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Roberta (Bobbi) Louise Singer (1941–2022)

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 136; Issue: 541 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.136.541.05

1535-1882

Hanna Griff-Sleven,

Music History and Culture

New York City, Puerto Rico, and the folklore/ethnomusicology world lost a major beat when Roberta (Bobbi) Singer passed away on June 12, 2022, at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in New Hampshire. Bobbi was a key mentor for many folklorists/ethnomusicologists and musicians in New York City and a relentless voice and presenter of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Caribbean Culture. Her passion for Puerto Rican music and its roots and sharing it all with the world at large contributed greatly to the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology.Bobbi was born a “red diaper baby” in the Bronx, but she spent most of her early life on Staten Island, where being raised as a secular lefty Jew in a predominantly Italian-Catholic environment was not easy. Her father, Joseph, who worked in the shipyard as a tool maker, died when she was 8 years old. Her mother, Miriam, raised Bobbi and her sister, Liz, as a single mother while working at a luncheonette and as a substitute caretaker for the parish priest (who loved discussing literature and politics with Bobbi's mother). In 1955, Bobbi and her family moved back to the Bronx, which was a more welcoming environment. Puerto Rican culture was starting to fill the streets of the Bronx as the Jews and Italians fled the city, and Bobbi reveled in the music, food, and acceptance of her new friends and neighbors.Bobbi studied the flute and later the saxophone and cello and entered the Manhattan School of Music on a scholarship. When her scholarship didn't get renewed, she transferred to Hunter College (tuition was free) and earned her Bachelor of Science in Music Education in 1965, while continuing to study music at the Manhattan School of Music at night. She then took time off from studying and stayed with family and friends in Italy and Budapest. She later earned a Master's degree in Ethnomusicology at Hunter College and, later in 1982, a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Her dissertation was aptly titled, “My Music Is Who I Am and What I Do: Latin Popular Music and Identity in New York City.” Her research included interviews with some of salsa's and Latin jazz's cutting-edge Nuyorican musicians on the scene, and she chronicled the dynamic 1970s Latino cultural scene in New York City. She wrote about her friends and colleagues in the city and her experience with the Latin community, and in doing so, paved the way for other cultural researchers to study and write about this vibrant community as well.New York City was her classroom. In the years leading up to the founding of the arts organization City Lore, Bobbi organized the 1983 concert called Music from the Islands: Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Manhattan, which marked one of the first performances of the iconic bomba and plena group, Los Pleneros de la 21. In 1986, she became one of City Lore's first staff members, organizing a music festival in and around the Central Park bandshell. That concert was pivotal for Bobbi. Rejecting teaching in a classroom, she was always thinking, researching, observing, and touring the vibrant Puerto Rican and Cuban music that was so alive in New York City. She was adamant that the research should not just be read by scholars but experienced by both Puerto Ricans and Cubans living in the United States and Cuba. She produced records, films, and music tours to make sure this research was accessible to the public at large.This passion for Latin music in New York City led Bobbi to create pivotal groundbreaking programs and projects. Along with René López, she helped produce the album, Caliente Equals Hot in 1977, which featured an array of local Puerto Rican and Cuban musical styles. This was the first time that anyone had collected various types of Latin music genres in this type of showcase, showing off the community's music in “all its grandeur”—as stated by musician Bobby Sanabria.Bobbi was passionate about exploring the connections between Puerto Ricans in New York City and Puerto Rico. The first tour, called Somos Boricuas (We are Puerto Ricans), she organized was designed to create an exchange between Puerto Ricans on the island and those in the diaspora. It was more than a concert. For the first time, musicians, who might have visited New York City or Puerto Rico in order to see family, experienced how the Puerto Rican sound absorbed and played out in New York City or came alive in the lushness of the Puerto Rican countryside. Both ends of this tour made lifetime connections for Bobbi and the bands.Bobbi liked to tell the story of Puerto Rican musicians who play la música jíbara arriving at Casita Rincon Criollo—a Puerto Rican social club in the Bronx, built in the style of country homes on the island—for the first time (as told to me in an interview conducted on January 31, 2020, in New York City): We were on the bus going up to the Casita with Island Puerto Ricans, and one of the decimistas [singers who improvise décima], saw the Casita as we turned the corner and he started to improvise about how it looks as though he's just going home. He just kept singing and singing as he got off the bus and he was singing as we went into the casita. And Ashley [James, the videographer] was filming, And I was crying . . . and the musicians were playing and the Pleneros were playing and they got together and into each other's drums and guiros and faces. I see . . . it now, it was just the most magnificent, powerful thing and I was thinking all I did was have had an idea and they filled it out. It was just phenomenal. And then the next year we went to Puerto Rico and some of those relationships continue.Roberta would eventually be honored as a Madrina (Godmother, meaning an elder treated with respect) to the casita for her work at the casita and with the musicians who played there.The next year (1991), Bobbi came into the City Lore office and said, “Hey Steve [Zeitlin, founding director of City Lore], I got an idea for a project, and I sort of spun it out for him. And he said, ‘Write a proposal.’” That proposal became the legendary Dos Alas/Two Wings Project, inspired by a poem written by journalist/poet Lola Rodríguez de Tío over a hundred years ago, “Cuba y Puerto Rico,” in which Puerto Rico and Cuba are depicted as two wings of the same bird. One hundred years later, this metaphor came alive. The Dos Alas/Two Wings project (1993–1994) highlighted the cultural and historical ties between Cuba and Puerto Rico by presenting a program of Afro-Cuban rumba and Afro-Puerto Rican bomba. This historic project brought together selected members of two widely celebrated vocal, percussion, and dance ensembles: Grupo Afrocuba De Matanzas from Cuba and Los Hermanos Cepeda from Puerto Rico. The project, which was supported by grants from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Arts Partners Program, Meet the Composer International Creative Collaborations Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts, began with a month-long residency in New York City in October 1996 featuring concerts, master classes, workshops, lecture-demonstrations, block parties, and more. The groups then toured the United States (Keene, New Hampshire; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; and other cities).The concert programs consisted of Afro-Cuban rumba and Puerto Rico's African-based bomba—living traditions that are rooted in West African music, dance, and spiritual beliefs, blended with Indigenous and Euro-Iberian influences. They are quintessentially Puerto Rican and Cuban, born out of the social, historical, economic, and cultural conditions of their own soils. Bomba and rumba shape the lives of their practitioners and are constantly evolving as their roots grow stronger and deeper. The highlight of every concert was Los Hermanos Cepeda and Grupo Afrocuba De Matanzas; closing out each concert in the Grand Finale tradition, the bands performed together in a rumbombazo—a spontaneous, sizzling combination of rumba and bomba in which Cubans and Puerto Ricans play and dance their own and each other's traditions. Bobbi, the bands, and all who came to see the concerts were exhilarated.One of the many outcomes of that tour was Bomba, Dancing the Drum (1999), a film directed by Ashley James, about the legendary Cepeda family of bomba fame. For nearly a century, the Cepeda family was in the forefront of keeping the legacy of the bomba tradition alive in Puerto Rico.Bobbi's legacy for Puerto Rican music lives on, as she was one of the founders of the Bomplenazo, a festival featuring the music of the Puerto Rican genres of bomba and plena at the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture in the Bronx. She and her longtime programmatic collaborator, Wally Edgecombe, the artistic director of the Center, acquired grants to present the Bomplenazo, which has taken place every other year since 2000. It brings together bomba musicians and dancers as well as pleneros from all across the diaspora and from the Island for a 3-day showcase of the music and traditions, and situates the Bronx as a center of that culture. It is probably the singular most important event for Afro-Puerto Rican music traditions, featuring concerts, workshops, film screenings, and jam sessions. Artists from California to Texas, Chicago, Florida, and, of course, Puerto Rico come to the Bronx for this event.Bobbi was equally passionate about social justice and worker rights. She fought valiantly against her Mitchell-Lama residence going private. The Mitchell-Lama program provides affordable rental and cooperative housing to moderate- and middle-income families. The program was sponsored by New York State Senator MacNeil Mitchell and Assemblyman Alfred Lama and was signed into law in 1955. Bobbi was raised to believe that everyone deserves to live a dignified life in a clean and respectable housing situation. Bobbi put up a good fight, but she lost.Another fight Bobbi fought and ultimately lost was her fight with 9/11-related cancer and other ailments. Bobbi lived a few miles from the Twin Towers and saw the planes hit on September 11, 2001. She stayed on her balcony and was covered in ash from the debris, which sadly caused her multiple cancers. First diagnosed in 2010, Bobbi sought treatment and kept the cancer at bay for 10 years. She ultimately died from heart failure and respiratory complications.After she was in and out of the hospital for a few years and had taken a few tumbles on the streets of Manhattan and in her home, Bobbi's nephew Michael Apfelberg and his wife, Kerstin, moved her to New Hampshire in January 2022. Kerstin visited Bobbi almost every day during Bobbi's transition to New Hampshire. Initially homesick for New York, real chicken soup, and Puerto Rican food, she had started to heal, walk about, and organize the aides at her facility to advocate for better working conditions. Indeed, her nephew Michael recalled that on the day she died, she spoke Spanish to her aide Lydia, asking her where she was from, about her family, and about her new life in New Hampshire. A folklorist to the end.She leaves behind her nephew Michael and his wife, Kerstin; her niece, Lisa Apfelberg-Walton, and her husband, Michael Walton, and their daughter, Madeline; her grandniece, Casey, and her husband, Jon, and their son, Hudson (nicknamed Hud by Bobbi, a pet name only she used) Woodward, who gave Bobbi much joy in her last months; and her cousin, Sandy Rear, who recently passed as I was writing this obituary. She was pre-deceased by her sister, Elizabeth, her husband, Hank Apfelberg, and her uncle, Philip Singer.