Post written by Michelle MacQueen

We started the second day of the Colloquium with a pair of presentations under the theme Alliances, Networks, Cosmopolitanism: Haitian Transnation and the Black Pacific. We heard first from Dr. Gage Averill. Gage is a renowned ethnomusicologist with an over-30-year history of research into Haitian popular music. He produced an award-winning book and a Grammy-nominated CD box set, as well as a string of works dealing specifically with the cultural geography and politics of music related to Haitian immigration. He has performed with rara bands, carnival ensembles and konpa groups in Haiti and in diaspora. His presentation was titled Sonic Signification in the Haitian Transnation. He reflected on his years of doing research on Haitian music and culture. In this work, he has pursued two overarching research questions. The first question was what prompted his initial book project: How does music interact with and shape power? The second question focused on Haitian cultural geography: How does music respond to, enact, and condition a sense of place and belonging– especially with migration and the emergence of a Haitian diaspora or transnation? He wrote in response to this question in a series of articles starting in 1993 followed by a sequence of chapters in edited volumes. His presentation distilled the themes of this second research question, while looking at how it intersects with the former question about music and power. He explained to us how music has served as the primary signifier of the Haitian diaspora, even as this diaspora continuously changes shape. He showed us how music works at the boundaries and seeps through these boundaries to enact alliances and communities of shared interests. Music is the soundtrack to rituals that facilitate nostalgic immersion, and also help to negotiate the relationship of the community (koloni) to other US and Canadian communities, as well as to the changing circumstances on the island. Gage examined the strategies and tactics of musicians based in the diaspora and in Haiti. He looked at how they sought audiences, influence and prestige through performance across national boundaries, while helping to structure the basic understanding of a Haitian transnation. He described how this research was always structured self-consciously along the lines of the “tournée” or tour.  As such, Gage enacted the same cultural geography as the Haitian musicians with whom he worked. His paper was based on forty years of research on—and participation in—Haitian popular music, religious ceremonies, rara, carnival, festivals, and “folkloric” performance. After the presentation, the audience discussed the importance of locality and Gage shared some more stories from his work in Haiti, including experiences with music and social demonstrations that involved encounters with the police.     Next up was Dr. Gabriel Solis with a presentation titled Blues in the Black Pacific: Jazz, Community Music-Making, and Afro-Indigenous Alliances in Australia. Gabriel Solis is a scholar of African American music and Indigenous musics of the Southwestern Pacific. He has done ethnographic and historical research with jazz musicians in the United States and with musicians in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on work in African American studies, anthropology, and history, he addresses the ways people engage the past, performing history and memory through music. Additionally, his work explores musicians’ and audiences’ interactions with and personalization of mass-mediated musical commodities in transnational circulation. He is the author of two books: one on Thelonious Monk and another on Monk’s collaborations with John Coltrane. He is also co-editor with Bruno Nettl of a collection of essays on improvisation cross-culturally.   The following pair of presentations was grouped together as Public Outreach and Education. Dr. Alisha Lola Jones presented first. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University (Bloomington). She is working on a book called Flaming?: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, under contract with Oxford University Press. This book breaks ground by analyzing the role of gospel music making in constructing and renegotiating gender identity among black men. Dr. Jones’ research interests include musical masculinities, global pop music, future studies, ecomusicology, music and theology, the music industry, musics of the African diaspora and emerging research on music and future foodways (gastromusicology) in conjunction with The Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, CA. Her presentation was titled “Be Grateful, We Celebrate Black History Month”: Issues in African Americans Practitioning Gospel Among European Americans. She started her presentation by noting the passing of the gospel music icon Edwin Hawkins on January 15, 2018. After touring the world, four-time Grammy Award winner Hawkins realized that there was not sufficient information covering the history and development of Black sacred music heritage and contemporary practice. Hawkins convened the first Music & Arts Seminar in San Francisco, California in 1979– what would become one of several organizations filling in a void in gospel music cultural preservation through mobile public arts education. Dr. Jones explained how these organizations often spike in activity annually during the summer among African American practitioners and in February among non-African American gospel enthusiasts. Highlighting this disparity, she asked: to what extent is bias sustained through the accepted seasonality of black music education in the U.S.? More plainly, she examined what is in it for folks who share their music outside of their communities. Drawing on sentiments heard in the field (including her own work in arts leadership), Dr. Jones described sort of vulnerabilities and exploitation that occurs in these seasonal instances of black music education.   She ended her presentation with some calls to action:

• Invest time in studying black sacred music with practitioners and scholars.
• Include African American scholars and practitioners in the development and institutionalization of the research.
• Offer equitable compensation, accounting for the invisible labor of training people whose potential cultural insensitivity is anxiety inducing.
• Have an answer to the question: What is in it for them as they share their knowledge?
• Be prepared for them to decline engagement for whatever reason.
• Avoid erasing their labor by citing your sources verbally and in written form.
• And finally, despite all of our misgivings about European American’s non-committal relationship promoting formal training in black sacred music, “be grateful, we celebrate black history month.”

 

Next, Huib Schippers presented Encounters Festivals: Creating cultural meeting grounds for artists, communities and cultural diplomacy.   Huib Schippers is the Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution. He has a long and diverse history of engagement with music across various settings and cultures. With a Master’s degree in English literature and twenty years of traditional training as a professional sitar player, he proceeded with (partially overlapping) careers in performance, education, research, journalism, the record trade, arts policy, and project management. He is the author of Facing the music: Shaping music education from a global perspective and Sustainable futures for music cultures: An ecological perspective, which he co-edited with Catherine Grant. His presentation focused on his time at the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia between 2005 and 2013. While at this institution, he was part of a team that organized four festivals that explored cultural meetings between Australian Indigenous people and white settlers (2005); Australia and the Asia Pacific (2007); China and Australia (2010); and India and Australia (2013) respectively.   Involving students and staff from Queensland Conservatorium, artists from the cultural area and Australia, and cultural and intellectual leaders, the events aimed to fearlessly explore musical meetings and interactions–warts and all–not avoiding issues like appropriation, inherent racism and imbalances of power, but also celebrating and showcasing the benefits of various levels of cultural exchange. His presentation noted key aspects of these festivals in an effort to highlight some of the complexities and rewards of intercultural work. The discussion of this presentation focused on the role of artistic festivals and public arts events to move beyond tokenistic multiculturalism and to work harder to make meaningful intercultural events.   Dr. Ameera Nimjee led us in a public dance workshop on Kathak Dance in Hindustani Music Culture. She is a trained kathak (North Indian classical) dancer, and continues to study, perform, and teach in Canada, the United States, and India. Her publications include book chapters in Music in the American Diasporic Wedding and Dance Matters Too: Markets, Memories, Identities. A member of the Ismaili community, she was Creative Director of the Jubilee Arts Festival at Lisbon, with over 50,000 in attendance. She worked for several years in writing, programming, and curation at the Royal Ontario Museum and Aga Khan Museum, and has published a journal article on music in museums.        

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Today marked the first official day of the 26th International Council for Traditional Music Colloquium. We spent the day at Membertou Heritage Park. Our discussions started with acknowledging the land on which our Colloquium took place: Mi’kma’ki — the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. We talked about the history of Membertou, and also more broadly about the history between Canada and Indigenous peoples, noting that there is significant work still to done.

 

 

 

 

 

We were honoured to have started our day by listening to the singing and drumming of Graham Marshall, David Meuse, and Bill Meuse. We thank them for sharing these songs and stories with us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were welcomed by Vice President Academic and Provost at Cape Breton University, Richard MacKinnon.

 

 

Svanibor Pettan also welcomed us on behalf of the ICTM and gave us an overview of the organization’s mandates.

We  then heard from Graham Marshall, who gave a presentation called Wula Na Kinu: This Is Who We Are. Graham was born and grew up in Membertou First Nation. He speaks and sings Mi’kmaq, and is a founding member of the Sons of Membertou. The group’s first album (1995) was nominated at the East Coast Music Awards, and they performed at the Halifax G7 that same year. He recently established another drum group, The Kun’tewiktuk Singers. Marshall worked with Mi’kmaq Family and Children’s Services for more than ten years and developed a mentorship program, in which older youth are paired with younger children to provide support through traditional practices. He is dedicated to continuing Mi’kmaq culture through the practice of singing, drumming, and other traditional knowledge, and to passing these traditions and knowledge to the next generation.

As a Membertou Council Member, Graham is active in the development and actualization of Indigenous policies and governance, and in implementing the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He serves on the Council’s Executive, focusing on community and cultural development, including Indigenous tourism. Graham told us about migration and encounter particularly with stories from his own life and experience. He also introduced us to the Kun’tewiktuk play that was created through Membertou’s collaboration in an earlier research-creation project phase with Marcia Ostashewski and the Centre for Sound Communities research team. Kun’tewiktuk tells the story of the forced relocation of the Kings Road Reserve community to its current Membertou location.

 

Next, we had our first keynote presentation from Tina K. Ramnarine. She is Professor of music at the Royal Holloway University of London and a musician, anthropologist and global cultural explorer. Her research focuses on music in global histories, cultural heritages and identity politics, as well as arts responses to contemporary global challenges. She has carried out extensive research across the Nordic countries, especially on Finnish and Saami music. She has worked on Caribbean music, labour histories in the Indian Diaspora, and intercultural gamelan projects in Bali. Her latest publications include the edited volumes Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency, We Mark Your Memory: Writings from the Descendants of Indenture, and Dance, Music and and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora. She has broad interests in transnationalism, decolonizing scholarship and postcolonial studies.

Her talk was titled Reclaiming Indigenous Cultural Heritage in an Island of Multiple Diasporas. Looking at the island of Trinidad, she notes that until until recently, Trinidad’s Indigenous communities were mostly invisible. In the last couple of decades they have become increasingly politically active and hence visible.

Her presentation discussed reclamations of Indigenous cultural heritage in an island of multiple diasporas. Looking to music, she showed examples of parang and to the changing politics around this genre. Her discussion draws on literary insights from Wilson Harris’s The Ghost of Memory, particularly the questions he poses in relation to new histories of Indigeneity: “What is spirit? What is the New World? What is art? What is truth?”

Through her discussion of parang and sites like Pitch Lake, Tina examined how heritage sites and cultural heritage practices are dimensions of the recuperative imaginaries of the arts, overlapping with diasporic cultural histories of African enslavement and Asian indenture. She suggests that in this context, Trinidad becomes a laboratory for examining the dynamics of migration and encounter between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘diasporic’, as well as reclamations of cultural heritage across both identity categories.

 

Dr. Alex E. Chávez gave a public lecture and demonstration about Sonic Bridges: Home, Intimacy, and the Borderlands. He is the Nancy O’Neill Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. Dr. Chávez’s research and teaching explore Latina/o/x expressive culture in everyday life as it manifests through sound, language, and performance. He has published in various academic journals, contributed to numerous prominent volumes, and his writing has been featured in public venues such as the Huffington Post and Revista Contratiempo. His book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño has won many awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of both academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer.

An accomplished musician and multi-instrumentalist, Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores (most recently Emmy Award-winning El Despertar), and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning artists. In 2016, he produced the Smithsonian Folkways album Serrano de Corazón. 

 

 

Alex introduced us to huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. A musician himself, Chávez has placed sound at the centre of his artistic practice, scholarship, and publicly engaged work. In this presentation, he discussed how the musico-poetic design and performance of huapango arribeño produce shared sentiments of intimacy, conviviality, and companionship. He also shared his own stories about how he has brought these insights in both his academic and creative work as a means of hearing across multiple types of borders.

 

Alex ended his presentation with a performance of one of his own songs.

 

We ended the evening with a public event by Dr. Afua Cooper. She is a senior academic trained in the history of Black people in Canada, and the African Diaspora. Her book on Canadian slavery broke new ground in the study of Canadian and Atlantic slavery and it was nominated for a Governor-General’s award, and named by the CBC as one of the best books published in Canada. A recognized poet, spoken word artist, and wordsmaestra, Afua helped found the Dub Poetry movement in Canada and organized five international Dub Poetry festivals in Canada, in addition to publishing five books of poetry and recording two poetry CDs. In recognition of her poetry she was installed in 2018 as Halifax Region’s Poet Laureate. An academic leader, Afua founded the Black Canadian Studies Association, the Dalhousie Black Faculty and Staff Caucus, and she established the Black and African Diaspora Studies Minor at Dalhousie. Her awards and achievements include: the Ontario Black History Society Daniel G. Hill Community Service Award (2019); Canadian Trailblazers Award, Historica Canada Recognition (2017); a SSHRC Scholar of Honour feature (2017); Nova Scotia Human Rights Award (2015). The impulse behind the work of this multi-disciplinary scholar/artist is democratic. She aims to bridge the gap between academe and the world at large.

Her presentation was entitled Fugitive Verses/Sonic Stories: Slavery, the Middle Passage, and the Soundscapes of Black People’s Freedom Quest.

Through a series of poetic performances, she drew on history, poetry, memory, literary archaeology, slave narratives, petitions, advertisements for runaway slave, and sale of slaves, Negro Spirituals, and dub poetry–all to tell a sonic story of the awfulness, the brilliance, the pain and anguish, and the resilience that are part and parcel of Black people’s 500-year migratory journey within Canada and the African Diaspora. From Cape Breton in the North Atlantic to the Niagara Peninsula in the south, to Victoria in the West, “Fugitive Verses” sings the Black Atlantic. Afua opened with a moving performance of The Child is Alive.

She told stories about historic figures like John Ware and Richard Pierpoint. We heard about migrations across the Atlantic in 15 Ships and about the Caribbean in Ra Ra. She also shared some very local stories in the poem Shots Rang Out On My Street Today, in conversation with the recently released Halifax Street Checks Report.

Afterwards, the audience discussed how poetry and performance as means of mobilizing public-facing scholarship, which Afua noted was one of the major successes of the recent project blackhalifax.com.