All Songs (Really) Considered?

Is music still only sound? Is that all we can talk about? For me as a scholar it is striking (and worrying) that the non-academic media continues to discuss music almost exclusively as an autonomous art object. Be they commercial radio stations, television channels, web sites, or magazines the discourse centers on the sound, on genre, and, largely, on the influences of b(r)ands on each other. Isn’t there anything else?

 

This all struck me recently while listening to the NPR radio program All Songs Considered, hosted by the long-time director of the highly popular All Things Considered: Bob Boilen. I saw the podcast offered among iTunes recommended programs, read the blurb describing itself as an “eclectic mix of fresh music by emerging artists and breakout bands,” and thought I’d found myself a great new resource for discovering various musics of the world or at least of the US. Instead I found my iPod saturated with a rather lame, self-congratulating version of a college radio station. Indie-pop for hipsters is the fare of the day. I was amused for about twenty minutes.

 

So I returned to read the reviews given the program. Aren’t other people bothered by the incongruity between the title and the content? Indeed they are. A few laud Boilen for his choices, but the naysayers have the majority, all lambasting him for not including . . . heavy metal or pop or hip hop: i.e. other mainstays of the commercial music industry. The radio program he directs is widely praised because it does indeed take on a surprisingly large range of topics from near and far, the serious to the utterly mundane, all with very even respect and treatment. All Things Considered deserves, in my opinion, both its name and its reputation. All Songs Considered does not.

 

Take one recent episode in which an NPR intern was asked to come on the show to play some of his top picks and discuss them with Boilen. To start with the range of musical styles presented remained largely within the description given above. If one wants to argue about genre, then it is at the least safe to say that no non-Western or non-commercial music got any play. But what is really at issue here for me is the content of the discourse. (I’m using discourse here in the original Foucauldian sense of a hegemonic field of symbolic interaction which maintains control, in part, by defining what can be discussed and what cannot. See Foucault’s essay “The Discourse on Language,” 1971) The conversation between the two presenters was almost exclusively limited to three topics: 1. impressionistic descriptions of the sound of the band in question, 2. talk of instrumentation/orchestration, and 3. discussion of influence between bands and/or band members. A common rhetorical device was, “It sounds like a cross between band X and band Y.” Another, “Do you know musician Z? Ok, well s/he’s the leader of this new band.”

 

The points I’m making here are very simple. First, NPR should be disappointed in the narrow range of its All Songs Considered program. With such an obvious reference to its much more catholic relative, the program can be seen as an absolute failure in continuing the liberal, open discourse common to the network. Second, this limited range of discourse about music – found in a particularly striking example here in the radio program All Songs Considered – is common to the mass of media about music in the cosmopolitan world. The talk of music in our culture remains frighteningly separated from the world in which it takes place and it should worry us that this is the case.

 

Furthermore, this myopia represents a failure of ethnomusicology to publicly critique this pervasive formalist aesthetic and, more sinisterly, the success of the Kulturindustrie to divorce music from its centrally spiritual, political, historical, and identity-forming functions. We are left with little more than a series of Barbie-dolls about which we can discuss the merits of straight-cut bangs or decry the return of bell-bottoms (now called ‘boot cut’), and thereby forget the gender-role implications of playing with mammorous Scandinavian toothpicks and other trivia. Doesn’t music mean more than that to us?

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

Part II

 

If the blues is the most visible (or audible) genre in which freed blacks created a post-Emancipation identity both for themselves and for the European descendants, then there is far more at stake in searching for its “roots” than mere academic exercise. These narratives of musical origins tell us specifics about the people who were variously forced (slaves and convicts), coerced (indentured servants), or gladly brought (colonists and religious exiles) to the New World and thus about the history of our nation and the conditions under which its early citizens lived. For music is not an isolated “art” reserved for entertainment and contemplation, as the modern cosmopolitan ethos would lead one to believe, but an activity in which real people negotiate, comment upon, reflect, and sometimes alter the realities around them. If its surfaces may seem abstract – notes and chords, poetic texts and swooping voices, dancing bodies and tapping feet – its reality is grounded the mundane and its story is of everyday life.

 

Searching for the origins of the blues allows us not only to investigate the musical materials which define the genre and, thus, hear the music more precisely, but also to trace the paths of those musical traits carried by individuals over the Hell of the Atlantic and transplanted in the New World. It provides a chance to learn and hear the further history of ourselves. Here in brief, then, are two major theories of the origins of the blues in Africa – one locating the site of greatest influence on the Guinea Coast in contemporary Senegambia and the other positing the dominance of the west central geographic Sudan, in the savannah hinterlands.

 

Michael Coolen (University of Oregon) has made a strong argument for the fodet genre played in Senegambia, based on his field research in the late 70s. He found a strong, active tradition of solo musicians/historians/storytellers called xalamakat after their string instrument the xalam in the area of west Africa that was the largest source for African slaves to the United States. This caste of musicians come from the Wolof ethnicity, but play songs both from and among the many other ethnicities that make up Senegal and Gambia. In this genre Coolen found – beyond the performance practice characteristics (single male musician, wandering from town to town, low social position, interpreter of history) – a number of musical structural similarities between the fodet and the blues. The pieces of this genre are cyclical, with 6 to 24 beats per phrase, then built into structures of two to four such phrases. This is not dissimilar to the standard blues with three lines of 16 beats each. In addition, the tonal center of the phrases sometimes moves away from the root of the main phrase, just as the third phrase of the blues moves to a tonal center a fourth or fifth above (moving, for instance, from a tonal center in D for the first two phrases to one in G or A for the last, before going back to the D tonality) Further, the melodies of fodet are primarily falling (start on a high note at the beginning of a phrase and fall to a lower one at the end) and emphasize the perfect fifth (whichever note is exactly 7 semitones above the root), also attributes common to the blues.

 

Finally, Coolen cites organological evidence (that is, evidence about instruments), which he finds particularly convincing in his comparison with the blues. Among the Wolof, ensembles consisting of the bowed-lute riti, the plucked-lute xalam, and a tapped calabash are common and bear striking similarity to the popular 19th century ensembles with fiddle, banjo, and tambourine in the United States. Although no lineage is claimed for the fiddle or the tambourine, Coolen draws an interesting picture of the xalam in comparison to the banjo. The body of the xalam is an oblong resonator carved out of a piece of hardwood, then covered with a stretched piece of cow’s hide. This skin is fastened either with small pegs or nails and a wooden fretless fingerboard is attached. The xalam has five strings, traditionally made of horse hair, which are attached to the finger board at different lengths and there is no standard tuning as several are used. The construction similarities, especially the specificities in string number, lengths, and tunings, in addition to the use of a similar “claw-hammer” playing technique, make the comparison between the xalam and the banjo striking; the fact that it was used in ensembles very similar to the banjo-violin-tambourine make up used so extensively in the US gives even more food for thought.

 

In the next part of this essay I’ll introduce the theories of Paul Oliver and Gerhard Kubik for the savannah hinterland origin of many blues traits, while also discussing a little of the causal theory that must be considered when trying to determine which genre in Africa most likely had the greatest influence on the blues. Does it make sense, as Coolen thinks, to find the genre most similar and with the largest number of slaves, or could musical attributes brought over by just a few very charismatic individuals have found more fertile ground for other reasons in the New World?

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

Part I

 

This much is clear: the blues is a musical genre that arose in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. It is an American music which was in large part a creative response to the identity vacuum left in the black community after the end of the Civil War and Emancipation. Whereas the role of black folk in America was laid out very explicitly – if often violently – during slavery, the forced dismantling of those social institutions was not accompanied by new structures. As the monied class sought to maintain control of its property and social standing, the European lower classes – a very substantial section of the population – found itself in competition with the newly freed slaves for the resources at the bottom of society. This scramble for position was not isolated to the economic realm however. The identity of the freed slaves was now also open to interpretation from all corners of the society. In the legal realm the Black Laws sought to define as inferior to those not of European descent, and minstrelsy and vaudeville shows, with their lively (and hugely popular) combination of song and dance, often performed by whites in blackface, portrayed a stereotype of blacks as unintelligent, uncosmopolitan, childlike, and laughable which was clearly advantageous for the white lower class to propagate. But, as was the case during slavery as well, these attacks were not taken lying down.

 

More that any other artistic genre, the blues can be heard to respond to this war for identity. If we examine many aspects of the blues, both as a genre and as a musical practice, we find attributes which can easily be interpreted as a reaction against the dominant culture’s attempts to force the blacks into a subserviant corner, primarily by refusing to play the same game. The most obvious place to begin is with the texts. Their content can be largely divided into two themes: the laudable outlaw, who refuses to live in society or by its rules, but nonetheless (or, therefore) deserves our respect, and the liberating power of being down and out – a sort of modern day Job. Both of these themes propose a method of dealing with the lot dealt blacks after Emancipation, albeit in different ways. If you can’t find a place in a society that doesn’t want you, then leave – live on its borders; or find a spiritual method of transcendence that allows you to turn those abuses of society into your own advantage. And these forms of compensation and identity creation are not limited to the music, but are also mirrored in the musical practice of the early blues. The stereotype of the lone, male wandering blues man is corroborated by what evidence we have. Blind Lemon Jefferson, for example, has said that he travelled from town to town, show to show with little other than his instrument, following the trains and the money. Similar accounts are told by Robert Johnson and bluesmen before them. Thus these men not only sang about outlaws, they themselves chose to live on the edges of society – with no home, no steady job, no family – in effect rejecting the categories of society and positing the benefits of life beyond.

 

If this is the true import of the blues, not just a catchy musical genre, but a field on which the social position of blacks in a new America was fought, then it is little wonder that people want to find its sources. As a matter of course, the origins of the blues are most often sought in Africa, because – the reasoning goes – if the blues is an African American genre, and the African American ancestors came from Africa, then it only makes sense to look there. And that, indeed, has been the course of research. A majority of the slaves brought to the United States were most likely from parts of west Africa and it is musics from this region that the blues most closely resemble. In the next part of this essay I will examine a few of the most plausible and well-researched theories of the blues’ origins in Africa, looking at musical specifics and not the vague generalizations of the pop media. Only then will I be able to turn to the United States itself and the class-based (and not race-based) organization of the pre-Civil War society to make the case for the blues as a syncretic genre in which lower-class musicians – from both Europe and Africa – reacted to their plight and sought musical similarities to create a new American art form.

Review: “World Music: A Very Short Introduction” by Philip V. Bohlman

‘World music,’ ‘worldbeat,’ and today I heard ‘international music’ – what do all these names mean, if anything? Does Indian classical music count even though it’s a classical tradition? What about Indiana polka? Paul Simon? And are we really only talking about music? Where are the people, the markets, the histories, the cultures? These are but some of the questions which the eminent scholar Philip V. Bohlman (University of Chicago) has addressed in this 2002 contribution to the Oxford “Very Short Introduction” series, and the answers he provides are many.

 

This multiplicity is already present in the structure of the chapters, each of which includes six brief sections covering different kinds of knowledge and discourse. They begin with a so-called ‘encounter’ with world music. One of Bohlman’s main points in the book is that the othering adjective ‘world’ always already indicates that the named music is the result of an encounter – almost always between the West and the rest. ‘World’ in this context simply means strange, non-Western, different, fascinating. The first of these encounters, chronologically, Bohlman says was the arrival in Brazil of the Huguenot missionary Jean de Lery in 1557 and his writings on the music of the Tupinamba, his initial fright and confusion and his later delight and wondrement. This and other historical encounters which form the birth place of world musics also form the beginnings of the chapters.

The second section of each chapter introduces either a historical or theoretical topic. The ontologies of music is the first – what do various cultures consider music? The Muslim reading of the Koran, for instance, is not music. For the Brazilian worshippers of candomble there is no meaningful separation between music, dance, prayer. At another extreme, the Hausa of northern Nigeria have words for musicians, instruments, and other things and concepts related to music, but not for music itself. It is ontlogically absent from their world. Another chapter deals with the division between folk music and world music; yet another the influence of north African musics and music theory of the middle ages on Europe. Here Bohlman seeks few answers, but provides a great deal for thought in a brief space.

 

Next, we get a profile of a ‘world musician,’ but not primarily of the kind found in most journalism of world music. For example, Bohlman takes up the musicians of the Middle Passage, a term used to refer to the African slaves brought to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Although the names of these musicians might be lost, their music is more present than ever before in the African American musics of North America, the Carribean, and South America and further to pop and commercial world music made in countries much farther afield. Thus the scanty details of what these tragic, yet inspiring men and women played, danced, and sang on the decks of the very ships that symbolized their terror are all the more pregnant with meaning.

The fourth section of each chapter discusses an issue of meaning or identity in music as expressed in aesthetics. This discussion in chapter two deals with the pressing issue of the space created between the West and the rest by the very category of ‘world music.’ If world music is that non-Western music encountered, recorded, and then brought back to the home country for sale and/or analysis, then it is nothing other than cultural colonialism made possible by the same imbalance of power – economic, educational, political – which rightly incenses all world citizens bearing any conscience at all. That being the case, what are we to do with the musics we so enjoy, the musicians who so fascinate us? Is it ok to buy their music from multinational record companies and thus support this system of indirect exploitation? Doesn’t simply writing about a musical tradition, as if from a point of authority, further this imbalance? Yes probably, is the answer Bohlman gives us, and thus enjoins us to remain ever critical of this process creating the space/division between these two worlds. Only be being first conscious of what is the case can we attempt to alter it.

 

The last two sections of each chapter I’ll leave to the readers to discover for themselves, as I believe the scope of this introduction has been sufficiently displayed. World music is anything but a simple topic and Bohlman has not given simple answers, but has done an admirable job of putting both breadth and depth of thought into a lively and jargon-free form. If you are seeking a brief introduction to the main products…I mean…musicians in world music today, then look elsewhere. But if you are interested in a critical and thorough introduction to the worlds of music, then this may well be a very good start.

 

Reviewed Work:

Bohlman, Philip V. 2002. World Music: A Very Short Intrduction. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 177 pages.