In continuing the discussion from my previous post, I wanted to draw attention to how music has played a crucial role in helping enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans in the nineteenth century to resist captivity and oppression. The bomba has been documented as one of the known performative genres extant since Spanish colonization in Puerto Rico. While the English translation of the word “bomba” signifies the word “bomb,” the word is actuallya Spanish mistranslation of the French word bamboula, roughly meaning a kind of drum. I have talked about the murky origins of bomba in Puerto Rico in From Ring Shout to Bomba: mainly, how the musical term is often attributed to the French botanist Andre Pierre Ledru in his trip to the island in the eighteenth century.
Bomba incorporates music and dance through group participation and often consists of a “call and response” approach. A leader sings a line of lyrics, and the rest of the groups sings back by “responding” to it. Instrumentation typically involves barrel drums, a log drum called a cua, maracas and singers. Bomba can be used for both religious and secular purposes and also consists of multiple drumming patterns: the most basic one being the bomba sica. The following tutorial video provides visual and musical notation examples for different bomba rhythms. How does this information relate to Afro-Puerto Ricans resisting enslavement in the nineteenth century? History reveals that enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans used the bomba in the 1820s to secretly communicate with each other about plans for revolt and escape from the island. More of this topic will be included in my upcoming book. It has become increasingly imperative over the years to understand the global connections, history, and identities of the African diaspora. I have spent the past decade or so perusing these aspects as they concern the Hispanophone and Lusophone (Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking) areas of the world. While my latest publication From Ring Shout to Bomba served as a comparative study of the Gullah Geechee people and Afro-Latin communities in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil by examining their histories, language, religion, and musical aspects, I also had the opportunity last year to expand my research on the historiography about the African presence in Puerto Rico.
Those who peruse the latest additions to the photographs in the “Gallery” section of this website will notice that, this past September, I presented at the 2022 Slave Dwelling Project conference at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Created by Joseph McGill, the Slave Dwelling Project seeks to encourage candid and civil discussions about the effects of African enslavement and Colonialism in the United States and abroad through detailed research and travels to areas where such practices were enforced. While the topic that year focused specifically on the Stono Rebellion in September 1739, one of the most important enslavement insurrections to have occurred in early colonial American history, the conference also allowed for discussions concerning enslavement revolts that occurred beyond the Thirteen Colonies. My involvement in that conference provided a comparative historiographical analysis of enslavement and revolts in Puerto Rico during Spanish colonization. Research on Puerto Rico has revealed the importance behind comprehending and preserving African enslavement history on the island. That often involves modifying that narrative with concrete data and, in certain instances, artifacts from the nineteenth century or earlier to avoid sugarcoating or romanticizing what occurred on the island. Sources from Guillermo Baralt, Luis A. Figueroa, and others not only clearly illustrate the Spanish involvement in enslaving African people in that area of the Caribbean. They also indicate instances where the enslaved populations either fought back against oppression or had conspired to do so. Sometimes, they implemented musical means via group participation in the bomba singing, drumming, and dancing by transmitting coded messages about liberation and escape from Puerto Rico. My goal lies in demonstrating to the public the gaps and challenges behind uncovering information about that part of the African diaspora resisting cultural erasure. In preparation for the one-hundred and fifty years of the official “abolition” of enslavement in Puerto Rico in 1873 on March 22, 2023, my next few posts will focus on issues related to locating and understanding documents about enslavement in Puerto Rico. Music can have the power to promote activism and effect positive social change. This is especially true when examining the musical aspects of the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights movements, as well the social changes occurring in the twenty-first century through the Black Lives Matter movement since the 2010s. The Cummer Museum of Arts and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida presented such an example of applying civil rights through music via a recreation of a “freedom concert” from the mid twentieth century to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These concerts, advocated by his wife and activist Coretta Scott King, often featured music, poetry and lectures all dedicated to overcoming racial discrimination through nonviolence. The musical concert which I witnessed consisted of varied genres performed by soprano Alison Buchanan and American pianist Kevin Sharpe of the Ritz Chamber Players.
In addition to featuring spirituals, African folk songs, and songs about liberation from oppression, the concert program also consisted of music by Black composers. More specifically, it featured classical music by Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912), Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), and Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941). Their pieces chosen for the program applied modern, virtuosic arrangements of African American songs and spirituals: from the piano arrangement of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” by Taylor, to the “Theme and Variations” approach to “Wade in the Water” via Troubled Water by Bonds. The program also contained Margaret Bonds’ musical settings of poetry by Langston Hughes and a fragment from the Adolphus Hailstork song cycle Songs of Love and Justice (1992). That specific piece shares some similarities with his Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed, in that Hailstork uses written texts and speeches from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Of the four songs in Songs of Love and Justice, the performers chose the third song (“Decisions”) for its relevance in the 2020s and overall message of encouragement for a better future… if people are willing to make the right choices in life to establish the path to peace. Music by Anthony L. Sanchez Text by Ditrie Marie Bowie Image from Birmingham Museums Trust via Unsplash: unsplash.com/photos/Y_XS34BFX00?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink Lyrics reprinted with permission from the author: Verse 1: The angels gathered ‘round on Christmas night While shepherds marveled at the starlight The angels gathered ‘round on Christmas night To celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Chorus: Venite adoremus, Dominum! Venite adoremus, Dominum! Verse 2: With Joseph standing guard on that calm night And Mary sighing in the twilight With Joseph standing guard on that calm night To celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. (Chorus) Verse 3: The kings followed a star which burned so bright To bring them to the King of peace and light The kings followed a star which burned so bright To celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. (Chorus) Part of my approach to music and audio as a composer involves comprehending the importance of sounds from everyday life. I have made it a habit to record these sounds and experiment with them in different ways. The first approach stems from conducting soundwalks at home and, whenever possible, through my travels. I initially became acquainted with the soundwalk as a concept after virtually attending the biennial CCM Music Theory and Musicology Society Symposium (Cincinnati, OH) from March 4-5, 2022. The concept, coined by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021) seeks to encourage active listening and participation within natural and manmade environments. My first attempt at creating a soundwalk occurred in my backyard as an exercise for the symposium. While wandering around the area and writing copious notes concerning what I had heard, I noticed almost immediately that the sounds from my backyard at that time clearly illustrated conflicting moments and served as a social commentary on the dangers of noise pollution. Natural sounds heard from within the space competed with more aggressive external contemporary noises produced by humans outside of the backyard in the suburbs. I have since conducted more soundwalks in the past several months across different areas of the United States in places like South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Sometimes, though, it helps me to return to my backyard to try and record more sounds. The beauty of recording audio outside in a raw, unedited format lies in the indeterminate approach. One will not always hear the same sounds twice. I recorded over sixteen minutes of audio from my backyard the day after the symposium on March 6, 2022 and was able to detect multiple invasive noises like cars, airplanes, and other machinery clashing with the natural sounds of birds and wind. I am currently in the process of compiling another soundwalk recorded in the same place earlier today. In preparation for the Halloween season, I would like to share several suspenseful pieces that I have been working on for some time. The Forebodings for electronics (stereophonic playback) began with the desire to experiment with and distort different timbres of the piano: both on the keyboard and inside of the instrument. I settled on the title “Foreboding,” a term meaning the dreadful feeling that something bad will occur, after creating and listening to the first piece created from 2017 to 2019. The Forebodings mostly involved improvising on the piano and editing the tracks by using programs like Audacity and Lexis Audio Editor to add multiple effects: things like applying “Echo,” “Reverb,” and “Reverse” to give the music a more unsettling quality. The CD-ROMantic smartphone application also enabled me to add more depth to “Foreboding II” and “Foreboding III” by altering the speed through “Vaporwave Effect” feature.[1] The final track created this month, “Foreboding IV,” deviates from the piano soundscape to focus on synthesized tones via the Arpio application. I altered the arpeggiation to bend the pitches by shaking my smartphone from side to side while recording the music. I then distorted this music by applying “Reverse,” “Reverb,” and “Echo” at different increments of delay from roughly one-thousand milliseconds to five-thousand milliseconds. I later ran the track through CD-ROMantic to change the speed and add more “Reverb” The end result produces a cluster of simultaneous sounds meant to convey the fear of the unknown, or that something does not feel quite right. These tracks represent efforts in trying to maintain attention to sonic detail. There are those, however, who have expanded beyond the compositional techniques that I have described to incorporate something entirely new. I recently came across a device called the Apprehension Engine at the suggestion of a commenter on YouTube. Created as a collaboration between Canadian film score composer Mark Korven[2] and instrument maker Tony Duggan-Smith, the Apprehension Engine consists of a wooden box combined with parts from musical instruments (like the guitar and hurdy gurdy) with found objects (like rulers and other pieces of metal) and electrical wiring for special effects. It is a very versatile contraption used specifically for horror films, and there are many tutorial videos that both show and explain how to build an Apprehension Engine at home. One such video series consists of twenty-four episodes revealing the history and construction process behind this instrument.
[1] I have previously used the CD-ROMantic app to create a digital musical album that combines original tracks that I created this year with the 1980s and 90s postmodern musical aesthetic of Vaporwave popularized in the 2010s. [2] Mark Korven is best known for his music to horror movies like The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Black Phone (2022). The latest film is currently available on the Peacock streaming service from NBC/Universal. Located in the city of Lubbock, Texas, the Buddy Holly Center houses artifacts from one of the most important musical artists in rock and roll and pop culture history. It chronicles the life and career of Charles Harden “Buddy” Holley (1936-1959): from his humble beginnings in Lubbock and his rise to fame with his band The Crickets, to his sudden death in a plane crash on February 3, 1959. The Buddy Holly Center functions as more than just a museum showcasing his audio recordings, concert tours, and family memorabilia. It demonstrates how his creativity and approach to musicianship revolutionized the sound and visual presentation of rock and roll music and served as the model for future artists: both in the United States and overseas. Holly drew inspiration from Black, Latin American, and Country/Western influences, He was also one of the first to give visibility to rock musicians when performing onstage by giving equal attention to himself and his bandmates, as seen in their performance of “That’ll Be the Day” on The Ed Sullivan Show. Buddy Holly also experimented with different and unconventional musical soundscapes for the 1950s rock and roll era. His studio recording of “Everyday,” for instance, uses hand slapping accompanied with a celesta.
What proved most intriguing for me during my visit to the Buddy Holly Center stemmed from the global impact that Buddy Holly left on the United Kingdom. During his short professional career (about eighteen months or so), Holly became one of the first artists to tour England in 1957. That experience served to inspire bands like The Beatles to incorporate his Americana sound and vocality into their works. Many have written extensively about this influence. Paul McCartney has also frequently acknowledged the importance of what Buddy Holly accomplished as an artist, to the point where the Buddy Holly Center archived a 2014 tour where McCartney performed in Lubbock. Footage o that concert, as well as news and promotional coverage of his arrival in the city, is currently archived via social media. In 2021 I posted content related to celebrating the commemoration of Junteenth as an official federal holiday. I would like to continue this discussion one year later by offering readers of this blog more resources that they can access both to put this holiday into greater perspective and as part of Black Music Month. It is especially important to note the global impact of Juneteenth. The investigative research that I have conducted over the past few years on the Gullah Geechee and Afro-Latin diasporic musical and religious connections, for instance, demonstrates shared histories and struggles concerning emancipation and equal rights… including moments where obtaining these freedoms and rights meant physically fighting back against oppression.
I must also add that, like the opera Omar that I discussed in my last post, musical perceptions of African American musical identity are constantly changing to promote greater visibility in performative spaces often deemed socially excluded. Consider works like Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 rap album DAMN and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop: the Pulitzer Prize-winning and 2022 Tony-winning musical that openly explores Black Queer identity and trauma. Consider, too, the importance of the efforts behind the Los Angeles-based group the Re-Collective Orchestra. Since their establishment in 2018 by Matt Jones and Stephanie Matthews, the ensemble aims for greater inclusiveness and representation within both the classical and popular music realms, as many of the orchestra members had initially collaborated on the film score to the 2018 Marvel film Black Panther. One must also not forget the constant musicological research concerning Black and African diasporic composers to expand the knowledge and repertoire beyond Scott Joplin and William Grant Still. In many instances, that involves searching for works from farther back in time beyond the twentieth century. Musicologists have recently rediscovered pieces of the musical legacy from the Afro-Portuguese Renaissance composer Vicente Lusitano (born circa 1520). In addition to composing choral works, serving as a Catholic Priest, and later converting to Protestantism, Lusitano also wrote extensively about Western Music Theory and Acoustics. His sacred choral pieces, like the motet Inviolata, integra, et casta es from 1551, employ the polyphonic vocal writing of the era while still maintaining tonality: in this case, using a musical texture of eight voices. Several compositions by Vicente Lusitano, which have been restored and notated by Samuel Brannon, are currently available to the public via the IMSLP musical score website. Over the years since I started this blog, I have discussed the impact of the African American, BIPOC, and African diasporic musical connections across the world and across myriad genres. Kicking things off with Black Music Month, I must expand upon my discussion of the role that contemporary classical music plays in these cultures: specifically, how BIPOC composers in the twenty-first century apply classical music genres like opera to not only demonstrate inclusiveness by fighting against stereotyping and historical inaccuracies, as have been the case for works like Porgy and Bess and a recent opera about Emmet Till.[1] These composers also explore previously overlooked facets of history or social struggles and directly communicate these audiovisual experiences with audiences. Such has been the case with the opera entitled Omar, a new work from Rhiannon Giddens and Micheal Abels. As a Grammy-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist, Giddens uses her musical talents to explore the African diasporic relations to European and American folk and popular genres. Abels is best known as a film score composer for the critically acclaimed Jordan Peal Horror films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). Their collaboration on Omar (with Giddons as the librettist/musician and Abels as the composer) presents an important work about preserving enslavement narratives, in addition to addressing religious belief systems as forms of communication and hope through struggles. Listening to Giddons and Abels speak with Martha Teischner at the 2022 Spoleto Festival USA, Giddens and Abels set Omar Ibn Said’s life story to music by basing the libretto on his recently recovered autobiography, which sheds light on both his decades in captivity from Senegal to the United States in the nineteenth century and the impact of his devotion to Islam. The collaboration proved both a challenging and important experience in helping to elevate the operatic genre and help to erase the stigma of exclusivity. It does not sugarcoat the horrors and pain of African enslavement through tense moments in the music via depictions of cruelty and physical violence. Even though Omar is presented to viewers primarily through Western orchestral and folk instruments and sung in the English language through rhyme schemes, Giddons and Abels still maintain cultural respect by incorporating chanted passages from the Quran in Arabic to stress the significance of Omar as an enslaved African, as a Muslim, and above all as a human being. [1] The backlash, petitions, and boycotts behind the Mary D. Watkins opera Emmett Till, A New American Opera (2022) had more to do with the libretto by Clare Cross, which included a fictional character and suggested a "White Savior/Guilt" narrative in the work. |
AuthorDMA. Composer of acoustic and electronic music. Pianist. Experimental film. Archives
April 2024
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