Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music
509
Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music
509eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572257 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Music / Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 509 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AFRICANS, EUROPEANS AND THE MAKING OF MUSIC
The first thing we must understand about the Africans who were taken into slavery in the Americas is that they were by no means members of a primitive society. The societies of the Western Sudan, which, at least up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the principal source of black slaves, may have been technologically simple by nineteenth-century European standards (at the time of the first large-scale encounters, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was little to choose between them, apart from the strategically crucial technologies of shipbuilding and explosives), but, socially, politically, aesthetically and spiritually they had, and still have, much to teach Europeans, those strange creatures whom, according to Okoye, Africans at first derided 'for their horrible looks, red faces, long hair and long heads', and whom they regarded as 'unsightly because they did not possess a black skin, full lips and broad nostrils'.
It is tempting to cite, as evidence for the 'advanced' nature of West African societies, that series of empires which arose in the Western Sudan from the eighth century A.D. onwards, whose names ring in the ears of Europeans like strange music, as alien as the names of planets in an epic of science fiction: Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu. These were immensely wealthy. A fourteenth-century Emperor of Mali, Mansa Musa, who is said to have ruled over the largest domains on earth apart from the Mongol Empire, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 (Islam spread early into West Africa, but the Africans transformed it, as they did later the Christianity of the missionaries, into a specifically African syncretism that co-existed, and still co-exists, comfortably with the older polytheistic religions); his largesse with gold was so prodigal that the value of the local currency in Cairo was depressed for some twelve years after his visit. The term 'empire' is, however, only a makeshift, for we do not have a term for that kind of political organization in which power, while seemingly vested in a supreme head of state, actually permeated upwards from the smallest social units, from families and clans through a loose confederation, to the Emperor, whose position depended upon the continuing assent of all; government in all essentials took place through the lineage-based community, which was, and seemingly remains today, the basic social unit across the continent. To the western bureaucrat such a community-based system of government will appear proof of primitivity or backwardness; nonetheless I do not intend trying to appease his prejudices by pretending that the decentralized 'empires' of the Western Sudan much resembled their centralized, top-downwards namesakes of Europe.
Instead, one can only point out that, from all accounts, the continent in the centuries before the disruption caused by the slave trade and, later, colonialism, was an orderly and well-governed place. The fourteenth-century Berber traveller Ibn Battuta reported that 'Of all peoples the Negroes are those who most abhor injustice. The Sultan [of Mali] pardons no-one who is guilty of it. There is complete and general safety throughout the land.' That this was a more or less general condition throughout sub-Saharan Africa is confirmed not only by African and Arab travellers but by Europeans also. A Dutch merchant's description of the city of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, was published in Amsterdam in 1668 and includes the following: 'The king's court is square and lies in the right quarter of the town as you approach it from the Cotton Gate. It is as big as the city of Haarlem and is surrounded by a wall like that surrounding the town itself. It is divided into many splendid palaces and comprises beautiful and long square galleries almost as large as the Amsterdam Exchange. These galleries are raised on high pillars covered from top to bottom with cast copper on which are engraved pictures of their war exploits and battles. Each roof is decorated with turrets bearing birds cast in copper with outstretched wings, cleverly made after the living models. The streets of the town are very straight and wide, each over a hundred and twenty feet wide.' Benin was famous not only for its artistic and architectural achievements but also for the shrewdness and enterprise of its merchants.
Even Henry Morton Stanley, by no means a sympathetic observer of Africa, allowed in 1875 that the King of Uganda was 'a pious Musselman and an intelligent humane king,'while as late as 1906 the anthropologist Leo Frobenius could write of his journey to the Congo: 'And on this flourishing material civilization there was a bloom, like the bloom on a ripe fruit, both tender and lustrous; the gestures, manners and customs of a whole people from the youngest to the eldest, alike in the families of princes and well-to-do and of the slaves, so naturally dignified and refined to the last detail. I know of no northern race who can bear comparison with such a uniform level of education as is to be found among these natives.' Frobenius's further comment is worth noting also: 'Judging from the accounts of navigators from the 15th to the 18th century, there is not a shadow of doubt that Negro Africa of that period, stretching from the south to the edge of the Sahara Deserts, was in the heyday of an uninterrupted efflorescence of the arts, an efflorescence which the European conquistadores callously destroyed as fast as they succeeded in penetrating into the country ...'
One could continue the list: the great Indian Ocean ports of Kilwa (which Ibn Battuta called 'one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world'), Mombasa and Mogadishu, centres of intricate networks of trade and cultural exchange that extended as far as Indonesia and even China, which the Portuguese with their superior firepower destroyed in an attempt to take them over; Timbuktu, with its splendid court and army of scholars 'bountifully maintained', wrote the sixteenth-century Spanish traveller Leo Africanus, 'at the king's expense', one of a chain of cities along the southern edge of the Sahara which served as 'ports' for the huge caravans, often twelve thousand strong, that brought European goods across the desert and returned with ivory, salt and gold. The great trading houses of Genoa and Venice knew that they were dealing not with 'primitive' people but with shrewd traders whom they treated with respect and even deference.
But, despite the brilliance of these and other city civilizations, the vast majority of Africans lived, then as now, in village societies, content to work a subsistence economy although, as Davidson says, 'the available evidence suggests that most peoples south of the Sahara had a standard of living far above the minimum subsistence level, and enjoyed a reasonably secure life,' mostly nonliterate (I shall have more to say on literacy later), the basis of social and political life the clan or lineage, the common ancestors. Two characteristics of African social life strike one again and again in commentaries.
The first is an absence of separation between aspects of life which Europeans are inclined to keep apart: the political, the economic, the religious and the aesthetic. Despite an absence of either historical founder or systematic body of doctrine, African religion permeates every aspect of human existence. The Christian theologian Dr John Mbiti, who insists that indigenous African religion, even when overlaid with Islam or Christianity, is a unity (there are, he says, many branches but only one tree), tells us that no African lacks a knowledge of God as originator, as other than human, or of the ethical responsibility of humanity in the world. A human being can become fully human only in society, and the model for society is the family — not only those presently alive but also those departed, as well as those yet to be born, all of whom are perceived as present in the society of their currently living relatives. Thus, humanness is not confined to the living; love and generosity are due no less to the dead, who in their turn watch over the living community, while those yet unborn have a right to full existence, so that the living have a duty to procreate in order to bring them to that condition.
The reciprocal relationship between individual and community finds expression in a system of rites of passage; nature may bring the child into the world but only the community can make him or her fully human. Hence the importance of naming ceremonies, in which the child dies to its mother but is reborn to the wider community, gaining not just one but many mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters, on all of whom falls the responsibility for nurture. Similarly, the rites of puberty and of marriage, procreation and death, each of which is a stage in the integration of the individual into the community, not only of the living but also of the dead and the not yet born, are each at the same time an occasion for the renewal of that community, injecting fresh energy and keeping death and disintegration at bay.
Just as the living individual is the link between the departed and the yet unborn, so he or she is also the link between the physical and the natural worlds, linking God to nature through membership of the natural world (not master over, but priest of, nature) and through the unique human moral and ethical consciousness. Thus all human life and activity take place within a religious framework, and no human act is without religious significance. The arts, too, contribute to this unified consciousness. 'In Africa,' says Davidson, 'tribal sculpture was seldom designed to be enjoyed as "art". Rather, each piece was designed to attract specific religious spirits. An ancestor figure ... was carved as a home for the spirit of a long-dead chieftain — a spirit which might otherwise roam in anger and harm the village. A beautiful doll was often fashioned to give sanctuary to the spirit of a child not yet born. Without the presence of such spirits, a piece of sculpture has little value. For example, if a wood carving began to crack or rot and was no longer a suitable home for a spirit, another figure was made to replace it, and the first piece, no matter how beautiful, was discarded as worthless.' A major function of the sculptures, the masks and the costumes, no less than of the music and the dance, was their use in rituals affirming and celebrating the power of the lineage and of the common ancestors; thus art and religion together served to reinforce the integrity of the community. Works of art were not kept on display, but were more often than not hidden away until the proper time to bring them out for the particular ritual purpose for which they were designed.
It is this striking temporal, physical and social continuity that has permeated every aspect of African life, in the rituals that embodied their skills and knowledge in agriculture, in the working of metals, in the weaving and dyeing of cloths, the building of houses, the design of villages and towns, the making of musical instruments and the complementary arts of costume, masking, musical performance and dance, themselves thought of as a single unity, the great performance art for which we lack a name (unless it be 'celebration'). All of these have been devoted to one end, which Davidson calls the art of social happiness. 'Few others', he says, 'dealt in the raw material of human nature with more subtlety and ease, or so successfully welded the interests of community and the individual. The Africans practised the art of social happiness, and they practised it brilliantly.' One might say that the intelligence of Africans is devoted to learning how to live well in the world rather than to mastering it, and they do not imagine, as does the scientifically-minded European, that the latter is necessary in order to achieve the former.
None of what has been said need imply that Africa has at any time been an earthly paradise, or that Africans are in any way better, more instinctively moral, artistic, religious, or, especially, 'closer to nature' than any other human people. Not only is much of that vast continent decidedly inhospitable to human life, but also Africans have shared the same tendencies to selfishness, quarrelsomeness and murderousness that characterize the rest of our species. The point is that in that continent human beings evolved ways of coping with these frailties and other kinds of potentially destructive impulses in ways that on the one hand preserved the fabric of society and on the other allowed room for individuals to work out their own development to the limit. Social and individual needs have been thought of not as opposed but as complementary and mutually dependent. It was in the rituals, the music and the dance forms that the society has dramatized and released the tensions within it, without being under any illusion that such releases can ever be achieved once and for all, but in full awareness that they must be negotiated anew by each succeeding generation.
The second characteristic of Africans is adaptability, and the ability to choose eclectically from a variety of sources and to profit from the potential richness of a number of perspectives simultaneously. This can be seen in the way in which Africans seem to be able at one and the same time, and without visible strain, to hold, for example, both polytheistic 'pagan' beliefs and practices and those of either Christianity or Islam, to be atthe same time 'traditional' and 'Europeanized' in their daily lives, in ways which often puzzle and even infuriate Europeans; the latter can deal with contradiction only by denying or eliminating one side of it — hence the rejection and even persecution of deviants, both sacred and secular, which has been such a persistent and bloody feature of European history — while Africans seem to be able to live happily with both sides. One might say that while the European lives in a world of 'either/or', the African's is a world of 'both/and'.
Even what Europeans call African 'tribalism', which is represented as an archaic and disruptive force in present-day African states, was in all probability created by the nineteenth-century colonial powers with the collusion of a small number of African rulers and intellectuals. Terence Ranger is of the opinion that in pre-colonial Africa 'there rarely existed the closed corporate consensual system which came to be accepted as characteristic of "traditional" Africa. Almost all studies of nineteenth-century Africa have emphasised that, far from there being a single "tribal" identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild. The overlapping networks of association and exchange extended over very wide areas. Thus the boundaries of the "tribal" polity, and the hierarchies of authority within them, did not define the conceptual horizons of Africans.' Ranger also quotes another writer who contrasts the 'colonial freezing of political dynamics' with the 'precolonial shifting, fluid imbalance of power and influence.'
That this is not 'primitive' or 'prelogical' behaviour can be seen from the emphasis put on multiplicity in African performing arts; John Miller Chernoff, who himself trained for some years as a drummer in the Ewe tradition of Ghana, makes a strong case for a parallel 'between the aesthetic conception of multiple rhythms in music and the religious conception of multiple forces in the world'. He says, 'African affinity for polymetric musical forms indicates that, in the most fundamental sense, the African sensibility is profoundly pluralistic ... Just as a participant in an African musical event is unlikely to stay within one rhythmic perspective, so do Africans maintain a flexible and complicated orientation towards themselves and their lives ... The sensibility we have found in musical expression more accurately appears to represent a method of actively tolerating, interpreting and even using the multiple and fragmented aspects of everyday events to build a richer and more diversified personal experience ... the adaptability and strength of an African's sense of community and personal identity reside in the aesthetic and ethical sensibility which we have seen cultivated in one of its aspects, music. As such the values of an African musical event represent not an integrity from which we are moving away but rather an integrity which, with understanding, we might approach. It is a felicitous orientation in a world of many forms.'
It is music and dance that have been, and remain, the prime manifestation of the African sensibility and worldview. Robert Farris Thompson goes so far as to say: 'The traditional choreographies of tropical Africa constitute, I submit, complex distillations of thinking, comparable to Cartesian in point of influence and importance.' Music itself, as these statements suggest, hardly exists as a separate art from dance, and in many African languages there is no separate word for it, although there are rich vocabularies for forms, styles and techniques.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Music of the Common Tongue"
by .
Copyright © 1987 Christopher Small.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
<P>Preface to the 1998 Edition<BR>I. Introduction Africans<BR>1. Europeans and the Making of Music<BR>2. On the Ritual Performance<BR>3. Rituals for Survival I<BR>4. On Cultures and Their Fusion<BR>5. Styles of Encounter I<BR>6. On Values and Values<BR>7. Rituals for Survival II<BR>8 On Literacy and Nonliteracy<BR>9. Styles of Encounter II<BR>10. On Improvisation<BR>11. Styles of Encounter III<BR>12. On the Decline of a Music<BR>13. Styles and Rituals<BR>14. On Records and Rewards<BR>15. Styles of Encounter IV<BR>16. Confronting the Rational God<BR>17 Index</P>What People are Saying About This
"I think this is the best and most comprehensive book about African-American musicking this century. As such, it will continually encourage us to celebrate our liberation from abstract knowledge, competitive individualism and the death dealing industrial state."
— Charles Keil, SUNY at Buffalo
"I think this is the best and most comprehensive book about African-American musicking this century. As such, it will continually encourage us to celebrate our liberation from abstract knowledge, competitive individualism and the death dealing industrial state."—Charles Keil, SUNY at Buffalo
"This book makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of the complex interweaving of African and European musical and cultural traditions that have brought African-American music and most other American musics in to being. His mastery of both musical traditions-as well as his acute sensitivity to the cultural and political contexts for musical production –sets this book apart. A must read for those of us concerned with the production of twentieth-century music and for those of us who wan to unravel the history of race, racism and cultural hybridity in America.""—Tricia Rose, author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
""I think this is the best and most comprehensive book about African-American musicking this century. As such, it will continually encourage us to celebrate our liberation from abstract knowledge, competitive individualism and the death dealing industrial state.""—Charles Keil, SUNY at Buffalo
“This book makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of the complex interweaving of African and European musical and cultural traditions that have brought African-American music and most other American musics in to being. His mastery of both musical traditions-as well as his acute sensitivity to the cultural and political contexts for musical production –sets this book apart. A must read for those of us concerned with the production of twentieth-century music and for those of us who wan to unravel the history of race, racism and cultural hybridity in America.”