Pub Date : 2015-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0119
Michael Iyanaga
In the sociohistorically important Reconcavo region of Bahia, in Brazil's northeast, the local majority African descendent population regularly celebrates its patron saints not only with masses and processions but also with samba song and dance. As such, samba is found at Catholic pilgrimages, ritual cleansings (lavagens), and, most prominently, saints' feasts. The last of these is perhaps most famously exemplified in the large three-day Festival of Our Lady of Good Death, held annually in the city of Cachoeira, which culminates in hours of celebratory samba dancing (see A. Castro 2006; Marques 2008). Less publicly, samba caps off rollicking patron saint house parties known as rezas, each moment of which is marked by ritual music. Standing in front of the home altar, attendees first intone a series of Catholic hymns before gathering in a ring to dance and responsorially sing their saint-saluting sambas (Fig. 1). On occasion, this samba can even prompt Catholic saints (and other entities) to possess the host and other guests for a divine dancing and singing distinct from the types of possession rituals characteristic of Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomble and Umbanda (Iyanaga 2013, 313-359). People typically see this samba for Catholic saints as an expression of their Catholic faith. In fact, with its church-inspired contexts and choreographies (e.g., the Sign of the Cross, bowing before the altar, etc.), saint-extolling texts, and capacity to instigate possession by Christian martyrs, this type of samba might best be described (in analytical, etic terms) as a "Catholic samba." But why is samba--by which I mean a local Afro-Brazilian dance, song, and rhythm--a fundamental facet of both public and private Catholic patron saint celebrations in Bahia? After many years of fieldwork in the Bahian Reconcavo (2008-2014), I can offer a fairly straightforward, ethnographic answer: People believe their saints adore samba. In the enthusiastic words of one Bahian woman I met in 2011, "What Saint Anthony likes is parties ... He likes samba!" (1) And Saint Anthony is no oddball. In fact, Saint Roch, Saints Cosmas and Damian, Saints Crispin and Crispinian, Saint Barbara, and Our Lady of the Conception--all of whom can be counted among the region's most popular saints--are believed to share Saint Anthony's predilection for the Afro-Brazilian art form. Yet this local, "native" perspective only provides a partial response to the question; an investigation of macrohistorical processes reveals another explanation for why saints love samba. In the present article, I insist on asking why, in a diachronic sense, people perform samba for their saints. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] By interpreting more than three centuries of devotional black musical practices in Bahia, this article posits that saints enjoy samba because Africans and their descendants effectively reinvented and transformed their Catholic saints, "converting," so to speak, the Christian martyrs into samba-lovi
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Pub Date : 2015-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0001
I. Forchu
The Igbo musical aesthetic concept, as is typical in African musical aesthetic practice, is concerned with the capability of musical sounds to appeal to and, more importantly, to fulfill expected aesthetic functions in the culture. African music is a treasure trove of indigenous resources that can be harnessed for human development. Unfortunately, this wealth has not been adequately approached, recognized, and utilized. Since insufficient attention is paid to indigenous African music and its practices in contemporary society, many of its various forms have disappeared. One such genre, Akwunechenyi, stands the risk of possible extinction, in addition to others. The disappearance of indigenous music brings about irretrievable loss of indigenous developmental resources enshrined within it. (2) Using the descriptive and analytical method, this research examines the aesthetics, or philosophy of beauty, enshrined in the Akwunechenyi music of Ukpo, the capital of Dunukofia Local Government Area of the Anambra State of Nigeria, as a tool for human development. Human development, which is not only a physical reality but also a state of mind, is a multifaceted process that entails an indefinite enhancement of the socioeconomic structures and general attitude of the populace (Todaro and Smith 2009, 25). This study, therefore, highlights the perception of musical aesthetics enshrined in Akwunechenyi music as practiced in Ukpo in the 1980s that promoted sustainable human development. This will be examined at two levels: (1) through the description of the structural features of the music and (2) through the aesthetic functions of the structural features at the time the music existed in Ukpo society. Akwunechenyi music is performed by the Akwunechenyi dance ensemble in a few Igbo-speaking communities. The Igbo ethnic group, with an estimated population of more than sixteen million (NPC, 2006), is one of more than three hundred ethnic groups indigenous to Nigeria. The Igbo people are found in southeastern Nigeria, occupying an area of about 40,000 square kilometers. The Igbo engage in trading, craftsmanship, subsistence farming, and civil service. They are highly enterprising; consequently, many live outside Igboland and Nigeria, engaged in various ventures. Prior to contact with the Western world in the fifteenth century, the Igbo had no identity as one people. A politically fragmented independent people lacking centralized allegiance, the Igbo have slight variations in culture, dialects, and social organization, with various subgroups being organized along the line of clan, village affiliation, and lineage. The traditional Igbo practiced a quasi-democratic and republican system of government founded on a patrilineal system of descent known as umunna. Umunna, which is made up of groups of related and extended families who trace their relationships to a commonly known ancestor, is headed by the eldest male member. It is the most powerful societal pillar and main
{"title":"The Endangered Musical Genre: The Case of Akwunechenyi Music of Ukpo","authors":"I. Forchu","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The Igbo musical aesthetic concept, as is typical in African musical aesthetic practice, is concerned with the capability of musical sounds to appeal to and, more importantly, to fulfill expected aesthetic functions in the culture. African music is a treasure trove of indigenous resources that can be harnessed for human development. Unfortunately, this wealth has not been adequately approached, recognized, and utilized. Since insufficient attention is paid to indigenous African music and its practices in contemporary society, many of its various forms have disappeared. One such genre, Akwunechenyi, stands the risk of possible extinction, in addition to others. The disappearance of indigenous music brings about irretrievable loss of indigenous developmental resources enshrined within it. (2) Using the descriptive and analytical method, this research examines the aesthetics, or philosophy of beauty, enshrined in the Akwunechenyi music of Ukpo, the capital of Dunukofia Local Government Area of the Anambra State of Nigeria, as a tool for human development. Human development, which is not only a physical reality but also a state of mind, is a multifaceted process that entails an indefinite enhancement of the socioeconomic structures and general attitude of the populace (Todaro and Smith 2009, 25). This study, therefore, highlights the perception of musical aesthetics enshrined in Akwunechenyi music as practiced in Ukpo in the 1980s that promoted sustainable human development. This will be examined at two levels: (1) through the description of the structural features of the music and (2) through the aesthetic functions of the structural features at the time the music existed in Ukpo society. Akwunechenyi music is performed by the Akwunechenyi dance ensemble in a few Igbo-speaking communities. The Igbo ethnic group, with an estimated population of more than sixteen million (NPC, 2006), is one of more than three hundred ethnic groups indigenous to Nigeria. The Igbo people are found in southeastern Nigeria, occupying an area of about 40,000 square kilometers. The Igbo engage in trading, craftsmanship, subsistence farming, and civil service. They are highly enterprising; consequently, many live outside Igboland and Nigeria, engaged in various ventures. Prior to contact with the Western world in the fifteenth century, the Igbo had no identity as one people. A politically fragmented independent people lacking centralized allegiance, the Igbo have slight variations in culture, dialects, and social organization, with various subgroups being organized along the line of clan, village affiliation, and lineage. The traditional Igbo practiced a quasi-democratic and republican system of government founded on a patrilineal system of descent known as umunna. Umunna, which is made up of groups of related and extended families who trace their relationships to a commonly known ancestor, is headed by the eldest male member. It is the most powerful societal pillar and main","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130874392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0023
Norberto Pablo Círio
As nineteenth-century Argentine local elites struggled to transform the country into a "white republic," Afro-descendant populations in Buenos Aires embraced peculiar strategies of social mobility. This entailed grappling with the hegemonic values of society while dismissing, at least publicly, their ancestral cultural practices. In this context, there emerged a particular distinction between two types of Afro-descendants: negro che and negro usted. This division can be understood as a straightforward but radical reshuffling of values and as an instance of adaptation to modern society. However, from the perspective of postcolonial theory, this process also appears as a possible strategy of camouflage and self-representation based on external references. The symbolic appropriation of discourses and practices of progress and power may have indeed allowed the introduction of an element of "instability in imitation." This paper analyzes this strategy in the lives of two afro-portenos (2) artists, Zenon Rolon (1856-1902) and Manuel Posadas (1860-1916), who travelled to Europe (Florence and Brussels, respectively) to improve their musical knowledge. Given the absence of scholarly studies on the lives of these artists and the difficulties of conducting research in multiple archives, sources are basically limited to existing contemporary afroporteno periodicals. For afroportenos, their printed press constituted an invaluable vehicle for the dissemination of news and ideas at a time when the promise of modernity was to place Argentina at the vanguard of all nations. Both Rolon and Posadas appeared often in these publications to account for their experiences in Europe, while their peers critically assessed their work, in both favorable and unfavorable ways. This article is divided into four parts. First, I will describe the sociopolitical context of mid-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Next, I will situate afroportenos in such a context, drawing on their hierarchical social stratification. Third, I will place the artists' own narratives in counterpoint to those published by their critics in the same afroporteno periodicals. Last, I will make use of postcolonial theory to analyze afroporteno social stratification as a mimetic strategy that destabilized dominant discourses by introducing a simulacrum of identity aspiring to fulfill an authorized version of Otherness. The underlying hypothesis is that Rolon and Posadas's self-praised success granted both the status of "artist" in Eurocentric terms, while their black lineage placed a wedge of instability within the dominant local narrative. If, on the one hand, this narrative advocated the univocal consolidation of whiteness as the essence and marker of Argentine identity, on the other hand, it also bolstered and prided on the great success of the two artists. Buenos Aires in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century In order to understand the social and political context inhabited by Rolon and Posadas, it is
当19世纪的阿根廷当地精英努力将国家转变为“白人共和国”时，布宜诺斯艾利斯的非洲裔人口采用了独特的社会流动策略。这需要与社会的霸权价值观作斗争，同时至少公开地摒弃他们祖先的文化习俗。在这方面，出现了两种非洲后裔的特别区别:黑人和黑人。这种划分可以理解为价值观的直接而彻底的重新洗牌，也是适应现代社会的一个例子。然而，从后殖民理论的角度来看，这一过程也表现为一种基于外部参考的伪装和自我再现的可能策略。对进步和权力的话语和实践的象征性占有可能确实允许引入“模仿中的不稳定性”元素。本文分析了这一策略在两位非裔艺术家的生活中，泽农·罗伦(1856-1902)和曼努埃尔·波萨达斯(1860-1916)，他们前往欧洲(分别是佛罗伦萨和布鲁塞尔)提高他们的音乐知识。鉴于缺乏对这些艺术家生活的学术研究，以及在多个档案中进行研究的困难，来源基本上仅限于现有的当代非洲艺术期刊。对于非洲人来说，他们的印刷品是传播新闻和思想的宝贵工具，当时现代化的承诺使阿根廷成为所有国家的先锋。洛伦和波萨达斯都经常出现在这些出版物中，讲述他们在欧洲的经历，而他们的同行则以有利和不利的方式对他们的工作进行了批判性评价。本文共分为四个部分。首先，我将描述19世纪中期布宜诺斯艾利斯的社会政治背景。接下来，我将把非洲裔美国人置于这样的背景下，利用他们的等级社会分层。第三，我将把艺术家自己的叙述与他们的评论家在同一份非洲艺术期刊上发表的叙述相对立。最后，我将利用后殖民理论来分析非洲社会分层作为一种模仿策略，通过引入一种渴望实现授权版本的他者的身份拟像来破坏主导话语的稳定。潜在的假设是，洛伦和波萨达斯自诩的成功赋予了他们以欧洲为中心的“艺术家”地位，而他们的黑人血统在占主导地位的地方叙事中造成了不稳定。如果说，这种叙事一方面主张将白人作为阿根廷身份的本质和标志加以明确的巩固，另一方面，它也为这两位艺术家的巨大成功提供了支持和自豪。19世纪下半叶的布宜诺斯艾利斯为了理解罗伦和波萨达斯居住的社会和政治背景，重要的是要对该国的情况进行概述，特别是关于19世纪下半叶的布宜诺斯艾利斯。这是由多种因素造成的，正如19世纪中期标志着一个前后在民族国家的发展和巩固。卡塞罗战役(1852年2月3日)结束了胡安·曼努埃尔·德·罗萨斯的统治，并将胜利者乌尔奎萨(Justo Jose de Urquiza)置于领导阿根廷联邦的位置，直到1860年。此外，自18世纪以来，由于萨克拉门托殖民地的非法走私，以及1810年五月革命后，通过不断扩大的工业革命制造的商品的合法贸易，英国的经济影响力有所增加。铁路的到来有利于通过布宜诺斯艾利斯港口出口原材料(牛肉、皮革、羊毛和谷物)。这一过程导致阿根廷较小的区域经济的削弱(Garavaglia 2007)。…
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Pub Date : 2014-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0229
Laurence Robitaille
At a summer festival in a major North American city, a dozen boys and girls, young adults all, are wearing white pants, standing in a circle, clapping hands, and singing in Portuguese. One pair in the middle of the circle seems to kick each other without really striking, dodging one another's feet with acrobatic and seemingly deliberately aestheticized movements. Once the pair stops, the group leader--a muscular dark-skinned man--explains to the gathering spectators that what they have just seen is called capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that was created by African slaves in Brazil as a form of resistance to colonial authorities. As he speaks, some of the practitioners give out flyers on which the main feature is a gorgeous blue-eyed, blond-haired young woman, who is, in fact, a capoeira student from the group doing the presentation. The historical explanation given by the mestre (the group leader and an expert practitioner) seems at odds with the setting of the festival, the image used on the promotional flyers, and the trendy allure of the members of the group. On the other hand, the appeal of this performance might very well have been amplified by this mysterious underground history, authenticated by the leader's "blackbody" that recalls the origins of the practice in slavery and his foreign accent that reveals his own Brazilian heritage. A number of paradoxical elements are at play in this scene. Together they point to the long route that capoeira has traveled: what started out as a practice of resistance is now a fashionable activity available worldwide. Indeed, this article works under the assumption that capoeira's exportation outside of Brazil was made possible by the practice's (partial) commodification, allowing it to circulate in a global culture industry as a product available for consumption. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, immigrating Brazilians brought their practice with them and many commercialized their embodied knowledge and specialized expertise, making it the basis of their livelihood (Robitaille 2013). Such globalization of capoeira has recontextualized it, unsettling both its relationship to its immediate national settings and its underlying socioeconomic and racial connotations. These associations are, however, put to use in the way capoeira is presented, marketed, received, and consumed in the global culture industries. This article explores how capoeira's circulation in North American markets and the diverse ways that mestres promote it shift the valuations attached to the practice and modify its meanings with respect to notions of race. In particular, I explore various disjunctures between representation and embodiment related to the globalization and commodification of capoeira and the various contradictions and possibilities that result. Not the least of these is the way that embodied knowledge in the context of a commercialized teaching of expressive culture unsettles and further complicates underst
{"title":"Promoting Capoeira, Branding Brazil: A Focus on the Semantic Body","authors":"Laurence Robitaille","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0229","url":null,"abstract":"At a summer festival in a major North American city, a dozen boys and girls, young adults all, are wearing white pants, standing in a circle, clapping hands, and singing in Portuguese. One pair in the middle of the circle seems to kick each other without really striking, dodging one another's feet with acrobatic and seemingly deliberately aestheticized movements. Once the pair stops, the group leader--a muscular dark-skinned man--explains to the gathering spectators that what they have just seen is called capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that was created by African slaves in Brazil as a form of resistance to colonial authorities. As he speaks, some of the practitioners give out flyers on which the main feature is a gorgeous blue-eyed, blond-haired young woman, who is, in fact, a capoeira student from the group doing the presentation. The historical explanation given by the mestre (the group leader and an expert practitioner) seems at odds with the setting of the festival, the image used on the promotional flyers, and the trendy allure of the members of the group. On the other hand, the appeal of this performance might very well have been amplified by this mysterious underground history, authenticated by the leader's \"blackbody\" that recalls the origins of the practice in slavery and his foreign accent that reveals his own Brazilian heritage. A number of paradoxical elements are at play in this scene. Together they point to the long route that capoeira has traveled: what started out as a practice of resistance is now a fashionable activity available worldwide. Indeed, this article works under the assumption that capoeira's exportation outside of Brazil was made possible by the practice's (partial) commodification, allowing it to circulate in a global culture industry as a product available for consumption. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, immigrating Brazilians brought their practice with them and many commercialized their embodied knowledge and specialized expertise, making it the basis of their livelihood (Robitaille 2013). Such globalization of capoeira has recontextualized it, unsettling both its relationship to its immediate national settings and its underlying socioeconomic and racial connotations. These associations are, however, put to use in the way capoeira is presented, marketed, received, and consumed in the global culture industries. This article explores how capoeira's circulation in North American markets and the diverse ways that mestres promote it shift the valuations attached to the practice and modify its meanings with respect to notions of race. In particular, I explore various disjunctures between representation and embodiment related to the globalization and commodification of capoeira and the various contradictions and possibilities that result. Not the least of these is the way that embodied knowledge in the context of a commercialized teaching of expressive culture unsettles and further complicates underst","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131570449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0255
Jeff Packman
Carnival is likely the best-known aspect of expressive culture in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, yet it is by no means the only significant public festival in a city widely known for the richness of its Afrodiasporic expressive culture. Indeed, another seasonal celebration known as the festas juninas (June Festivals) or more colloquially, Sao Joao, deeply informs music, dance, and related industries throughout Brazil, the state of Bahia, and its capital city, Salvador. In fact, according to A Tarde (Loenelli 2013; Quiteria 2013), one of Salvador's principal newspapers, Sao Joao is actually "bigger" than Carnival. Moreover, since 2008, the state government has actively promoted and invested in developing tourism during Sao Joao, which was long considered to be the depth of the so-called low season. All of this suggests that the festas juninas are or are rapidly becoming as economically important as carnival. In addition to changes related to economics, the political complexity of Sao Joao that was long overshadowed by a veneer of rural simplicity and related social harmony is now becoming more visible (Packman 2012). Whereas concerns over racial politics have been contested openly during Bahian carnival since the 1970s (Dunn 1992; Crook 1993), Sao Joao celebrations in Salvador have historically lacked similar overt expressions of resistance. Now, however, alongside the increased commercialization that many residents suggest is making the festas juninas more like carnival, challenges to dominant racial imaginings through music and movement that have become the norm during pre-Lenten celebrations are also on the rise in June. These interventions take place amidst a series of commemorations that have and, in general, continue to idealize particular notions of rural life, glossing racial inequities both through discourse and the privileging of music and dance practices known as Forro, which are distinct from those more common in Bahia during the rest of the year. Along with what I have described elsewhere (Packman 2012) as June season "festive interventions"--challenges to dominant notions of race and black Bahian subjectivity through the samba (rather than Forro) practices of self-identified black members of Salvador's popular classes--much of my interest in recent shifts in Bahia's Sao Joao celebrations lies with the implications of various industries of cultural production. In this article I explore how residents of Tororo, a primarily black working-class neighborhood in Salvador, participate in and, indeed, produce June samba in a politically engaged manner that includes various activities explicitly situated to generate financial return. While questions may remain among scholars, activists, and many members of the public as to the coexistence of commercial interest and political efficacy (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 1997; Adorno 2008; Gilroy 2010), I argue that these two facets of June samba in Salvador not only coexist but are in many ways compleme
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Pub Date : 2014-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0201
Mark Laver
For most of its history, the relationship between jazz and commerce has frequently been characterized as fundamentally oppositional. This stance can be seen in Stanley Crouch's acerbic criticisms of Miles Davis for his "pernicious effect on the music scene since he went rapaciously commercial" (quoted in Porter 2002,302); in Amiri Baraka's furious characterization of the mainstream white (and middle-class black) American commercial aesthetic of "social blandness" that threatened to efface jazz's black cultural roots (Baraka 1963,181); and in the assertions of jazz historians such as Grover Sales (1984), Lewis Porter (1997), and Mark Gridley (2006) that jazz does not belong to the category of popular music and, as such, is not beholden to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. While a number of musicologists and sociologists have published compelling work in the last fifteen years debunking this binary, (1) the notion of an opposition between music (jazz particularly) and commerce has proved remarkably durable, both in jazz musicians' own understanding of their relationship to the culture industries and in the way that relationship is represented in the popular media. In some respects, Charles Mingus, the bassist, composer, bandleader, and sometime author, was the equal of Crouch, Baraka, Sales, Porter, Gridley, and other historians in his adamant views that the encroachment of commercial concerns had an enormously deleterious impact on artistic production. Along with Baraka, Mingus was vociferously critical of the destructive impact that the white-controlled culture industries had on the music of black Americans. Over the course of his career, Mingus became famous for his anticommercial rants--both in person and in print. In 1953, for instance, Mingus publicly railed against white promoters who marketed musicians whom he deemed to be artistically deficient: "impresarios bill these circus artists as jazzmen because 'jazz' has become a commodity to sell, like apples or, more accurately, com" (quoted in Saul 2001,398). The discursive tension between art and commerce continues to be a defining theme in the popular life of jazz music in our own day. While it is certainly manifest in numerous valences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century jazz discourse--from specialized criticism to the popular press to the public and private discussions of musicians--this tension is seldom articulated more clearly than in television advertising. When corporate marketing departments and advertising agencies enlist the music to help build a brand identity, they inevitably hone in on jazz's long-standing anticommercial status to burnish the commodity with a countercultural veneer. In the late 1990s, for example, Volkswagen was seeking to reconnect with what had become its primary North American demographic: young drivers. In 1997, working with Boston-based advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, the company launched a new campaign based around the slogan "Drivers Wanted." A
在其历史的大部分时间里，爵士乐和商业之间的关系经常被认为是根本对立的。这种立场可以从斯坦利·克劳奇对迈尔斯·戴维斯的尖刻批评中看出，他“对音乐界产生了有害的影响，因为他贪婪地商业化了”(引自波特2002,302);阿米里·巴拉卡(Amiri Baraka)愤怒地描述了美国主流白人(和中产阶级黑人)的“社会平淡”商业审美，这种审美有可能抹去爵士乐的黑人文化根源(Baraka 1963,181);格罗弗·萨莱斯(1984)、刘易斯·波特(1997)和马克·格里德利(2006)等爵士历史学家断言，爵士乐不属于流行音乐的范畴，因此不受市场变迁的影响。尽管在过去的15年里，许多音乐学家和社会学家发表了令人信服的著作，揭穿了这种二元对立，(1)音乐(尤其是爵士乐)和商业之间对立的概念被证明是非常持久的，无论是在爵士音乐家自己对他们与文化工业的关系的理解上，还是在这种关系在大众媒体上的表现方式上。在某些方面，贝斯手、作曲家、乐队指挥、有时也是作家的查尔斯·明格斯(Charles Mingus)与克劳奇、巴拉卡、萨莱斯、波特、格里德利和其他历史学家不相上下，他坚定地认为，商业利益的侵蚀对艺术创作产生了巨大的有害影响。与巴拉卡一样，明格斯强烈批评白人控制的文化产业对美国黑人音乐的破坏性影响。在他的职业生涯中，明格斯因他的反商业言论而闻名——无论是当面还是在报纸上。例如，在1953年，明格斯公开斥责那些推销他认为在艺术上有缺陷的音乐家的白人推广者:“经理们把这些马戏团艺术家称为爵士乐人，因为‘爵士乐’已经成为一种商品，就像苹果一样，或者更准确地说，像网络一样。”(引自Saul 2001,398)。在我们这个时代，艺术与商业之间的话语张力仍然是爵士乐流行生活的一个决定性主题。虽然它确实在20世纪和21世纪爵士乐话语的许多价值中表现出来——从专业批评到大众媒体，再到音乐家的公开和私人讨论——但这种紧张关系很少比电视广告更清楚地表达出来。当企业营销部门和广告公司利用爵士乐来帮助建立品牌形象时，他们不可避免地会利用爵士乐长期以来的反商业地位，给这种商品披上反文化的外衣。例如，在上世纪90年代末，大众汽车(Volkswagen)试图重新与北美的主要消费者群体——年轻司机——建立联系。1997年，该公司与总部位于波士顿的广告公司Arnold Worldwide合作，围绕“招聘司机”的口号发起了一项新活动。阿诺德的首席创意官罗恩·劳纳在2000年接受《广告周刊》采访时描述了该活动旨在发展的品牌特征。他使用了人性化、幽默的词汇，让人想起上世纪五六十年代道尔·戴恩·本巴赫(Doyle Dane benbach)的广告，仿佛大众这个品牌就是一位大众汽车的司机:“平易近人、诚实、有幽默感;你喜欢的那种人....他们充满激情，他们渴望生活，渴望驾驶……但不要太把自己当回事”(Parpis 2000)。根据这一口号的扩展版，理想的大众司机显然也是一个负责任、掌控一切、拒绝屈服于社会或制度压力的人:“在人生的道路上，有乘客，也有司机。司机想要的。”1999年，阿诺德制作了一系列以“司机通缉”为主题的电视广告，发展了这一品牌个性。事实上，正如《广告周刊》撰稿人Eleftheria Parpis所解释的那样，该系列广告本身并不是为了销售基于特定技术属性的汽车，而是为了通过向消费者介绍新的、独特的、吸引人的品牌标识来吸引消费者。…
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Pub Date : 2014-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0169
Steven F. Pond
Although [college] world music ensembles provide at best a pale simulacrum of "the real thing," the implicit goal is still to maximize authenticity by performing near exact replicas of musical models from other cultures. --Gage Averill (2004,100) In traditional African societies the force of tradition is naturally very strong, although it does not stifle creativity. --J. H. Kwabena Nketia (2005, 334) That which is enshrined in a sound recording, for example, is only one among several possible renditions. --Kofi Agawu (2003, 19) For six days Tim Feeney and I had been acutely focused on learning traditional Ewe drumming, sheltered in the shade of a tree outside the International Centre for African Music and Dance at the University of Ghana at Legon (a suburb of the capital city of Accra). On day seven, a July afternoon in 2008, we were taken to Dzodze, a few miles from Ghana's Atlantic coast near the Volta River delta, to attend the funeral celebration for a local Ewe woman. Here was a chance to experience firsthand the music we had so recently studied and memorized in an academic setting. However, Feeney and I bumped hard against our own neophyte assumptions; talking it over later that evening, we berated our naivete. The traditional agbadza funeral music we'd heard today in Dzodze didn't match the agbadza music we had immersed ourselves in for the past week. (Pond 2008) (1) The previous summer, preparing to begin his position as director of percussion at Cornell University, Feeney had studied privately with ethnomusicologist and Ewe music and culture specialist David Locke, of Tufts University, and Torgbui Midawu Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, the African ensemble director at the University of North Texas, (2) both educators of international reputation. Feeney had supplemented these studies throughout the year with ongoing lessons from James Burns, another specialist in Ewe music, and Pierrette Aboadji, a dance instructor (and former member of the Ghana Dance Ensemble), both of nearby Binghamton University. Burns provided us with the logistical support, accommodations, and access to key Ghanaian musicians for our joint trip in 2008. An ethnomusicology and musicology professor at Cornell, my own prior exposure to Ewe drumming dated back to my undergraduate (and some graduate) study with Ewe master drummer C. K. Ladzekpo at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980s and early 1990s and to my doctoral study and subsequent research in the African diaspora, particularly as it relates to jazz. In our intensive week at the University of Ghana, Feeney and I, joined by James Gardner, a student from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, had been attempting to learn a half-semester's worth of drumming patterns and playing techniques in six days of lessons with Johnson Kemeh, one of the leading expert instructors in ritual and dance drumming at the university. Now, the ubiquitous trotro taxi minibus had deposited us four hours
虽然[大学]世界音乐乐团最多只能提供“真实事物”的苍白模拟，但隐含的目标仍然是通过表演来自其他文化的音乐模型的近乎精确的复制品来最大限度地提高真实性。——Gage Averill(2004,100)在传统的非洲社会中，传统的力量自然是非常强大的，尽管它并不扼杀创造力。- - - J。H. Kwabena Nketia(2005, 334)例如，被保存在录音中的东西，只是几种可能的再现中的一种。六天来，蒂姆·菲尼和我一直在勒贡加纳大学(首都阿克拉的郊区)非洲音乐和舞蹈国际中心外的树荫下，全神贯注地学习传统的羊击鼓。第七天，2008年7月的一个下午，我们被带到距离加纳大西洋海岸几英里的佐泽(Dzodze)，这里靠近沃尔特河三角洲(Volta River delta)，参加当地一位母羊族妇女的葬礼。这是一个亲身体验我们最近在学术环境中学习和记忆的音乐的机会。然而，菲尼和我强烈反对我们自己的新假设;那天晚上谈得很晚，我们痛斥自己的天真。我们今天在Dzodze听到的传统的agbadza葬礼音乐与我们过去一周沉浸在其中的agbadza音乐并不匹配。去年夏天，在准备开始担任康奈尔大学打击乐总监一职时，菲尼曾私下与塔夫茨大学的民族音乐学家、伊族音乐和文化专家大卫·洛克以及北德克萨斯大学的非洲乐团总监托吉·米达乌·吉迪恩·弗利·阿洛沃伊一起学习，他们都是享誉国际的教育家。在这一年中，菲尼还从附近宾厄姆顿大学的另一位埃维音乐专家詹姆斯·伯恩斯(James Burns)和舞蹈教练皮埃尔特·阿阿吉(Pierrette Aboadji)(也是加纳舞蹈团的前成员)那里持续学习。在2008年的联合旅行中，伯恩斯为我们提供了后勤支持、住宿和与加纳重要音乐家的接触。作为康奈尔大学的民族音乐学和音乐学教授，我之前接触到Ewe击鼓可以追溯到20世纪80年代和90年代初我在加州大学伯克利分校与Ewe大师鼓手C. K. Ladzekpo的本科(和一些研究生)学习，以及我的博士学习和随后对非洲侨民的研究，特别是与爵士乐有关的研究。在加纳大学密集的一周时间里，菲尼和我，还有来自伦敦大学亚非学院的学生詹姆斯·加德纳(James Gardner)，在约翰逊·凯梅(Johnson Kemeh)的六天课程中，试图学习半个学期的击鼓模式和演奏技巧。凯梅是加纳大学仪式和舞蹈击鼓方面的主要专家导师之一。现在，无处不在的trotro出租车小巴已经把我们送到了四小时以外的地方(全程只有197公里，或122英里)，我们准备从科佐·塔博洛(Kodzo Tagborlo)那里了解更多我们所理解的“传统”，他是沃尔特地区的主要鼓手，也是中型城镇佐泽(Dzodze)的首席鼓手，佐泽是一个商业中心和县城。(3)作为文化外行人、活跃的音乐家和音乐学者，菲尼和我都急于“把它做好”——尽可能真实地学习伊维族的仪式和舞蹈击鼓技术、曲目和背景。菲尼刚从耶鲁大学(Yale)的打击乐专业获得音乐艺术博士学位，他一心要培养自己的技能，而我也渴望培养自己的技能。现在我们一起上课，打算在加纳集中的三周实地调查和课程中学习相同的材料，这样他的世界击鼓和舞蹈合奏团和我的音乐调查课程，非洲侨民，可以相互建立和加强。…
{"title":"A Negotiated Tradition: Learning “Traditional” Ewe Drumming","authors":"Steven F. Pond","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0169","url":null,"abstract":"Although [college] world music ensembles provide at best a pale simulacrum of \"the real thing,\" the implicit goal is still to maximize authenticity by performing near exact replicas of musical models from other cultures. --Gage Averill (2004,100) In traditional African societies the force of tradition is naturally very strong, although it does not stifle creativity. --J. H. Kwabena Nketia (2005, 334) That which is enshrined in a sound recording, for example, is only one among several possible renditions. --Kofi Agawu (2003, 19) For six days Tim Feeney and I had been acutely focused on learning traditional Ewe drumming, sheltered in the shade of a tree outside the International Centre for African Music and Dance at the University of Ghana at Legon (a suburb of the capital city of Accra). On day seven, a July afternoon in 2008, we were taken to Dzodze, a few miles from Ghana's Atlantic coast near the Volta River delta, to attend the funeral celebration for a local Ewe woman. Here was a chance to experience firsthand the music we had so recently studied and memorized in an academic setting. However, Feeney and I bumped hard against our own neophyte assumptions; talking it over later that evening, we berated our naivete. The traditional agbadza funeral music we'd heard today in Dzodze didn't match the agbadza music we had immersed ourselves in for the past week. (Pond 2008) (1) The previous summer, preparing to begin his position as director of percussion at Cornell University, Feeney had studied privately with ethnomusicologist and Ewe music and culture specialist David Locke, of Tufts University, and Torgbui Midawu Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, the African ensemble director at the University of North Texas, (2) both educators of international reputation. Feeney had supplemented these studies throughout the year with ongoing lessons from James Burns, another specialist in Ewe music, and Pierrette Aboadji, a dance instructor (and former member of the Ghana Dance Ensemble), both of nearby Binghamton University. Burns provided us with the logistical support, accommodations, and access to key Ghanaian musicians for our joint trip in 2008. An ethnomusicology and musicology professor at Cornell, my own prior exposure to Ewe drumming dated back to my undergraduate (and some graduate) study with Ewe master drummer C. K. Ladzekpo at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980s and early 1990s and to my doctoral study and subsequent research in the African diaspora, particularly as it relates to jazz. In our intensive week at the University of Ghana, Feeney and I, joined by James Gardner, a student from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, had been attempting to learn a half-semester's worth of drumming patterns and playing techniques in six days of lessons with Johnson Kemeh, one of the leading expert instructors in ritual and dance drumming at the university. Now, the ubiquitous trotro taxi minibus had deposited us four hours","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128558887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-09-01DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.2.0285
X. Livermon
The sweeping changes that ushered in the fall of the apartheid regime and the implementation of a Bill of Rights has generally meant that more attention has been paid to human rights and dignity in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly for those who were previously excluded from protections during apartheid. This article looks at contemporary South African popular culture through the lens of kwaito music in order to dissect how, years after apartheid, there are still those bodies that retain infrahumanity. 1
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Pub Date : 2014-08-15DOI: 10.5406/blacmusiresej.34.1.0009
Maxine W. Gordon
On a Thursday afternoon on June 5, 1947, at the C. P. MacGregor Studios in Hollywood, California, Dexter Gordon had a record date for Dial Records and wanted Melba Liston there. Not only did he want her to play, but he also wrote a tune for her, the aptly titled "Mischievous Lady." Dexter on tenor saxophone and Melba on trombone were joined by Charles Fox on piano, Chuck Thompson on drums, and Red Callender on bass, for two three-minute recordings. Melba was twenty-one years old, Dexter was twenty-four years old, and the oldest one in the band was Red Callender, who was thirty-one. Here was a recording with five musicians who were young in years but who had plenty of musical experience and were ready to do the job at hand with Melba as peer and as "Mama." As Melba remembered it, "When he got his record date, he said, 'Come on, Mama'--I think they were callin' me Mama already back then, 'cause I used to fuss with them about smokin' their cigarettes or drinkin' their wine--and they'd come and get me when something was goin' on, and I would play little gigs with them. I was scared to go in the studio, though, because I didn't really hang out with them when they were jamming and stuff. I was home trying to write, so I didn't have that spirit on my instrument as [an] improvisational person. I was really very shy. I really didn't want to make that record session. I don't know which was worse--makin' it or trying to persuade them to leave me out of it" (Placksin 1982, 181). But she made it, and the recording became a part of the body of fertile music that young jazz musicians produced in the middle of the twentieth century, music that was the product of years of working together in close community--studying together, eating together, laughing together, and, yes, playing together. The recording also showed Melba as "Mama" in a different sense: She was the "boss" of an improvisational sound that made her, at the very least, first among equals and that won her a legendary status among jazz musicians. The recording date pays homage to an accomplished musician seemingly too modest to acknowledge her musical influence or dominance. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Melba joined the Musicians Union (Local 767, the Colored Musicians Union) when she was sixteen-years old in order to take her first professional job as a member of the Lincoln Theater pit band. We tend to think of the postwar generation of innovative musicians as fully grown artists who made the world anew and blew the culture open with their revolutionary sound, but it is important to remember how young they were at these key moments in their own creative lives and in the changing cultural times. The environment around Los Angeles, and Central Avenue in particular, allowed for a community of young musicians to grow musically and socially. These relationships were formative and, in the case of Dexter and Melba, led to friendships that lasted throughout their lives. The musicians lived near each other, many in the
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Pub Date : 2014-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0085
G. Bradfield
I have to dig down and do it from there, it's all from my soul. I write soul music, more or less. --Melba Liston (1996) I first entered Melba Liston's musical world through her work with iconic pianist and composer Randy Weston. An aspiring young saxophonist working in a record store in the early 1990s, I stumbled on his Spirits of Our Ancestors (Verve 551 857-2), in which Weston and Liston weave diverse strands of their musical heritage together, blending African rhythms with modem harmony, sophisticated composition with wild flights of improvisation. Twenty years later, I had the opportunity to explore that world further through Liston's scores, archived at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. (1) My most recent CD at that time, African Flowers (Origin 82572), documented a series of ten interconnected pieces portraying my experiences touring eastern and central Africa. For my next recording, I hoped to explore music that had influenced African Flowers, ranging from traditional regional African music to western-influenced styles such as Congolese Rumba to jazz works inspired by Africa. In the last category, the long collaboration between Weston and Liston looms large; from Uhuru Afrika (Mosaic Select 4) to Khepera (Verve-Gitanes 557 821-2), their most compelling work is permeated with African rhythms and themes. Examining Liston's archives, I initially focused solely on the Weston scores. Through these, I hoped to gain some understanding of how the two of them dealt with the African elements in their music and, if possible, apply their methods to my integration of African musical traditions into my own work. I also intended to identify some works that could be reorchestrated for my ensemble to pay tribute to the Weston-Liston canon as part of the aforementioned recording project. Shortly after commencing my research, however, I realized that very little of the CBMR collection revealed anything directly about Liston and Weston's use of African source materials. The most significant materials are a letter from Weston (Weston 1959) to the record label Roulette, mentioning the need for a month's preparation and research for Uhuru Afrika and the notation of percussion rhythms--unusual in these scores--for "Bantu." The fact that these rhythms differ slightly from those on the recording perhaps indicates some collaboration between composers and musicians or a degree of improvisational freedom in the recording session. This is hardly surprising, though, and not enough to extrapolate much about the composers' specific methods concerning the influence and integration of African music. More importantly, as I looked through the vast collection of Liston's scores for everyone from Weston to Dizzy Gillespie, Marvin Gaye to Mary Lou Williams, I came to recognize her unique voice and wide-ranging, yet rarely acknowledged, contribution to jazz, rhythm and blues, and other American musical forms in the latter half of the twentieth cent
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