by | February 18, 2011 · 1:00 am

Tropicália and Bahia

 

The tropicália movement of the 1960s, which coincided with a period of intense cultural and political unrest in Brazil, emphasized the country’s multiethnic identity by incorporating the entire spectrum of Brazilian music. Although the movement had an ostensibly political framework of national scope, many of its products had deep roots in the traditional music of Bahia, the most important reservoir of Afro-Brazilian culture.

Among tropicália’s most important figures were Afro-Brazilian singer-songwriters such as Gilberto Gil and Tom Zé; several other artists connected with the movement hailed from Bahia. An overview of song texts and musical features of tropicália shows that the influence of Bahia’s traditional music and culture remained a strong factor behind even the most avant-garde experiments of the various artists who converge under that rubric. The website Tropicália is an extensive resource for exploring tropicalismo, the aesthetic of tropicália.

This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here or on the Black studies category on the right to see a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

Below, Gil speaks about Bahia, tropicália, and political suppression. Many thanks to James Melo for his help with this post!

Related article: Macunaíma and brasilidade

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by | February 15, 2011 · 1:00 am

African American women composers

From spirituals to symphonies: African American women composers and their music by Helen Walker-Hill (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007) challenges the assumption that black women’s only significant musical contributions have been in the worlds of blues, jazz, pop, and traditional music.

The book includes detailed discussions of the lives and works of Undine Smith Moore (left), Julia Perry, Margaret Bonds, Irene Britton Smith, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Valerie Capers, Mary Watkins, and Regina Harris Baiocchi, all of whom have combined the techniques of Western art music with their own cultural traditions and individual gifts.

This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here or on the Black studies category on the right to see a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

Below, Tichina Vaughn performs Dream variations, Bonds’s setting of the poem by Langston Hughes.

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by | February 12, 2011 · 1:00 am

Herskovits and Freud

Numerous examples of the Freudian concept of repression may be observed in black cultures in Africa and the Americas. Though they do not use the Western term, these cultures involve a full awareness of repression and its attendant dangers for individuals and society, and they have developed therapeutic activities to mitigate it.

This according to the 1934 essay “Freudian mechanisms in primitive Negro psychology” by Melville J. Herskovits, which was included in Essays presented to C.G. Seligman (London: Kegan Paul International). While the word primitive has since been discredited, the piece is a milestone in the history of anthropology and is considered the first successful application of psychoanalytic theory in that field.

Herskovits explores how in many cases these therapeutic activities comprise satirical or insulting singing events that express what cannot be spoken directly, providing a release of repressed feelings in a socially supported framework. He discusses examples from Benin, Haiti, and Suriname, with particular attention to the Suriname Maroon lóbi singi ritual.

Usually performed by women, lóbi singi may comprise an exchange of insulting song verses, or it may involve a woman who socially redeems herself through singing satirical verses about her notorious past in alternation with a chorus of her peers; in both cases, social wounds are healed by the expression of repressed feelings.

This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here or on the Black studies category on the right to see a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

Top: In 1929, Herskovits contemplates ritual objects that he collected in Suriname.

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by | February 9, 2011 · 1:00 am

Black Grooves

Hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture at Indiana University, Black Grooves is a review site that aims to promote black music by providing monthly updates on interesting new releases and quality reissues in all genres—gospel, blues, jazz, funk, soul, and hip hop, as well as classical music composed or performed by black artists.

Reviews of selected new discs and DVDs are featured, with occasional attention to books and news items. An extra effort is made to track down releases by indie, underground, foreign, and other labels that are not covered in the mainstream media. While the primary focus is on African American music, related areas such as Afropop and reggae are also covered.

This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here for a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

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by | February 6, 2011 · 1:00 am

John Abbott, jazz photographer

Throughout his career, John Abbott’s award-winning images of jazz have been featured on over 250 album and magazine covers; he has been the primary cover photographer for JazzTimes magazine since 2002.

On 7 September 2010, the 80th birthday of the jazz legend Sonny Rollins, Abbott’s Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins was published by Abrams. As Rollins’s photographer of choice for the past 20 years, Abbott captured images of him at home and at work; essays by the jazz critic Bob Blumenthal are included.

Below, Abbott and Blumenthal discuss the making of the book.

Related article: The Jazz Baron

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by | February 4, 2011 · 1:00 am

“Now what a time”

An installment in the Library of Congress’s American memory series, “Now what a time”: Blues, gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938–1943 presents approximately 100 sound recordings—primarily African American blues and gospel songs—and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia, in 1941 and 1943.

Song lists made by the collectors, correspondence with the Archive about the trips, and a special issue of the Fort Valley State College student newsletter, The Peachite: Festival number, are also included. Notable in this collection is the topical rewording of several standard gospel songs to address the wartime concerns of the performers.

Also included are recordings made in Tennessee and Alabama (including six Sacred Harp songs) by John Work between September 1938 and 1941. These recording projects were supported by the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture at the American Folklife Center).

War song, performed by Buster Brown in March 1943, can be heard here.

This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here or on the Black studies category on the right to see a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

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by | February 2, 2011 · 11:31 am

Dagomba dance-drumming

Created by the ethnomusicologist David Locke, Dagomba dance-drumming presents sound recordings, staff notation, and text materials on the dance drumming of the Dagomba people of northern Ghana.

The recordings and historical narratives—including a personal narrative of training in drumming—were collected from Alhaji Abubakari Lunna, an expert on Dagomba performing arts and culture. The story of Lunna’s life conveys the scope of the knowledge that a great drummer learns, the way this heritage is transmitted, and a glimpse into the Dagomba drumming scene during the second half of the twentieth century. The website is hosted by Tufts University.

This is the first in our series of posts celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here or on the Black studies category on the right to see a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

Below, an excerpt from a performance of Takai, a Dagomba dance that involves the striking of metal rods in the dancers’ hands and swirling movements that are enhanced by their flaring costumes.

Related post: Traditional Ghanaian sampling

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by | January 30, 2011 · 7:49 am

Scots-Irish music

Created by Dick Glasgow in 2006, Scots-Irish music presents information on the traditional instruments and music of Ulster, with additional information on the music’s relocation in the U.S. Appalachian region. The site includes numerous links to other online resources relevant to Ulster’s musical traditions.

The giant lambeg drum, above, is typically heard with traditional Ulster fife playing (below).

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by | January 23, 2011 · 7:31 am

Fonoteca: Radio Nacional de Colombia

 

Fonoteca: Radio Nacional de Colombia presents over 29,000 historical recordings, including speeches by presidents and public employees since 1940, serials since 1941, interviews since 1944, religious music festivals, llanera, bagpipes, porro, vallenato, rock, reggae, and Native American music from 1975 to date, as well as lectures and high school class broadcasts from 1960 through 2004.

The site also features the virtual Fonoteca radio station, whose broadcasts have long been part of the youth-oriented Radionica, the Radio Nacional de Colombia FM station.

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by | January 20, 2011 · 6:54 am

Pitch perception B.C.E.

Although the notion of pitches being relatively high or low was well-established by the first century C.E., when Pliny used the terms summus, medius, and imus, there is no evidence that earlier Greek theorists espoused this metaphor. The terms νήτη (nētē, “down-located”) and ὑπάτη (hypatē, “up-located”) were used, but they referred to the physical placement of kithara strings, not to a spatial concept of pitch; in fact, the higher the pitch in our terms, the further down-located it was on the instrument.

The commonest adjectives for pitch in ancient Greek writings are ὀξύς (oxys, “sharp, piercing”) and βαρύς (barys, “heavy”). Ptolemy wrote that the former quality was a result of λεπτότης (leptotēs, “fineness”) and πυκνότης  (pyknotēs, “close spacing [of notes]”, and that the latter was caused by μανότης (manotēs, “thickness”) and  παχύτης ( pachytēs, “loose spacing”) . The idea of higher and lower sounds, and their eventual depiction as such in notation, was a later development.

This according to “The development of vertical direction in the spatial representation of sound” by Eleonora Rocconi, an essay included in Archäologie früher Klangerzeugung und Tonordnung: Musikarchäologie in der Ägäis und Anatolien (Rahden: Leidorf, 2002), pp. 389–392.

Related article: The perfect-pitch puzzle

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