Interculturalism and American Music

Interculturalism and American Music Mead Hunter AMERICAN MUSIC, IT COULD well be said, has been intercultural from its earliest days. Though the dominant (or at least more visible) heritage is European, the history of American music cannot be understood without charting the gradual, practically inadvertent infiltration of African forms. Two more disparate bloodlines would be hard to imagine. Since the ancient Greeks, Western theorists have sought to "rationalize'' music-define it, codify its functions. Pythagorean thought classified music with mathematics, a notion that mystified the nature of music by obfuscating its social basis. The medieval Church, by encouraging the development of notational devices, furthered music's reification from an auditory/sensory art into a quantifiable arrangement of readable (and thus predictable) tones. So it was not long before this process reached its immanent conclusion: the symphony orchestra, in which precision is everything, and individual expression occurs within narrow parameters, as overdetermined by the conductor. Such is the rational aspect of the European heritage. By contrast, African music (West and North African, that is, these being the regions whose people would so powerfully influence American culture) was never set apart from other aspects of life and submitted to the rationalization process. Even in the one apparent virtuoso specialization of ritual drumming, percussionists played for what was essentially a collective experience. According to critic Ortiz Walton, black music underwent a radical sublimation in the early American slave states, specifically because of edicts against drum playing: 186 Given the drum's retention, as was the case in all other 'New World' slave societies, it is likely that black music here would have sounded more like that of Trinidad, Haiti, or Jamaica, all these musics having retained more of an African percussive orientation. The enforcement of anti-drum laws in the United States made it necessary to transfer the function of the drum to the feet, hands, and body by way of the Spirituals during the slave era and by way of instrumental music after the Civil War in the new form of black music called Jazz. Encoding lyrics with ambiguous language was another historically determined feature of black music during slave times-broadcasting geneology, whereabouts and news through apparently guileless "field hollers"-and has remained so from then right up through rock. Blues, jazz, and rock have long been notorious for double-entendres and inside references; but it is rarely noted that this expressive aspect is also encoded into the music itself. The layering of major tonalities upon minor ones (made popular with the advent of Ragtime) is a musicological embodiment of psychological and physiological tensions that rock music would later exploit to the fullest (the Beatles being an excellent example). Ragtime, as originated by Scott Joplin in the late nineteenth century, marked a milestone in American musical history by incorporating native African elements (notably syncopation and "displaced" accents) into melodic structures that were themselves descended from spirituals and other vocal forms. Also importantly, it supplied an overtly rhythmic base that in effect transmogrified and restored the long-disfavored African drums. And as it was the first African-derived musical style that could be converted into a widely popular synthesis, ragtime attracted a great deal of commercial attention. The sad chronicle of its appropriation by white capital extended in even fuller force to ragtime's godchild, jazz. As an expression of alienation like all previous forms of American black music, blacks would see the music industry steal jazz from them, alter it, and sell it back. In his book, Noise: The PoliticalEconomy of Music, Jacques Attali records, "the first market for jazz was composed of the workers of the ghettos of the Northern cities." Attali goes on to say: The economic appropriation of jazz by whites resulted in the imposition of a very Westernized kind of jazz, molded by white music critics and presented as music 'accessible to the Western musical ear'-in other words, cut off from black jazz, allowing it to reach the white youth market . .. 187 Of course white Americans had been evolving grassroots music of their own during the previous two hundred years. Irish and Scottish folk forms such as the jig and the ballad strongly influenced popular taste...