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Toward and against a Sounded History

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3484126

1527-1900

Marc Hertzman,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Music can be an abstract and confounding thing. It is “central to human life,” wrote Oliver Sacks, “yet it has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. . . . It has no necessary relation to the world.”1 Music can also seem magical. “Profound music,” Cornel West attests, “leads us—beyond language—to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.”2 Somewhat paradoxically, for all its power and ethereal qualities—and despite the massive complex of genres (jazz, rock, country, etc.), components (melody, rhythm, notes, instruments, composers, instrumentalists, vocalists, audiences, critics), and forms (live, recorded, acoustic, electric, improvised) that comprise it—music is often understood and consumed in tiny, individualized pieces: an anthem, a song, a lyric. Samba is Brazil. Puerto Rico is salsa. Black music is authentic.While I fully support this forum's call to spend more time exploring the sonic archive, I would like to strike a somewhat dissonant tone and suggest that while we can and should think about music and history in new ways, doing so does not necessarily have to involve sound. My argument is rooted in the notion that for all its abstract and mystical qualities, music is created, circulated, played, listened to, embraced, rejected, and transformed through decidedly mundane human acts. Behind each exquisite, soul-shaking note lie earthbound things: contracts, property rights, commodity chains, workers.The Brazilian social scientist João Baptista Borges Pereira was interested in these very subjects when he wrote Cor, profissão e mobilidade: O negro e o rádio de São Paulo (Color, profession, and mobility: The Negro and the radio in São Paulo), published in 1967. Pereira was adamant about the fact that, the object of his study notwithstanding, he could not care less about music. “This study,” he wrote, “is not in the least bit concerned with telling the history of radio or music.”3 Pereira asked black radio employees how they categorized and situated themselves socially. He conducted interviews, compiled quantitative and financial data, and distributed questionnaires, all of which he used to “understand microscopically the processes of social interaction between blacks and whites” and to study “the mobility of blacks [pretos].”4If Pereira's approach seems unnecessarily restrictive, the study's richness clearly demonstrates the benefits derived from thinking about music not only in the terms described by Sacks and West but also as a professional, economic, and social arena not unlike the factories, police stations, bars, and halls of government that so often garner historians' attention. Pereira cast his net up and down the industry hierarchy, interviewing executives, administrators, technicians, janitorial staff, established stars, and aspiring, semiprofessional artists (calouros). Black calouros, he wrote, “insistently and intentionally seek to professionalize themselves.”5 Despite the fact that many found themselves in a “chronic and almost definitive state of preprofessionalization,” they continued to pursue “social recognition through [their] chosen and ideal profession.”6 Most of the calouros whom Pereira interviewed saw their work in music as a means for personal advance or as a potential path to improving their family's status and station. Many described their hope to provide loved ones with better homes, education, new clothes, and family vacations. Some explained how radio might offer an opportunity to “become somebody.”7 As one artist told Pereira, “In the spot where I wash cars I'm just anybody. Nobody concerns themselves with me, and I don't concern myself with anyone . . . but when the audience applauds I feel my head ‘flip,’ it seems like I'm someone else, like I'm growing. It's like I've made it.”8The portraits that emerge—ambitious black calouros, intent on using music as a way to improve their financial and social standing—contrast sharply with the standard depiction of black musicians in Brazil and elsewhere. In the United States, Ron Radano writes, “the listening public has remained remarkably committed to a particular story about black music,” which derives its power, so the thinking goes, “directly [from] the depths of social tragedy.”9 In Brazil, the perceived link between black musicians and destitution represents a powerful myth, one that has provided an important vehicle for drawing attention to inequality and racism but that has also marginalized important examples of black entrepreneurship and forms of self-identification that do not fit cleanly within the familiar set of references, symbols, and narratives that all seem to point to the same understood truth: that soulful, authentic black music springs forth exclusively from misfortune, hardship, and economic marginalization.Is it possible to derive analysis and conclusions through sound alone that are as revisionist and critical as Pereira's? Through a brief consideration of two versions of a song called “Rei vagabundo” (Vagabond king), I would like to suggest a significantly qualified “yes.”10 Considered together, the recordings illustrate how artists, producers, and audiences use music to craft distinct concepts, propositions, images, and symbols. The first version was recorded in 1936 by Carlos Galhardo (Catello Carlos Guagliardi), the son of Italian immigrants, and composed by Ataulfo Alves, a smooth, well-dressed Afro-Brazilian artist, and a white musician named Roberto Martins. The song, bouncy and upbeat, glorifies the purportedly happy life of Mangueira, the iconic favela (hillside shantytown) that is home to one of Rio de Janeiro's most storied samba schools. Some 30 years later, Nelson Cavaquinho (Nelson Antônio da Silva) produced a distinctly more critical version. While working as a police officer in Mangueira, Silva developed relationships with local musicians. In the early 1950s, by then an established artist, he moved to Mangueira. He recorded his version of “Rei vagabundo” in 1968, the same year that the military tightened its grasp on power, seized in a coup four years earlier, by placing new limits on political representation and freedom of expression.In the 1936 version, Galhardo croons of a happy, carefree life in Mangueira. His Vagabond King lives in a beautiful “castle” along with his “queen.” Nelson Cavaquinho presents starkly different imagery, conveyed by his voice and the song's lyrics, slower pace, and melancholy acoustic chords. Mangueira, a tearful Vagabond King laments, is an empty kingdom filled with shacks that are “castles” only in the “imagination.” Read simply as texts or transcripts, the songs' lyrics alone do not invite or reveal the depth of meaning or the dramatic differences between the two versions that come through so clearly and forcefully in sound. While Nelson Cavaquinho's words conjure pain and sadness absent in Galhardo's, the full effect of the song—that place “beyond language”—is felt only by listening.Galhardo's version opens with brass and is then propelled forward by the almost immediate introduction of a fast-paced pandeiro (close relative of the tambourine), which whisks the rhythm along for the length of the song. The chorus has a cheerful lilt that frames Galhardo's slightly more earnest vocals. If all of that makes the listener want to jump up and dance, the sparse instrumentation and pensive tone of Nelson Cavaquinho's version have almost the opposite effect. Strings carry most of the weight, occasionally ceding center stage to vocals by Nelson Cavaquinho and the chorus. If not uniformly plaintive, this version certainly does not replicate the bouncy vibe of the 1936 number. A trained musician or ethnomusicologist can hear and do much more with sound than most historians, but Nelson Cavaquinho's basic message is clear to any listener: poverty is something to lament (and perhaps protest), not gloss over or celebrate.Whatever the limits (and pitfalls) of a historian engaged in close listening, the potential benefits are significant. On a most basic level, taking the time to listen reveals messages and meanings inaccessible when songs are analyzed simply as texts. More significantly, sonic cues can force us, somewhat counterintuitively, to pass through and ultimately move beyond the abstract to the material. For example, the multiple, sometimes competing rhythmic and melodic layers in the different versions of “Rei vagabundo” lay bare the collaborative, sometimes competitive nature of music. A historian interested in distribution of wealth, labor, or markets might well hear in these collections of instruments and voices competing financial interests, contracts, and the exchange of cash and property rights.Listening also beckons us to journey beyond the familiar practice of using a single song to illustrate or introduce a larger point before moving on to other concerns. One author uses “A favela vai abaixo” (The favela's coming down) to frame a broader discussion of city planning and favelas in Rio. The song, written by Sinhô (José Barbosa da Silva) and recorded in 1928, laments a perceived decline of Rio's hillside shantytowns and very real plans to raze them. The author reads in the song's lyrics a “radical manifesto” that turns “upside down the precepts justifying the visible poor's expulsion from Rio de Janeiro's central cityscape.”11 It is also tempting to consider the possibilities that arise from placing the song in a larger musical context. Heard on its own terms, “A favela vai abaixo” sounds, as the author puts it, “jaunty, melodious.”12 But alongside Galhardo's “Rei vagabundo,” “A favela vai abaixo” feels more wistful than sprightly. The vocalist, Francisco Alves, hits lower notes than Galhardo does and conjures an almost melancholy lament in a way that the 1936 hit does not. The comparison opens interesting questions. Did Galhardo, Alves, and Martins understand their piece to be in conversation with Sinhô's? What might a broader listening project—one that includes more musical creations—tell us about urban planning projects and the responses to them? Whatever the answers to these specific questions, I believe that music holds the most for historians when we study it not only through single illustrations, anthems, or manifestos but also as a commodity and cultural product embedded in, shaped by, and connected to multiple voices and complex webs of networks and relationships. In other words, if we are going to listen, then let's not just listen closely; whenever possible, let's also listen with as many songs on the turntable as possible.Whether focusing on a single piece or a fuller sonic repertoire, how does one combine close listening with material concerns and larger networks and relationships? One compelling model is Louise Meintjes's Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, which brings together a musician's and ethnomusicologist's ear with fieldwork and questions not unlike those that animate Pereira's study. In exploring the complex processes, multiple actors, and competing goals and interests that went into making one album “sound Zulu,” Meintjes embraces a stance quite unlike Pereira's.13 “I work in sound,” she writes.14 But while unabashedly interested in sound, Meintjes is not only interested in sound. Rather, she analyzes it along with observations gleaned from interviews, ethnography, and a reading of larger political and social fields, all in order to make arguments about race relations, politics, and the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The challenge for historians who do not possess finely tuned close listening skills is to figure out our own ways to peel back the many layers of creation and contestation that are part and parcel of making music—to find different ways to listen.15In a recent article, Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa, and two others nudge their colleagues in a similar direction by outlining a “sounded anthropology,” a practice and field of knowledge that asks anthropologists to stop “thinking of the field recording only as a source of data for the written work that then ensues and rather [think] of the recording itself as a meaningful form.”16 To take their challenge seriously means paying attention to the many things that shape music and then become all but invisible in the final product: personal and professional connections that can help secure one artist a place in the studio at the expense of another; rivalries and friendships among musicians, recording technicians, and executives; audience taste (actual and perceived); distribution networks; market forces; and legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual property rights, among other factors.If this forum, where our primary interest is debate and exchange, is not the perfect venue in which to outline a sounded history, it does seem appropriate to at least venture a few comments about why historians tend to ignore these things and treat music as an illustration or, worse, a “sideshow.”17 Almost without fail, every time I give a talk someone asks if I am a musician. (This was especially the case when interviewing for jobs in history departments.) There is nothing wrong with the question, but it still always strikes me as somewhat odd. I have never heard an audience or a search committee ask a labor historian, for example, if she has experience working as a mule spinner or in a factory. There is something about music that makes historians think that they need concert experience to understand it. (A less optimistic interpretation might be that some scholars still dismiss anything found in nontraditional archives, or anything that smacks of culture, as fluff.) This is not to say that historians are naturally disposed to understand and study music. To the contrary, direct engagement with ethnomusicology is a must.18In Brazil (and elsewhere in Latin America), historians' hesitance toward music is starting to fade, not because of a sudden discovery or dependence on close listening but because of the gradual realization that however unique music is, at the end of the day musicians are not so different from any other figures that historians study.19 Thinking about the similarities as much as the differences between musicians and other subjects of historical inquiry helps protect against turning music into one more in a litany of unconnected “topics of inquiry.”20 In an often-cited piece (discussed in HAHR in 1999), Lynn Hunt wrote that “just as social history sometimes moved from one group to another (workers, women, children, ethnic groups, the old, the young) without developing much sense of cohesion or interaction between topics, so too a cultural history defined topically could degenerate into an endless search for new cultural practices to describe, whether carnivals, cat massacres, or impotence trials.”21 Accordingly, our goal should be wider vision and more nuanced methodology rather than the creation of a new or growing field, subfield, or isolated topic of inquiry. The point is not to create legions of music or sound historians but rather to continue to break down the false, persistent barrier that separates music and musicians from putatively serious history and that treats songs as isolated examples.To do so requires creativity and perseverance. Just locating musicians in the archives can be a less-than-straightforward task. Musician unions, associations, organizations, formal networks—in short, professional visibility—generally evolved much later than those for groups more familiar to historians (stevedores, factory workers, etc.). On a global level, we know relatively little about exactly how, why, and when music became understood as anathema to serious work. The distinction goes back at least to 1776 (and surely much farther), when Adam Smith separated “unproductive” labor into two camps: the “important” kind, whose work benefited society but didn't create or multiply wealth (churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters), and the “frivolous” sort practiced by “players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, &c.”22 The fact that Smith distinguished music not only from productive labor but also from important unproductive labor says a lot about why making music the object of serious study can be an uphill battle.If we here return to Pereira, we may begin to understand why he was so insistent about the fact that his study was not about music. When Pereira wrote Cor, profissão e mobilidade, he was entrenched in an intellectual milieu in São Paulo dominated by sociologists who favored quantitative and other reputedly serious forms of study and were inflected with a social scientific vision of Marxism that left no clear place for culture. In a letter to Pereira, the French scholar Roger Bastide congratulated him for reclaiming with his book a “culturalist perspective” that could support further study of “social infrastructure.” The great success of the São Paulo sociologists, Bastide wrote, was to leave behind culture, which had plagued earlier generations, who, to Bastide and others, were overly patriotic and optimistic about race relations. The critical Marxist response was an important, “urgent task,” Bastide explained, “but along the way we ended up ignoring the domain of culture. It became necessary to reintroduce it.”23 It is easy to see why Pereira would insist that his research was not a return to the earlier—and, to Bastide, less rigorous—studies of culture. Making radio the site and object of his work sent a clear signal about what the São Paulo sociologists had left behind, but his focus on economics and social relations—and his insistence that his work was not about music—made clear that he could still cut it as a serious social scientist, even in the eyes of Bastide and other discipline elders.For historians writing today, a half century later, the scenery looks different. Culture is not marginalized as it once was, and neither Marx nor Smith guides our literature. But that does not mean that we have really figured out how to fully integrate music, musicians, and sound into history, or how to take the best spirit and insights from Pereira's study without closing our ears altogether. Sound should be an important part of our work, but we should take a cue from Pereira, Meintjes, Ochoa, and others who, in very different ways, are interested not only in sound itself but also in the many different things that go into producing it. Following their lead will help us grapple with music's ethereal nature without conceiving it as something that simply floats in isolation, capable of illustrating larger points but somehow disconnected from the broader historical forces that shape it.