Music Book Review: Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Secret History by Kristina R. Gaddy

Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History
by Kristina R. Gaddy (Music 787.88 Gad)

The banjo might be the first truly American musical invention. Nowadays, we associate the banjo with country and bluegrass music, where it has continued to proliferate as an important component of those musical styles, but during its history, it’s been used for many kinds of music, and its development coincided with a lot of early American history, too. But it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact date and place of its invention: there are related instruments still in use today in many parts of Africa, though the American iterations of the instrument have their own unique design elements. Learning more about the banjo might help us to learn more about ourselves, too, and Kristina Gaddy’s new book, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History, reveals a lot about both musical developments in early America as well as social issues that have been part of the entire length of our history.

 

Gaddy approaches the subject of the banjo both as a musician and as an historian. Her background as a nonfiction long-form journalist is important to this book, as it digs deeper into the earliest formative days of the banjo than previous scholars have generally published so far — there is a lot of original research here that ultimately pieces together as clear a picture of the beginnings of the banjo as we’re likely to find. But she is a musician herself, and an enthusiast of the banjo. She plays fiddle, and she has even produced a CD of field recordings of banjo player Currance Hammonds. Her partner, Pete Ross, is a luthier who produces elaborate replicas of period banjos, including exacting replicas of some of the earliest known instruments. This fascinating combination of backgrounds keeps Gaddy’s writing about the banjo both thoroughly researched and very enthusiastic.

 

Grammy, Pulitzer and MacArthur-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens provides a short foreword to the book that aptly describes the current state of research into the earliest days of the banjo: “Anybody who studies the banjo knows they are walking into a swamp of unknown players, scraps of primary sources, dead ends, flashes of brilliant understanding and also of utter despair. How is something so integral to American culture so badly understood and so widely misrepresented?” She points out that ceremonial and spiritual aspects of the banjo’s creation haven’t been discussed before, though they are likely essential to the real history of the instrument.

Those scraps of primary sources take interesting forms in the earliest history of the banjo: Gaddy takes over the prelude of the book with a discussion of her and her partner Ross’ searches for new information about the banjo in pre-1820 visual art. For Ross, these early paintings can be important clues for his replicas of early banjos, and for Gaddy, finding some new art that “changed what we knew about the instrument’s origins” led to the deep research that ultimately produced this book. Her immediate observations, which the book delves into in great detail, were that the origin of the banjo might not be as all-American as generally accepted, and that the early banjo was a sacred instrument, rather than a secular musical invention as it’s often discussed.

 

Gaddy traces the earliest appearances of the banjo in print to 1688, in the writings of Hans Sloane, who served as doctor to the governor of Jamaica. While we’ve always known that the banjo was created by early African-American slaves, the history of the instrument — and of the slave trade — go back even earlier than America itself. Sloane wrote of “strum stumps” that he observed being played by enslaved Jamaicans at a festival in 1688, and his descriptions aptly match the distinctive characteristics of the banjo. In particular, his descriptions of instruments that are made “in imitation of lutes” with gourd bodies, flat fingerboards, and tuning pegs point to being early banjos rather than instruments like the gurmi or the akonting from West Africa, because the music made on them features a regular return to high notes. These notes would likely have come from shorter high-pitched strings added to the “strum stumps,” the precursor to the 5th string on a modern banjo. Sloane collected various curiosities throughout the world over the course of his life, and they were eventually donated to Great Britain where they became the beginning of the British Museum. His collection included at least two examples of “strum stumps” that survived into the early 20th Century, but they have unfortunately been lost. Sloane’s accounts are followed by a chapter on the observations of Father Jean-Baptiste Labat on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, who observed similar instruments around 1694 that he described as a “sort of guitar” being used during a dance referred to as the calenda. Gaddy digs deeper into the nature of the calenda dance itself: while Western observers of the era thought of it as mere entertainment, it seems clear that the dance and its accompanying music have spiritual foundations reaching back to the slaves’ homelands in Africa. So the earliest accounts of the banjo seem to indicate that it was developed no so much in America the country, but in the islands of the early Americas.

 

But the story isn’t that simple. In reality, this research, and most of this book, is as much a survey of the history of slavery in the Americas as a story of the banjo. The banjo is fundamentally a product of slavery, an instrument that draws from its creators’ traditions, the practicalities of their new circumstances, and the natural result of cross-cultural exchanges that happen over time, like the Creole and Gullah languages or the Vodou, Santeria, or Obeah religious practices. To trace the bare threads of information left about the early development of the banjo, Gaddy takes us from the Caribbean to the New England states and back again many times. Her writing style is captivating: each chapter generally focuses on the writings of one European or American interacting with slaves, each of these somewhat unreliable narrators contributing their own sighting of a banjo-like instrument, usually as an aside while writing about their broader observations of dance and musical practices of the slaves in their area. Some of these narrators are priests, some public employees, some soldiers, and some slave-owners themselves. And in the midst of their writings, they mention instruments that all lead to the banjo: the Creole-bania, the banger, bonja, bangeo, banza, and so on. When one considers that the inner lives and traditions of slaves are either woefully misunderstood or barely acknowledged at all in many of these primary sources, we’re lucky to have any mentions of the banjo at all! We’re left with a complicated puzzle that will never point to a particular person, date or location, not unlike the stories of most victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

 

Research into the earliest days of the banjo takes up most of the book. Toward the end, we move into the beginnings of the modern banjo around the 1840s. The instruments we’d quickly recognize as banjos now, with drum head tops on wooden hoops, originated around this era, and these were generally the product of white musicians performing in blackface for white audiences at minstrel shows. The banjo had already started to represent Black musical culture through songs written by and for white audiences and distributed as sheet music since roughly the 1820s, but the minstrel shows spread an exaggerated (and often demeaning) interpretation of Black cultural arts around the country. The book doesn’t really get into the history of white musical styles that have subsequently adopted the banjo, but of course there are lots of resources for learning more about the strains of country, blues, folk and bluegrass music for which the banjo has become an iconic instrument. But it’s fair to say that although the styles we associate with banjo playing in the modern era are overwhelmingly created by and for white audiences, the instrument itself, and its early repertoire, are entirely the domain of slaves.

 

There is a final “coda” chapter that addresses the handful of Black contemporary artists who have re-engaged with the banjo. This is a relatively new musical movement that Gaddy traces through the early days of the internet, when the “Black Banjo Then and Now” forum transitioned into hosting the first Black Banjo Gathering in 2005. New generations of black artists are picking up the banjo, combining musical artistry with deep dives into the history of Black music in America. To the extent that the banjo represents the earliest strains of new music in the country, they’re revealing the history of both black music, and American music as a whole.

 

Gaddy has uncovered more of the hidden history of the banjo with this book than any authors before her, but more work remains to be done. Her extensive notes at the end of the book should serve as a great starting point for further research. More answers may turn out to be right in front of our eyes, just not viewed from the proper context of discovery yet, just like the image that was on display in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that Gaddy and Ross happened upon at the beginning of the book.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Lift Every Voice: The History of African-American Music by Burton W. Peretti, Black American Music: Past and Present by Hildred Roach.)

 

( official Kristina R. Gaddy web site )

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: The Oud: An Illustrated History by Rachel Beckles Willson

The Oud: An Illustrated History
by Rachel Beckles Willson (Music 787.82 Wil)

The oud, a common stringed instrument throughout the Middle East, eventually begat the Medieval-era lute, which was at its essence an oud with gut frets tied around the neck, and from there, the guitar was eventually born. Though we don’t see lot of oud performances in the United States, it remains one of the most popular stringed instruments in Middle Eastern musical traditions, along with its cousins the baglama, the tanbur, and the buzuq.

 

We recently got a new book at the Polley Music Library called The Oud: An Illustrated History by Rachel Beckles Willson, and it may be the first book-length discussion of the history and present status of this noble instrument published in the English language. As it turns out, this book can show us a lot about the instrument itself, lesser-discussed aspects of music history (both Eastern and Western), and the many ways the instrument continues to be used in contemporary music, both traditional and new forms that combine multiple traditions.

 

As Willson notes in her introduction, the oud is found all over the world today, but there isn’t as much concrete information known about its history, particularly for Western audiences. She has a background as a writer, musician, composer, artist and educator that makes her uniquely qualified for writing this book. As an artist who has toured the world as a professional concert pianist, who also has studied composition and the saxophone at the collegiate level, and who has regularly published as a music scholar, she has been able to bring all of these skills to her personal journey into learning to play the oud since 2010. She has returned with an in-depth analysis of the instrument’s history and the social and political conditions around its development over the ages. In her exploration of the oud, she has studied many unique styles and traditions connected with the instrument, finding that many nationalities take umbrage with the different musical approaches of their neighbors. As she says, “My outsider position is my strength. It is what allows me to bring together the multiple voices that make up the history and contemporary life of this extraordinary instrument, and to draw out the fascinating stories of those who have been lost along the way.”

 

Willson approaches the instrument from a variety of perspectives, starting with the history of the instrument, and early stringed instruments more generally. The oud is not the earliest stringed instrument, though it is so ancient that the absolute beginning of its development remains somewhat lost. Musicologists generally divide the early chordophone instruments including the oud into two categories: long-necked and short-necked. The long-necked varieties are much older, dating back to somewhere around 2300 BCE in the area of Iraq. These evolved into a different set of instruments: the tanbur, the dutar, the more modern saz and baglama instruments. They generally all share characteristics of having smaller bodies with their relatively long necks, relatively few courses of strings, and many have frets made of gut tied onto their necks. In contrast, the oud features more courses of strings and a shorter neck to achieve a similar range, all attached to a considerably larger body. Evidence of instruments close to this design start to appear in the historical record closer to one century BCE. The relatively modern iteration of the instrument, likely very similar to the ouds still in use today, appears to date to roughly the 7th or 8th Century CE.

 

Next, we explore construction of ouds. While there are similarities in features and proportions, there are ouds of somewhat different sizes in use today, each refined to the particular needs of a region or country’s particular musical tradition. Arabic, Turkish, Iraqi and Egyptian ouds are all common, and their subtly different scale lengths (the distance that the strings span) and body sizes all create unique tonal characteristics. Willson also discusses the techniques used to make ouds, which include a lot of ingenious molds that help to shape wood staves or “ribs” into the classically recognizable pear-shaped bowl back that these instruments all feature. The various pieces of wood that comprise the oud are both functional and made to be quite beautiful!

 

I found the third section of the book to be the most interesting, as I knew the least about it: Willson explores what she describes as the “tangled lives of oud players” historically. Specifically, the early history of the oud, and of a lot of Middle Eastern musical culture in general, was driven by the contributions of women: “Women performed in temples and they performed in courts, playing a range of instruments…women continued to dominate the professional class of players in the first centuries of Islam, and so the earliest oud players were inevitably women.” This is not to say that the culture at large was matriarchal: in these earliest years, some of these women were free, and some were enslaved courtesans, also expected to be responsible for musical entertainment. As many religious scholars assessed that music itself was a corrupting influence, musicians in general weren’t particularly admired, either.

 

Over time, men took over music-making, and in present times, relatively few women have been involved with playing the oud. Willson explores this transition in the next section, in which the oud travels throughout Europe and gradually becomes the lute in many countries. This happened in the 15th and 16th centuries, and at some point the two instruments and their traditions more or less diverged permanently, with lute players opting to play more contrapuntal and chordal-based music by plucking with their fingers instead of a plectrum, aided by the addition of frets to lute necks. Some things remained the same, though: women who played this instrument in Medieval Europe were often courtesans as well. As empires and trade routes changed from the Medieval era to the present, there appear to be some similarities in the West and the East in terms of how music was treated culturally: in both cases, the celebration of composers and performers as “geniuses,” or people to be admired as representing their area’s cultural traditions to an increasingly interconnected world, became common, and most of those figures were men. And the instruments themselves, like many cultural artifacts, have become collectable and valuable, an interesting phenomenon when one considers how impoverished most instrument-making families have been historically.

 

For readers with a musical background but not much knowledge of how middle eastern music works, the section on taksim may be the most important here. This tradition has dictated a lot of the direction of middle eastern music since the 17th century. It’s a form of improvisation, with some differences: in the West, our improv is often governed by chord progressions. There, where the music is often not heterophonic or chord-based, taksim dictates particular melodic directions and angles preferred to be used with their scales, or makam. The playing of taksims remains an important part of the oud playing tradition today, and the pieces produced through this tradition often go on to become familiar songs themselves, with a mix of composition and improvisation.

 

Though the oud is used by many cultures in the middle east, most countries have their own unique traditions, repertoire, and even microtonal tuning systems, which make a fretless instrument like the oud ideal for traveling between traditions, and even participating in the creation of new ones. The later sections of the book focus on these new traditions, many of which find oud players taking on roles in exciting new blends of musical traditions from around the world. It’s a flexible instrument that shines in a wide variety of styles, and it’s great to see it finally being celebrated in the West with this thorough overview book!

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula : Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar by Lisa Urkevich or Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural Study by Amnon Shiloah.)

 

( Wikipedia page about The Oud ) | ( official Rachel Beckles Willson web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Sound Actions - Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments
by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (Music 781.11 Jen)

In our era of rapidly-evolving technology, one would expect that the music world would be enjoying some fascinating new directions made possible by new musical inventions. If we look at a wider range of time, that’s definitely true: synthesizers in particular dramatically expanded the possibilities for music over the last 50 years or so, and recording technology has moved forward by leaps and bounds in that same range of time. However, advancements in musical instruments themselves have moved relatively slower, especially in recent years. The primary orchestral instruments have changed very little in the last several centuries, and the electric and electronic instruments of the last century largely imitate the core designs of acoustic instruments that came before them. Despite the wide range of new sonic possibilities afforded to musicians through synthesizers, for example, the overwhelmingly most common interface for playing synths remains the keyboard, relatively unchanged in design since the early clavichord instruments of the Renaissance era.

 

From a musicians’ perspective, this all makes sense—the time and effort invested in learning to perform on a keyboard makes it possible for musicians to express themselves easily on all kinds of instruments that feature a keyboard interface, while other kinds of interfaces could create a new learning curve. But what if new interfaces could offer new kinds of musical possibilities that are hard to even conceptualize through the lens of our usual strings and horns and percussion? A new book published by MIT Press raised this question for me. It’s called Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.

 

The author of this book, Dr. Jensenius, has spent much of his career at the University of Oslo, where he has been a music technology instructor and also was briefly the director of their musicology department. He is currently the deputy director of RITMO at the University, which stands for “rhythm, time and motion,” a program that investigates various ways that rhythm influences our thinking and behavior. In “Sound Actions,” he uses these knowledge areas to break music down to a unique set of constituent parts that can help all of us to consider new approaches to music. In some ways, the book reads as a kind of applied philosophy book: Jensenius introduces a set of terms, defines the terms, and then uses them to analyze how music-making works from fresh perspectives, which often suggest new kinds of musical interfaces we might try. And he gives us his “conclusion” in the Prelude of the book, which is refreshingly simple: “Relationships between actions and sounds are at the core of music making. Consequently, such relationships should form the basis for thinking about music.”

 

As we jump into the main body of the book, the first important term introduced is “musicking.” This is a subtle but important distinction from other near-synonyms like “music-making” or “thinking about music,” in that it’s presented as a form of interaction with music that is always active. Jensenius looks at a number of roles involved along the chain of music creation, from creating instruments to composing, performing and listening, and then looks at these roles from several different perspectives: are they happening in real time as music is being made? Is their nature fundamentally about creation of music, or is it more experiential? And new musical technologies create new roles, such as the producer in many recorded and even live music settings. There are many levels of analysis that can be applied to all of these musicking roles, too, from cognitive issues like the speed or latency of our perception to social and cultural perspectives.

 

Next, Jensenius discusses the “embodiment” of music, or literally how music relates to the human body. Again there are so many perspectives to consider: our physical gestures and actions create music, our bodies perceive the results, we’re sometimes motivated to respond to music with our bodies through activities like dancing, and so forth. Here, we’re approaching the title of the book conceptually: from one particularly distilled perspective, musical activity can be thought of as a series of “sound actions,” physical gestures of musicking. These thoughts are followed by a chapter on the nature of musical instruments. Defining these proves to be somewhat difficult, in part because we generally think of musical instruments as some kind of “technology” with physical form that has been manipulated to better serve our musical purposes. But it’s also true that many natural items have been used to make music just as they are, and that forms of technology made for other uses have been used as musical instruments. Some of our instruments are already part of us, anyway: the human voice is probably the earliest “instrument” by most measurements. Jensenius settles on a definition borrowed from the Grove Music Dictionary: “Vehicle for exploring and expressing musical ideas and feelings through sound.”

 

At this point, the focus turns to those “sound actions” directly, or “music-related body motion” at its most elementary form. Looking at these concepts at this granular level, where human motions are put into service to impart forces on objects which then produce sounds, gives us an opportunity to reconsider both the design of these objects and the nature of the movements we’ve been using to stimulate them. These concepts even spill over into areas like music notation in the following chapters, which is just one of many potential forms of producing “representations” of “sound actions.” By this point, readers will have made it roughly halfway into the book, and while all of this jargon might feel unnecessary, it’s giving us a precise point from which to start conceptualizing future musical instruments. Hang in there! The next section discusses “action-sound couplings,” which is where we start getting into the nuts and bolts of how various human motions work with objects to create different kinds of sounds, and how adjustments to those motions can produce musically useful variations in the sounds such as different volumes, textures, or durations. And this is further amplified by a chapter on “action sound mappings,” which takes the information implied from the “couplings” area which is useful for acoustic instrument design into the area of electroacoustic instrument design. That is, the final sounds being produced in an electroacoustic musical situation, such as a synthesizer, might be coming from a slightly less-direct motion/sound relationship than “coupling” describes, but we can organize a series of related actions into a “mapping” that serves as an intuitive or logical interface between our motions and the sounds that can be produced by such an instrument.

 

The final chapters of the book continue to hone in on how different aspects of modern technology can be applied to music situations. Computing and digital modeling introduce new possibilities that can lead to new interface concepts. Both analog and digital technologies can create the opportunity for new kinds of spatial relationships between musicians, or between musicians and their instruments. Toward the end, many of these concepts are applied to “unconventional instruments,” which can be made of all kinds of shapes and sizes, and sometimes played by multiple performers. Gestures in the air can be made into music. Brainwave activity can be made into music. And if we keep a space open for ourselves to think about new technology from elemental perspectives, we may continue to find all kinds of fascinating new ways to make music!

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Science of Music: How Technology has Shaped the Evolution of an Artform by Andrew May or Sound Inventions: Selected Articles from Experimental Musical Instruments edited by Bart Hopkin.)

 

( official Alexander Refsum Jensenius blog )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!