Music at Wesleyan: From Glee Club to Gamelan

World Music Takes Root and Flourishes

WORLD MUSIC TAKES ROOT AND FLOURISHES Cage’s appearance was not the only new departure for the emerging campus music scene. In the early 1960s, the legendary Indian musician, Ravi Shankar, stopped at Wesleyan on one of his earliest tours to the United States. His visit marked an important milestone on the road to Wesleyan’s future World Music Program. Winslow and McAllester got the go-ahead to hire a full-time ethnomusicologist, and they found Robert E. Brown, who had just graduated from the very first academic world music program, which was offered at UCLA. The campus quickly noticed a new spirit, as reported by an alumni magazine reporter in 1964: A bearded, quiet young man named Robert E. Brown introduced the South Indian or Carnatic music at Wesleyan in 1961. In a manner so gentle that he might have been expected to cause few ripples on the campus, he has generated so much activity and interest in a completely strange subject that it is not unusual to hear the remark: “Wait till you see what Brown’s got going now.” Here is a snapshot of the music scene of the early 1960s. Much music making was done in informal spaces (like kitchens) in the years before the Center WORLD MUSIC TAKES ROOT AND FLOURISHES 39 Ravi Shankar at the Memorial Chapel, 1961(?). Bob Brown’s World Music Kitchen, early 1960s. for the Arts was built. Dick Winslow, driving spirit of the department, has his pipe; and Jon Higgins, an undergrad who much later returned to become Director of the Center for the Arts and Dean of Division I, sports the usual cigarette of the day. Bob Brown, who engineered the great growth of the department in the 1960s ran a series of “curry concerts” in his house, a Wesleyanowned barn, where he cooked food alongside resident faculty from India. Sometime during this era, a book appeared in India lamenting the decline of their classical music and praising a college in America where the professor and musicians not only teach music, but live and cook with students. The authors cite Wesleyan as a utopian model India should learn from. Winslow’s report to the Trustees of 1966 summarizes what went on in the early 1960s frankly and colorfully: When Brown arrived in autumn 1961, things began to happen fast. He and McAllester jointly offered a survey of world music. Brown established a study group in Indian music, made the case that we couldn’t teach the stuff without instruments, and we bought some. Interest grew. Soon we were faced with the situation that you could take students only so far without the presence of native teachers, and we began acquiring them …. We sent two brilliant boys to India on Fulbrights …. One of our students wrote a cross-cultural opera which 40 received a major performance at the Loeb Theatre at Harvard with Wesleyan students playing and singing, traveling virtuosi such as Ali Akbar Kahn [sic] began dropping in to see what was going on, etc., etc. Then came the move to establish a doctoral program, it made sense, and is now underway. To provide proper support for a doctoral program we needed to add a western musicologist, and I think we got a lulu in young Jon Barlow. 41 Jon Barlow meets Beethoven. This bust stayed in the department lobby for decades, 1970s. Jon Barlow: Early Music and the Liberal Arts, undated. We needed more breadth in world offerings, so we now have three Indian artists (singer, drummer, vina player, all absolutely of the first rank), a fine Japanese koto player, a Japanese musicologist who also did three years research in Persia, a professor in Sanskrit and—coming next year—an expert in linguistics. I think we are pioneering a fantastically fruitful area. I predict that within ten years our example will have been widely emulated and within twenty-five years it will have become a norm. It is in our view, not only eminently logical but almost frustratingly necessary. We are grateful, we are very grateful, that Wesleyan University, its administration, trustees, and indeed its faculty generally, had the flexibility, good humor, good sense, faith, to allow the beginning to be made. There have been some trying times, there has been some exotic behavior, there have been galloping expenses. All this ought to be going on in the presence of experimental music: experimental, avant-garde music...