William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (1950:73). This idea that the past is always present is at the heart of this paper. Nothing is created in a vacuum, and while the cultural constructs of historical eras differ vastly from those of the present, they crucially inform the here and now, being not dead, or even completely past. Of course, a comparison of historical and contemporary attitudes is something of an artificial construct in and of itself; while we might perceive past voices only through a glass, darkly, via diaries, documents, and art, these voices can enter into a dialogue with the present only through mediation by a third party, in this case, myself.^[i]

In my mediation, I want to take several voices from the past and, hoping that I do not put too many words in their mouths, contrast their constructed realities with related constructs in the present. The culture-scape is baroque opera in the years 1724 and 2005. The lens is Georg Frideric Handel's opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto or "Julius Caesar in Egypt."^[ii] I examine gender and sexuality interpretations that result from what has been called the "castrato problem." While this and many other baroque works were written specifically for castrati, the vocal superstars of the baroque era, the cessation of castration as a practice has thankfully forced contemporary opera directors to make a variety of choices when casting roles originally written for castrati. The resulting performances move beyond heteronormativity, and reinforce the characterization by culture scholars Corinne Blackmer and Patricia Smith of opera as a very queer art form (1995:8).

THE CASTRATI

To appreciate the nuances of contemporary stagings of baroque opera, we must begin with the history of the castrato. Castration is the surgical removal of the testicles. The practice of castrating boys for their singing voices—what has been called aesthetic castration, or castration for the sake of art—dates back to church choirs in early medieval Constantinople and 12th-century Spain, although there have been eunuchs throughout history.^[iii]Boys were castrated before the onset of puberty in order to preserve their fine high singing voices, a goal unfortunately not always realized. When conducted before puberty, the surgery altered hormone levels in the male body and resulted in a comparatively plastic skeletal structure; a rounder, softer, and hairless face; and a body that was significantly larger than that of the average man.

Figure 1: Gaetano Berenstadt (left) and Senesino (right) flank Francesca Cuzzoni in a 1723 caricature by John Vanderbank of Handel’s Falvio (Kelly 2004:43).

During the Renaissance era, hearing a castrato sing was the privilege of the European elite, and these upper classes often included men of the church. In 1589, Pope Sixtus V issued a papal bull approving the recruitment of castrati for the choir of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, continuing the biblical edict from first Corinthians that women "shall keep silence in the churches." However, those recruited had to have lost their genitals through "tragic accident." As the castrati rose in popularity, the number of "tragic accidents" escalated, and it was estimated that some 4000 Italian boys were castrated per year by the early 18th century (Berry 2011:18).

While most castrati just barely eked out a living in church choirs, fame and fortune could be found on the operatic stage (Berry 2011:37). Some of the earliest operas—for example, Monteverdi's 1607 Orfeo—featured castrati, and the tradition continued well into the 1700s. Now in the present day, the practice of castration has thankfully ceased, and directors staging baroque operas must deal with the absence of castrati, or "castrato problem," when making casting decisions. Despite several interesting attempts to re-create it using computer technology—notably the BBC documentary Castrato and the film Farinelli, il Castrato—the baroque castrato's vocal timbre no longer exists. Contemporary directors, therefore, have a variety of options open to them that can only approximate the castrato sound. The vocal line might be transposed down an octave, of course, to be sung by a bass or baritone. But alternatively and more interestingly, the original vocal range might be maintained by assigning the role to a male falsettist or countertenor—that is, a man who sings primarily in his falsetto—or to a woman. Casting countertenors or women rarely results in performances that read as heteronormative to modern audiences. To examine these audience interpretations, I wish to contrast the meanings of historical and contemporary constructions of gender and sexuality as they relate to Georg Frederick Handel's opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto.

GIULIO CESARE

Handel premiered Guilio Cesare in 1724 as part of the sixth season at the Royal Academy of Music, also known as the King's Theatre, in the Haymarket of London. Like most baroque operas, it has many plots, subplots, and even sub-subplots! The main storyline follows Julius Caesar just after he has defeated and invaded Egypt. Much of the plot includes political (and romantic) maneuverings on the part of Cleopatra as she attempts to seduce Caesar into supporting her as the sole ruler against her brother, Ptolemy. Cleopatra's servant and confidant, Nirenus, provides comic relief.

In my analysis of gender and sexuality, I focus on these three male characters: the title character Julius Caesar; Cleopatra's brother, King Ptolemy of Egypt; and Cleopatra's servant Nirenus. The premiere cast featured castrati in all three roles: Senesino, Gaetano Berenstadt, and Giuseppe Bigonzi, respectively. The 2005 Glyndebourne Festival Opera version instead features two countertenors as Ptolemy and Nirenus and a woman en travesti or in drag playing Caesar.

GENDER AT THE PREMIERE

Although we do not know as much about the actual premier of Giulio Cesare as we would like, scholars such as Thomas Laqueur have been able to uncover a great deal about sexuality and gender constructs during this era. In the 17th and 18th centuries, words we use now to construct gender and/or sexuality identities like "gay," "lesbian," "queer," and "heterosexual" did not yet exist.^[iv] Nor are they particularly appropriate. The Galenic model of biological sex still held sway, in which "men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection," with men, of course, being more perfect than women (see figure 2) (Laqueur 1990:4-5). This model, also called the one-sex model, posited that men and women are essentially the same, the only difference being the genitalia physically expressed outside the male body (that is, the penis and testicles) are expressed analogously inside the female body (that is, the vagina and ovaries) (Laqueur 1990:4-5). Terms like "homosexual" and even "bisexual" did not have a place in this model, and men who practiced sodomy "were thus no different, no more effeminate, in their basic identities" than men we would now describe as heteronormative (Freitas 2009:114).

Figure 2: From 1542, the female reproductive system (at left) and the male reproductive system (right) illustrating the penis/vagina isomorphism (Laqueur 1990:86).

In this one-sex model, the castrato, much like the pubescent boy, functions as a kind of middle ground. Many seventeenth-century works of literature, art, and records of everyday life (nearly all of which were produced by men) repeatedly characterize the boy as an object of desire. Although significantly rarer, the castrato also fulfills a similar role. Scholars note that castrati were called "feminine men," "perfect nymphs," and "more beautiful than women themselves," descriptions that reinforce the castrato as a sexual and gendered middle ground. Perhaps more usefully, musicologist Dorothy Keyser characterizes the castrato in baroque society as an ambiguous figure, a blank canvas upon which any sexual role might be projected (1987/88:49-50).

The castrato as a blank canvas combined well with a period construction of "Italianness" in Great Britain.^[v] This era witnessed a phenomenon called the "Grand Tour," an opportunity for British men of the upper classes "to escape the prying eyes and gossiping tongues of London polite society and indulge their passions, notably classical art and the 'sodomitical vice,' in the place that was thought of as synonymous with both: Italy" (Thomas 2006:173). Musicologist Roger Freitas has documented the castrato Atto Melani, who had several homosexual affairs with patrons; it is likely that other castrati also had sex with men (2009:101). Consequently, noblemen returning from the Grand Tour brought back an understanding and perhaps an appreciation of the increasing Italian tolerance for sodomy. The Grand Tour additionally functioned to connect the concept of sodomy with anything Italian, including the Catholic Church, priests, and of course, castrati.^[vi] Therefore, the blank canvas of the castrati might easily include projections of sexual desire from audience members by virtue of their Italianness. This held true for women as well as men, especially because for women, the castrato was safe. No matter what sexual acts a woman might perform with a castrato, he was physically incapable of causing any scandalous pregnancies. Therefore, a woman's reputation would remain intact, even after an entertaining affair. Thus, in addition to aesthetic pleasure, the arias of Senesino or perhaps merely seeing Gaetano Berenstadt walk on stage had the potential to kindle sexual desire in any audience member.

Beyond the body of the castrato lies his voice. While I dislike disassociating the voice from the body, the fetish in the 17th and 18th centuries for the soprano vocal range cannot be ignored. This fetish began in 1580, when Duke Alfonso d'Este formed the concerto delle donne—a small ensemble of accomplished female singers—to entertain his new bride in Ferrara, Italy. The concerto delle donne soon became very famous, and attracted many new compositions. As their fame grew, their high tessitura became increasingly sought after, leading, some scholars propose, directly to the emergence of the castrati (McClary 2012:99).

Musicologist Susan McClary suggests that, upon hearing the concerto delle donne, many male spectators and artists might not only have "responded to the sound as an object of desire but actually coveted the subject position itself" (2012:100). Although these musicians and composers could hardly turn themselves into castrati, they could compose for them and promote them. Therefore, the soprano voice, whether it originated in a female or an altered male body, became an important fetish that could ignore gender demarcations. This leads directly to the often queer contemporary performances that result when casting roles written for castrati.

GLYNDEBOURNE GENDER

In solving the "castrato problem," the Glyndebourne chose to cast two countertenors, and a woman in drag in a production that mixes together British colonial, 1920s jazz-age, exoticized pseudo-Egyptian, and Bollywood aesthetics. Some contemporary audience interpretations of the resulting Glyndebourne production might include: Caesar and Cleopatra as a lesbian couple and the Egyptians as effeminate or homosexual men. These interpretations result from a combination of the bodies and voices of the actors, the costumes they wear, and the manner in which they portray their characters. This last component combines actual dance choreography with more general movement style, and the quality of movement—what we might call the choreographic timbre—is often more important than merely observing which parts of the body locomote. Of course, connecting movement with concepts or stereotypes of gender and sexuality is never easy, all the more so when one attempts to avoid oversimplification of remarkably complex cultural constructs.

From the point of view of at least one modern lesbian, there is an "interplay of erotically charged identification and difference" in casting a woman to play the character of a man (Blackmer and Smith 1995:5). This is especially true in cases where the male character must romance and/or rescue the heroine. Corrine Blackmer, Patricia Smith, and Hélène Cixous speak to the power of opera in general—"that seemingly forbidding and improbable realm of artifice—[where a woman could], through the power of her voice, transcend her gender and, more than love, rescue her own sex" (1995:5). In Giulio Cesare, one such moment happens vocally in the duet between Cleopatra and Caesar: "Caro! – Bella! Più amabile beltà" (2:15-2:37). Here, as Susan McClary might say, Sarah Connolly and Danielle de Niese's voices "intertwine, take turns being on top, rub up against each other in aching dissonances, [and] resolve sweetly together" (2012:101). Caesar might be a man, but Sarah Connolly is not, and there are distinct same-sex erotic moments in this duet as a result.

In addition to the charge created by two high voices originating from two female bodies entwined in a (seemingly) heterosexual love duet, there is the question of the choreography. Connolly performs a very masculine Caesar, who swaggers around the stage with a decisive step, or who sits with feet planted firmly apart, a body full of straight lines with few curves. The stereotypically masculine movement quality that Connolly brings to the role is thrown into high relief when contrasted with Ptolemy's immature or somehow "gay" movement quality in the recitative preceding Caesar's aria "Va tacito e nascosto" (0:12-0:30 and 1:05-1:35).

In contrast to the strong Caesar, countertenors Christophe Dumaux and Rachid Ben Abdeslam perform their Egyptian characters as homosexual, even effeminate. Both actors are thin, lithe men, and throughout the production both combine feminine costumes and/or movement qualities to great effect. For example, there is the gender bending outfit Ptolemy wears during his aria "Belle dee di questio core." The costume is evocative of that of belly dancers, and comprises a turban, earrings, stylized wrist cuffs, a top that combines a belly dancers breast band with the harness worn in a leather bar, a sirwal or punjabi pants, and a robe, which Ptolemy removes to great hilarity from the audience (see figure 3). His costume is reminiscent of that worn in 1910 by Vaslav Nijinsky, the queer choreographer for Les Ballets Russes, in their production of Scheherazade (see figure 4). In his aria, Ptolemy alternates stereotypically gay, feminine, or effeminate movements with hypermasculine gestures. For example, the luxuriant manner in which he removes and swirls his robe and slinks around the stage as compared with the pose in front of the mirror and the somersault, which have an almost violent flavor to them. In addition, there exists a choreographic quotation which, while evocative of stylized ancient Egyptian art, also comes from Nijinksy: toward the end of the video clip, Christophe Dumaux references Nijinsky's Faun in L'après-midi d'un faune from 1912 (see figure 5). The inclusion of these reference to Nijinsky, who holds an important place in LGBTQ histories, further queers this aria (0:00-1:00).

Figure 4: Vaslav Nijinsky in Scheherazade, 1910 (photo courtesy Library of Congress). [http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.19576/]

Figure 5: Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun in the 1912 production of L'après-midi d'un faune (from http://thebestofhabibi.com/vol-18-no-3-march-2001/ballet-as-ethnic-dance/).

There is also the aria "Chi perde un momento" sung by Nirenus. In this dance sequence, Nirenus and his—interestingly male and not female—backup dancers perform a number drawing on conventional Bollywood choreography with campy and effeminate gestures. Their hands form sinuous curves, at times as though as they are manipulating skirts, and they clearly have fun with the stereotype of the gay man with limp wrists. Additionally, their extensive hip movements are more typically associated with women, as is the hand on the hip. All three performers also exchange occasional flirtatious glances (0:17-0:45).^[vii]

The characters of both Nirenus and Ptolemy are realized by countertenors. Countertenors are defined as men who develop their falsetto range, sometimes called the head voice. Although both male and female voices are capable of realizing a plethora of high and low pitches, gender norms are challenged when a woman sings very low and particularly strange when a man sings very high. Contemporary Euro-American cultures by and large construct masculinity as characterized by a lower vocal register. Deviation from this expectation is cause for surprise. Therefore, while both Christophe Dumaux and Rachid Ben Abdeslam augment their performances with stereotypically feminine and campy choreographies and costumes, the heart of the perceived effeminacy of their characters lies in their tessitura. The conflation of high male vocal tessitura with alternative or deviant sexuality and/or gender identity has existed since the renaissance of the countertenor voice in the 1940s with the British countertenor Alfred Deller. From all appearances a Kinsey zero and devoted family man, Deller was plagued throughout his career by perceptions that he was a eunuch or otherwise abnormal. The stereotype continues to the point that even now heterosexual countertenors often feel they have to come out of the closet as "straight." Consequently, the first note sung by a countertenor on the operatic stage immediately reads as some kind of queer to contemporary audiences, for surely any "normal" man would choose to sing in his chest voice. Creating the character with stereotypically gay choreographic timbres merely augments what the voice began.

CONCLUSION

The castrato's physical absence from the stage results in performances that open spaces to comment on contemporary gender and sexuality norms and identities. Caesar, that strong and masculine Roman general, becomes a strong and butch lesbian. Ptolemy, the inefficient Egyptian king and politician, becomes a villainous fairy. The servant Nirenus becomes a sissy or pansy. Stereotypical masculinity and femininity are questioned, altered, and otherwise queered through the very act of answering the castrato problem. However, no matter what option a contemporary director chooses—whether to transpose the music down for a bass, or cast a woman in drag, or countertenor—the sound and/or the sex of the contemporary performer still differs from that of the castrati. In comparison, the bass sings too low, the woman in drag is too female, and the countertenor's voice sounds too thin and reedy. The difference, perceived through the vocal timbre or body of the contemporary actor, creates comparisons with what might have been. The castrati are still fetishized, as evidenced by the recent surge of interest in Baroque repertoire in general and in the number of countertenors recording albums explicitly dealing with the castrati.^[viii] In the very attempt to replace them or sing anew their music, their absence re-creates their presence. As contemporary performances signify and re-signify the original powerhouse acts of the castrati, those baroque-age celebrities are still present, and their voices might still be heard through the very fact of their absence: they are not dead, they are not even past.

References:

RECORDINGS

Bach, Johann Christian. 2009. La dolce fiamma: Forgotten Castrato Arias. Philippe Jaroussky, countertenor. CD (Virgin Classics 5099969456404).

Castrato. 2006. Francesca Kemp, director. BBC Channel Four.

Fagioli, Franco, countertenor. 2013. Arias for Caffarelli. CD (Naïve V 5333).

Farinelli, il Castrato. 2000. DVD. Gelrard Corbiau, director. Stephan Films. (Columbia TriStar Home Video 10629).

Handel, Georg Frideric. 2005. Giulio Cesare. DVD. Glyndebourne Festival Opera, William Christie, conductor, David McVicar, director (OA 0950 D).

Hansen, David, countertenor. 2013. Rivals: Arias for Farinelli. CD (Sony Music 88883744012).

Jaroussky, Philippe. 2007. Caristini: The Story of a Castrato. CD (Viorgin Classics 0094624228).

PRINT MATERIALS

Berry, Helen. 2011. The Castrato and His Wife. New York: Oxford University Press.

Blackmer, Corrine E. and Patricia Juliana Smith. 1995. "Introduction." In En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, edited by Corrine E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, 1-19. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dame, Joke. 2006. "Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato." In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 139-154. New York: Routledge.

Faulkner, William. 1950. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage Books.

Freitas, Roger. 2009. Portrait of the Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harris, Ellen T. 2001. Handle As Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Kelly, Thomas Forrest. 2004. First Nights at the Opera. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Keyser, Dorothy. 1987/88. "Cross-Sexual Casting in Baroque Opera: Musical and Theatrical Conventions." Opera Quarterly 5(4): 46-57.

Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

McClary, Susan. 2012. Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rousseau, George S. 1991. Perilous Enlightenment: Pre-and Postmodern Discourses: Sexual, Historical. Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press.

Stone, Lawrence. 1977. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Thomas, Gary C. 2006. "'Was George Frideric Handel Gay?' On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics." In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 155-204. New York: Routledge.

Tougher, Shaun, ed. 2002. Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond. London: Gerald Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales.

Revival and Reconciliation: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity. By Philip V. Bohlman. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. [xxxiv, 285 p. ISBN 9780810881839. $85.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Reviewed by Nicholas J. Chong

Philip Bohlman’s Revival and Reconciliation: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity brings together eleven essays concerning the role of music, religion, and sacred music in modern and postmodern Europe.  All but two of the essays have been published elsewhere in earlier versions, but Bohlman notes in a preface (“Sources”) that he has “thoroughly revised” each of these previously-published works to reflect the findings of more recent research (xiv).[1]  In line with the author’s scholarly specialties, the essays focus on Eastern European and Mediterranean geographical contexts, and on the period since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  At the same time, they try their best to situate their various objects of study within broader historical and geographical contexts, reaching back (sometimes quite far back) into the past, as well as reaching out to other parts of Europe.

Revival and Reconciliation is also the sixteenth volume in a series entitled “Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities,” edited by Bohlman and Martin Stokes, who contributes a foreword here.  The larger scholarly goal of this series is made clear on a page preceding the colophon: to turn ethnomusicology back towards Europe, towards a continent normally placed under the disciplinary purview of historical musicology.  The intention is to explore less familiar, non-canonical European musical repertories and, in so doing, to broaden the cultural definition of Europe beyond those provided by dominant historiographical narratives.  In this book, both Stokes’ Foreword and Bohlman’s Prologue explicate what this project means for the study of European sacred repertories:  it challenges the usual idea that European modernity is secular and, in turn, challenges the dominance of Christianity in understandings of European religion. Bohlman seeks to tell stories that resist the conventional teleological narratives of modern European history.  For him, the revival of sacred and sacred music in Europe since 1990 indicates how the past is used, at least by some, to oppose a hegemonic idea “modernity” and to deal with a time of cultural and political uncertainty.  Bohlman grapples continuously with the paradox that in an era otherwise marked by increasing secularism in Europe, “in some European societies and among some social groups [religion’s] presence remains tenacious” (xxvii).

Although the essays in Revival and Reconciliation concern a variety of specific subjects and were (in their original versions) written over a period of more than twenty years, a number of themes recur across all of them, which Bohlman helpfully summarizes in his Prologue (xxix-xxxii).  These themes include:

1. the undeniable dominance of Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, in the “longue durée” of European history (even if, as Bohlman shows repeatedly in his work, this does not mean that the non-dominant voices of Jews, Muslims and minority Christian sects should be ignored).  
2. the connection of religion and music to place: sacred “spaces” and “landscapes”; different types of religious, ethnic and political boundaries; and movement, as exemplified by migration and by religious pilgrimage. 
3. the relationship of religion and politics, especially with regard to “empire and race” (xxxi).  (Indeed, showing how the sacred and secular overlap in unexpected ways is, more broadly speaking, a key goal of Bohlman’s book.)
4. an emphasis on worshipping communities, rather than on individuals, on popular religious practice rather than on religious institutions.
5. revival, defined both in a limited sense (actual religious revival) and more broadly (retrieving or attempting to retrieve something from the past as a social or political gesture)

The special importance of this last theme of revival is perhaps reflected in the book’s organization.  The eleven chapters (corresponding to the eleven essays) are divided into four sections whose headings are all variations on the idea of “going back.”

The first of these sections, entitled “Remembrance,” comprises three chapters broadly related to the Mediterranean.  Chapter 1, “Past, Present, and the People without Music History,” interrogates the scholarly tradition of treating the Mediterranean as timeless, outside history.  Bohlman’s attitude to this tradition is highly nuanced:  to perpetuate this tradition without reflection is to impute Western categories of thinking on other cultures, yet it is also true that many of those same cultures do subscribe to forms of “timeless” conceptions in defining their own identities.  In particular, timelessness is an especially important idea of diasporic (religious) communities.  Throughout this essay, Bohlman shows how music’s temporal qualities have made it a key component of ideas of timelessness, for both the scholar and the cultures he or she studies.  Chapter 2, “Recovering the Mediterranean, Recovering Modernity,” explores the role of Jewish music, “as a sacred music connecting the Mediterranean to Europe” (24), in the construction of Western musical discourses.  Early modern Europeans, for instance, used the Jewish music of biblical times as models of perfection.  Along the way, Bohlman critiques the history of his own field, pointing out its complicity in constructing timeless and false musical cultures abstracted from actual history.  The first section of the book ends with “And She Sang a New Song,” a study of the way in which gender roles are reconfigured in Mediterranean sacred song repertories.  Bohlman pays particular attention here to the role of women both in religious communities and in religious symbols, imagery and narratives.

The second section is entitled “Return,” and is made up of three studies of religious pilgrimage in Europe, two of which focus heavily on the Marian pilgrimage site of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina:  Chapter 4, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Chapter 6, “The People’s Voice in Sacred Song.”  Using Medjugorje as the primary example, the first of these two chapters explores why pilgrimage has been so central to the practice of folk religion in the modern, post-modern age.  In a link to concepts raised in earlier chapters, Bohlman argues that in folk religion, pilgrimage enables the meeting and intermingling of past and present, blurring various “boundaries,” both literal and figurative.  Sacred music, in turn, “serves as a means to mirror folk religion” (61), its purported timelessness attractive in an age where it is increasingly difficult for people to carve out spaces in which to contemplate the timeless.  In this chapter, Bohlman is especially attentive to the relationship between music and material culture:  to the role of technology in reproducing music for mass groups of pilgrims and to the link between sacred music and sacred iconography.  “The People’s Voice in Sacred Song” describes the crucial role of music in communicating the specific spiritual messages of Medjugorje, especially to far-flung diasporic communities.  This essay then proceeds to an extended discussion of religious revival.  Bohlman proposes seven processes of revival, connecting the religious dimensions of revival to what he sees as its political dimensions—folk religion, Bohlman seems to imply, is very much a form of popular political action.  This connection between religion and politics then receives more detailed treatment in Chapter 5, “The Final Borderpost,” which centers on the political aspects of pilgrimage, in particular on the manner in which pilgrimages cross political borders.  As Bohlman writes, “Pilgrimage, and its expressive agent, music, are components of a contested Europe—of contested boundary areas” (82).

Chapters 7 and 8 of Revival and Reconciliation make up its third section, entitled “Revival.”  Chapter 7, “To Hear the Voices Still Heard,” is a poignant study of the role of synagogues in post-1989 Europe, focusing especially on their function as “vessel[s]” of Jewish liturgical music (136), a repertory that had been central to historical debates over Jewish identity in Europe.  For Bohlman, the uncertainty associated with what synagogues now mean in the “new Europe” is emblematic of the difficulty for Jewish communities to define themselves culturally in the same setting.  This chapter is followed by “Sacred Popular Music and the Journey to Jerusalem,” which explores the intersection of the sacred and popular in the religious music associated with the Catholic Jubilee Year of 2000.  Bohlman uses this phenomenon as a springboard for a detailed meditation on the more general relationship between sacred and popular (169-71, “Religious Music and the Instantiation of Sacred Space”), stressing that in religious settings, the private interacts with the public to a greater degree than is often acknowledged—and that music is crucial in mediating this interaction.  Sacred music attains characteristics of the popular and, conversely, the ostensibly popular music of the new Europe often incorporates sacred themes.

The final section of the book, “Reconciliation,” contains the two essays in the volume that have not been published elsewhere, Chapters 9 and 11.  In chapter 9, “Music of the Other Germany,” Bohlman investigates self-identifiably German music that does not conform with the ideals of “die Musik”—that is, European art music, viewed as German and Christian in its roots.  He begins by reminding the reader of the importance of religion to constructions of German art music—a construct as unified as the unified Germany it purports to represent.  He then presents as an opposition to this the music of minority Christian sects, as well as the music of Jews and Muslims—a Germany that resists the unity of the hegemonic view.  The following chapter, “World Music at the End of Time,” is an extended historiographical meditation on the globalization of “world music.”  Bohlman argues that the way in which world music is defined as “outside history” is linked to various modern and postmodern theorizations of the “end of history,” which in his view are ultimately religious in nature, influenced by Christian eschatology.  Bohlman considers ideas of the “end of history”—which he labels collectively as “endism”—to be expressive of a utopianism that is a response to the historical conditions of modernity.  The concept of utopia is then subjected to more scrutiny in the book’s final chapter, “Journey to Utopia,” where Bohlman explores (sacred) music’s potential to make “miracles” of intercultural reconciliation happen.  He suggests three possible forms of resistance to hegemonic historical teleologies:  “utopian imagination, dystopian nostalgia, heterotopian reality” (249).  The first two are necessarily imaginary—journeying into a no-place idealized future or seeking a return to the past.  The unavoidable reality is “heterotopia,” defined as the “convergence of utopia and dystopia,” where communities can be defined by hopes for an unrealized “post-ethnic” Europe, but hopes which also derive from reaching into the past (249).  Bohlman concludes the chapter, and the book, by exhorting the reader to accept, even embrace, the ambiguities and tensions in this model, which reflects the complex place of sacred music in the new Europe, where religious revival occurs alongside increasing secularism, where religion is used both to divide and unite.

Read as a whole, from cover to cover, the book suffers at times from repetitiousness.  As mentioned earlier, Bohlman’s Prologue makes clear that a set number of themes recur throughout the book, but the book also occasionally repeats particular examples, like Medjugorje, in multiple chapters.  To be fair, however, such overlap of material has the benefit of better encouraging the reader to make connections between what might otherwise seem to be disparate ideas and examples, and in any case, the book’s organization makes it more user-friendly for those interested in its chapters as individual essays.  Another practical concern, for this reader at least, was the relative paucity of notated musical examples, which made it difficult to get an aural sense of the musical styles and repertories Bohlman describes.  There are obvious problems with transcribing into canonical Western notation music that comes from outside that notational tradition.  However, one wonders if some transcription, with appropriate acknowledgement of its limitations, could have helped at least a little in giving non-specialist readers especially an idea of how the music being studied sounds.  Indeed, those who fear that notation might reify the music should consider that Bohlman’s focus on the materiality of music (CDs, prayer cards with song texts, advertising material for concerts etc.) risks reifying it in a different way.  In any case, anything that regularly reminds the reader of music’s sounded form, that conveys a sense of the music experienced as heard, should be welcomed.  If notation is problematic, then perhaps modern technology might help, for instance by making pertinent recorded examples available to the reader via a website or in an accompanying CD.

More significant criticism might be directed at some of the argumentative and methodological assumptions which, to this reviewer at least, occur repeatedly throughout the volume.  One of the most admirable qualities of Bohlman’s work is its thought-provoking emphasis on blurring the boundaries between things often thought to be opposites:  past and present, sacred and secular, public and private, communities in Europe and their diasporas elsewhere.  In some contexts, this blurring of boundaries could, in my view, have been pushed further.  The most obvious example is Bohlman’s emphasis on popular religious practice, what he calls “subaltern religion” (108), rather than on so-called institutional religion.  “Folk religion,” he writes, “does not depend on orthodoxy or the institutions of the church, rather, it emerges directly from belief systems that provide coherence among believers themselves” (108).[2]  One wonders if this binary is overly simplistic, if the “believers themselves” and the “institutions” in fact act in a much more complex and dynamic relationship.  This is shown, in fact, by Bohlman’s own example of Pope John Paul II’s charismatic appeal (181)— an institutional leader who inspired popular religious fervor.[3]

In a few other contexts, however, blurring boundaries seems, in my opinion, actually to go a little too far.  Bohlman’s essays include references to different religious traditions, sometimes in close proximity on the page.  His underlying point is obviously to show commonalities between these diverse communities, and especially, as he states repeatedly, to include the perspectives of non-dominant religious communities like Jews, Muslims and minority Christian groups.  This apparent impulse towards a kind of universalist attitude towards religion—it is a common assumption of modern comparative religious studies—and the search for common ground is much needed in a world where religion has been a cause of so much human conflict.  However, it seems reasonable to ask whether more specific attention also needs to be given to the particularity of individual religious traditions.  Can we go too far in using the practices at Sufi shrines to understand the musical repertories associated with the shrines of Christian saints (173-74)?  To cite another example, the Muslim hajj and Christian pilgrimage obviously share many similarities (87), but might there also not be significant ways in which they are different?  Perhaps the very valid and commendable search for common human impulses driving different religious groups might be more frequently balanced by some acknowledgement of the ways in which those groups also are, and see themselves as, distinct.

One of the other boundaries that Bohlman seeks often to blur is that between the sacred and secular, in particular between the religious and the (socio-)political.  As in the case of the boundaries between different religions, it is indisputable that religion and politics are intertwined in the complex ways that Bohlman so insightfully draws attention to.  Again, however, one wonders if analogies are occasionally pushed too far, or too quickly.  For instance, Bohlman’s description of European colonial expansion as a form of pilgrimage (80) seems, to me at least, to have been insufficiently justified.  Colonialism and religious pilgrimage do share a desire to break political boundaries, but surely not all forms of mass political “movement” are alike?  In a similar vein, calling the 1999 Eurovision Song Contest, which took place in Jerusalem, Europe’s “foremost popular-music pilgrimage” (185), or comparing the 2012 victory in that same contest of a group of Russian grandmothers to a “miracle” (238), is rhetorically elegant, but it is hard not to wonder if it risks trivializing actual religious pilgrimage and actual religious miracles.  One should acknowledge, however, that at numerous other points in the book, Bohlman makes more persuasive connections between religion and politics, between sacred and secular, perhaps because those connections are, in these instances, simply given more space to be thoroughly explained.  One example is Chapter 10’s extended discussion of “endism” and Christian eschatology, mentioned earlier.  Chapter 9 also contains a more succinct illustration of a more nuanced treatment of the relationship between the sacred and secular:

I do not mean to suggest that the sacred and the secular are the same, but rather that they are not.  It may be that music and religion are incompatible, and they thus struggle for the same space.  In doing so, they prevent that space from collapsing into selfness.  They open it hence making entrance by the other possible, if not crucially necessary (202).

With regard to Bohlman’s treatment of the boundaries both between religions and between sacred and secular, one might sum up by asking whether the exploration of similarities and parallels between multiple entities could be accomplished without collapsing those different entities into each other.

Finally, given Bohlman’s apparent desire to see religion as political, and to see politics as religious, it is no surprise that religious groups often come across throughout the book as mass political movements, hence the author’s declared emphasis on religious communities rather than on individuals, described in the Prologue as a focus on “the common voice of communities” (xxxii).  Bohlman is not incorrect when he writes, “individual pilgrims do sing, of course, but the context in which they prefer to sing is that of a chorus of fellow pilgrims” (xxxii).  However, I was troubled at times by the almost complete absence of the voices of individual believers.  How can Bohlman describe what a group or a community collectively thinks without providing testimony from the individuals who make up that community?  Especially when Bohlman seems to attribute political goals to religious communities, I found myself asking repeatedly whether those believers are aware of the political significance of what they might simply consider to be acts of devotion to God.  For example, Bohlman writes at one point that “Europe’s modern pilgrims look only to the past as a means of embodying the connections to a sacred genealogy that will empower them to look beyond the boundaries of the present, boundaries which quickly have proved insufficient to chart the continent’s future and to contain the movement of its increasingly diverse peoples” (101).  It is true, of course, that the actions of these religious believers might be political even if they themselves do not think so.  Our job as scholars, after all, is to theorize, to assess, even to judge.  But without sufficient attention to the individual voices of those we study, is there not a risk of making these communities say what we wish them to say, of inscribing our identities onto others?  In Chapter 4, Bohlman himself writes that though “pilgrimage music forms a common repertory capable of unifying a community during pilgrimage,” it is also true that “each individual invests his or her personal experiences in the music” (65).  In my view, precisely that encounter of individual believers with the sacred, and with the music embodying the sacred, ought to receive more sustained attention.

The methodological and argumentative concerns I have raised involve issues with which all historical and sociological scholars of music struggle to some degree.  The appropriate balance between competing demands—for example, to find commonalities between communities without stripping away their individuality—is a very difficult one to strike, and could depend on what one’s argumentative goals might be in a particular situation.  Ultimately, therefore, I wish to emphasize that the criticisms I have offered in the preceding paragraphs should take nothing away from the enormous scholarly achievement that Revival and Reconciliation represents.  The book constitutes an anthology of work by one of the preeminent music scholars of our time, writing on topics on which he is a recognized specialist—an indisputable testament to more than two decades of dedicated research and thought.  More importantly, it provides much-needed scholarly attention to the prominence of religion in contemporary Europe—a welcome alternative to the stereotype of modernity’s secular nature.  Even if one does not always agree with Bohlman’s treatment or interpretation of his historical and sociological examples, those examples themselves, mesmerizing in their diversity, are presented and described with an insightfulness and attention to detail that we would all do well to emulate.

The Ethnomusicology Review Sounding Board is pleased to offer an overview from Jonathan McCollum and David G. Hebert of their forthcoming edited volume Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology (Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books).

Historical ethnomusicology is increasingly acknowledged as a significant emerging subfield of ethnomusicology due to the fact that historical research requires a different set of theories and methods than studies of contemporary practices, and many historiographic techniques are rapidly transforming as a result of new technologies. In 2005, Bruno Nettl observed that “the term ‘historical ethnomusicology’ has begun to appear in programs of conferences and in publications” (Nettl 2005, 274), and as recently as 2012 scholars similarly noted “an increasing concern with the writing of musical histories in ethnomusicology” (Ruskin and Rice 2012, 318). Relevant positions recently advanced by other authors include that historical musicologists are “all ethnomusicologists now” and that “all ethnomusicology is historical” (Stobart, 2008), yet we sense that such arguments —while useful, and theoretically correct—may ultimately distract from careful consideration of the kinds of contemporary theories and rigorous methods uniquely suited to historical inquiry in the field of music. In the forthcoming book Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology (Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books), editors Jonathan McCollum and David Hebert, along with contributors Judah Cohen, Chris Goertzen, Keith Howard, Ann Lucas, Daniel Neuman, and Diane Thram systematically demonstrate various ways that new approaches to historiography­­­––and the related application of new technologies––impact the work of ethnomusicologists who seek to meaningfully represent music traditions across barriers of both time and space. Contributors specializing in historical musics of Armenia, Iran, India, Japan, southern Africa, American Jews, and southern fiddling traditions of the USA describe the opening of new theoretical approaches and methodologies for research on global music history. In the Foreword, Keith Howard offers his perspective on historical ethnomusicology and the importance of reconsidering theories and methods applicable to this field for the enhancement of musical understandings in the present and future.

In Chapter 1, “Introduction: Foundations for Historical Ethnomusicology,” Jonathan McCollum and David G. Hebert address both the scholarly agenda and foundations of the field of historical ethnomusicology via description of its antecedents and relations to other disciplines, as well as the historical contributions of notable scholars.

In Chapter 2, “Methodologies for Historical Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century,” David G. Hebert and Jonathan McCollum discuss various methodologies of historical research in ethnomusicology. This chapter emphasizes two fundamental issues: 1) how the use of primary documents may corroborate or refute what traditional ethnography determines about the musical past from oral accounts and 2) how an array of data, including preexisting recordings of performances and interviews, notation manuscripts, newspaper articles, letters, and other primary sources held in archives enable the expansion of knowledge when robust analytical strategies are used. The discussion includes detailed comparison of approaches found in some prominent examples of both early and recent scholarship in historical ethnomusicology, and the chapter also discusses recent technological developments in the twenty-first century that transform the possibilities for research into the musical past, including for the development of comprehensive bibliographic and discographic reference works.

In Chapter 3, “Implications of Current Debates in Philosophy of History for the Study of Historical Ethnomusicology,” David G. Hebert and Jonathan McCollum discuss how historical ethnomusicology has been increasingly identified as a significant emerging subfield of ethnomusicology, and how its scholarship may be enriched through awareness of contemporary debates in the philosophy of history. They note that progressive historians are increasingly interested in rich accounts of the accumulation of data and evolution of its interpretations as opposed to direct assertions regarding past events. As music production and consumption have shifted to online digital distribution platforms, the quality and range of instantly accessible musical sounds, experiences and knowledge have rapidly altered worldwide, with profound implications for contemporary musicianship as well as research and pedagogy. It follows that moving from a critical to a speculative approach, the authors suggest humanity has recently transitioned from digital prehistory to an era of information saturation due to the popularization of social media and digital surveillance, and that some musicological analyses would therefore benefit from viewing music as data. Increasingly, records of music consumption and music-related discourse are captured and permanently stored, accessible via social media, both corporate and national security “data mining”, and hacking. Hebert and McCollum assert that in addition to enabling a robust reconsideration of practices associated with collection, storage, analysis (and leaking) of digital files, philosophy of history enables insights into how musicologists may more effectively respond to such challenges as the role of cognitive dissonance in cultural memory, and the teleological distortion of narrative schema. Finally, they call for wider discussion of ethical issues in the field, including judicious approaches to the exposure of inaccurate claims and unbalanced interpretations, issues of repatriation and cultural translation, and the extent to which both living and deceased musicians might be afforded certain rights to privacy in an age of global digitization, information saturation, and mass surveillance.

In Chapter 4, “Hearing Echoes, Sensing History: The Challenges of Musical Diaspora,” Judah M. Cohen begins by illustrating some highly personal and even visceral dimensions of historical understanding through rich autobiographical reflections. Upon introducing the concept of diaspora, Cohen identifies his focus: an investigation of interdiasporic discourse in the musical exchanges between two populations that represent classic paradigms for diaspora theory: Jews and the African diaspora. Cohen’s analysis covers examples from across a broad range of genres, from klezmer and folk music to even reggae and hip hop. Specifically, the cases in his discussion illustrate how Passover’s symbolic capital has been used in musical contexts to engender diverse forms of interdiasporic exploration: “one employs the holiday celebration itself as a platform for joint performance, a second takes the basis of the holiday as a conceptual starting point for broader exploration, and the third uses broader ‘meanings’ derived from the holiday to develop cross-diasporic themes for presentation.”

In Chapter 5, “Ancient Music, Modern Myth: Persian Music and the Pursuit of Methodology in Historical Ethnomusicology,” Ann Lucas discusses how both ethnomusicologists and Iranian musicologists hold up the system of traditional Iranian music that emerged in the twentieth century as an evolutionary product of music systems used by Persian-speaking people since at least the eleventh century. Indeed, much research produced in Iran over the past thirty years has focused on demonstrating exactly how the modern modal complexes known as dastgah evolved out of previous modal concepts used in the Middle East after the rise of Islam. Yet there is a temporal gap between the modern system of traditional Iranian music and the historic modality described in Persian treatises. This gap is marked by past musical systems’ complete dependence on predetermined modal structure, and traditional Iranian music’s application of modal structure after the original practice of the tradition was established at the turn of the twentieth century. The purpose of Lucas’s chapter is to demonstrate the modernity of modality in the contemporary practice of traditional Iranian music. Thus, this chapter explores how a strong synergy between modern Iranian nationalism and European Orientalism in the twentieth century led to a variety of different modal structures being superimposed onto traditional Iranian music in order to make this modern system of music fit with new notions of Iran’s perennial Persian history and past cultural glory. This situation demonstrates that Iranian modernity fostered its own forms of modality, and that far from being a meme from the musical past, these forms of modality were created by modern forces to meet the demands of the modern era.

In Chapter 6, “Analysis of Notation in Music Historiography: Armenian Nuematic Khaz from the Ninth through Early Twentieth Centuries,” Jonathan McCollum notes how the study of music from the past is challenging for a variety of reasons—namely the scarcity of information that we have about the music of the past and the challenges of recreating the past from what known documents and fragments that do exist. This chapter delves into the complexities of two aspects of historical ethnomusicology—analysis of notation in primary manuscripts and historiographic analysis of critical secondary resources. This chapter’s purpose is to offer an introspective view into how historical ethnomusicology may reveal nuances that have, until this time, not been thoroughly explored. McCollum focuses specifically on khaz, a form of musical notation of the early Armenian Church, and traces its development from the ninth century to its eventual decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to presenting a historical account of the development of Armenian khaz notation, he also analyzes the historiography of the Armenian neumatic system through a critical review of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century khaz studies from both Armenian and Western scholars. Broadly speaking, McCollum reflects on historiography’s ability to potentially deconstruct written history’s potential subjectivity.

In Chapter 7, “Southern American Fiddling Through the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Three Snapshots,” Chris Goertzen considers how the composite repertoire of southern U.S. fiddling came into being in multiple historical layers, in each case with the bulk of activity in oral tradition, but always with at least a toehold in the world of publication (and to a lesser degree of manuscripts).  His chapter consists of a trio of snapshots of fiddling: in late eighteenth-century Scotland, in early nineteenth-century England (and the young U.S.), and in the mid-nineteenth century American south, trying to evaluate the historical remains (the notations, testimony from letters and travel reports, etc.) and also invoking the refractive evidence offered by modern practice. Fashions, cultural politics, relative ease of travel, technology of publishing, among other factors in flux, interacted visibly and invisibly to constantly reshape the culture of fiddling and its aesthetic materials. Some things we can we truly know, while others seem permanently out of reach, but his emphasis is on what we can intelligently suspect about the history of southern U.S. fiddling.

In Chapter 8, “A Tale of Two Sensibilities: Hindustani Music and its Histories,” Daniel Neuman contrasts two “sensibilities” as orientations for the conceptualization of Indian music history: the Khandani (literally, “of the lineage”), who are predominantly Muslim hereditary musicians, and the Pandit, being typically Hindu scholarly Brahmans that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a dominant force in Indian music. As Neuman notes, the Khandani focus on “performance and practice,” while the main interests of the Pandit lies in “theory and education.” Consequently, these two groups have very different historical agendas and interpretations. Neuman draws upon his wealth of experience from having studied Indian music across four decades to develop a compelling and richly detailed narrative that traces the biographies of notable Indian musicians.

In Chapter 9, “The Legacy of Music Archives for Engaged Historical Ethnomusicology,” Diane Thram’s chapter discusses the evolution of sound archives as important resources for ethnomusicological research. Following discussion of the history of sound archives in Europe and the United States, she turns to a broad examination of contemporary challenges arising from digitization. This chapter describes important insights from Thram’s experience managing an array of projects as Director of the International Library of African Music, the largest African music collection in the world today. Thram’s discussion covers practical issues of great interest to music archivist, scholars conducting research in archives, and anyone interested in either developing a new music archive or strengthening a preexisting one.

In Chapter 10, Keith Howard explores the legacy of historical studies of East Asian music, contrasting the approaches of East Asian musicologists with that of the “Picken school” in the latter half of the twentieth century, which comprised the Cambridge University-based scholar Laurence Picken and his students and associates. To situate his account, Howard first contextualizes what Ruth Stone referred to as the “dearth of historical perspectives” in ethnomusicology through to the 1980s, finding parallels in anthropology’s troubled relationship with history, and identifying in the post-war appeal for equity and equality a rejection of the “sciencing” of comparative musicology. He then, with some trepidation given the robust defences that have been mounted by members of the “Picken school,” challenges criticisms made of East Asian musicologists by Picken and his former student Jonathan Condit. In respect to Korea, he shows how their accounts are respectfully studied but ultimately sidelined in local scholarly discourse. By exploring and contrasting Korean perspectives, and then taking as example the music and dance of extant state sacrificial rituals, Howard illustrates how history is used selectively to serve and justify both a discourse of identity and contemporary performance practice.

In Chapter 11, “Conclusion: Advancing Historical Ethnomusicology,” David G. Hebert and Jonathan McCollum summarize essential points from the entire book and indicate specific ways that music scholarship may move forward with new approaches. This chapter also illustrates how theories and methods of historical ethnomusicology may be relevant to scholarly work across an array of music subfields, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz studies, popular music studies, early music performance practice, and music education history.

The book ends with an Index to enable convenient browsing and searching. We are hopeful that this book will stimulate greater interest in historical ethnomusicology and enhance the production of robust scholarship on all music, regardless of when the music has taken place. We are fortunate and thankful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with an outstanding group of contributing authors who collectively offer expertise on an array of musical traditions throughout this book. Through a rigorous editorial review process, entailing multiple revisions guided by critical peer-reviews, we have endeavored to ensure the quality of the book’s contents. It is our hope that the discussion of musical practices, theories, and methods in this book will prove useful for graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses, and especially serve as an inspiration to the next generation of historical ethnomusicologists.

References

Nettl, Bruno. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Ruskin, Jesse D. and Timothy Rice. "The Individual in Musical Ethnography." Ethnomusicology 56 (2012):299-327.

Stobart, Henry, Ed. The New (Ethno)musicologies. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008.

Jonathan McCollum is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Humanities Division at Washington College.

David G. Hebert is Professor of Music at Bergen University College.

Danza Azteca includes a diverse and amalgamated repertoire––a pastiche of various indigenous music and dance traditions subsumed under the umbrella of danza. As a result of the diversity contained in this repertoire, the various histories of the dances and indigenous traditions, when analyzed separately, offer a complex set of interwoven narratives as diverse as the performers and heritages danza now includes. There are key periods of change and adaptation in these histories that can be interpreted differently, and the distinction between breaks and transitions become fraught with political meaning. Key periods that historians might interpret as breaks in the continuity of tradition may be interpreted by practitioners as transitions into new periods of the same tradition. The importance of interpretation in determining histories and lineages in musical traditions surfaces in the examination of two key transitions in the history of danza: the transition from a pre-Hispanic dance into “Christian” dances, and the recent transition from these “Christianized” dances into danza. The different perspectives on these significant periods in the history of the dance contribute to its narrative and further complicate its already complex history as a pan-Indian dance style.

The transition of some Mesoamerican indigenous dance forms into “Christian” dances occurred within the first few decades of the Spanish presence in the Americas. The Spanish relationship with indigenous dance cannot be described adequately with rigid terminology, as it varied by region and tradition, and its depiction depended upon the individual chronicler. On one hand, the Spanish were wary of indigenous music and dance as vehicles of religious meaning; yet, on the other, they were fascinated by the colorful displays and masterfulness with which the indigenous performers practiced their art. Two sources that illustrate this dichotomy are the Florentine Codex (1577) by Bernardino de Sahagún, and the History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith (1645) by Andrés Pérez de Ribas. In his introduction to Book II of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún describes the presence of indigenous unsanctioned performances and his continuing efforts to eradicate them:

It is well established that the songs and psalms he [the devil] has composed are the cave, the forest, the thorny thicket where this accursed adversary now hides. And they are sung to him without its being understood what they are about, other than by those who are natives and versed in this language, so that, certainly, all he desires is sung, be it of war or peace, of praises to himself, or of scorn of Jesus Christ, without being understood by others. (1982:58)

Sahagún considers these songs and the dances antithetical to Christianity. Contrastingly, Ribas describes the mitote, another prevalent form of indigenous dance, as an acceptable dance that has been reconfigured for Christianity:

. . . the mitote, or festive dance, which is a particularly enjoyable sight and is new both to Spain and other nations. The mitote that the seminarians of San Gregorio celebrate is called the mitote of the emperor Moctezuma. Although in the past it was dedicated to gentile purposes, now it is a Christian celebration dedicated to the honor of Christ Our Lord, King of Kings. (1645:714-715)

Ribas emphasizes its appropriateness as a Christian festival by highlighting its relationship to the Church and the reconfiguration of indigenous symbolism for Christianity.

To better understand how pre-Hispanic traditions transitioned into the Colonial Period and beyond, it is useful to consider the categories of “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” performance as alluded to by Ribas and Sahagún respectively. Dance forms that became “sanctioned” gained approval from the Church, often by adopting Christian symbolism. The most prevalent forms that fall under this category are conchero and the mitote, as described by Ribas. In spite of the adaptation of Christian symbolism, the dances retained indigenous characteristics indicating their roots, ranging from their treatment of the four directions, the regalia worn by the performers, and the ritual practices carried out by the dancers. Contrastingly, unsanctioned performance faced formidable obstacles during the Colonial Period, including cultural policing by the Catholic Church, the death of culture bearers, and the interruption of lines of transmission often caused by the schooling of children in Catholic institutions. In spite of these challenges, David Tavárez found instances of “unsanctioned” performances occurring as late as 1718, when the last performance of nicachi songs in Oaxaca supposedly took place (2011:228-229), indicating that pre-Hispanic musical practices were able to continue well after the arrival of the Spanish.

Conchero is generally accepted as having roots in indigenous dance practices. One of the most prevalent narratives describing the origins of conchero as a “sanctioned” and “Christian” dance stems from Guanajuato, and particularly the town of San Miguel de Allende and the Santa Cruz tradition. This is by most accounts the tradition from which the most conchero mesas trace their roots, yet even within the Santa Cruz tradition there are several conflicting explanations as to how the dance tradition began. The most common explanation is that the origin of the tradition hinges on a key battle in 1531 between the Chichimeca and the Spanish during which a cross, Santa Cruz, descended from the heavens with Santiago de Matamoros. The Chichimeca are said to have danced around the cross shouting “El es Díos,” a now common exclamation among the concheros (Rostas 2009:167). Belief in Santa Cruz extends down to Mexico City, and the guardians of the cross descend from the original recipients in the Otomí military. According to Timothy Craig, this potentially explains the continuing military structure of the dance groups (2007:169-170). The concheros still play an important role in caring for the cross and perform the velacíones, or all night musical honoring during the festivals. Through this process and the conversion narrative it invokes, syncretism allowed for the survival of the tradition, transitioning it from a potential threat in the eyes of the early colonial powers to a form of worship condoned by the Church.

A second variant of the story involving the Chichimeca is offered in Martha Stone’s ethnography of the concheros. In an account given to her by an informant, it is believed that the Tlaxcalans brought the dance to the Otomí-Chichimeca when they entered the area as colonizers, a calculated move to aid in subduing the Chichimeca (1975:197-201). The Tlaxcalans secured a high social standing for themselves by traveling north, guaranteeing special privileges for themselves and their descendants (Velasco in Schmal: 2004). According to Stone, the Tlaxcalans had already converted and syncretized their customs with Christianity, and it was the hope that the Otomí-Chichimeca would emulate their upstanding behavior as a newly colonized population (1975:200). Given the movement of Tlaxcalans in the early Colonial Period and the account given to Stone, the dances of the Tlaxcalan colonizers and Otomí may have integrated within a few decades after the arrival of the Spanish, creating the foundation for conchero and the pan-Indian style now practiced in the danza tradition.

The recent transition from conchero to danza as performed in the United States took its current form during the period of the 1960s through the 1980s, particularly through the influence of teachers like Florencio Yescas. The rise of modern danza in the United States paralleled the civil rights movements, reinforcing the role of danza as a form of resistance to dominant culture (Luna 2012; Aguilar 2009). The form of danza that arrived from Mexico also bore heavy influence from the agenda of earlier twentieth century nationalists in Mexico, particularly José Vasconcelos, the secretary of public education from 1921-1924. The nationalist agenda frequently “borrowed” local indigenous practices for the creation of the new mestizo national identity that highlighted and romanticized the Aztec past, contributing to the pastiche of repertoire. Music, dance and songs were included on Vasconcelo’s agenda through the Department of Fine Arts (Encinas 1994:724). The early influences of these strong “Aztec” nationalist currents found in many forms of danza contributes to the difficulty of distinguishing the roots of danza traditions, since the tradition now contains elements from many different indigenous traditions. Each of these traditions has a history, and many of these blur into a pan-Indian Mexican narrative that harkens back to Tenochtitlan, although to date I have found no verifiable instances of an indigenous dance that has been successfully traced to dances from the Aztec capital.

The core repertoire of danza stems largely from the “sanctioned” dances and repertoire, particularly conchero, although the dancers have often made great efforts to remove Christian symbolism in the last thirty years. Many differences between conchero and danza exist, including the replacement of the concha, a stringed instrument, with pre-Hispanic drums such as the huehuetl; changes in the attire of the performers; and the song repertoire, as danza typically does not perform the Christianized alabanzas that comprise a key part of the conchero repertoire (Rostas 2009:193). Many danza groups view Catholicism in the conchero practices as a subterfuge for pre-Hispanic religion from which danza and other indigenous knowledge can be “recovered.” Mario Aguilar notes that this is contentious in the conchero communities, as many danza proponents reject Christian elements in favor of their interpretation of a “true” indigenous history (2009:184). This narrative serves to reinforce continuity between danza and the pre-Hispanic past, and it transforms conchero from a syncretic tradition into a subversive act of resistance.

Historical studies of danza and indigenous dance traditions are complicated by the dearth of reliable sources. The challenge of finding documentation on indigenous dance traditions and discovering how many of these traditions may have survived into the present is that if a tradition appears documented in a colonial era source, it often represents the discovery and subsequent destruction of a tradition and its line of transmission. Contrastingly, traditions that might have survived in secrecy would not have “official” documentation, as it would have eluded the Spanish authorities. This presents a significant challenge in researching the indigenous music and dance practices intertwined into danza’s history, as unbroken transmission may seem improbable, but not verifiably impossible.

In David Tavárez’s examination of the extirpation of religious practices in Oaxaca by the Church during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he found that many of the Church cantors also served as ritual specialists for indigenous religious practices. Not only could the music and dance be syncretic, but religious practitioners could also have fluency in both religious realms. Extirpation campaigns as late as the early 1700s yielded books of ritual songs in Oaxaca, indicating their survival for more than one hundred and eighty years after the initial arrival of the Spanish at Tenochtitlan (2011:145). Only one hundred and sixty years later, the Church would separate from the State, reducing its powers to legislate religion. Might other undocumented traditions have survived to witness this separation, and how would such survival be determined? Tavárez argues against long-term continuity due to changes in meaning, symbolism, and instrumentation:

Even if Indigenous specialists in some communities continue to petition local and regional deities, these entities' names, attributions, and powers have shifted significantly. The beat of the nicachi or the teponaztli no longer summons native celebrants to sing and dance for Zapotec or Nahua sacred entities, although those instruments may still be used in other contexts. In other words, local collective and elective spheres have undergone multiple historical transformations since colonial times, and the projection of long-term continuities from the present into the past and vice versa would result, as Chance and Taylor argued regarding Mesoamerican cargo systems, in the re-creation of a dubious ethnographic past. (2011:270)

The difficulty of this conclusion is that it offers no viable means for modern practitioners to assert a line of continuity, drawing a hard line between transformations and breaks in tradition. This is a potentially unrealistic standard for any indigenous practices to meet in order to verify continuity.

Tavárez implies that the transformations in the practice are breaks in continuity; however, modern practitioners like Jennie Marie Luna argue that there is continuity, including the transition to conchero as well as the later the transition to danza:

Nevertheless, the literature suggests that anything that came forth post-Spanish colonization was an accommodation and is still a direct result of that colonization. This Danza product is often referred to as “Conchero.” The Danza Conchera is called such to refer to the mandolina/small guitar-like instruments that were made with the shell (in Spanish: concha) of an armadillo . . . Since the Church did not allow the Indigenous people to continue playing flutes or drums (viewed as instruments of the devil), the people used a process of subterfuge. Being talented musicians, they were able to learn to use the new instruments in order to preserve their own songs, rhythms and sacred knowledge (Poveda 1981). The Spaniards viewed the new stringed instrument (a Spanish adaptation) as acceptable. The mandolina or concha became the instrument upon which Nahua peoples were able to remember and preserve the original beats of Danza rhythms. While this European-influenced instrument may have replaced the drums, it became the only way that songs and beats were recorded in the memories of danzantes. In effect, danzantes still took control of the stringed instrument, making it their own. Through using the shell of the armadillo, they were able to maintain its integrity as an Indigenous instrument, honoring the animal life, in the same way that the drum honored the tree life. Through using an instrument acceptable to the Spanish, they were able to appease them, while preserving the songs and beats for future generations to continue Danza today. (2012:115-116)

This current interpretation by danza creates a narrative that supplies the contentious historical lineage necessary to substantiate their claims to an indigenous past. As illustrated by Tavárez and Luna, the adaptation of conchero as a Catholic dance can be interpreted as syncretism or a total break with indigenous traditions; and the transition from conchero to danza can similarly be interpreted as either a break in the tradition or a transition to a more indigenous form of the dances, depending on the interpreter and their agenda. By drawing on various strains of indigenous dance and dance history, danza has formulated one pan-Indian history and dance repertoire that can be understood as not one truth, but many truths, representing individual and group interpretations of these overlapping indigenous heritages and histories.

Works Cited

Aguilar, Mario. 2009. “The Rituals of Kindness: The Influence of the Danza Azteca Tradition of Central Mexico on Chicano-Mexcoehuani Identity and Sacred Space.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California Claremont and San Diego.

Craig, Timothy Charles. 2007. “Folk-Religious Belief and Practice in Central Mexico: Re-construction of Tradition and the Dynamics of Folk-Religious Plasticity.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado.

Encinas, Rosario. 1994. “José Vasconcelos.” Prospects 24:719-729.

Luna, Jennie Marie. 2012. “Danza Mexica: Indigenous Identity, Spirituality, Activism, and Performance.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California Davis.

Poveda Pablo. 1981. “Danza de Concheros en Austin, Texas: Entrevista con Andrés Segura Granados.” Latin American Music Review 2(2):280-299.

Ribas, Andrés Pérez de. [1999] 1645. History of the Triumphs of Our Most Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Rostas, Susanna. 2009. Carrying the Word. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.

Sahagún, Bernadino de. [1982] 1577. Florentine Codex: Introduction and Indices. Edited by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Santa Fe: The School of American Research.

Schmal, John. 2004. “The History of the Tlaxcalans.” Houston Institute for Culture. http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/tlaxcala2.html (accessed 8 December 2013).

Stone, Martha. 1975. At the Sign of Midnight: The Concheros Dance Cult of Mexico. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Tavárez, David. 2011. The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

The accompanying image is from The Folding Screen with Indian Wedding and Flying Pole (1690), which is currently housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Kristina Nielsenis currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Hispanic instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic music. Kristina received her MA from UCLA after completing BM in piano performance at Western Washington University and an additional year of studies in the Mesoamerican Languages and Cultures program at Copenhagen University. She founded and now manages the Historical Perspectives subsection of the Sounding Board.

Wandering Stars: Songs from Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre, 1906-1910. Renair Records 2013. Compiled by Julian Futter and Michael Aytward. One compact disc (25 tracks) with liner notes (40 pp.).

Reviewed by Jana Mazurkiewicz

This terrific album exposes us to once-mainstream, but now mostly forgotten, music written and sung in a language that is often said to be dying or even to be already dead. Yiddish theatre songs and the stars of Yiddish stage have been overshadowed by the renaissance of the reconstituted Klezmer music that we face today. Fashion comes back. Perhaps the time will come when the “rejected” Yiddish theatre songs will have their big revival too. Restoration of old and extremely rare recordings is certainly an important step in that direction.

Yiddish theatre has been always inseparable from Yiddish songs. They have common origins, and the father of Yiddish theatre, Abraham Goldfaden, was also a songwriter and a composer. The greatest and most ambitious Yiddish music was produced between 1876 and the late 1940s in Yiddish theatres such as Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre. Lemberg (in English, Lviv), now in Ukraine, was an important spot on the map of Yiddishland and a home for many Yiddish theatres. Most of them were ephemeral, traveling theatre troupes. The only permanent one with its own stage was run by the Gimpel family. It changed its location many times before finally reaching 11 Jagiellonska Street at the very center of Lviv. The theatre was established in 1889, despite the opposition of both Austrian authorities and Jewish religious authorities (Talmud forbids “the theatre and circuses of idolatry” [Avodah Zarah 18b; Shabbat 150a]), by Jakob-Ber Gimpel, a veteran member of the chorus at the Polish Municipal Opera. After his death, the management of this cultural institution was passed on his sons, Adolf Gimpel and Emil Gimpel. The theatre received a license to stage one-act plays, farces, song concerts, operettas and plays in the “Jewish jargon” (Yiddish), so all of these theatrical forms were in its repertoire. The Gimpel’s Yiddish Theatre managed to function continuously until the outbreak of the Second World War.

A forty page booklet with liner notes included with the album contains extensive information about the historical background of the Gimpel Yiddish Theatre in Lemberg along with fascinating short biographic portrayals of the artists and brief but detailed descriptions of the songs. The quality of the album is high because of great and well-trained voices (sometimes nearly operatic) of such theatre stars as Pepi Littmann, Leon Kalisch, Jacob Fuchs, and Isaac Deutsch, among others. All of the twenty-five songs on this CD, thanks to careful restoration, won back the shine of their original sound. Many of them, like “Oyfn pripetshik” (“On the Cooking Stove”) or “Freytik af der nakht” (“Friday Evening”), became so famous that they attained the status of anonymous folk songs and the names of the composers (in this case, Mark Warshawsky and G.Z. Weismann) almost disappeared from the history of Yiddish music. Particularly precious, from the historical point of view, are recordings such as the original “Yidl mit zayn fidl” (“Yiddle with his Fiddle”) and one of the earliest recordings of the national anthem of Israel (previously the Zionist anthem), “Hatikva” (“Hope”). The song following “Hatikva,” “Dort vo di Zeder” (“Where Are the Cedars”), based on a poem written by Isaac Feld, was considered by the first Zionist Congress to become an Israeli anthem for a while. Its melody is clearly inspired by the “The Internationale.” Another interesting song is “Di vokh fun Pesach tsayt” (“Passover Week”), set to the melody of Shields and Evans’s “In the Good Old Summertime,” published in New York at the beginning of the 20^th century. It demonstrates the influence of American culture on European Yiddish theatre. It has to be mentioned that most of these songs were very flexible in terms of the lyrics and melody, which underwent frequent changes while crossing the borders of time and space. The CD closes with the only existing recording session of the prominent Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem reading fragments of his prose.

The biggest strength of this album, besides its high quality in sound and level of musical performance, is the wide variety of the recordings, which were chosen from what is left from the period between 1906 and 1910. The projects of research and restoration took ten years and included discographers, record collectors, and enthusiasts of Yiddish culture from all over the world. One must remember that Yiddish recordings are particularly rare because most of them were destroyed during the Second World War. This CD contains a beautiful collection of songs representing several genres which were particularly characteristic for Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre, such as wedding songs, festive songs, love songs, and drinking songs. Some of them are funny and another are heartbreaking, but most of them incorporate laughter through tears. The tradition of having contradictory emotions and sudden changes of rhythm and mood in Yiddish songs was the main reason why such famous composers as Ravel, Shostakovich and Mussorgsky found them brilliant, original and inspiring. This particular form of expression mirrors the unpredictability of the Jewish fate in the diaspora. Eclectic instrumentation is another characteristic feature of Yiddish music. A whole range of instruments is employed, but violin, piano, and flute dominate. The majority of Yiddish melodies are in the minor mode and in so-called Ahava rabbah mode (typically including an augmented second interval, i.e., E-F-G#-A / A-G#-F-E), borrowed from liturgical and Hassidic music; however, all kinds of creative melodic variations happen to be applied to that pattern. The uniqueness of the texts and melodies of Yiddish theatre songs, as well as their diverse music forms, are due to the multiculturalism and multilingualism of the artists who created them. They came from various counties, ethnic backgrounds and traditions, and turned the towns and cities they lived in, like Lviv, into “melting pots” with fascinating cultures.

This album plays an extremely important role in preserving the rich Yiddish heritage. It is a real treat to be able to listen to the songs that have been retrieved after more than 100 years and reintroduced to the general public.

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Jana Mazurkiewicz is a Polish Ph.D. student at the Slavic Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in contemporary Yiddish culture. Her book Death or Resurrection? Contemporary Yiddish Theatre in Europe is in the process of being published in Poland. She currently researches contemporary Yiddish theatre outside Europe.

I travelled to The Gambia in the summer of 2012 to learn to play a stringed instrument called akonting, not knowing then that it would spark my current dissertation research. Played by musicians of the Jola ethnic group from the Senegambian region of West Africa, the akonting is recognized as the closest known African relative of the American banjo.[1] This essay considers the role of history in the relationship between the two instruments, including both the challenge of tracing historical documentation and the ways that historical narrative has been produced by cultural activity in Senegambia and the United States. The following brief documentary film, made during my 2012 visit, introduces the sound of the akonting as played by my teacher Musa Diatta and gives a sense of my experience of fieldwork in The Gambia.

Conflicting Histories

Gambian musician and scholar Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta gave a presentation at the 2000 Banjo Collectors' Conference that would forever change the narrative of that instrument's history. Jatta first heard the banjo in the early 1970s while studying accounting in Atlanta, Georgia. When a bluegrass tune came on the local radio station, he was immediately struck by the banjo's sonic similarities to the akonting, an instrument he had played as a young man. A friend informed him that the banjo had roots in West Africa (a fact which had by then been deliberately obscured by a century of historical white-washing), launching Jatta on a path of research tracing this historical connection.

Nearly thirty years later, Jatta presented his findings at the Banjo Collectors' Conference in Massachusetts with his longtime Swedish collaborator Ulf Jägfors. The two men proposed that the akonting and banjo shared a close historical relationship, based on a nearly identical downstroke playing style and similar organological features such as a full-spike neck and an M-shaped bridge sitting atop the animal-skin soundplane. Their claims were apparently quite controversial: some members of banjo-centered online message boards accused Jatta of fabricating the instrument and its tradition for personal renown, while others allegedly even threatened physical violence against him. Why did this presentation arouse such outrage? What deeply embedded schema did their argument contest?

Left: Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta playing an akonting. Right: Detail from The Old Plantation, one of the earliest depictions of gourd banjos in the United States (circa 1790).

The akonting's uncanny resemblance to early American banjos challenged two central aspects of the banjo's existing historical narrative. First, it disrupted the previous consensus that American banjos descended from a group of West African archetypes played by griot musicians – plucked lutes such as the xalam, hoddu, and ngoni. While these instruments are similar to American gourd banjos in many respects, they differ in key organological details: they have wooden resonators instead of gourd resonators; they are tanged lutes rather than full-spike lutes; and their playing style involves a combination of up- and down-picking that is similar but distinct from what we know of early banjo technique. Although subtle, these differences leave room for the banjo to remain a uniquely American invention based on indeterminate African influences – and indeed the banjo's frequent sobriquet is "America's instrument." The existence of a single, specific relative containing nearly all the key features of American gourd banjos displaces the site of invention from the New World to West Africa.[2] Secondly, the emergence of the akonting contradicts the narrative of Western scholarly omniscience. Initial skepticism about the akonting's authenticity likely stemmed from a belief that such an instrument could not have escaped notice by Western scholars in this information-rich day and age. While excellent scholarship by Charry (1996), Coolen (1984), Epstein, (1975) and others has catalogued a large number plucked lutes in West Africa, the vast human diversity of that region has clearly left gaps in the Western musical ethnologue, of which the akonting's recent "discovery" is but one example.

A third reason for incredulity about the akonting is the sheer extent of its similarity to early American gourd banjos. Several essays have detailed these similarities thoroughly and systematically, so I will not dwell on them here (cf. Adams and Pestcoe 2007; Adams and Sedgwick 2007a and 2007b; Adams and Levy forthcoming; Bamber n.d.; Jagfors 2003; Levy 2012; Pestcoe n.d.). Suffice it to say, however, that the retention of construction details and especially the characteristic downstroke playing style through centuries that saw the cultural genocide of slavery and the explosion of industrial banjo manufacturing is a remarkable testimony both to the durability of musical practices and their ability to adapt to new contexts. The following videos of my akonting teacher Musa Diatta performing some of his favorite songs in The Gambia briefly illustrate the distinctive playing technique and the repeating vocal stanzas of akonting songs.

Musa Diatta plays "Mande Waruna"

Musa Diatta plays Corie Beju Dakaram

History of the Akonting

In the fourteen years since Jatta and Jägfors' presentation, any lingering skepticism about the akonting among American folk musicians has been replaced by enthusiastic acceptance of the instrument as the "ancestor" or "grandfather" of the banjo. While the evidence linking the two contemporary instruments is strong, the specific nature of their relationship rests on a murky historical conjecture: namely, that akontings were commonly played 400 years ago, during the time when millions of Senegambians were enslaved and transported to what is now the United States. Oral histories of Jola people suggest that the akonting tradition dates back at least three generations, and it is considered a very old instrument. However, since the Jola culture does not have the well-defined role of musician and oral historian played by griots, Jola oral history tends to be less formalized than other Sahelian societies and therefore does not reach into the distant past. Documentary evidence of the akonting by Western scholars dates to at least 1959, when the French anthropologist Louis-Vincent Thomas noted that "the most common and also the most famous of the chordophones [played by Jola people] is the kõtin or kõkin [i.e., akonting], which no sufficiently skilled young man misses playing" (Thomas 1959:382).[3] Neither Irvine and Sapir's 1976 article on musical style and social change among the Kujamaat Diola, nor Mark's 1994 analysis of a Jola music festival, nor Charry's 1996 survey of plucked lutes in West Africa mentions the akonting,[4] perhaps indicating the instrument had become less common or simply that those scholars did not visit areas where it remained in use. I will continue to conduct oral histories and scour university archives for further evidence of the akonting's history during my next visit to Senegambia, but for now the historical record remains rather limited.

Earliest known sketch of an akonting, with details of string fixture and bridge shape. The neck appears to sit atop the soundplane with an uncertain method of securing it to the resonator, representing either a different construction method from contemporary akontings or a graphic error by Thomas. From Thomas 1959: Planche XXVL.

Tracing the akonting's history is further complicated by the historical complexities of the Senegambian region and the Jola ethnicity in particular. For centuries, everyday life in the Senegambian region has been profoundly influenced by far-reaching cultural networks, such as the intertwined spheres of Islam, colonialism, and capitalism. (Some of these influences are represented in the brief opening images of the film by the ubiquitous squawking radios and billboards advertising special rates for Hajj savings accounts and international cellphone providers offering a chance to win a free trip to Mecca.) Senegambian traditions that many consider quintessentially West African – such as drinking strongly concentrated ataaya green tea or dying brightly colored batik fabrics ­– are in fact legacies of colonial connections to East Asia via European powers. As Amselle (1998), Ranger (1983), and others have famously argued, the very nature of the distinct ethnic groups of contemporary Africa may also be intertwined with histories of colonialism. Indeed, Mark has argued that the sense of widespread Jola ethnic solidarity emerged in response to French colonialism and Mandinka expansion in the 1800s, and continues to sustain itself through shared customs and geography along with the fraught post-colonial political situation (Mark 1985; 1992).[5] While it is tempting to project contemporary African traditions into the distant past, as some Jola musicians do for the akonting, it is difficult to gauge the historical effects of multiple turbulent centuries on contemporary practices. As Senegambian historian Donald Wright concludes:

Anthropologists have done historians of Africa great service with their cultural studies, but often they have lent confusion to historical study by the reference to societies in the cultural present, treating them as if they never had different ways of doing things until fairly recent times [...]. In such studies, there is an implied sense that only the complex world of the twentieth century brought change to "traditional ways." Of course, this is not historical, not an appropriate way to consider cultures through time. As all people in all cultures, African societies changed. The difficulty is that for most of those societies there is not sufficient evidence of the way things used to be. (2004:45)

Producing Historical Narrative

Despite the difficulties in tracing the history of the akonting, it is undeniably a close relative of the American banjo – and this historical narrative has been mobilized through cultural activity on both sides of the Atlantic. Embraced by roots music enthusiasts in the United States, akontings are now available for purchase from well-known American banjo suppliers such as Elderly Instruments and from respected banjo builders such as Jeff Menzies and Bob Thornburg, and even from at least one folk instrument store in Argentina. The Ships of the Sea museum in Savannah, Georgia held an Akonting/Banjo Weekend in 2007, where attendees learned how to build an "a-can-ting" using a cookie tin or coffee can. Perhaps a dozen banjo players have visited The Gambia to learn from source musicians there, among them Rhiannon Giddens of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops and ethnomusicologist Greg Adams. Florida-based banjoist and researcher Chuck Levy designed and commissioned an instrument he calls the "banjonting," which combines elements of the banjo and akonting, and he also released an album of old time Appalachian fiddle tunes that includes four traditional Jola songs played on fiddle and akonting, sonically linking the two genres.

Left: Cover art for Banjo Journeys, album recorded by Florida-based banjoist and researcher Chuck Levy. Note that a smiling Senegambia is depicted dancing with several American states. Right: An akonting for sale at Elderly.com, a major folk instrument retailer.

Meanwhile, in Senegambia, the akonting is experiencing a parallel revival. Since 2005, Daniel Jatta has been working to establish the Akonting Center for Senegambian Folk Music in his hometown of Mandinari. Having recently moved permanently back to The Gambia from his previous residence in Sweden, Jatta is currently working with his cousins Remi, Ekona, and Musa Jatta to develop a curriculum and DVD series that teaches students how to play akonting and includes introductory tutorials to the Jola language. Jatta has donated akontings to the national museum in Banjul, the capital city, and earlier this year spoke at a nationally sponsored event in The Gambia officially recognizing the akonting as the "grandfather" of the banjo.

Other Jola musicians have taken the akonting in different directions. Sana Ndiaye plays a custom-made akonting with the interethnic hip hop group Gokh-Bi System (meaning "The Neighborhood System"). He describes their sound as a fusion of "'Ancient' African traditional rhythms with contemporary 'urban' American beats in a style [...] dubbed, Ancient Meets Urban" (www.gokhbisystem.com/). Ndiaye describes the akonting as "an ancient and extremely rare three-stringed gourd instrument (which looks like a large banjo) that is virtually extinct in Senegal. It is a distinctive component of our authentic sound."

Left: The Akonting Center for Senegambia Folk Music in 2012. Musa Diatta and Daniel Jatta pose in front with local children. Right: Sana Ndiaye (center) plays a custom-made akonting with the hip hop group Gokh-Bi System.

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Anthropologist Ferdinand de Jong describes the practice of secrecy in Jola initiation rituals as a means of negotiating both interpersonal power relations and the broader spheres of Senegalese politics and global modernity (2001). For de Jong, the incorporation of distinctly contemporary elements into such practices "are not modern inventions of tradition […], but historical ways of dealing with modernity" (2001:7). The mobilization of historical narrative connecting the akonting and banjo likewise cannot be considered an invented tradition. Rather, it is a contemporary continuation of Senegambia's centuries-long history of reciprocal exchange with the global world system, and a production of historical narrative in which, to paraphrase the philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe (1988), stories told about others are elements in the stories told about selves. Like the braids of palm-root that once served for their strings, the story of the banjo and the story of the akonting are inseparably entwined.

Works Cited

Adams, Greg and Chuck Levy. Forthcoming. "The Downstroke Connection: Comparing the Jola Ekonting and the Banjo."

Adams, Greg and Paul Sedgwick. 2007a. "Encountering the Akonting: A Cultural Exchange." Old Time Herald 10(9):36-41.

______. 2007b. "'O'Teck!': An Introduction to the Akonting." Banjo Newsletter 34(5):12-18.

Adams, Greg and Shlomo Pestcoe. 2007. "The Jola Akonting: Reconnecting the Banjo to its West African Roots." Sing Out! 51(1):43-51.

Amselle, Jean-Loup. 1998. Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Trans. Claudia Royal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bamber, Nick. n.d. "Searching for Gourd Lutes in Guinea Bissau's Bijago Islands." <http://www.myspace.com/akonting/blog/173189481?MyToken=b564ce3e-424b-407c-a8bd-883632985c46>

______. n.d. "Two Gourd Lutes from the Bijago Islands of Guinea Bissau." <http://www.shlomomusic.com/banjoancestors_ngopata.htm>

Charry, Eric. 1996. "Plucked Lutes in West Africa: An Historical Overview." The Galpin Society Journal 49:3-37.

______. 2000. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Companion CD: "Mande Music."

Coolen, Michael Theodore. 1984. "Senegambian Archetypes for the American Folk Banjo." Western Folklore 43(2):117-132.

Epstein, Dena. 1975.“The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History.” Ethnomusicology 19(3):347-371.

de Jong, Ferdinand. 2001. Modern Secrets. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

Irvine, Judith and J. David Sapir. 1976. "Musical Style and Social Change among the Kujamaat Diola." Ethnomusicology 20(1):67-86.

Jagfors, Ulf. 2003. "The African Akonting and the Origin of the Banjo." The Old-Time Herald 9(2):26-33.

Lambert, Michael. 1998. "Violence and the War of Words: Ethnicity v. Nationalism in the Casamance." Africa 68(4):585-602.

Levy, Chuck. 2012. "An Interview with Laemouahuma (Daniel) Jatta." <http://www.banjourneys.com/jatta_interview_transcript/>

Mark, Peter. 1985. A Social, Economic and Religious History of the Basse Casamance since 1500. Wiesbaden, Germany: Steiner Verlag.

______. 1992. The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

______. 1994. "Art, Ritual, and Folklore: Dance and Cultural Identity among the Peoples of the Casamance." Cahiers d'Études Africaines 34(136):563-584.

Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Pestcoe, Schlomo. n.d. <http://www.shlomomusic.com/>

Ranger, Terence. 1983. "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa." In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 211-262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Louis-Vincent. 1959. Les Diola: Essai d'Analyse Fonctionnelle Sur une Population de Basse-Casamance. 2 vols. Dakar: IFAN.

Wright, Donald R. 2004. The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia. 2nd ed. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Scott V. Linford is a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His research approaches music as key feature of experiential senses of community, through fieldwork in West Africa, Central America, and the United States. An award-winning filmmaker and banjoist, Scott formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of Ethnomusicology Review and Director of the UCLA Bluegrass and Old Time Ensemble.

As I look back over the last ten years, and the peculiar journey with J.S. Bach that the time represents for me, it’s sometimes hard to believe that I’m here, now, playing the Goldberg Variations in their entirety, from memory, for sometimes sizeable audiences, well enough apparently to get enthusiastic approval from the classical section of the New York Times. I’m really a jazz pianist, after all, and the Goldbergs are, by I believe pretty much everyone’s account, hard. And the crazy thing is that I never set out to do this in the first place. How did I get here? The best answer I can give, to echo an experience many Bach interpreters have reported through the years, is that Bach taught me.

I grew up in Paris, France, in an American family, and started studying piano at the local conservatory when I was six. I was never asked what I wanted to play, as some of my friends in the US were—playing TV themes wasn’t on the radar. Mostly, I was made to play Bach, lots of it. At the same time, following the example of my grandfather, who was a jazz pianist on the West Coast, I started improvising, and that mode of music-making quickly took over my fledging artistic identity, even as I kept going through the classical repertoire with my teachers at the Conservatoire.

So I grew up with solid classical training paired with an all-out obsession with jazz and improvisation, which I mainly taught myself. In my early teens, I discovered the Goldberg Variations at a friend’s house in Paris, as recorded by Glenn Gould in 1981, and they took hold of me then like the most beautiful and tenacious earworm. Still, it was only in my early twenties, while studying jazz at the New England Conservatory, that I got a score, and even then, it took me a long time to look past the Aria. Slowly, out of what felt like simple curiosity, I started learning a Variation here and there, in breaks between practicing jazz scales. By the time I moved to New York, in ’06, I had learned the first five, at most. And yet, even as I put all my efforts into breaking into the New York jazz scene and developing a personal voice as an improviser, the Goldbergs stuck with me. I kept coming back to them, and found a classical teacher, Zitta Zohar, who convinced me they were somehow within reach.

The jazz pianist Fred Hersch, a long-time mentor of mine, recently reminded me that he had asked me, back then, why I was spending so much time learning the Variations, music that I would presumably never perform. Apparently I answered, “I don’t know—it just feels like something I have to do.” And so I soldiered on, slowly and not all that surely.

Meanwhile, my fledging jazz career was developing. I got a boost from the American Pianists Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship, a competition prize that included a fair amount of touring. And so it was that I found myself backstage at a small concert hall in Czech Republic in early ‘08, fifteen concerts into a twenty-day solo tour, nearing creative exhaustion. I had decided for some reason that the gigs should be freely improvised, and I was starting to run out of ideas. So I decided to use the Goldbergs as inspiration: I played the first four or five, and followed each one with long, freeform improvisations that used the spirit of the preceding variation as a jumping-off point. The audience’s reaction surprised me—I walked off stage feeling that something special had happened. So I tried it again the next night. Bach’s genius suddenly struck me, hard: instead of panning for gold dust in a cold and barren stream, which is how it increasingly felt to make improvisations up out of nothing, using the Goldbergs as inspiration was like starting with a giant gold nugget in my hand. Each one had such an utterly distinct identity. Suddenly my improvisations, though still totally speculative and fanciful, had as their subject something very specific, something rock-solid and strong.

And so my improvising started to teach me about Bach. Back home, as I turned to him again with renewed enthusiasm, I wanted to know why it was that each of his short pieces felt so entirely of a piece. The answer—Bach’s extreme compositional economy—took a long time to reveal itself to me; strangely, it didn’t jump out at me at all when I was just learning to play the pieces. And yet, to take an early and simple example, Variation 2 introduces a motive in its first half that gets repeated nearly verbatim in every single bar of the second half, this motive itself being derived from the oscillating bass-line figure that repeats throughout. I can only describe Bach’s strategy for saving the piece from predictability as sleight-of-hand: like a skilled magician, he continuously directs our attention away from the obvious. The clockwork machinery hides in plain sight.

He uses misdirection throughout the Goldbergs, in fact. Where a lesser artist might have wanted to make his achievement in devising a series of canons at every interval from the unison to the ninth clear to the listener, Bach often seems to do everything in his power to hide it, even as he never breaks from strict canonical form. Besides the continuous overlapping and crossing of voices, which is its own form of disguise, there’s a wonderful moment in Variation 12 where the third voice - which is free and not subject to canonical rules - steals the thunder from one of the 2nd voice’s entrances by playing its melody a third away, a beat early.

Only the least pedantic composer would do such a thing. And this is in a canon at the inverted fourth, where a listener’s chances of anticipating the canonic response are even lower than in the non-inverted ones! An advanced volleyball-like fake-out is being deployed against an opponent who couldn’t possibly return the ball if he tried. Bach, I slowly realized, had his cake and ate it, too. His structures, if you look, are as plain as day and as solid as the steel skeleton of a modern building, and yet we rarely, if ever, notice them (as we often do, for example, in Handel). We only hear the incredibly expressive melodies, the rhythmic inventiveness, the continuous small surprises. Has a rule-follower ever been less boring than Bach?

By the summer of ’09, I had worked up enough courage to play eight of the Variations, followed by improvisations, at a small solo concert in Paris. I had been studying Zen philosophy and believed wholeheartedly that an improvisation should have integrity, as a piece of music, if I only put myself in an unobstructed frame of mind and let it flow, as it were, out of me. And the audience, for the most part, was convinced—it felt, again, like something special was happening, that I was exploring fertile ground.

But something started to gnaw at me: was it truly right, when Bach was being so phenomenally economical and elegant, to respond in such a freewheeling way? What would happen if I started to borrow some of his structure, too, beyond his emotional leads?

In the fall, I had a small solo tour through the Midwest, and played the Goldbergs on every gig. This strange idea I’d had—of following one of the most perfect works of art with quite imperfect improvisations—was starting to crystallize in my mind as something that had a certain legitimacy, partially as a result of personal conviction, but also because of the encouragement I was getting on the road. Still, a year went by before I started thinking seriously of recording it. In early ’11, after releasing a jazz piano trio album of original material and writing a concerto for piano and wind symphony, I happened to meet Bonnie Barrett, the director of Yamaha Artist Services in New York. I became a Yamaha artist and saw an opportunity: if I brought in my own recording gear, I could use the Yamaha showroom in Midtown Manhattan to make my solo record with virtually unlimited studio time. As much as I’d been performing the music in public, a part of me realized there was still a lot of work to do. I just didn’t know quite how much.

Editor's Note: Part II of this story can be read here.

Born in Paris to American parents, “tremendously gifted” (LA Times) pianist-composer Dan Tepfer has translated his bi-cultural identity into an exploration of music that ignores stylistic bounds. His 2011 Goldberg Variations / Variations, which pairs his performance of Bach’s work with improvised variations of his own, has received broad praise as a “riveting, inspired, fresh musical exploration” (New York Times). He has worked with the leading lights in jazz, including extensively with saxophone luminary Lee Konitz, while releasing seven albums as a leader. As a composer, he is a recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for works including Concerto for Piano and Winds, premiered in the Prague Castle with himself on piano, and Solo Blues for Violin and Piano, premiered at Carnegie Hall. Bringing together his undergraduate studies in astrophysics with his passion for music, he is currently working on integrating computer-driven algorithms into his improvisational approach. Awards include first prize and audience prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, first prize at the East Coast Jazz Festival Competition, and the Cole Porter Fellowship from the American Pianists Association. His recent soundtrack for the independent feature Movement and Location was voted Best Original Score at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival. Learn more at www.dantepfer.com.

Editor's Note: Part I of this piece can be read here.

To make a long story short, I recorded what eventually became Goldberg Variations / Variations three times. Once as I’d been performing it, with fewer than half the Variations and long, rambling improvisations. Then, when I realized presenting only part of a work so whole as the Goldbergs to the world would be an embarrassment, as a much-too-long and obscure investigation into all the Variations, with a non-linear structure and a speculative tone throughout. And finally, once I realized that the purity and coherence of the Goldbergs called out for the most simple and clear structure possible, the way it finally ended up, with each of the 30 movements alternating with an improvisation of similar length, closely linked to the preceding Variation.

Since I essentially learned to play the second half of the Goldbergs while I was recording it, I started to think of the project less as a record of a live performance and more as a conceptual work that might end up only existing as a recording. There are, after all, many electronic and pop artists who never perform their work live. Recorded music can be a destination of its own.

The recording process was a powerful learning experience for me. Suddenly my weaknesses of articulation and phrasing, when I played Bach’s notes, couldn’t be ignored (as they could so easily when I practiced at home, or even when I performed). Alone in the Yamaha space, often late into the night, I recorded take after take of the Variations, and didn’t shy away from editing the best portions together. Glenn Gould did plenty of editing, I reasoned, so why couldn’t I? (I conveniently ignored the fact that he, at least, was more than capable of performing the work in front of an audience). Similarly, the recording process brought out all the structural, emotional and technical faults of my improvisations. As I advanced through the stages of the recording process, it became clear to me that the only way they could hope to stand up next to the beauty and perfection of the Variations was if they lost most of the indulgence I’d been allowing them to have. They needed to be concise and focused; they needed to get to the point, all while remaining personal. I started to develop explicit strategies. I realized, for example, that I was capable of improvising my own canons, as long as I kept them fairly rudimentary. I realized that many of the virtuosic Variations stemmed from a very restricted amount of material, and tried to find ways to improvise with a similarly limited set of ideas. I saw that Bach gave himself considerable license in the way he navigated the I-I-V || V-vi-I harmonic framework that all the Variations share, and let myself take my own varied pathways through the changes. I researched the last Variation, the Quodlibet, learned the words to the folk songs it uses as its melodic material, and substituted two jazz tunes I love as material for my improvised response. I gradually went from an implicit, alchemical relationship with the Variations to a much more precise and explicit one. And to my surprise, I gradually saw the project turn into something that felt like it had an integrity of its own.

It’s hard to record improvisations. There’s always the possibility that the next take will be better—it’s hard to stop. And yet as I recorded and re-recorded my responses to Bach, I began to recognize a flag that would occasionally go up in my mind, on good days, saying “this one’s good enough”. At first it was only one of my improvisations that felt that way, but I knew I had found a tone that rang true. My goal became to extend that tone, that feeling. I found it in another, then another, and later, in most of them (but not quite all). Saxophonist and producer Ben Wendel came in to help me choose the final takes, and suddenly I had a 62-track, 78-minute solo piano record that didn’t fit into any record-store genre category.

When it came out, at the end of 2011, I figured I would play a couple CD-release concerts and get back to touring with my trio or playing duo with saxophonist Lee Konitz, with whom my musical relationship had been growing. But to my surprise, critics either absolutely loved it (many of them) or loathed it with a passion (a few of them), and it started to take on a life of its own. After the Wall Street Journal ran a smart and generous feature, it even—surprisingly—started to sell.

For the album release, I played the full first half of the variations for the first time, from memory, and it felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life, like teetering on the edge of a precipice from beginning to end. I played the Paris CD-release gig at the Sunside, a small jazz club, and an agent heard me there who decided to take a chance on me. Soon he had booked a long fall tour for me in surprisingly large venues in France, and it dawned on me that it just wouldn’t be good enough to play only half of the record. I sublet my Brooklyn apartment, traveled to Cuba, and for two and a half weeks studied percussion in the morning and memorized Goldbergs in the afternoons, away from cell phones, internet and acquaintances. An inexperienced performer of classical works, this was slow work for me, but I found it intensely rewarding. The act of memorizing forced me to make sense of the Variations, to organize them in my mind in a way that I hadn’t had to in the recording process. Bach’s economy became all the more apparent, as did the many-fold symmetries that govern the entire work, from the structural to the physical.

Bach was a lover of symmetry. If most of us can agree that symmetry is important in aesthetics—people tend to prefer symmetrical faces to asymmetrical ones—Bach took the idea to the extreme. At the physical level, in almost every variation as well as the majority of his other keyboard works, both hands get treated with exacting evenness, as if he wanted the interpreter of his music to fully appreciate the symmetry of his own body, from his hands to the hemispheres of his brain. It’s not so much that the music is equally difficult for the left hand as it is for the right, although that’s part of it: it’s that to play Bach’s music well, one is obligated to bring the same amount of melodic consciousness to the left hand as the right. This is not the case in keyboard music by most other composers, which tends to heavily favor the higher register of the right hand. I’ve always resisted redistributing the voices of the Variations between the hands for this reason, even though it’s fairly common practice to do so in order to reduce hand crossing. To me, the experience of physical symmetry is an essential part of the piece.

At the structural level, the Goldbergs exhibit symmetries from the smallest to the largest scales. At the smallest, Bach is constantly playing with inversion, one example being the 16th-note runs that begin the first and second halves of Variation 26 above, strict mirror-images of each other.

At mid-scale, the rising or falling direction of the canonic intervals offers its own symmetries. Variation 24, for example, starts as a canon at the falling octave, switches to a rising octave on either side of its middle, and ends at the falling octave again, showing palindromic symmetry in its structure.

At the largest scale, the I-V || V-I binary form of the Aria and the variations, with its central axis of symmetry, reflects the symmetry of the whole work, which similarly starts and ends in the same place (the Aria) and is split at its midpoint in the silence between the 15th variation and the 16th variation, the only to be titled “Overture”—a new beginning. The division of the Aria into 32 bars similarly reflects the work’s division into 32 movements, connecting the part to the whole. It’s easy to see this as an analogy of our existences: from ashes to ashes, with life in between. No wonder, then, that the Goldbergs are often described as expressing every possible shade of human emotion.

By the fall of ’12, I had coerced so many friends into letting me run through the program for them at home in casual performances—always with their share of little disasters—that I was beginning to get an idea of what I was up against. Performing the Goldbergs in public is not only a musical and spiritual challenge; it’s a physical and mental marathon, too. There’s no place to hide in Bach’s limpid music—it will immediately reveal and magnify any lapses in concentration, any tightening up of the body, any fear. And alternating between my role as interpreter of the written text and my role as in-the-moment improviser only made the task harder, constantly jolting me out of the possibility of getting ‘in the zone’ as I switched between mental states. To say I was terrified is an understatement, but the truth is that I’ve always been a thrill-seeker, in sports just as much as in music. So the terror had its own attraction. My dad called me an adrenaline junkie. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s during the fall tour that I started to learn what it really means to perform the Goldbergs. The tour was well received, but after I came home to Brooklyn, I heard Piotr Anderszewski play Bach’s English and French Suites at Carnegie Hall and was struck with a mirror-neuron-like physical feeling for how direct and unencumbered his relationship to the piano was. I realized that I had only fleetingly truly relaxed my body into the keyboard when I was playing Bach’s music on the road. A number of people had noted, in fact, how different my body language was between the variations and my improvisations. The fear of a memory slip or technical slip-up kept my body on edge.

Much of my work since then has been on diminishing the sensation of fear. I realized, for example, that focusing my attention on rhythm and how it manifested in my body was a big help. It gave the notes a context to sit in and directed my attention forward, slightly into the future and away from the paralyzing present. I also realized the obvious, which is that the more I deepened my knowledge of Bach’s text, the more confidence I had when presenting it to an audience. Weeks after a solo performance in Vancouver, on the tail end of a duo tour with Ben Wendel, with whom I had just released a duo record, I got a call from an accomplished baroque harpsichordist who specializes in Bach and had heard my concert there. While he wished me good luck, he told me in no uncertain terms that my performance of the canons needed work. Why would you only bring out the top voice, he asked, when they’re all equally important? I didn’t have the heart to explain that I’d bring them all out if I could—that I was holding on for dear life out there. But I did take his cue and returned to Bach’s score with increased humility, practicing singing the interior voices of the canons while I played the others on the piano, or at other times willing myself to transpose variations to foreign keys from memory, and again at others spending hours obsessing over the exact phrasing of one short melody. Every time I opened the score, I was reminded that there is always something further to discover in Bach’s music—that the more you seek, the more you find. One thing dawned on me: when you’re starting with material of this quality, you don’t need to add anything to it. Your job is to get out of the way, to solve your interpretive problems so as to reveal the work itself as clearly as possible, like scraping mud off a diamond. I’m grateful to the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, a masterful interpreter of the Goldbergs, for generously giving me encouragement and musical advice during this time.

In the fall of ’13, a short solo tour came together on the East Coast, culminating in a show at one of my favorite New York venues, Le Poisson Rouge, a place that will present just about any style of music, from Johnny Gandelsman on solo violin to Laura Mvula with full band, as long as it’s good. Something happened on the tour—something started to click emotionally. I stopped trying so hard, started to let things be, both in the variations and my improvisations. “Don't try to make the music beautiful - it is beautiful; just let it out”, the beloved piano guru Sophia Rossoff had told me, and I slowly began to understand what she meant. And after the gig at Le Poisson Rouge, a man introduced himself to me, warmly, as Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times. A day later there was a glowing review in the paper, and suddenly the record was selling better on Amazon than Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga, if only for a brief while. In the following days I got calls from some of the best presenters and festivals in America inviting me to perform.

What astonishes me about this is that the same critic, a fierce and erudite expert on classical music, may very well have panned me if he had heard me two years earlier. It took me that long to even begin to understand what was at stake when performing this music in front of an audience. And in those two years, my rising standards for what makes an acceptable performance of Bach started to spread laterally to the other types of music I was making, from my composing to my improvising. Dealing with Bach so frequently and—it felt—so intimately made all but the most well structured and meaningful new music feel lacking in comparison.

Looking back, as I prepare for solo shows at the Ravinia Festival, SF Jazz Center and Wigmore Hall in London, I’m amazed any of this happened at all. From many perspectives, I’m sure it would seem that I developed my Goldberg Variations / Variations project exactly backwards. But I didn’t know any better, and that’s probably why it ended up coming into existence—I just followed my nose. Above all, I’m grateful for the opportunity, a truly unexpected one for me, to engage much more deeply than I thought I ever would with one of music’s greatest geniuses, and to let Bach teach me.

Born in Paris to American parents, “tremendously gifted” (LA Times) pianist-composer Dan Tepfer has translated his bi-cultural identity into an exploration of music that ignores stylistic bounds. His 2011 Goldberg Variations / Variations, which pairs his performance of Bach’s work with improvised variations of his own, has received broad praise as a “riveting, inspired, fresh musical exploration” (New York Times). He has worked with the leading lights in jazz, including extensively with saxophone luminary Lee Konitz, while releasing seven albums as a leader. As a composer, he is a recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for works including Concerto for Piano and Winds, premiered in the Prague Castle with himself on piano, and Solo Blues for Violin and Piano, premiered at Carnegie Hall. Bringing together his undergraduate studies in astrophysics with his passion for music, he is currently working on integrating computer-driven algorithms into his improvisational approach. Awards include first prize and audience prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, first prize at the East Coast Jazz Festival Competition, and the Cole Porter Fellowship from the American Pianists Association. His recent soundtrack for the independent feature Movement and Location was voted Best Original Score at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival. Learn more at www.dantepfer.com.

Flower World: Music Archaeology of the Americas, Volume 2. Edited by Matthias Stöckli and Arnd Adje Both. Berlin: Ekho Verlag. 2013. [198 p., Individual €59; Institutional €92.] illustrations, photographs, references, index.

The field of American music archaeology has developed dramatically since the 1968 publication of Robert Stevenson’s Music in Aztec and Inca Territory, which, for better or for worse, remains one of the most referenced sources on pre-Columbian music in the Americas. At present, the field has moved increasingly towards exploring identifiable regional variations and historical transitions in form and function––a shift away from the tendency to make sweeping generalizations that marks Stevenson’s generation of scholarship. The recent publication of the second volume of Flower World: Music Archaeology of the Americas offers an exciting glimpse into the new methodological questions and considerations arising as a result of this transition to regionally specific and culturally informed archaeological musical studies. Each of the eight studies in the volume provide a unique framework for archaeological research tailored to a particular set of research challenges, including limited ethnographic records, scant surviving archaeological data, and a lack of playable instruments. Collectively, the studies highlight the growing flexibility of musical archaeology in the Americas, and its capacity to contribute to both historical and contemporary research questions in archaeology and ethnomusicology.

Henry Stobart and Daniela La Chioma Silvestre Villalva author two studies utilizing innovative research questions and methods. Stobart’s integration of architecture and space in his analysis of the Inca ushnu platforms is one example of how musical archaeologists are reexamining performance environments in conjunction with ethnographic sources. Through his analysis, Stobart suggests that the acoustic conditions of the platforms lend themselves more towards visual rather than auditory performances. His analysis of space and function provides a useful set of considerations for future historical studies of performance at historical sites. The study by Villalva also draws on contextual clues regarding the function and significance of musical performance. In her study of music and fertility, she analyzes the iconography of the antaras that appear on Nasca vases, and relates these to what is known of Nasca music and the Nasca cosmos. By connecting iconography and function, she compellingly hypothesizes that the images include two categories: a supernatural depiction and an earthly counterpart. Her study utilizes a research methodology that demonstrates how musical meaning can be unearthed from unlikely sources, including “non-musical” ceramics.

Egberto Bermúdez and Grazia Tuzi provide another set of ethnographic source options for historical research, blurring the line between archaeology and ethnography. Tuzi’s study surveys the historical Voladores dance and how it has evolved into the current contemporary performance. Tuzi presents a number of illustrations of Voladores, ranging from depictions in the early colonial sources, like the Duran Codex, Bobonicus, and Fernández Leal Codex, to later depictions from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Tuzi then examines the transformations in the Voladores tradition, including its more recent adaptation for tourist entertainment, as well as how the UN designated status of “intangible cultural heritage” has affected its performance. Tuzi keenly demonstrates how ethnomusicology can integrate musical archaeology to illuminate the significance of current performance practices through her refreshing mix of ethnographic fieldwork and detailed historical investigation of Colonial sources.

Bermúdez also draws on Colonial sources in his ethnographic study of Columbian sacrificial music performance, in which he examines a particular case of Spanish policing from the early Colonial Era. He draws from an extensive body of Colonial era literature in his research, including the Cantares, and the Florentine Codex, and he argues that the processes of cultural exchange hypothesized by Reichel-Dolmatoff support these broader connections. Bermúdez’s willingness to seek larger connections is commendable, but also raises the question of how and when culturally specific works like the Florentine Codex can be applied to other American cultures. Hopefully this will continue to be explored in future publications.

In addition to the diverse methodologies and data employed by the studies mentioned above, the Flower World collection also includes organological studies that explore instrument usage, classification, and distribution. Organological studies in the collection include a study of Nasca whistles by Anna Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska; a study of ceramic instruments from the Greater Nicoya region by Carrie L. Dennett and Katrina C. Kosyk; a study of poli-globular flutes by Vanessa Rodens, Arnd Adje Both and Gonzalo Sánchez Santiago; and a study of the Hopewell panpipe by Mark Howell.

Several of the studies propose methods for categorizing the highly diverse ceramic instrument collections by typology and historical period, including the studies by Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska and Rodens, Both and Santiago. Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska identifies two categories of construction among Nasca whistles that she postulates correspond with two historical periods. The study finds that the changing aesthetics were likely tied to changing functions, although what these functions were is currently indiscernible. The study by Rodens, Both and Santiago endeavors to tentatively classify poli-globular flutes into four types with eleven sub-variants. The chart of poli-globular flutes in this study is exemplary, and includes the known providence of the instrument, approximate dates, dimensions, observations, an image, publications that have discussed the artifact, and the name of the artifact’s current collection. This chart should be a model for future studies. Additionally, the study includes an excellent literature review of recent Mesoamerican organological studies, which is highly overdue.

Rather than addressing classification, the study by Dennett and Kosyk and that by Howell focus instead on larger thematic relationships within the instrument collections. Dennett and Kosyk alternatively find overarching themes that transcend the identified chronological and political boundaries in the Greater Nicoya. The study postulates that the consistent appearance of animal iconography indicates a continuing function of the instruments that transcends the identifiable historical periods and regional political boundaries. The study by Mark Howell offers a glimpse of another creative archaeological methodology. With little data available, Howell instead focuses on the relationships between construction materials, potential sounding capabilities, and the sacrificial contexts in which they were found. He aptly demonstrates how asking broader questions can lead to meaningful musical analysis in contexts with limited surviving data.

In sum, the collection offers a refreshing acceptance of the diversity of the pre-Columbian Americas. Future publications might consider how to put these studies in dialogue with each other. For instance, how do the studies by Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska and that by Dennett and Kosyk overlap in their respective findings regarding the intersections between historical periods and larger overarching themes? What are the next anticipated steps for classifying the many other ceramic instrument collections that defy classification, as initiated by Rodens, Both and Santiago in their study? And how should recurring themes, such as the overlap between iconography, material, meaning, function and organological classification, be negotiated going forward?

Although some readers might lament that there are few overarching conclusions to be drawn from the present volume, each study represents an important step toward piecing together how these musical cultures operated as separate entities and participants in larger regional networks. The collection continues to build upon a growing body of literature moving analysis from generalizations to a more informative specificity.

References

Stevenson, Robert. 1976. Music in Aztec and Inca Territory. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Kristina Nielsenis currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Hispanic instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic music. Kristina received her MA from UCLA after completing BM in piano performance at Western Washington University and an additional year of studies in the Mesoamerican Languages and Cultures program at Copenhagen University. She founded and now manages the Historical Perspectives subsection of the Sounding Board.

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [392 p. ISBN 9780822351634. $27.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.

Reviewed by Scott V. Linford

Country music in the United States self-consciously narrates racial, gender, and class identities. While the narrative that country music is white music has long held sway in popular consciousness, a relatively recent wave of scholarship and musical activity has disrupted that myth by deconstructing its origins and highlighting the contributions of African-American country musicians. The twelve chapters of Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, edited by Diane Pecknold, make a valuable contribution to this literature by documenting the participation of African Americans in country music and analyzing country music as a site for the elaboration of African-American identities.

Reasserting the African American Presence in Country Music

Interventions into the white myth of country music have gained traction in the last few decades, constituting a distinct nexus of scholarly production. Librarian Dena Epstein’s 1975 article unearthing the banjo’s African roots was a seminal step in recovering the instrument’s black history,[1] and has inspired a number of subsequent works searching for banjo analogues in West Africa (Adams and Pestcoe 2007; Adams and Sedgwick 2007; Bamber n.d.; Coolen 1991 and 1984; Jagfors 2003; Linford 2013; Pestcoe n.d.; Shaffer 2005). This effort set the stage for Cecilia Conway’s beautifully written account of African-American banjo history and the living tradition of black banjo players in North Carolina (1995), based on two decades of fieldwork that overlapped with parallel work by Kip Lornell (2002, 1989, 1975, 1974) and Robert Winans (1982, 1979). Karen Linn’s more analytical work traced the banjo’s changing racial, regional, gender, and class significance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly connecting these deliberate changes in the instrument’s meaning to the economic maneuverings of banjo manufacturers (1991). Recent works by Aaron Fox (2004a, 2004b) and Geoff Mann (2008) have analyzed the strategies used by country musicians to self-consciously create and promote white and working class identities, and have helped lay bare the constructed nature of country music’s semiotic whiteness. Finally, and perhaps most explicitly related to this project, journalist Pamela Foster’s two books (2000, 1998) illuminate the numerous and regular contributions of African Americans to country music.

Working in tandem with this scholarly research are the recent efforts of African-American musicians to reassert the African-American presence in country music. While Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, and others have been working in country subgenres for decades, recent albums by Sankofa Strings (2012), The Ebony Hillbillies (2011), and the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops (2012, 2010, 2006) have a more evidently self-conscious mission to play with country music’s narratives and roots. The Carolina Chocolate Drops in particular make ample use of the revisionist rhetorical strategy identified by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “signifyin’”: “a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition. […] To name our tradition is to rename each of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem. To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify” (1988:xxi). African-American discourse theorizes about itself self-reflexively, especially through “unmotivated” repetition that expresses respect and through “motivated” revision that recasts earlier texts in a critical light. The playfully ironic but seriously evocative title of the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig–and the eponymous song which is re-named “Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)”–reclaims and renames a song composed by African Americans and stolen by a minstrel performer, resetting it in a contemporary, hip hop-style groove created by foot-stomping and the minstrel instrument of the bones. This haunting arrangement simultaneously signifies self-reflexively on the blackness of the original tune and uses its troubled history to signify the contemporary African-American identities of the performers.

Hidden in the Mix enters this field with a deliberate mission, described eloquently in Pecknold’s introductory essay “Country Music and Racial Formation.” The book seeks to move beyond the conceptualization of African-American musicians as mentors and inspirations for more well-known and commercially successful white musicians (e.g., the partnership between African American Lesley Riddle and the white “father of country music” A.P. Carter, or the influence of African-American guitarist Arnold Shultz on the white “father of bluegrass” Bill Monroe). Instead, it aims to explore the work of African-American country musicians in their own right and the fascinating complexity of country music’s relationship to black identities. On a simple level, then, it responds to Christopher Waterman’s observation that “performers, genres, texts, and practices not consonant with dominant conceptions of racial difference have [...] often been elided from academic, journalistic, and popular representations of the history of American music” (2001:167). More subtly, Hidden in the Mix avoids narrow conceptions of country music and blackness, a pairing whose incongruity has been played for laughs, or used to symbolize alienation from an authentic black self, or employed as a form of what Toni Morrison calls “playing in the dark,” using notions of blackness to provide affective depth to white identities. Working from a constructivist model of race and identity, the book’s ultimate goal is neither to argue that country music is “really” black nor to exploit the apparent curiosity of black musicians participating in a genre that is racialized as white, but rather to explore “the shifting and multifaceted ways in which resilient black identities are fashioned through musical production, whether that music is construed as ‘black’ or not” (2013:7).

After Pecknold’s thoughtful introduction, the book’s twelve chapters are grouped in two parts. Part One, “Playing in the Dark,” addresses the paradox that country music retains strong significations of whiteness despite the large number of African Americans who have contributed to its repertoire, and that even the high-profile presence of prominent African-American performers such as Ray Charles has counter-intuitively served to accentuate the genre’s semiotic whiteness. Part Two, “New Antiphonies,” approaches country music as a site for the negotiation of black identities, viewing the genre’s collisions with soul, hip hop, Caribbean dance halls, and others as sonic contributors to conceptions of blackness. Black music here is not reflective of an a priori cultural essence; it participates in the construction of black identities.

Part One: Playing in the Dark

Part One’s four chapters achieve their goal from diverse angles. Patrick Huber’s “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924-1932” (Chapter One) provides an excellent introduction to the historical creation of separate “hillbilly music” and “race music” recording genres, including the ways that these genres not only reflected segregationist ideas but contributed to the naturalization of racial categories in the United States. His survey of the significant number of African-American and interracial recording sessions released in the hillbilly genre prior to 1933 holds historical value for its insights into the early years of country music’s construction as an “invented tradition.” Diane Pecknold’s “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” (Chapter Two) continues this focus on the influence of the recording industry, interrogating the role of Ray Charles’ seminal album in challenging the perception that “race music” would not play well on regional radio stations. The album’s success changed the economic landscape of recording label categories, but Pecknold argues that the primary impact of the album was to redirect the class narrative of country music and not, as is now popularly believed, to challenge country music’s whiteness.

The latter two chapters of Part One examine the careers of lesser-known African-American musicians in relation to country music’s white narrative. Erika Brady’s “Contested Origins: Arnold Schultz and the Music of Western Kentucky” (Chapter Three) focuses on the role of African-American guitarist Arnold Schultz in the development of bluegrass and especially the thumbpicking guitar style. While his actual contributions to those musical developments are unclear, Schultz has become a mimetic originary figure, whose blackness adds to the controversy of those genres’ origins. “Fiddling with Race Relations in Rural Kentucky: The Life, Times, and Contested Identity of Fiddlin’ Bill Livers” (Chapter Four) by Jeffrey A. Keith narrates the remarkable life of African-American fiddler Bill Livers as an exemplar of race relations and ethnic interchange in rural Kentucky. Keith describes three phases in Livers’ career: as a “buffoon” in an otherwise all-white band who nevertheless used storytelling to subtly undermine racism; as “the embodiment of romantic primitivism” (120) in a hippie band that sought to unite rural culture and 1960s counterculture; and finally as a regular on the folk revivalist circuit. In all three stages, Livers’ acute awareness of changing racial power dynamics guided the way he adjusted his performance style to meet the expectations of his audience.

Part Two: New Antiphonies           

United by their approach to country music as a site for the negotiation of black identities, the eight chapters of Part Two cover diverse terrain. Tony Thomas’ “Why African Americans Put the Banjo Down” (Chapter Five) challenges the prevailing argument that black musicians stopped playing the banjo in the twentieth century due to its associations with the racist stereotypes perpetuated by minstrel shows, arguing instead that black musical tastes, dances, and performance contexts changed in ways that did not accommodate the banjo. Thomas’ assertion that the organological limitations of the banjo (particularly its characteristically short sustain and limited range) made it unsuitable for blues music may overlook the success of musicians such as Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops in adapting the banjo to the blues. Likewise, his argument that African Americans do not share white Americans’ enthusiasm for nostalgia may not account for differences in class and rural/urban identities within the African-American experience (indeed, the seventh chapter of Hidden in the Mix discusses the musical trope of African-American nostalgia for rural life). However, Thomas' reevaluation of previous arguments and the evidence used to support them makes this chapter a significant contribution to recent conversations about the banjo's African-American history and identity.

Kip Lornell’s highly personal essay “Old-Time Country Music in North Carolina and Virginia: the 1970s and 1980s” (Chapter Six) tells the story of his groundbreaking fieldwork with African-American musicians working in non-blues country genres in the 1970s and 1980s. His chapter underscores the diversity of African-American folk music as including far more than only blues and gospel genres, but the chapter’s real value (especially for ethnomusicologists) lies in the autobiographical story of how Lornell’s lifetime of musical interests led to his much-appreciated career of scholarly and applied work. “The South’s Gonna Do It Again: Changing Conceptions of the Use of ‘Country’ Music in the Albums of Al Green” (Chapter Seven) by Michael Awkward explores the works of Al Green and particularly his intimate, spiritual Belle Album (1978) in the context of shifting notions of black masculinity and “the country” as a source of nostalgic musical inspiration. Although Awkward’s prose is sometimes serpentine, he manages to weave together issues of fame, racialized gender expression, and fraught regional symbolism at a time when African Americans were questioning the promise of the urban North and returning to the imagined homeland of the black South.

The only essay to consider country music outside the United States, “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): The Creole-Country Two-Step in St. Lucia and Its Diaspora” (Chapter Eight) by Jerry Wever is an ethnographic and historical account of the popularity of country music among African-Caribbean dancers in St. Lucia. Although the prevalence of country music from the United States in St. Lucia is sometimes bemoaned by musicians and intellectuals as a form of musical colonialism, others prefer to view country music as a musical form that is already creolized by the contributions of African Americans and the characteristically Caribbean habanera rhythm. Wever positions the St. Lucian case study as an intervention into the dialogue about the racialization of country music in the United States, providing a welcome global perspective that could be supplemented by studies of United States country music elsewhere in the world (cf. Cohen 2005; Goertzen 1988) as well as other “country” musics such as Mexican and Chicano norteño and Brazilian música sertaneja and música caipira (Dent 2009).

Adam Gussow’s “Playing Chicken with the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West” (Chapter Nine) takes on the hybrid genre variously known as country rap, hick-hop, or hill-hop, particularly with regard to the career of African-American musician Troy Coleman, better known as Cowboy Troy. While audiences and critics sometimes react to Coleman’s deliberately controversial music with surprise or thinly veiled racist horror, Gussow argues that the braggadocio of Coleman’s stage persona hides a savvy finesse that asserts a space for blackness in contemporary country music and encourages listeners to think of country music as a creole genre.

Barbara Ching’s “If Only They Could Read between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music” (Chapter 10) argues that the work of African-American country songwriter and novelist Alice Randall (a Harvard graduate, occasional university professor, and “a postmodernist versed in critical race theory” [256]) toys with what communications scholar Josh Kun calls “audiotopias.” For Kun, audiotopias are “almost-places of cultural encounter,” where sounds with diverse semiotic significances (for example, “white music” and “black music”) can exist simultaneously in the utopian sonic space of American music (Kun 2005:17). While briefly engaging with black country artists of the second half of the twentieth century (such as Charley Pride, Linda Martell, and Stoney Edwards) and discussing their different approaches to addressing race, Ching focuses on the ways that Randall self-consciously engages narratives of country’s supposed whiteness (for example by simultaneously paying homage to Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline in a song she wrote for Trisha Yearwood). An excellent analysis that brings forward Randall’s use of utopian musical space to address the question of African-Americans’ relationship to country music, Ching concentrates almost entirely on the lyrical content of Randall’s oeuvre, neglecting the possibilities of examining musical sound as a discursive and performative practice unto itself (a critical aspect of Kun’s audiotopia concept).[2]

“You're My Soul Song: How Southern Soul Changed Country Music” (Chapter 11) by Charles L. Hughes describes the large, interracial group of session musicians, songwriters, producers, performers, and executives in Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals who collectively shaped the sounds and genre identities of Southern soul, country, and country-soul music. While previous works have discussed the contributions of white musicians to soul music (as in Hughes’ discussion of foundational works by Peter Guralnick [1986] and Barney Hoskyns [1998]), Hughes hones in on the mutual influences and interracial collaborations of soul and country music in a field nonetheless fraught with prevailing white appropriation and control of black musics. Hughes’ meticulously researched work provides a valuable glimpse behind the scenes, highlighting the importance of non-performers in shaping musical sounds and meanings.

The book’s final chapter, David Sanjek's “What's Syd Got to Do with It? King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover” (Chapter Twelve) is a narrative account of Jewish-American executive Sydney Nathan and African-American A&R man Henry Glover of King Records and their practice of marketing crossover recordings (i.e., recording the same song in multiple genres and styles). Sanjek differentiates “crossovers” from crossracial “covers” such as those by Pat Boone and his ilk, which verged on embarrassing racial impersonation or caricature. Taking a rather idealistic view of this practice, Sanjek characterizes crossovers as “a musical melting pot, for two (and sometimes more) musical and cultural traditions consequently collide, fuse, and reformulate” (311). He further implies that Nathan and Glover’s financial directives happily aligned with positive social motivations of integration: “an ancillary element of [King Records’] agenda ratified the pluralistic essence of our national character” (336). While a cynical reader might wish to inquire further into the racialized power dynamics between the mercurial Nathan and strategic Glover, this essay’s placement at the end of the volume may be a gesture at optimism for country music’s potential as an audiotopic site of crossracial collaboration and integration.

Conclusions

Hidden in the Mix stands as an important contribution to literature on American country music and its wide range will be appealing to a broad readership, especially scholars of ethnomusicology, music history, anthropology, American studies, and ethnic studies. The book’s introduction and twelve chapters amply fulfill their two-fold mission to deconstruct the creation of country music’s whiteness and interpret country music as a site for the negotiation of blackness. Aside from these general themes, the book brims with unforgettable anecdotes: the story of black guitarist Amédé Ardoin, who was savagely beaten after playing at a white house party with white Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee, allegedly for accepting a handkerchief from the daughter of the white homeowner (30); Ray Charles’ pithy response to an interviewer who asked about the difference between white and black jazz bands (“Oh, about a hundred dollars a week” [85]); the aging Bill Livers’ wholehearted embrace of the 1970s free love ethic (illustrated by an anecdote involving an appreciative female fan and a wheelbarrow [132]) and the way he sometimes dumbed down the technical complexity of his fiddling so as not to appear superior to white fiddlers (133); Kip Lornell’s simple but inspiring ethnographic mission to “go out into the field, find out what’s on the back roads and in small communities, and add to the body of knowledge by way of album liner notes, articles, books, and recordings” (173); and the easy way that Nashville songwriter and producer Buddy Killen used the same disco-infused backing track with two different sets of lyrics to score simultaneous hits on the R&B charts (recorded by African American Joe Tex) and the country charts (recorded by Caucasian Bill Anderson) (283). By turns tragic, comedic, inspiring, and insightful, these stories enliven the chronicle of race and music in the United States.

Works Cited

Adams, Greg and Shlomo Pestcoe. 2007. “The Jola Akonting: Reconnecting the Banjo to its West African Roots.” Sing Out! 51(1):43-51.

Adams, Greg and Paul Sedgwick. 2007. “Encountering the Akonting: A Cultural Exchange.” Old Time Herald 10(9):36-41.

Bamber, Nick. n.d. “Two Gourd Lutes from the Bijago Islands of Guinea Bissau.” <http://www.shlomomusic.com/banjoancestors_ngopata.htm> Accessed July 18, 2013.

Carolina Chocolate Drops. 2012. Leaving Eden. Sound recording. Nonesuch.

______. 2010. Genuine Negro Jig. Sound recording. Nonesuch Records.

______. 2006. Donna Got A Ramblin' Mind. Sound recording. Music Maker.

Coolen, Michael Theodore. 1991. “Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture.” Black Music Research Journal 11:1-18.

______. 1984. “Senegambian Archetypes for the American Folk Banjo.” Western Folklore 43(2):117-132.

Cohen, Sara. 2005. “Country at the Heart of the City: Music, Heritage, and Regeneration in Liverpool.” Ethnomusicology 49(1):25-48.

Conway, Cecelia. 1995. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Dent, Alexander. 2009. River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ebony Hillbillies. 2011. Barefoot and Flying. Sound recording. EH Music.

Foster, Pamela. 2000. My Country, Too: The Other Black Music. Nashville: Publishers Graphics.

______. 1998. My Country: The African Diaspora’s Country Music Heritage. Nashville: My Country.

Fox, Aaron. 2004a. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______. 2004b. “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad’ Music.” In Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derko, 39-61. New York: Routledge.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goertzen, Chris. 1988. “Popular Music Transfer and Transformation: The Case of American Country Music in Vienna.” Ethnomusicology 32(1):1-21.

Guralnik, Peter. 1986. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. Boston: Little Brown.

Hoskyns, Barney. 1998. Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South. London: Bloomsbury.

Jagfors, Ulf. 2003. “The African Akonting and the Origin of the Banjo.” The Old-Time Herald 9(2):26-33.

Kun, Josh. 2005. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Linford, Scott V. 2013. “O’teck Akonting: Ethnography of a Senegambian Folk Lute.” Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. Indianapolis, 11/15/2013.

Linn, Karen. 1991. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lornell, Kip. 2002. “Non-Blues Secular Black Music in Virginia.” In American Musical Traditions. Volume 2: African American Music, edited by Jeff Todd Titon and Bob Carlin, 42-49. New York: Schirmer Reference Books.

______. 1989. “Banjos and Blues.” In Arts in Earnest: Field Studies in North Carolina Folklife, edited by Daniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zugg, 216-31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______. 1975. “Pre-Blues Black Music in Piedmont North Carolina.” North Carolina Folklore Quarterly 23(1):27-32.

______. 1974. “North Carolina Pre-Blues Banjo and Fiddle.” Living Blues 18:25-27.

Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(1):73-100.

Pecknold, Diane, ed. 2013. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pestcoe, Shlomo. n.d. <http://www.shlomomusic.com/> Accessed July 18, 2013.

Sankofa Strings. 2012. Colored Aristocracy. Sound recording. CD Baby.

Schaffer, Matt. 2005. “Bound to Africa: The Mandinka Legacy in the New World.” History in Africa 32:321-369.

Waterman, Christopher. 2001. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrine,’ and the Excluded Middle.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, 167-205. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winans, Robert. 1982. “Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex‑Slave Narratives.” Black Music Research Newsletter 5(2):2-5. 

______. 1979. “The Black Banjo-playing Traditions in Virginia and West Virginia.” Journal of the Virginia Folklore Society 1:7-30.

Scott V. Linford is a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His research approaches music as key feature of experiential senses of community, through fieldwork in West Africa, Central America, and the United States. An award-winning filmmaker and banjoist, Scott formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of Ethnomusicology Review and Director of the UCLA Bluegrass and Old Time Ensemble.

Cornwall, at the far south west of the United Kingdom, is simultaneously a county of England, a royal Duchy, and Celtic nation, and as such its culture and heritage bears witness to a long history of conflicting social, economic and cultural pressures. Cornwall’s musical traditions have often been overshadowed by other aspects of its heritage as well as by the outputs of its Celtic cousins; however, both Cornwall’s contemporary and historical musical heritage is rich and varied, with a range of genres and styles.

Above: Map showing Cornwall, UK courtesy of Nilfanion.

Cornish carols are one such genre; a social and musical tradition performed at Christmas, as opposed to May or Easter carolling traditions. The local representation of a non-conformist religious choral practice that was widespread across the United Kingdom, the corpus known today as Cornish carols is largely the result of an upsurge in carol composition following the visits of John Wesley (1703-1791) and the subsequent growth of the Methodism. Surviving caroling traditions in Cornwall, such as those in Padstow, reflect elements of practices described in early nineteenth century accounts of caroling practices in Cornwall. These accounts describe groups of musicians touring their particular town, village or parish throughout the night singing carols to the local residents at their houses (Gilbert 1822; Sandys 1833). The musicians were also usually rewarded with some money or food and drink.

Above: Carolers outside the Golden Lion pub in Padstow, December 2010 (photo: Elizabeth Neale).

Above: The Padstow carolers performing "Zadoc" (Recorded by Elizabeth Neale, 2011).

Sounding Out: The Cornish Association

Cornish carols were spread across the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the migration of Cornish miners to the British colonies and other territories (Payton 2005). Their presence in South Australia during the 1890s is of note since the carols were explicitly tied to perhaps the most fervent contemporary expressions of Cornish identity. The discovery of copper at Kapunda, Gawler and the northern Yorke Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in thousands of Cornish miners voluntarily traveling to the colony with the aid of government-assisted passages. In particular, the towns of Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina (the Copper Triangle) became known as Australia’s “Little Cornwall,” and continue to celebrate Cornish heritage. The prominent historian of the Cornish in Australia, Professor Philip Payton, considers that the nineteenth-century Cornish communities in the Copper Triangle not only unconsciously retained Cornish culture in their continuation of existing cultural habits, but also that “individuals and organizations deliberately replicated former behaviour or adopted ‘Cornish’ rhetoric as a means of asserting community or institutional identity in their new land” (Payton 2007:57).

Adelaide was evidently also a strong locus of Cornish identity, since it was there that the Cornish Association of South Australia (CASA) was formed in 1890. The project of a group of influential Cornishmen, the CASA’s aims were not only to facilitate social interaction and to aid new migrants in South Australia, but also to promote Cornish culture and customs. Complex narratives of race and identity immediately emerged within the CASA’s rhetoric; during the inaugural banquet, John Langdon Bonython (vice-president of the CASA) made a speech in which he overtly positioned the Cornish as the descendants of the pre-Roman inhabitants of the United Kingdom, stating that it was “the stock of these hardy Celts which were now building up this Greater Britain of the South” (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5). However, he was also at pains to maintain their British credentials and unswerving allegiance to the empire:

Their monuments were in every continent, and no people had done more to build up the British Empire than the people of Cornwall. (Loud cheers) They talked about hands across the sea uniting the various portions of the British Empire, and making federation possible, but whose hands were they but the hands of Cornishmen, who in their pride of race never forgot that they were citizens of the British Empire. (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5).

The foregrounding of race in these dialogues reflects the contemporary social and scientific preoccupation with classification. The term race was often interchangeable with “species,” and in the context of human civilizations, connoted language and culture alongside physical and mental characteristics. As such, positioning the Cornish as a Celtic race and therefore separate from the Anglo-Saxon English was a powerful assertion of distinct biological and cultural identity.

These dialogues of race and identity were reiterated during the CASA’s promotion of Cornish carols. The Cornish Musical Society (CMS) was formed later in the same year with the express purpose of practicing specifically Cornish carols to be sung at Christmas under the auspices of the CASA. The group gave their first concert in 1890, using as their source material a collection that was published by musician, collector and teacher Robert Hainsworth Heath in Cornwall in September 1889.

Above: Frontispiece of Robert Hainsworth Heath’s Cornish Carols, Part 1, published in 1889 (photo: Elizabeth Neale, author’s copy).

The first of two collections of Cornish carols, Heath included pieces that he had collected from other local composers, as shown on the front cover, and others that he had composed himself. Well-publicized both before and after, the initial concert was a success and it was repeated and expanded the following year. At this gathering, Bonython stated that:

It was a long retrospect to look through nineteen centuries back to the time when the first Christmas carol was heard on the plains of Bethlehem. But Cornish people should never forget that a hundred years had not elapsed before carols celebrating the Nativity were being sung in Cornwall and that they had been sung there forever since. Passed down from generation to generation, the strains of these carols linked the present with the past and united the Cornish of today with the Cornish of the first century. It was no wonder that the people of Cornwall were carol singers, and that wherever they might be found they still sang at Christmastide the sweet songs of the old home. (The Advertiser 28/12/1891:6)

In spite of the rhetoric conveyed by admirers of the carol tradition, a further examination of the genre, music and texts utilized by the Cornish Musical Society further complicates the conception of Cornish identity promoted by the Cornish Association in two primary ways that highlight the musical collision between a Cornish and British imperial identity. First, while the collection includes a number of texts not yet found in extant collections of hymns and carols, and are therefore likely to have been composed by Cornish musicians, it concurrently, also includes texts such as “Joy To The World,” and “While Shepherds” from English and Scottish hymn writers such as Isaac Watts, John Cawood and James Montgomery. These are not of Cornish origin and would have been well known across the United Kingdom. Second, the style of the musical materials cannot be said to be unique to Cornwall. Cornish carols generally are written for four parts (sometimes sharing three parts between SATB) and are usually unaccompanied, although historical accounts often describe he presence of instrumentalists within caroling parties (Shaw 1967:102). While the carols may employ a variety of texts, they characteristically begin in unison, and as the stanza progresses, develop a fugal section before returning to complete the stanza in unison. As such they are rather analogous within the genre of Protestant hymn fuging tunes, popular in both England and America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Temperley 1981). There is therefore a clear disjuncture between the provenance of the musical materials utilized to support Cornish identity, and the cultural and biological heritage claimed by the CASA.

Reconstructing Music, Contesting Identity

The vision of Cornish identity disseminated by the CASA thus included intertwining and colliding notions of Celtic, English, British and imperial identity; however, the musical materials that were used to support an ancient Cornish heritage were not congruent with the history claimed by the CASA. This is not to suggest that the genre of Cornish carols is academically illegitimate, or that the CASA were deliberately misleading; rather, the intention is to recognise the constituent materials of the tradition in conjunction with the rhetoric put forward by the CASA in order to gain a deeper insight into the narratives at play. Indeed, the CASA’s initial promotion of Cornish carols appears to have bolstered the tradition significantly, considering the genre’s subsequent upsurge in performance and the further publication of other collections of Cornish carols within South Australia.  The performance of Cornish carols became an established part of the CASA’s activities in the following decades. The tradition not only musically evoked a distinct historic identity and culture, but also was active in the present, socially bonding Cornish communities in the South Australia and conceptually bonding the Cornish across the diaspora.

The CASA’s efforts reflect the contemporary European political, sociological and compositional trends towards the use of folk or traditional culture in the project of nationalism and the process of nation-building (White and Murphy 2001; Bohlman and Radano 2000). In tandem, as scholars have increasingly critiqued, debated and deconstructed the concepts of race, the nation (Anderson 1983) and the socio-cultural apparatus of nationalism (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), the door has opened for examining the construction and performance of identity within regions, among deterritorialised peoples and within other non-nation states. Further development of these debates among diaporic communities would broaden the academic perspective of migrant cultures, especially when their historical context is taken into account. As such, the Cornish caroling tradition, and the context and dialogues surrounding it, is significant not only for our understanding of historical Cornish diasporic identity in Australia, but also in ethnomusicological approaches to the music cultures and projects of historic migrant minorities.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Bohlman, Philip V., and Ronald M. Radano, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial

Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gilbert, Davies. 1822. Some ancient Christmas Carols, with the tunes to which they

were formerly sung in the West of England. London: John Nicholls and Son.

Heath, Robert Hainsworth. 1899. Cornish Carols, Parts 1 & 2. Leipzig: Robert

Hainsworth Heath.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Payton, Philip. 2007. Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

––––––. 2005. The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’.

Fowey: Cornish Editions Limited.

Sandys, William. 1833. Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern. London: Richard

Beckly.

Shaw, Thomas. 1967. A History of Cornish Methodism. Truro: D. Bradford Barton

Ltd.

Temperley, Nicholas. “The Origins of the Fuging Tune” In Royal Musical Association

Research Chronicle 17:1-32.

The Advertiser (South Australia: 1889-1931). "Cornish Association, Inaugural

Banquet – An Enthusiastic Gathering" (writer unknown). 22/2/1890:5.

––––––. "Cornish Musical Society: Christmas Carols" (writer unknown), 28/12/1891:6

White, Harry, and Michael Murphy. 2001. Musical Constructions of Nationalism:

Essays on the History and Ideology of European Music Culture 1800-1945.

Cork: Cork University Press.

Bio

Elizabeth is a second year PhD candidate co-supervised at Cardiff University and the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter. She received her BA in music and English literature and MA in ethnomusicology from Cardiff University, and her project is supported through the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

In December 1917, U.S. Merchant Marine Truman Blair Cook wrote a diary entry describing his crew’s arrival in Arica, Chile—a small mining town near the country’s northern border. The following is excerpted from Oregon Historical Quarterly, where Cook's diaries were published in 1976:

Dec. 28. Arrived at Arica [in northern Chile] and dropped anchor at 11 a.m. Seems good to see signs of people. . . . Running from the beach is a pier of concrete and steel with locomotive cranes that lift the cargos from the lighters onto the flatcars. When anyone from the ship goes ashore they are rowed in by boatmen for a peso . . . each way. If after six up to ten p.m. he soaks you from 3 to 10 pesos if he thinks he can get away with it. Arica is the port for the railroad that runs back into Bolivia and Bolivia's outlet for her rich mines.

The town is of about 2,000 population, mostly Chileans, Spanish and Indians. Only a few Americans and few more English can be found, but all speak Spanish. . . . The whole town reeks of the smell that is common to all of the towns in this country. Everything is very high and doubly so to an American, as they see you coming, so to speak.

The town is very proud of its jazz band and its bright uniforms. It plays every other evening and Sunday morning and evening. I found it hard to talk to the people at first but now I know a few Spanish words and get along in a way. I have only been ashore four times as I always come back with enough fleas to keep me in misery for a week. The town is full of them and the dogs' backs are brown with them. The natives seem to be entirely ignorant of them. The only trees to be seen are the few in the plaza and a few more in the streets. The plaza is a jumble of trees, flowers, historic cannon, and statues of the liberation of the country.

This entry is a rather typical seaman’s description of a maritime voyage. What makes it remarkable, however—and also vexing—is that it refers to the town’s “jazz band,” and thus is the earliest use of the word that I have found referring to musical activity in Chile. It is clear that jazz activity was taking place in the country long before North American recording companies set up studios in Santiago in 1930—according to musicologist Álvaro Menanteau, the first jazz recordings by Chilean musicians were recorded in Buenos Aires in 1926 in an effort to cater to Chilean taste in popular music (2003:27).

What makes this reference to the Arica town jazz band vexing, for jazz scholars at least, is that the reference alone does little to describe what that jazz activity sounded like. Indeed, 1917 is the same year that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded their jazz sounds in New York; it is possible but highly unlikely that the inhabitants of a remote mining village in the Atacama Desert had access to that record as a musical touchstone. It is also possible that the sounds produced by the Arican “jazz band” reminded Cook of early tours along the North American West Coast by African American musical pioneers such as Jelly Roll Morton.

Original Dixieland Jazz Band's recording "Dixie Jass Band One-Step"

What this encounter between the North American merchant marine and this band of Chilean musicians does show, however, is that the word jazz was traveling rapidly around the world as a way of naming musical activity. And although the term now connotes a relationship to musical genre, it also carries with it a host of other meanings. This point is illustrated perhaps most dramatically by Mark Laver in his 2015 book Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning, which addresses the use of jazz in advertising. (A preview of this book was published here in March.) After enumerating a bizarre and wide-ranging list of products bearing the name “jazz,” Laver concludes,

If jazz can simultaneously be a seasoned potato, a diet cola, an in-ear thermometer, and a super yacht, if it can cost anywhere from US$1 to £300 million, its core meaning is exceptionally elusive, if it has any singular core meaning at all. (2015:2)

The word’s association with music has never been exclusive, either. First printed in the Los Angeles Times in reference to a minor league pitcher’s curveball in 1912, the word only became associated with musical practice in New Orleans a few years later. As Lewis Porter notes in the link above, before the mid-1910s, New Orleans musicians referred to what they did as “ragtime.” Cook, a West Coast sailor who had spent time in California before 1917, seems to have been familiar with the word’s seedier connotations—this is evident from the other associations in the text to dirt, stench, and fleas.

Furthermore, the word has undergone subtle transformations as it has assimilated into other languages. In Spanish, for example, the spelling is maintained but the pronunciation is changed depending on local dialect—Chileans pronounce it “yass,” for example, while Argentines call it “shass.” In Russian, meanwhile, the pronunciation is similar but it is transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as “джаз." The dominance of the name, it bears noting, is deeply connected to the United States’ role as a hegemonic power throughout Latin America in the wake of World War I. In Jazz Sells, Laver draws on an argument from Ernesto Laclau to drive this point home:

[If] the unity of the object is the retroactive effect of naming itself, then naming is not just the pure nominalistic game of attributing an empty name to a preconstructed subject. It is the discursive construction of the object itself. . . . The essentially performative character of naming is the precondition for all hegemony and politics. (Quoted in Laver, 2015: 231)

In other words, the music being played by the uniformed Aricans only became “jazz” upon the arrival of an Oregonian merchant marine. Thus, it was Cook—neither Arican nor African-American musicians—who called the group a jazz band.

This awkward fit between the word and the music has never gone away, as Amiri Baraka famously noted in his influential Down Beat essay “Jazz and the White Critic.” Nicholas Payton put it most provocatively when he wrote at his blog in 2011,

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t play Jazz. I play Postmodern New Orleans music. . . . I am a part of a lineage. I am a part of a blood line. My ancestors didn’t play Jazz, they played Traditional, Modern and Avant-garde New Orleans Music. I don’t play Jazz. I don’t let others define who I am. . . . The man who lets others define him is a dead man. With all due respect to the masters, they were victims of a colonialist mentality.

In his 2005 essay “Core and Boundaries,” jazz historian Scott DeVeaux delves more deeply into the ways in which this core meaning is maintained, both the word and the music. He demonstrates how jazz history has been written by drawing boundaries, leaving out many musical practices along the way. Those boundaries have defined a set of dichotomies, with the core jazz meaning lying on one side and not the other: art, not commerce; black, not white; male, not female; and North American, not European, African, or of any other geographical provenance—certainly not Arican! Writing in a similar vein, John Szwed designates the musical practices that fall outside of these boundaries with scare quotes—as “jazz”—in his book Jazz 101 (2000). This has been done, as Payton notes, by mostly white North American critics and historians without separating the word from the music.

But DeVeaux also argues that contemporary listeners—not to mention a staggering diversity of musical practices drawing on jazz histories—lie mostly outside of those boundaries, and in order to reach them, we must cross them and engage with those peripheries. My dissertation fieldwork, which has recently taken me to Chile to focus on jazz practice at the Santiago club Thelonious, concerns itself deeply with this interplay between inside and outside—core, boundary, and periphery—especially in terms of geography and nationality, but also race, class, and gender. The practices of musical performance and listening that take place on a given night in Santiago—or, for that matter, Arica—may fall well outside of these boundaries, in terms of race and geography, while falling squarely within them in terms of class, gender, and musical taste.

I plan visit to Arica in early 2016 to follow the trail started perhaps unwittingly by Cook—a fellow white Oregonian—nearly a century ago. As I learn more about the surprising local histories that have played out alongside both this word and the sounds with which it has been associated, I am drawn more closely to the music that those Arican bandsmen were making at the time they encountered Cook’s jazz-tinged ears. It has been suggested by Payton and others that the word be retired, replaced by Black American Music, or #BAM. But what happens when we add Brown Arican Music to the historical mix? Whether we like it or not, these sounds have been connected through the uses of the word "jazz" by white North Americans to describe music made by nonwhite others. And as I hope to have shown, listening for these global jazz connections can offer deep surprises—about both the word and the music it has named.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Jazz and the White Critic." Down Beat. August 15, 1963.

Cook, Truman B. 1976. “Merchant Marine 1917-1918.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 77(2):100-129.

DeVeaux, Scott. 2005. “Core and Boundaries.” Jazz Research Journal 2(1):15–30.

Laver, Mark. 2015. Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning. New York, NY ; Abingdon: Routledge.

Menanteau, Alvaro. 2003. Historia del Jazz en Chile. Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores.

Payton, Nicholas. 2011. "On Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore." Nicholas Payton Blog. https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/.

Porter, Lewis. 2011. "Origins of the Word Jazz." WBGO.org Blog. http://www.wbgo.org/blog/origins-word-jazz.

Szwed, John. 2000. Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hachette Books.

Alex W. Rodriguez is a writer, improviser, trombonist and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at UCLA. He founded the Sounding Board subsection "Space is the Place" in 2013 and served as Editor in Chief for Ethnomusicology Review in 2014. Alex studied trombone performance Amherst College, and completed a Master of Arts degree in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers University, where he wrote his thesis on early jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden and studied trombone with Conrad Herwig. His current research focuses on jazz clubs around the world and the creative improvised music communities that surround them, with case studies in California, Chile, and Siberia. He is currently conducting fieldwork at the Santiago jazz club Thelonious, Lugar de Jazz. Alex also contributes jazz coverage to NPR Music and maintains a blog, Lubricity. He also co-founded the UCLA Omni-Musicality Group, and has served as the Brass Instructor and Curriculum Director for the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra and PS1 Elementary School.

Recent discussions in historical musicology suggest that there is a growing interest in the relationship between Western music and the position of Europe in world history. This incipient “global turn,” if it can be characterised as such, reflects an increased awareness of globalisation within other academic disciplines and in contemporary world society and politics. Perhaps the most important intellectual influence, which has been felt across a range of disciplines, is the growth of postcolonial studies. While postcolonial theory has been most thoroughly applied in the social sciences—and has long been integral to disciplines such as anthropology and ethnomusicology—its impact can also be seen in the rise of global historical studies. Some historians may reject postcolonial theorists’ distrust of large-scale narratives or empiricist methodology, but there is no doubt that much historical work now recognises the interdependency of European history with that of the rest of the world.

Key to this global conception of history—and, implicitly, to traditional European historiography—are debates surrounding the notion of a “great divergence” between the West and the rest, leading to the emergence of modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet while the exceptionalism of Europe has been challenged in many quarters, other scholars have sought to defend this model, and it continues to have considerable purchase in the media and in popular consciousness (e.g. Ferguson 2012). Indeed, as Dipesh Chakrabarty and others have argued, the construct of history itself, with its emphasis on development and progress, is deeply intertwined with ideas of Western superiority and the mechanisms of imperialism (Chakrabarty 2008; Young 1990). From this perspective, the opposition of a European “history” of music versus a non-European “ethnography” of music (evident in the still common use of the “ethno-” prefix for research about non-European musics) is not simply a matter of disciplinary boundaries, but is the product of habits of thought which have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism. As Gary Tomlinson writes:

Across the century from 1750 to 1850 music lodged itself at the heart of a discourse that pried Europe and its histories apart from non-European lives and cultures. Perched at the apex of the new aesthetics, it came to function as a kind of limit-case of European uniqueness in world history and an affirmation of the gap, within the cultural formation of modernity, between history and anthropology … It arose, it is not too much to say, in complex alliance with Europe’s increasing domination of foreign territories and societies around the world. (Tomlinson 2007:285)

One type of response to the absence of the non-European in historical musicology, therefore, has been to explore precisely these narratives of Self and Other in European musical thought during and after the Enlightenment. Thus, several authors have detailed the way in which European music writing has represented non-European cultures as a means of self-fashioning and in order to reinforce various ideological constructs, from universalism to romanticism and evolutionism (Tomlinson 2007; Zon 2013; Bohlman 2013). Other scholars have researched the role of music in the colonial encounter, emphasising the way in which cross-cultural musical experiences shaped identities both in the colonies and in metropolitan centres (Agnew 2008; Irving 2010; Woodfield 2000). Non-European musics—or imaginings of them—became increasingly present in the cities of Europe during the later nineteenth century, whether through world exhibitions, musical exoticism, or new compositional techniques, and these issues too are well represented in musicological literature (Fauser 2005; Locke 2011; Cowgill and Rushton 2006).

Despite the obvious merits of these studies, what they have in common is an almost exclusive reliance on European-language sources and an overwhelming focus on European music. Where non-European musics are discussed, it is invariably through the prism of colonial literature, or with reference to their appropriation by European composers. This is perhaps in keeping with a particular approach to global history, which emphasises the colonial roots of modernity and sees globalisation as an aspect of the European project to map, conquer and subjugate economically the rest of the world (e.g. Nussbaum 2005). Echoes of this are also found in Jürgen Osterhammel’s recent global history of the nineteenth century, where he describes the spread of opera to Asia and the Americas in order to illustrate the globalisation of aesthetic practices (Osterhammel 2011:28–30). There is a certain inevitability to such accounts of European “cultural imperialism,” which suggest that, historically speaking, local musical practices are of little consequence in comparison with the universal adoption of Western art music and its aesthetic conventions (see e.g. Cook 2013). Yet the problem here, at least as far as musicology is concerned, may lie in the paradoxes of postcolonial theory itself, and more specifically in the influential work of Edward Said (1978, 1993).

Dealing as it does with representations of the Other in European culture (and, it should be noted, examining only European sources), there is little room in Saidian discourse for the Other to emerge as a historical actor. As Robert Young points out, “if Said denies that there is any actual Orient which could provide a true account of the Orient represented by Orientalism, how can he claim in any sense that the representation is false?” (Young 1990:130). (A further irony here is Said’s patronage of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra [led by Daniel Barenboim], which, as Rachel Beckles Willson [2009] has trenchantly argued, serves to reinforce ideas of European cultural superiority and to obscure political conflict while claiming to foster “harmony” in the Middle East.)

Such contradictions have, of course, been discussed at length within postcolonial studies, and are certainly recognised by some scholars who have studied Orientalism in relation to European music. Matthew Head, for example, acknowledges that “anti-imperialist and anti-Orientalist theory … may express political and ethical concern for the Other but it does not itself cut through the web of Orientalist discourse to provide insight into the reality of the Other’s attitudes”—though in the final analysis, Head reaffirms his belief in the validity of Said’s theory (Head 2000:137). Other musicologists too have offered valuable critiques of Orientalism, adding historical depth and nuance to the somewhat bleak and undifferentiated picture of Western imperialism suggested by Said’s reading of European opera (de Mascarenhas 2010; Locke 2005; cf. Said 1993:133–59). But although such studies give us an increasingly refined understanding of how Europeans perceived the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus on representation (fostered above all by Said’s own work) means that they tell us nothing about the historical reality of music-making outside of Europe. While this may not be the aim of the authors, it is problematic in as much as it has led to further distortions of the historical record and, I would suggest, has perpetuated inaccurate perceptions of non-European musics.

The literature on European appropriations of “Turkish” music is particularly instructive, since the Ottoman Empire, as a major Islamic power that posed a threat to Christendom throughout the early modern period, has often functioned as Europe’s paradigmatic Other. The fashion for turquerie in early modern Europe was thus mirrored by a politicised discourse that portrayed the Ottomans as corrupt and despotic (Çırakman 2001). A number of scholars have analysed musical depictions of the Ottomans during the eighteenth century—e.g. those by Rameau and Mozart—as well as Orientalist writing on Ottoman music. In a contribution to the recent Cambridge History of World Music, for example, Sebastian Klotz (2013) discusses perceptions of “world music” during the Enlightenment, with particular reference to an essay on Ottoman music by Charles Fonton (1725–93) (for a critical edition of Fonton’s essay, see Neubauer 1999). However, by analysing it solely within the framework of European history, Klotz fails to take into consideration the broader (“global”) context of Fonton’s essay, which is essential to explain what distinguishes it from the work of, say, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde (1780).

Most importantly, Fonton was a Levantine, or a person of European descent who lived in the Ottoman Empire, and a member of a dynasty of dragomans (interpreters) who had been resident in Istanbul for several generations. He was born in Istanbul, and although he spent nine years (1737–46) in Paris for his education, he passed most of his life in Istanbul and Izmir (Smyrna), where he died in 1793 (Touzard 1997). Fonton’s subject position is therefore not “European” in a straightforward sense—indeed, the Levantines of the Ottoman Empire (perhaps in a similar way to the “Eurasians” of India) were often regarded with suspicion and distaste by “real” Europeans (Coller 2010).

“Air de Cantimir.” A peşrev in the mode Bestenigar by Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), transcribed by Charles Fonton (1751, p. 137)

So while Klotz is undoubtedly correct to argue that aspects of Fonton’s essay reflect the values of the French Enlightenment, in order to properly contextualise it one must also place it within the framework of Ottoman history; or rather, one must attend to the complex entanglement of European and non-European history. Klotz’s lack of engagement with Ottoman or Middle Eastern studies literature is typical of musicological analyses of Orientalism, which tend to locate the site of “cross-cultural” encounter squarely within Europe. This approach effectively silences the actual music of the Ottoman Empire, substituting for it a close reading of European sources and musical practices that reaffirms the Eurocentrism it ostensibly seeks to displace. This is emphatically not due to a lack of historical evidence: in comparison with many other non-European music cultures, there is an abundance of primary sources on Ottoman music, many of them including notation, not to mention a large and accessible secondary literature (İhsanoğlu et al 2003). Yet in his discussion of Fonton, Klotz repeats the canard that there is “an absence of notational systems” or “written clues” in relation to non-European musics, thereby reiterating the idea that the Orient is knowable only through European perceptions of it (Klotz 2013:281).

However, by actively engaging with the written sources of Ottoman music, we can begin to move away from a one-sided discussion that concentrates solely on European perceptions of the Orient, and instead attempt to understand the historical reality of musical practices during the Ottoman period. Fonton’s transcriptions of Ottoman music, for instance, may usefully be compared with contemporaneous Turkish-language sources such as the Kevseri Mecmuası (c. 1740), which reveals that, far from being imaginative exotica, they correspond (albeit with inevitable distortions) to the music played in mid-eighteenth-century Istanbul (Ekinci 2012; Wright 2007:22–5). An awareness of correspondences such as these allows us to distinguish between real musical contacts with the Ottoman Empire—facilitated here by the particular circumstances of Fonton’s life—and European representations of “Turkish” music. It also shifts the debate away from representation and towards a more historically situated discussion that takes into account the material conditions which enabled musical encounters. By avoiding this approach in favour of an analysis that focuses only on discourse, we risk setting up a solipsistic debate about Self and Other in which the Other is nowhere to be found.

“Der makam bestenigar, berefşan.” Cantemir’s Bestenigar peşrev, transcribed by Mustafa Kevseri (c. 1740, fol. 47v)

Of course, as many scholars have pointed out, “authentic” representations of non-European musics may be equally as problematic as orientalist imaginings of them (see e.g. Head 2003:211–12). Partly for this reason, musicologists may feel more comfortable critiquing European perceptions of the Other than attempting to engage with actually existing non-European musics. Furthermore, it should be emphasised that any move towards a less isolationist narrative of European music history is surely to be welcomed. Nevertheless, to quote Gary Tomlinson again, “[w]e should say not that Europeans have begun to hear non-European musics, but that [we] have begun to scrutinize the peculiar deafness that at once constitutes our modernity and conceals the global forces in it” (Tomlinson 2007:196). However well-intentioned and self-critical our attempts to acknowledge the Others of Western music may be, the disproportionate weight given to European perspectives at the expense of local worldviews and practices gives rise to a worrying sense that we have been here before. If we are really interested in moving beyond Eurocentrism—towards “a history of many different voices” (Strohm [2013])—it is therefore imperative that we also attend to thevery real sounds, documents and practices of non-European musics.

Audio: Peşrev in makam Bestenigar / usul berefşan (16/8 meter) composed by Dimitrie Cantemir

Jacob Olley is a research associate on the long-term project "Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Music Manuscripts from the Near East," based at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is currently completing a PhD entitled "Writing Music in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Ottoman Armenians and the Invention of Hampartsum Notation" in the music department at King’s College London.

Email: olley@uni-muenster.de

Works Cited

Manuscripts

Fonton, Charles. 1751. Essai sur la musique orientale comparée à la musique européene [sic]. Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. n. a. 4023.

Mustafa Kevseri. [c. 1740]. [Untitled treatise and music collection]. Milli Kütüphane, Ankara, [microfilm] Mf1994 A 4941.

Other Sources

Agnew, Vanessa. 2008. Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds.

          Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beckles Willson, Rachel. 2009. “The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.”

          Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134: 319–47.

Bohlman, Philip V. 2013 “Johann Gottfried Herder and the Global Moment of World-Music

         History.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 255–76.

         Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

         Difference. New ed. Princeton, N.J.; London: Princeton University Press.

Çırakman, Aslı. 2001. “From Tyranny to Despotism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened

         Image of the Turks.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33: 49–68.

Coller, Ian. 2010. “East of Enlightenment: Regulating Cosmopolitanism between Istanbul

         and Paris in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History 21(3): 447–70.

Cook, Nicholas. 2013. “Western Music as World Music” In The Cambridge History of World

         Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 75–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cowgill, Rachel and Rushton, Julian, eds. 2006. Europe, Empire and Spectacle in

         Nineteenth-Century British Music. Aldershot: Ashgate.

de Laborde, M. [Jean-Benjamin]. 1780. Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. 4 vols.

          Paris: Ph.-D Pierres.

de Mascarenhas, Domingos. 2010. “Beyond Orientalism: The International Rise of Japan and

          the Revisions to Madama Butterfly.” In Art and Ideology in European Opera:

          Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton, edited by Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper

          and Clive Brown, 281–302. Suffolk: The Boydell Press.

Ekinci, Mehmet Uğur. 2012. “The Kevserî Mecmûası Unveiled: Exploring an Eighteenth

          Century Collection of Ottoman Music.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22:

          199– 225.

Fauser, Annegret. 2005. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Rochester

          Woodbridge: University of Rochester Press.

Ferguson, Niall. 2012. Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power. London: Penguin.

Head, Matthew. 2003. “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial

          Theory.” Music Analysis 22: 211–30.

Head, Matthew. 2000. Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music. London: Royal

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İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin, Ramazan Şeşen, Gülcan Gündüz and M. Serdar Bekar. 2003.

          Osmanlı Mûsikîsi Literatürü Tarihi (History of Music Literature during the

          Ottoman Period). Istanbul: İslâm Tarih, Sanat ve Kültür Araştırma Merkezi.

Irving, D.R.M. 2010. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. Oxford:

          Oxford University Press.

Klotz, Sebastian. 2013. “Tartini the Indian: Perspectives on World Music in the

          Enlightenment,” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited

          by Philip V. Bohlman, 277–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, Ralph P. 2011. Musical Exoticism: Images and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge

          University Press.

Locke, Ralph P. 2005. “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ is Aida?” Cambridge Opera

          Journal 17: 105–39.

Neubauer, Eckhard. 1999. Der Essai sur la musique orientale von Charles Fonton mit

          Zeichnungen von Adanson. Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of

          Arabic- Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.

Nussbaum, Felicity A., ed. 2005. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, Md.; London:

          John Hopkins University Press.

Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2011. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19.

           Jahrhunderts. München: C.H. Beck.

Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge.

Strohm, Reinhard. [2013]. “Balzan Research Project: Towards a Global History of Music.”

           http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/balzan-research-project/

           (accessed 28 January 2016).

Tomlinson, Gary. 2007. Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Touzard, Anne-Marie. Touzard, “Un drogman musician: coup d’oeil sur la vie et les oeuvres

de Charles Fonton.” In Istanbul et les langues orientales: Actes du colloque organisé par

           l'IFEA et l'INALCO à l'occasion du bicentenaire de l'Ecole des langues

           orientales, Istanbul, 29-31 mai 1995, edited by Frédéric Hitzel,

           197–214. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Woodfield, Ian. 2000. Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late

            Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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            nihavend»?” Studii şi cercet. Ist. Art., Teatru, Muzică, Cinematografie,

            serie nouă 1(45): 3–45.

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             Philip V. Bohlman, 298–318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfLxosgmIuE

“Peşrev in makam Bestenigar / usul berefşan (16/8) - Dimitrie Cantemir.” From the album Cantemir: Music in Istanbul and Ottoman Europe around 1700. Ihsan Özgen, Linda Burman-Hall and Lux Musica. Golden Horn Records, 2002.

Issues of space and place pervade jazz historical narratives, especially when considering conventional “up the river” histories. According to such accounts, jazz began in New Orleans (presumably a product of mixing influences in Congo Square and Storyville), traveled up the river to Chicago (to Lincoln Gardens or Austin High School), east to New York City (many cite the Cotton Club in the Swing era and Minton’s and 52nd Street for bebop), west to Los Angeles (and the supposed birth of West Coast Jazz on Central Avenue), and so on. Though scholars now debate the usefulness of such simplistic and often uncritical place-based narratives, they remain a stock feature of many jazz pedagogies.

Part of my work investigates how race and class impact the perception of particular places of jazz performance. In this blog post, I consider a specific site—George Wein’s Storyville: The Birthplace of Jazz, a Boston jazz club that opened in 1950 and lasted until 1960. Through close study of articles, oral history interviews, audio, images, and census information, I demonstrate how Storyville’s overt discourse of respectability—a discourse that privileged white audiences as “serious” connoisseurs of jazz art music—was rooted in race and class-based stereotypes.

Storyville, Boston

In 1950, Boston University graduate George Wein, the son of a physician, shocked his family by opening a jazz club in Boston’s Copley Square Hotel. Unashamed of what he described in his autobiography as “jazz’s seamy origins,” Wein took the name of his club from New Orleans’s former red-light district, Storyville, created by the New Orleans City Council at the turn of the twentieth century as a means to contain prostitution in the city. Storyville has long been associated with the beginnings of jazz: Cornetist Buddy Bolden, trumpeters Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and pianist Jelly Roll Morton grew up and played in and around Storyville. As Murray Forman argues, “it is in and through language that the values of place are produced.” Therefore, for Wein to take the name of Storyville for his club was to link his club to historical narratives of authentic jazz.

Postcard image of Basin Street, ca. 1908.
http://archive.oah.org/special-issues/katrina/Long.html

By the end of 1950 the Copley Square Storyville closed, due to a miscommunication with the management of the Copley Square Hotel. In 1951 Wein re-opened the club in the Hotel Buckminster, closer to both Boston University and Fenway Park. The Buckminster Storyville was not as successful as the Copley Storyville until Wein booked British jazz pianist George Shearing in September 1951. In 1953, Wein moved Storyville back to the Copley Square Hotel, which was under new management. The club stayed in the Copley Square Hotel until it closed permanently in 1960.

Location and Audience

In his recollections of Storyville, Wein does not specify which location he means (Hotel Buckminster or the Copley Square Hotel), suggesting that his concept of Storyville as a space remained largely unchanged, regardless of the actual place it occupied. Wein explained in a 2008 interview that Storyville’s audience was primarily white and college-educated:

Once we caught on, our audience was mostly made up of professors from the different local colleges. We didn’t draw many kids because they didn’t drink and most were under 21, the legal age limit then…The club attracted blacks when I had certain artists booked, but for the most part the audience was white and middle class.

Though Wein featured somewhat diverse groups of musicians including Dixieland Revivalists Bob Wilber and Jimmy McPartland and “modern” jazz artists such as Charlie Parker, the Modern Jazz Quartet, George Shearing, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday, many of these musicians were indeed successful among white audiences. Wein further explained that the club’s Copley Square location was ideal for the primarily white, affluent, and educated neighborhood surrounding it: “In terms of location, clientele, and the quality of the music, Storyville could be the first club poised to compete with the Savoy and the Hi Hat, both in an African American neighborhood.”

Census information corroborates Wein’s claims that the areas surrounding the Copley Square Hotel and Hotel Buckminster included a white, well-educated, white-collar audience. The image below shows a mapping of Boston’s 1950 census results regarding race and ethnicity, which indicates that while Copley Square was on the border of a distinctly white and a distinctly black neighborhood, the Copley Storyville itself was neatly tucked into a predominantly white neighborhood—and the Hotel Buckminster was located in an even more racially segregated neighborhood.

1950 Census map of Boston (the lighter the shading, the whiter the population, and vice versa). Includes Tract K-4A (Hotel Buckminster), Tract J-3 (Copley Square Hotel), Tract K-5 (Copley Square), Tract L-2 (Savoy and Hi Hat) and Boston University (for reference).
Source: Sweetser, Frank L. The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950. Boston University. Division of Mental Hygiene, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961.

In the chart below, I compare the race, education, and type of employment across the Copley Square, Copley Square Hotel, Hotel Buckminster, and Savoy and Hi Hat neighborhoods. The confluence of race, class, and education in these neighborhoods is clear when comparing the Storyville neighborhoods with Tract L-2, the census tract that contained the Savoy and the Hi Hat jazz clubs. The Savoy and Hi Hat clubs were not only located in a majority African American neighborhood, as Wein noted, but the neighborhood also included significantly more blue collar workers, fewer professionals/managers, and fewer high school graduates. Ultimately, Tract L-2 demonstrates how place, race, class, and access to education intersected. In other words, perceptions of race inevitably rely on perceptions of class and education, as well.

Census data for the Copley Square Hotel (Tract J-3), Copley Square (Tract K-5), the Hotel Buckminster (Tract K-4A), and the Savoy and the Hi Hat (Tract L-2).

Storyville as a Listening Room

Although Wein drew upon Storyville, New Orleans’s authenticity, he simultaneously distanced his own Storyville from the shady reputation of its namesake, insisting that “Storyville was a respectable place.” He stressed that his vision of Storyville was that of a “true music room. Storyville was never a joint. We had no floor show, no drug dealers or resident hookers. We kept things clean.” For Wein to call his own Storyville “respectable” and emphasize its freedom from drugs and sex work was another way of explicitly naming it a white place, a racial designation further underscored by associations with affluence and education, and in direct opposition to working class black places.

Unlike Storyville, New Orleans, George Wein’s Storyville was indeed known by its patrons and by music critics to be a “respectable” club. One way in which critics implied Storyville’s whiteness was by invoking the necessity for “serious” listening at Storyville. In 1953, Nat Hentoff referred to Storyville’s “relative silence.” Cyrus Durgin, a music reporter for the Daily Boston Globe, also wrote about Boston Storyville’s apparently surprising need for “attentive listening.” A self-described “longhair” (i.e. lover of European classical music), Durgin used Storyville as an example of how jazz had become a “serious” music, calling it Boston’s “best temple of jazz” in 1954. Durgin offered the actions of Storyville’s audiences as “proof” of jazz’s shift toward “attentive listening performances” by the Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck Quartets—both heard as predominantly white groups by their audiences.

Some people do talk, but not many, and conversation is frowned upon. Most of the customers are there to listen, to Mulligan’s closely-woven musical strands that sound not unlike syncopated Bach, or to Brubeck’s resourceful piano style, with its moving voices of counterpoint and its fascinating shades of harmonic and instrumental color.

In this passage, Durgin not only described Storyville as a relatively quiet listening experience, in which any talking was limited to only brief interactions, but he also related the necessity for such close listening only to white musicians, through his descriptions of Mulligan and Brubeck’s Bach-like and contrapuntal music.

For all of George Wein, Nat Hentoff, and Cyrus Durgin’s insistence that Storyville was a “quiet” place for listening to jazz, albums and radio broadcasts recorded live at Storyville suggest that quiet was a relative term. Though Durgin specifically highlighted silent audiences for performances by Mulligan and Brubeck, these musicians’ live recordings feature audience noise particularly prominently. Mulligan’s December 1956 recording at Storyville offers a glimpse at the frustrations some jazz musicians felt even toward Storyville’s “quiet” audiences. Audience chatter is prevalent throughout the tracks, but perhaps the most striking moment is found during “Limelight,” when Mulligan has an infamous encounter with a whistling audience member.

While Mulligan’s outburst could have been unique, especially at a club so renowned for its “respectful” audience, the Storyville audience seems to have been noisier than Cyrus Durgin or George Wein cared to remember. For instance, on a Brubeck recording from October 22, 1952 at Storyville, a patron whistles along with saxophonist Paul Desmond on the melody of “You Go to My Head.” Rather than accost the patron as Mulligan did, the characteristically non-confrontational Desmond simply deviated enough from the melody to throw off the whistler, who eventually stopped.

Images of the Brubeck Quartet at Storyville complicate the dichotomy between “serious” and participatory listening. (See one image here; while this is the only archival image available online, other images in the Brubeck Collection show more of the Storyville scene.) Indeed, the audience pictured seems to demonstrate the kind of focused listening described by Durgin and Wein—all visible bodies are focused on the stage and the Brubeck Quartet, all bodies pictured seem still. But the tables and the items left casually on them remind us that Storyville was a social place—a nightclub—in which it was not only acceptable to drink and smoke, talk and laugh, but in which such behaviors were expected. Even if Brubeck’s music was, as critics often claimed, more “complex,” more “intellectual” for its references to European classical music, audiences could choose to focus their listening entirely on the Brubeck Quartet—or not.

The Copley Square Hotel Storyville today (at the Fleur-de-lis)—it’s now an exclusive club with images reminiscent of Storyville, New Orleans (http://storyvilleboston.com). The Hotel Buckminster Storyville is now a Pizzeria Uno.

Conclusion

By acknowledging Storyville as a “listening” club, Wein, Durgin, and other jazz writers implicitly linked the club and its audience members to whiteness—even if audio accounts suggest that the audience was less silent than suggested in written accounts. Put simply, Storyville remained a club, in which conversation and drinks were not merely accepted, but expected, and although musicians such as Mulligan insisted on being heard as “serious” artists, audiences nevertheless felt comfortable attempting such participation. In other words, Storyville was a place in which primarily white, educated, middle and upper-class audiences could be privileged as “serious” listeners by white jazz commentators—even if the behaviors and modes of listening they enacted were actually not “silent,” “quiet,” or “attentive.” Regardless of the actual experience of listening at Storyville, the club’s location in a white neighborhood, white audience, and overt discourse of respectability directly countered narratives of black places, such as Storyville, New Orleans, which remain rooted in race and class-based stereotypes—narratives that were distinct from places of whiteness.

The stakes of research on race, class, and place are not limited to historical reconstructions such as the case study I have investigated here, but rather are imperative to understanding the full spectrum of present-day race and class-based privileges and injustices. Living in St. Louis, in which every municipality that makes up the greater metropolitan area carries with it an implicit association with race and class, the importance of such research on the race of place is all too obvious. Consider, for instance, the infamous “Delmar Divide” and the policing of black bodies in implicitly white public spaces, including but not limited to the very visible deaths of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin. For two recent examples of such policing leading up to the Missouri primaries, see: 

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2016/03/14/how-st-louis-stopped-donald-trump

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kansas-city-pepper-spray-trump_us_56e51dc1e4b065e2e3d637f1

But it is not enough to simply identify places of blackness or of poverty (nor is it appropriate to assume that places of blackness are places of poverty, or vice versa). We need to also make places of whiteness and of affluence visible. In his explanation of the importance of race to space, political philosopher Charles Mills argues that normative space, or space that is seemingly not raced, is frequently raced white: “Space is just there, taken for granted, and the individual is tacitly posited as the white adult male, so that all individuals are obviously equal.” Likewise, George Lipsitz argues that public spaces not often discussed in terms of race are usually raced white, or privilege whiteness. I would add that in addition to privileging whiteness, such normative public spaces also privilege whiteness as it intersects with upper and upper-middle class identities, and educational backgrounds—and further, masculinity, heterosexuality, and ability. Such privileges are not completely invisible—as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and George Yancy argue, whiteness is largely not invisible to the people of color who experience the negative manifestations of white privilege daily. So in closing, I emphasize that it is only by making places of whiteness visible to white people that we can begin to alter, and indeed dismantle, the associations of whiteness, affluence, and educational status with discourses and spaces of respectability.

Notes

Cover photo: Storyville, ca. 1955. Detail of a photograph by Nissan Bichajian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections. http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/34173

References

Ahmed, Sara. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands E-Journal 3, no. 2 (2004).

Durgin, Cyrus. “Jazz Moves to Newport as Serious Music Form.” Daily Boston Globe (20 June 1954), C79.

Frith, Simon. “Rhythm: Race, Sex, and the Body.” In Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, 123-144. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg, 165-179. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Hentoff, Nat. “Counterpoint.” Down Beat (1 July 1953), 8.

Lipsitz, George. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Sweetser, Frank L. The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950. Boston University. Division of Mental Hygiene, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961.

Wein, George. Myself Among Others, with Nate Chinen. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.

Wein, George with Marc Meyers, “Interview: George Wein (Part 1)” Jazz Wax (23 July 2008): http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/07/interview-georg.html

Yancy, George. Look, A White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012.

Kelsey Klotz recently completed her PhD in Musicology, with a certificate in American Culture Studies, at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow at Washington University, and has also been awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her dissertation, “Racial Ideologies in 1950s Cool Jazz,” examines the cultural construction of whiteness in histories of cool jazz.

Introduction: 129° F

Many of my friends an colleagues in Kuwait were shocked that I came during a time of world record high temperatures to study music during the past summer. Temperatures reached a blistering 129 degrees Fahrenheit during mid-August, but it was not the first time I experienced such heat. During the 2014-15 academic year, I spent ten months in the Sultanate of Oman on a Fulbright scholarship studying the oud  and performing with the Oud Hobbyists Association. After visiting Kuwait twice during my stay in Oman, I decided that it would be the ideal place to return for summer 2016 after my first year at UCLA. My connection with the oud began a few years before I traveled to the Gulf while I was studying Arabic during my undergrad in Morocco and later in Egypt, where I attended classes and participated in concerts with Naseer Shama's bayt al-'ud al-'araby (Arabic Oud House). Due to friendships I retained during my undergraduate studies with Kuwaitis and other students from the region, I always retained a strong interest in Gulf music (often referred to as khaliji music), and specifically musical traditions that utilize the oud.

 Kuwait City resides on a large bay, which historically was an ideal natural harbor for maritime trade vessels from around the Indian Ocean.

Music aside, the Gulf's historical connections with other nations and cultures surrounding the Indian Ocean also drew me in. As the place of the Arabic language's origin and of great wealth due to the current oil economy, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) nations play a vital role in the affairs of the larger Arab world. At the same time however, Indian Ocean connections also help distinguish this region from the rest of the Arabic speaking world in some very important respects (Bishara 2014); culturally these include cuisine, clothing, language, and music. Internally, the Arabian Peninsula is also an extremely diverse region and historical connections, migrations, and cultural movements from within are equally important as those between continents on maritime routes (Urkevich 2015). The musical styles I have been interested in developed historically on similar networks of exchange between Yemen, the Gulf (my preferred term to “Arab” or “Persian” Gulf), East Africa, and India, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Considering the significance and complexity of this history, a large part my field work is reviewing historical sources in English and Arabic on music, maritime trade, and migrations. In addition to my research, I have also been involving myself with a broad community of musicians and local organizations. When I first arrived to Kuwait, I connected with a NGO called Loyac, which promotes concerts, the arts, and community service. I have been participating in some of their public music performances and also giving oud lessons through their organization. While I am deeply interested in the history of the region, my involvement at Loyac and other musical activities have kept me in the present.

In the midst of an oud lesson with Hussa - photo credit: Faris Ali

Ṣawt and the Diwaniyya

One of the musical genres I have been particularly interested in is called ṣawt, popular throughout the Gulf region among oud players, poets, and music connoisseurs. The genre's instrumentation usually features oud, violin, and small cylindrical drums called merwas. There is a dynamic and ever developing relationship between lyrics, melody, and rhythm in ṣawt. Performers may substitute and interchange melodies, poems, and rhythms creating endless combinations of the three; however, some poems are more commonly paired with a particular melody and rhythm. Today, there are about four rhythms commonly performed in ṣawt and a far greater number of melodies drawn upon by singers performing the repertoire.

Ṣawt has historically been a point of contention between Kuwaiti and Bahraini musicians and scholars arguing as to whom founded the genre. Similarly, and due to the genre's Yemeni influences, others argue that ṣawt in the Gulf region is merely an extension of other genres performed in Southern Arabia, which consists of the Hadhramout province of Yemen and in the Dhofar province of Oman (Kathiri 2009). As these heated scholarly debates have somewhat subsided, most consider the renowned poet, 'Abdullah al-Faraj (1836-1901) to be the founder and innovator of this genre after his return to the Gulf region from Bombay in the late nineteenth century. For centuries before the discovery of oil, the economy of the Gulf and the greater Arabian Peninsula relied heavily on trade with port cities surrounding the Indian Ocean from East Africa to modern day Malaysia and Indonesia. As the capital of the British Indian Empire, Bombay was the main economic hub of the region where many Arab traders, mercenaries, and laborers lived during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Al-Faraj's father was a rich businessman and worked in the pearl and horse trade in Bombay (two of the most desired exports from the Arabian Peninsula during that time), and encouraged him to pursue the arts and music (al-Faraj 2001). When al-Faraj returned to the Gulf in the latter part of the nineteenth century, he brought back with him an original repertoire of songs, poetry, and melodies mixing a variety of Yemeni and Indian influences. This repertoire was later developed by other musicians throughout the twentieth century into the genre ṣawt performed today.

Kuwait and Bahrain have both been historically the most prominent nations for ṣawt performance and record production; however, many musicians in Kuwait tell me that only the older generation of musicians in Bahrain still perform ṣawt. They add that in Kuwait, ṣawt performers and enthusiasts have been much more successful in maintaining and developing the tradition. In fact, performers of the younger generation in Kuwait are often invited to Bahrain and Qatar to perform for older audiences and musicians who are the few connoisseurs of ṣawt left there. Perhaps Kuwaitis have been more successful at maintaining the genre because the context of its performance has also been kept alive: the diwaniyya, which remains a vital political and cultural institution in Kuwaiti society. A diwaniyya is a large meeting room for men connected to a family house where extended family, friends, and colleagues meet and socialize. Musical gatherings and concerts held inside diwaniyyas are commonly referred to as jelsāt, samrāt, or qā'dāt. Many diwaniyyas are purposed solely for musical performances and often for specific genres depending on the taste of the owner. During one jelsa, some friends told me it was more common for women to participate in these musical gatherings during the 1950s and 1960s, but this was before more conservative ideologies took hold during the late 1960s and gender segregation became more prominent in various social contexts in Kuwaiti society. Currently, the music conservatory in Salmiya, Kuwait continues to blur these lines teaching men “female”  traditional musical genres and women “male” traditional genres. Ṣawt is considered one of the “male” genres taught to women in the conservatory context.

The performers end of diwaniyyat 'ahal al-marwās; from the left: Khalid al-Shati, Salah Hamed Khalifa (son of a renowned ṣawt performer Hamed Khalifa), Fahed al-Kendary, Abdullah al-Jadda, Yousef al-Jadda, and a guest playing merwas.

During the past summer, I attended many qā'dāt (sin qā'da; commonly used in reference to a ṣawt performance) in the diwaniyya pictured above, which is dedicated specifically to the preservation and performance of ṣawt. The name of the diwaniyya is called diyaniyya 'ahal al-marāws (roughly translates to “diwaniyya of the people of the marwās”) and was established as a meeting place for ṣawt performers and other musicians. Located in a rural suburb outside Kuwait city called Chabt, the diywaniyya was founded by a group of friends and connoisseurs of ṣawt (two of them are pictured above: Fahad and Abdullah) who consider performing ṣawt a hobby, and pay for the diwaniyyas' expenses out of their own pockets. In addition to a variety of old tape decks and large speakers, they have decorated the diwaniyya with old photos depicting ṣawt performers, a plethora of antiques, ancient gramophones, and old record collections - most of them gramophone 78 rpm records that were common before vinyl. After the ṣawt performance during my first visit, we sat and listened to some of the old seventy eights which included mostly music from the Gulf region, but also recordings of famous Egyptian stars such as Umm Kalthoum, early twentieth century Hindi film classics, and some 1930s jazz hits by Louis Armstrong and Russ Morgan.

Also partly visible in he picture above, it is worth noting the model of the old Kuwaiti maritime vessel, the boom. Such models are common in majālis (living rooms similar to diwaniyyas), diwaniyyas, and in households around the Gulf and serve as reminders of the maritime past. In diwaniyyat ahal al-marwās, the model holds particular significance as boom ships were also a primary context of ṣawt performance before the oil boom. Musicians were hired to perform on the decks of ships as they traveled from the Gulf to the coasts of South Asia, Southern Arabia, and East Africa. In a travelogue documenting his time on a Kuwaiti boom sailing from Yemen to Zanzibar in the 1930s, Australian Alan Villiers recalls a variety of musical activity at sea from gramophone records playing, to ṣawt performances, and a the Kuwaiti crew singing songs in Farsi at port in Kenya (Villiers 2006).

Recording ṣawt: From Indian Ocean Trade Routes to Cassette Decks

As with many musical traditions around the world, the development of the record industry during the early twentieth century had a great effect on the development of ṣawt and its transmission to preceding generations. The first recordings of ṣawt were made in the late 1920s by the second generation of performers after 'Abdullah al-Faraj. Before the age of the oil economy, many of these earlier performers still traveled maritime trade routes between Iraq, the Gulf, and Western India. The record pictured below from the diwaniyya's record collection features Sālim Rāshid al-Sūri, an Omani ṣawt singer who spent extensive time recording in India during the 1930s. Famous Kuwaiti musicians who followed similar routes recording in Cario, Baghdad, and Bombay during this early period include  Salah and Daud Ezra, and 'Abd al-Latīf al-Kūwaytī who made the first recordings of ṣawt in Baghdad for the Bayḍafūn (Baidaphone) company in 1927. As early as 1930s, ṣawt records were being sold in Yemen as the record industry began to recirculate ṣawt repertoire on maritime routes between the Gulf and Yemen (al-Salhi 2015).

Diwaniyyat 'ahal al-marwās and other circles of musicians in Kuwait continue to document and record ṣawt by videotaping and sound recording almost every performance they host. Today, many musicians and diwaniyya owners make their own private audio recordings, archive them, and distribute them using social media. Like the enthusiasts at 'Ahal al-marwās, many musicians throughout Kuwait make live recordings with old cassette tape decks or boomboxes, and later convert the cassette audio into a digital file. Despite also having new state of the art field and portable recorders, many prefer the sound of cassette recordings because of their distorted, warm, and “living” (ḥayy) feeling. Here is the link to 'Ahal al-marwās's Soundcloud page, “mrwas_q8,” where they upload many of the musical performances (or qā'dāt) they host. The recordings here feature some of the most renowned ṣawt performers from Kuwait and the gulf region today including Ibrahim al-Khashrim, Salah Hamed Khalifa and Suleiman al-Amari. Please give them a listen, follow, and show support for ṣawt music internationally! The diwaniyya also has an Instagram account under the same name: “@mrwas_q8”.

https://soundcloud.com/mrwas_q8

Documentation and Social Media

The picture below is of myself and renowned musician and ṣawt performer Naser Abo Awad, recording into his Phillips cassette boombox. I was invited to do so in order to document my presence as a guest musician at the jelsa in his family's diwaniyya. As others have mentioned previously in our field (Seeger 1987), being a musician often makes the ethnomusicologist an subject of fascination and worthy of documentation by members of the culture she is studying, rather than the other way around. As an American playing oud professionally and as a teacher here in Kuwait, I have attracted considerable attention from local news media, local musicians, and also considerable attention on social media networks. Throughout the GCC, social media apps such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have some some of the most active users in the world while having economically and culturally transformed Gulf society in recent years (Elzaini 2015). Through connections made on social media, I knew many of my friends and colleagues before personal meetings or even before arriving in Kuwait. Many musicians similarly use social media to document jelsas and their own daily musical activities sharing them with others. By using apps like Instagram and Snapchat, I have been able to document and keep a fairly large community within Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the broader region up to date about my experiences here as a researcher and musician. I commonly make posts about my research, participation in interviews, concerts I attend, and my own performances in both English and Arabic. This has allowed for a greater breadth of interaction and communication between myself and other researchers, musicians, and an interested public throughout the region.

Ethnomusicologists have long wrestled with the concept of field work, what it entails, and what its boundaries are. Similarly, others have pointed out that ethnomusicologists can offer inventive approaches to participant observation research and ethnography as both social scientists and musicians (Titon 2008:38). As a foreign researcher in an area of the world that continues to struggle for nuanced, accurate, and honest representation, I continue to wrestle with the concepts of ethnography and “field work.” As a musician and researcher, the field is everywhere from my Instagram account, to the stage, and to the actual process of picking my MA paper topic that I will write this year (which musicians, scholars, and fellow ethnomusicologists here in Kuwait commonly inquire about and critique). As others have indicated, defining the field is perhaps not as important as being reflective about our experience, how we gain knowledge, and how knowledge and experience is written about (Rice 2008; Berger 2008). In this installment for Notes From the Field, I have hoped be informative about my experience, but also convey a brief glimpse of a fascinating history and the current activities of musicians here in Kuwait. It was certainly all worth the heat.

 A post I made on my Instagram account thanking members of the Bin Hussein group for their hospitality and hosting an 'uns, which is a celebration where a variety of traditional musics are performed including sawt. The occasion of the 'uns was to celebrate Khalid Bin Hussein's return to Kuwait from Germany, where he was accompanying his wife going through a successful cancer treatment.
 

References

Al-Faraj, Abdullah. 2001 (1903). Diwan Abdullah al-Farj. Kuwait: The Abdul Aziz Saud
    al-Babateen Prize Foundation for Poetic Creativity.
Al-Salhi, Ahmed. 2015. “Catalog of Kuwaiti and Egyptian Songs: Studies about Historical Musical
    Documentation dating back to 1930.” Message of Kuwait 52:30-41.
Berger, Harris M. 2008. “Phenomenology and the Ethnography of Poplular Music: Ethnomusicology at
    the Juncture of Cultural Studies and Folklore.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
    Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York:
    Oxford University Press.
Bishara, Fahad Ahmed. 2014. “Mapping the Indian Ocean World of Gulf Merchants, c.
    1870-1960.” In The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies,
    edited by Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho. London: Hurst & Company.
Elzaini, Sarah. 2015. “Social Media's Economic Revolution in the Gulf.” Foreign Policy Association.
    February 9. http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2015/02/09/social-medias-economic-revolution-in
    the-gulf/ (accessed 15 September 2016).
Kathiri, Muselim. 2009. “The Oud in the Arabian Peninsula: Historical Studies.” Nizwa -
    Cultural Chapter 57:151-163
Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why the Suya Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 2008. “Knowing Fieldwork.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
    Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York:
    Oxford University Press.
Rice, Timothy. 2008. “Towards a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience.” In Shadows in
    the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and
    Timothy J. Cooley. New York: Oxford University Press.
Urkevich, Lisa. 2015. Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain,
    and Qatar. New York, N: Taylor and Francis.
Villiers, Alan. 2006 (1940). Sons of Sindbad. London: Arabian Publishing Ltd.
 

History is not a universal narrative of one tradition, one person, one people, or one nation; rather, it is the sum of all possible histories that may illuminate a present moment or place. To conduct research in ethnomusicology, musicology, or any other discipline of the humanities is to inherently engage in the study of histories, including how they converge, intersect, and conflict. People have different habits, different worldviews, and different cultures of music as a result of certain historical experiences, which are remembered and reimagined over time. As researchers of music in culture or music as culture, we also become wrapped up within intersections and conflicts between histories, and have our own ways of imagining them too. Editors of the Ethnomusicology Review would like to invite you to share historical perspectives from your research for our online platform "Sounding Board." Tell us why conflicts and convergences of history are important to understanding a current place or space of music making of interest to you today. Additionally, if you have any other project, conference paper, or unpublished work dealing with issues surrounding history and music, feel free to reach out!

Please contact Gabe Lavin, associate editor of Ethnomusicology Review’s “Sounding Board: Historical Perspectives,” at glavin@ucla.edu if you wish to contribute or have any questions. Sounding Board is an informal, yet academically focused online platform to discuss research, ideas, and other issues related to the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology.

Editor's Note: Part I of this piece can be read here.

To make a long story short, I recorded what eventually became Goldberg Variations / Variations three times. Once as I’d been performing it, with fewer than half the Variations and long, rambling improvisations. Then, when I realized presenting only part of a work so whole as the Goldbergs to the world would be an embarrassment, as a much-too-long and obscure investigation into all the Variations, with a non-linear structure and a speculative tone throughout. And finally, once I realized that the purity and coherence of the Goldbergs called out for the most simple and clear structure possible, the way it finally ended up, with each of the 30 movements alternating with an improvisation of similar length, closely linked to the preceding Variation.

Since I essentially learned to play the second half of the Goldbergs while I was recording it, I started to think of the project less as a record of a live performance and more as a conceptual work that might end up only existing as a recording. There are, after all, many electronic and pop artists who never perform their work live. Recorded music can be a destination of its own.

The recording process was a powerful learning experience for me. Suddenly my weaknesses of articulation and phrasing, when I played Bach’s notes, couldn’t be ignored (as they could so easily when I practiced at home, or even when I performed). Alone in the Yamaha space, often late into the night, I recorded take after take of the Variations, and didn’t shy away from editing the best portions together. Glenn Gould did plenty of editing, I reasoned, so why couldn’t I? (I conveniently ignored the fact that he, at least, was more than capable of performing the work in front of an audience). Similarly, the recording process brought out all the structural, emotional and technical faults of my improvisations. As I advanced through the stages of the recording process, it became clear to me that the only way they could hope to stand up next to the beauty and perfection of the Variations was if they lost most of the indulgence I’d been allowing them to have. They needed to be concise and focused; they needed to get to the point, all while remaining personal. I started to develop explicit strategies. I realized, for example, that I was capable of improvising my own canons, as long as I kept them fairly rudimentary. I realized that many of the virtuosic Variations stemmed from a very restricted amount of material, and tried to find ways to improvise with a similarly limited set of ideas. I saw that Bach gave himself considerable license in the way he navigated the I-I-V || V-vi-I harmonic framework that all the Variations share, and let myself take my own varied pathways through the changes. I researched the last Variation, the Quodlibet, learned the words to the folk songs it uses as its melodic material, and substituted two jazz tunes I love as material for my improvised response. I gradually went from an implicit, alchemical relationship with the Variations to a much more precise and explicit one. And to my surprise, I gradually saw the project turn into something that felt like it had an integrity of its own.

It’s hard to record improvisations. There’s always the possibility that the next take will be better—it’s hard to stop. And yet as I recorded and re-recorded my responses to Bach, I began to recognize a flag that would occasionally go up in my mind, on good days, saying “this one’s good enough”. At first it was only one of my improvisations that felt that way, but I knew I had found a tone that rang true. My goal became to extend that tone, that feeling. I found it in another, then another, and later, in most of them (but not quite all). Saxophonist and producer Ben Wendel came in to help me choose the final takes, and suddenly I had a 62-track, 78-minute solo piano record that didn’t fit into any record-store genre category.

When it came out, at the end of 2011, I figured I would play a couple CD-release concerts and get back to touring with my trio or playing duo with saxophonist Lee Konitz, with whom my musical relationship had been growing. But to my surprise, critics either absolutely loved it (many of them) or loathed it with a passion (a few of them), and it started to take on a life of its own. After the Wall Street Journal ran a smart and generous feature, it even—surprisingly—started to sell.

For the album release, I played the full first half of the variations for the first time, from memory, and it felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life, like teetering on the edge of a precipice from beginning to end. I played the Paris CD-release gig at the Sunside, a small jazz club, and an agent heard me there who decided to take a chance on me. Soon he had booked a long fall tour for me in surprisingly large venues in France, and it dawned on me that it just wouldn’t be good enough to play only half of the record. I sublet my Brooklyn apartment, traveled to Cuba, and for two and a half weeks studied percussion in the morning and memorized Goldbergs in the afternoons, away from cell phones, internet and acquaintances. An inexperienced performer of classical works, this was slow work for me, but I found it intensely rewarding. The act of memorizing forced me to make sense of the Variations, to organize them in my mind in a way that I hadn’t had to in the recording process. Bach’s economy became all the more apparent, as did the many-fold symmetries that govern the entire work, from the structural to the physical.

Bach was a lover of symmetry. If most of us can agree that symmetry is important in aesthetics—people tend to prefer symmetrical faces to asymmetrical ones—Bach took the idea to the extreme. At the physical level, in almost every variation as well as the majority of his other keyboard works, both hands get treated with exacting evenness, as if he wanted the interpreter of his music to fully appreciate the symmetry of his own body, from his hands to the hemispheres of his brain. It’s not so much that the music is equally difficult for the left hand as it is for the right, although that’s part of it: it’s that to play Bach’s music well, one is obligated to bring the same amount of melodic consciousness to the left hand as the right. This is not the case in keyboard music by most other composers, which tends to heavily favor the higher register of the right hand. I’ve always resisted redistributing the voices of the Variations between the hands for this reason, even though it’s fairly common practice to do so in order to reduce hand crossing. To me, the experience of physical symmetry is an essential part of the piece.

At the structural level, the Goldbergs exhibit symmetries from the smallest to the largest scales. At the smallest, Bach is constantly playing with inversion, one example being the 16th-note runs that begin the first and second halves of Variation 26 above, strict mirror-images of each other.

At mid-scale, the rising or falling direction of the canonic intervals offers its own symmetries. Variation 24, for example, starts as a canon at the falling octave, switches to a rising octave on either side of its middle, and ends at the falling octave again, showing palindromic symmetry in its structure.

At the largest scale, the I-V || V-I binary form of the Aria and the variations, with its central axis of symmetry, reflects the symmetry of the whole work, which similarly starts and ends in the same place (the Aria) and is split at its midpoint in the silence between the 15th variation and the 16th variation, the only to be titled “Overture”—a new beginning. The division of the Aria into 32 bars similarly reflects the work’s division into 32 movements, connecting the part to the whole. It’s easy to see this as an analogy of our existences: from ashes to ashes, with life in between. No wonder, then, that the Goldbergs are often described as expressing every possible shade of human emotion.

By the fall of ’12, I had coerced so many friends into letting me run through the program for them at home in casual performances—always with their share of little disasters—that I was beginning to get an idea of what I was up against. Performing the Goldbergs in public is not only a musical and spiritual challenge; it’s a physical and mental marathon, too. There’s no place to hide in Bach’s limpid music—it will immediately reveal and magnify any lapses in concentration, any tightening up of the body, any fear. And alternating between my role as interpreter of the written text and my role as in-the-moment improviser only made the task harder, constantly jolting me out of the possibility of getting ‘in the zone’ as I switched between mental states. To say I was terrified is an understatement, but the truth is that I’ve always been a thrill-seeker, in sports just as much as in music. So the terror had its own attraction. My dad called me an adrenaline junkie. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s during the fall tour that I started to learn what it really means to perform the Goldbergs. The tour was well received, but after I came home to Brooklyn, I heard Piotr Anderszewski play Bach’s English and French Suites at Carnegie Hall and was struck with a mirror-neuron-like physical feeling for how direct and unencumbered his relationship to the piano was. I realized that I had only fleetingly truly relaxed my body into the keyboard when I was playing Bach’s music on the road. A number of people had noted, in fact, how different my body language was between the variations and my improvisations. The fear of a memory slip or technical slip-up kept my body on edge.

Much of my work since then has been on diminishing the sensation of fear. I realized, for example, that focusing my attention on rhythm and how it manifested in my body was a big help. It gave the notes a context to sit in and directed my attention forward, slightly into the future and away from the paralyzing present. I also realized the obvious, which is that the more I deepened my knowledge of Bach’s text, the more confidence I had when presenting it to an audience. Weeks after a solo performance in Vancouver, on the tail end of a duo tour with Ben Wendel, with whom I had just released a duo record, I got a call from an accomplished baroque harpsichordist who specializes in Bach and had heard my concert there. While he wished me good luck, he told me in no uncertain terms that my performance of the canons needed work. Why would you only bring out the top voice, he asked, when they’re all equally important? I didn’t have the heart to explain that I’d bring them all out if I could—that I was holding on for dear life out there. But I did take his cue and returned to Bach’s score with increased humility, practicing singing the interior voices of the canons while I played the others on the piano, or at other times willing myself to transpose variations to foreign keys from memory, and again at others spending hours obsessing over the exact phrasing of one short melody. Every time I opened the score, I was reminded that there is always something further to discover in Bach’s music—that the more you seek, the more you find. One thing dawned on me: when you’re starting with material of this quality, you don’t need to add anything to it. Your job is to get out of the way, to solve your interpretive problems so as to reveal the work itself as clearly as possible, like scraping mud off a diamond. I’m grateful to the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, a masterful interpreter of the Goldbergs, for generously giving me encouragement and musical advice during this time.

In the fall of ’13, a short solo tour came together on the East Coast, culminating in a show at one of my favorite New York venues, Le Poisson Rouge, a place that will present just about any style of music, from Johnny Gandelsman on solo violin to Laura Mvula with full band, as long as it’s good. Something happened on the tour—something started to click emotionally. I stopped trying so hard, started to let things be, both in the variations and my improvisations. “Don't try to make the music beautiful - it is beautiful; just let it out”, the beloved piano guru Sophia Rossoff had told me, and I slowly began to understand what she meant. And after the gig at Le Poisson Rouge, a man introduced himself to me, warmly, as Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times. A day later there was a glowing review in the paper, and suddenly the record was selling better on Amazon than Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga, if only for a brief while. In the following days I got calls from some of the best presenters and festivals in America inviting me to perform.

What astonishes me about this is that the same critic, a fierce and erudite expert on classical music, may very well have panned me if he had heard me two years earlier. It took me that long to even begin to understand what was at stake when performing this music in front of an audience. And in those two years, my rising standards for what makes an acceptable performance of Bach started to spread laterally to the other types of music I was making, from my composing to my improvising. Dealing with Bach so frequently and—it felt—so intimately made all but the most well structured and meaningful new music feel lacking in comparison.

Looking back, as I prepare for solo shows at the Ravinia Festival, SF Jazz Center and Wigmore Hall in London, I’m amazed any of this happened at all. From many perspectives, I’m sure it would seem that I developed my Goldberg Variations / Variations project exactly backwards. But I didn’t know any better, and that’s probably why it ended up coming into existence—I just followed my nose. Above all, I’m grateful for the opportunity, a truly unexpected one for me, to engage much more deeply than I thought I ever would with one of music’s greatest geniuses, and to let Bach teach me.

Born in Paris to American parents, “tremendously gifted” (LA Times) pianist-composer Dan Tepfer has translated his bi-cultural identity into an exploration of music that ignores stylistic bounds. His 2011 Goldberg Variations / Variations, which pairs his performance of Bach’s work with improvised variations of his own, has received broad praise as a “riveting, inspired, fresh musical exploration” (New York Times). He has worked with the leading lights in jazz, including extensively with saxophone luminary Lee Konitz, while releasing seven albums as a leader. As a composer, he is a recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for works including Concerto for Piano and Winds, premiered in the Prague Castle with himself on piano, and Solo Blues for Violin and Piano, premiered at Carnegie Hall. Bringing together his undergraduate studies in astrophysics with his passion for music, he is currently working on integrating computer-driven algorithms into his improvisational approach. Awards include first prize and audience prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, first prize at the East Coast Jazz Festival Competition, and the Cole Porter Fellowship from the American Pianists Association. His recent soundtrack for the independent feature Movement and Location was voted Best Original Score at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival. Learn more at www.dantepfer.com.

Flower World: Music Archaeology of the Americas, Volume 2. Edited by Matthias Stöckli and Arnd Adje Both. Berlin: Ekho Verlag. 2013. [198 p., Individual €59; Institutional €92.] illustrations, photographs, references, index.

The field of American music archaeology has developed dramatically since the 1968 publication of Robert Stevenson’s Music in Aztec and Inca Territory, which, for better or for worse, remains one of the most referenced sources on pre-Columbian music in the Americas. At present, the field has moved increasingly towards exploring identifiable regional variations and historical transitions in form and function––a shift away from the tendency to make sweeping generalizations that marks Stevenson’s generation of scholarship. The recent publication of the second volume of Flower World: Music Archaeology of the Americas offers an exciting glimpse into the new methodological questions and considerations arising as a result of this transition to regionally specific and culturally informed archaeological musical studies. Each of the eight studies in the volume provide a unique framework for archaeological research tailored to a particular set of research challenges, including limited ethnographic records, scant surviving archaeological data, and a lack of playable instruments. Collectively, the studies highlight the growing flexibility of musical archaeology in the Americas, and its capacity to contribute to both historical and contemporary research questions in archaeology and ethnomusicology.

Henry Stobart and Daniela La Chioma Silvestre Villalva author two studies utilizing innovative research questions and methods. Stobart’s integration of architecture and space in his analysis of the Inca ushnu platforms is one example of how musical archaeologists are reexamining performance environments in conjunction with ethnographic sources. Through his analysis, Stobart suggests that the acoustic conditions of the platforms lend themselves more towards visual rather than auditory performances. His analysis of space and function provides a useful set of considerations for future historical studies of performance at historical sites. The study by Villalva also draws on contextual clues regarding the function and significance of musical performance. In her study of music and fertility, she analyzes the iconography of the antaras that appear on Nasca vases, and relates these to what is known of Nasca music and the Nasca cosmos. By connecting iconography and function, she compellingly hypothesizes that the images include two categories: a supernatural depiction and an earthly counterpart. Her study utilizes a research methodology that demonstrates how musical meaning can be unearthed from unlikely sources, including “non-musical” ceramics.

Egberto Bermúdez and Grazia Tuzi provide another set of ethnographic source options for historical research, blurring the line between archaeology and ethnography. Tuzi’s study surveys the historical Voladores dance and how it has evolved into the current contemporary performance. Tuzi presents a number of illustrations of Voladores, ranging from depictions in the early colonial sources, like the Duran Codex, Bobonicus, and Fernández Leal Codex, to later depictions from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Tuzi then examines the transformations in the Voladores tradition, including its more recent adaptation for tourist entertainment, as well as how the UN designated status of “intangible cultural heritage” has affected its performance. Tuzi keenly demonstrates how ethnomusicology can integrate musical archaeology to illuminate the significance of current performance practices through her refreshing mix of ethnographic fieldwork and detailed historical investigation of Colonial sources.

Bermúdez also draws on Colonial sources in his ethnographic study of Columbian sacrificial music performance, in which he examines a particular case of Spanish policing from the early Colonial Era. He draws from an extensive body of Colonial era literature in his research, including the Cantares, and the Florentine Codex, and he argues that the processes of cultural exchange hypothesized by Reichel-Dolmatoff support these broader connections. Bermúdez’s willingness to seek larger connections is commendable, but also raises the question of how and when culturally specific works like the Florentine Codex can be applied to other American cultures. Hopefully this will continue to be explored in future publications.

In addition to the diverse methodologies and data employed by the studies mentioned above, the Flower World collection also includes organological studies that explore instrument usage, classification, and distribution. Organological studies in the collection include a study of Nasca whistles by Anna Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska; a study of ceramic instruments from the Greater Nicoya region by Carrie L. Dennett and Katrina C. Kosyk; a study of poli-globular flutes by Vanessa Rodens, Arnd Adje Both and Gonzalo Sánchez Santiago; and a study of the Hopewell panpipe by Mark Howell.

Several of the studies propose methods for categorizing the highly diverse ceramic instrument collections by typology and historical period, including the studies by Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska and Rodens, Both and Santiago. Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska identifies two categories of construction among Nasca whistles that she postulates correspond with two historical periods. The study finds that the changing aesthetics were likely tied to changing functions, although what these functions were is currently indiscernible. The study by Rodens, Both and Santiago endeavors to tentatively classify poli-globular flutes into four types with eleven sub-variants. The chart of poli-globular flutes in this study is exemplary, and includes the known providence of the instrument, approximate dates, dimensions, observations, an image, publications that have discussed the artifact, and the name of the artifact’s current collection. This chart should be a model for future studies. Additionally, the study includes an excellent literature review of recent Mesoamerican organological studies, which is highly overdue.

Rather than addressing classification, the study by Dennett and Kosyk and that by Howell focus instead on larger thematic relationships within the instrument collections. Dennett and Kosyk alternatively find overarching themes that transcend the identified chronological and political boundaries in the Greater Nicoya. The study postulates that the consistent appearance of animal iconography indicates a continuing function of the instruments that transcends the identifiable historical periods and regional political boundaries. The study by Mark Howell offers a glimpse of another creative archaeological methodology. With little data available, Howell instead focuses on the relationships between construction materials, potential sounding capabilities, and the sacrificial contexts in which they were found. He aptly demonstrates how asking broader questions can lead to meaningful musical analysis in contexts with limited surviving data.

In sum, the collection offers a refreshing acceptance of the diversity of the pre-Columbian Americas. Future publications might consider how to put these studies in dialogue with each other. For instance, how do the studies by Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska and that by Dennett and Kosyk overlap in their respective findings regarding the intersections between historical periods and larger overarching themes? What are the next anticipated steps for classifying the many other ceramic instrument collections that defy classification, as initiated by Rodens, Both and Santiago in their study? And how should recurring themes, such as the overlap between iconography, material, meaning, function and organological classification, be negotiated going forward?

Although some readers might lament that there are few overarching conclusions to be drawn from the present volume, each study represents an important step toward piecing together how these musical cultures operated as separate entities and participants in larger regional networks. The collection continues to build upon a growing body of literature moving analysis from generalizations to a more informative specificity.

References

Stevenson, Robert. 1976. Music in Aztec and Inca Territory. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Kristina Nielsenis currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Hispanic instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic music. Kristina received her MA from UCLA after completing BM in piano performance at Western Washington University and an additional year of studies in the Mesoamerican Languages and Cultures program at Copenhagen University. She founded and now manages the Historical Perspectives subsection of the Sounding Board.

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [392 p. ISBN 9780822351634. $27.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.

Reviewed by Scott V. Linford

Country music in the United States self-consciously narrates racial, gender, and class identities. While the narrative that country music is white music has long held sway in popular consciousness, a relatively recent wave of scholarship and musical activity has disrupted that myth by deconstructing its origins and highlighting the contributions of African-American country musicians. The twelve chapters of Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, edited by Diane Pecknold, make a valuable contribution to this literature by documenting the participation of African Americans in country music and analyzing country music as a site for the elaboration of African-American identities.

Reasserting the African American Presence in Country Music

Interventions into the white myth of country music have gained traction in the last few decades, constituting a distinct nexus of scholarly production. Librarian Dena Epstein’s 1975 article unearthing the banjo’s African roots was a seminal step in recovering the instrument’s black history,[1] and has inspired a number of subsequent works searching for banjo analogues in West Africa (Adams and Pestcoe 2007; Adams and Sedgwick 2007; Bamber n.d.; Coolen 1991 and 1984; Jagfors 2003; Linford 2013; Pestcoe n.d.; Shaffer 2005). This effort set the stage for Cecilia Conway’s beautifully written account of African-American banjo history and the living tradition of black banjo players in North Carolina (1995), based on two decades of fieldwork that overlapped with parallel work by Kip Lornell (2002, 1989, 1975, 1974) and Robert Winans (1982, 1979). Karen Linn’s more analytical work traced the banjo’s changing racial, regional, gender, and class significance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly connecting these deliberate changes in the instrument’s meaning to the economic maneuverings of banjo manufacturers (1991). Recent works by Aaron Fox (2004a, 2004b) and Geoff Mann (2008) have analyzed the strategies used by country musicians to self-consciously create and promote white and working class identities, and have helped lay bare the constructed nature of country music’s semiotic whiteness. Finally, and perhaps most explicitly related to this project, journalist Pamela Foster’s two books (2000, 1998) illuminate the numerous and regular contributions of African Americans to country music.

Working in tandem with this scholarly research are the recent efforts of African-American musicians to reassert the African-American presence in country music. While Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, and others have been working in country subgenres for decades, recent albums by Sankofa Strings (2012), The Ebony Hillbillies (2011), and the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops (2012, 2010, 2006) have a more evidently self-conscious mission to play with country music’s narratives and roots. The Carolina Chocolate Drops in particular make ample use of the revisionist rhetorical strategy identified by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “signifyin’”: “a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition. […] To name our tradition is to rename each of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem. To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify” (1988:xxi). African-American discourse theorizes about itself self-reflexively, especially through “unmotivated” repetition that expresses respect and through “motivated” revision that recasts earlier texts in a critical light. The playfully ironic but seriously evocative title of the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig–and the eponymous song which is re-named “Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)”–reclaims and renames a song composed by African Americans and stolen by a minstrel performer, resetting it in a contemporary, hip hop-style groove created by foot-stomping and the minstrel instrument of the bones. This haunting arrangement simultaneously signifies self-reflexively on the blackness of the original tune and uses its troubled history to signify the contemporary African-American identities of the performers.

Hidden in the Mix enters this field with a deliberate mission, described eloquently in Pecknold’s introductory essay “Country Music and Racial Formation.” The book seeks to move beyond the conceptualization of African-American musicians as mentors and inspirations for more well-known and commercially successful white musicians (e.g., the partnership between African American Lesley Riddle and the white “father of country music” A.P. Carter, or the influence of African-American guitarist Arnold Shultz on the white “father of bluegrass” Bill Monroe). Instead, it aims to explore the work of African-American country musicians in their own right and the fascinating complexity of country music’s relationship to black identities. On a simple level, then, it responds to Christopher Waterman’s observation that “performers, genres, texts, and practices not consonant with dominant conceptions of racial difference have [...] often been elided from academic, journalistic, and popular representations of the history of American music” (2001:167). More subtly, Hidden in the Mix avoids narrow conceptions of country music and blackness, a pairing whose incongruity has been played for laughs, or used to symbolize alienation from an authentic black self, or employed as a form of what Toni Morrison calls “playing in the dark,” using notions of blackness to provide affective depth to white identities. Working from a constructivist model of race and identity, the book’s ultimate goal is neither to argue that country music is “really” black nor to exploit the apparent curiosity of black musicians participating in a genre that is racialized as white, but rather to explore “the shifting and multifaceted ways in which resilient black identities are fashioned through musical production, whether that music is construed as ‘black’ or not” (2013:7).

After Pecknold’s thoughtful introduction, the book’s twelve chapters are grouped in two parts. Part One, “Playing in the Dark,” addresses the paradox that country music retains strong significations of whiteness despite the large number of African Americans who have contributed to its repertoire, and that even the high-profile presence of prominent African-American performers such as Ray Charles has counter-intuitively served to accentuate the genre’s semiotic whiteness. Part Two, “New Antiphonies,” approaches country music as a site for the negotiation of black identities, viewing the genre’s collisions with soul, hip hop, Caribbean dance halls, and others as sonic contributors to conceptions of blackness. Black music here is not reflective of an a priori cultural essence; it participates in the construction of black identities.

Part One: Playing in the Dark

Part One’s four chapters achieve their goal from diverse angles. Patrick Huber’s “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924-1932” (Chapter One) provides an excellent introduction to the historical creation of separate “hillbilly music” and “race music” recording genres, including the ways that these genres not only reflected segregationist ideas but contributed to the naturalization of racial categories in the United States. His survey of the significant number of African-American and interracial recording sessions released in the hillbilly genre prior to 1933 holds historical value for its insights into the early years of country music’s construction as an “invented tradition.” Diane Pecknold’s “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” (Chapter Two) continues this focus on the influence of the recording industry, interrogating the role of Ray Charles’ seminal album in challenging the perception that “race music” would not play well on regional radio stations. The album’s success changed the economic landscape of recording label categories, but Pecknold argues that the primary impact of the album was to redirect the class narrative of country music and not, as is now popularly believed, to challenge country music’s whiteness.

The latter two chapters of Part One examine the careers of lesser-known African-American musicians in relation to country music’s white narrative. Erika Brady’s “Contested Origins: Arnold Schultz and the Music of Western Kentucky” (Chapter Three) focuses on the role of African-American guitarist Arnold Schultz in the development of bluegrass and especially the thumbpicking guitar style. While his actual contributions to those musical developments are unclear, Schultz has become a mimetic originary figure, whose blackness adds to the controversy of those genres’ origins. “Fiddling with Race Relations in Rural Kentucky: The Life, Times, and Contested Identity of Fiddlin’ Bill Livers” (Chapter Four) by Jeffrey A. Keith narrates the remarkable life of African-American fiddler Bill Livers as an exemplar of race relations and ethnic interchange in rural Kentucky. Keith describes three phases in Livers’ career: as a “buffoon” in an otherwise all-white band who nevertheless used storytelling to subtly undermine racism; as “the embodiment of romantic primitivism” (120) in a hippie band that sought to unite rural culture and 1960s counterculture; and finally as a regular on the folk revivalist circuit. In all three stages, Livers’ acute awareness of changing racial power dynamics guided the way he adjusted his performance style to meet the expectations of his audience.

Part Two: New Antiphonies           

United by their approach to country music as a site for the negotiation of black identities, the eight chapters of Part Two cover diverse terrain. Tony Thomas’ “Why African Americans Put the Banjo Down” (Chapter Five) challenges the prevailing argument that black musicians stopped playing the banjo in the twentieth century due to its associations with the racist stereotypes perpetuated by minstrel shows, arguing instead that black musical tastes, dances, and performance contexts changed in ways that did not accommodate the banjo. Thomas’ assertion that the organological limitations of the banjo (particularly its characteristically short sustain and limited range) made it unsuitable for blues music may overlook the success of musicians such as Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops in adapting the banjo to the blues. Likewise, his argument that African Americans do not share white Americans’ enthusiasm for nostalgia may not account for differences in class and rural/urban identities within the African-American experience (indeed, the seventh chapter of Hidden in the Mix discusses the musical trope of African-American nostalgia for rural life). However, Thomas' reevaluation of previous arguments and the evidence used to support them makes this chapter a significant contribution to recent conversations about the banjo's African-American history and identity.

Kip Lornell’s highly personal essay “Old-Time Country Music in North Carolina and Virginia: the 1970s and 1980s” (Chapter Six) tells the story of his groundbreaking fieldwork with African-American musicians working in non-blues country genres in the 1970s and 1980s. His chapter underscores the diversity of African-American folk music as including far more than only blues and gospel genres, but the chapter’s real value (especially for ethnomusicologists) lies in the autobiographical story of how Lornell’s lifetime of musical interests led to his much-appreciated career of scholarly and applied work. “The South’s Gonna Do It Again: Changing Conceptions of the Use of ‘Country’ Music in the Albums of Al Green” (Chapter Seven) by Michael Awkward explores the works of Al Green and particularly his intimate, spiritual Belle Album (1978) in the context of shifting notions of black masculinity and “the country” as a source of nostalgic musical inspiration. Although Awkward’s prose is sometimes serpentine, he manages to weave together issues of fame, racialized gender expression, and fraught regional symbolism at a time when African Americans were questioning the promise of the urban North and returning to the imagined homeland of the black South.

The only essay to consider country music outside the United States, “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): The Creole-Country Two-Step in St. Lucia and Its Diaspora” (Chapter Eight) by Jerry Wever is an ethnographic and historical account of the popularity of country music among African-Caribbean dancers in St. Lucia. Although the prevalence of country music from the United States in St. Lucia is sometimes bemoaned by musicians and intellectuals as a form of musical colonialism, others prefer to view country music as a musical form that is already creolized by the contributions of African Americans and the characteristically Caribbean habanera rhythm. Wever positions the St. Lucian case study as an intervention into the dialogue about the racialization of country music in the United States, providing a welcome global perspective that could be supplemented by studies of United States country music elsewhere in the world (cf. Cohen 2005; Goertzen 1988) as well as other “country” musics such as Mexican and Chicano norteño and Brazilian música sertaneja and música caipira (Dent 2009).

Adam Gussow’s “Playing Chicken with the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West” (Chapter Nine) takes on the hybrid genre variously known as country rap, hick-hop, or hill-hop, particularly with regard to the career of African-American musician Troy Coleman, better known as Cowboy Troy. While audiences and critics sometimes react to Coleman’s deliberately controversial music with surprise or thinly veiled racist horror, Gussow argues that the braggadocio of Coleman’s stage persona hides a savvy finesse that asserts a space for blackness in contemporary country music and encourages listeners to think of country music as a creole genre.

Barbara Ching’s “If Only They Could Read between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music” (Chapter 10) argues that the work of African-American country songwriter and novelist Alice Randall (a Harvard graduate, occasional university professor, and “a postmodernist versed in critical race theory” [256]) toys with what communications scholar Josh Kun calls “audiotopias.” For Kun, audiotopias are “almost-places of cultural encounter,” where sounds with diverse semiotic significances (for example, “white music” and “black music”) can exist simultaneously in the utopian sonic space of American music (Kun 2005:17). While briefly engaging with black country artists of the second half of the twentieth century (such as Charley Pride, Linda Martell, and Stoney Edwards) and discussing their different approaches to addressing race, Ching focuses on the ways that Randall self-consciously engages narratives of country’s supposed whiteness (for example by simultaneously paying homage to Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline in a song she wrote for Trisha Yearwood). An excellent analysis that brings forward Randall’s use of utopian musical space to address the question of African-Americans’ relationship to country music, Ching concentrates almost entirely on the lyrical content of Randall’s oeuvre, neglecting the possibilities of examining musical sound as a discursive and performative practice unto itself (a critical aspect of Kun’s audiotopia concept).[2]

“You're My Soul Song: How Southern Soul Changed Country Music” (Chapter 11) by Charles L. Hughes describes the large, interracial group of session musicians, songwriters, producers, performers, and executives in Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals who collectively shaped the sounds and genre identities of Southern soul, country, and country-soul music. While previous works have discussed the contributions of white musicians to soul music (as in Hughes’ discussion of foundational works by Peter Guralnick [1986] and Barney Hoskyns [1998]), Hughes hones in on the mutual influences and interracial collaborations of soul and country music in a field nonetheless fraught with prevailing white appropriation and control of black musics. Hughes’ meticulously researched work provides a valuable glimpse behind the scenes, highlighting the importance of non-performers in shaping musical sounds and meanings.

The book’s final chapter, David Sanjek's “What's Syd Got to Do with It? King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover” (Chapter Twelve) is a narrative account of Jewish-American executive Sydney Nathan and African-American A&R man Henry Glover of King Records and their practice of marketing crossover recordings (i.e., recording the same song in multiple genres and styles). Sanjek differentiates “crossovers” from crossracial “covers” such as those by Pat Boone and his ilk, which verged on embarrassing racial impersonation or caricature. Taking a rather idealistic view of this practice, Sanjek characterizes crossovers as “a musical melting pot, for two (and sometimes more) musical and cultural traditions consequently collide, fuse, and reformulate” (311). He further implies that Nathan and Glover’s financial directives happily aligned with positive social motivations of integration: “an ancillary element of [King Records’] agenda ratified the pluralistic essence of our national character” (336). While a cynical reader might wish to inquire further into the racialized power dynamics between the mercurial Nathan and strategic Glover, this essay’s placement at the end of the volume may be a gesture at optimism for country music’s potential as an audiotopic site of crossracial collaboration and integration.

Conclusions

Hidden in the Mix stands as an important contribution to literature on American country music and its wide range will be appealing to a broad readership, especially scholars of ethnomusicology, music history, anthropology, American studies, and ethnic studies. The book’s introduction and twelve chapters amply fulfill their two-fold mission to deconstruct the creation of country music’s whiteness and interpret country music as a site for the negotiation of blackness. Aside from these general themes, the book brims with unforgettable anecdotes: the story of black guitarist Amédé Ardoin, who was savagely beaten after playing at a white house party with white Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee, allegedly for accepting a handkerchief from the daughter of the white homeowner (30); Ray Charles’ pithy response to an interviewer who asked about the difference between white and black jazz bands (“Oh, about a hundred dollars a week” [85]); the aging Bill Livers’ wholehearted embrace of the 1970s free love ethic (illustrated by an anecdote involving an appreciative female fan and a wheelbarrow [132]) and the way he sometimes dumbed down the technical complexity of his fiddling so as not to appear superior to white fiddlers (133); Kip Lornell’s simple but inspiring ethnographic mission to “go out into the field, find out what’s on the back roads and in small communities, and add to the body of knowledge by way of album liner notes, articles, books, and recordings” (173); and the easy way that Nashville songwriter and producer Buddy Killen used the same disco-infused backing track with two different sets of lyrics to score simultaneous hits on the R&B charts (recorded by African American Joe Tex) and the country charts (recorded by Caucasian Bill Anderson) (283). By turns tragic, comedic, inspiring, and insightful, these stories enliven the chronicle of race and music in the United States.

Works Cited

Adams, Greg and Shlomo Pestcoe. 2007. “The Jola Akonting: Reconnecting the Banjo to its West African Roots.” Sing Out! 51(1):43-51.

Adams, Greg and Paul Sedgwick. 2007. “Encountering the Akonting: A Cultural Exchange.” Old Time Herald 10(9):36-41.

Bamber, Nick. n.d. “Two Gourd Lutes from the Bijago Islands of Guinea Bissau.” <http://www.shlomomusic.com/banjoancestors_ngopata.htm> Accessed July 18, 2013.

Carolina Chocolate Drops. 2012. Leaving Eden. Sound recording. Nonesuch.

______. 2010. Genuine Negro Jig. Sound recording. Nonesuch Records.

______. 2006. Donna Got A Ramblin' Mind. Sound recording. Music Maker.

Coolen, Michael Theodore. 1991. “Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture.” Black Music Research Journal 11:1-18.

______. 1984. “Senegambian Archetypes for the American Folk Banjo.” Western Folklore 43(2):117-132.

Cohen, Sara. 2005. “Country at the Heart of the City: Music, Heritage, and Regeneration in Liverpool.” Ethnomusicology 49(1):25-48.

Conway, Cecelia. 1995. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Dent, Alexander. 2009. River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ebony Hillbillies. 2011. Barefoot and Flying. Sound recording. EH Music.

Foster, Pamela. 2000. My Country, Too: The Other Black Music. Nashville: Publishers Graphics.

______. 1998. My Country: The African Diaspora’s Country Music Heritage. Nashville: My Country.

Fox, Aaron. 2004a. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______. 2004b. “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad’ Music.” In Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derko, 39-61. New York: Routledge.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goertzen, Chris. 1988. “Popular Music Transfer and Transformation: The Case of American Country Music in Vienna.” Ethnomusicology 32(1):1-21.

Guralnik, Peter. 1986. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. Boston: Little Brown.

Hoskyns, Barney. 1998. Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South. London: Bloomsbury.

Jagfors, Ulf. 2003. “The African Akonting and the Origin of the Banjo.” The Old-Time Herald 9(2):26-33.

Kun, Josh. 2005. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Linford, Scott V. 2013. “O’teck Akonting: Ethnography of a Senegambian Folk Lute.” Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. Indianapolis, 11/15/2013.

Linn, Karen. 1991. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lornell, Kip. 2002. “Non-Blues Secular Black Music in Virginia.” In American Musical Traditions. Volume 2: African American Music, edited by Jeff Todd Titon and Bob Carlin, 42-49. New York: Schirmer Reference Books.

______. 1989. “Banjos and Blues.” In Arts in Earnest: Field Studies in North Carolina Folklife, edited by Daniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zugg, 216-31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______. 1975. “Pre-Blues Black Music in Piedmont North Carolina.” North Carolina Folklore Quarterly 23(1):27-32.

______. 1974. “North Carolina Pre-Blues Banjo and Fiddle.” Living Blues 18:25-27.

Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(1):73-100.

Pecknold, Diane, ed. 2013. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pestcoe, Shlomo. n.d. <http://www.shlomomusic.com/> Accessed July 18, 2013.

Sankofa Strings. 2012. Colored Aristocracy. Sound recording. CD Baby.

Schaffer, Matt. 2005. “Bound to Africa: The Mandinka Legacy in the New World.” History in Africa 32:321-369.

Waterman, Christopher. 2001. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrine,’ and the Excluded Middle.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, 167-205. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winans, Robert. 1982. “Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex‑Slave Narratives.” Black Music Research Newsletter 5(2):2-5. 

______. 1979. “The Black Banjo-playing Traditions in Virginia and West Virginia.” Journal of the Virginia Folklore Society 1:7-30.

Scott V. Linford is a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His research approaches music as key feature of experiential senses of community, through fieldwork in West Africa, Central America, and the United States. An award-winning filmmaker and banjoist, Scott formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of Ethnomusicology Review and Director of the UCLA Bluegrass and Old Time Ensemble.

Cornwall, at the far south west of the United Kingdom, is simultaneously a county of England, a royal Duchy, and Celtic nation, and as such its culture and heritage bears witness to a long history of conflicting social, economic and cultural pressures. Cornwall’s musical traditions have often been overshadowed by other aspects of its heritage as well as by the outputs of its Celtic cousins; however, both Cornwall’s contemporary and historical musical heritage is rich and varied, with a range of genres and styles.

Above: Map showing Cornwall, UK courtesy of Nilfanion.

Cornish carols are one such genre; a social and musical tradition performed at Christmas, as opposed to May or Easter carolling traditions. The local representation of a non-conformist religious choral practice that was widespread across the United Kingdom, the corpus known today as Cornish carols is largely the result of an upsurge in carol composition following the visits of John Wesley (1703-1791) and the subsequent growth of the Methodism. Surviving caroling traditions in Cornwall, such as those in Padstow, reflect elements of practices described in early nineteenth century accounts of caroling practices in Cornwall. These accounts describe groups of musicians touring their particular town, village or parish throughout the night singing carols to the local residents at their houses (Gilbert 1822; Sandys 1833). The musicians were also usually rewarded with some money or food and drink.

Above: Carolers outside the Golden Lion pub in Padstow, December 2010 (photo: Elizabeth Neale).

Above: The Padstow carolers performing "Zadoc" (Recorded by Elizabeth Neale, 2011).

Sounding Out: The Cornish Association

Cornish carols were spread across the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the migration of Cornish miners to the British colonies and other territories (Payton 2005). Their presence in South Australia during the 1890s is of note since the carols were explicitly tied to perhaps the most fervent contemporary expressions of Cornish identity. The discovery of copper at Kapunda, Gawler and the northern Yorke Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in thousands of Cornish miners voluntarily traveling to the colony with the aid of government-assisted passages. In particular, the towns of Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina (the Copper Triangle) became known as Australia’s “Little Cornwall,” and continue to celebrate Cornish heritage. The prominent historian of the Cornish in Australia, Professor Philip Payton, considers that the nineteenth-century Cornish communities in the Copper Triangle not only unconsciously retained Cornish culture in their continuation of existing cultural habits, but also that “individuals and organizations deliberately replicated former behaviour or adopted ‘Cornish’ rhetoric as a means of asserting community or institutional identity in their new land” (Payton 2007:57).

Adelaide was evidently also a strong locus of Cornish identity, since it was there that the Cornish Association of South Australia (CASA) was formed in 1890. The project of a group of influential Cornishmen, the CASA’s aims were not only to facilitate social interaction and to aid new migrants in South Australia, but also to promote Cornish culture and customs. Complex narratives of race and identity immediately emerged within the CASA’s rhetoric; during the inaugural banquet, John Langdon Bonython (vice-president of the CASA) made a speech in which he overtly positioned the Cornish as the descendants of the pre-Roman inhabitants of the United Kingdom, stating that it was “the stock of these hardy Celts which were now building up this Greater Britain of the South” (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5). However, he was also at pains to maintain their British credentials and unswerving allegiance to the empire:

Their monuments were in every continent, and no people had done more to build up the British Empire than the people of Cornwall. (Loud cheers) They talked about hands across the sea uniting the various portions of the British Empire, and making federation possible, but whose hands were they but the hands of Cornishmen, who in their pride of race never forgot that they were citizens of the British Empire. (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5).

The foregrounding of race in these dialogues reflects the contemporary social and scientific preoccupation with classification. The term race was often interchangeable with “species,” and in the context of human civilizations, connoted language and culture alongside physical and mental characteristics. As such, positioning the Cornish as a Celtic race and therefore separate from the Anglo-Saxon English was a powerful assertion of distinct biological and cultural identity.

These dialogues of race and identity were reiterated during the CASA’s promotion of Cornish carols. The Cornish Musical Society (CMS) was formed later in the same year with the express purpose of practicing specifically Cornish carols to be sung at Christmas under the auspices of the CASA. The group gave their first concert in 1890, using as their source material a collection that was published by musician, collector and teacher Robert Hainsworth Heath in Cornwall in September 1889.

Above: Frontispiece of Robert Hainsworth Heath’s Cornish Carols, Part 1, published in 1889 (photo: Elizabeth Neale, author’s copy).

The first of two collections of Cornish carols, Heath included pieces that he had collected from other local composers, as shown on the front cover, and others that he had composed himself. Well-publicized both before and after, the initial concert was a success and it was repeated and expanded the following year. At this gathering, Bonython stated that:

It was a long retrospect to look through nineteen centuries back to the time when the first Christmas carol was heard on the plains of Bethlehem. But Cornish people should never forget that a hundred years had not elapsed before carols celebrating the Nativity were being sung in Cornwall and that they had been sung there forever since. Passed down from generation to generation, the strains of these carols linked the present with the past and united the Cornish of today with the Cornish of the first century. It was no wonder that the people of Cornwall were carol singers, and that wherever they might be found they still sang at Christmastide the sweet songs of the old home. (The Advertiser 28/12/1891:6)

In spite of the rhetoric conveyed by admirers of the carol tradition, a further examination of the genre, music and texts utilized by the Cornish Musical Society further complicates the conception of Cornish identity promoted by the Cornish Association in two primary ways that highlight the musical collision between a Cornish and British imperial identity. First, while the collection includes a number of texts not yet found in extant collections of hymns and carols, and are therefore likely to have been composed by Cornish musicians, it concurrently, also includes texts such as “Joy To The World,” and “While Shepherds” from English and Scottish hymn writers such as Isaac Watts, John Cawood and James Montgomery. These are not of Cornish origin and would have been well known across the United Kingdom. Second, the style of the musical materials cannot be said to be unique to Cornwall. Cornish carols generally are written for four parts (sometimes sharing three parts between SATB) and are usually unaccompanied, although historical accounts often describe he presence of instrumentalists within caroling parties (Shaw 1967:102). While the carols may employ a variety of texts, they characteristically begin in unison, and as the stanza progresses, develop a fugal section before returning to complete the stanza in unison. As such they are rather analogous within the genre of Protestant hymn fuging tunes, popular in both England and America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Temperley 1981). There is therefore a clear disjuncture between the provenance of the musical materials utilized to support Cornish identity, and the cultural and biological heritage claimed by the CASA.

Reconstructing Music, Contesting Identity

The vision of Cornish identity disseminated by the CASA thus included intertwining and colliding notions of Celtic, English, British and imperial identity; however, the musical materials that were used to support an ancient Cornish heritage were not congruent with the history claimed by the CASA. This is not to suggest that the genre of Cornish carols is academically illegitimate, or that the CASA were deliberately misleading; rather, the intention is to recognise the constituent materials of the tradition in conjunction with the rhetoric put forward by the CASA in order to gain a deeper insight into the narratives at play. Indeed, the CASA’s initial promotion of Cornish carols appears to have bolstered the tradition significantly, considering the genre’s subsequent upsurge in performance and the further publication of other collections of Cornish carols within South Australia.  The performance of Cornish carols became an established part of the CASA’s activities in the following decades. The tradition not only musically evoked a distinct historic identity and culture, but also was active in the present, socially bonding Cornish communities in the South Australia and conceptually bonding the Cornish across the diaspora.

The CASA’s efforts reflect the contemporary European political, sociological and compositional trends towards the use of folk or traditional culture in the project of nationalism and the process of nation-building (White and Murphy 2001; Bohlman and Radano 2000). In tandem, as scholars have increasingly critiqued, debated and deconstructed the concepts of race, the nation (Anderson 1983) and the socio-cultural apparatus of nationalism (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), the door has opened for examining the construction and performance of identity within regions, among deterritorialised peoples and within other non-nation states. Further development of these debates among diaporic communities would broaden the academic perspective of migrant cultures, especially when their historical context is taken into account. As such, the Cornish caroling tradition, and the context and dialogues surrounding it, is significant not only for our understanding of historical Cornish diasporic identity in Australia, but also in ethnomusicological approaches to the music cultures and projects of historic migrant minorities.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Bohlman, Philip V., and Ronald M. Radano, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial

Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gilbert, Davies. 1822. Some ancient Christmas Carols, with the tunes to which they

were formerly sung in the West of England. London: John Nicholls and Son.

Heath, Robert Hainsworth. 1899. Cornish Carols, Parts 1 & 2. Leipzig: Robert

Hainsworth Heath.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:

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Payton, Philip. 2007. Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

––––––. 2005. The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’.

Fowey: Cornish Editions Limited.

Sandys, William. 1833. Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern. London: Richard

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Shaw, Thomas. 1967. A History of Cornish Methodism. Truro: D. Bradford Barton

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Temperley, Nicholas. “The Origins of the Fuging Tune” In Royal Musical Association

Research Chronicle 17:1-32.

The Advertiser (South Australia: 1889-1931). "Cornish Association, Inaugural

Banquet – An Enthusiastic Gathering" (writer unknown). 22/2/1890:5.

––––––. "Cornish Musical Society: Christmas Carols" (writer unknown), 28/12/1891:6

White, Harry, and Michael Murphy. 2001. Musical Constructions of Nationalism:

Essays on the History and Ideology of European Music Culture 1800-1945.

Cork: Cork University Press.

Bio

Elizabeth is a second year PhD candidate co-supervised at Cardiff University and the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter. She received her BA in music and English literature and MA in ethnomusicology from Cardiff University, and her project is supported through the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.