Beethoven as a Black Composer

Posted on September 25, 2018September 27, 2018 by oconnellmusic101

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(Nadine Gordimer laying a wreath in the black township of Alexandra, South Africa, where protesters were killed by police in 1986.)

The South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) has a short story called “Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black,” about a multiracial university professor in Johannesburg thinking back over his life and his identity:

Beethoven was one-sixteenth black

the presenter of a classical music programme on the radio announces along with the names of musicians who will be heard playing the String Quartets no. 13, op. 130, and no. 16, op. 135.

Does the presenter make the claim as restitution for Beethoven? Presenter’s voice and cadence give him away as irremediably white. Is one-sixteenth an unspoken wish for himself.

Once there were blacks wanting to be white.

Now there are whites wanting to be black.

In 1934, the Jamaican-born journalist Joel Augustus Rogers (1880-1966) published a book called 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof (a title borrowed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for a recent book of his own). As Gates notes about the author of his own book’s namesake:

Sometimes, [Rogers] was astonishingly accurate; at other times, he seems to have been tripping a bit, shall we say, as in his “Amazing Fact #8,” which I quote in full: “Beethoven, the world’s greatest musician, was without a doubt a dark mulatto. He was called ‘The Black Spaniard.’ His teacher, the immortal Joseph Haydn, who wrote the music for the former Austrian National Anthem, was colored, too.”

Both claims are false, I am afraid, though I love the work of both composers! But no one can get everything right all the time, correct?

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Speculations that Beethoven was of “Moorish” ancestry date back to the composer’s own lifetime. Nineteenth-century biographers have described his dark complexion, “flat, thick nose,” and “thick, bristly [and] coal-black” hair. J.A. Rogers and others later suggested that Beethoven’s mother had transmitted African ancestry to her son by way of her Flemish forebears; the Low Countries had been under Spanish rule in the sixteenth century, and Spain had been ruled by Muslims (or Moors) originally from North Africa off and on from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries.

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(Spain in the 11th century.)

The notion that Beethoven was black became popular in the 1960s and 1970s during the Black Power movement. Stokely Carmichael mentioned it in his speeches to students, as did Malcolm X in his famous Playboy interview with Alex Haley in 1963.

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The claim of Beethoven’s black ancestry has been refuted by scholars, but the idea has cropped up again in recent years. A project called Beethoven Was African aims to show that the polyrhythms Beethoven uses in his piano sonatas bear a resemblance to the polyrhythms of west African drumming.

Reviewing the Beethoven Was African project, the music critic Tom Service writes:

My initial response to the question, “Are Beethoven’s African origins revealed by his music?” that has been asked at the website Africa Is a Country, is a definitive “no”. It is based on questionable premises that lack real historical evidence, at least to the story of Beethoven and his music over the past couple hundred of years.

This is far from a new idea. Here, Nicholas T Rinehart outlines the century-long history of the “Black Beethoven” trope and analyses the cultural and racial politics that have made this such a potent idea. He suggests our attraction to the notion that Beethoven was black is a symptom of classical music’s tortured position on race and music: “This desperation, this need to paint Beethoven black against all historical likelihood is, I think, a profound signal that the time has finally come to make a single … and robust effort [to reshape] the classical canon.”

Read Rinehart’s article here.

The Beethoven-was-black trope also raises questions about what race is; about what identity is; and about how we categorize both ourselves and others by highly subjective markers.

Does the fact that Beethoven’s music expresses an ethos of struggle, and triumph over it, point to markers of the composer’s “blackness”?

Does the fact that the Nazis lionized Beethoven and his music militate against his perceived blackness?

What do you think?

The piece often used as a marker of Beethoven’s blackness is his last piano sonata, op. 111 in C minor. The second movement is in theme-and-variations form, and the variations become more abstract as the piece continues. Two of the variations are highly syncopated, which has led some to retrospectively credit Beethoven, in this sonata, with “inventing” ragtime or even jazz.

Babatunde Olatunji demonstrates west African polyrhythms.

Daniel Barenboim demonstrates Beethovenian polyrhythms.

Juba

Posted on September 18, 2018November 14, 2018 by oconnellmusic101

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(A sketch of Solomon Northup.)

You may recall that Solomon Northup, whose memoir Twelve Years A Slave was the basis for the 2013 movie of the same name, was a musician. He wrote of his life as a free black violinist in New York State:

In the winter season I had numerous calls to play on the violin. Wherever the young people assembled to dance, I was invariably there. Throughout the surrounding villages my fiddle was notorious.

In his memoir, Northup also describes playing violin for a Christmas party in Louisiana, an occasion at which the slaves were permitted to take off their masters and perform their own versions of European high-society dances. Afterwards, the slaves

set up a music peculiar to themselves. This is called “patting” . . . the patting is performed by striking the hands on the knees and then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, and the left side with the other — all the while keeping time with the feet and singing.

This patting is also known as patting juba, or just juba. It derives from sub-Saharan African music; the word “juba” means “to pat or keep rhythm” in the Bantu language. The patting of one’s own body as an instrument was an adaptation made by the slaves when drums were banned in the American colonies. And why were drums banned? You all remember this, from the 1964 film Zulu: chanting as preparation for war.

In 1739, twenty Congolese and Angolan slaves gathered on the banks of the Stono River near Charleston. They commandeered a guns-and-ammo shop, killed the owners, armed themselves, and headed south, chanting and playing drums — “a call to arms, a preparation for battle.” As they marched, more slaves joined in, until the rebels numbered over a hundred. By the end of the day, dozens of whites were dead, and the leaders of the Stono Rebellion would soon be executed.

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After the rebellion was put down, the colonies enacted punitive measures against blacks, including the death penalty for any slave who learned to read. Slaves were no longer allowed to congregate, earn money, or grow their own food — and drums were banned. Juba was in some ways a response to the drum ban: the body became a rhythmic instrument.

Juba is usually performed just with the voice and the body. The drummer Sule Greg Wilson says:

Juba was sung and percussed to throw off and discharge the negativity of the institution of chattel slavery. Thus, we find in Juba a vital, sacred act—not to be confused with the good-time community activity of Hambone. Though both use body percussion, they are–functionally–very different.

As Sweet Honey in the Rock say, “You don’t just sing juba, you have to do juba. . . the word is African, but doing juba was made up by our people when we had to express how hard and unfair it was to be slaves . . . maybe some evil person can destroy your drums, but can anyone stop a true drummer from drumming? . . use your body . . . become a drum.”

More juba:

A children’s call-and-response version which does not shy away from the injustice of slavery.

When juba is done as a social or community activity, it’s often called hambone. Here, Danny “Slapjazz” Barber demonstrates and discusses its origins in the Stono Rebellion:

Ella Jenkins shows Mister Rogers how to do it:

You can see how juba/hambone mutates over time into another form:

Which becomes this:

And this:

Authenticity, part III: White Tears

Posted on September 15, 2018January 6, 2019 by oconnellmusic101

White Tears, from which you have read an excerpt, is the story of Seth, a young, white, college-educated sound engineer, who accidentally records a line from an old blues song while picking up ambient sounds in Washington Square Park. He and his business partner, the scion of a wealthy family whose riches come from running private prisons and black ops sites, post the recording online as a prank, and call it a historical record by Charlie Shaw, a blues musician from the 1920s whose name they have made up. Soon, however, a record collector contacts them to tell them that Charlie Shaw was, and perhaps still is, a real person. So the novel is a kind of a ghost story, as well as a commentary on black music and the ways it has historically intersected with the American class system.

Hari Kunzru, an Englishman of Pakistani descent, says of his novel, “This is a book about absence,” raising the questions: Why were some black artists from the past recorded, and not others? Why are some black musicians remembered, and others forgotten?

In the video linked above, Kunzru speaks of moving to the United States around the time of Barack Obama’s first election:

The moment of false hope . . . for a post-racial America, the idea that we could just forget all this stuff and consign it to history, and then the realization that actually this history still poisons public life in the U.S. to an unbelievable degree . . . I was quite shocked by that . . . I wanted to bring my own experience, because I am an outsider, but I have a particular history with those questions here [in England]. My history is all about empire and dealing with that . . . There was a moment when . . . this romanticized idea of American history was very big in the hipster culture . . . [White Tears is also] a story about wealth and inheritance, and inherited money, and what . . . rich young people, whose parents have whatever to make [their] money, come to New York in order to convert [financial] capital into cultural capital.

What does Kunzru mean by “cultural capital”?

Read this fascinating interview with Kunzru on the research he did on the histories of blues recording and record collecting.

And read this essay by Rishi Nath in Africa Is A Country, which suggests that the real ghost whose presence hovers over White Tears is that of Biggie Smalls.

The line of the song that Seth inadvertently picks up is “Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own.” This is probably a reference to this song, “Furry’s Blues,” by Walter “Furry” Lewis:

And possibly also to this country blues song:

Incidentally, in 1976, Joni Mitchell wrote a song about cultural appropriation in which Furry Lewis features, “Furry Sings the Blues”:

Old Furry sings the blues

Propped up in his bed

With his dentures and his leg removed . . .

Old Furry sings the blues

You bring him smoke and drink and he’ll play for you

lt’s mostly muttering now and sideshow spiel

But there was one song he played

I could really feel . . .

Old Furry sings the blues

He points a bony finger at you and says

“I don’t like you”

Everybody laughs as if it’s the old man’s standard joke

But it’s true

We’re only welcome for our drink and smoke . . .

W. C. Handy, I’m rich and I’m fey

And I’m not familiar with what you played

But I get such strong impressions of your hey day

Looking up and down old Beale Street . . .

Furry sings the blues

Why should I expect that old guy to give it to me true

Fallen to hard luck

And time and other thieves

While our limo is shining on his shanty street

Old Furry sings the blues

Near the end of Kunzru’s novel, an entire chapter consists of the repeated words “ha ha ha,” a reference to “The Negro Laughing Song,” a popular song from the days of minstrelsy. As Kunzru describes it,

The genre of the laughing song comes from the 19th-century. These songs start with a black performer singing about the racist things white people say when they see them. Then the song dissolves into rhythmic laughing. It’s the laughter of somebody who is trying to diffuse a potentially violent situation. There is such a horror to the laughter. The laughter is a window into what it felt like to be a black man on the street at sun down in the south during segregation.

I specified to the publisher that I wanted it to run as spread so that the reader turns the page and has “ha ha ha” on the left and right side. To me that is the heart of darkness, or the heart of whiteness, in the book. It’s the kind of horror that can’t be described and just exists in this contentious laughter.

A remaster of the original 1891 recording of “The Negro Laughing Song” by George W. Johnson:

Another suggested playlist for the book is here.

While I loved this book, my brother, the music critic George Grella (above), who wrote this book about Miles Davis, said on GoodReads:

This is a terrible book.

. . . Nothing against the ambition, which boils down to the question of authenticity, what it is and the dangers of pursuing it to the utmost level of purity. The vehicle is old-time American music, from poor Southern musicians, mostly black and mostly blues players, recorded in the 1920s on labels like Paramount. The characters who carry this are Seth (the protagonist) and Carter, buddies from college who use Carter’s family money to start a recording studio. They in turn are paralleled by the story of an older record collector and the obsession of one of his colleagues. Both pairs are connected through what is essentially an imaginary song from a pseudonymous musician, Charlie Shaw.

Kunzru is woefully unprepared to execute this task. The self-conscious quality of his research is painfully embarrassing throughout: the author picked up details of audio engineering, musicians’ names, song titles, and serial numbers, without ever picking up any understanding of the subject. He seems to have never heard the music in question, or it seems to have never penetrated his understanding—he comes off as the collectors themselves, obsessed with the completeness and quality of the physical object and not much interested in the art it contains. Seth and Carter somehow find themselves caring only about old acoustic recordings without ever seeming to find anything in the music that matters to them as human beings (that Kunzru name checks some well-known music writers who are features of the upper middle-class white bourgeoisie and can’t hear African-American music past Beyoncé is a tell).

This all turns into an overwrought potboiler of sex and murder, with a heaping condescension of the young white man finding, through violence and tragedy, the authentic feeling of being a young black man deep in the Jim Crow South. This is a terrible kind of slumming, Kunzru arguing that Seth has achieved this experience through writing that is nothing more than gazing at (and never putting the needle down on) the shellac grooves on a 78 side. The prose itself has the earnest, focussed, affectlessness that is everywhere now, spawned from countless MFA programs, and that is professionally smooth, bland, and that allows the author to disavow any specific meaning. That is dishonest, and the foundation of this deeply dishonest book.

We are going to be exploring the book in depth over the course of the semester, focusing, among other issues, on “original” culture vs. remix culture; authenticity and appropriation; and whether sound is created and perceived differently according to cultural conditioning.

Traditional African Music Forms

Posted on September 7, 2018 by oconnellmusic101

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Saint Maurice, patron saint of soldiers.

Here are some examples of what African music from the earliest days of cross-Atlantic cultural encounters might have sounded like.

When we talk about traditional African folk music, we have to qualify what we mean by “traditional.” Seventeenth-century west African dances, like the Pandulungu, Guandu, or Cubango from Angola, have been lost. Most of the folk music that is most directly tied to African traditions from the days before the Atlantic slave trade can be found in its most undiluted forms in South and Central America and the West Indies, such as this invocation to the ancestors of the Maroon people of Jamaica.

These African traditions were inexorably changed by the cross-cultural encounters brought about by the slave trade.

The bomba, a traditional musical style of Puerto Rico, owes much to west African drumming, and was first documented in the early sixteenth century. It’s a call-and-response challenge between the dancers and the drummers, with the dancer leading and the drummers responding.

Another Puerto Rican dance form, originally from Angola:

Afro-Colombian traditional music incorporates the marimba:

More traditional Afro-Colombian music:

Three African-American/Afro-Caribbean fiddle tunes transcribed in the eighteenth century, played on a replica of a homemade slave fiddle.

Even in Congo Square, the music played by enslaved African-Americans had already been changed by its translation from the coast of Africa to the West Indies and to the American mainland.