The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships of the African Diaspora by Samuel A. Floyd, with Melanie L. Zeck and Guthrie P. Ramsey (review)

The late Samuel Floyd (1937–2016) explores with coauthors and coeditors Melanie Zeck and Guthrie Ramsey his final thoughts about music of Africa and the African diaspora. The book spans approximately four centuries of music making, employing innovative methodology and critical literary analysis to interrogate the interrelationships between black musical genres and music of the Western musical canon. Floyd employs the metaphor of a sailing ship to encapsulate three images: ancient Africans as seafarers and traders; slave ships during the Middle Passage, which brought millions of humans as cargo from Africa to geographical regions where the African diaspora developed; and the diaspora's return to Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its impact upon indigenous music on the continent. He further codifies the term "Call/Response" (capitalized in this instance) to denote the connected traits between music of Africa and the African diaspora: "The Call refers, historically, to African musics (and musical traits) on the continent, while the Response refers to the Diaspora's transformation of these musics and musical traits into new entities. . . . Call/Response, like the metaphor of the sailing ship, can be employed in a quasi-literal sense to reflect the sonic phenomena that make up black music" (xxiv).

The book is organized in two broad parts. Part 1, chapters 1–5, examines the music of Africa and the African diaspora. Floyd draws upon a plethora of scholarly research from various disciplines and critically analyzes these data through the prism of his sailing ship and Call/Response metaphors. Chapter 1 discusses the history and musical culture of the great kingdoms of West Africa, and the author links these musical traditions to East and Central Africa by identifying transethnic cultural exchanges (such as the xylophone of the Bantu-speaking Chopi in present-day Mozambique, the mbira and hourglass-shaped drums of Tanzania, the marimbas in the Congo and Angola), which he argues "took place in other ways and over wider distances than we generally have been aware in the past" (21). Chapter 2 traces the influences of African musicians outside of Africa, beginning in the seventh century A.D. with dispersal during the Indian Ocean slave trade, continuing with the Moorish invasion and occupation of Spain from 711 to 1492, and ending with the importation of Africans into European colonies of the New World during the transatlantic slave trade. Africans (slave, free, or Maroons) brought their music and cultural traditions with them, and they created "new musics" by transforming the European musical forms they encountered. The musical styles and genres used in this transformation process were "the dance musics of the various African traditions, which were found primarily in the ring shouts, in work and play [songs], in festival celebrations of the African slaves, and in the social dance music of Europe, that is, of the Spanish, French, and British" (44).

Chapter 3 examines what Floyd calls one of the last frontiers of musicological research: black composers and performers of concert art music. Despite a long legacy of blacks producing music in the Western concert tradition, they remain relatively unheralded in Western music history. Readers will find the scholarship that Floyd marshals in this chapter useful for identifying composers and performers, commencing with Vicente Lusitano (ca. 1522–ca. 1560), the first black composer to publish music; eighteenth-century composer-performers active in Europe (Ignatius Sancho, George Bridgetower, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges) and their contemporaries in Brazil (José Joaquim de Mesquita and José Mauricio Nunes Garcia); as well as such nineteenth-century musicians as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, José White, and Claudio Brindis de Salas. African American pioneers are also identified. Readers are reminded that "there is much to be learned about these...