Peter Hoesing

An ethnomusicologist has many teachers

Yesterday I had the privilege of working with Grinnell music alumnus Erik Jarvis to hang a temporary exhibition of photographs from my field research in Uganda. Erik works with the Grinnell Area Arts Council, preparing their lovely historic building on Broad Street–a recently renovated adaptive re-use that is a work of art in its own right–for a wide variety of exhibitions and events. This time we were putting up a mini-exhibition of twelve photographs that I took at a pair of events in the Busoga region of eastern Uganda. In a wild synchronicity of contrasting sacred musical worlds, they will remain on view through the Grinnell College production of Godspell April 13-16 until my Ugandan Ensemble plays on April 19th.

Nearly a decade ago, when I was playing in three different world music ensembles in a given year, Dale Olsen was thinking a lot about what it meant to perform folkloric musical traditions on stage and encouraging us, his students, to engage in that discourse as well. He referred to the practice of “stagelore,” noting that these performances are discrete from the culturally situated iterations of the teachers we encounter in our fieldwork. They generate their own significations. Tom Turino asserts the difference as a distinction between the cultural formations of those who create the traditions (like the woman pictured below and those who surround me above) and the cultural cohorts who come to appreciate, adopt, and perform them (like my students, colleagues, and me).

Lukoghe plays a kagwala

Now I have the self-conscious and perhaps precarious privilege of directing my own ensemble, a self-selected cultural cohort of Grinnell students who have worked hard all semester to prepare this performance. They have learned Luganda and Lusoga phrases and songs, they have become devoted novices on East African instruments, and they have learned in these and other ways something about how the Baganda and Basoga of southern Uganda live, eat, think, and pray. I hope, through their efforts and mine, that our performance will represent something of the creative ways of being-in-the-world that I have come to so deeply appreciate about those who teach me their songs.

I’ve had so little time for blogging this summer, or much any reflection for that matter. In May, my family completed our move from South Carolina to South Dakota. I got a job offer right in the middle of that move, so now we’re looking down the barrel of one academic year involving a lengthy commute from our new home to that job. I don’t remember when or under what circumstances, but a few years back my wife passed along a fantastic piece of life advice/commentary from her father: “You only have today to be good to them.”

He was talking about our two sons, of course.

In May, the specter of spending every day with them until August seemed like so much time. It was almost daunting to think through how to occupy their busy little hands and their spongy little minds. We played, we painted and drew, we read countless books, and then I realized this morning that now that time is gone. They didn’t understand why Daddy’s face was leaking during music time this morning, but they hugged and kissed me sweetly anyway. Then one boy bellowed something incomprehensible and the other farted, so the moment passed as quickly as we started laughing.

On Monday we pack them off to daycare so we can both resume work and be–to use another well-worn phrase from my in-laws–just as happy as if we were normal. I started the summer thinking about things that I could try to teach these two lovely little rascals. Now it’s crystal clear that I’m the lucky schlub who got to learn how to be their father over and over again each day.

This next part will be hard, but then again when has getting up and packing the kids off to go anywhere been easy? I pray we might all learn from the example of our second-born: he’s pictured here having just yelled one of his current favorite words, “GO!”

Yes indeed: into life and love we go once again, ever deeper.

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We have already seen some tremendous scholarship this weekend, and there’s more to come. I was fascinated by archival and manuscript research by three students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Samantha Horn, Amanda Black, and Jamie Blake. Sadly, administrative duties and other distractions have kept me from seeing too many Florida State Colleagues’ presentations, but the buzz about them is always encouraging despite those frustrations. Fellow #HBCU folks will be glad to know that J. Wissler Elias from Florida A&M gave a fine presentation on reception of Mark Applebaum’s music on that campus. Tyler Sonnichsen, Victor Hernández-Sang, and Chris Ballengee guided us through the robustly diverse soundscapes of Washington D.C. and its connections to Paris, Trinidad, and a broad, inclusive Latino musical community. This morning, Les Gay endowed us with new ears for listening through a comparison of Sonny Rollins’ various recordings of “St. Thomas,” particularly his 1965 live video at Tivoli Gardens (though I’m still looking for a link to that video).

I was so pleased with the intersections and parallels in yesterday’s tightly focused session on Sound, Space, and Substance in Music and Ritual, a panel I put together. We always hope to generate those kinds of rich conversations, but this one was particularly productive. It will be exciting to continue that discourse.

Meanwhile, there’s so much more here than any one person can see or hear. It’s a great metaphor for a first trip to Trinidad & Tobago. The place is deep, complex, and masqued in many intriguing ways.

One of the great privileges of traveling and working in South Africa has been to experience the robust diversity of the choral tradition here. Vestiges of apartheid have created a social world in which people speak of “black choirs” and “white choirs,” but the University of Pretoria Tuks Camerata clearly bucks that trend. In a bit different way, the Johannesburg Metro Police Department Choristers resist classification based on repertory as well.

The first signal of this was what we heard as we piled into the JMPD van to go and meet some of the Choristers at a police barracks in Jozi: it was a Meyerbeer opera! I came into this with as few expectations as possible, but this really did surprise me. It wasn’t a fluke, either. The director of the choir, Mofukeng, had a stack of classical CDs in the van and others in a personal vehicle that he used to take us back to our hotel later that night. Clearly there’s a fascination here with European classics.

Being rather unfamiliar with the particulars of contemporary South African choral music, I couldn’t have known that this fascination has not only been around for some time, but also heavily influenced new compositions by African composers. Much of the music we heard at the JMPD rehearsal was 21st century music composed by Africans in a European tonal style with a pretty consistently Romantic flavor. It was so interesting to see a choir of mature voices dive into this material with such gusto. The individual voices in the choir are stunning. Together, the group at its best sounds much like an opera chorus. They have similar stamina, too: when we returned from a dinner with the director, some of the choir officers, and a police administrative official, we learned that they had already been rehearsing for two hours and would continue for two more!

The end of the rehearsal revealed a different kind of repertoire diversity than that which the UP Tuks Camerata had shown us. Nearly all of the JMPD’s material is of African origin, but the end of their rehearsal consisted of traditional spirituals. The repetitive style of these tunes lends itself to dancing, so we got to see some spontaneous group choreography as well. The whole thing struck me as a tremendous opportunity to explore the notion of authenticity. The indigenization of European harmony in Romantic style creates one kind of South African choral authenticity. The longstanding tradition of African spirituals that involve no less European harmony–though in a decidedly different style–creates another. To invoke an old Lucille Clifton formulation, the combination of the two with other works expresses the soul of African variety.