Abstracts

Presentations are listed alphabetically by author's last name. Click on any title for information about the session in which it will be presented.

"Brother John is Gone": The Lost Musical Artifacts of New Orleans
Connie Atkinson
On the stage of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, a Mardi Gras Indian gang chants "We Come from a Place Where They Dance in the Rain"—a song obviously written from outside the city, composed by artists displaced by the flood that drowned their neighborhood, taking with it their costumes, their instruments, their audiences, and much of their material history. But before Hurricane Katrina, before the international outrage, before the many post-K grants and funding to archive the disaster, there was little interest in archiving physical material of the musical culture of New Orleans. In a city acknowledged by many as an important site in the development of American music, why was irreplaceable material found (and lost) in attics, garages, and suitcases? A combination of distrust of institutions and the prioritization by funding bodies of some musical genres over others put priceless material in harm's way. Funding today centers around archiving the ruins; there is little support for preserving what remains in private collections. This paper will look at the musical treasures of a performance town and how an emphasis on charts, personalities, and celebrity that marginalized performance practices created a long history of neglect, suggesting that new technology and a new attitude by granting organizations might prevent such large scale loss.

Tracing Africa: Social Memory and Performance in Haiti
Gage Averill
Trase vèvè is a common ritual technology in Haitian Vodou, consisting of the application of powders, typically corn meal, to the ground in patterns that represent Afro-Haitian deities or sacred concepts. These tracings—enacted as points of intersection with the world of ancestors and spirits and functioning as condensation symbols of Haitian theology—are obliterated during ceremonies through dance and movement. Similarly, Haitian ritual music traces perceptible links to African ancestry and to Haiti's history as a nation of largely African descendents, preserving markers of national origin, ethnicity, the means by which Africans came to Haiti. This paper examines music as a technology of social memory deployed to reinforce a notion of African diasporic identity. I draw especially on the recordings of Haitian music made by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax and Revolie Polinice in Haiti, circa 1936–1937 and on video recordings made by the author.

The Black Music Diaspora: Developing a Framework for Theory and Method
Daniel Avorgbedor
This paper first provides a critical overview of selective sites of discourse from past and current research on the musical traditions of the black diaspora, with the focus on implications for theory and method. The overview also facilitates the enumerating of the basic challenges and prospects in developing a coherent body of analytical systems and methodological practices, across the disciplines and as commensurate with the black music diaspora. The paper's basic assumptions and premises hold that definitions of geocultural boundaries of diasporic formations, their variegations in time and space, and ways in which identity formations are interactively encoded in and qualified by musical practices depends largely on the prowess and prospects of our research paradigms, tools, methods, and modes and languages of narration or (re)presentation. To achieve this end, selections will be drawn from the following list of propositions, questions and premises:
a. New and emerging concepts in global diaspora studies such as de-diasporization, re-deterritorialization, incipient and secondary diasporas, and diasporas in the plural mode;
b. Aspects of "Whiteness" studies are necessary in sustaining, for example, emerging narratives about a "southern diaspora" in the United States;
c. Contemporary critiques of double consciousness (e.g., triple, multiple consciousness);
d. Postcolonial critical perspectives of syncretism, hybridity, "changing same," and autonomous invention;
e. Ways in which interdisciplinarity and perspectives of "interarts inquiry" are supported in local aesthetic, ontologies, and cultural practices of "music" and holistic outlook that transcend the sonic, visual, and metaphysical environments;
f. Levels and legacies of cultural or individual  trauma and their significance in "culturally sensitive" research instrumentation
It will be argued that for a wholesome research project, we must recuperate positivism and integrate useful features in our methods and analyses.

Saying It by Playing It, Playing It by Saying It: Paralinguistic Parallels in African Diasporic Musics
Kenneth Bilby
The present-day Maroon peoples of the Guianas (e.g., Saramaka, Ndyuka, and Aluku) and Jamaica (Windward Maroons) possess what may be the only existing African-derived drum and horn "languages" (based on actual spoken forms) in the Americas. This paper will present a few examples of these still-living Maroon "surrogate languages" and will suggest some of the larger questions of cultural transmission and creolization they raise. These actual drum and horn languages will serve as the point of departure for a discussion of paralinguistic musical concepts and practices in other parts of the African diaspora that might be considered cognate. How might we extrapolate from these relatively transparent Maroon examples of African-derived musically encoded language to less clear-cut examples of "musical speech" or "speech-like music" from other parts of the Americas? What insights might be gained by looking more closely at such apparent parallels? The paper will begin to explore some of the grounds for linking the widely varying paralinguistic forms of musical expression dispersed across the African diaspora, with a view to helping us understand them as products of a broadly shared historical and cultural heritage.

The Past as Prologue: The Future as Challenge
Florence Borders
To some members of the record-keeping profession, August 29, 2005, will live on as a day of challenge, one that was being addressed before the city of New Orleans was completely drained. Even before many of the residents of New Orleans had been able to return, some members of these professions had successfully convinced those in charge that it was absolutely essential that they be granted permission to enter the city and assess damage sustained by their valuable collections; often, the greater the time allowed to lapse between assessing damage and applying of restorative measures, the great the likelihood of losses to valuable, one-of-a-kind items. The most immediate result of this specific disaster was the notable revision of disaster plans in many repositories.
This presentation will focus on the losses sustained but will also highlight what has survived. Chief among collections held by repositories will be that of Harold R. Battiste, jazz musician and retired professor of jazz studies in a New Orleans university. His papers are housed at Amistad Research Center on the campus of Tulane University and include a variety of record types. Among these are correspondence, phonograph records, music scores, photographs, scrapbooks, compact discs, and financial records, some related to the All for One Music Foundation. Additional collections held by Amistad to be included will be those of Tom Dent and Sybil Kein. Community resources, including institutions and individuals will be included in the survey.

"O Herói": The Ambivalent Heroism of the Circulation of Black Musics in the Americas
Barbara Browning
This paper will open with an analysis of Caetano Veloso’s song "O Herói" from the recent album, Cê. The song musically and lyrically cites the work of contemporary black Brazilian recording artists, such as MV Bill, who take both aesthetic and political cues from the United States' politically inflected hip hop. At least superficially, these artists might seem to be taking on wholesale the strategies of their U.S. counterparts, but Veloso's lyric ambiguously suggests a more complex relationship and particularities regarding the case of at least some Brazilian rap.
The ambiguity of Brazil’s appropriation of black American cultural expressions and the political resonances of hip hop in particular have been further highlighted by the recent controversy surrounding the film Tropa de Elite, in which a hip hop aesthetic reads simultaneously as heroic and antiheroic to different audiences. Hip hop itself has long been acknowledged as a musical idiom with Caribbean inflections. As beats, vocal styles and political postures (both superficial and profound) circulate, how do their meanings change?

Diversity as Inspiration: Minority Composers in the Repertory of Music Education
Mark Clague
Classical music culture in the United States suffers from a vicious cycle of exclusion that limits the performance of non-canonical works, a burden particularly acute for minority composers whose works may be viewed with aesthetic suspicion. Programming today favors what has been done before and what sells, while the new and different too often receive little support beyond the celebration of a world premiere. Educational institutions share responsibility for perpetuating this closed system by rehearsing the canon under the auspices of preparing student musicians for "real world" auditions in which they will be judged by their ability to perform traditional repertory. Yet American music educators also have the opportunity to challenge the status quo by introducing student performers to new music by unexpected composers, breaking the cycle of repetition and discrediting the aesthetics of the canon.
This paper surveys challenges facing works by minority composers in assaulting the classical music canon and explores tactics for introducing these works into the curriculum of the American school of music. These opportunities include Black History Month / MLK concerts, chamber music and solo repertory, and adding diversity requirements to graduation recitals and exams at the masters and DMA levels. It argues that students would gain a range of practical "real world" benefits from these experiences by confronting the too-often silent metadiscourse that accompanies minority repertory and finding innovative ways to engage their audience, especially given that issues of audience and community typically ignored by educational institutions are vital concerns of professional ensembles and presenters today.

The Limitations of Diaspora: The Case of African-American Music in the Southern United States
David Evans
The concept of diaspora has only limited usefulness in explaining the music of African-American people in the southern United States. As an all-encompassing term for the dispersal of African people and the resulting New World populations of African descent and their cultures (including music), diaspora is as useful as other terms such as pan-African, African-American (in its broadest sense), or black. Diaspora might even be preferable to these other terms in cases where one wants to emphasize the process of dispersal rather than simply the result. While the use of diaspora seems to promote comparative studies with other ethnic diasporas and communication with scholars working on these issues, the nature of slavery, which caused most of the African diaspora, and its historical and cultural effects makes such comparisons problematical. Furthermore, as soon as one begins to grapple with the specifics of music in any region, such as the southern United States, one needs additional concepts related to historical events, interactions with non-African peoples and their music, effects of mass media and commercialism, and the influence of creative individuals. Diaspora does not easily explain major characteristics of U. S. African-American music that set it apart from its counterparts in the Caribbean and Latin America, such as the prominence of blue notes, blues scales, and heterophony. Music in the United States over the past two-hundred years can also be understood as a series of stylistic and genre revolutions occurring at roughly thirty-year intervals, correlated with distinctly American historical phenomena, such as the introduction of Protestant Christianity, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. These musical revolutions and historical phenomena can sometimes be correlated loosely with movements of people within the United States that might be described as diasporic, such as trans-Appalachian expansion, settlement of the "Southwest" and Texas, sharecropping and migrant industrial work, and urbanization, but it should be kept in mind that these movements also affected other Americans and their cultures.

Of Music, Sailing Ships, and Diasporal Ports of Call
Samuel A. Floyd Jr.
This paper discusses the beginnings of a model for the research and explication of the provenance and transformation of black music and its spread throughout the world. It addresses three diasporal regions: the Circum-Caribbean, Europe, and North America. In the development of this model, the concepts of movement and transformation guide inquiry: movement, in recognition that the music of the diaspora is dynamic as it mirrors the struggles and fulfillments of diasporal life; and transformation, in recognition of the fact that African and African-American performance practices have changed both African and European musics in various times and at various diasporal and not-so-diasporal locations. Moreover, whatever the location, African and African-derived performance practices invoke tradition, recall and reestablish the radical and the traditional, and provide diasporal change with its rhetorical dynamism. This presentation posits that the knowledge, research, and study of these processes will make possible the development of an approach to diasporal inquiry that moves attention away from an overemphasis on boundaries toward a view of diaspora as a fluid process in which geographical demarcations are viewed primarily as incidental and accidental conveniences of geographical identification. In this model, the term diaspora will be viewed as more than an emblem or symbol of community and identity, but also as a process that will function as an empowering framework for musico-diasporic scholarship.

Dissecting the 2007 Habana Danzón Festival: The Transnational Meaning of Cuba's National Dance.
Alejandro L. Madrid (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Born in Matanzas, Cuba, at the end of the nineteenth century, the danzón was one of the results of a long and continuous process of diasporic musical miscegenation in the Caribbean that infused European dances and music ensembles with African rhythms and musical instruments. Largely perceived as a lascivious form of entertainment by the white, upper-class Cuban elites for many decades, the danzón slowly rose to the level of ‘national dance’ as nationalist discourses developed in the country in the 1930s came to identify blackness as one of the key components of an ‘essential’ Cuban national identity.
Curiously, as the danzón was being declared Cuba’s national dance, the musical diaspora of the genre throughout the Gulf of Mexico in the early twentieth century made the music and its dance a site for cosmopolitan belonging among the Mexican working classes. The continuous presence of the danzón in Mexican popular culture throughout the twentieth century and the proliferation of strong danzón scenes in Veracruz, Mérida, and Mexico City contrasts with the slow decline of the genre in Cuba, where, after the 1959 revolution it became an ossified dance form kept alive in ballet folclórico performances but largely absent from the island as a social dance.
Based on fieldwork in Matanzas, Havana, and Mexico City, this paper seeks to explore the current revival of the danzón in Cuba in relation to its continuous success in Mexico. In this paper, I examine the 2007 Habana Danzón Festival as an enunciation that exposed the complex ways in which questions of representation, desire, race, local politics, and nationalism intersect in the performance of the danzón, arguing that in fact, such performances put in evidence the transnational character of nationalist projects.

Can Jazz be Rid of the Racial Imagination? Creolization, Racial Discourses, and Semiology of Music
Denis-Constant Martin
This paper will make a few theoretical propositions to design a framework in which various analysts coming from diverse backgrounds could discuss in a constructive manner African-American musics. It will suggest that such a framework could be imagined by combining Edouard Glissant's theory of creolization, Ronald Radano's emphasis on the importance of discourse in the racial construction of music, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez's semiology of music.
According to the creolization paradigm developed by Martiniquean philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant, after the conquest of the Americas (both continental and insular), human beings of various origins found themselves—in spite of massacres, slavery, and racism—involved in cultural contacts and exchanges from which stemmed creolization processes resulting in original creations affecting the whole world (Tout-Monde). These processes of original creation fueled by contacts and blending were nevertheless absorbed in and reorganized by the "racial imagination" prevailing in American societies. According to Radano, racially constructed discourses on music assigned creole innovations to particular groups: musics that were originally mixed became considered as black musics and were actually appropriated and enriched within black groups. In this situation, the semiology of music, as theoriticized by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, could provide a framework for debating African-American musics both as creole (e.g., mixed) and black. It proposes to analyse the significations (including the social meanings) of music within a field of interactions organized around musical "objects." These interactions associate people participating in the production processes of music and people who are included in the reception processes of music.
Today, the processes of production and reception of jazz mobilize an immense diversity of actors. Understanding jazz—as music and as social phenomenon—calls for protracted conversations between a diversity of analysts, and a semiology of jazz could accommodate their conversations.

Stax Records and the Memphis Sound: Exploring the Concept of Southern Black Diaspora in Popular Music
Portia Maultsby
The early discussions of diaspora are rooted in the concept of homeland—a place that becomes the reference for values, tradition, and identity. Since the 1990s, the use of this term has proliferated; it has been applied to various situations and, thus, has acquired a plethora of meanings across a broad range of disciplines. Roger Brubaker calls the results of this practice a "diaspora diaspora"—a dispersion of the meaning of the term in semantic, conceptual, and disciplinary space. This definition provides a rationale for applying the concept of diaspora to black music in the southern United States. In doing so, several questions arise, including (1) what constitutes and how do we define "diaspora of the southern United States"; (2) how is it positioned within the framework of the broader African or black diaspora; and (3) in what ways can the concept of diaspora contribute new perspectives to our understanding of southern and other regional black musical traditions?
I explore these questions first by examining the early connection between blacks in the United States and their homeland of Africa and the process for change in the identity and culture of slaves from Africans in America to African American. Within this context, I examine the South as the new homeland for the critical mass of African Americans whose identity and culture remain rooted in the cultural values and social practices of an African past. The concept of a new homeland allows for the exploration of criteria for defining a southern black diaspora and a black musical diaspora. I apply these criteria in exploring the ways in which the 1960s and 1970s productions of Stax Records (known as the "Memphis Sound") may embody the concept of a southern black music diaspora.

Emergence or Creation? Rethinking the Formation of Afro-American Vernaculars and Musics
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Much of the literature on Afro-American vernaculars and musics have given the impression that the African captives in the New World deliberately decided to speak differently from the European immigrants with whom they had interacted and to develop their own separate cultures. Where there are similarities between White and Afro-American cultures, such as in the southern United States, it has been claimed that the slaves influenced their white masters, regardless of the fact that more than half the Europeans in plantation colonies were hardly better off than the slaves, except in the eyes of the law.
While recognizing the undeniable contribution that Africa has made to the Afro-American vernaculars and musics, I wish in this paper to question the "deliberate creation" part of the scenario. I argue that the significance of the European element in the same cultural phenomena cannot be denied either, as is obvious not only from regional variation in the kinds of vernaculars and musics that evolved from these manifoldly lopsided population contacts but also in the kinds of technology used to produce the musics. Although there are cross-regional similarities, the most important ones are also contained within colonial affinities, namely, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, versus Spanish colonies. The vernaculars are interrelated likewise. I also adduce some sociohistorical factors to argue that the evolutions are more a matter of "emergence," involving self-organization, than "creation," presupposing some design. I note, however, that some ecologies favored the African element over the European one, without in any case precluding the "hybridization" of cultures. "Periodization" is also a critical factor shedding light on the particular significance of African contributions.

Ministering to the Musically Myopic Audience through Creative Programming and Ensemble Design
Morris A. Phibbs
Most performance events, whether formal or informal, demonstrate rigid lines of demarcation that keep musical audiences well insulated and within self-defined areas of comfort. Maintaining these divisions serves several functions: to cater to well-defined audiences according to musical taste, to adhere to repertoire according to performance ensemble capabilities and training, to observe the ethos of performance venues, and, in the practical world, to enhance producers’ incomes and attendance potentials. These are all valid reasons to design programming that reflects basic economic limitations, the availability of artistic expertise, restricted production capabilities, and music’s functionality. However, they also provide easy excuses for producers, educational institutions, and performers and performance organizations to maintain a status quo that limits the music available to most audiences. Creative ensemble design and repertoire selection, paired with a willingness (possibly even a sincere desire) to cross cultural and artistic boundaries, can yield performances that, while certainly not detracting from genre-specific musical activity, will help fulfill the need to educate, entertain, and perpetuate the broadest possible range of musics.

On Ownership and Value
Ronald Radano
It is common to hear claims that black music expresses national ideals of unity and belonging, just as its racialization makes explicit parallel indications of disunity and separation. Black music gives form to what we are all thought to share at the same time that its origin in African-American culture challenges the theme of inclusion. This paradox of inclusion-exclusion appears repeatedly in black music's modern rhetoric, from Du Bois's "most beautiful expression born this side the seas" to the claim that jazz is "America's classical music." If black music represents the many, it remains the privilege of only a few.
This paper explores the depth of the contradiction of unity-disunity as it runs across the history of black music. Key to this analysis will be the matter of ownership: a possession created in slavery by those possessed, black music was from the beginning a product of a contradictory relationship built upon the greater contradiction of race. And as it entered into the public sphere, black music assumed new, more complex levels of contradiction. What had become for African Americans a key expression of racial exclusivity or "blackness" would be for others a commodity rightfully claimed within the new consumer market. The paradox of unity-disunity would come to define the very core of black music's significance, revealing not only the basis of its rhetoric of authenticity but also its invention and production. Understanding the nature of this contradiction would therefore seem to be critical to the analysis of black music as a modern phenomenon.

Can the Object Speak?
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
By examining the relationship of specific visual artists to iconic tropes from African American history as a template, this paper speculates on how contemporary musicians may use similar creative patterns to express a relationship to black music's distant, inaudible past.

The Selecta as Agent of Diaspora Literacy
Elaine Richardson
This presentation focuses on some ways that Jamaican dancehall selectas (selectors, or disc jockeys) function as agents of black diaspora literacy through their playing, contextualization, and interpretation of songs that address black life. I will give examples of Jamaican dancehall selectas' discourse as it is employed in Cleveland, Ohio, to discursively knit together the identities of black women dance hall participants who are Afro-Jamaican transplants and "native" Afro-American Cleveland Ohioans. I pay particular attention to the selecta's reliance on vernacular knowledge of black women's experiences and black women's validation of the selecta's knowledge through their performances and communication in the dancehall.

The CBMR's Expanded Mission, Crossing Boundaries, Enlarging Perspectives
Thomas Riis
What can be done to redress imbalances in what is currently studied and understood as black music? One way to rephrase that question is to ask, who claims black music for their own, and what space—what country, region, city, or neighborhood—do they call home? How, then, do the musical practices of such claimants resemble the tradition of the homeland, the motherland, they have chosen?
If Africa is tacitly accepted as the starting point of black music—for obvious historical reasons—then all other locations must unavoidably be deemed diasporic. But the "dispersion of an originally homogeneous people" (the dictionary definition of diaspora) implies a unified, self-conscious community and culture with a demonstrable existence at some time in the past. This line of thinking leads to a paradox. The actual diversity of languages, tribal communities, material cultures, political systems, religious practices, and musical dialects spread across the mother continent over the last several centuries, for which the evidence is unambiguous and extensive, would seem to confound a simple unitary tale of origins. The "Africa" of our imagination is a mythic Ideal, a composite memory forged in the immediacy of contact between Africans and non-Africans, part of the tragic "dialectic of master and slave . . . integral to modernity" (in Paul Gilroy's words).
Given the challenge of locating the specific place where black music began, it is perhaps useful to view the moment in time of crossing the boundary out of Africa as the decisive instant and action at which to begin our examination. Adopting Victor Turner's ideas of liminality (developed in studies of various African rituals) can also illuminate such a study. Individuals in a state of liminality or limbo are betwixt and between, a position of insecurity and vulnerability that is surely reflected in their musical practices. Also, Gerhard Kubik's "matrix" of African musical traits (adumbrated perceptively in Black Music Research Journal 25, no. 1/2) can move us to a deeper analysis of diasporic styles.
In order to move the discussion forward without slighting neglected musical traditions outside familiar North American metropoles, our recourse to both Turner and Kubik takes into account the degree of disorientation that marginalized or disasporic musicians experience and also how they choose to define their relationship to a deep-seated set of African musical practices.

Music for All Seasons: Building Inclusive Concert Programs
John Gordon Ross
In 2008, it is still not common to hear the music of African-American composers on main-series orchestral concerts. Several living composers have made tremendous inroads, but what about the music of the previous generations, especially those African-American men and women who wrote during the ninenteenth and early twentieth centuries? Aside from the First Symphony of William Grant Still, the Negro Folk Symphony of William Dawson, and the occasional Duke Ellington piece, most of these composers are ignored. Certainly this cannot be said of the repertoire of the major mid-century European composers and Euro-American composers of Copland's generation.
This paper will present successful examples of works I have programmed from the early to mid-twentieth century that fit comfortably in my main series programming. I will include openers, solo-orchestral works, and longer works. Although he is not American, I include Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
The selections and suggested programming come from my personal experience and satisfaction in over thirty years of programming works by black composers on main series concerts in Cleveland; Kingsport, Tennessee; and Hickory, North Carolina. I hope that my suggestions may, at the very least, spur others to examine some of these works. Most of these scores are in the collections of CBMR, most have been recorded, and all are readily available for rental or purchase from at least one source. Some examples include R. Nathaniel Dett, "Juba Dance" from In the Bottoms (orchestrated by Strasser); Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, New World a Comin'; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Suite of Incidental Music from Othello; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Danse Negre; Florence Price, Dances in the Canebrakes (orchestrated by Still); William Grant Still, Woodnotes (based on Paul Laurence Dunbar poems); William Grant Still, Suite for Violin and Orchestra; William Grant Still, Symphony no. 3, Sunday Symphony; and Clarence Cameron White, Elegy and Bandanna Sketches.

The Potential of Black Music Research for Informing Instructional Content and Curricula Design
Rosita M. Sands
This paper presents a preliminary examination of how the scholarship produced as a result of black music research can make an impact on the teaching of music at all levels, particularly at the level of higher education. The paper will take into consideration three aspects of the MayDay Group's core Action Ideals, as articulated on the group's website: (a) the broadening of the research and theoretical bases for music education; (b) greater inclusion of the social and cultural contexts of music and music-making activities in music education; and (c) the need for a stronger focus on curriculum and curriculum design in the practice and preparation of music educators or those involved in the delivery of music instruction. The MayDay Group has publicly declared its interest in "authentic musical actions of people and . . . music that incorporates a rich diversity of musical meaning and experience." Since black musical traditions are inherently diverse, they provide a varied soundscape that is conducive to and provides fertile ground for the broadened approach to scholarly inquiry that is called for and promoted by the MayDay group's ideals. In addition, black music research has historically used ethnomusicological approaches to research that focus on social and cultural contexts of the various black musical traditions. Whether or not those individuals involved in scholarly inquiry in the field of black music research have typically considered where and how the knowledge presented in their research is used or applied, the potential of much of this research for impacting instructional content in a substantial manner is real and should not be overlooked. This discussion addresses the nexus between black music research and teaching and, specifically, the incorporation of knowledge and understandings at appropriate levels and relevant areas of instructional content and academic curricula.

"Caracas is a Caribbean City"—But What Kind of Caribbean?: The Musical Reevaluation of Social Place in Contemporary Venezuela
T. M. Scruggs
Music has been a key element in the increasingly discredited construct of a racially neutral "café con leche" Venezuelan nation. This paper critiques such a "national aesthetic consensus" by analyzing post-1960s projections of Afro-Venezuelan forms and the continued strong urban identification with Afro-Caribbean popular music. I suggest that the elite discourse that posits styles from salsa to rap as wholly imported from the outside has both neglected many national hybrid creative efforts as well as served as a foil to obviate the place of much of Venezuela's population within a continental African-American diaspora. Recent social struggles and national debate have begun to recast the frame within which the multifaceted African-American musical aesthetic is created and consumed in Venezuela. Musicians working in such diverse forms as rap, reggae, and ska, as well as innovative Afro-Venezuelan musical forms, increasingly challenge a race-neutral, "tropical" conception of Caribbean culture. These cultural workers operate within new spaces developed from the process aligned with Hugo Chávez and offer a new concept of African-infused musics from both sides of the national border.

Toward Defining a Northern U.S. Black Diaspora Through Formal Elements of the Music
David W. Stowe
Brubaker suggests that scholars are currently awash in a "diaspora" diaspora and that to restore some substance to the term we should use the term diaspora to refer not to bounded groups but to practices, projects, and idioms. To be meaningfully diasporic, these practices should reflect an experience of dispersion through space, orientation to a real or imagined homeland, and maintenance of a distinctive identity within a host society. Because these conditions are frequently met in black musical practices occurring in the northern United States, it is tempting to posit the existence of a regional musical diaspora within the larger African-American diaspora. Clearly there are multiple musical homelands involved in such a category: the American South, the Caribbean, and so forth, which have complex relationships of exchange among them as well as with the northern United States. My interest here is in advancing some formal elements that may be of use in theorizing the existence and salience of a northern U.S. black musical diaspora. First, we might find the existence of musical instruments or techniques that clearly originate in, say, Alabama or Cuba. Second, we might encounter timbres or tone colors played on instruments that simulate the sound of instruments from such places. Third, we might identify the use of rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic elements organized according to principles that have migrated to the northern United States from, for example, Mississippi or Trinidad. Fourth, we might encounter musical or lyrical themes drawn from Georgia or Jamaica, or some such homeland. Complicating this conceptual project are the existence of multiple homelands from which a northern U.S. black musical diaspora draws, and the impact of commercial popular culture in eroding the sense of distinctive cultural identity thought to be definitive of a diaspora.

The Origins of Jazz
John Szwed
The development of jazz in the early part of the twentieth century was a cultural phenomenon of such proportions that it quickly unsettled not only the United States but most of the world. One of the results of its popular ascendancy was that it drove other forms of African-American music out of the spotlight: the modernist narrative and the discourse of fashion that developed around jazz ultimately made other musical forms seem like relics from a distant past. But those other musics (spirituals, work songs, blues, rags, and so forth.) did not disappear but continued to prosper, even in parallel to the development of jazz, where they influenced its evolution.
This paper will draw on hundreds of little-known popular and specialist articles published before•1940 as well as on unpublished materials by such people as Alan Lomax and Aaron Copland and will attempt to assay what yet needs to be understood about this music and its interplay with other musics. What gets counted as jazz? Where and when did it originate (through monogenesis or polygenesis, as an American music, or a New World music)? Who created it (African Americans, Creoles, Whites, or all of them)? Is it a folk music, a popular music, or a high art? How was jazz understood and received by musicians, scholars, and the public in general?

Beyond Inclusion: New Paradigms for the Teaching of Black Music
Robert Tanner
According to the Action Ideals enumerated in the website for the MayDay Group, "[t]he social and cultural contexts of musical actions are integral to musical meaning and cannot be ignored or minimized in music education." If this is a principle to be embraced as part of a music unit's mission, the implications for teaching in areas that fall outside of the Western concert tradition are profound. In recent decades, many strides have been made in the teaching of black music, particularly at the college level. Examples range from increased visibility and programming of works by black composers to residencies by artists specializing in black music to the emergence of ethnically centered courses and curriculum programs. However, with each development, care must be taken to ensure that, in addition to merely introducing concepts, practices, and personalities connected to black music, all necessary efforts are made to present these elements from perspectives appropriate to their content rather than filtered through the precepts of the dominant curriculum. Through examination of teaching methods that have been applied in the past through the present, this paper will consider new approaches in the areas of music theory, composition, history, and performance that satisfy objectives and evaluative criteria for those subject areas while maintaining the integrity of various topics related to black music.

Dub Music of Jamaica: The Acoustics of Diaspora and the Post-Colony
Michael Veal
The Jamaican recording engineers who innovated dub music in the 1970s created a musical language of disruption, breakage, fragmentation, and dissolution. This paper offers a basic historical survey of their innovations, and suggests ways in which the unique stylistic traits of the music might be theorized as sonic reflections of the cultural conditions of diaspora and post-coloniality.

African Diaspora and Colombian Popular Music in the Twentieth Century
Peter Wade
This paper argues that the concept of disapora is problematic insofar as it implies a discourse of one-way traffic outwards from an origin point (usually seen as geographical, cultural, or racial). In fact, as the history of Colombian popular music indicates, musical processes are characterized more by a series of multilateral exchanges, which are dynamic and often unpredictable. However, these exchanges are always being read and interpreted in specific ways by different sets of audiences and commentators who are interested in constructing certain narratives, often ones in which origins play an important role. Diaspora then serves a function as a narrative about commonality and sameness within diversity and difference. From an analytic point of view, diaspora can serve such a function, framing an analytic concern with identifying cultural connections of a kind that are not captured by terms such as transnationalism or globalism (although Pan-Africanism may have closer affinities). However, analytically speaking, diaspora has to be distanced from simple concerns with unidirectional outward dispersals from a single origin point (which may also carry certain masculinist connotations).
This paper will explore the idea of diaspora and musical exchanges in relation to changes in Colombian popular music, specifically that from the Caribbean coastal region of the country, often identified as more or less African-influenced. It will trace changes that occurred from the 1920s onward, with the commercialization of cumbia and porro and related styles, and look also at more recent developments around vallenato, champeta, and rap.

Up North: Placing Gospel Music
Gayle Wald
My paper approaches the topic of the panel by first interrogating the idea of “the North” as it pertains to U.S. gospel music produced during what Horace Boyer calls gospel’s Golden Age. The North, in gospel music and in African-American culture of the 1930s and 1940s, is both an imaginary and real place. Hence for black migrants from the South in the early twentieth century, the North includes Midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit.
The rest of the paper traces the nonlinear development of gospel music traditions, the importance of regional musical styles and scenes, and, most important, the role of travel in the theory and practice of gospel music. Despite the rootedness of gospel sounds in specific locations (such that Boyer could organize his study The Gospel Sound around the regional production of gospel), the realities of “the gospel life” meant that many performers spent their careers on the road, traveling both in the United States and abroad. I am particularly interested in what this “diaspora” of gospel performers means for the conceptualization of gospel as a national and transnational musical practice.

A Personal Reflection on Hurricane Katrina Losses and Their Cultural Implications
Michael White
As a result of the flooding of eighty percent of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, my home in the city’s Gentilly section remained simmering in up to eight feet of toxic water for nearly three weeks. The house and all of its contents were left in a state of complete ruins, among which included one of the largest privately owned collections of material relating to African-American and New Orleans music, history, and culture. This collection consisted of several thousand books, films, recordings, interviews, research material, photographs, and music memorabilia. In addition, there was a collection of rare sheet music, early jazz transcriptions, and unrecorded original compositions. Also lost were dozens of musical instruments, including over fifty vintage clarinets.
Many of the destroyed items in my collection were rare, out of print, one of a kind, and irreplaceable. They represented over thirty years of research and collecting. More than just a privately hoarded treasure stash, the items were often used for teaching, research, exhibits, writing, consultations, composing, and band development. The research material and personally conducted interviews were of a now-gone generation of jazz musicians born between the late 1890s and 1910. In that material was the basis of future books and essays, which would have shed new light on the early jazz and New Orleans culture.
While much of New Orleans remains, as always, largely indifferent to the fate of local cultural and historical material, my archival losses—representative of several similar destroyed collections belonging to artists, photographers, writers, and others—expose major problems in the views, attitudes, perceptions, documentation, and perpetuation of important cultural treasures. The existence of such collections and their loss both expose problems in the typical American view toward history and offer the opportunity to examine, evaluate, address, and seek solutions for the future.

An American Pedagogical Dilemma: Black Music Research versus Conventional Instruction in Music History
Christopher Wilkinson
In the preface to its "action ideals," the MayDay Group announces that it is "concerned to identify, critique, and change taken-for-granted patterns of professional activity [as well as] social, musical, and educational philosophies." One pattern of professional activity "taken for granted" in American post-secondary education is that the study of music history will be primarily the study of European art music along with twentieth-century American derivatives. Many are clearly comfortable with the philosophy underlying this approach. Successive editions of standard textbooks on the subject reinforce this viewpoint, evidence that there has been little call for reform by musicologists.
This perspective violates a fundamental purpose of higher education: to prepare students to engage productively with contemporary American society, which obviously embraces a diverse and complex musical culture. A monocultural perspective cannot adequately prepare future generations to participate in a multicultural musical environment that resulted from the fusion of two distinct ancestral cultures. This is the dilemma posed by conventional pedagogies of music history.
Rigorous scholarship in African-American cultural history has documented the co-equal collaboration of black musical tradition with those of Europe in the formation of our musical culture. Strip away the traits of American music that are of West African ancestry, and one would effectively eliminate defining characteristics of this music: a reality ignored by conventional historical pedagogy.
This paper will examine the link between research into African-American musical history and the pedagogy of music history. I will contrast the "taken-for-granted" pedagogy reinforced by the principal textbooks with an alternative that is more inclusive, more accurate, and ultimately more intellectually empowering. My presentation will be highlighted by a visual representation of the evolution of American music illustrating the influence of its two principal ancestral traditions: those of West Africa and Europe.

Black Music Elements in Renaissance and Early Baroque Music: A Preliminary Overview
Stefano Zenni
Following the end of the fifteenth century, new musical elements appeared in the dance and court music of Renaissance Europe. Two forces shaped new genres: one from Africa to Europe and another from the Carribean to Europe. While the literary and visual evidence of black musicians abounds in Renaissance art, it is in the music that we can find undisputable evidences of African influences. Examples of these influences are evident in the melodic and rhythmic elements of Mudarra’s Fantasia que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico; in ostinato dances such as folìa, chacona, and sarabande; in the widespread use of handbooks to play chord changes on the Spanish guitar; and in the new interest in the technique of arpeggios. All these elements, carefully analyzed, open a new perspective on the understanding of Renaissance and Baroque music, on the birth of modern tonality, and on the spread of black music and sensibility in Europe.