Songs and Intellectuals:

Abstract

Paul Gilroy's effort to grasp the cultural and political currents of the black Atlantic finds one of its guiding threads in black music, its social relations, and its circulation in this vast area. The story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the complex reception of their performances of spirituals by diverse audiences on both sides of the Atlantic functions as a key example in his critical and nuanced examination of the politics of black authenticity. This discussion, in turn, directly contributes to Gilroy's case for a theoretical model of diaspora that understands ethnicity as “an infinite process of identity construction.”1It makes intuitive sense that a similar focus on music should allow us to extend Gilroy's approach to the black Atlantic beyond the boundaries of the English-speaking world, especially given the vitality, creativity, and global reach of African-inflected musics all through the Americas. That is not as easy as it seems, of course. Still, Gilroy's treatment of the Jubilee Singers provides a fruitful perspective for exploring the opportunities for and challenges of including two other major languages of the Americas, Spanish and Portuguese, in the conversations of the Atlantic diaspora. In particular, his discussion of the work of Alain Locke (1885–1954), a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of the influential anthology The New Negro (1925), opens up a promising comparative perspective.A professor of philosophy at Howard University, Locke had received his PhD from Harvard in 1918 and had been the first African American to receive a Rhodes scholarship. He wrote about African American culture and supported the work of African American intellectuals throughout his career. In The New Negro, Locke brought together creative pieces by African American writers as well as essays on African American culture and its relation to Africa. For George Hutchinson, Locke's goal as an editor was to affirm the “ideal of a national Negro cultural awakening” through the orchestration of “numerous different voices and points of view.”2Gilroy quotes from the opening paragraph of the essay on music that Locke contributed to The New Negro: The spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America. But the very elements that make them uniquely expressive of the Negro make them at the same time deeply representative of the soil that produced them. Thus, as unique spiritual products of American life, they become nationally as well as racially characteristic. It may not be readily conceded now that the song of the Negro is America's folk song; but if the spirituals are what we think them to be, a classic folk expression, then this is their ultimate destiny. Already they give evidence of this classic quality…. The universality of the spirituals looms more and more as they stand the test of time.3 Locke's representation of the spirituals as folk music of national and universal significance finds a close analogy in the treatment of certain vernacular musics that are culturally identified as having African roots by two influential Latin American intellectuals, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) and the Brazilian Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), particularly in their essays on music that date from the 1920s.Carpentier and Andrade are recognized now as major literary figures of the twentieth century and remembered, above all, for their achievement as fiction writers. In the 1920s, at the beginning of their careers, both writers were engaged in polemics for artistic renewal and played an important role as intellectual leaders.4 Andrade was one of the organizers of the 1922 Week of Modern Art in São Paulo, usually regarded as the starting point of the modernist movement in Brazil. Carpentier was at the center of the Afro-Cuban movement in Cuba. Like Locke, Carpentier and Andrade were both advocates for African-inflected musics in Cuba and Brazil. In the 1920s, a defense of black vernacular musics was likely to be met with a dismissive, if not hostile, response, as Locke's remark that “it may not be readily conceded now that the song of the Negro is America's folk song” implies. All three writers insisted, tirelessly, that these musics must be taken seriously, at a time when prejudice weighed heavily on their reception.This article explores a suggestive pattern of similarities in the ways that Locke, Carpentier, and Andrade approach African-inflected vernacular musics. The three intellectuals converge in calling on composers of cultivated music to both recognize the richness of these traditions and draw on them to create work that will be comparable in spirit and quality to that of Stravinsky and other great names of twentieth-century European music. Yet the striking parallels between their musical projects go hand in hand with significant, albeit less evident, contrasts between the personas that each intellectual constructs in the process of writing. Locke takes the position of a black intellectual leader. Carpentier, for his part, writes as a white intellectual who admires the music of Afro-Cubans from the outside. Andrade writes as a mestiço who is confident that he fully belongs in the mestiço culture of Brazil. My comparative discussion brings to light a broad and unstable field of racial identifications and relations in which “blackness” is variously defined. In order to do justice to the complexities of the racialized culture of the Atlantic world, I suggest, we need to move beyond the clear-cut, binary opposition between “black” and “white” that prevails in the English-speaking area of it (and that underlies Gilroy's argument). By so doing, we can develop a flexible, dynamic, and comprehensive understanding of “blackness.”5If we consider now the conclusion of Locke's essay, the parallels between his work and that of the Latin American authors becomes especially clear. In the last few paragraphs of the text, Locke calls for “a broader conception and more serious appreciation of the Negro folk song.” He believes that it is not enough simply to preserve the spirituals. Locke envisions, rather, their “art development” into “the music of tomorrow” by a “genius” who will be the “giant of his age.”6 Throughout the article, he mentions several composers who are already working in the direction he has in mind. These names suggest how far beyond “folklore” Locke hopes that such “modernist music” will develop: Edgar Varèse (1883–1965), a French and American composer of experimental music; William Grant Still (1895–1978), whom Eileen Southern has described as the dean of African American composers; Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), who established himself as a major composer in France in the 1920s (after spending a few years in Brazil); Antonín Dvórak (1841–1904), a leading figure of Bohemian musical nationalism, and Igor Stravínsky (1882–1971), whose Firebird (1920) was a landmark of twentieth century music. Locke brings together a group of composers who are well recognized as innovators of cultivated music yet share, at the same time, an explicit interest in reworking vernacular traditions. They are all European, with the exception of William Grant Still. All of them draw from the vernacular musics of the Americas, albeit in varying degrees.Locke's list of names suggests that he relies on musical nationalism as a model for his project of having a composer of genius develop innovative music out of the material provided by the spirituals. A widespread movement that had begun in Europe in the nineteenth century and coincided with political movements for national independence, musical nationalism remained a vital current of innovation at the time when Locke was writing.7 Locke pointedly refers to Dvorák, a composer who had lived and worked in the United States from 1892 to 1895 and whose well-known New World Symphony (or Symphony no. 9 in E Minor) had premiered in New York City in 1893. His article for The New Negro mentions thematic and melodic borrowings from spirituals in Dvorák's work, reiterating an opinion about the New World Symphony that was current at the time and encouraged by the composer himself.8The national styles of twentieth-century music are a central reference for Andrade and Carpentier as well. The same European composers favored by Locke are revisited in the Latin Americans' texts: Varèse, Milhaud, Dvorák, and Stravinsky. Locke included African American composer William Grant Still in this largely European group; Carpentier and Andrade follow an analogous strategy, bringing up the names of composers from Cuba and Brazil on a par with the Europeans. However, there is little overlap between the names of composers from the Americas mentioned by the three writers. Carpentier and Andrade converge in their admiration for the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), but they don't seem familiar with William Grant Still. Carpentier adds to the group the names of the Cubans Amadeo Roldán (1900–1939) and Alejandro García Caturla (1906–1940), while Andrade calls attention to another Brazilian composer, Luciano Gallet (1893–1931).Taken together, this consistent preference for musical nationalism and the coincidences in Locke's, Andrade's, and Carpentier's choice of European models reveal a great deal about their outlook. All three intellectuals develop their arguments from the perspective of cultivated as opposed to vernacular musics. Locke was known among his contemporaries for his elitist musical tastes. When he began his studies at Harvard, Locke wrote to his mother about his interest in taking piano lessons but added that he could not afford them.9 On the other hand, the Latin Americans' approach to music was formed through long training in the classical European tradition. Andrade trained as a pianist at the Conservatório dramático e musical in his native São Paulo from 1911 to 1917 and began a tenure as professor of history of music and piano at the same institution in 1924. He sustained a lifelong interest in classical music, apparent in all facets of his work—as creative writer, essayist, journalist, and educator.10 Carpentier, for his part, was also “a promising pianist in his youth” and even contemplated a career in music.11 Critics have often noted that Carpentier's engagement with music is enduring and permeates most of his work.12In their essays and journalistic pieces of the 1920s, roughly contemporaneous with The New Negro anthology, the two Latin American intellectuals articulate analogous projects for the music of Brazil and Cuba. As Mareia Quintero Rivero has shown, both argue for the recognition and the development of the vernacular musics of their nations.13 Their arguments run parallel to Locke's. Above all, they rely on a similar distinction between folkloric and artistic music. Andrade's Ensaio sobre a música brasileira (first published 1928) brings to the foreground with special clarity the assumptions implicit in the contrast between folklore and art: “O artista tem que só dar pros elementos já existentes [na inconsciência do povo] uma transposição erudita, que faça da música popular, música artística, isto é, imediatamente desinteressada” (“The artist only has to make an erudite transposition of elements that already exist [in the unconsciousness of the people], in order to make artistic music out of popular music, that is, in order to make immediately disinterested music”).14 Andrade's stance is openly normative. His understanding of “art” relies directly on the categories of classical aesthetics. Not only does he embrace the demand that art be disinterested; he presents it as the criterion for distinguishing between artistic and popular music, or “folklore,” as he puts it in other passages of the text. The familiar vocabulary of aesthetics permeates his argument. Elsewhere in the essay, we find a discussion of composers of “genius” who may write music that has “universal” appeal even as they write national music. The convergence between Andrade's argument and Locke's suggests that both develop within a shared framework of assumptions. Such a perspective on aesthetics and art cannot help but carry implications for their understanding of “folklore.” Andrade's popular music and Locke's spirituals are analogous not just in their unrecognized folkoric richness but, finally, in being not quite artistic.Similar assumptions shape Carpentier's approach to Cuban music. An analogous outlook is especially evident in his enthusiastic review of Amadeo Roldán's Obertura sobre temas cubanos, a central work of Cuban nationalist music. Caroline Rae briefly reconstructs the context of the composition and performance of this piece, in the course of her discussion of Carpentier's activity as a journalist and music critic in 1920s Havana. At the time, Carpentier was “a committed advocate of European modernism.”15 His articles discussed “Debussy, Ravel, Falla, the Ballets Russes, Picasso, Leon Bakst, Cocteau, Satie, the composers of Les Six (individually and as a group), Bartók, and Stravinski, hailing The Rite of Spring as the ideal model for Cuban musical nationalism.”16 Rae stresses that Carpentier belonged to a Leftist group of intellectuals, the Grupo minorista. Although Amadeo Roldán did not sign the Minorista manifesto, he knew those in the group well and developed a close friendship with Carpentier. Roldán shared with Alejandro García Caturla the goal of composing music inspired by both Afro-Cuban rhythms and the innovative classical music of their time.Carpentier's review of Roldán's Obertura relies, again, on the distinction between folklore and art: “Roldán cree que la inspiración popular debe utilizarse haciendola sufrir un intenso trabajo de elaboración, purificándola, modificándola en ciertos aspectos, a fin de transformarla en una materia ligera, dúctil, apta a dejarse imponer los moldes de la forma, sin la cual no puede existir verdaderamente la obra” (“Roldán believes that in order to use popular inspiration, [a composer] must make it go through an intense work of elaboration, purifying it, and changing it in certain respects, in order to transform it into a light, flexible matter that will be amenable to the imposition of the mold of form, without which there can be no work”).17 Capentier's representation of the composer is already a familiar one: although he has one foot in the folk tradition, his horizon extends far beyond folklore. Roldán is defined as an artist precisely because his goal is to go beyond the realm of the vernacular. For Carpentier as well, the task of the composer is to alter folkloric music to the point that it can be used as “matter” in a formal composition.Comparison with the two Latin American writers calls attention to an aspect of Locke's treatment of the spirituals that may not be immediately apparent. The model of musical nationalism, shared with Andrade and Carpentier, enables Locke to build an argument calling for a certain black vernacular music to be taken seriously—except not on its own terms. This approach does not simply carry consequences for the way the critic understands the relation of folklore to art or the role of the composer; it shapes also Locke's own position as an intellectual. Like the composer of artistic music, Locke does not belong, simply or fully, to the tradition of the spirituals. Rather, he sees beyond that world and looks for the horizon of universal culture. The orientation of the intellectual beyond and away from folklore is unmistakably clear in Andrade's and Carpentier's work; the comparison helps bring it to light in Locke's texts as well.In a roundabout way, this comparison has led to an insight into Locke's view of spirituals that resembles points that have already been made by African American scholar of black music Samuel A. Floyd Jr. Editor of an anthology on the music of the Harlem Renaissance, Floyd contributes to the volume an article about Locke's essays.18 At the same time as he acknowledges that Locke's work “invites comparison” with “the efforts of late nineteenth-century western European Nationalist composers,” Floyd places his arguments in the context of a broader cultural project shared by several Harlem Renaissance intellectuals who aimed for “the cultural transformation of black folk culture into a formal or higher culture—an art of greater value.”19 Even as Floyd is critical of the contradictions in Locke's attempt at the “vindication” of black music, he calls attention to the political goals that underlie his overall project: “At bottom, the Renaissance was an effort to secure economic, social, and cultural equality with white citizens, and the arts were to be used as a means of achieving that goal.”20In the course of his contextual reconstruction, Floyd calls attention to class differences among Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and describes them in terms of housing patterns: For the affluent—doctors, lawyers, and successful businessmen—there was Sugar Hill, where also resided W. E. B. Dubois, Roy Wilkins, Walter White, Jules Bledsoe, and other Renaissance leaders who lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue in one of the nation's first high-rise apartment buildings. Just below Sugar Hill was Striver's Row, where successful middle-class New Negro artists and writers such as Paul Robeson, Countee Cullen, Clarence Cameron White, W. C. Handy, and Fletcher Henderson lived in the classy Paul Dunbar Apartments which stood at 7th Avenue and 150th Street. James Weldon Johnson lived at 185 West 135th Street and Fats Waller lived next door. Then there was The Valley, which contained the black working classes and “sporting types.”21 Floyd's introduction of the category of class allows us to see in a new light the preference for musical nationalism that is evident not just in Locke's approach but in that of the three intellectuals we have been considering. Locke's, Andrade's, and Carpentier's familiarity with the European composers and their projects presupposes an elite education and their ambition to have local composers emulate musical nationalism betrays the outlook of an elite. As Brazilian critic José Miguel Wisnick has noted in a discussion of Andrade's essays on music, the “abyss” that divides the intellectual from the people may be apprehended as a “cultural” one, yet it may also be formulated, “in other terms, as class alterity.”22This broad comparative pattern brings to light another shared element—but one that distinguishes these projects from their European models. Locke, Carpentier, and Andrade derive from musical nationalism an approach to African-inflected vernacular musics. Yet, in addition to parallels, the comparative pattern calls attention to a significant divergence as well. In the process of writing about these musics, each intellectual ends up taking a position within a broader cultural field that defines what counts as “black” and what counts as “white.” Their perspectives differ, as do the writing personas that each shapes for himself in the process of writing. Such diversity, in turn, calls attention to variations in the ways that “blackness” is understood throughout the Americas. The effort to bring Spanish and Portuguese into the conversations of the black Atlantic requires, above all, that we explore the problems posed by these differences in construction.Carpentier—like Locke—identifies folklore, directly and exclusively, with black vernacular music; however, he approaches it from a diametrically opposed point of view. Carpentier was white, as we know well. His parents were European; he grew up speaking both Spanish and French, was educated at least in part in France, and spent a good part of his life in France too. Nevertheless, during the 1920s, first in Cuba and later in Paris, Carpentier was a central figure of the Afro-Cuban movement. As we have seen, he supported the music of Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla with enthusiastic reviews.23 In addition, he collaborated with the two composers: while he wrote the scenarios for Roldán's Afro-Cuban ballets El milagro de Anaquillé and La rebambaramba, García Caturla set to music some of Carpentier's Poemas afrocubanos. Robin D. Moore notes that in 1924 Carpentier became the editor in chief of the magazine Carteles, which “proved important to the overall valorization of Afrocuban music and dance in Cuba.”24 Finally, Carpentier's first novel, Écue-yamba-ó (1933) is a major prose work that came out of this movement, even if in later years its author was reluctant to have it republished.25Miguel Arnedo-Gómez takes the time to reconstruct the context of the Afro-Cuban movement in the opening chapter of Writing Rumba, his study of the poetry of the period. He begins by noting that blacks in Cuba faced “precarious social conditions” in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In his view, the effort to “revalorize Afro-Cuban traditions” responds to a moment of economic depression and political agitation against Cuban republican regimes as well as of intense dissatisfaction with the controlling role the United States played on the island. In this moment of heightened nationalist sentiment, Afro-Cubanism is distinguished by “the desire to promote an image of an ideal future Cuba without racial divisions.”26 Carpentier's work gives ample evidence of such a “desire for black and white unity”; at the same time, it often betrays the perspective of a white man.Carpentier's most well developed treatment of blacks' contributions to the music of the island is to be found in La música en Cuba (1946).27 Based on archival research, the author's knowledge of contemporary music, and his sophisticated training as a musician, this narrative of the development of Cuban music since the sixteenth century reads almost like as a novel. Although Carpentier discusses the role of black musicians throughout the book, the topic is most in evidence in the chapter “Los negros” (“Blacks in Cuba”), which focuses on the free black professional musicians of the nineteenth century. He stresses their “inmensa contribución” to the artistic life of Cuba (146). The author's effort to bring their achievements to the attention of his audience is everywhere evident. Carpentier reconstructs the work black musicians performed, the professional restrictions they faced, and their difficult and insecure position in Cuban society. He presents the information he has been able to collect about their achievements. Blacks were the majority among professional musicians, yet they were barred from the most advantageous positions (138). The Havana Cathedral, Carpentier notes, did not accept “Ethiopians” in its chorus. Yet black musicians found employment in public dance halls, in the theater, and in bands and orchestras that performed on public and social occasions. Carpentier registers the names of Juan José Rebollar, the best maker of musical instruments in Cuba, Claudio José Domingo Brindis de Salas, a virtuoso who had a distinguished career in Europe yet died alone in Buenos Aires, María Gamboa, a singer who was acclaimed in many European centers, and many others.Nevertheless, and especially in passages that discuss the social division between free blacks and slaves, the outlook of an outsider, privileged and white, comes to the fore. Because of his twentieth-century musical tastes, Carpentier is interested mainly in vernacular, urban, and contemporary Afro-Cuban musics. Arnedo-Gómez calls attention to a “kind of ethnographic methodology” that led him and other Afro-Cubanist intellectuals to make efforts to “come into direct contact with their raw material” by visiting black working-class neighborhoods near Havana, attending religious ceremonies, and collecting and taking notes on the music and rhythms they heard.28 In La música en Cuba, Carpentier assumes that the music that he finds interesting now had been performed during colonial times only by slaves in slave barracks rather than by professional musicians. In the few paragraphs that seek to imagine how a classically trained black musician might respond to vernacular Afro-Cuban music, Carpentier lapses into the language of exotic primitivism: En esta primera mitad del siglo XIX, el negro hace música blanca, sin aportarle más enriquecimientos que los debidos a su atávico sentido del ritmo, que le lleva a acentuar de modo muy personal ciertos tipos de composiciones bailables. Cuando escribe una melodía, no parece recordar, por ahora, el acervo ancestral africano. El toque batá, el himno yoruba, las supervivencias totémicas observadas en comparsas del día de Reyes, la invocación “en lengua,” transmitidas por la tradición oral entre las negradas esclavas, son cosas que tardaron mucho tiempo todavía en salir de un confinamiento impuesto por el sistema social de la Colonia. Cuando las comparsas se sueltan por las calles, el 6 de enero, con sus diablitos, reyes, y culonas, el “hombre político” se sesga, dejando pasar, como el blanco, aquel carnaval tolerado por las autoridades en virtud de una vieja costumbre. Si el tambor hace vibrar, por simpatía, las más secretas fibras de su corazón, no lo confiesa. (150)(In the first half of the nineteenth century, blacks played and created white music, without enriching it further, except with their atavic rhythmic sense, where they uniquely accentuated certain kinds of danceable compositions. When they wrote a melody, they did not seem to remember for the moment the rich treasure of their ancestral African heritage. The batá beat, the Yoruba hymn, the totemic survivals observed in the carnival parades [comparsas] held on Three Kings Day, the invocations in “native tongue” transmitted in the oral traditions of the black slaves would take a long time to leave the confines imposed by the colonial social system. When the comparsas are let loose on the street on January 6, with their diablitos [little devils], kings and culonas [big-bottomed women], the “political man” draws back, letting pass, just like whites, that carnival tolerated by the authorities, respecting an old custom. If the drum made the innermost fibers of his heart resonate in sympathy, he did not admit it. [163]) Carpentier comes close to reproaching professional black musicians for their music and the instruments they played. His second-guessing rests on a racialized understanding of music: cultivated music is “white,” even when played by a black virtuoso, while Afro-Cuban vernacular musics are “black.” Carpentier operates here with a clear-cut opposition between “black” and “white.” This division, in turn, cannot help but affect the image of the author and his audience. Carpentier and those he addresses appear to share an understanding of cultivated music; in the terms laid out by this passage, then, both author and audience are constructed as white. Black Cubans don't seem to participate in the conversation, which is, nevertheless, about them.Andrade, for his part, approaches the relationship between popular and Afro-Brazilian vernacular musics in different terms from both Locke and Carpentier. An overriding concern with national music serves as the viewpoint organizing the argument of his Ensaio sobre a música brasileira (1928). Andrade admires Brazil's música popular, describing it as “a mais completa, mais totalmente nacional, mais forte criação de nossa raça até agora” (24) (“the most complete, most totally national, strongest creation of our race up to now”). He has a broad conception of música popular. In his view, it encompasses not only rural musical folklore that might be collected by a scholar, as he himself collected it, but also urban musics, both the varieties performed in Afro-Brazilian communities and the numerous songs that were then being commercially recorded, such as the widely available and successful early sambas by Afro-Brazilian composer Sinhô (1888–1930). Andrade maintains that the people of Brazil—“a nossa raça” (“our race”)—are the product of a mixture of several different races. This representation, both influential and persistent in Brazil, was shared by most in his generation.29 Andrade's own experimental—but now canonical—narrative Macunaíma (1928), which dates from the same period, explores analogous images of the nation and its mestiço people with irony and perhaps some pessimism as well.30The following passage illustrates the key importance of Andrade's view of the Brazilian people for his reflections on popular music: Cabe lembrar mais uma vez aqui do quê é feita a música brasileira. Embora chegada no povo a uma expressão original e autêntica, ela provém de fontes estranhas: a ameríndia em porcentagem pequena; a africana em porcentagem bem maior; a portuguesa em porcentagem vasta. Além disso a influência espanhola, sobretudo a hispanoamericana do Atlântico (Cuba e Montevidéu, habanera e tango). A influência europeia também, não só e principalmente pelas danças (valsa polca mazurca shottsh) como na formação da modinha. (25)(It is worth remembering, yet again, what Brazilian music is made of. Although it has reached an original and authentic expression in our people, it comes from disparate sources: the Amerindian in a small percentage; the African in a much larger percentage; the Portuguese in vast percentage. Beyond that, there's the Spanish influence, especially the Spanish-American from the Atlantic (Cuba and Montevideo, habanera and tango). European influence too, not simply or mainly in dances (waltz, polka, mazurca, shotts) but also in the formation of the Brazilian modinha.) Here, and elsewhere in the Ensaio, the notion of an “original and authentic” música brasileira serves the purpose of establishing that a Brazilian people has already been shaped out of so many disparate voices.Andrade diverges widely from Locke and Carpentier on this point: he doesn't treat popular music as solely the province of Afro-Brazilians but takes it to be an achievement of the people of Brazil