Playing Together – Being Together

 

Is there something unique about the experience of playing music with other people? Is there a deep philosophical and moral lesson to be learned from just banging on some drums with a few friends? I want to say ‘yes.’

 

I’m currently playing caixa (snare drum) in a samba ensemble led by a talented Brazilian musician and academic visiting the United States for a semester. She studied in the oldest samba school in Porto Alegre for three years before beginning to teach samba ensembles at a local college. Here, our ensemble is made up of several music students, musicologists, and other people from the community. And what she stresses is that samba’s main lesson comes from playing together. The music only works when we listen not to our own parts, but those of everyone else. When that happens, when in sync with other people, there is a feeling of unity, and it is this feeling that drove her to want to teach samba to others.

 

 For anyone who has never had the experience of playing music intensely with other people it is quite easy to describe, whether you believe my description or not. In essence, in the process of really ‘grooving’ with other people, in really getting what you’re playing in sync with what they’re playing, the normal self-awareness which we often call ‘consciousness’ falls away and you become one with all the others. Or, to more precisely describe the experience, all awareness of self and other disappears – one simply is with others, there is no perceived distinction. All that exists in the moment is the music. One literally has the sensation that one has become the music itself.  This inevitably comes to an end, often to the mild shock of the individual and the detriment of the music. A sense of ‘where have I been?’ or ‘how much time has passed?’ belies the being-somewhere-else of the experience. But why might this be interesting?

 

In brief, I feel that in these experiences of the loss of the self we glimpse the being-with others that is always already our mode of being in the world. We are not, to contradict Descartes, isolated minds, each our own island. Instead we are only insofar as we are with other people. We think in a language we share with other people. We conceive of ourselves in relation to others. Our world is populated largely by those close to us. The world is not of our creation, but handed to us by others already filled with meaning. And I believe that this ecstatic experience one can have while playing with other people shows us that our being is always together with other people. By presenting an extreme version of our everyday being in the world, playing together shows us the world for what it is, and can help us be better people. At least, that’s what I hope.

 

So, if you can, find someone to play some music with. Join a local ensemble. Look for a choir or a percussion group in your area and see if you don’t then see the world differently: one, and not many. 

Oh, the (parody of) Germans

 

Larry Goldings, Thelonious Monk, and Musical Understanding

 

 

 

This video parody was created by the accomplished jazz pianist Larry Goldings, presumably to express his admiration of Thelonious Monk. While fascinating on many levels I find it particularly interesting for what it demonstrates about musical understanding. In brief, I want to argue that you can only understand Monk’s music if you have already gained some proficiency in listening to jazz of the first half of the twentieth century, such as stride, swing, bebop, and the blues to boot. In turn, the video is only funny if you understand Monk’s music. Thus, at its base, what it represents is a parody of a loving parody. And a simultaneously humorous and insightful one at that demonstrates understanding is never in itself. Understanding is always deferred to something else, that something else further on. And on and on.

What good is musicology?

 

To disclose a musical understanding.

 

This is the answer, in brief, to a question endlessly posed in myriad forms by discerning granting committees, well-intentioned advisors, curious colleagues, befuddled friends and family, and, not least among them, ourselves. Why do we study the musical practices of others and our own? Why do we expose an otherwise enjoyable past-time – in our case – to excruciating dissection? Would the world be any different were we to desist? I have toiled with these questions as much as any other and I wish to suggest an answer. Musicologists, in the catholic meaning of the term, are no different from others in their ability to understand music, to learn to play instruments, or even to recognize the intricate interrelations music has with other spheres of human activity. In fact a stronger argument could be made to the contrary, that musicologists are too often cloistered in their world of theory and abstraction to really get to the heart of the matter as do unreflective musicians, performers, or listeners. Their skill, and hence utility, lies elsewhere. Musicologists make explicit that which we always already knew; they help us see, hear, and feel that which was always already present in experience and practice.

 

Musical understanding, musical being is, I maintain, not something privy solely to a few Bach specialists, sitar gurus, Bird devotees, or the like. It is, rather, a species of experience common to most all humans. Perhaps the Suyá of the Amazon’s Upper Xingo Basin spend more of their time singing than we do, but music as a meaningful experience pervades our lives nonetheless. Were alien anthropologists to live among the people of the cosmopolitan West, to take one example, certainly they would note that, while particular topics rouse the interest of only a few at any given gathering – some talk on the politics of paper versus plastic bags, others the statistics of a certain Cubs sporting team – all seemed possessed of adept knowledge in the realm of what they call ‘music.’ A small majority had some training as practitioners on piano, guitar, or another common instrument; many attended musical rituals called ‘concerts’ on a semi-regular basis – some in large, grandiose halls, others in dark, alcohol-soaked chambers; all were familiar with innumerable performers, historical events of musical import, and the correct behavioral norms specific to various activities. To boot, their daily routines were saturated by mechanically-reproduced music issuing forth from radios and iPods, computers and elevators. Music was everywhere and everyone an expert they would have to conclude.   But if musical understanding is so common a good, then it cannot be in its attainment that lies the distinctiveness of musicologists. Their skill, simply or not so simply, is to allow our musical understanding to disclose itself to us; to aid us in seeing what lies right before our noses.

 

Of course a visual metaphor will not do if the phenomenon is, in the first place, aural. To appreciate what is valuable in the musicological endeavor we must first clarify what is meant by the experience in question. What does it mean to experience music as meaningful? Why do unfamiliar musics often irritate or fascinate us, or at least leave us cold? In short, what does musical understanding consist in? Perhaps two brief tableau will make clear what phenomenon we’re after here. 

 

 

1. Sunday Jam Session

The Velvet Lounge on Chicago’s near South Side, 9:30 pm. The small, dark, intimate interior – last renovated in the 1960s, when wallpaper with large-print flowers in pastel pink, orange, and green was still en vogue – is populated almost exclusively by men is ‘casual attire.’ The house band, a handful of other musicians who have come to sit in, and ten or so familiar listeners are here, chatting and babying a $1.50 Schlitz or a bottle of High Life. No one’s really here to drink  – they’ve come for the music. Kobe, Josh, and Jim (drums, bass, and piano, respectively) take the stage and the already subdued crowd ceases to talk. The altoist Dennis Winslett climbs the three wooden stairs to the stage, inaudibly asks the band if “Cherokee” is ok, and they nod. Dennis closes his eyes, puts his horn to his mouth, taps his foot, and counts quietly, “a-one, a-two, a-one, two, three…,” and they’re off. The audience members smile appreciatively, bop their heads, feet, or hands along to the beat. One furrows his brow as Dennis begins his solo with a clever repetition of one tone in an unpredictable rhythm, waiting anxiously for the pending torrent of notes we all know is to come. Another focuses on Jim’s reserved, but way-out comping style, trying to jive the chord changes in his head with those emanating from the piano’s amplifier. When Kobe’s turn comes, all concentrate on the mixture of Art Blakey’s intensity and Roy Haynes’ inventiveness this ‘young lion’ embodies. People shake their heads in disbelief, but in truth they know exactly what to believe. This is ‘sick’ jazz, as Josh would put it, as good as it gets, and everyone feels it way down inside.

 

 

2.Mom listens to the BaAka

The built-in oak desk in the kitchen of my childhood home in Iowa, 9:30 am. Having cleared away the breakfast things, I boot up the computer at my mother’s desk and open a web site created by the ethnomusicologist Michelle Kisliuk on the BaAka pygmies of the Central African Republic. I navigate to the short video clip of the Mondimba dance and call over to her, “Hey Mom, could I show you something?” wanting to see what her reaction might be. She’s removed her apron and found a lukewarm cup of coffee; she comes and sits at the desk. The footage begins. A couple dozen people in little or no dress dance in a rough circle. Straw huts can be seen in the background on the red dirt earth. In the clearing formed by the short, dark-skinned men and women is a figure covered in a full-body cone-like mask made of leaved branches tied at one end and inverted over the head of the dancer beneath. He or she twirls in one direction, then the other with no discernible regularity. The other dancers sing in seeming disharmony; the song has no obvious structure; the words are indecipherable. The video ends. Mom doesn’t know what to make of it, and, having humored me, goes off to do her morning crossword.

 

In addition to what phenomenon I’m interested in here, I hope these two scenes have provisorily shown the degree to which music is entwined in a ‘web of culture,’ to use the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1926-2006) well-worn turn of phrase. Beginning with something as artless as music the understanding situation quickly thrusts one into cultural domains once thought truly far afield. As though we were ever innocent of its kin, we find ourselves no longer talking just about ‘music,’ but about religion, bodily practice, and sexual mores. In short, in understanding music we may begin with music, but we soon find ourselves concerned with a whole way of life. This strikes me as a fitting metaphor. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1967, b. Meßkirch), with his passion for etymology, would surely have pointed out that ‘way’ comes from the German ‘Weg’ meaning a ‘path.’ Paths are connections between points created by habit, by wearing down the earth, by impressing the ground with the regularities of our lives. As individuals pass over the same route, one following the other, day after day, the grass – at first merely trampled and sad – recedes and dies, leaving the bare earth. More time passes and the barren path eventually becomes a deep scar on nature’s visage. Thus practice marks the landscape, just as the landscape of human activity is guided by the path, leaving its traces in our talk (“That’s the way to Erlangen.”) and our things (shoes, walking sticks, backpacks). Following the path is much easier than forging one anew. To understand walking begins with the path, but quickly takes us to speech about directions and equipment for the practice. They, in turn, take us to spatial arrangement of villages, forms of instruction, the material bases of leather production, and so forth. To understand means to understand a way of life, to be fluent in a practice.

Are iPods Antisocial?

A Short History of Recorded Sound: Part II 

Many of us remember the 80s and by far one its highlights was the advent of the Walkman. Seemingly ubiquitous overnight – well, I may have begun to form permanent memories at that point, so that’s just my take on it – the Walkman took what was already a good thing, the cassette, and made it that much better. A beautiful object of industrial design, the feeling of holding an early Walkman must have rivaled that of the iPod itself. A robust mechanical box a mere few times the size of the re-recordable cassette it held within, the Walkman was the ultimate in portability, even if it didn’t yet quite fit in your pocket. While radio and portable cassette decks had split the listening audiences into tiny splinters, the teens giggling in their rooms, dads rockin’ out in the garage, and mom with her NPR pacifier always in the background, the Walkman transgressed all remaining boundaries (well, except the shower). Now listening to music was possible not only in isolation, but as a force of isolation. The street, the sidewalk, the supermarket all were transformed from necessarily public spheres into semi-private ones, where you no longer had to fear eye contact or the possibility of someone asking you a question.  

For many – especially the shy and misogynistic among us – this was a godsend. And commuters, lawn-care personnel, and bus drivers around the industrialized world were partially relieved from the drudgery of their duties. But the flip-side of this was a diminution of social interaction. The Walkman made people antisocial. Our social interactions are based on many media – body language, facial expression, clothing, even an aura or mood, if you will – but prominent among them is the auditory realm of listening and speaking. The Walkman shut this off. With Michael Jackson deftly filling out Quincy Jones’ best-laid plans in your cans, honking horns, public announcements, and, primarily, speech was filtered out. That channel was turned off. Thus, in a certain regard the iPod was nothing new. Ok, its beauty matched the minimalist sensibilities of the 90s – desperately needed as the world itself became paralyzingly complex. And, yes, it prevented us from having to carry other tapes in our hip packs. Agreed, it fit in a pocket every so easily. But, these were not differences of kind. 

What I want to argue, however, is that beyond a certain threshold differences in degree become differences in kind. That it to say, yes, the Walkman was also a portable music listening device that removed people into their own isolated worlds, but the iPod’s ubiquity has pushed the social body into a new realm: publicness is disappearing, monism is on the rise. Lest you think I want to make some sort of logical argumet here about why such a threshold exists and what proves we’ve crossed it, let me disappoint you. To follow the advice of the philosopher Bert Dreyfus, I intend to “Stick to the phenomena!” Walk down the street (if you happen to live somewhere where people do that), or sit on some form of public transportation, or go even to a local mall or cafe and what you will find today are not people, but isolated persons. The martian from outer space would report that the humans seem unable to walk around in public without little wires streaming down from their ears. Is it fashion? Is the sound of the social just too scary? What has changed here on Earth? On my last visit they still seemed to be able to talk to each other, to look at each other, to stand the being of one another. 

That this is the case, I will allow you all to confirm or deny for yourself. Certainly this phenomenon is more developed in urban areas in the industrial West and less developed elsewhere. But, I contend, the trend is inexorable, for just as the Walkman was replaced, so is the iPod on the verge of its certain death. Approximately 120 million mp3 players of various sorts are estimated to be in use around the globe. Of our world population that is relatively insignificant. But roughly 1.5 billion people carry a cell phone, making it more common by a factor of ten. Thus when all those cell phones are traded in for new music-capable ones in the coming years, the phenomenon described above will only accelerate. Perhaps the public sphere will disappear all together. A recent article in the journal Technology Review spoke of contact lenses that would allow visual information to be laid over what the wearer sees. When we all listen to our smartphones and read email off our contact lenses, hopefully our bodies will still be able to guide us along the street. Maybe we’ll be able to go door-to-door without registering the existence of even one other being. Wouldn’t that be a relief?  

Are iPods Antisocial?

 

A Short History of Recorded Sound and Practice: Part I

 

Let’s face it. Until the middle of our last, wonderful century listen to music was a social activity. Cheap radios, Walkmen, and iPods have changed that. Now we listen alone. What have we lost?

 

Of course people have always sung to themselves, whether in the shower or the brook nearby, while musicians have sat alone and played only for themselves. Music as a solitary experience was not unknown before the 20th century. It was just rare. Edison invented the first working device to record sound in 1877. His cyclinder gramophone was designed as an early answering machine – for telegraphists unable to take down multiple incoming messages at once – but, as is so often the case, its revolutionary power was felt elsewhere. Indeed it wasn’t until more than 10 years later that a bright manager of his in San Fransisco decided people might enjoy listening to sounds for entertainment that its possibilities for music were even explored. In these so-called “sound parlors” one could pay a small fee to sit around a phonograph outfitted with five listening horns and hear the sound of animals, human voices, and music too. To these earliest of recorded media listeners the novelty and strangeness was the point. A player piano was comprehensible as a mechanical device that activated the keys, but how sound was captured on a small cylinder of cardboard and wax was a pure wonderment at the turn of the century.

 

Within a decade or two of the first sound parlors cylinder and disc gramophones became public commonplaces. Found in cafes and living rooms people quickly developed a taste for listening to Caruso or Bessie Smith – the world’s finest entertainers and musicians – in the comfort of their locales. But listening still remained a social activity. Slowly replacing the piano that had been the center of social activity, people were accustomed to gathering together for musical entertainment, sharing in the experience, and, presumably, singing and dancing along.

 

What began to change this was the invention of the transistor. Building on “borrowed” 1925 patent papers from the physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, researchers at Bell Labs created the first working model in 1947, and production began soon thereafter. The transistor is, in essence, just an amplification circuit, but one much smaller and durable than the vacuum tubes it replaced. This allowed for the miniaturization of electronic devices which continues to this day. But its immediate impact was on the radio. Radio had taken off during the 20s and become a major source of entertainment, especially during the years of the Great Depression. Much as they did with the piano and gramophone, people gathered together for entertainment, dancing, and socialization in homes and cafes listening to live concerts broadcast over the air waves. But, as we all know from antique stores, vacuum tube radios were large, heavy devices that needed to be plugged into the wall. Transistors allowed radios to be made small, light-weight, and battery-powered. Listening was becoming a more solitary activity.

 

Not just for stealing away to one’s room or listening in the park on a sunny day, the portable radio had a significant role in the development of a separate youth culture. When only one device was in each house and families listened together there was a tendency towards compromise. Everyone listened to the same things, and you’ll bet the elders had more say. The transistor radio circumvented this necessity allowing the younger generation to listen to their own music and radio shows, whether the parents and grandparents liked it or not. It was no longer any of their business. Be it in pairs or huddled under the bed sheets late at night, listening to music had moved out of the living room, out of the larger social realm towards the private.

 

In the next part we’ll move on to the Walkman and the iPod. Certainly though if anyone has any comments I’d love to hear them.

Does Music Disclose the Temporality of Being? Part II

In the last post I introduced the extremely basic concept of temporality as experienced by human being, what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Dasein. In this post I want now to turn to this concept as applied to the experience of music. It is Heidegger’s wish that we return “to the things themselves.” A rudimentary understanding of phenomenology – the method used by Heidegger to uncover the nature of being – is that it claims we too often miss what is right in front of our noses. In this case not a set of keys we’re looking for, but the very nature of our experiences. His ultimate goal was to uncover the nature of being, but not by any active means, but by letting being disclose itself to us. The process of phenomenology is one of letting things speak to us as they are in themselves. Being, as simultaneously highly abstract and yet ever-present, is extremely difficult to attend to for precisely those reasons. It is my claim, then, that at least this temporal aspect of being – that of the past and future as immanent in the present – is most easily disclosed in our experience of music.

 

Let’s think about an example. Imagine listening to a piece of music, or playing one yourself. Whether you’re familiar with the piece or the tradition your ears attend to it as its patterned sound reaches you. (I’m assuming here that you’re listening to it as music, and as such you’re assuming that it is intentional and patterned.) You note as many aspects as you can, sounds, timbres, rhythms, phrases, anything that might be recognizable as an entity. When you find it you note it mentally. As you build an inventory of object in the sound you have a database against which you can reference the sound of the present, and given the successions heard in the past you hear new sounds and make guesses about where the music is going, what a phrase will do, how a rhythm will end. Thus, even in our brief example we see how, in listening to music, our experience may remain in the present – it can’t do otherwise – but our attention is split between the past and the future. The past gives the present meaning, tells us what we’re hearing, and allows us to listen for the future. But the future remains always unsure – at least until the piece ends – and thus we keep guessing what will come of our present.  

 

The usefulness of this aesthetic attention to music, then, is that is listening to music and letting our temporal experience of music speak to us, we gain insight into the way Dasein always already is. We are better attuned to how our lives are always in the present, but always constituted by the past, and oriented toward a future. Just as music is a pleasing tension between the known and the unknown, ever on a knifes edge, so is our being at once sure and unsure. Perhaps music lets us hear our being more clearly.

Does Music Disclose the Temporality of Being? Part I

One feature of Dasein according to Heidegger’s Being and Time is that, in contrast to the other two kinds of being, Dasein – the kind of being that people have – stands in a unique relation to time. Both objects of the universe and the equipment of our world (the other two kinds of being – Vorhandensein and Zuhandensein) exist in time, they were in the past and will continue to be in the future, but their being is not concerned with either; their being isn’t directed towards the not-now. People, on the other hand, are quite different. They are, to use Sartre’s rather obtuse expression, “not what they are and what they are not.” That is to say, for us the past and the future are always immanent in the present.   

 

The past is an issue for us because of our insistence upon the unity of the subject. Rocks and hammers are quite happy whether we think them unitary or not, but people/Dasein is convinced of its persistence through time. Bluntly put, we take “I” to stand for something that is the same now as it was when I was a child and that will remain so (at least) until my death. But this self is not stable or unchanging. We grow, experience new things, change our minds, move to new countries, even our very cells are replacing themselves constantly. Nonetheless, the past is for us constitutive of the present. Our being is at once now and simultaneously past; we are not what we are, but what we were. 

 

The case of the future is different, but similarly straight forward. Demonstrated by our willing of things to happen, our orientation towards doing things in the world, our outlook is also always ahead of itself. Except when reflecting on the past or when forcing ourselves to be truly conscious of the present our focus remains primarily not in the now, but in the future. We view our selves as projects moving towards some goal, be it so grand as becoming a world-renowned novelist or making dinner for the evening. From big to small our intentionality towards the world and towards ourselves is in the not-yet,  in the will-be.

 

That this is the case can not be proven in any scientific or logical sense. I can not write out a proposition regarding Dasein’s orientation towards temporality, but it can be disclosed. In the Heideggerian phenomenological tradition, if we pay sufficient attention to the phenomena themselves they will show themselves as they are in themselves. Proof can only come from hearing of similar conclusions reached by other people. Thus, if you can not sympathize with the explanation given above then you will have difficulty following the argument any further. But if this realization strikes you as strange, then that needn’t be cause for concern. Phenomena are not hidden from us, but we are all too often insensitive to their being as they are. We are too caught up in our own habits of the world to pay them sufficient attention. This is the core of the realization one has when walking around one’s neighborhood and paying real attention to the buildings, trees, etc. They have not changed, but we are shocked to see all that is there, missed because of lack of attention. I will leave it there for now. In the next part I want to move from Dasein – our way of being – to music as something that discloses this temporal aspect of being. 

Notes on Musical Understanding

 

 

1. Over Christmas (2007) I spent many of my morning hours reading and contemplating a seemingly rather obscure topic: what does musical understanding consist in? What is it to ‘get’ a piece of music and what is it to fail. Does it even make sense to ask this question? Must we retreat to the weak multi-culti view that everyone has their own understanding of music and that’s just fine. Philosophers of music – that rare breed – has taken this as one of their central questions over the past twenty years and some progress has been made, but the answers remain inchoate. It is not my purpose here to fill that lacuna – that I’m trying to do in a longer work, which I may share here later – but to ask some of the recurring questions and outline central areas of discourse. These are notes, thoughts, and, ultimately, a request for input.

 

 2. Understanding music is equivalent to getting its meaning. In understanding music we understand its meaning. Thus what understanding consists in is based on a conception of musical meaning. Ethnomusicologists have, in my opinion, the most interesting things to say on this topic as their view of the subject is necessarily so catholic. The historical musicologists and philosophers of music alike seem unaware of music outside the western European art tradition (except for a small cabal young enough to deal with rock music) and this myopia severely limits the scope of their thinking. Musical practices (musics, as many ethnomusicologist prefer) are each so very distinct that any inductive reasoning from such a small sample inevitably gives rise to dubious results. If we restrict ourselves to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms then coming to grips with a form of universal human practice will be as difficult as surmising the basics of human taste by visiting McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Burger King. 

 

The simplest and most reliable entry to this question is dictated by Ludwig Wittgenstein – one of the 20th century’s most significant philosophers – in his statement, Don’t think, but look! Musics are always practices; they are collections of sounds, actions, bodies, habits, instruments, dances, behaviors, and beliefs all mixed together into a multivalent happening and doing that we can see, hear, and experience for ourselves. To withdraw to the study and contemplate the meaning of music is to mistake meaning for thought. Meaning is in the world and so it is there that we must seek it. Now ethnomusicologists may not phrase their thinking quite this way, but their actions speak quite clearly. Still today, after more than two decades of sustained critique of the traditional ethnographic method as colonialist, imperialist, and just plain exploitative, no one has found away around the necessity of living among a musical practice in order to learn its ways. Thus, most scholars spend at least one full year in “the field” observing music making, learning to play an instrument themselves, noting the wider cultural, social, religious, economic, and gender practices, and boning up on the people’s history. The result of this is a fluency with a musical practice – albeit often rather rudimentary – that can be likened to basic fluency with a language. Understanding a music is like being fluent in a language.

 

3. Much has been made over the years of the similarities and differences between music and languages and I have no desire to repeat them here. It will suffice to say that anyone who thinks for more than 60 seconds about the platitude, “Music is the universal language,” can spot a leak or three. But however weak the similarities concerning how music means, the similarity of fluency seems to hold up. The philosopher Jerrold Levinson, to name but one person who comes to mind, has called this musical literacy. That is to say a piece of music doesn’t exist in isolation. Even when I sit down to listen to it by itself it is always heard in relation to other hearings of other pieces from the same tradition or in contrast to other, distinct traditions. But in the former, more usual case, it is by learning what to listen for, how to listen that I can knowingly, understandingly listen.

 

Think of listening’s first steps. Like those of the first words in a new language, they are awkward, one is unsure what is important, what should be attended to, what is considered a move, what a resolution. Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well.” And here we are really at the root of the matter. Music, as a human practice, is largely arbitrary – in the sense that it could be otherwise – and largely learned – in that knowledge must be gained through socialization and experience. Thus, to understanding a music one must have spent a sufficient amount of time in the world of that music. One must learn to feel at home, to dwell, to know the way about to understand what a music is.

Traces in the Blues: The Genre as a Creative Syncretism of African and European Sources

 

Part III 

 

The fodet genre of Senegambia discussed in the last part of this essay remains alive today and clearly displays the musical characteristics that make it intriguing to listen to in comparison with the blues of the early 20th century. Formally fodet pieces are cyclical like the blues’ common 12-bar repeating chord structure; melodically they emphasize two to four descending phrases arranged in a particular pattern – sometimes even AAB, thus directly analogous to the blues’ structure; most fodet pieces have one main tonal center (its key, if you will) that is played in for the larger part of the cycle and one other tonal center (usually a whole step away) that functions much like the V/dominant tonal center of the blues’ cycle last four bars;   and the melodic material emphasizes the fifth very strongly, just as in the blues. The instrument – xalam – is from the family of instruments known to be the basis of the banjo in the United States, interesting because the fiddle, banjo, tambourine trio was probably the most common in early US-American history. Finally, the social role of fodet players – keepers of history, social commentators, inter-group diplomats, and entertainers all rolled into one – bears striking similarity to that of later blues men. Given these parallels and the fact that an overwhelming number of slaves were shipped from Senegambia and the Guinea Coast in the 17th and 18th centuries together make a strong case for considering the fodet as a prominent musical tradition that affected the creation of the blues.

 

Common sense, however, is sometimes too common. While it makes sense that if we find similarities between two traditions and large numbers of people who came from one place and were transplanted to the other that this is the most likely route of transfer, we must ask whether it is actually the case. Gerhard Kubik, building upon the revolutionary insight of Paul Oliver, has challenged this doxa, arguing that it is perhaps not the number of people that matter but the fitness of the transfered material that matters most. For example the mouth-resonated musical bow played in white Appalachia almost definitely was a transfer from a similar tradition carried over by a small number of slave from Mozambique.

 

“People from southeastern Africa in the United States may have been few in number, but this would not necessarily inhibit their cultural influence. Here, as always, we have to bear in mind that culture is not necessarily transmitted in proportion to people’s numbers. One charismatic personality will suffice to release a chain reaction. One virtuoso musician can end up being imitated by hundreds. This fact has often been neglected by researchers proceeding from a collectivistic perception of culture. (Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues p. 13)

 

The argument is powerful, I find, especially if we look to other cultural practices where one person indeed has caused a tidal shift, such as Kenny Clarke’s revolution in jazz drumming or Charlie Parker’s on the saxophone, to name but two within the musical realm.   Indeed, in an environment as hostile as that of the US slave culture a solo tradition may have had the greatest chance of success.   Even if this may not be the rule, it occurs often enough to cast doubt upon any argument based upon numbers of transported culture bearers. Understanding that power is in this case not in numbers allowed both Oliver and Kubik to look beyond the coastal areas for musical traditions which might bear even greater similarity to the blues. What they found was surprising.

 

Africa is no different than other geographies in the sharp distinctions there are between coastal and interior regions. Coasts tend to be places of intense trade and intercourse with other regions, often have different climates and cuisines, and thus it is unsurprising to find the musical traditions in the west central Sudanic hinterland – that geographic area just interior to the West African coast – are similarly distinct. Without pointing to a particular song type or genre Kubik shows how the musical styles of this area contrast with those of the Mande traditions on the coast. In addition to solo singing traditions accompanied by various stringed instruments (lutes such as the xalam and garaya; one-stringed fiddles such as goge, goje, and riti) the area displays an absence of polyrhythms and so-called asymmetric time-line patterns. Time-line patterns are repeated rhythms used to orient the players and listeners within a ‘bar.’ In the West we use many symmetric rhythms, such as 1234, 1234 or 123, 123, 123, whereas a common Brazilian one is 12312312, 12312312. In the latter the division is not even, but asymmetric, and Kubik has noted during his more than four decades of research in Africa that where polyrhythms are prominent, so to are asymmetric time-lines. Thus the absence of both in the blues – which uses a 4-beat bar and a symmetric shuffle feel (123, 123, 123, 123) – points similarly to an African tradition lacking such musical features, such as the west central Sudanic belt we’re looking at here. Lastly, Kubik notes that the singing style of this area emphasizes a “raw” vocal timbre and heterophony (singing a melody over a chordal background) similar to the blues and distinct from the “sweeter” timbres and parallel harmony of the coastal regions. 

 

The interior not only has a different culture because of differences in trade, subsistence, and interaction, but also because of the historical inheritance from the Muslim influence. Islamic converts fled to Africa still during Mohammed’s lifetime, but it was from the 8th century on that various parts of Africa – especially here in the eastern sub-Saharan area – were Islamicized, bringing them new instruments, musical traits, and practices. Chief among them for our purposes are the declamatory vocal style (loud voice, good projection, addressing an audience), wavy intonation (heavy vibrato, moving a pitch slightly around), use of melismas (the florid vocal improvisation often associated with blues and gospel singers, many notes sung to one syllable of text often at the end of a phrase) and the widespread use of pentatonic scales (scales with five pitches to the octave, not seven as is common in the West). Together these stylistic traits suggest to Kubik that the blues retained tonal and rhythmic material from the ancient Nigritic song styles – those discussed in the foregoing paragraph – and ornamentation and performance aspects of the Islamic influences.

 

What both Kubik’s and Coolen’s theories lack is any direct evidence for particular movements of people to areas of the United States and the emergence of even a proto-blues style that would raise one probability above the other. But I think it clear that both provide us with a clearer picture of the sorts of musical traditions that may have led to the blues of the early 20th century. Tracing these traits is no mere academic exercise for it forces us not only to listen to the music more closely, but it allows us to hear history embedded – consciously or not – in the very fabric of the sound. Thus heard, the music is forcefully thrust back into the real world from which it came and which gave it its life. In the next part we will return from Africa and look at the probable conditions in the New World from which the blues arose. The picture drawn will, for many, be a surprising one.

Rock – Rebellion or Maybe No?

Rebellion is the stuff rock ‘n’ roll is made of. If there is a line between rock and pop – and I think there is – then it is this attitude, this stance of doing the wrong thing that is at its center. Elvis’ voice is too wild, his hips out of control; the Stones’ reference to brown sugar a little too obvious; and, well, Heroin, is about doing heroin. Society at large rightly objected to these public expressions of alterity because they flew in the face of our accepted habitus and dared even to revel in it. The youth are being corrupted, the world is going to hell. (Fade in Led Zeppelin…)

 

Or have we been living in hell all along? Prof. Dr Peter Wicke (Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin), one of Europe’s leading experts on popular music culture, has suggested that the seeming rebellion of rock music culture is a space in which nascent traits of the dominant society are variously celebrated and decried. In short, rock is the place of social contest, but contest of traits already endemic to the whole of society. Such a proposition might irk our ready-rocker who wants to be called an outlaw, feared and yet respected for his – yes, his – brash disavowal of society’s mores, but it is quite promising for the observer wishing to find more than visceral value in the music culture of rock. Rock is thus transformed into prominent stage for the analysis of new social and cultural formations, thus extending Attali’s argument beyond the economic realm.

 

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1999/1984 [1977]) the French economist, politician, and Marxist intellectual argues that the stages of the mode of musical production through European history always foreshadow the analogous change in the economy. The movement from noise to music is the gradual acceptance of societal norms already present. “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. For this reason musicians, even when officially recognized, are dangerous, disturbing, and subversive (p 11).” Attali thus places musical rebellion in this liminal space between revolution and normativity: music is the rebellion of becoming normal.

 

Is the undulating, thrusting fascination of Elvis’ hips truly that radical to America culture of the 1950s? What about the dances of minstrelsy or the Charleston and the risque Josephine Baker? Sexualized dance was nothing new, but Elvis’ faux pas was to lay this bare and present it to a willing audience of teenage girls. Similarly, “interracial” sex and narcotic drug use are practically founding gestures of our great country given the liberties slave owners regularly took with their female property and the tobacco plantations of the colonies which supplied the Old Country. But these aspects of habitus remained proscribed from the dominant discourse, while rock dared talk about it and sell it to the little ones.

 

I will leave it to others to comment or reflect on this suggestion in relation to other examples. Further, I recognize the slight inconsistency of the theoretical position outlined above – is rock a true harbinger of new cultural artifacts or does it merely reveal what was already there? – but both demand a repositioning of rebellion in rock ‘n’ roll. Rock does not have the status of an Act in the Lacanian sense of initiating that which was previously inconceivable; it isn’t true revolution, but rather a ground on which very real, existing traits of the dominant society are contested.