Black Music Research Journal最新文献

{"title":"\"Cien porciento tico tico\": Reggae, Belonging, and the Afro-Caribbean Ticos of Costa Rica","authors":"Sabia McCoy-Torres","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"“Puerto Limón hands in the air!” The DJ shouted into the microphone in Spanish inflected with a West Indian accent. It was reggae night at Ebony, a San Jose nightclub, in January 2012, and the DJ was calling all limonenses to raise their hands and celebrate their hometown on the dance floor. This form of address had additional significance. In Costa Rica, the Caribbean coastal province Limón—whose capital is Puerto Limón—has historically been associated with the country’s Afro-Caribbean population: the descendants of immigrant laborers mostly of Jamaican origin. Although today Limón is racially mixed, the historic formation of the province, widely referred to as el caribe (the Caribbean), is such that in the popular imagination to claim limonense is also to claim black racial identity and Afro-Caribbean culture. That night, the DJ was invoking both black and Caribbean identities in the multiracial, though predominantly white, space. As excitement built, a black dancer (I will call him Anthony in keeping with the English names Afro-Caribbean people tend to have) entered an empty space in the middle of the crowd and began to display his skill in dancehall reggae-style dance. Inciting improvisational challenges is central to dancehall performance practices and gives competing dance collectives and individuals the opportunity to display their ingenuity and win the admiration of spectators. In keeping with this performance practice,","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"120 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127269494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Freedom Songs: Helping Black Activists, Black Residents, and White Volunteers Work Together in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Summer of 1964","authors":"Chris Goertzen","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0059","url":null,"abstract":"“Freedom songs” is the umbrella term for the diverse body of songs adapted or composed for the civil rights movement, particularly songs in most frequent use in that struggle during the early 1960s. Many of these songs remain familiar today, among them “This Little Light of Mine,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round” and, of course, “We Shall Overcome.”1 Two activists—one white, one black—attest to the powerful roles freedom songs played. Veteran singer and activist Pete Seeger (2004) made the broad claim that the civil rights movement could not have succeeded without the songs. Cordell Reagon, organizer and song leader in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was more specific in an earlier interview with scholar Kerran Sanger (1995, 40): “The music is what held the Movement together.” Regional studies are emerging as a sound route to a more nuanced understanding of the remarkable political, demographic, and event-related complexities of civil rights history (Moye 2011). John Dittmer’s Local People:","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126421616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ragga Soca Burning the Moral Compass: An Analysis of \"Hellfire\" Lyrics in the Music of Bunji Garlin","authors":"Meagan Sylvester","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0087","url":null,"abstract":"Ragga soca, a music indigenous to the twin island Caribbean nation Trinidad and Tobago, incorporates the freestyle aesthetics of hip-hop lyricists, the political critique and social commentary of calypso, the “chant down Babylon” demeanor and stagecraft of reggae and dancehall performers, and the spontaneous delivery of “biting” lyrics popular among Trinidadian extempo artists, another subgenre of calyspo. Typically, it can be loosely described as a fusion of soca and indigenous Jamaican musical forms, namely Jamaican dancehall and, to a lesser extent, reggae beats and soca rhythms. From my knowledge of the music industry in Trinidad, having been a member of several music networks during the years 2006–16, I posit that Bunji Garlin, who began his public career in 1999, is the singular most successful and widely known ragga soca artist performing the genre today. Bunji Garlin’s ragga soca “fire” songs produced between 2004 and 2011 make use of the “fire bun dem” theme. In these, we see Garlin’s direct use of biblical verses drawn from Revelation 21:8 (which describes how hellfire will be meted out to unrepentant wrongdoers). Further, his lyrics seek to adress the punishment to be delivered to those individuals involved in profane acts against society. In 2012, I began a project to review and analyze the lyrics of his songs in an attempt to chart to what extent his ragga soca lyrics have retained any of the political and social commentary “bite” and “sting” of its progenitor,","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115911843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revisiting the Katanga Guitar Style(s) and Some Other Early African Guitar Idioms","authors":"David Racanelli","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.36.1.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Before the rise of rap and hip-hop in Africa during the 1990s, the guitar reigned supreme for over a half a century as an integral instrument in syncretized forms of African jazz and popular music. It served as an indispensable resource in an array of musical styles, speaking a mutually intelligible language that transcended differences of race and ethnicity. During the 1920s and 1930s, numerous commercial recordings of West African acoustic guitar music were made, signifying the growing popularity and appeal of guitar playing in sub-Saharan Africa. However, while Kru sailors and other itinerant musicians developed and disseminated palm wine highlife idioms, including dagomba, ya amponsah, and mainline, their playing style has only tenuous ethnographic, ethno-linguistic, or musical connections to Copperbelt guitar music, which developed in Central Africa during the immediate post–World War II era. During the 1950s, distinct acoustic guitar playing styles emerged in urban mining camps and towns located along the Copperbelt, a region in Katanga in southeastern Zaïre (southern Belgian Congo) and northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Gerhard Kubik","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130596507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exploring Indigenous Interpretive Frameworks In African Music Scholarship: Conceptual Metaphors And Indigenous Ewe Knowledge In The Life And Work Of Hesinɔ Vinɔkɔ Akpalu","authors":"G. Dor","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.2.0149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.2.0149","url":null,"abstract":"Indigenous African knowledge and frameworks are increasingly gaining discursive currency in African studies and its cognate fields. While Indilinga: African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems has exclusively been devoted to \"African indigenous knowledge,\" for example, the 2006 book edited by David Millar, Stephen Bugu Kendie, Agnes Atia Apusigah, and Bertus Haverkort consists of thematically related articles on indigenous African knowledge that advocate development in different spheres of Africans' lives. Yet, closer to the geo-cultural focus of my article is Gbolonyo (2009), a study of forms of indigenous knowledge in Ewe musical practices. With a strong conviction about the importance of the preceding direction for African music scholarship, I write this article aiming to abstract paradigms of indigenous epistemology. Given that conferences are fertile sites for advocating new directions in scholarship, I presented this article at the Third International Symposium on the Music of Africa at Princeton University in April 2009. (2) I argue that ethnomusicology and its related disciplines will become richer when scholars rigorously and constantly explore the hermeneutical and epistemological tools that are embedded in the very African music cultures we study. They are an integral facet of indigenous knowledge and would contribute to our African-centered representation of Africa and Africans in revealing ways with added fresh insights. In this article, I examine Vinoka Akpalu's use of metaphors in (1) the nomenclature of an Ewe music genre he invented, (2) his song texts and poetry, and (3) his sayings and position on dissemination strategies of his songs. This discussion is based on my 1998-1999 and 2003 field conversations with selected Ghanaian Ewe traditional music composers, Nicholas Nayo's seminal study of Akpalu (Nayo 1964, 1973), (3) Sheshie's (1991) biographical insights on Akpalu's life and work, (4) and perspectives from Daniel Avorgbedor, Kofi Gbolonyo, Kofi Anyidoho, and James Essegbey (Anlo Ewe Africanist scholars). Also, Kobla Ladzekpo (a renowned Ghanaian master drummer from Anyako) shared perspectives that complementarily enrich this article. Further, as this article advocates the use of conceptual metaphors, an element of indigenous knowledge, as interpretive frameworks in African music scholarship, I give each of the preceding themes a critical discussion at vantage points, intended to illuminate and legitimize Akpalu's case evidence and my positioning. Interpretive Frameworks: Prevailing Practices and Landscape Although it has long been proven that the attribute of humans as knowledgeable beings is not the exclusive monopoly of certain cultural communities (Boas [1894] 1982), the place of prize and prominence given to different forms of local knowledge within the larger academic community is far from satisfactory. Admittedly, most of today's ethnomusicologists and other ethnographers have, to some extent, acknowledged the ri","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129482514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Las Tonadas Trinitarias: History of an Afro-Cuban Musical Tradition from Trinidad de Cuba","authors":"Johnny Frías","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.2.0229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.2.0229","url":null,"abstract":"The tonadas trinitarias are an Afro-Cuban musical manifestation native to Trinidad de Cuba, a town on Cuba's south-central coast. They represent a transcultural product of guajiro (1) and Bantu-derived musical practices, originating among members of Trinidad's Cabildo de San Antonio de Congos Reales in the late nineteenth century. Now confined to the local folkloric stage as tourist entertainment, in their original form they were performed by neighborhood groups of singers and drummers during nocturnal transits through the town's streets. In this article, I hope to accomplish three things. The first is to draw attention to and contribute to the gap in research on the music of Cuba's provincial areas (commonly referred to as las provincias)--particularly the central provinces--which are often sidelined in favor of research focusing on the cities of Havana, Matanzas, and Santiago. The second is to provide a comprehensive history of the origins and evolution of a local, small-scale creole (2) genre in Cuba, drawing on literary sources and the oral histories of elder musicians in Trinidad. Finally, I will assess both the positive and negative effects of state support of the tonadas trinitarias and the accompanying process of folkloricization. My conclusions are drawn primarily from fieldwork I conducted in Trinidad in 2009 for my master's thesis, during which I interviewed various local musicians involved with the tonadas trinitarias and took percussion lessons in order to learn the parts. I also attended the daily performances of the Conjunto Folklorico de Trinidad, which are put on for tourists at El Palenque bar and restaurant. I met my informants through Cuban musicologist Enrique Zayas Bringas, a native of Trinidad, who encouraged me to document the tradition. Many of the musicians were longtime friends of Zayas Bringas, including members of the Conjunto Folklorico de Trinidad as well as elder musicians who were no longer active participants. These elder musicians proved to be my most interesting informants, and their accounts are included here. Since the tonadas trinitarias are currently only performed in staged tourist performances and primarily by younger musicians, the elders' recollections served to paint a portrait of the tradition in its original community-oriented context. Nonetheless, the input provided by my younger informants in the Conjunto Folklorico de Trinidad allowed me to contrast their experiences with those of the elder performers and assess recent changes, such as the effects of folkloricization. The tonadas trinitarias (also referred to as simply tonadas (3)) underwent a process of folkloricization under Cuba's Revolutionary government. Hagedorn defines folkloricization as \"the process of making a folk tradition folkloric,\" and uses the performance of Afro-Cuban religious repertoire by the state-sponsored Conjunto Folklorico Nacional in Havana as an example (2001, 12). She explains how the creation of state-sponsored folklor","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126324149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Myriad Subtleties”: Subverting Racism through Irony in the Music of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie","authors":"D. Malcolm","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.2.0185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.2.0185","url":null,"abstract":"In his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie recognizes the impact racism had on his youthful behavior and acknowledges his misreading of Louis Armstrong's minstrelsy-influenced performance style: \"Hell, I had my own way of Tomming. Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of Tomming, of accommodating itself to a basically unjust situation. ... Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops's [Armstrong's] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile\" (2009, 296). Since jazz, from its origins in the early 1900s in New Orleans, was increasingly performed by black musicians for white audiences, African-American jazz musicians have often been a focal point for racial conflict in the United States, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. As Gillespie suggests, black musicians frequently dealt with racial prejudice by relying on strategies derived from African-American culture, in particular signifying, which includes a variety of rhetorical strategies including indirection, irony, and verbal disjunction. \"Tomming,\" a reference to the eponymous character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ([1852] 1982), is generally used pejoratively to criticize blacks who apparently ingratiate themselves with white society by unctuous and exaggerated servility; however, this persona might equally be regarded as a form of signifyin(g), or more specifically, indirection or masking that facilitates ironic subversion. Although the guise it took in jazz performance changed from apparent submission to feigned aggression, signifying often characterized black dealings with the dominant white culture both in slavery and during the 1940s when the social changes that occurred in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century gradually began to mitigate the racist oppression African Americans had suffered for several centuries. Critical Approach The primary focus of this discussion is on the gradual decline in irony used in jazz during the first half of the twentieth century as a \"political\" (Gates 1988, 45) and satiric tool to attack the ideology of white supremacy. During this period, the parodic revisioning of the various elements that constitute jazz performance (e.g., musical narrativity, costume, gesture, and language), which has been a seminal characteristic of jazz since its inception, gradually achieved greater expression and became a significant factor in the emergence of bebop. A discussion of this nature is problematized by the complexity of irony and the related genres of satire and parody, the still relatively opaque nature of musical meaning, and the difficulty of tracking microlevel social change. Irony, as Linda Hutcheon argues, is \"a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual)\" (1994, 10). It also involves, according to","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127438421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Indivisible: The Nation and Its Anthem in Black Musical Performance","authors":"S. Redmond","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0097","url":null,"abstract":"Oh! how shall I speak of my proud country's shame Of the strains on her glory, how give them their name? How say that her banner in mockery waves-Her star-spangled banner--o'er millions of slaves? --Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, \"Eliza Harris\" (1853) I wish I knew how it would feel to be free I wish I could break all the chains holdin' me I wish I could say all the things that I should say Say 'em loud say 'em clear for the whole wide world to hear. --Nina Simone, \"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free\" (1967) On July 1, 2008, Denver, Colorado, hosted its annual State of the City address. This typically pro forma occasion was, in this year, a high profile event for the city and the nation at large; in addition to celebrating the nation's independence, that year's address served as a prelude to the city hosting the Democratic National Convention at which the Democratic Party would announce its presidential nominee. Wavering, as it was in this moment, between two viable candidates--an African American male and a white American female--the party's decision was eagerly anticipated. Denver's heightened function in ushering in the nation's future made the performances staged that day all the more significant, and it was in recognition of that profile that the mayor's office chose jazz musician and performance artist Rene Marie to sing the national anthem. After an introduction by City Council President Michael Hancock in which he mistakenly identified her as \"Rene Martin,\" Marie approached the microphone. As she sang the B flat note to announce \"The Star Spangled Banner,\" her text deviated, as she sung not \"Oh, say can you see\" but, instead, \"Lift ev'ry voice and sing.\" In this deconstructed and hybrid performance, which combined the melody of \"The Star Spangled Banner\" with the lyrics of the Negro National Anthem \"Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,\" Marie set a new tone for discussions of race and patriotism at the dawning of a \"postracial\" America. Marie's performance, which left city representatives \"as surprised as anyone,\" is a dynamic example of how our racial present continues to be informed by considerations of past political struggle (Osher 2008). Her use of the lyrics of \"Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing\" signals a reconfigured citizenship that grapples with the lived experience of race through a national anthem emblematic of liberty built by settler colonialism and chattel slavery. One generation after the end of slavery in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois famously articulated the plight of the nation's Negroes as \"double consciousness,\" an identity tug-of-war between race and nation that is never fully reconciled in spite of its constant negotiation. Marie's performance signals Du Bois, yet it moves through and beyond it by way of a sonic praxis in which she constructs an alternative national genealogy of political engagement and allegiance. As Hazel Carby rightly argues, Du Bois's judgments in The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1996) \"reveal highly ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"22 24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116554386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mingus in the Workshop: Leading the Improvisation From New Orleans to Pentecostal Trance","authors":"Jennifer A. Griffith","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0071","url":null,"abstract":"But within all the varied components of black music and throughout all the changes it underwent, it remained a group-oriented means of communication and expression. --Lawrence Levine (1977, 239) In the mid-1950s Charles Mingus embraced two historical African-derived approaches that emphasized group expression: (1) the collective improvisation of early New Orleans jazz, whose roots lay in (2) the ecstatic worship and singing rituals of the black Pentecostal church. Mingus's recordings from the mid-1950s to early 1960s musically progressed from short sections of frontline collective interplay and group improvisation reminiscent of early jazz to longer forms of ecstatic ritual. This latter practice--in the form of solos, band, and audience participation--was a direct invocation of the \"Holy Ghost-filled\" spiritual communion (Booker 1988, 32), or Holy Spirit possession that Mingus had witnessed in Pentecostal church services as a youth. Many writers have observed Mingus's diverse influences. Eric Porter (2002) writes that Mingus challenged all musical boundaries, invoking his aesthetic of late Romanticism, his anticipations of free jazz, and points between in tributes to Jelly Roll Morton. Brian Priestley (1982) remarked on influences from Mingus's work as a sideman for Louis Armstrong and big-band leaders Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington. Both Porter and Priestly also note influences of the black church, bebop harmonies, and rhythms modeling Charles Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk as well as Lennie Tristano's modernist jazz sounds. Finally, Todd Jenkins mentions Mingus's jazz-rock and world-music fusions (2006, 4). Relatively little has been written regarding the contexts of these influences, particularly of early New Orleans jazz and the black Pentecostal church, nor have they been explored in close readings of Mingus's works and recordings. In this article, I argue that Mingus's use of New Orleans-style collective improvisation and composition (as in his response to Jelly Roll Morton) and the influence of church music follows a stylistic trajectory. I also explore his use of these influences contextually and through a musical analysis of the recordings. The elements of the two African-derived approaches are most evident in five recordings from the 1950s. The New Orleans style can be heard in the frontline's collectively improvised sections, in recordings as early as \"Jump Monk\" (1955), in \"Pithecanthropus Erectus\" (1956), \"Dizzy Moods\" (1957), and implicated in \"Moanin\" (1959), where melodic instrumental interplay--along with group and solo improvisation--create texture and timbre, but also determine a tight structure. Later, such elements evolved into the pivotal idea of \"growth\" or expansion, what Mingus referred to as \"extended form.\" Here he gives soloists room to enact a spiritual transcendence within this more flexible form; Mingus's reenactments of the communal dynamics of the black church play out most obviously in \"Better Gi","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133927002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Uplift, Gender, and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha","authors":"Rachel L. Lumsden","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.35.1.0041","url":null,"abstract":"In May 1911 the well-known ragtime composer Scott Joplin filed a copyright application for his only surviving opera, Treemonisha. Unable to find a publisher (the work was rejected by at least three companies, several of which had previously championed his ragtime works), Joplin chose to publish the score to the opera himself and began to offer it for sale shortly before receiving copyright. (1) Joplin wrote both the music and libretto to Treemonisha, a three-act opera that contains an overture, orchestral interludes, and dance numbers. Joplin also composed a lengthy written preface to the opera that not only outlines in detail the backgrounds of the main characters and the setting of the work, but also describes his use of a recurring leitmotiv to represent \"the happiness of the people when they feel free from the conjurors and their spells of superstition\" (Joplin [1911] 1971,3). The opera centers on the efforts of a young, educated, African-American woman (Treemonisha) to enlighten her rural community, highlighting Treemonisha's conflicts with the evil conjuror Zodzetrick; by its conclusion, Treemonisha has been captured by Zodzetrick, rescued by her friend Remus, and selected leader of her community. Although opera certainly has its share of heroines, Joplin's fascinating decision to feature an educated African-American woman--one who does not fall hopelessly in love, die, or go insane by the end of the opera, but instead is chosen to lead her community--deserves serious scholarly consideration. Scholars have increasingly come to recognize the significance of Treemonisha within the American operatic canon, and research such as that of Berlin (1991/1994), de Lerma (1990), and Sears (2012) has substantially broadened our understanding of the opera and its reception. (2) Still, little attention has been paid to the actual musical content of this profoundly important work (with the exception of a single chapter in Latham 2008, which contains broad, long-range analyses using a Schenkerian perspective). Even more surprisingly, no scholarship has focused on the complicated relationship between Joplin's depiction of Treemonisha and prevailing discourses about black womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. These issues are particularly pertinent for developing a nuanced understanding of the complex ways in which both race and gender are constructed in Treemonisha; recent work such as Andre, Bryan, and Saylor (2012) has emphasized the necessity for scholars to consider \"blackness\" not as a rigid, uniform category, but instead as a multivectored field informed by other intersectional considerations, such as gender, class, nation, and sexuality. (3) This article examines how the character of Treemonisha intersects with contemporaneous ideologies of African-American womanhood, arguing that Joplin's depiction of Treemonisha illustrates some of the core fractures, debates, and contradictions surrounding racial uplift and gender during this era. After ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"259 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133528614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}