosts the Evolution Jam Session at the Zinc Bar, and the group regularly presents its homegrown Revive Big Band, led by trumpeter Igmar Thomas.

The band also features rapper, turntablist, and Berklee College of Music professor Raydar Ellis. Of Ellis, jazz writer Willard Jenkins has said:

The soul of the RBB’s hip hop perspective is rapper-turntablist Raydar Ellis, who is completely immersed in the form, has the in-the-pocket cadence and couplets down, has the requisite moves & stage presence, but sans the hard guy/male diva/I’m-a-gazillionaire-and-you’re-not posturing persona of so many rappers. (quoted in Reyes 2014)

Of Revive’s commitment to the relationship between jazz and hip hop, Ellis himself notes: “Revive is just trying to show the world it's not so much a divide it's just a family reunion and that’s what makes it both individual and shared” (personal communication).

The existing relationship between hip hop and jazz, the importance of records and recording, and the rise of a digital space to build communities as well as market and promote performances created a perfect and well-received storm for jazz to be interpreted and presented by a younger generation to new audiences. Other examples of such genre-defying jazz artists are Robert Glasper, Kris Bowers, Thundercat, Brandee Younger, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian Scott, Mark de Clive-Lowe, and Marcus Strickland.

Another recent instance of the relationship between jazz and hip hop was keyboardist Kris Bowers’ cover of “Rigamortis” by rapper Kendrick Lamar, whom Bowers has counted as a personal favorite. Bowers makes musical choices and utilizes techniques that demonstrate a close listening to and command of jazz, hip hop and even 20^th century prepared piano techniques. The video of the performance can also be read as an homage to his mentor and former teacher pianist Eric Reed, given that Lamar’s version makes use of Reed’s composition “The Thorn” from Willie Jones III’s album The Next Phase (2010).

However, like any kinship, everything isn’t a sunny day in the park. There is a pending litigation of Lamar’s use of “The Thorn,” which was not cleared for the track that was originally released on a mixtape and later achieved great commercial success.[1] This case stands as an illustration of both the ever-increasing compatibility between the genres stylistically and the ongoing conflicts over intellectual property rights. With any luck, this case is well on its way to a resolution with artists justly compensated.

Still, Lamar’s continued interest in jazz as well as jazz artists of his time is extremely apparent on his latest album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), which some keen listeners have astutely pointed out could be considered a jazz album in and of itself. The album features a virtual who’s who of “next generation” artists—Robert Glasper, Bilal, Lalah Hathaway, Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Ambrose Akinmusire, Ronald Bruner, Jr., Robert Searight, and Chris Smith—who contribute greatly to the album’s distinct musical qualities, which have been extremely well-received by fans and critics. Greg Tate, for instance, writes with great insight in a powerful and thoughtful essay, “The Compton MC's second major-label album is a masterpiece of fiery outrage, deep jazz and ruthless self-critique” (2015).

It is yet to be seen what will come of the new music and artists of our time in both jazz and hip hop and how they will be discussed and interpreted by future generations. However, something exciting is happening that is already quite worthy of consideration, discussion and debate. My personal hope is that these current artists and their music continue to make strong impacts and inroads and to cover more ground in a continuum rooted in rich African American expressive art forms and history. The declarative phrase, “We got the jazz,” expressed by young hip hop artists was a reverent nod to the past and certainly foretelling of today. It continues to beg the question: who’s got next?

Notes

Bibliography

“About.” Revive Music. Accessed April 9, 2015. http://revive-music.com/about/.

Deshpande, Jay. “Jazz Pianist Robert Glasper on His Role in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.” Slate. March 27, 2015. Accessed March 30, 2015. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/03/27/kendrick_lamar_s_to_pimp_a_butterfly_robert_glasper_on_what_it_was_like.html.

Ellis, Raydar. Personal communication with the author. April 2, 2015.

“Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp a Butterfly': A Track-by-Track Guide.” Rolling Stone. March 16, 2015. Accessed March 17, 2015. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/kendrick-lamars-to-pimp-a-butterfly-a-track-by-track-guide-20150316.

Mitchell, Gail. “Kendrick Lamar Collaborator Bilal on 'To Pimp a Butterfly': 'A Lot of This Is Kendrick's Genius'.” Billboard. March 17, 2015. Accessed March 17, 2015. http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/6502408/kendrick-lamar-bilal-to-pimp-a-butterfly-interview.

Reyes, Dan Michael. “5/12: Revive Big Band Live at the Blue Note Jazz Club.” Revive Music. April 29, 2014. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://revive-music.com/2014/04/29/revive-big-band-live-blue-note/.

--------. “Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp A Butterfly – Meet the Musicians Who Made the Album Possible.” Revive Music. March 17, 2015. Accessed March 17, 2015. http://revive-music.com/2015/03/17/kendrick-lamar-pimp-butterfly-meet-musicians-made-album-possible/.

Schloss, Joseph G. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Stewart, Earl and Jane Duran. “Black Essentialism: The Art of Jazz Rap.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 7, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 49-54.

Tate, Greg. “To Pimp A Butterfly.” Rolling Stone. March 19, 2015. Accessed March 21, 2015. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/kendrick-lamar-to-pimp-a-butterfly-20150319.

Williams, Justin A. “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music.” The Journal of Musicology 27, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 435-459.

Wood, Aja Burrell. “Kris Bowers Covers Kendrick Lamar’s 'Rigamortus.'" Revive Music. February 25, 2014. Accessed April 2, 2015. http://revive-music.com/2014/02/25/kris-bowers-covers-kendrick-lamars-rigamortus/.

Aja Burrell Wood is a Harlem based ethnomusicologist from Detroit who teaches African American music at Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music and The New School. Her work includes research on musical community amongst black classical musicians, jazz in the digital era, music and civic engagement in Harlem, and other related genres of the African Diaspora such as blues, hip hop, soul and West African traditions. In the field of arts presenting, she has worked with Wynton Marsalis Enterprises, Dianne Reeves, Revive Music Group and Hot Tone Music. She is currently working to complete her doctorate at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

It all began as an assignment for Ethnomusicology 205.  The two archivists (Aaron and Maureen) suggested archival collections to research that might specifically interest each student in the class.  For Marc Bolin, we could think of no better choice than the Don Ellis collection.  Bolin looked through dozens of boxes of Ellis parts and scores and when he found "Strawberry Soup," he knew he had to do something with the piece and decided to perform it.

Bolin contacted his friend and colleague Dr. Courtney Jones, Assistant Professor of Trumpet, School of Music, University of Iowa and sold him on the project.  Bolin found the funding (thank you to the Nelson fund, Dr. Daniel Neuman, and the Office of Instructional Development), organized the band, and conducted rehearsals until Jones came to town.  The archivists want to acknowledge and thank Marc Bolin for his passion, drive and exceptional organization skills; this project made the musical manuscripts in the Archive and the music of Don Ellis come to life.

Marc Bolin on tuba

Once we all knew the project was definitely moving forward, we felt we had to pull out all the proverbial stops.  It was decided Dr. Jones would play Ellis' quarter-tone trumpet and PhD student Alex Rodriguez would play the Ellis "superbone" (slide/valve trombone).  We admit that most curators would traditionally view instruments as objects to be viewed, not as instruments to be played, but we felt very strongly that these instruments needed to be heard. 

Alex Rodriguez on the Ellis "superbone"

Alex Rodriguez on the Ellis "superbone"

Dr. Courtney Jones on the Ellis quarter-tone trumpet

And once we decided the instruments were to be played, how could we not showcase several of the Ellis costumes?  The white mirrored suit was designed by the Emmy-winning Pete Menefee for the 1977 Shirley MacLaine Special Where Do We Go from Here?  And we could provide no better description of Dr. Jones than the one penned by Bolin describing Jones as "a talented and spirited musician, conductor, and performer whose talents helped to refine a presentation that will not be forgotten."

Dr. Courtney Jones--wearing the Menefee-designed Ellis costume--conducting

A Don Ellis Portrait: Strawberry Soup with Marc Bolin, Ph.D. student, UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology and Dr. Courtney Jones, Assistant Professor of Trumpet, School of Music, University of Iowa premiered in Professor Charley Harrison's"Jazz in American Culture: 1940s to the present" (Ethnomusicology 50B) course.

Yes, the teal shirt is another Ellis original costume

The final stop of the "Don Ellis Portrait" tour took place in the UCLA Music Library as part of UCLA's inaugural Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) performances.  Kudos to Music Librarian Joy Doan for making JAM happen at UCLA!

The Ellis Portrait Big Band performing in the UCLA Music Library

The Ellis Portrait Big Band performing in the UCLA Music Library

And we have to include an image of the Archive's own recording technician, David Martinelli, on percussion

Thanks to everyone involved, A Don Ellis Portrait was not only a huge success, but an amazing collaboration between UCLA students in ethnomusicology, systematic musicology, musicology, music performance, jazz majors, world music majors, and the Thelonious Monk Institute.

And let's introduce the band...  Matt Gaffney, soprano flute; Dave Wilson, alto; AJ Kluth, tenor clarinet; Liam Collins, baritone sax; Courtney Jones, Ellis quarter-tone trumpet; Tristan Hurd, trumpet; Jack Kent, trumpet; Zach Ramacier, trumpet; Rachel O’Conner, French horn; Alex Rodriguez, superbone; Cameron Rhamani, bass trombone; Marc Bolin, tuba; Duke Anderson, drums; David Laudicia, drums; Ziyad Marcus, percussion; Dave Martinelli, percussion; Brita Tastad, violin; Luke Sanstanastaso, violin; Lydia Luce, viola; Rhamin Abrams, bass; Nashir Jay, jazz bass; Carmen Staaf, piano.

Dr. Jones promises he will soon have video of the performances posted on his website and when he does, we will share it here.

(And thanks to Aaron for all the images!)

Images--Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What is made of wood, animal gut, horsehair, flaxseed oil, and sometimes a bit of toad or lizard skin? It sounds like a base for a magic potion, but in fact it is the ingredients for the most valuable musical instrument today: the violin and its bow. Although many of its materials are now considered exotic, the violin and many other “professional” instruments had humble beginnings. Many musical instruments were initially constructed out of materials that were accessible and affordable, so why don’t we use available resources to build and invent instruments more often?

Making and playing homemade instruments has tremendous educational, environmental, and artistic value that can reclaim musical creativity for teachers and students. Using homemade instruments helps sustain music programs that support self-sufficient and resourceful education, preserving tradition as well as encouraging innovation. When fully engaged in musical invention, children can develop their naturally imaginative and participatory approach to learning. I would like to explore these possibilities through three homemade ensembles: a jug band, a recycled orchestra, and an experimental instrument ensemble, all of which build a strong foundation for musical creation and comprehension. I will illustrate how these ensembles accomplish goals of sustainability as well as meet national standards for music education. I hope the following examples and resources encourage educators to incorporate these ideas into their classrooms, programs, and curricula.

The following definitions relate sustainability to art and education. Bowers explains sustainability in relation to education:

The long-term survival (sustainability) of each species in an ecosystem depends on a limited resource base. Building learning communities around the issue of sustainability means that teachers see the long term impact they have on students. (1995, 206)

The Center for Sustainable practice in the arts (CSPA) defines sustainability as including: environmentalism, economic stability, and strengthened cultural infrastructure. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro defines sustainability in their 2009-2014 Strategic Plan as: “the enduring interconnectedness of social equity, the environment, the economy, and aesthetics.” I will combine these definitions of artistic and educational sustainability when considering the effectiveness of the following ensembles. For example, all the ensembles create programs that are more accessible and affordable for students with various financial and musical backgrounds, increasing potential of greater equity. Homemade instrument making also teaches sustainable aesthetics of design while continuing cultural traditions of music and craft. 

Along with sustainability, homemade instrument making teaches the national music standards as outlined by the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), which I've listed below. I will refer to these standards by referencing the numbers from that list. All homemade ensembles have the potential to teach performance and theory skills as well as incorporate outside fields such as visual art, history, math, craft, and science (NAfME 2, 8).

National Music Education Standards (from NAfME)

1. Singing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music.

2. Performing on instruments, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music.

3. Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments.

4. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines.

5. Reading and notating music.

6. Listening to, analyzing, and describing music.

7. Evaluating music and music performances.

8. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts.

9. Understanding music in relation to history and culture.

Jug Band

The jug band, a traditional American ensemble from the early 1900s, made important contributions to the development of jazz and other black dance music. Jug bands are known for their incorporation of homemade instruments such as the jug, washtub bass, washboard, and other percussive instruments using household objects. “Instruments were home made in some cases, or substitutions were found such as with a jug sounding like a tuba, or using a washboard for a rhythm instrument. Music was madeand created and invented, and new styles were developed” (Fraser 2013). Traditionally jug bands used homemade instruments due to unaffordable or inaccessible store bought versions, placing economic sustainability at the core of their origins. Such constructive values of resourceful and creative music making can be easily taught and later applied by students in numerous contexts. With its affordable materials, jug-band music can increase students’ own economic awareness while maintaining more stable and sustainable music programs, which too often lose or lack funding to begin with.

Jug-band music is especially conducive to sustainable education not only because of its environmentally conscious use of materials, but also its potential to revive an under-documented musical tradition. Jug-band music developed, in part, from situations of economic, social, and racial injustice in African American river communities, whose history should be part of our education as it is essential to our past. Jug-band music, as well as other traditional music, can sustain and develop awareness between culture and environment. Bowers states that using folk traditions in the arts can provide “ways of understanding and experiencing that are not destructive of human and human/nature relationships” (73), later adding references to ecology by stating that such practices “could become an educational model that would connect community, which it now addresses, with environmental renewal” (184). A good resource for using American traditions in education is The Foxfire Approach, which advocates creative and active learning that emphasizes the equality of teacher and student.

Curriculum can seamlessly expand beyond folk tradition by connecting to other musical traditions, which similarly utilize household materials but produce dramatically different outcomes. For example, an educator can connect folk music to contemporary classical music by comparing and contrasting jug-band music with a piece such as John Cage’s Living Room Music. Cage’s composition uses instruments constructed from household items and found objects (Jager, 73). Students can tangibly explore and discuss these similar approaches, which arose from very different populations. An advanced level of understanding connections between music, culture, and tradition can begin to develop through students’ simple engagement with these complex cultural comparisons.

Along with teaching historical and cultural significances, (NAfME 8,9) jug-band music addresses concepts and practices of improvisation, an essential element of its style (NAfME, 3), as well as develops listening and analyzation skills. (NAfME 6) Primarily an oral tradition, jug-band music develops ear training, rhythm, and comprehension of form. Adapting household items and other accessible material into traditional musical instruments is creative, resourceful, and can encourage behaviors of recycling, reusing, and general environmental sustainability.

Recycled Orchestra

Top-level classical instruments are handmade; therefore, constructing homemade instruments is a logical approach to incorporating classical music’s tradition and history. Projects can range in difficulty and sophistication depending on the time frame and skill level of the students. Although your students may be manipulating discarded wood, metal hubcaps, broken toys, glass, or plastic pipes instead of pernambucco, ivory, mother of pearl, or animal gut, skills from the masters of instrument making can nonetheless be explored (NAfME, 8). Hands on experience with the instrument construction process can develop a respect and reverence for the art of instrument making, leading to better care and appreciation for students’ own current or future instruments. 

The “Landfill Harmonic” in Cateura, Paraguay, is a current example of a successful recycled orchestra. Nicolas Gomez, the local garbage picker, builds instruments out of materials such as water pipes, bottle caps, silverware, and recycled wood.

"The children of Cateura, live in one of the poorest slums in Latin America. Just outside Asuncion, Paraguay, Cateura is the city’s trash dump. It is built on a landfill. Here, people live in a sea of garbage. […] There was no money for real instruments so together they started to make instruments from trash - violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates." (Landfill Harmonic)

Such ensembles address problems of poverty and waste pollution by teaching values of environmental sustainability, promoting equal education, and becoming economically sustainable.

Addressing issues of material misuse in traditional classical instrument building in an article on the environmental impacts of high quality violin wood, Aaron S. Allen (2012) observes, “In unwitting ways, musical cultures have contributed to the destruction of the ecosystems on which they depend.” Rymer (2004) and Dudley (2011) address similar issues concerning professional instrument materials that are damaging delicate ecosystems. Teaching young musicians their responsibility to the environment can help lead to increased awareness of current eco-musical issues as well as affect their general long-term environmental consciousness.

While I am not advocating using recycled instruments instead of store bought ones, making instruments can supplement and enrich the traditional orchestral experience. Students can practice performance skills (NAfME, 5) in a group as well as individually (NAfME, 2) when allowed the freedom to take home self-made instruments without fear of liability. As a result, instrument ownership can become more intimate and meaningful. Nancy Barry, a professor of music education, discusses homemade instruments in school music classes. “As far as the quality of sound,” Barry says, I don't have any delusions of using homemade instruments for real instruments.” But Barry cites other reasons for making instruments. “Sometimes we have students who abuse and misuse instruments. This project can enhance respect for classroom instruments.”

Also, Barry observes: "In some situations, there's no budget to purchase $200 or $300 Orff xylophones. And even if I had unlimited resources for good quality instruments, I would explore the science of sound by having students create their own instruments. There's so much we can reap." (Barry 1996, 40)

Programs such as Bash the Trash offer workshops for music teachers to incorporate homemade instruments into their curricula. These programs teach music making in relation to sound science, composition, and improvisation through building and playing homemade and recycled instruments.

Experimental Instrument Ensemble

Inventing instruments constructs a platform for inventing music. Students are given complete creative freedom when allowed unlimited flexibility of construction, sound, and performance. By lifting perceptions of “correct” musical sound and erasing possible comparisons to previous compositions, children can flourish by using their innate and uninhibited creativity. Music educator John Paynter states, “Musical instruments themselves inspire musical ideas, not only by the quality of the sounds they produce but also by the way they are constructed and played.” Actively contributing to instrument making and composition, students will preserve traditions as well as develop innovations.

Involving students in instrument building and inventing is an extremely engaging and intimate experience. In his introductory material, Coleman discusses this relationship:

"The history of all types of education has proved that children are most interested in those materials of learning that offer the opportunity for manipulation, exploring, experimenting, and creative adventure. In whatever fields the child can do creative work, and can experience the excitement of producing something that is his very own, these are the fields that will hold the greatest charm for him. […] A real intimacy with some kind of instrument is necessary before a child can be free to express musical feeling with his hands. One who builds an instrument for himself is laying the foundation for that intimacy, and for free creative expression in music. The making of the instrument is a building process, but the creative experience of making a melody to play on this instrument follows naturally. There are all degrees of creativity […] True education is not concerned about the finesse or perfection of the child’s first or second production; it is concerned about the direction in which this growth is going."(Coleman 1939)

Breaking boundaries between composer, inventor, builder, and performer furthers musical equity (NAfME, 3,4). An experimental instrument ensemble offers long-term retention, personal involvement, and sincere commitment, which impacts students beyond the classroom, and creates a sustainable model of education.

L’Art Pour L’Art, a professional experimental and contemporary music ensemble based outside of Hamburg, Germany, guides children in making their musical fantasies a reality with an open environment where instruction is tailored to individual students’ unique curiosities and natural learning progression. Students often use homemade instruments or alternative sound sources in their compositions. One student placed her ensemble by a creek in the woods, incorporating the natural soundscape, with a horse appointed as conductor. The horse’s mouth was attached to a contact microphone, amplifying various chewing patterns depending on what it was fed, which directed the tempo and rhythm of the piece. Eliminating boundaries forces students to truly define music, sound, composition, and performance in an engaged and advanced way. Experimental instrument ensembles cultivate skills in listening, analyzing, and conceptualizing (NAfME, 6) by posing questions such as ‘what is music?,’ ‘how is a musical composition constructed?,’ ‘what qualifies as a musical instrument?’ etc.

Building electronic instruments both recycles and reuses old and obsolete electronics while combining science and music curricula. An approach called “hardware hacking”, accessibly illustrated by Nicolas Collins, provides a solid introduction and fun projects such as “Transforming a Portable Radio into a Synthesizer” (Collins 2009, 73) or various hackings of old electronic toys into sound makers. Once you begin, the resources and recipes for new musical instruments are endless. 

Call to Reclaim

Lou Harrison reflected on some of the ideas presented here:

"Making an instrument is one of music’s greatest joys. Indeed, to make an instrument is in some strong sense to summon the future. It is, as Robert Duncan has said of composing, “A volition. To seize from the air its forms.” Almost no pleasure is to be compared with the first tones, tests & perfections of an instrument one has just made. Nor are all instruments invented & over with, so to speak. The world is rich with modelsbut innumerable forms, tones & powers await their summons from the mind & hand. Make an instrument --- you will learn more in this way than you can imagine." (In Banek and Scoville 1980.)

Music education should inspire exploration, creativity, and expression, relating to students’ everyday lives as well as other academic disciplines and fields. Making and playing homemade instruments supports creative and comprehensive education, multiple components of sustainability, and core standards of music education. So whether you decide to heat up the soldering iron, flip over an old washtub, or salvage leftover veggies, you’ll find that music is everywhere.

Works Cited

Allen, Aaron. 2012. “‘Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s Violins and the Musical Trees of the Paneveggio,” in Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660-1830,

eds. Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini, 301-315. Oxford: SVEC.

Banek, Reinhold, and Jon Scoville. 1980. Sound Designs: A Handbook of Musical Instrument Building. Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press.

Barry, Nancy H. and Dianne Hope. 1996. “Students Make Instruments.” Teaching Music IV/2 (October): 40.

Bowers, C. A. 1995. Educating for an Ecologica"y Sustainable Culture: Rethinking Moral Education, Creativity, Inte"igence, and Other Modern Orthodoxies. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Coleman, Satis N. 1939. Creative Music in the Home: Music, Stories How to Make Instruments, How to Play Them, and Many Tunes to Play. New York: The John Day Company.

Collins, Nicolas. 2009. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.

Dudley, Kathryn Marie. 2011. “Are Guitar Makers an Endangered Species?” The New York Times, October 26.

Fraser, Douglas. “Jugband History: Jug Inspires Jazz and Blues.” The Genuine Jug Band Website (accessed May 2013).

Jaeger, Stefan. 2008. Experimente"e Musik in der Hauptschule: Ausgewählte Ansätze für das Klassenmusizieren. Augsburg: Wissner.

Bash the Trash. “Workshops with Music Connections” (accessed May 2013).

Landfill Harmonic. “Landfill Harmonic: Inspiring dreams one note at a time!” Kickstarter Website (accessed February, 2013).

National Association for Music Education. “National Standards for Music Education” (accessed May 2013).

Paynter, John. 1992. Sound and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rymer, Russ. 2004. “Saving the Music Tree.” Smithsonian Magazine (April).

Schroeder, Michael. Interview and observation by author, Hamburg, Germany (21 September 2013).

The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. “CSPA Mission Statement” (accessed March 2013).

The Foxfire Fund. “The Foxfire Approach” (accessed May 2013). University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“Strategic Plan 2009-2014” (accessed March 2013).

My first ethnographic fieldwork experience was a short trip to Jamaica, where I interviewed twenty Rastafarians regarding their perspectives on white people and non-Rastas participating in reggae music. Prior to this, I had little knowledge of field methods, much less theoretical approaches in anthropology and ethnomusicology; I was a reggae musician who had become curious about how this genre informs—and is informed by—a sense of identity and connection to the black liberation struggle in Jamaica, especially that of the Rastafari movement. While this music appealed to me on many levels, the reactions my all-white reggae band often received from audiences in the Philadelphia area raised several questions: Is the authenticity of our sound compromised by our ethnicity and heritage? Is this somehow inappropriate or disrespectful? Most importantly, can a community of people claim ownership or authorship of a form of creative expression? I am still struggling with these questions, but what I learned during that brief undergraduate research experience helped to prepare me for the fieldwork I have done in the Greater Philadelphia Area, where I live and work.

Shortly after I returned from Jamaica, I received a message from John Homiak, the Smithsonian anthropologist who had connected me with my guide and hosts in Red Hills, right outside of Kingston, and who had just looked over some of my reflections from that trip. He challenged me to think about the extent to which anyone within the Rastafari community had made me feel like an outsider. My “otherness” was certainly blurred during this experience: I had the appearance of a non-Jamaican, non-Rasta, white man, and I know people took notice of my presence, often confusing me for other white males who had visited previously; however, I cannot count the number of times that I was told, “Jah no partial,” that is, anyone can be a part of this community, regardless of “race, color, or creed,” as one Nyahbinghi priest assured me. Those first two categories, race and color, are common themes in Rastafarian discourse and music, and while they are not simple issues, I can understand the flexibility with which Rastas treat these categories in judgments of who is or is not a legitimate Rastafarian. What remains a puzzle for me is this issue of “creed”: how is it that I am often included in a Rasta’s idea of “InI” when I do not profess a belief in the divinity of Haile Selassie?

This question has been answered, in part, by the notion that Rastafari is a “divine conception of the heart"—to quote the Morgan Heritage song, “Don’t Haffi Dread,” which is often cited by Rastas as a reminder that “you don’t haffi dread [don’t have to wear dreadlocks] to be Rasta” (Morgan Heritage 1999)—and not necessarily a matter of following cultural or religious behavioral codes. I still wonder, however, how it is that one can deny some of the central components of the faith yet be regarded as within, or at least connected to, the movement. Despite the diversity of expressions and social structures among the various Rastafarian communities, as well as the absence of initiation rites in most groups, I would still expect a sharper distinction between members and non-members based on, at the very least, some kind of outward identification of oneself as a Rastafarian. The fact that such discrimination seems to be lacking may be due, in part, to the legacy of resistance against colonial norms, including the religious institutions that require acceptance of specific tenets of faith and morality. Another possibility is that Rastafarian identity, being at an intersection of several loyalties and motivations, is assigned or claimed primarily in relation to specific sociopolitical situations, albeit still perceived as an “inborn conception” (Price 2009:142) for all of humanity. This paradox, Rastafari as a permanent, eternal identity that takes on meaning in individual agency or collective action rather than permanent features or generalizations, reveals possibilities for relationship within the community based solely on behavior or intent. Rastafari’s insistence that their teachings are knowledge, rather than belief, further elucidates the preference given to experience and conscience, rather than specific expressions of ideological or cultural solidarity. I do not mean to minimize the role of tradition in sustaining Rastafari culture, but it is evident that the dynamics of the movement prioritize participation over explicit identification through initiation rites and creeds.

The role of the Bible in Rastafari illustrates this point. With several years of education in Christian teachings and interpretations of the Old and New Testaments, I naturally consider Rastafarians’ interpretations in light of my own conclusions or what I have learned from biblical scholars. Some Rasta individuals or entire communities adhere, to various degrees, to the scriptures’ regulations for sexuality, observance of the Sabbath, and maintenance of hair and clothing. Prophecy also holds an important place in Rasta thought, the most obvious examples being the return of Christ in his kingly character, as Haile Selassie I, and the repatriation of the Israelites (the African Diaspora identified as such) to their promised land. Beyond these basic doctrinal foci, the use of Bible verses and stories serves a more universal purpose: demonstrating and sharing wisdom by applying the text to current events. I recall a few reasonings (a term used within the Rastafari movement for sacred conversations on spiritual and political topics) in which I had the minority view about gender roles, sexual morality, race, and religion, and the underlying cause of the difference in opinion was a divergence in interpretation of a passage from the Bible, or a different understanding of church history. In one of the most telling examples of this, on one occasion when I was reasoning with three elders, one of them mentioned a passage in the Bible that declares that homosexuals “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10). I politely replied that the same passage includes drunkards, thieves, fornicators, and others, who, despite their transgressions against biblical law, do not receive the same level of condemnation from Rastas or Christians. The discussion then turned toward the question of whether or not homosexuality is “natural,” and our different views on the debated scripture were not resolved; however, I was able to enter more deeply into this Rasta activity of reasoning because of my familiarity with the verses being discussed. Despite my age, race, nationality, and lack of affiliation with the movement, these well-known elders continued to show me respect as we reasoned—over a beer, I might add.

Altar in the center of the Nyahbinghi tabernacle in Scott's Pass, Jamaica. The circular layout of the tabernacle is supposed to facilitate reasoning, in which all present may participate.

While some Rastafarians have rejected the Bible or questioned the integrity of the text as handed down through Christian institutions (Price 2009:176), a general knowledge of its stories and teachings can serve as a sort of cultural lexicon to facilitate communication, especially in divine reasoning. The tensions associated with interpreting and accepting the Bible are paralleled by Rastafari’s engagement with scientific inquiry and cultural discourses, as well. Although opinions naturally vary, evolutionary theory is often viewed with skepticism because of its association with atheism. On the other hand, Rastafarians cite the discoveries of evolutionary anthropologists as evidence that the first humans came from Africa. Cultural anthropologists have also been treated with caution, a stance that makes sense in light of Jamaica’s colonial past; however, if scholarly work can advance the message and positive image of Rastafari, or if an ethnographic study notes a connection between an ancient African tradition and a modern cultural practice in the diaspora, it may be welcomed among an otherwise anti-academic Rasta community. The various disputes over the divinity, death, and political career of Selassie also suggest that a person’s own conclusions are secondary to the intent of their participation in the debate, especially their degree of respect for the emperor and the goals of African unity and repatriation. These apparent contradictions and ambiguities demonstrate the legacy of struggle that has emerged from cultures of slavery, betrayal, colonial and post-colonial violence, and continued exploitation in the Caribbean as well as in communities around the world where Rastafari is being embraced. Unsure of who is an ally and who is a “bag o’ wire” (betrayer), Rastafarians collectively and delicately author a narrative of identity that is flexible and open yet ever conscious of “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” deceivers who seek to keep the world in mental slavery.

It is also entirely possible to be a sheep in wolves’ clothing; although I have much to learn about ethnography, my encounters with Rastafari have taught me this. I am indebted to the anthropologists who have gone before me in much more precarious times and places. Carole Yawney was one of these trailblazers. In a tribute to Yawney, her long-time research partner John Homiak (2013) describes the many challenges she faced in attempting to establish a relationship with the Rastafari movement in Jamaica during the early 1970s. A white woman from Canada living and moving among the Rastafari in West Kingston, especially at a time when women were virtually excluded from reasonings, naturally earned a great deal of scrutiny and suspicion. However, her persistence resulted in well over three decades of purposeful collaboration with the international Rastafari community, and her activism included offering expert testimony on behalf of Rastafari in Jamaica and South Africa (Homiak 2013:105). Hoping to become part of a meaningful partnership such as this one, I am particularly inspired by the fact that Yawney “never professed a Rastafari identity” but “took Rastafari spirituality very seriously” (Homiak 2013:109). I am reminded of a conversation with B. Davis, a musician from Trenton, New Jersey, in which I told him that I do not call myself a Rasta, and he replied, “Breddah, you a real Rastaman from ancient imes in the present trodding in the future!” Collaborative ethnography is a challenge that requires much more than sharing information and resources; in the Rastafari community, it means moving with the movement, taking its values seriously, and respecting people enough to speak with them in a language they know and love.

The cover photo is Humble 13: Pictured (from left to right): RyRy Joji, Dubsmith, B. Davis, Timi Tanzania, of the Philadelphia-based reggae/dubtronica group, Humble 13. This photo was taken in May 2014 in West Philadelphia, where we were reasoning on Dubsmith's porch.

References

Homiak, John P. 2013. “When Goldilocks Met the Dreadlocks: Reflections on the Contributions of Carole D. Yawney to Rastafari Studies” In Let Us Start with Africa: Foundations of Rastafari Scholarship, ed. Jahlani Niaah and Erin Macleod, 62-122. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.

Price, Charles. 2009. Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. New York: New York University Press.

Discography

Morgan Heritage. “Don’t Haffi Dread.” From Don’t Haffi Dread. © 1999 by VP Records. VP 1545. Compact disc.

Sounds of Plurality and Solidarity in Istanbul at the 100^th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide 

^{(Photo: "Where were you, God?" Armenian graffiti in Kurtuluş, Istanbul)} 

On April 24, 2015, public gatherings around the world commemorated the 100^th  anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. An otherwise-unlikely roster of celebrities and world leaders (Amal Clooney, Pope Francis, Kim Kardashian, and Vladimir Putin) drew considerable media attention to the centenary. Turkey’s government affirmed its official stance by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican and promising to ignore the European Parliament’s resolution that called on the country to recognize as genocide the massacres and deportations of Armenians at the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

I experienced the centenary in Istanbul, the city from which over 200 Armenian intellectuals were deported in advance of mass killings of Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontic Greeks further east. I traveled to Turkey with Project 2015, mostly diasporan Armenians from the U.S. and Western Europe. Project 2015 board members stressed that our presence was at the invitation of the local civil society organizations planning commemorative events around the city. Citizens of Turkey—many of whom were not of Armenian heritage—took the lead in demonstrating that the issue of genocide recognition resonated with their country's discourses regarding government transparency, cultural pluralism, and freedom of speech.

Below are six excerpts from audio recordings I made during a week’s worth of commemoration events in Istanbul. I have a lot of transcription, translation, research, and analysis ahead of me, but what seems to unite these diverse sounds of remembrance and protest is a sense of immediacy. Amid us visitors were people speaking to their own government, on the very soil where it happened, figuring out how to live together.

Wednesday, 22 April. 11:30PM. Istanbul Congress Center.

We’ve just reached hour four of musical performances and poetry readings. The concert is “In Memoriam, 24 April: In Memory of the Armenian Intellectuals Sent to their Deaths in 1915,” organized by Anadolu Kültür and Kalan Müzik. The large hall remains full as Ara Dinkjian, Kardeş Türküler, Jordi Savall, and other artists return to the stage for an encore. The audience erupts into applause after the first few notes of “Ağladıkça” (Turkish for “As We Wept”). Written by American Armenian oud player Ara Dinkjian, the song was made famous in Turkey by Kurdish singer Ahmet Kaya. An attempt to get the audience to sing along fizzles, but I can see tears in the eyes of many audience members, and the musicians receive a standing ovation. Catalonian viol player Jordi Savall has written in the program, “Without Emotion there is no Memory, without Memory there is no Justice, without Justice there is no Civilization and without Civilization human beings have no Future.”

Full list of performers for “Ağladıkça”: Kardeş Türküler (band specializing in Anatolian folk songs), Ara Dinkjian (oud), Haïg Yazdjian (oud), Jordi Savall (viol), Ertan Tekin (duduk), Ari Hergel (guitar), Erman İmayhan (cello), David Mayoral (percussion), Gaguik Mouradian (kemancha), and Haig Sarikouyoumdjian (duduk).1

Friday, 24 April. 10AM. A Pharmacy on Cumhuriyet Avenue.

0:00. This is a small event organized by members of the Istanbul Armenian community.2 We’re participating at the invitation of DurDe (Say Stop to Racism and Nationalism), a grassroots human rights organization based in Turkey. We’ve gathered in front of the former home of Gomidas Vardapet (a priest and ethnomusicologist) and Avedis Nakashian (a doctor). Both men were deported on April 24, 1915. We’re a small group, but we spill out into the busy Cumhuriyet Avenue, causing a noisy commotion as cars weave around us. No, there’s no loudspeaker, we’re told. This is a commemoration, not a rally. 

0:38. I’ve moved closer to the entrance of the pharmacy, where two men explain the significance of the day and the building. I join a group holding foam board posters, each bearing the name, birthdate, and picture of a deported Ottoman Armenian intellectual. The speakers repeat each statement in Turkish and Armenian as they summarize Gomidas Vardapet’s work as priest and ethnomusicologist: his collecting of village folk songs in Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; his significance to Armenians and to the intellectual and artistic life of Istanbul; the details of his deportation; and his eventual mental breakdown. Participants lay red carnations by two newly-made plaques to be installed on the building: (in Turkish and Armenian) “Gomidas lived in this house and from here in 1915 was sent into exile.” “Dr. Avedis Nakashian lived in this house and from here in 1915 was sent into exile.” 

Friday, 24 April. 12:45PM. A ferry between Eminönü and Haydarpaşa.

A chartered ferry takes us from the Old City to the Asian side, where we’ll participate in an event at the Haydarpaşa train station. We’re joined by members of the Human Rights Association and Nor Zartonk, a youth political organization based in the Armenian community of Turkey. Fatma Müge Göçek, Project 2015 board member and professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Michigan, gives out logistical information in Turkish and English. We’re treated to Canadian Armenian opera singer Isabel Bayrakdarian’s recordings of Armenian liturgical music, but the boat’s sound system cannot accommodate the dynamic contrasts of these symphonic arrangements. Distortion silences all but the most stubborn conversationalists. Men turn around to glare at the speakers. Parents cover their children’s ears. Many passengers take out their cell phones and iPads to document the journey. We watch the Old City’s minaret-studded skyline grow smaller as the music blares at top volume.

Friday, 24 April. 1PM. Haydarpaşa Terminal.

There are enough of us to cover the steps of the Haydarpaşa train station, an imposing Neo-Renaissance structure on the Bosphorus Strait. We sit. Many hold signs bearing the photographs of deported Armenian intellectuals. Smaller pieces of paper read, “This building is a crime scene!” and “Genocide, Apologize!” in Turkish, Armenian, or English. A microphone is held to a small speaker, and a recorded voice recites the names of those Armenian intellectuals forced to board trains into Anatolia on April 24, 1915. “They were sent to their deaths from here,” the voice repeats before each group of names. We’re surrounded by a construction site, a seaport, and a ferry dock; the noise from each makes it nearly impossible to concentrate. Finally, a woman shouts, “A moment of silence, please!” (3:45). All but the seagulls seem to heed her request.

Friday, 24 April. 6PM. İstiklal Avenue, in Front of the French Consulate.

0:00. Policeblock the entrance to İstiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s famous pedestrian avenue in the Beyoğlu district. A group has congregated in front of the French Consulate, and recorded duduk music marks a significant contrast from busy Taksim Square. Media reporters shove their way through the crowd, trying to get footage of those seated in solemn commemoration. Seeing a wide open space behind the group, my friends and I make our way to the other side.

0:38. Between the commemoration and the southern police barricade, parents chase after their children, and friends greet each other warmly. Ears perk up at the sound of a crowd moving toward us. Hearing indecipherable shouting, there’s some confusion as to whether the protesters are with or against us. I inch closer to the southern barricade, eventually recognizing the long drawn-out syllables of a chant Istanbul streets have heard before: “Katil devlet hesap verecek!” (The murderous state will pay the price!) The crowd waves large signs showing the faces of deported Ottoman Armenians and recent Armenian victims of hate crimes in Turkey. The signs are similar to the ones from the day's earlier events, but this time they bear the words “We are here!” in Armenian and Turkish. I can spot the Nor Zartonk logo. Kurdish slogans are also visible. Men and women at the front of the crowd carry a long banner declaring in Turkish that “genocide continues.” Directly behind that banner, three Assyrian youth display homemade signs reading, “Assyrian Genocide 1915,” “I died 1915,” and the Syriac hashtag, “#seyfo100.” I’m struck by the juxtaposition of sights and sounds—vocal political protest on one side, and solemn commemoration on the other. As the barricades open and the marchers fill the open space, I rush back to my friends so I don’t get lost in the crowd.3

3:00. Live singing before the speeches begin. (I would be grateful to any readers able to provide additional context for this song.)

3:50. Speech, in Turkish. (In lieu of a direct translation, I am including the condensed English version read aloud for non-Turkish speakers.) 

One hundred years today the Armenian Genocide, one of the bloodiest of human tragedies started. 235 prominent Armenians were rounded up. Among them were dentists, members of parliament, journalists, writers, and intellectuals. The 24th of April was a systematic attempt at genocide, which in two years, one of the longest established people of Anatolia was exterminated. 24th April marks the beginnings of unspeakable violence visited upon a nation. The violence went hand in hand with massacres, the massacres with forced exile, forced exile with rape, rape with robbery, and robbery with plunder. Within two years there were no more Armenians. We all know that genocide does not only mean mass killing and mass deportation. With consummate denial, obliteration of the genocide, and the systematic invention of life in order to make us forget, the Turkish state has always attempted to cover up this big tragedy with big lies. Listen to these examples: the Turkish president’s reaction to the Vatican’s recent statement on the genocide, the reaction of the three main political parties to the European Parliament’s declaration urging of Turkey to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and the most recent one, President Erdoğan’s statements criticizing the Vatican’s and the European Parliament’s declarations. It goes on. Every genocide creates its own tradition. We, who are fighting for the recognition of the genocide, want to create a tradition of confronting the genocide. Fighting for this is our obligation to the hundreds of thousands of our citizens we lost in 1915. Fighting for this is our guarantee of equal and fraternal politics today. Fighting for this is our debt to Hrant Dink, Sevag Balıkçı, and Maritsa Küçük.4 And to our sisters and brothers scattered around the world and forced to live away from their soil. It is our debt to our own consciousness. We have declared that this pain is ours. We have declared that these are some wounds that time does not heal. We have apologized, and we continue to apologize. We confront the genocide, and we continue to confront it. Now it’s the government’s turn. We accept from it not talking of mutual pain, but an apology. We apologize. One century is an opportunity to confront the genocide. Confront it.5

10:18. The commemoration is over. As we disperse down İstiklal, we’re accompanied by a remastered recording of Gomidas at the piano, accompanying his student Armenak Shah Muradian, who sings the folk music collector’s arrangement of “Garun a” (“It is Spring”).

10:52. İstiklal Caddesi, back to normal, about 20 minutes after the commemoration finishes.

Saturday, 25 April. 7:15PM. Kadiköy Yeşil Ev.

A café employee says we’ll find the concert venue once we pass CHP. Sure enough, as I head up the hill with two friends, we’re surrounded by flags bearing the logo of the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party), Turkey’s oldest political party and now the country’s main opposition party. Above us, small red, white, and light blue flags hang like paper lanterns, strung back and forth across the street forming a canopy. A few more steps, and the colors change: purple, green, white, yellow, red. “This seems right,” I speculate, looking up at the flags of the Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP) (People’s Democratic Party), a new left-wing party known for its progressive stance on Kurdish, Armenian, and other minority issues—as well as environmentalism, labor, gender equality, and LGBT rights. With the general election in June, the HDP is gaining momentum in the hopes of surpassing the 10% parliamentary threshold. Tonight, they’re hosting a concert by celebrated artists from the Republic of Armenia, Hasmik Harutyunyan and the Shoghaken Ensemble.6

Up the stairs of an inconspicuous apartment building, we join about thirty-five other people in a small, L-shaped room. A man complains that HDP didn’t approve the more comfortable seats. What’s a sixty-five-year-old to do with brittle plastic chairs and small wooden desks?

0:00. Hasmik Harutyunyan sings “Ganche Groung” (“Call Out, Crane”). She’s dressed like the other three members of the ensemble in gold and black costumes inspired by traditional Armenian dress. Two triangles on her skirt form the unmistakable shape of Mount Ararat, an Armenian national symbol visible from Yerevan but located within the borders of Turkey.

0:43. A volunteer begins to translate Hasmik Harutyunyan’s words into Turkish, but everyone recognizes the next song, “Bingyol,” named after a city in eastern Turkey where many Armenians used to live. A number of us in the audience had heard the song just days earlier at Wednesday’s “In Memoriam” concert at the Istanbul Congress Center. Instead of Kardeş Türküler’s opening saz solo, Levon Tevanyan dazzles us with an improvised solo on the end-blown flute, blul. When the melody begins, audience members sing along.

3:50. Karine Hovhannisyan’s kanun playing further energizes us. Hasmik Harutyunyan and Aleksan Harutyunyan (voice and percussion) move through the audience, making sure we don’t stop singing and clapping.

4:40. Amid thank yous and goodbyes, a discussion emerges about shared culture. Aleksan Harutyunyan interrupts with “Sari Gyalin” (known in Turkish as “Sarı Gelin”). Telling the story of two star-crossed lovers, the song is a well-known symbol of musical connections between Armenians and Turks.7 Conversation ceases, and the audience takes over, singing the Turkish and Armenian lyrics simultaneously. 

I am grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to travel to Turkey for the commemorations as part of an independent study with Sebouh Aslanian, Project 2015 board member and the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair of Modern Armenian History at UCLA. Much gratitude goes to Project 2015 for providing study grants funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and an anonymous British foundation. 

• 1. Additional performers at the “In Memoriam” concert: Hasmik Harutyunyan, Karine Hovhannisyan, Erkan Oğur, Onnik Dinkjian, Şahan Arzruni, Henning Schmiedt, and Eileen Khatchadourian
• 2. Estimates put the number of Armenian citizens of Turkey at 60,000, though that figure does not reflect the recent migration of undocumented workers from the Republic of Armenia.
• 3. Some Project 2015 participants, seated closer to the center of the commemoration and facing away from the march, feared the oncoming sounds were those of Turkish nationalists violently breaking through the police barricade. American Armenian photographer Scout Tufankjian highlighted the strong emotions of this moment on Facebook, and her post was shared widely around the world: https://www.facebook.com/ArmenianDiasporaProject/photos/a.834541659906095.1073741827.192690990757835/1079347952092130.
• 4. Three Armenians killed in Turkey in recent years. Hrant Dink was a well-known editor, assassinated in broad daylight near the office of his newspaper, Agos; Sevag Balıkçı was a young man killed by a fellow soldier during his compulsory military service; and Maritsa Küçük was an elderly woman stabbed to death in her apartment. Questions remain about the role of systemic anti-Armenian racism in these individuals’ deaths and their ensuing investigations.
• 5. Heghnar Watenpaugh, Project 2015 board member and professor of art history at UC Davis, also delivered a speech in Turkish at the commemoration. The full text of her speech can be read in English, Turkish, and Armenian on Jadaliyya: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21473/let-us-make-a-new-beginning_speech-for-the-armenia.
• 6. This was not an official Project 2015 event, and I have to thank Anoush Suni, graduate student in anthropology at UCLA, for letting me know about the concert.
• 7. Eliot Bates provides an excellent discussion of this song in his book Music in Turkey: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (2010).

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends atEcho: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions and feedback from scholars working on music from all disciplines. 

This month, our contributor is Cody Kommers. Cody is currently a fourth year cognitive science student at UCLA and will be joining Apropose, a Silicon Valley startup, as a human-centered data scientist after graduation. His work pursues data driven solutions for humanistic problems, especially those in music, language, and design. For more about his research exploring computational models of jazz improvisation, see his website.

In 1937, Claude Shannon submitted his thesis at 21 years old to complete the electrical engineering master’s degree at MIT.ⁱ  In this paper, now known as the “most famous masters thesis of the 20^th century”ⁱⁱ he provided a theoretical foundation for the then-coming computer revolution.  This paper, essentially proposing the idea of using 1s and 0s in computers, is not even his most influential.  Shannon is best known for single-handedly creating the field of information theory in relative entirety, seemingly without any precedent.ⁱⁱⁱ Even in a century inaugurated by the discovery of the photoelectric effect and punctuated with the creation of the personal computer, it is difficult to overstate Shannon’s contributions to technological development.

Shannon was born on April 30, 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan to a small, Midwestern family.  His father, Claude Sr., was a self-made businessman, and his mother, Mabel, was a teacher.  He lived in Michigan until he moved to Boston to attend graduate school.  Not much is known about Shannon’s early life.  As a young man, Shannon possessed the slender, tidy appearance of one who works with numbers and buoyant detachment of one who was meant to do so.  He was gentle without being tepid, never judged a problem by its perceived utility, and had a self-proclaimed affinity for funny motions. During his career at Bell Labs (the famous laboratory founded by Alexander Graham Bell), he provoked both curiosity and reverence from his coworkers.  He spent his nights juggling on his unicycle, riding through the halls after everyone else had gone home.  The singular feature of his desk was the “Ultimate Machine”.  This box had only one switch—when flipped, the lid opened, a robotic arm reached out, flipped off the switch, and closed the box. 

Shannon named the central concept of his information theory “entropy” (distinct from entropy in the second law of thermodynamics).  Simply stated, Shannon’s entropy measures uncertainty in information.  To illustrate, one who plays the game “20 Questions” by first asking “is it my left pinky toe?” rather than “is it fictional?” is not taking into account entropy.  If the first question is answered in the negative, one has not gained much information—it could still be anything, including your right pinky toe.  In contrast, regardless of whether the second question is answered in the negative or the affirmative, one crosses off about half of the possible answers.  The difference in the information one acquires is quantified by Shannon’s entropy. 

Shannon initially demonstrated the power of entropy on understanding how letters fit together in English words.^iv Imagine seeing a word beginning with the letters ‘re-‘.  Which letter will come next?  There are any number of likely possibilities—return, relate, reveal—all with different letters in their third position.  In contrast, if one sees a word that begins with ‘q‘, it is very likely that the next letter will be ‘u’.  We know this from experience—‘u’ almost always comes after ‘q’.  In this case, if one knows the next letter is proceeded by a ‘q’, there is very little uncertainty about what it will be.  The difference between these two cases can be quantified by Shannon’s entropy as well.  The common denominator between guessing letters and 20 questions is that not all information is created equal; what you know influences how much you don’t know. 

The assumption underlying Shannon’s entropy is that whatever happens next depends on whatever just happened (e.g., the ‘u’ depends on the ‘q’).  This broad, rather trivial assumption allows entropy to be measured in other sequences, such as words in language and notes in music.  With language, this is the basic mechanism behind one’s smartphone being able to predict the next word to be typed.  Analogous to the case with letters, the word “are” is more likely to follow from “my children” than “is” would be.  The smartphone knows this because “my children are” occurs far more frequently than “my children is”—the phone’s uncertainty concerning the next word can be measured with entropy.

Graph 1. Distribution of letters in English language as a percentage of occurrence (e.g, occurring 1 of every 10 letters = 10% = 0.1).^v

Similarly, with music, it is possible to guess the next pitch to be played from the preceding pitches.  In a simple case, if one sees the first three notes of a major scale, then one is relatively likely to see the fourth note come next.  This can also be measured by entropy.  Consider the different levels of predictability in different kinds of music.  In pop, pitches are likely to be from the same key and cluster around the same range.  In jazz, the key and range will be constantly shifting.  Different genres of music have different levels of entropy. 

At first, it seems unsurprising that entropy could be measured in music—different styles of music have different idiomatic phrases, akin to language.  But it is unclear exactly what the commonality between letters, language, and music is that would allow them to be quantified in such a manner.  The reason that one, speaking standard American English, says “my children are” rather than “my children is” follows from a relatively severe grammatical restriction concerning verb conjugation.  The equivalent restriction in music is not obvious.  Sure, it would be a little uncouth to play an Eb over a C major, but one is certainly more likely to hear such a thing from Charlie Parker before one would hear “It were the best of times” from Charles Dickens.      

This common structure underlying music, language, letters, and many other social and natural phenomena was discovered by George Kingsley Zipf, a professor of linguistics at Harvard, in 1935—more than a decade before Shannon proposed information theory.  Zipf was born near the beginning of the 20^th century to a family of second generation German-Americans.  Though he made his living from studying words, Zipf did not believe in owning books; he relied on libraries for all but his dictionaries and philological resources.  Zipf’s colleagues viewed him as “the kind of man who would take roses apart to count their petals.”^vi

Zipf proposed that, in any given language, only a few words comprise the majority of usage while the vast majority of words are rarely ever used.^vii This feature of usage of words can also be generalized to phenomena such as usage of letters, usage of pitch and rhythmic sequences, populations of cities, GDPs of nations, and traffic of internet sites.  In each of these cases, only a couple entities get the majority of the action. 

Zipf discovered his famous principal in what is perhaps the least enthralling linguistic endeavor of the 20^th century: He decided to tally the number of times each word occurred in James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Counting the appearance of each word, he found that some words, such as “indisputable”, occur only twice while others, such as “the”, occur once out of every eighteen words.

Graph 2. Distribution of usage in English language.^viii Notice that only a couple words are used more than 1000 times (e.g., “the”); most words are used less than 10 times (e.g., “indisputable”).  These data are from a large sample of English from a social media website.

To begin, I invite you to watch this clip of Esperanza Spalding and Gretchen Parlato collaborating in recording Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Inútil Paisagem,” plucking strings, clapping, clicking tongues, improvising, singing with words in English and in Portuguese, vocalizing melodies, bass lines and counterpoints. 

Spalding and Parlato are contemporary jazz singers—Spalding is also a bass player—whose voices are constantly defined as instruments.  Two reviews of many speak of “the delicate sound of Spalding's voice that almost reflects that of a violin” (Berlanga-Ryan 2011) and assert that “Gretchen Parlato’s voice is a cello.  It’s a muted trumpet, a trombone.  It’s an alto saxophone” (Greenlee 2009).

This is not a new phenomenon.  Instruments have long been considered to influence singers in jazz.  Think of Louis Armstrong as songster and trumpeter, of Ella Fitzgerald’s and Betty Carter’s dexterous scatting, of Sarah Vaughan’s ‘black baritone,’ of Chet Baker’s straight mute sound.  These are all singers whose styles and techniques include elements of instrumentality.[1]

Instrumentalists in jazz have long been informed by vocality, too.  In Thinking in Jazz, ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner speaks amply about instrumentalists who learn to play through singing, play songs by storytelling, and achieve sounds by imitating timbres of the voice.[2]  Berliner invokes a familiar idea when he quotes a musician saying that “Miles Davis transformed the character of his instrument with such a variety of inflection that ‘at times he didn’t even sound like he was playing a trumpet.  It was just the sound of his own voice’ (LH)” (Berliner 1994, 126).

Here is an image of jazz musicality in which singers and instrumentalists craft their sounds with constant attentiveness to each other.  I call this the ‘voice-instrument dialectic,’ in which these two nominally oppositional entities are neither mutually exclusive nor is one defined completely through the other, but rather they both always act on each other.  It seems, though, that one direction of impact—the voice on the instrument—remains marginalized, less frequently noted than the other.  For example, listen to this clip of Billie Holiday and Lester Young.

In the evocative conversation in the beginning, Young and journalist Chris Albertson discuss the reciprocity between the saxophonist and Holiday.  When Albertson says to Young, “You’re her favorite soloist,” Young responds, “Well, she is mine, too,” adding, “so that’s a draw.”  When Albertson says, “she gave you the name Prez,” Young replies, “And I gave her the name of Lady Day,” adding again, “so that’s even.”  When Albertson says of Holiday that, “she has said that…her style of singing is formed after your style on the tenor sax,” instead of continuing with symmetry, Young agrees with and affirms Albertson’s statement.  This is not to criticize Young, but to suggest that the influence of singers on instrumentalists is less easily pronounced. 

This power dynamic between voice and instrument persists in the reception of Spalding and Parlato.  They are both, in unique ways, successful in today’s jazz scene,[3] and in endorsing the singers, critics and fellow musicians reveal how instrumental qualities are tied up with aesthetic value.  A peer musician of Parlato’s says, “Gretchen’s not just a singer; she’s a musician” (Clayton in Appelbaum 2011).  A review of Spalding describes her as an “acoustic bass-playing jazz vocalist [who] could swing with the wisdom and force of Ray Brown while singing with the intuitive rangedefying [sic] freedom of Ella Fitzgerald” (Jisi 2013).  A review of Parlato concludes, “combining the ability and elegance of a classic jazz diva with the curiosity and vision of the genre’s forward-thinking pioneers, Parlato represents a bold evolution of the jazz singer” (Bolles 2013).  Here, musicality exists outside the realm of singing, bass playing is associated with wisdom while singing is associated with intuition, and singers occupy the past and the theatrical, not the creative and innovative.  Why, if voice and instrument influence one another as they do, do critics continue to give aesthetic validation in this way?  Why do instruments appear to be understood as better than voices?

A place to start looking for answers is the fact of voices belonging to bodies—in jazz, historically, black bodies, female bodies, bodies which, at certain moments in time, needed to be transcended for economic and political ends.  As jazz scholars have noted, part of the move within jazz toward increased musical complexity with 1940s bebop was driven by an economic pursuit to stop the ease with which swing had been appropriated, and a political pursuit to “reject the legacy of the minstrel mask by emphasizing ‘art’ instead of ‘entertainment’” (Monson 1995, 407).  These pursuits deepened a cleave between singers and instrumentalists that continues to inform their separated traditions today: singers, with sensual bodies and universal words, as historical originators and entertainers, lacking in complexity and innovation, fixated on the Great American Songbook, limited by diatonic improvising or no improvising at all; and instrumentalists, with their mechanical tools of great speed and range, as masterful innovators, creating new styles, crafting and developing their improvisations, elaborating with rhythmic and harmonic complexity.[4]

The voice is in a dialectical relationship with instruments, but the historical separation of its bodied containers, of singers, resists its explicit presence.  In Freedom Sounds, ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson makes the point that in 50s and 60s U.S. jazz, racial tensions that were rigidly expressed in black and white musicians’ communities and discourse were in fact much more fluid within their aesthetic practices.  In other words, music accommodated more pluralism than did its social structures.  This is the case with Spalding and Parlato, too, as their music expresses more fluidity between voice and instrument than society and discourse suggest.

To be sure, their music asserts some clear instrumental markers—repertoire associated with instrumentalists,[5] maneuvers deemed more musically complex (odd meters, complicated chord changes, non-diatonic improvisations), increased improvisation, and a move away from lyrics and language.  I argue, though, that it is exactly within these instrumental markers where the singers’ voices are vitally important, and where the music is telling us to pay attention to vocality as much as to instrumentality. 

Parlato has over the years done several versions of Herbie Hancock’s tune “Butterfly.”   She wrote lyrics to the melody, and has slightly reworked the rhythm of the last eight measures of the original form, which she then uses also as an introduction, interludes, and vamps.  In a live version on her most recent album, Live in NYC, the introduction is made up of this section.  Parlato begins by clapping and improvising using the pitches of the main melodic event in compound meter.  While she continues clapping, her voice, with some interjections from the rhythm section, slowly introduces the simple meter groove of the tune, creating a polyrhythmic texture.

This introduction makes a very strong point.  It is entirely embodied, and accomplishes so much—the polyrhythm that the whole rhythm section continues to elaborate through the piece begins with Parlato’s voice, resonance, lips, tongue, and hands.  This is a general quality of Parlato’s singing—her vocality is often intertwined with her rhythmic decisions.  She often uses repetition, riffs and vamps.  These reframe her voice as percussion, but they also direct focus to her tone, orienting ears to the timbre of her voice and the physicality of her sound production, perhaps more than the melodic content of her lines. 

This combined attention to tone and repetition also relates to modal improvisation.  Parlato often improvises in the midst of complex harmonies, and this stylistic and rhythmic orientation mean that she can do so without marking a lot of chord changes.  In her solo in the live version of Wayne Shorter’s “Juju,” she improvises with a diminished scale on an open vamp, which is both a nuanced recontextualization of the original tune, famous for its focus on the whole tone scale, and a place where her voice exposes its heightened qualities—it becomes extra nasal, extra direct and piercing, extra stretchy and full of breath.

This improvisation is a radical departure from the standard mode of jazz singers’ improvisation—scatting.  As vocal imitation of instruments, scatting is already one of the most potent examples of the voice–instrument dialectic.  Parlato, however, seems to have a complex relationship to scatting, both building on it, and going beyond it, expanding the possibilities of instrumentality of the voice.  In contrast to the familiar ‘shoobedobop’, then, are Parlato’s long tones with no consonants heard in “Juju.”  

Spalding, similarly, is introduced as a singer who “vocalizes in fast, non-lyric-based style, as if she were voicing the horn melodies.  Just don’t call it ‘scat’ singing” (Norris 2008).  The interviewer’s warning against the term is informed by Spalding’s own stated aversion to it.  She sings about this and demonstrates in this live performance:

Still, even within Spalding’s expansions of instrumentality within her improvisations, she continues to be indebted to the voice.  In an interview, Spalding demonstrates both her distinctiveness from scatting and her admiration for it:

I really love the way Ella Fitzgerald would scat and the way Betty Carter would scat. I never thought to emulate what they were doing. I thought they were really good doing a vocal solo. So when I started doing that, there were ideas that I couldn’t play on the bass. I didn’t have the technical facility to do certain melodies, certain ideas that I wanted to try to do. (Quoted in Vitro 2013)

This statement demonstrates a radical shift from the usual claim that singers don’t have the technical facilities that instrumentalists have, to the opposite claim, that Spalding as bass player cannot do what Spalding as singer can.  Her vocal improvisation isn’t just an imitation of the bass.  It adds something new to the conversation.  And they work together; Spalding often improvises simultaneously on bass and voice, using the same material but separated by octaves for the different registers.  Her voice moves quickly and makes big interval leaps, gliding up and down, and smearing consonants, always keeping together with the bass’s line.  They play the same melodic material but each contributes equally to the moment.

Both Spalding and Parlato use wordless singing also while vocalizing the ‘head’ of their tunes, in lieu of lyrics, as well as in interludes, and as backup harmony.  This seems to be one of the key elements to which critics refer when speaking of the singers as instrumentalists.  Spalding herself says:

I just feel like I’m playing like a horn player… “I Adore You” is a song that I wrote, and I thought about putting lyrics to it, but it doesn’t make sense, cuz that type of singing – it’s… a very fast melody, that literally a horn player or a piano player could play.  …So why would I put lyrics to it?  It’s good how it is. (Quoted in Norris 2008)

“I Adore You” is indeed a good example of wordless singing in unorthodox sections, and it also, incidentally, has a noteworthy collaborative bass and voice solo.

Parlato’s head on this version of Wayne Shorter’s “E.S.P.” is a good example of her extended wordless singing.

The extended absence of lyrics is a shift away from the speaking voice to the musicking instrument.[6]  But here, too, vocality intervenes.  A big part of the excitement of wordless singing is the fact that it can lie side by side with words, lyrics, and poetry, all of which both singers are invested in deeply.[7] Finally, it is, of course, the very embodiment of the voice, the ability to manipulate diaphragms and cavities to shift and shape consonants and vowels, that enables the production of effective wordless singing in the first place.

In closing, I’ll press my point, which has been twofold.  Critics and fellow musicians highlight the instrumentality within Esperanza Spalding’s and Gretchen Parlato’s music, marking the historically racialized and gendered constructions of the voice that skew perceptions of excellence away from it and in favor of the instrument.  But the two singers, in their choices of repertoire, in their manipulations of rhythm, harmony, improvisation, and tone, in the interaction between their voices and other instruments, and in their use of lyrics and wordless singing, like many others before them, draw on the important dialectic relationship between voice and instrument.  Spalding’s and Parlato’s music makes a case for musicality within jazz not only through instrumentality, but also, pertinently, through the body and its sound, through the voice.

Notes

Charlotte Heth has a long history at UCLA.  In 1973, she began teaching a survey course on American Indian music.  In 1975 she completed her disseration in Ethnomusicology, "Stomp dance music of the Oklahoma Cherokee: a study of contemporary practice with special reference to the Illinois District Council Ground."  Heth was director of UCLA's American Indian Studies Center (1976-1987) and Chair of UCLA's Deparment of Ethnomusicology.  Heth was also President (1993-1995) of the Society for Ethnomusicology.  Heth retired from UCLA in 1994 to become Assistant Director for Public Programs at the National Museum of the American Indian.  If you want to learn more about Heth, read Victoria Levine's 2013 interview with Heth in the Society for Ethnomusicology Newsletter.

Celebrating 40 Years of Ethnic Studies at UCLA 1969-2009, includes interview with Charlotte Heth

The Archive holds Heth's fieldwork recordings; these recordings were used in support of her doctoral research.  I should also add that the Heth recordings are some of our most highly repatriated materials. 

In addition to the field recordings, we have several videorecordings that were made during Heth's Sociology of American Indian music (Music 153C) class in 1976 and 1977.  Two of these are now part of the Ethnomusicology Archive collection in California Light and Sound.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on April 12, 1976, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on May 23, 1977, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

“This is absurd,” I overheard a security guard mutter. Her statement was understandable given the amount of people crammed into a Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) gallery to listen to a performance of John Zorn’s “The Gnostic Preludes.” Hundreds of listeners sat on the floor, filling the space between paintings and sculptures as if the patrons of a hipster bar in Silverlake had been evacuated into the gallery and decided to take a seat—more long beards, heavy metal t-shirts, studded belts, and tattoos than I’m accustomed to seeing at a museum. Zorn was there and, cautioning the congregants to respect the artworks around them, seemed delighted. I attended all of the May 2nd John Zorn Marathon organized by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP). Like many critics of Zorn’s oeuvre, I found the ten works performed at LACMA and the later sets at UCLA’s Royce Hall to be difficult, if not impossible, to parse. Such resistance to description, for me, raises questions about the role of the composer’s authorial voice and identity as expressed via musical composition and performance in the postmodern world. To that end, I offer my thoughts regarding the marathon (organized in deference to Zorn’s 60th birth-year), through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of music as mode of territorialization, Postmodern theory, and of course my own artistic and theoretical proclivities. 

First, a consideration of identity as related to a composer’s work, cultural situatedness, and the role of music in the development of the subject via Deleuze and Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that artistry is not a uniquely human activity, but is an outgrowth of practices occuring in the animal kingdom. Human music, like the “music” of other animals, is an activity by which we construct milieus from chaos and thereby perform our identities. As I understand it in the Deleuze/Guattari model, this takes place by first staking out a milieu from surrounding chaos (the milieu of all milieus) by way of performing a recognizable eventing1 which, eventually, signifies a territory. The rhythms and melodies of musical practices, like placards in a physical space, present/event the artist’s works while simultaneously signifying the composer’s identity and territory: “The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark your distance….Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards.”2 Territories are, then, not things, but acts which demarcate spaces of influence by rhythmic performance of difference which are separated from the surrounding milieus or chaos. These aforementioned “placards”, in the case of musical phenomena, are musical performances. Or, in the case of composers, compositions which, in their presentation, signify (or perform) the composer’s musical territory while simultaneously signifying (or performing) the composer’s subjectivity. 

Zorn’s stylistic promiscuity, perhaps counterintuitively,  can also be read through Deleuze and Guattari, as they suggest that a territory must borrow from other milieus: “it bites into them, seizes them bodily. . . It is built from aspects or portions of milieus.”3 A territory, then, transcodes other milieus (musical traditions, in this case) and stakes out a sphere of influence and performance of self in potentially recombinant ways. In these terms, I suggest that Zorn uses his plurality of styles to transcode and de-territorialize/re-territorialize established musical styles, dissolving the binary between high and low culture and the notion of the artist’s voice as a consistent and self-same identity. Zorn’s performance of identity understood this way is recognizable as an eventing of Jean-François Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives”; it gives voice to difference, presents micro-narratives, and is thus may be read as distinctly Postmodern. Zorn shows the boundaries of his territory to be recognizable by gleeful appropriation of genres; his consistent inconsistency.

Zorn’s consistent inconsistency exemplifies the aspect of Postmodern theory concerned with the decentering and disintegration of subjectivity. Musicologist Susan McClary discusses Zorn’s penchant for mid-performance genre switching (e.g., in Naked City) and narrative pastiche (as in works like Spillane) in Conventional Wisdom: “The disintegrated subject so decried by Modernist theorists of Postmodernism (e.g., Baudrillard and Jameson) here flaunts itself without apology. This is hellzapoppin’ nihilism at its best, reveling in the rubble of Western civilization without regrets.”4 She goes on to note, though, that to a listener armed with clues regarding themes in Zorn’s work (film noir, jazz performance modalities, modernist compositional techniques, Radical Jewish Culture, etc.) the works can become intelligible. Keeping in mind McClary’s prompt to look for clues, I’ll move on to a consideration of the actual musical performances from the marathon. Beginning at 10am and running until almost 1am (with breaks, of course), the marathon consisted of almost nine hours of music. With so many performances to consider, I’ll restrict my comments here to those about which I have the most to say in the interest of brevity.

Positioned in front of Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus,” the young and remarkably adept JACK Quartet performed “The Alchemist” (2011). Already a capacity crowd by 11am, this work evinced extended string techniques and Zorn’s serialistic proclivities, punctuated by blocks5 of tonality. The musical works and the listening crowd were already, in the Deleuzian sense, performing difference at LACMA; staking out a new territory, and transcoding the space from a “Holy of Holies”6 of quiet reflection into a social space for musical signification. Zorn sat on the floor at the string quartet’s feet seemingly quite pleased with their performance, though he did quickly offer them notes after the performance (in between yelling at a man standing too close, attempting to overhear, “Hey man, look out! That’s a Rembrandt!”)

The JACK Quartet performs Zorn's "The Alchemist" in front of Rembrandt's "The Raising of Lazarus" still early in the day. Photo by the author.

Later, we moved spatially, temporally, and stylistically to hear one of my favorite pieces of the marathon, “Zeitgehöft” (roughly translatable as “Timestead”) (2013), a string duo performed by members of JACK Quartet. The performance took place in front of Kurt Schwitters’ “Construction for Noble Ladies” (1919) and across from the Paul Klee “Untitled” (1929). Offering clues into the work’s inspiration as well as his own process, Zorn shared an anecdote. Reminded of Schoenberg’s string trio Opus 45, itself written after a near-death experience, Zorn set out to write a string duo representative of his recent experience of undergoing a dental procedure without anesthesia. The piece was also influenced by a collection of German-language poetry of the same name by poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan. The angst manifest by this piece, performed in front of a work by an artist who often represented the machinations of war (Schwitters), influenced by a string trio written by a composer forced to flee Germany after the rise of national socialism and furthermore referencing a near death experience (Schoenberg), and named after the works of a Holocaust survivor (Celan), is far from subtle. The polysemy and compounded signification of all of these references was almost overwhelming in light of the remarkable performance by Christopher Otto (violin) and Kevin McFarland (cello). As Paul Ricoeur suggests, speaking of the strands of meaning present in artworks, the poverty of language, and the primacy of experience: “There is in the work the capacity to make all these aspects ever denser, to intensify them in condensing them. And in speaking of this we can only distribute the polysemy along the different and diverging axes of language. The work alone gathers them together.”7 “Zeitgehöft” was painful, mechanical, textured, crying; it was remarkably powerful. 

Changing tone and modality yet again, the crowd followed Zorn to a gallery featuring, among other modernist masterworks, Jackson Pollock’s “Black and White Number 20” and Mark Rothko’s “White Center” for a series of  improvisations by Zorn (alto saxophone) and Dave Lombardo (drum set). Characteristically bombastic and musical, Zorn’s extended saxophone techniques of altissimo, multiphonics, circular breathing, and vocalization were complemented by Lombardo’s energy and wit. Adept improvisers, the two generously followed one another’s musical queues, acted by turns as leader and accompanist, and created a sensitive and cohesive mutual voice. 

About five hours later and a few miles west, Abraxas, Secret Chiefs 3, and Zorn’s own Bladerunner trio were lined up to perform, respectively: Psychomagia, Masada Book Two, and a series of improvisations at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Both Abraxas and Secret Chiefs 3, longtime musical collaborators with Zorn, performed his music with great technical prowess and aplomb. Bladerunner delivered the skronk, violence, and power expected of his free-improvisational work. But the most intimate performance of the day was Zorn’s solo midnight improvisation on the Skinner organ. Looking rather small on the darkened stage, Zorn drove the organ as if he were test-driving a new car: flipping switches, pushing and pulling stops. Sometimes bombastic, but certainly not virtuosic, The Hermetic Organ was intimate, honest, and raw. 

Zorn improvising "The Hermetic Organ" on Royce Hall's Skinner Organ. Photo by the author.

So, where was Zorn in all of this? I don’t mean literally (he was usually sitting on the floor in front of the performers), I mean, how can we know Zorn’s humanity, musical project, and socio-cultural positioning by the varied pieces played back to back in a purposefully symbolically charged environment? Though I referred to Zorn as a postmodern artist above, the more I think about the music I heard during the marathon, the less the term seems to apply. Though the term  “postmodern” captures Zorn’s voracious borrowing from genres and subversion of high/low binaries,8 it fails to capture the cohesive identity that appears after a prolonged exposure to his. This isn’t a compositional fingerprint the way some composers are sometimes considered (i.e., Bach apotheosized the order of all creation in his counterpoint, Beethoven relayed his eroticism, expansiveness and angst, Strauss was the waltz king, etc.) Rather, Zorn’s identity seems caught up in his attraction to the Other. In fact, this appropriation and representation of Other-ness may in fact perform a sort of meta-identity. Could his re-territorialization of cultural space, his biting off of whatever is relevant to him in the chaos (remember - Deleuzian chaos - the fecund milieu of all milieus) of the postmodern world be an act of artistic re-integration? As McClary notes regarding the clues available to a listener situated in the postmodern world, these pieces can make “a kind of sense well established within late twentieth-century culture.”9 The referents we need to follow Zorn through his maze of influences are littering the pop landscape for all to see. Perhaps by his work he is creating recombinant postmodern experiences for himself and his listeners; super-gluing dis-integrated cultural phenomena back together in strange but recognizable configurations. This is the artistic identity that emerges after the CAP marathon: not a disintegrated subject lacking personal identity, but a deeply informed maven of cultures engaged in reconfiguring them for his audience so they can see them—and themselves—from new and surprising angles. The security guard was right, it is sometimes absurd. But rather than plodding through what could be a nihilistic experience of the postmodern world, Zorn’s milieu, and the new meanings his work can evince in his territory of influence, reimagine and reconfigure this world for the better. 

• 1. Eventing here refers to the notion that works are ontologically differentiated from objects in that they are temporal and culturally coded human constructs. Musical works in particular are necessarily temporally situated as they are experienced not instantaneously, but in their unfolding by listening subjects engaged in interpretation; constructing their own hermeneutic circles of understanding.
• 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 319-320.
• 3. Ibid., 314.
• 4. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 146.
• 5. I use the term “blocks” here in reference to John Brackett’s investigation of the poetics of Zorn’s compositional process wherein it is noted that he often works in a process similar to filmic montage. He sometimes “achieves coherence in his compositions by adapting, modifying, and incorporating music by other composers into his own works…”. John Bracket, John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression (Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 2008), xiv. Furthermore, Brackett suggests: “…Zorn’s preferred method of composing with ‘block structures’ exerts a strong influence on the type of unity that is operative for a particular piece. One could say, then, that the ‘block structures’ function as a way of presenting smaller musical ideas that—when taken together—produce the coherent whole” (Ibid., 172n10.)
• 6. I refer here to the Hebrew concept of the “Holy of Holies”, that inner-most part of the Tabernacle, and later, the Temple. In this segregated space a High Priest could, once per year, be in the presence of God. There is a double significance here in relationship not only to Zorn’s professed Radical Jewish Culture “biting off” and transcoding the idea of museum space as a sort of holy resting place of artworks, themselves representative of the idea of bourgeois nineteenth-century art-religion.
• 7. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 172.
• 8. For instance, see: Ellie M. Hisami, “Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn”, in Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton, 329-346 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), as well as John Brackett, John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), 173n22: “McClary problematizes the view of Zorn as the quintessential postmodern composer…As McClary points out…belief in the possibility of the whole self flies in the face of certain strains of postmodernist thought (particularly some poststructuralist varieties).”
• 9. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 146.

Editor's Note: In this short piece, composerNathan Currier responds to an article by Mark Perlman that appeared in a prior issue of the Ecomusicology Newsletter and previews a longer article of his own, "Classical Music in the Anthropocene," which appeared in a later issue of that publication and can be read here.

“In some cases our work might have direct relevance to environmental problems,” Marc Perlman noted in “Ecology and Ethno/Musicology: The Metaphorical, the Representational, and the Literal” in the Ecomusicology Newsletter 1, no. 2 (October 2012). “In other cases the relevance could be very indirect, or indeed conjectural; but I suspect that in most cases our ultimate concerns are environmentalist ones.” In my own case, it might be because of its direct relevance that my perspective is quite distinct from this literature: I have spent much time in recent years outside of music dealing with fine points of climate science and policy. Climate change is central to the fate of the biosphere, as well as to the economic, political, cultural and moral basis of society. Yet traditional environmentalism (i.e. the social movement emerging from the 1960s) has thus far found it difficult to adequately come to terms with this epic environmental problem. Climate science is itself a discipline full of internal upheaval, controversy, and complexities of communication. In “Music in the Anthropocene” (forthcoming in this Newsletter) I consider climate science within Earth System Science (ESS), the ESS relationship with Gaia theory, and these in light of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” concept of the split between science and the humanities.

Perlman also noted, “Just as ecologists argue that biodiversity increases the robustness of an ecosystem, we have argued that musical diversity will strengthen human culture, rendering it less vulnerable to future threats.” I certainly agree. And just as in climate policy, where it is clear that the Western developed powers will need to lead the way and carry the economic burdens of mitigation, so if we wish to see musical diversity survive, we in the West need to undergo a massive and rapid internal transformation. Western culture’s conception of its own history, therefore, is likely to be vital to the survival of much that surrounds it. Focusing on Western culture, my paper is devoted to issues that could be constructive in working towards a less negative outcome for planetary diversity (biological and cultural). I consider the period when both ecology and musicology were beginning, and when the so-called “common practice period” was ending. I examine the intersections of these, connecting Mahler’s music and Haeckel’s science, in order to explore how these fields might be drawn together around a cohesive philosophical position. 

Ecomusicology fuses two well-defined fields: environmentalism and ethno/musicology. I advocate for a further fusion more deeply invested in science as “ecology + musicology.” I suspect that, when we get serious about trying to save ourselves from the extraordinary risks ahead, the underlying problems within traditional environmentalism in dealing with climate will become readily apparent, and a large-scale shift will take place. By way of example, I would briefly note some of the following problems: 1) a refusal to recognize that GHG emissions reductions alone are increasingly unlikely to stabilize global mean surface temperature at levels that can dependably preserve the world we are familiar with; 2) the desire to eliminate all aerosol pollution negative forcings as quickly as possible; 3) the desire to decommission nuclear power plants right away; 4) an exaggerated faith, with insufficient quantitative analysis, in the capacity of an intermittent “renewable” energy source like wind power (large-scale harvesting of wind would alter wind patterns); 5) a lack of acknowledgment that near-term radiative forcing declines from non-CO2 components of the climate system should be separated out and done right away to improve the probability of avoiding near-term tipping points; and 6) an out of hand opposition to all geoengineering. 

Such attitudes grow from basic precepts of traditional environmentalism that have informed much ecocritical thinking, including the field of ecomusicology, and the short list of examples above already constitutes a powerful impediment to ameliorating the climate crisis. To highlight the different thinking in “Music in the Anthropocene,” I end by looking at one of these problems, likely to be among the greatest controversies of the century: geoengineering. For Mahler and Haeckel, Goethe’s Faust was a work that was particularly formative; I interpret its ending as a direct adumbration of geoengineering. Intriguingly, this analysis might provide a good vehicle for a more nuanced discussion of human agency within the biosphere than is now prevalent in geoengineering discourse. All the while, I seek to highlight Faust’s unique closeness to the evolution of the Western European tradition of classical music, suggestive of a role that this art might yet play.

"I, Ethnographer (Part 1): A Reflection on Being (in) the Field," was published in Apirl, 2015.

One afternoon in Kingston, Jamaica, during my first fieldwork experience, Bongo Shephan Fraser (my guide, the cover photo) and I stopped at an ital restaurant owned by Priest Dermot Fagan. This was my opportunity to meet the priest, explain my research topic, and arrange a time to interview him at his school in the Blue Mountains. As we sat outside of the restaurant with a few of Fagan’s bredren, I explained that I was a reggae musician, and I wanted to understand how Rastafarians feel when white people perform this music that came out of the black liberation struggle. Shephan began to respond, and his voice suddenly shifted into an impassioned tone as he insisted that Rastafari condemns racism. This caught me off guard, and I wondered if I had unintentionally implied that their ideology was racist, so I quickly apologized for any miscommunication and attempted to explain the context of my research in clearer terms. At this point, everyone started to laugh, and one of them walked over to me to reassure me that I had not upset anyone, but this was just the way the Rastafari reason with each other: “Rasta is a people of fire, so we speak with fire.”

I often witnessed people speaking in this register, and I am still not sure if I should characterize the tones of voice as anger, excitement, or something else altogether. The fact that the concurrent topics of discussion were religious or political in nature may indicate that an aggressive form of word-sound power (according to Rastafari, this is the energy conveyed through speech acts, similar to the nommo concept of Dogon tradition) is more likely to be employed in contexts of reasoning when central tenets of the faith are called into question. I wonder how many times I have mistaken heightened tones of speech, facial expressions, and hand motions for anger or personal attacks, rather than an excited participation in a powerful exchange of ideas. Near the end of my visit, Shephan told me that some people thought I looked “lost” when I first visited the tabernacle but more comfortable on my last visit. I gave him a very simple explanation for this: I could barely understand what was being said by the people around me with their thick accents and patois, but I started to be able to follow along after a few days. In addition to the common problems in understanding different English dialects and accents, the cultural influences on tone and body language present serious challenges for any analysis of discourse.

Timi Tanzania is a Philadelphia reggae musician and art teacher. His enthusiasm for his Rastafari faith extends well beyond his musical endeavors; as shown here, Timi enjoys reading about his African roots and the history of the Rastafari movement.

The other side of this issue involves how I, as an ethnographer, am being understood – the vibe I am giving through my questions. Regardless of whether my accent or choice of words is decipherable in any given setting, the content of my questions can evoke or provoke a wide range of feelings, thoughtful responses, lively discussion, or confusion, all of which may be influenced by my relationship to the group and how I have framed my line of questioning. Despite the short time frame of my research in Jamaica, I was fortunate to have Shephan introducing me to people as a friend, saving me the trouble of earning their trust. In some cases, I had to demonstrate deeper knowledge of Rastafari, usually a teaching of Garvey or Selassie, in order to be taken seriously. I learned the hard way, however, that the possibility of being misunderstood is an inevitable part of the ethnographic process and, perhaps, a very valuable one. My interview with the late High Priest George Ions continues to teach me this lesson.

I had met the priest and some other elders outside of his home just before the Sabbath service one week earlier, and I had taken that opportunity to explain that I was researching Rastafarian perspectives on the participation of white people in reggae. The elders responded to my summary by stressing three points: reggae is only a small part of Rastafari culture; Rastafari is for everyone, regardless of color, race, or creed; and they were among those who taught Bob Marley about the Rasta faith. Sensing that the elders were uninterested in discussing the topic any further, I shared some of my own experiences with what seemed to be resentment from black Rastafarians and reggae fans in the Philadelphia area. I said that I could understand where this might come from: Marcus Garvey wrote about the importance of black people developing their own industries independent of white influence or support, yet white people who had never gone through the black liberation struggle in Jamaica were capitalizing on this cultural tradition that grew out of the Rastafari movement. Some nods and further discussion from the elders indicated that they were glad to hear of my familiarity with Garvey’s teachings and the historical context of reggae music. The service began shortly after this discussion, and I did not record any interviews that day, as I had wanted to observe and be mentally and spiritually present for the experience.

When we returned to his home on the following Sabbath, George was lying down on his couch, resting a recently broken foot. He did not seem particularly eager to be interviewed, so after he and Shephan discussed some administrative concerns, I set up my camera and promised to be brief. This was, by far, the most awkward conversation I had during my entire trip to Jamaica. Most of the priest’s answers were brief, and there were times when I may have been trying too hard to get him to elaborate on his thoughts, or I may have been asking questions that he had no interest in discussing. Eventually, the priest seemed to be getting tired of this line of reasoning.

Bean: There are songs that come to mind about slavery. Bob Marley sang about it, Gregory Isaacs sang about it. Would you be skeptical at all if I started singing those songs right now, and say maybe that’s not an honest thing, that I can’t really feel that because I didn’t go through that myself?

George: Well, really, that question is very tedious for I, yes, to tell you if you could go through it or not. You within yourself would have to know if you can go through it. For many can go through it, as plenty can go through. No, I wouldn’t have it, for as I told you, “A remnant from every nation [must praise His Majesty].” So where there the words is, one can go through the works, for the words are free to each and every man.

With only one week of formal experience in ethnographic research, I felt discouraged and unsure of myself at this point. I was already having difficulty finding people to interview; talking to a stranger about faith is not something many people are comfortable with, especially not when they have to sign a three-page consent form to do so. Adding to this, one of the most respected Rastafari elders thought of my interview questions as “tedious.”

Bauman and Briggs note the power dynamics at work in the dialogic processes of analyzing performances and texts. “To be sure,” they write, “the exercise of such power need not be entirely one-sided; our interlocutors may attempt to control how their discourse will be entextualized and recontextualized. These processes have significant implications for the methods, goals, and not least, ethics, of our profession” (Bauman and Briggs 1990:78). More recently, in his proposal for “an anthropology of interviewing,” Briggs suggests ways for ethnographers to more thoughtfully and ethically approach our research. One of his suggestions is helpful for the type of situation detailed above: “Attend to ways in which interviewees and people who refuse to participate attempt to subvert the communicable cartographies and pragmatic constraints that researchers use in attempting to structure interviews” (Briggs 2007:566).

Priest George’s response was one of several forms of subversion performed in response to my “cartography” - that is, my positioning of various values, symbols, and ideas, including my self-positioning as musician, student, white, American, and Other. Through a series of succinct speech acts, he redistributed the power within our reasoning: my construction of a perceived authenticity contingent upon race and heritage was delegitimized, not because George denied the existence of such a perspective within the movement, but because his priority was to proclaim the importance of praising Selassie. In retrospect, I think of his short answers and challenges, such as “Why not?” and “That question is very tedious,” as the beginning of my own “fieldwork enlightenment,” to borrow a phrase from Barre Toelken. Toelken challenges all ethnographers to reconsider the way we navigate our work: “We already have plenty of ‘things’ to study; what we lack is a concerted effort to understand fieldwork itself as an interhuman dynamic event with its own meanings and contextual peculiarities” (1995:35).

Bongo Shephan Fraser, the author's guide and key consultant among the Rastafari community in Jamaica. His impassioned style of speaking and gesticulating inspired the author to think more critically about the "vibe" of Rastafari speech and musical expression.

References

Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59-88.    

Briggs, Charles L. 2007. “Anthropology, Interviewing, and Communicability in Contemporary Society.” Current Anthropology 48:551-580.

Toelken, Barre. 1995. "Fieldwork Enlightenment." Parabola 20:28-35.

Music in Kenyan Christianity: Logooli Religious Song. By Jean Ngoya Kidula. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. [xv 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-00668-4, Paperback: 30.00, Cloth: 85:00, E-Book: 24.99].

Reviewed by Nicholas Ssempijja / Makerere University

“Musical features for Christian religious song share stylistic descriptions with indigenous repertoire……including music as self-expression both for artistic and social religious purposes” (Kidula 2013:181).

Jean Ngoya Kidula’s Music in Kenyan Christianity, Logooli Religious Song is another publication in the Ethnomusicology Multimedia series that carries on the discourse on the interplay between Christianity and Ethnomusicology with special focus on religious musical identity (Barz 2000, 2003, 2006). Her work has a unique approach to religious syncretism engaging such themes as gender in religious musical performance, musical hybridities, the media and agency in religious performance and identity creation.

 Kidula’s research is based in Kenya among the Avalogooli who occupy the northern shores of Lake Victoria. It entails an extensive, systematic, historical documentation of the role of religious music (Quakers and Pentecostals) in Christianizing (missionization) the Kenyan people particularly the Avalogooli. Similar to Gregory Barz’s study of Kwaya music in Tanzania (2003), this study concentrates on Euro-American Christian music introduced during the colonial period and its impact on the identity of the Avalogooli in Kenya.

The study’s empirical data was gathered through fieldwork conducted for thirty years. Kidula utilizes varied means to arrive at this information including but not limited to interviews, observation, participant observation, documentary information, magazines, journals and early missionary/colonial documents, letters, reports and memoirs. Generally, all eight chapters of Kidula’s study specifically elucidate on music’s ubiquity in religious identity construction and affirmation.

In the opening two chapters, Kidula takes us through the realms of Logooli social-political set up, including culture, aesthetics, taboos, rites of passage and religious beliefs as well as the early attempts at Christianizing the Avalogooli. She relentlessly explores the history of Logooli indigenous musical heritage, aesthetics of performance, ideologies connecting music to culture and religion. Kidula assuredly identifies herself as a mulogooli, in essence distinguishing herself as a native researcher who later turns out as a ‘halfie’ (Ssempijja 2012a).  This assures the reader of her richer insider perspectives during the course of researching and writing this book. In an extensive historical overview of the Avalogooli (chapter two), Kidula explains circumstances under which the demarcation (Partition) of Logooli land by British colonists was done. She wraps up the chapter by affirming that music is a persistent marker of continuity, change and transformation amongst Avalogooli. This Kidula does by demonstrating the role played by music in the consolidation of an Avalogooli religious-cultural identity.

Chapter three broadly considers the encounter between the Avalogooli and the Euro-American religious and music cultures. It revisits the colonial encounter with Christianity and circumstances under which the Avalogooli embraced Christianity packaged with new musical practices. Using early documentation, missionary/colonial reports about the Quaker and Pentecostals, Kidula revisits the doctrines, philosophy, practices and musical inclinations of both the Quakers and Pentecostals, hand-in-hand with the consequences that emanated from the use of the new Christianity and its music. The chapter lays a case for the ensuing discussions concerning religious syncretism and agency. It considers the initial strategies laid by the missions to proselytize the Avalogooli highlighting the variables and constants between the Avalogooli and the new religious cum musical systems. It answers questions concerning how the Avalogooli embraced Christianity, and enumerates circumstances under which Quakers were able to score highly in the areas of mass conversions and doctrinal conviction. Generally, the section concludes with the missionary transformation of Logooli identity religiously, musically and culturally. 

The next chapter (chapter four), “consolidation” is more structurally and theoretically grounded since it is here that the writer expounds on the conceptual base for the entire study. The chapter is an expedition into the Avalogooli musical systems and challenges that prevailed in accommodating the foreign religion with its music. Taking an example of the challenge of introducing hymns to the Logooli, the section revisits how new musical genres such as choruses and refrains, gospel music, and choir music among others, were introduced and fully embraced by the Avalogooli people. In this chapter’s recapitulation, Kidula notes that, “Avalogooli composed songs in these styles not only as new ways of sounding music and religion but also as an elaboration of similar indigenous forms and contexts” (94).

Chapter five “accommodation” suggests/provides alternative means/avenues of analyzing African musical performance practices. It re-affirms Kidula’s special approach to critically analyzing African music particularly considering or connecting the sonic elements to the traditional ethnomusicologically considered parameters such as contexts of performance, composers, lyrics, and melodic sources among others. In justifying this in-depth analysis, Kidula notes that, “the texts and musical structures reveal cultural, lyrical, and melodic sources, as well as the missionaries’ musical and theological preferences” (97). She thus delves into agency from a linguistic perspective, highlighting its recurrent problems that have also been envisaged elsewhere in the missionization of Africa. Here Kidula offers a very interesting comparison in the song dueling practices considering both sonic elements (such as rhythm, tempo and meter) as well as other extended performance practices (usually envisaged in many African musical contexts) including the place of dance. She labors to elucidate on the interconnectedness of these elements towards the final realization of the performance that is deeply embroiled with identity markers. Kidula takes a comparative analysis between the Avalogooli’s use and significance of the drum and what she terms as the “Ugandan Catholic Indigenous style” a kind of simplistic generalization of Ugandan Catholicism (Catholic music) viewing it from the precincts of the drum and not inculturation (see Ssempijja 2012b). The section also takes a deep inclusion of acculturation, and the resultant hybridities emanating from this musical syncretism which together contribute to the broader project of Avalogooli identity affirmation and agency.  While critically analyzing the song translations from English to Luyia, Kidula notes the multiple dimensions of new roles that the translated songs acquired hand-in-hand with their resultant consequences.

Chapter five is part of the discourse on syncretism forming an important conceptual base for the discussion on Avalogooli religious identity with its recurrent transformations. Kidula links the colonial encounter to the contemporary performance practices witnessed in Logooli Christian music. In her implied postcolonial criticism and analysis, Kidula presents performances and religious practices that articulate mimicry and mockery both religiously and also musically. These are highlighted when she draws on numerous translated texts whose meanings from English to Lulogooli/Luyia are inaccurate. Such practices involving mimicry and mockery were common in many other African regions affecting even performance practices including the playing of some European introduced musical instruments.

Chapter six is a continuation of the debate on syncretism. In emphasizing her approach to syncretism, Kidula cites Fashole and points out that “Africans were Europeanized, not Christianized, and that Christianity was accommodated and Africanized (Fashole-Luke 1978). To substantiate this claim, Kidula cites a number of biblical examples. At some point Kidula delves into ways in which the Avalogooli are localizing these biblical stories. An example is on page 162, where she narrates the story of Miriam the sister of Moses, particularly how she led other women to celebrate in song the crossing of the Red Sea. This is one of the biblical stories that Kidula cites as having received a particular syncretism. Elsewhere in this chapter, her anthropological approach to the study of religion is evident. Alternatively, this section could also be considered as “localization of the Euro-American-introduced religious practices”— particularly Christianity. Since localization has been conceptually used as a means of constructing, affirming, reinvigorating and renewing identities, part of this section of Kidula’s work points to ways localization works in the Logooli religious identity affirmation.

The final chapter (seven) is another space devoted to analyzing examples of contemporary religious songs that exemplify this religio-musical syncretism. Kidula analyzes these selected songs while identifying/highlighting the various local Logooli musical idioms and how they are musically manipulated in this religious syncretism. The section also revisits the place of religious songs in contemporary education and media. Notable and commendable also is the fact that the book utilizes accompanying audio and video examples which are accessible through a URL that has been provided in the preface. The examples are rather varied and rightly engage a better reading experience.

Her epilogue and postlude (chapter eight) generally sum up the major thesis of the study. Here Kidula notes that, “the music of the Logooli Christians is a local and indigenous expression, a national and mediated product, and an international and global phenomenon” (229). As a recap, she also highlights some of the most memorable moments during her research and convincingly draws contrasts between the conceptualization of African and western (Euro-American) performance practices. Among these notable experiences is when she recorded songs with the village women who worked with her mother.

 Kidula’s clear and fluid writing style has already earned her international acclaim since this publication is already a 2014 Society for Ethnomusicology Nketia Book Prize winner. Hence the study benefits not only scholars in ethnomusicology but also in music composition and analysis, religion particularly Christianity/missionization, social anthropology, history, cultural studies, gender and general East African studies particularly those that cover Kenya geographically. It is also a landmark contribution to studies in the wider East African region.

This study will also be an important resource for courses in the study of anthropology and religion particularly Christianity in Africa, as well as a historical documentation of a marginalized culture of the Avalogooli. However, with this study’s over emphasis on Kenya, one needs other resources in order to understand religious musical practices in the wider East African region. Nonetheless, Kidula’s work is a significant contribution to Ethnomusicology and the anthropological study of religion (Christianity).

References:

Barz, Gregory. 2000. “Politics of Remembering: Performing History (ies) in Youth Kwaya Competitions in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.” In Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in East Africa, edited by Gregory Barz and Frank Gunderson, 379-405. Dares Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota.

______. 2003.  Performing Religion. Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania. Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions.

______. 2006. “‘We are From Different Ethnic Groups, but We Live Here as One Family’: The Musical Performance of Community in a Tanzanian Kwaya.” In Chorus and Community, edited by Karen Ahlquist, 19-44. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Fashole Luke, Edward W. 1978. Christianity in Independent Africa. Chicago. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ssempijja, Nicholas. 2012a. “The ‘Native’, the ‘Halfie’, and Autoethnography: Ethics and Researcher Identity in Fieldwork”. In Nordisk musikkpedagogisk forskning. Årbok  14 (Nordic Research in Music Education. Yearbook 14: 217–235.

_______.  2012b. Glocalizing Catholicism Through Musical Performance: Kampala Archdiocesan Post-Primary Schools Music Festivals. Dissertation for the degree of Philosophiae doctor, University of Bergen, Norway.

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions.

This month our post is by Benjamin Court. Benjamin Court is a PhD Candidate in Musicology at UCLA with a specialization in Experimental Critical Theory. His dissertation "Musical Amateurism, 1968-1984: Knowing Incompetence" defines amateurism from an epistemological perspective by investigating historical perceptions of the knowledge required to perform competence and incompetence. 

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“Experimenting with sound satisfies one of the most fundamental drives in a young person – namely curiosity or the desire to explore. It also satisfies the desire to actively participate in a corporate activity, rather than passively absorb what may be felt too much of an abstraction. The most beautiful piece of music or the most interesting piece of information can easily fail to move a child. What he discovers for himself as a spontaneous by-product of a practical activity more often fires his imagination.” - Brian Dennis, Experimental Music in Schools (1970)

            Established by Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton, and most famously the composer Cornelius Cardew in 1969, the Scratch Orchestra was founded upon a principle of inclusion, encouraging any willing participant to join, regardless of their previous musical training. In “A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution,” Cardew offered a definition: “A Scratch orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).” The result was an ensemble that collected artists of varying musical abilities with the intention of breaking down the borders between “musicians” and “non-musicians.” By attempting to rearrange the usual hierarchies of skill involved in music-making, Cardew imagined that the Scratch Orchestra would emulate a classless society. Many members of the Scratch Orchestra (including Cardew) would become full-fledged communists by the ensemble's dissolution in 1972, but a post-'68 ethos of anti-bourgeois egalitarianism was present even during the early months of the Scratch Orchestra.

            Having grown directly out of Cardew's “Experimental Music” class at Morley College, the Scratch Orchestra reflected Cardew's belief that musical composition and performance primarily served an educational role. As a composition teacher at Morley, as well as the Royal Academy of Music and the short-lived Antiuniversity of London, Cardew developed a teaching philosophy that suggested experimental musical-making, especially score-based improvisation, could lead to the collective development of new “musical languages,” and ultimately to new ways of life. The spontaneous creation of music required no previous experience, but was nonetheless didactic. Thus, the amateur and the virtuoso were on equal footing, according to Cardew's philosophy.

*       *       *

            As an educator, I found myself both inspired by and skeptical of Cardew's vision as I researched this history. On the one hand, the idea of a radically equal classroom was invigorating, especially one in which preconceived notions of skill no longer stood in the way of music-making. But on the other hand I questioned how the guidelines established by Cardew (himself a classically trained musician who studied at the Royal Academy of Music) would truly erase socially determined constructs of taste and talent to create a better musical life. So I decided to test these ideas.

            My first experience testing out the Scratch Orchestra was in spring 2014, with the seminar “Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde.” This class offered an excellent mix of students with a fairly wide background of musical abilities. Among the 19 students in the class, some were classically trained from a young age, some were self-taught, some had played in school but since abandoned their instrument, and some had never played an instrument. For our performance, I selected page 95 of Cardew's Treatise (1963-67) – an entirely indeterminate graphic score with no instructions for performance. Though Cardew offered no specific directions for this score, in the accompanying “Treatise Handbook” he wrote that the ideal performer of the piece would be a “musical innocent,” i.e. someone who has “escaped a musical education,” but nonetheless become a musician. Cardew saw traditional music education as limiting, and attempted to write music that can be interpreted by anyone, regardless of their background.

For our collective interpretation of page 95 of Treatise, we began by breaking the class into three sections: winds, strings, and percussion (with myself as the conductor, a role at which I am truly an amateur). We opted to read left-to-right, with the three sections oriented around the thick center line. The center line represented the percussion, anything below the line was for strings, and anything above the line was for wind instruments. The height of each line above or below the thick center line represented pitch, while blank space indicated a rest. Anytime there was a vertical line the musicians in that section would make a single, loud interjection. We decided to assign the black dots in the second half (in the wind section) to extended techniques, such as blowing through the instrument without making a pitched sound, and the small boxes to wordless singing.

            Working through a single page of this score, and coordinating this diverse group of musicians required nearly the entirety of the three-hour seminar. But by the end, we had a successful performance – we were able to see an entire performance through, from beginning to end, according to the interpretation that we established. However, the student reaction was mixed, rendering the notion of a “successful performance” uncertain. While most of the students agreed that participating in a Scratch Orchestra enhanced their appreciation for the sounds of experimental music, they were not entirely convinced of the related social-political implications. One student, who had no previous musical training, wrote, “Because there is no particularly correct sound, I was able to participate without feeling left out from music-making.” For her, the Scratch Orchestra succeeded in its basic participatory aims. But one of my more experienced musicians, who was tasked with playing the piano, felt that her training added pressure to help lead her section through more difficult portions of the score. This pressure actually reinforced ability-based power dynamics within the ensemble, rather than erasing them. Moreover, she commented, “Although the piece was intended to be atonal, I could not get myself to abandon the music theory techniques that have been engrained in my head for as long as I could remember.” Curiously, though Cardew never specified the sounds that should result from an interpretation of Treatise, my student assumed (perhaps based upon assigned recordings of Treatise) that the piece ought to sound “atonal” or dissonant. Though the Scratch Orchestra was ostensibly open to any willing participant regardless of their musical training, a “correct” performance of this score nevertheless seemed to demand a more general, abstract knowledge of the avant-garde. Or, as one of my students wrote, “Listening to this music and enjoying it is a taste that must be acquired.”

The result was four radically different interpretations and performances. The first group split the three triangles into different movements, with the shape of the triangle determining the dynamics and the number of lines inside each triangle indicating the number of beats to perform. The second group assigned a different concept to each triangle: Perception, Freedom, and Reality. Each triangle/concept was performed by a different set of instruments, each containing its own internal logic, thus creating three overlapping interpretations. The third group read the score from top to bottom, interpreting dynamics and tempi in the distance between points on the triangles, and with sides of the triangles assigned to different group members. The fourth group divided two of the triangles into different instrumental groups, with their own structures of dynamics and tempi, then converged the instruments into a group performance of the final triangle.

By allowing the students to generate their own interpretations, rather than work through one collective interpretation, we were able to witness the breadth of possibilities in indeterminate scores and the potential for complex, systematic interpretations from students that otherwise had no experience performing music. This version of the experiment was perhaps a greater “success” in its ability to create a space for equal participation among the musicians. The untrained students felt that the open-ended score allowed for spontaneous, creative composition that they otherwise would not have generated. The more experienced musicians reported that despite their initial hesitancy to “unlearn” their musical skills, they felt a sense of emancipation from traditional notation. Yet, the class was still divided about the social-political potentials of the music. In our discussion after the performances, the students expressed an appreciation for the inclusiveness of performing this music, but expressed a similar ambivalence about the aesthetics as the students from “Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde.” Many of the students reported that they simply did not enjoy the sounds being produced, even by their own group. Rather than breaking down our notions of “good” and “bad” musical sound, some students felt frustrated that they were essentially forced (by the score, and by their own limitations) into producing unpleasant sounds. Thus, if Cardew imagined such music to be anti-elitist, then why was it so difficult for some students to connect with it?

Though the efficacy of the goals that the Scratch Orchestra established nearly fifty years ago are still to be determined, as a pedagogical exercise there is undoubtedly merit to the student-centered performance of this music. Instead of a classroom founded upon a one-way flow of information, from teacher to pupil, experiments with participatory music-making encourage students to question, explore, and create their own methods of learning. Whether or not the Scratch Orchestra can break down musical hierarchies or enact the musical equivalent of a classless society, there is nonetheless a pedagogic utility to this type of sonic experimentation. For most students, they are participating in a musical experience that is entirely new. Students are encouraged to consider what it means to translate visual signs into sound, and to do so with no regard for traditionally constructed ideals of beauty. When we attempt to place aside our usual notions of taste and talent (even momentarily), we have the opportunity to produce and listen to musical sound with one layer of social signification removed. And if we are ultimately unable to hear past our own tastes and talents, then we have at least produced sounds for thought-provoking discussion.

*      *      *

In the major narratives of jazz history, the 1970s seem to hold little of value.

This is hardly an original observation. In a seminal article from 1991, Scott DeVeaux showed how critics and historians mistakenly came to present the first several decades of jazz as a “coherent whole,” which in the 70s saw a splintering-off into contentiously divided camps: stuffy neo-classicists, incomprehensible avant-gardists, and “sellout” fusion artists, of whom a young Wynton Marsalis complained “imitated people that were supposed to be imitating them.”

In preserving, more-or-less, this “different camps” approach, contemporary textbooks—like Mark Gridley’s Concise Guide to Jazz that I am assigned to give my classes at City College of New York—continue to give a similar narrative.[1] And while they sometimes note the continued existence of these niches, they rarely give much of a sense of the importance of 1970s jazz to today’s broader musical landscape. Ken Burns’s Jazz gave even less of a sense that the 70s made much of an impact. The documentary’s last episode highlights Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington’s deaths and Lester Young’s return from Europe as the only notable events of the decade.

Yet, a quick look at the contemporary scene reveals multiple the echoes of 1970s jazz. Brad Mehldau—whose acoustic Art of the Trio albums were a highlight of the late 90s and early 00s—has recently turned towards a more electro/fusion sensibility in his collaboration with drummer Mark Guiliana, Mehliana. Their sound evokes the layered synthesizers of early Bob James and the loose rock energy of The Tony Williams Lifetime album Emergency. As we saw in last month’s post by Tamar Sella, Herbie Hancock’s “Butterfly” has become a centerpiece in the repertoire of artists like Robert Glasper and Gretchen Parlato.

It is Glasper’s work more than anything that has led me to rethink the importance of the 70s, and I’ve had the good fortune of doing so while teaching Introduction to Jazz at City College. While thinking through the narratives that I can use to convey the importance of this era to my students, what has struck me is not its divisiveness, but instead, a coherence of thought and practice among a wide range of artists.

In this post, I focus on two developments—out of many possibilities—taking place within the jazz idiom in the 1970s: (1) an “explosion of timbres,” and (2) an increasingly explicit orientation towards self-organization and urban activism among musicians. The argument that I trace through these two developments is threefold: first, although a broadening timbral spectrum and an orientation towards self-organization and activism occurred throughout many genres, jazz artists were central to their proliferation in the 1970s; second, timbre and activist orientations towards music both render the music affectively powerful through their political significance; third, it is largely through these developments that we can understand the legacy of 1970s jazz on the broader contemporary landscape.

Timbre

Turn down whatever you might be listening to and try to conjure up a mental aural-image of a jazz group. Chances are that the image that comes to mind involves one of a dozen or so instruments that have dominated jazz practice over the decades: bass, piano, trumpet, saxophone, maybe clarinet, if you’re thinking of early jazz.

Now listen carefully to the opening moments of Bob James’s “Nautilus”:

In the opening seconds, the sustained notes of the Rhodes and soft string background are joined by the sounds of rattles, a chime, then a second layer of synthesizer, then drums, then electric bass and guitar, ambient high pitched percussion, and synthesizer splashes. This sound illustrates what I call the “explosion of timbres” that characterizes much 70s jazz. James (an avant-garde musician in the 60s who became a smooth jazz artist) and many other jazz musicians of his generation clearly distinguished themselves from their predecessors (and subsequent generations) through their eagerness to think beyond the timbral constraints of the standard acoustic group. This is not to say that acoustic instruments weren’t similarly involved in this increasing timbral richness. Take, for example, Stanley Cowell’s use of mbira on The Heath Brothers’ “Smilin’ Billy Suite Part II”:

Jazz musicians had long pioneered new timbral possibilities in music. In 1956, Sun Ra incorporated the electric Wurlitzer (which had come out in 1954) into his Super-Sonic Jazz, an early example out of many of his evocations of space travel. In 1965, James used tape music from avant-garde composers Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley on his album Explosions. In the 1970s, this experimentation increased exponentially. In addition to the new guitar sounds—like those used by John McLaughlin—and new keyboard sounds—like those used by Herbie Hancock—Afro-centrism and pan-Africanism brought an increased use of African instruments, from The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s use of the Mande balafon to Bill Summers’ famous imitation of the BaBenzélé Pygmy hindewhu voice–whistle style on Hancock’s iconic Head Hunters version of “Watermelon Man.”

The political significance of African instruments in this era is clear: it expressed valuation of African culture and African roots that had been denied to previous generations as well as a pan-African sonic solidarity, explicitly linked to a political solidarity in albums like Max Roach’s Freedom Now!.[2] Although the use of electronic instruments may not outwardly seem political, Mark Dery argues in his seminal article “Black to the Future” that Black science fiction counterposes the redemptive possibilities of technology against its everyday experience as a tool for suppression used against Black populations. This point is well illustrated in the opening of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place.“The music is different here…” Sun Ra states, “not like planet earth. Planet earth sound of guns, anger, frustration… We set up a colony for Black people here. See what they could do on a planet all their own, without any White people here.” Redemptive technology—the ability to start a new colony in outer space, Sun Ra’s music—is here pitted against the sound of guns that pervades the planet Earth:

In today’s landscape, the timbral richness of 70s jazz can also be considered political in that it provides a counter-narrative to a classicized idea of “timelessness” in jazz music. Insofar as the music is thought to transcend the historical moment in which it is made, it is also rendered apolitical; if a piano trio presents jazz as an art form to be appreciated for its autonomous aesthetic beauty, a proliferation of timbral indices as heard in 1970s jazz can have the opposite effect: it enmeshes the music in a sonic world full of historical and political relations—Afro-futurist, Afro-centrist, pan-Africanist, or otherwise.

Many of my students, whether they realize it or not, are familiar with the timbral palette of 70s jazz. This is because 70s jazz largely constitutes the instrumental basis for the hip-hop that came a generation later, as Aja Burrell Wood explored recently on this blog. Hip-hop producers from Rick Rubin to Q-Tip to J Dilla and scores of others have found inspiration in the sound of 70s jazz records. Grandmaster Flash transformed Bob James’s record “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” into “rocking the bells,” a centerpiece of early DJing displays. James’s “Nautilus” became one of the most sampled songs of all time.[3] Cowell’s mbira on “Smilin’ Billy Suite Part II” became the basis for Nas’s “One Love.” The list goes on and on.

For many of today’s jazz musicians, hip-hop provides a bridge from jazz of the 1970s to today and for this generation, broad timbral palettes are returning as a central feature of the music. This is illustrated in Robert Glasper’s collaboration with rapper and producer Pete Rock in a series of tribute concerts to Roy Ayers. Pete Rock had famously sampled Ayers’s “Searching” in his 1994 song of the same name. The 2011 rendition with Glasper and his Experiment band showcases Casey Benjamin’s digitally altered voice along with Glasper on piano and Fender Rhodes and Pete Rock providing extra sound effects, as well as Stefon Harris’s vibes, Chris Dave’s drums and Derrick Hodge’s bass. As in the 1970s, an eagerness to explore the possibilities of timbre prevails:

Self-Organization and Community Involvement

In Blues People, first published in 1963, Amiri Baraka made the argument that black music reveals African American dispositions towards America, from slavery to contemporary demands for full citizenship.[4] With much help from Baraka’s own involvement in politically-oriented artistic movements, this concern with race and American life became explicit in the 1970s. Many artists who had aligned themselves closely with the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, began, in the 1970s, organizing themselves into collectivities promoting goals of empowering African American communities and gaining independence from the profit-driven music industry.

As the visibility of Civil Rights era groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) gave way to the more militant Black Panther Party (BPP), demands for policy-directed reforms became coupled with demands for better urban living conditions and greater powers of self-determination for African American communities. Many of the BPP’s demands remain central to discussions of urban reform: “the power to determine the destiny of our Black Community”; “decent housing”; “an immediate ending to police brutality and murder of Black people”; “freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails,” and others.

Self-determination, community organization, and demands for urban reform were widespread among jazz musicians. Once again, Sun Ra was a pioneer in this aspect of musical life. His Arkestra gave an early model for increased musical and social autonomy, establishing communal residences first in New York, starting 1961, then in Philadelphia, starting in 1968, where musicians studied Ra’s philosophy and rehearsed constantly. Community involvement was typified by organizations like the Black Artists’ Group (BAG) in Saint Louis and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, who established themselves as institutions centered around artistic experimentation and youth education. Other artists like Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver took the music industry’s weakening interest in jazz as an opportunity, establishing the artist-controlled label Strata-East.

Among the artistic developments championed by these collectivities, there is a definite move towards the mixing of media. Sun Ra starred in the 1974 movie Space is the Place; members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago donned face paint and gave their performances a highly dramatic flair; BAG produced myriad collaborations between musicians, dancers, painters and playwrights; recordings like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and the Last Poets’ “This Is Madness” (reproduced and updated here with Pharoah Sanders) placed jazz and poetry together with highly politicized messages.

Like jazz’s timbral advancements, these projects continue to resound through the work of contemporary artists. The links are often direct and they are found in music that has been critically and commercially successful and is familiar to many of my students. Afro-futurist themes are ubiquitous in the work of singer Janelle Monáe. Sun Ra’s mirror-mask figures from Space is the Place reappear in her video for “Tightrope.” Elsewhere, she combines the dramatic aspect of jazz and other Afro-futurist music of the 1970s with a feminist critique:

Lyrics about the assault on the African American community at the center of the BPP’s demands have returned with a vengeance in several notable recent hip-hop tracks, from Kanye West’s “Who Will Survive in America” (sampling Gil Scott-Heron’s track of the same name), to Kendrick Lamar’s recent “The Blacker the Berry.”

The political similarities between today and the 1970s became extremely evident when my 2014 lecture on Saint Louis’s Black Artists’ Group happened to coincide with the eruption of violence in Ferguson, MO after the shooting of Michael Brown. Relatedly, students a semester before were concerned about the lack of spaces where they could voice their political demands, especially after the closing of the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Student and Community Center in the building next door to ours. Discussing jazz in the 70s helped to demonstrate the importance of such spaces, the strategies of previous generations dealing with the same challenges, and ways the arts in particular were mobilized towards ends of community development.

Conclusion

By dealing with these two developments in 1970s jazz—selected somewhat arbitrarily out of a large group of possibilities—I hope that I have shown directions for presenting the decade other than as a moment of the division of a “cohesive whole” of jazz into three warring camps or as a period of transition from Armstrong, Ellington, and Young to a new generation led by Wynton Marsalis. Much more could be said about Afro-futurism, harmonic and rhythmic developments, or any number of other features that found significant traction among artists in the 1970s. The important thing about these developments is that they are not confined to a specific group, but widespread across the jazz landscape—and often beyond it. They connect jazz from the era with sounds and issues that are extremely familiar to today’s college students. Furthermore, they cause us to rethink jazz beyond its normative status as a “timeless” art (excluding its historical specificity), played on a small handful of acoustic instruments (excluding electronic and non-European ones), rooted in abstract sound (excluding its relations with film, poetry and other media), in which musical innovation is distinct from sociopolitical context.

Notes

References

Dery, Mark. 1994. “Black to the Future.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, 179–222. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DeVeaux, Scott. 1991. “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography.” Black American Literature Forum 25(3):525–560.

Gridley, Mark. 1992. Concise Guide to Jazz. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

---------. 2007. "Misconceptions in Linking Free Jazz with the Civil Rights Movement." College Music Symposium 47:139–155.

Brendan Kibbee is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at City College of New York, where he has taught Piano, Introduction to Jazz, and Introduction to World Music. He studied piano with Stanley Cowell for four years while earning a Bachelor in Music in Jazz Studies from Rutgers University. While keeping active with jazz projects, his current research focuses on music, politics, and urban life in Senegal, West Africa, and he is working on a dissertation titled "Counterpublics and Street Assemblies in Postcolonial Dakar."

The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive is thrilled to announce that the second round of recordings from our collections are now available at California Light and Sound Collection on the Internet Archive.  California Light and Sound is a project of the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP).  This round of recordings has a special emphasis on African American music in California. 

“As a body of materials, the videos are a treasure trove for researchers interested in the Los Angeles black music -- a topic that continues to be under-researched.”—Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology

You can browse the Ethnomusicology Archive channel or go directly to the newly-added videos by clicking on the links at the bottom of the page.  But I thought I would highlight a few...

Jester Hairston (1901-2000) was an actor, composer, arranger, and choral conductor.  Hairston came to Los Angeles in 1936 where he established a successful career as an actor and choral conductor for film music.  One of the first African American actors in the Screen Actors Guild, television fans might recognize Hairston as “Rolly Forbes” on the 1986 series Amen.  But he might be best known in Hollywood for his work behind the camera.  As a choral conductor and arranger, Hairston composed or arranged more than 300 songs in films such as Green Pastures, Lost Horizon, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Lilies of the Field, for which he composed the song "Amen" and dubbed the singing voice of actor Sidney Poitier.  He continued to conduct in his 90s, crisscrossing the world as a goodwill ambassador for the State Department.

Guest lecture by Jester Hairston in Ethnomusicology 91P, Music of African-Americans, Professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, on November 5, 1992. At 1:07:15, Hairston leads the class in singing "Amen." 

Albert McNeil is a native Angeleno and was raised in Watts.  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 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 appointment, he taught Ethnomusicology at the University of Southern California for 12 years.  The Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers (founded 1968) are his creation, and he has dedicated himself to upholding a choral tradition of the concert spiritual and the contributions of African American composers of concert, opera, and theater music.

Guest lecture by Prof. Albert McNeil in Ethnomusicology 91P, Music of African-Americans, Professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, on March 5, 1992.

Trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (1917-1993), along with Charlie Parker, ushered in the era of Be-Bop in American jazz.  Gillespie was one of the founding fathers of the Afro-Cuban &/or Latin Jazz tradition, able to fuse African American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms to form a burgeoning CuBop sound.  Always a musical ambassador, he toured Africa, the Middle East and Latin America under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department.  In March 1989, Gillespie was a Regents' Lecturer at UCLA.  On March 16th, in a lecture hosted by Prof. Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje, he spoke about his time in Africa, jazz history, and told personal anecdotes.  On March 17th, in a lecture hosted by Prof. Steve Loza, Gillespie spoke about jazz in music education and the structure of jazz.

Dizzy Gillespie, UCLA Regents' Lecturer, March 1989 - Note:  Tape 1 content begins at 00:02:45.  In the first video, you can spot Kenny Burrell, Ray Giles and Nazir Jairazbhoy.   On tape 2, Djedje is leading the seminar, which continues to tape 3 and in tapes 3-4 Loza heads the seminar with UCLA Ethnomusicology Founding Chair Nazir Jairazbhoy at all events.

Here is the complete list of the second round of UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive recordings on California Light and Sound.  And more are forthcoming, so stay tuned!!

• Spirituals in Los Angeles, lecture by Jester Hairston
• Spirituals in Los Angeles, lecture by Prof. Albert McNeil (2012)
• Spirituals in Los Angeles, lecture by Prof. Albert McNeil (1992)
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by DeWayne Knox
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by John and Vermya Phillips
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Margaret Pleasant Douroux (1997)
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Margaret Pleasant Douroux (1993)
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Rodena Preston.
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Gwendolyn Cooper Lightner
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Bette Cox
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Isaiah Jones
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Albert Goodson
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Vi Redd
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Margie Evans (1992)
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Margie Evans (1995)
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Clora Bryant (2004)
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Clora Bryant (1993)
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Brenda Holloway
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Nedra Wheeler (1998)
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Nedra Wheeler (1993)
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by J.Harrison Wilson
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Don Lee White.
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Patrice Rushen
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Rev. Eugene D. Smallwood (1991)
• Gospel in Los Angeles, lecture by Dave Weston
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Gerald Wilson
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Big Jay McNeely
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Evelyn Freeman Roberts
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Karen Briggs
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Eddie Meadows
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Lesa Terry
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by James Newton
• Music of African Americans in California, lecture by James Roberson
• Jazz in Los Angeles, lecture by Bobby Bradford
• Jazz in Los Angeles, lecture by Billy Childs
• Music in Urban Environments: A One-Day Interdisciplinary Conference
• Spring Concert Festival 1997: Strings and Soul: A Meeting of World Masters
• Dizzy Gillespie, UCLA Regents' Lecturer
• Tito Puente, UCLA Regents' Lecturer
• Seegers and UCLA, lecture by Anthony Seeger

What is “Afropolitanism?” For most of its supporters and critics, this neologism in the Africanist lexicon connotes an elite cultural sensibility, celebrated by some as a sign of an artful and urbane African worldliness and derided by others for merely putting a new twist on an old idea of Africa, freshly packaged and adorned for consumption in upscale shops and trendy art galleries from London to Accra. I will not dwell on these debates here, as they have been well argued in other public forums (see, for example, Dabiri 2014 and Tveit 2013). What interests me is an approach to the Afropolitan that derives its force from the forms, styles, affects, and ideologies of a vital and vocal popular culture in contemporary Africa. Such an Afropolitanism suggests a mode of African being that articulates multiple social positions—professional and aesthetic, religious and diasporic, political and economic—as rooted as they are routed, as localized as they are worldly. A case study from my research on Malian music in contemporary Bamako (Skinner 2015) will elaborate this perspective.

An Afropolitan Muse

Consider the life and work of Madina Ndiaye. Madina is a pious Muslim, self-proclaimed tomboy, and, before loosing her eyesight to an infection of the optic nerve in 2003, a skilled tailor with a keen sense of fashion. But in Mali, Madina is mostly known as a professional kora player, a master of the 21-string Mande harp, an instrument she began to play as an adult in the early 1990s. “The kora,” she says, “came to me in a dream.” In this dream, Madina sits alone, dressed in a black robe illuminated by spotlights, on the stage of the French Cultural Center in downtown Bamako, giving a performance rooted in the rich patrimony of Mande music (Biarrat and Pegeault 2008). Motivated by a sense of destiny, Madina sought out instruction. She first went to Mali’s National Arts Institute, which then housed the country’s sole school of music, only to find that the kora professor was on indefinite leave. Undeterred, Madina took a more time-honored approach, arriving at the doorstep of the late Sidiki Diabaté, one of the first artists to introduce and popularize the kora, an instrument of the western Mande world, to Mali in the mid-20^th century (Ndiaye 2007).

The Diabatés are a renowned family of griots, or in Bamana, the local lingua franca, “jeliw,” Mande artisans practicing the traditional art of musical praise and storytelling known as “jeliya.” Yet, their tradition is, to borrow a borrowed phrase from Christopher Waterman, “a very modern tradition” (1990). When Madina first visited the Diabatés in 1990, Sidiki, known throughout West Africa as “the king of the kora,” was a senior member of Mali’s National Instrumental Ensemble (a group he helped found after independence in 1960). His elder son, Toumani, who inherited the title of “prince,” was a rising star on the world circuit (who, in 2006, won a Grammy Award with the late Ali Farka Touré). Like any other student seeking to learn the kora in the Diabaté household, Madina was asked to present five hundred CFA (about one dollar) and ten kola nuts to the elder Sidiki to begin her studies, but Madina was not just another kora student.

First, the kora is an instrument of the jeliw, and, if one follows Mande discourses of authenticity, one does not simply become a jeli; one is born a jeli. And, Madina, who bears the noble surname Ndiaye, is not a jeli. The Diabatés respect this cultural claim to musical heredity but have made many exceptions over the years, for non-griots from abroad (like me) and in Mali (like Madina). Today, Toumani proudly proclaims that his son Sidiki (his grandfather’s namesake) is the seventy-second generation of Diabaté kora players (“transmitted,” he says, “from father to son”), but he is no less proud of the fact that the instrument now enjoys a vast following of fans and devotees—in Mali, Africa, and throughout the world. Second, the offering of ten kola nuts to the family patriarch presents its own complicated story. This is a gift that a young man typically presents to the family of the woman he intends to marry. When the elder Sidiki accepted the bundle of bitter nuts and legal tender from Madina, she became “engaged” to the kora, an instrument locally understood to be gendered female – an object of masculine musical mastery in a patriarchal society. That such an engagement might be called “symbolic” does not diminish its importance, or, in Madina’s case, its controversy.

As her musical mentor Do Dembelé puts it: “Madina not only challenged the griots, she challenged an entire society. Because, what she has done changes peoples ways of thinking, their modes of seeing and understanding.” “She’s a bulldozer,” says close friend and kora teacher, Dialy Mady Cissoko. “When she wants something, all else gets pushed aside” (Biarrat and Pegeault 2008). Still, criticisms of her gender, sexuality, and birthright have been frequent and severe, most recently using her loss of sight as a sign of social and cultural transgression. Reflecting of these personal attacks, Madina shifts the blame from self to society. “It’s a great shame for Mali,” she tells me. “Others say, ‘she’s not a griot.’ But ‘griots’ and ‘nobles,’ we are all the same! It’s on this world that we’ve created the griots. God did not create that. ... So I don’t give a damn about such things. In my family, we don’t tolerate any form of racism. I learned my humanism from them” (Ndiaye 2007).

Dialy Mady Cissoko, at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako, Mali.

This tolerant but critical, confident yet respectful, traditional and modern humanism resounds in Madina’s music and artistic persona, in the cycling bass patterns and punctuated solos of her kora performance; through her lyrical praise of women’s dignity and criticism of self-interest among “people today;” in her impeccable sense of stage fashion and sassy embrace of her voluptuous figure; and in her repeated proclamation to audiences, at home and abroad, that “regardless of where we come from or where we live, we are all immigrants!” This social and musical humanism can also be heard in Madina’s public advocacy of the status and identity of artists in Mali today. As a society, she argues, Mali does not do nearly enough to support its musicians, relying instead on the global culture industry to determine and promote artistic value. In her words: “In Mali, if you have not travelled abroad, people won’t give you the time of day. But as soon as you’ve come back from Europe, you’re considered a star! ... There are great artists here, who have never toured [abroad]. They sing marvelously well. But they struggle to make their demo, to get their songs out. Still, they don’t give up. I think we should encourage them instead of creating a clan just for the divas and stars. ... It’s Mali that needs to give value to its artists, before Europe” (Biarrat and Pegeault 2008). 

A report on Mali’s national television about a documentary on Madina Ndiaye’s musical life and work.

Afropolitan Antiphony

Madina Ndiaye’s humanistic perspective on music and society emerges from an emphatically popular approach to the arts, politics, and urban social life in Africa today. The Malian art world of which she is formative part is irreducibly plural, full of aspiring stars and workaday groups, traditional griots and modern artists; it is politically engaged, confronting the promiscuous realities of everyday governance with poignant criticism and activism; and it audibly addresses a broad public of everyday urbanites, who are engaged in a common struggle to get by and make do in a world fraught with precarity and, at times, hostility. In this way, Madina’s self-described humanism resonates with Achille Mbembe’s recent account of Afropolitanism. To conclude and further clarify this popular mode of African being-in-the-world, I put musician and historian in dialogue, in an Afro-centred call-and-response across the academy and arts.

In his book, Sortir de la grande nuit, Achille Mbembe presents the Afropolitan as part of a broader vision of African renaissance beyond the structures and disjunctures of postcolonial society (2010: 229). Afropolitanism represents, for him, a “cultural sensibility, historical and aesthetic” characterized by “the awareness of this imbrication of here and elsewhere, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa.” For Madina, this is an awareness of domination and subordination in the Malian culture industry, of orientations toward Europe and aspirations for Africa. Mbembe continues, “this relativization of roots and primary belongings and a way of embracing, fully cognizant of origins, the foreign, the strange and the distant.” This is Madina “not giving a damn” about distinguishing between griots and nobles, but it is also her respect for the rich musical heritage she aspires to learn. Again, Mbembe, “this capacity to recognize oneself in the face of another and to value the traces of the distant within the proximate.” “No matter where you come from or where you live,” Madina tells her audiences, near and far, “we are all immigrants!” And, Mbembe adds, “to domesticate the un-familiar, to work with all manner of contradictions.” This is the insult and injury that accompanies a woman’s journey to master a man’s instrument and make music that breaks with insular inheritances.

And this, finally, is the Afropolitanism of a popular musician in Mali today.

A music video for Madina Ndiaye’s “Mali,” a vocal and instrumental praise song to the country she calls home.

References

Dabiri, Emma. 2014. “Why I’m not an Afropolitan.” africasacountry.com, 21 January.

Mbembe, Achille. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit: essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: Editions La Découverte.

Ndiaye, Madina. 2007. Interview with the author. Bamako, Mali. 3 May.

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

Tveit, Marta. 2013. “The Afropolitan Must Go.” africasacountry.com, 29 November.

Waterman, Christopher. 1990. “‘Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition’: Popular Music and the Construction of Pan-Yoruba Identity.” Ethnomusicology 34(3): 367-379.

Ryan Thomas Skinner studies the local and global music cultures of contemporary Africa and its diasporas. His research addresses issues of popular culture, ethics, aesthetics, urbanism, public piety, cultural politics, nationalism, and the idea of Africa in the world today. He is the author of the book Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music (Minnesota, 2015) and is currently conducting fieldwork for a project titled, “Race, Politics, and Performance in Afro-Swedish Public Culture” funded by the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship, and scholarships from the American Swedish Institute and the American Scandinavian Foundation. Skinner is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at The Ohio State University.

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions and feedback from scholars working on music from all disciplines

Photo of Lee Bidgood at the White Stork bluegrass festival in Luka nad Jihlavou, Czech Republic after a screening of the film Banjo Romantika, 2013, taken by Zdeněk Hrabica.

Lee Bidgood is a musician and scholar working among the US string band, early music, the practices of theology and music, and borders and thresholds.  Assistant Professor in the department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, he teaches a graduate course on Ethnomusicology and Appalachia as well as undergraduate classes in Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies. He also leads a mandolin orchestra and coordinates the MA program in Appalachian Studies.

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I never imagined that I would help produce a documentary film based on my ethnographic fieldwork.  Meeting documentary filmmaker Shara Lange during new faculty orientation at the university where we were both newly hired eventually led to our film Banjo Romantika (2013)—a full-length feature based on my research on bluegrass music in the Czech Republic, in which I play a key role as writer, producer, and on-screen character.  Taking part in this film project has led me to consider how film enriches relationships with field colleagues, providing new opportunities for teaching and learning.  I find that collaborations like ours can reframe and extend ethnomusicological work in productive ways.

As I began fieldwork exploring bluegrass-related music making in the Czech Republic I captured video and audio recording, but never spent serious money on a recording rig or gained training in producing high-quality media materials. I focused on presenting that world in writing.  It did not occur to me that others might find a version of any of this media interesting, compelling, or useful.  In my mind the footage that I had collected since first traveling to the Czech Republic in 2000 was "pure research" and existed solely to support my work as a fledgling scholar.  With this mentality of “private scholarship,” I was somehow satisfied that the low-quality video of performances, workshops, and band rehearsals which I recorded would remain in my private hoard.  MiniDiscs, MiniDV tapes, and hard drives full of media files, with only small excerpts of transcribed speech dusted off to appear in my academic writing.   In this period when I saw films like Throw Down Your Heart (Paladino, 2008) I was cautious, not sure that such polished productions could really be useful parts of ethnomusicological discourse or—at a more basic level—of fieldwork. 

While in the Czech Republic in 2002-3 and 2007-8 I took many photographs, but without a clear strategy for using them for my work.  My project working with Czech bluegrassers contained a wealth of visual dissonance and creative recontextualization that seemed difficult to capture without visual media—Czech use of the Confederate flag or of US military jeeps, for instance (see examples below).  I slowly began to consider how these visual elements could be a substantial counterpart to my writing.  I also realized that part of my hesitancy was that I didn’t have the skills needed to create compelling media. 

Photo 2  -  “Rebel” in the audience at the 2003 Banjo Jamboree bluegrass festival, the oldest event of its kind in Europe, first held in 1972.  Photo by the author.

Photo 3  - Jeep owned by a bluegrass musician in Luka nad Jihlavou, Czech Republic, 2009. Photo by the author.

Before we met in 2010, Shara Lange’s growing body of documentary work already showed a keen and insightful approach to representing unexpected juxtapositions and international movements on film.   Her film The Way North (2007) provides a sense of the struggles of Maghrebi woman who have settled in Marseille; and The Dressmakers (2013) addresses a variety of approaches to making clothing (craft, couture, and manufactured) and the ways that these kinds of work are valued in contemporary Morocco. 

I had a healthy respect for the value of films such as these when I met Shara in 2010, but little vision for how or why I might take part in a documentary project.  I hadn't read much on ethnomusicological film in graduate school, but remembered Richard Schechner's description of filmmaker Gardner and linguist Staal heading a project to stage the Agnicayana ritual and create the resulting film, Altar of Fire (1976).  I remember thinking that the team’s collaboration was a useful and productive marrying of disciplines.  I also retained Schechner's critical edge in discussing the problematic "mess" of "restorations" such as documentary film, which aren't as "easily recognized as interpretations" as academic writings (Schechner 1985, 63).  This was my objection to films like Paladino’s, which muddied the distinction I felt divided "entertainment" and "document" per Feld's survey (1976, 293) of ethnomusicological and visual communication. 

Photo 4 – Shara Lange shooting the Czech band Reliéf at the Hradešinské Struny festival, 2011.  Photo by the author.

When Shara and I set out to film in the Czech Republic, my lingering sense of a scholarly ideal led me to impose a research-design structure to our slate of scheduled interviews and visits to performance events.  This stance quickly met with the practicalities of fieldwork (which ranged from me not being able to successfully work the sophisticated camera, to a hardware glitch garbling a key bit of interview audio, etc.); at a more foundational level, however, my sense of the project sometimes conflicted with Lange's goals as a filmmaker.  Although dedicated to an observational perspective, and thus to a transparent presentation of her subjects, she also emphasized to me the importance of a dramatic "through-line" to the film, and spoke of the people we were filming not as colleagues or subjects but as "characters."  As I pushed for more and longer filmed interviews (thinking that more words from “characters” mouths would give them more agency and provide more information) she sought evocative moments, interactions, and scenes. 

As we worked to edit our footage for the film, I continued to read about film and ethnomusicology, starting with Feld’s 1976 article on the subject.  I appreciated the advice and anecdotes from Zemp (1990), whose account of filming Swiss yodelers and “yootzers” provided ways of considering ethical concerns that were more immediately germane to our film project than the IRB protocols that I was also assimilating at the time.  Simone Kruger’s consideration of “Ethnomusicological uses of film and video”  (2009) provides even more practical advice, particularly on using film and video in teaching and in other public presentations of scholarly work.

After filming I was still coming to grips with this new way of thinking about this framing of my field colleagues and my work, when I was thrown a new twist - I was going to become a character myself.  While our location shots had left me out of the frame for the most part, we needed a presence to help string the film's scenes together.  We decided to shoot footage of me taking on the role of musician and emcee at a concert organized for this very purpose at a music venue in Tennessee.  At the concert I led a group of musicians through performances of Czech bluegrass-related songs sung in both English and Czech, providing explanations between songs. 

This clip includes footage shot at the Down Home in Johnson City, TN in 2012 as well as material shot at Czech banjoist Marko Čermák’s cabin outside Prague in 2011. 

Neither Shara nor I wanted to include voice-over explanations, as we wanted to convey the variety of interpretations of Czech bluegrass that we recorded during our fieldwork.  Put into a role on screen, I still remained a privileged interpreter and arbiter.  However, as a character providing explanations, I was captured on screen talking, mumbling, and explaining without a script. I also joined my Czech colleagues in creating (or rather, re-creating) Czech bluegrass on film.  We were still determining the representation of Czech bluegrass and bluegrassers, but within our “restoration” of a Czech bluegrass performance.  By making me a character among other speaking and interpreting characters, we hoped to offer a diverse set of views, not just one authoritative voice.  While our staged “live concert” ruse is not without problems, it provided a way to move forward in making our footage into a film.

The most significant result of the documentary on my continuing fieldwork among Czech bluegrassers is an increased engagement with my projects.  Discussing my plans for an English-language academic paper or monograph has never quickened my colleagues' pulses.  Seeing or hearing about the film has led many Czech people to contact me with questions, concerns, and feedback that I have been trying to elicit for years through more traditional means.  We plan to broadcast the film on a television station in the Czech Republic, launching it into the wider discourse among fans and non-fans of bluegrass there.

Photo 5 – Banjo Romantika screening at the Banjo Jamboree bluegrass festival in Čáslav, Czech Republic, 2013. 

One unexpected dividend of my role as a “character” emerged when I screened the film in the Czech Republic in 2013 for an audience of bluegrassers at the Banjo Jamboree bluegrass festival. Several colleagues responded animatedly after the film to my request for comments, saying that they understood the film as my attempt in representing Czech bluegrass from the moment they heard my voice singing a well-known Czech song about bluegrass in the film’s first scene. As a character in the film, I was doing for their musical practices what they have been doing for decades with U.S. Bluegrass practices! 

Now, years after the rush of filming, the honeymoon period is over. We find ourselves working to understand the process of public television stations' selection of content (we are first seeking television broadcast of our film in the US), learning from Shara about the ways that you have to cultivate knowledge about a film project through careful propagation and cultivation of relationships with people and entities. New processes were added to (and, sometimes, in potential opposition with) my ethical concerns in fieldwork.  We have had to negotiate musical publishing rights, work with a film industry lawyer, and trade my consent agreements for "durable master licenses" that grant us as filmmakers unconditional rights to the use of our recorded material in all media.

There are fun parts of the film project, too: we make and sell "merch," go on tours to promote the film, apply to and attend festivals.  Sometimes I feel like part of the start-up of an independent band, with boxes of DVDs and t-shirts stacked in my foyer at home.  These productions might seem peripheral, but they—and the film—continue to slowly circulate among Czechs with whom I work, and spread to those outside the circles of my immediate fieldwork connections.  Facebook and other social networking sites have proven key media in bringing these people to my attention, and providing a platform for conversation and possible future fieldwork.  As I am becoming less able to travel and spend extended periods of time in the Czech Republic due to family and work, I’ve found a new set of avenues for mediated fieldwork.

Photo  6 - “Zdeněk Roh, Czech banjoist and luthier featured in Banjo Romantika, with film’s coproducers Shara Lange and Lee Bidgood (L-R) at the Nashville Film Festival, 2014.  Photo by the author.

Collaboration remains the core and generative engine of this project. The film could not have happened without Shara's filmmaking expertise: she shot, edited, and guided the entire process.  At the same time, my social contacts provided us with essential welcome and support. This kind of wide community involvement and interaction remains central to the project. Question-and-answer sessions after screenings of the film have created small community discourses including voices from Czechs, Americans, filmmakers, musicians, scholars, fans, and total strangers.

These fruitful discussions reassure me that this film has found itself in a productive position between both Shara’s and my own field  of work.  It is both a polished media product due to Shara’s care and expertise, while at the same time it is a central part of my ongoing ethnomusicological work in collaboration with institutions, field colleagues, and students. Working in-between disciplines and outside of academic limits structurally bears out my ethnomusicologically informed goal to staudy what happens between people. Our work together on the film, and the reception and ongoing mediation of our project has reinforced my emerging conviction that music, like film, is something that lives "in-between," emerging amidst and among participants.

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Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Feld, Steven.  “Ethnomusicology and Visual Communication,” Ethnomusicology 20:2 (May, 1976), pp. 293-325.

Kruger, Simone. 2009. “Mediating Fieldwork: Ethnomusicological Uses of Film and Video,” in Experiencing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Learning in European Universities. Burlington: Ashgate. pp. 189-208.

Zemp, Hugo. 1990. “Ethical Issues in Ethnomusicological Filmmaking,” Visual Anthropology 3:1, pp 49-64. 

From the 1920s through the early 1950s, Central Avenue was the economic and social center for African American Los Angeles. It was also a hub for all Southern Californians who wanted to hear the latest and best in jazz. The sounds of Central Avenue reverberated throughout California.  In coordination with the 20th Annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival (25-26 July), several pre-concert events were organized and a Central Avenue public-history website created. 

The Historic Central Avenue: A Public History Resource Website"seeks to consolidate the best historical and archival resources available to support the public's interest and the efforts of policymakers, community organizations, and others to develop the public visibility, educational value, and community-economic development of the Central Avenue Cultural Corridor."  I created an Archive Pinterest page The Music of Central Avenue and Beyond featuring performances and lectures relating to Central Avenue and to jazz, so that Archive materials could be featured on this new website.  (It is listed on the Historic Central Avenue website under "Historical Photos, Videos, and Audio.")

Thanks to Professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, the Ethnomusicology Archive holds a variety of materials related to Central Avenue, including lectures from notable Los Angeles musicians and the Bette Cox collection.  Many of these recordings are now available on the California Light and Sound Collection on the Internet Archive (and many more are forthcoming, so stay tuned!)  California Light and Sound is a project of the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP).

I would also be remiss if I did not mention our colleagues at the UCLA Center for Oral History Research.  Oral History has two series that relate to Central Avenue:  Black Music and Musicians in Los Angeles: Spirituals, Gospel, Jazz, and Spoken Word and Central Avenue Sounds Oral History Project. 

Black Music and Musicians in Los Angeles: Spirituals, Gospel, Jazz, and Spoken Word features interviews with Bette Cox, Margaret Douroux, Albert McNeil and Don Lee White.  Bette Cox, of course, wrote the book Central Avenue: Its Rise and Fall, 1890-c. 1955: Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (BEEM Publications, 1996).

The Central Avenue Sounds Oral History Project features a veritable who's who of musicians:  Ernie Andrews, Gil Bernal, Joseph Bihari, Rene Bloch, Hadda Brooks, Clora Bryant, David Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Douglass, John Ewing, Art Farmer, William Ernest Green, Leroy Hurte, Jackie (John) Kelso, Ruben Leon, Melba Liston, Paul R. Lopez, Larance Marable, Cecil McNeely, Frank Morgan, Anthony Ortega, Vi Redd, Minor Robinson, Marshal Royal, Fletcher Smith, Clifford Solomon, Horace Tapscott, James Tolbert, Gerald Wiggins, Gerald S. Wilson, Britt Woodman, Coney Woodman, William Woodman, Lee Young and Marl Young.  These oral histories were the inspiration for the book, Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (UC Press, 1999)

Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Bette Cox (2001).  Cox, author of "Central Avenue: Its Rise and Fall (1890-1955)," 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.

Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Clora Bryant (1999).  Legendary trumpet player Bryant is the co-editor of "Central Avenue Sounds" (University of California Press, 1999). Bryant is also one of the featured musicians in the award-winning documentary film, "The Girls in the Band."

Music of African Americans in California, lecture by Gerald Wilson (2000).  Wilson (1918-2014) was a jazz trumpeter, conductor, composer/arranger, and educator. He arranged for Duke Ellington, Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz artists. He received a Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990. In 2012, he received the 4th Annual L.A. Jazz Treasure Award. Wilson taught jazz history at UCLA from 1991 - 2008.

And, again, stay tuned for more Central Avenue and Los Angeles music coming to the Ethnomusicology Archive channel on California Light and Sound.

Image at top of page:  Gerald Wilson in Los Angeles, November 1996. James Arkatov Collection (Collection 340). Performing Arts Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

The Vision Festival is an annual multi-arts festival centered around the avant-jazz aesthetic that has been developing in downtown Manhattan since the 1970s loft jazz scene. While largely a music festival, it always includes poetry, visual art, and dance. The festival takes place each June (or July) in New York City and draws artists and audiences from around the world. Each year, it is organized chiefly by dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker.

The first Vision Festival took place in 1996. As Scott Currie described:

Taking what can only be described as an extraordinary and courageous leap of faith, [Nicholson Parker] guaranteed artists modest but significant fees for 31 performances of music, dance, and poetry over the course of five evenings (5 – 9 June 1996) at the Learning Alliance (324 Lafayette Street), with a program of six additional self-supported performances organized for the afternoon of Saturday 8 June. (2009:190)

Since its inception, the Festival has engendered a performing arts organization called Arts for Art, which, besides presenting the Festival, has presented a weekly concert series, several education programs, a seasonal concert series that brings its complex aesthetic into the Lower East Side’s numerous community gardens, as well as many other impromptu events.

Earlier this month, the Vision Festival celebrated its 20^th consecutive year. As part of the Festival’s anniversary celebration, an academic conference was held at (and co-Sponsored by) Columbia University on July 6. The day began with remarks by Michael Heller, who worked for Arts for Art years ago before going to complete a Ph.D. at Harvard, where he wrote his dissertation on the 1970s loft scene in downtown Manhattan (2012). Heller dedicated the conference to Amiri Baraka and Ornette Coleman, two giants whose absence has been keenly felt since they left the planet in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

Heller introduced the first of four speakers, Scott Currie, who presented a paper that engaged jazz historiography. History and press coverage of the avant-garde, he argued, mirror post-modern orthodoxy in that they make the idea of artistic agency—the idea that music and art can change the world—seem absurd and impossible. Currie quoted Matthew Shipp, who would later appear on the panel: “Every aspect of society is geared toward making sure the ‘60s never happen again.”

Responding to questions, Currie weighed in on a terminological debate about whether the music should be called “free,” “avant-garde,” “jazz,” or anything (at all)/(else). In advocating the term “avant-garde,” he defined it as “attacking the institution of art with the intention of reconstituting the relationship between art and life.” For Currie “avant-garde” means art as revolution, though he observed that in common parlance the term has come to mean merely experimental. In his specific use of avant-garde—invoking political engagement—Currie declared that the Black avant-garde was the only true American avant-garde.

Bernard Gendron’s presentation sparked a heated response from the audience when he pointedly identified the specific moment when the “downtown scene” began. He cited George Lewis and Michael Dessen, whose formulation of Downtown I and Downtown II distinguished between, on the one hand, a “putative post-Cage” commonality among Philip Glass, Philip Corner, John Cage, et al. and, on the other, a group of people including John Zorn, vocalist Shelley Hirsch, et al. (Lewis 2008:331). Gendron posited a specific definition of a scene as a “geographically centered association of artists, institutions, and promoters on public display.” Based on this definition, he located the downtown scene as having originated at the Kitchen in 1972. Before 1972, he argued, there were post-Cageian artists working below 14^th street, but no institutions and no visibility.

From the audience, Steve Dalachinsky, poet and devotee of Arts for Art and the downtown arts scene, rebutted this thesis. Dalachinsky argued that focusing on the Kitchen was too narrow and that there were so many other artists doing so much other work at that time and place, it was misleading to pinpoint the specific time and place of the Kitchen in 1972 as the beginning of the scene. Yuko Otomo, Patricia Nicholson Parker, and others concurred with Dalachinsky’s criticism. Brent Hayes Edwards invoked his role as moderator to mediate the two positions, insisting that we acknowledge the binary Downtown vs. Uptown as contested: Sam Rivers was working downtown but rehearsing in Harlem; did Black artists care about being Downtown? He reminded us of Fred Moten’s (2003) observation that people (ridiculously) talk as though the terms “Black” and “avant-garde” are mutually exclusive.

Ellen Waterman engaged agency and improvisation in terms of three “negotiated moments”: (1) corporeal archaeology, for which she gave an analysis of Gayl Jones’ 1975 novel Corregidora and discussed improvisation as a surreal strategy; (2) performativity, for which she discussed improvisation as a space to challenge and exceed the boundaries that society draws around subjectivities in view of Judith Butler’s argument that subjects are constructed by discourse; and (3) stance, for which she discussed listening, cognition, and perception.

Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer closed out the morning sessions, offering a critique of complacency and self-congratulation among jazz scholars and writers who extol jazz and improvisation for their power for social transformativity. He pointed out that, despite nearly a century of jazz, the United States is still a country characterized by deeply rooted social inequities, which have recently become more visibly documented in the form of cell phone videos of police brutality, and which have resulted in nationally televised mass protests like the ones in Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. Iyer discussed two of his own pieces through which he had meant to effect real change in political consciousness. One piece, Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, included poetry by veterans of color from the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iyer confronted audiences with the people who fought the wars that most of them would rather forget and with the oft forgotten fact that they were largely fought by people of color. The second piece Iyer discussed was a response to his feeling exoticized by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a predominantly white organization in a rapidly gentrifying Black urban area. Rather than tacitly accepting the institution’s attempt to use Iyer’s non-white visage as a mask to cover its glaring whiteness, he staged a die-in as part of his performance and drew attention to elitism in art. Iyer’s talk received a standing ovation.

After lunch, a panel discussion moderated by Michael Heller featured Patricia Nicholson Parker, her husband musician William Parker, musicians Joe McPhee and Matthew Shipp, former Arts for Art Board Chairman Brad Smith, and visual artist Jeff Schlanger. They raised ontological questions about freedom, discourse, and self-determination. One of the topics that Bernard Gendron had discussed was the journalistic response to downtown music. Precursors to the Vision Festival had not received any press coverage, and that fact was cited by Patricia and William Parker as one of the reasons for organizing the Vision Festival. William Parker said they were after the kind of attention that the AACM in Chicago and the Los Angeles musicians had been getting.

Several panelists emphasized the fact that the Vision Festival has always declined corporate sponsorship, relying instead on grants from foundations and government agencies and on private donations to fill the gap between its costs and the revenue generated from ticket sales and concessions. Matthew Shipp recalled how they had resisted appeals from George Wein to, in Shipp’s words, “be part of his plantation for a while.” The Vision Festival continues its tradition of community-based fundraising, both patronizing and accepting support from local (Lower East Side) businesses, and recruiting volunteers to staff events.

Another important issue raised was sustainability. The festival’s grass-roots beginning and its dependency on donations and volunteer labor would not necessarily predict 20 years of success in a demanding market like New York, its economic seismology having radically redrawn the socio-geographical map of the urban landscape upon which the festival was built. William Parker emphasized the importance of Patricia Nicholson Parker to the Festival’s longevity. He observed that there has to be someone dedicated to the administration and the fundraising, or it dies.

It is no secret that the survival of the Vision Festival has been due to Patricia’s extraordinary efforts. But after 20 years, Arts for Art has reached a crucial turning point. Todd Nicholson, former Associate Director, has returned from Japan to assume the position of Executive Director as Patricia moves from that position to Artistic Director. As a former Associate Director of Arts for Art myself, and having now worked with Todd, I can attest that there is certainly no one better suited to lead the organization into its third decade. However, I also know that with an organization that is built so much on personal relationships, volunteerism, and good will, a transition from Patricia’s personality to anyone new will be a tricky one.

The conference was capped off with a keynote address by poet Nathaniel Mackey, who was introduced eloquently by Robert O’Meally. Mackey spoke about poetry as a performance art. He elaborated on the meaning of the breath in poetry and in jazz, relating them and illustrating the multivariate (and poetic) use of the breath in jazz through vivid audio examples by John Tchicai and Ben Webster. And he spoke of the politicized breath in the past and in the present: the last words of Eric Garner, now a slogan for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the observation by Fanon, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Now, after all this serious talking, we had a big, gorgeous music and arts festival. It was a fitting commemoration of a milestone year. There had been already been an evening of films at Anthology Films on Second Avenue downtown: one film on Billy Bang, the other on William Parker and Hamid Drake. For six days after the conference (July 7–12), music, dance, poetry and visual art were presented at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South in Greenwich Village. The attributes of the space—an enormous marble room with 30-foot ceilings—presented acoustic challenges to the production team, led by one of the Vision Festival’s perennial unsung heroes, Bill Toles. Nevertheless, the performances were exceptional, even for a Vision Festival.

While my volunteer duties kept me out of the theatre for many of the performances, I witnessed several unforgettable performances. The first day of the festival featured musicians from the AACM, many in from Chicago and elsewhere, who were celebrating the 50^th Anniversary of their own organization. On Wednesday night, the Sun Ra Arkestra got everyone on their feet while bringing the house down, and on Thursday, Milford Graves’ group, which included William Parker and Charles Gayle, displayed inestimable heights of sonic consciousness. I missed Ingrid Laubrock on Saturday night, but the community was abuzz after her set, as they were after Steve Dalachinsky’s poetry reading.

One of the most memorable performances for me was Larry Roland’s poetry; afterwards, he told me, “Everybody thinks I’m a bassist. I say, I’m a poet who has a bass.” Wadada Leo Smith and Aruan Ortiz took advantage of the room’s echo and delivered a profound lesson in space. William Parker premiered a breathtaking new composition—part of his Martin Luther King, Jr. project—with an ensemble that partnered familiar masters with exciting emerging artists. Pianist Connie Crothers was masterful in her collaboration with dancers Amanda Cray and Elaine Gutierrez. In fact, there was a marked emphasis on the non-musical art forms for this festival, especially with the inclusion of dance troupe Urban Bushwomen, whose aesthetic was unusual for the Vision Festival but who were very well-received. Visual art installations by Jo Wood-Brown, Jorgo Schäfer and Robert Janz, as well as visuals projected behind the stage by Bill Mazza, Jeff Schlanger and others, transformed the space into an immersive creative environment.

The production of the Vision Festival is a family affair, and for those of us who’ve been involved with it, every summer is a family reunion. We had food home-cooked by volunteers, masterminded by vocalist Anaïs Maviel, whose mother even flew in from Paris to help. The festival was unusually well staffed this year thanks to the meticulous efforts of William and Patricia’s daughter Miriam Parker, who also somehow gave a stunning dance performance in collaboration with her father on percussion and Michael Bisio on bass.

One person I spoke to during the festival was astute. Somewhat astonished he said, “Everybody just gives everything they have at the Vision Festival.” Sound is love; art is love; love is creation. The Vision Festival endures because it is made out of love.

References

Currie, A. Scott. 2009. "Sound Visions: An Ethnographic Study of Avant-Garde Jazz in New York City." Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University.

Heller, Michael C. 2012. "Reconstructing We: History, Memory and Politics in a Loft Jazz Archive." Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University.

Lewis, George E. 2008. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Adam Zanolini is a reedist, writer, and ethnomusicologist based in Chicago, and a Ph.D. candidate in music at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Adam performs as part of the Participatory Music Coalition, the MB Collective, and the Border Bend Arts Collective in Chicago. He has also served as Associate Director of Arts for Art, presenter of the annual Vision Festival of avant-jazz in New York City. All of which are dedicated to an interdisciplinary/multi-arts approach to improvised creation. He is also part of the Live the Spirit Residency, presenter of the annual Englewood Jazz Festival in Chicago.