Who is the
author of “Listening in Detail: performance of Cuban music” and why is it
important to ask this? I find it critical to ask because as scholars we are
attached to our work in special ways. For example, Alexandra Vazquez—author of
the book—is Cuban American who obviously is interested in examining Cuba and
its music and how it is influential in many ways to both the island and the
states. I was very interested in the way that she brings in this notion of listening in detail which she goes in
depth in her introduction section. She states, “To listen in detail calls into
primary question the ways that music and the musical reflect—in flashes,
moments, sounds—the colonial, racial, and geographical past and present of Cuba
as much as the creative traditions that impact and impart from it” (p. 4). A
question that quickly came to me is if this notion of listening in detail is
strictly for examining Cubans and their connections to Cuba. In other words,
Vazquez goes on and states that examining Villa’s music in detail “shaped [her]
interactions with music and with Cuba” (p.4). Taking into consideration that
Cuba is closed (u.s. embargo), it is only safe to say that Cuban Americans like
Vazquez connect with Cuba through accessible ways (music, stories told by relatives
and friends). What are your thoughts about Vazquez’s notion of listening in
detail? And what other positive outcomes can you think of? Can you apply
listening in detail to your own life and how you interact with music. I know
for myself I would say that I only recently (last 3 years) began to listen in
detail. Before this period I would only “hear” and not listen
Alfredo
Rodriguez’s album Cuba Linda is the main focus of Chapter one and in listening
to the song Cuba Linda of the album I was able to see why she began with such a
crucial artist.
Examining the
song I can draw some interesting findings. For starters the song begins in a
classical way for about a minuet and thirty-five seconds and then begins the
Cuban style music. Rodriguez began playing music at a very young age and after puberty
he started playing the piano with a classical touch, which I feel had an
influence on this song. What are your thoughts about the lyrics of Cuba Linda
on page 81-82 specifically with the notion of listening in detail
When we began the semester I
remember Dr. Owens brought the idea that we would examine the artwork of the
artists. And although we haven’t done this, I wanted to bring that to the class
especially since Vazquez talks about it in her book.
What comes to
mind when examining the cover of Cuba linda especially now that colors are
involved (I only say this because in the book it is black and white)? The
colors definitely bring in something special that I decode as something that is
ALIVE we all come from different backgrounds and we can play together, music
brings people together. I also like how the Piano is in the background because
this instrument is a classical one and its used to Jam in this way that
Rodriguez does.
I wanted to focus on the last
chapter because we gain a glimpse of the results that many Cuban born children,
at the time of operation peter pan, went through. Which include Vazquez’s
father. What are your thoughts about this chapter and the relations with the
notion of listening in detail? Is it more relevant with this group of children
that were part of operation peter pan because before they left and felt the
actual music, the actual Cuba Linda that Rodriguez sings about.
Within Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, Earl Lovelace
centers the annual Trinidadian Carnival as the motivation, release, voice, and
symbolic subjectivity of the Trinidadian characters populating the play. Within
the two acts, characters like Fish-Eye (Belasco), Aldrick Prospect, Cleothida,
and Sylvia are all shaped both by the long-standing traditions that shaped how
each of the characters have interacted within the Calvary Hill Carnival space
as well as the ways in which this tradition is rapidly changing as their worlds
expand. This tension, I believe works itself into the very fiber of the text,
pushing questions of Trinidad racial identity, capitalism, and its relation to
the creation of a Trinidadian identity. In otherwords, as Pariag mourns to his
wife, “They not seeing me,” how can we look through The Dragon Can’t Dance for ways in which the characters are
obscured from being seen and seeing themselves and the surrounding world.
The Masquerade:
Pulling on the Past, Scale by Scale
ALDRICK Yes. Every year I do it again. Every threat I sew,
every scale I put on the body of the dragon is a thought, a name, a chant that
celebrate how I get here and how I survive on this Hill. Every year I trace my
life again” (18).
Aldrick’s dragon exists as a traditional character within the
Carnival mas tradition. Frightful, fierce, and ancient, the dragon mas is
entrenched within a longstanding Trinidadian folk culture (Traditional Mas
Archive 2016). As typically depicted the dragon mas enacts theatrical
aggression and transgression. As noted by scholar Max Harris in 1998 article, “The
Impotence of Dragons: Playing Devil in the Trinidad Carnival,” the dragon mas
is held in chains the equally frightful Imp and Devil traditional mas characters.
As Carnival is created within an intersection of transgression, the Devil,
Imps, and Dragon characters all collectively point towards a potential violence
that simmers on the surface but ultimately remains harmless. As Harris states,
“Although they were enacting danger, they themselves were not dangerous” (109).
This foiled potentiality is a particularly intersting way to think about the
character Aldrick. In many ways throughout the text, Aldrick sits perpetually
at the potentiality of events. He spends the time before and after Carnival
preparing his next Dragon costume, he can’t enter into a romantic relationship
with Sylvia because of the potential “woman things” she may need, his and
Fisheye’s fizzled revolutionary moment, down even to the potentiality that
informs the final scene of Act 2.
·Aldrick
states early on, “Is only when this dragon breathe fire that this city know
that it have people living here. . . If . . . if it wasn't for this dragon,
this island wouldn't even know we is people here on top this hill”, how does the text show the dragon as a
living archive?
·What does it mean that the
dragon is tied up within Aldrick’s growing revolutionary and rebellious
disposition and a seeming permanent temporal potentiality that staves off and
chocks Aldrick and Fisheye’s rebellion?
On Race . . .
The idea of masquerade is also
interesting when thinking about the ways in which racial differences created
seemingly uncrossable lines between characters. Thinking of interactions
between Pariag and Aldrick, the tensions between Indian and Creole are based
within silence that is continually willed forward by class differences and
supposed prejudice. The fraught silences between Pariag, Aldrick, and even
Fisheye are contextualized by Pariag’s lament that his neighbors simply
couldn’t see what type of man he was. In what other ways are racialized differences
intersected with class to create a deliberate silence between two characters
within arguably similar concerns and viewpoints? …I’m thinking Cleothida
and Olive.
Calypso
and Carnival Outside National and Regional Borders
FISHEYESuspend me? You want to suspend me from
Calvary Hill Steel band so your sponsors could come in and put their name on
the flag? Reds . . . Reds, you know how I get to be in this band. Is you invite
me. I had nothing, no life, no place, and I come up this hill and join the
band. Out of old oil drums and rubbish bins and steel and old iron we make
something to sing, to sound, to ring for everybody living here on top this hill
. . . If we didn't have nothing in Calvary Hill, we had this band. And now you
telling me you want to put another name on this flag. For some fresh paint and
free jerseys, you want me to agree to sell out Calvary Hill people band. (36)
Lurking
within this text are the fears for what will come of Calvary Hill, its musicans
and its regional culture, as national borders that have localized artistic
forms expand and explode. Early in the text Philo, who goes on to become a
well-respected Calypso musician, dismisses concerns over white artists playing
the steel drum. However, by the last pages of the play he comes back to Calvary
Hill after international acclaim and travel stating, “ Oh, God. And to think I
is their own. I is what come out of their belly. Just where I am a traitor and
betrayer without memories of self I want to remember and hold you and love you”
(87). This shift is shcking, even as his international success “wins” him
Cleopthida’s affection, the shame that colors Philo’s tone here seems to
indicate a way in which the calypso he plays in Port of Spain and in Europe is
rooted in something distant from the calypso of Calvary Hill.I think this is particularly interesting when
thinking about the text deals in questions of racial identity when seeking out
a traditional Trinidadian identity. How
does sound interact within this space? What exactly makes Philo a traitor?
Gender
Questions
The majority of my in-class presentation will deal with
gender, however, I would like to leave some food for thought pre- in class
discussion.
Within this text, there is a clear divide between the
masculine musicians and the women, who serve as Queens of the masquerade. Do we
perceive this divide to be organic or hinting at a larger sexist tradition?
How can we think about the interactions between women within
the narrative and the narratives of colorism and class that are encoded within
them?
What do we make of the princess and slave girl binary
attached to Sylvia’s choice in costume? While this works as a nod to carnival’s
transgressive roots, it is impossible to ignore that this exchange plays out in
relation to men seeking control over Sylvia’s body.
What is Philo and
Aldrick’s investment in Sylvia being as free and importantly untamable as they
claim? On first sight this appears as hotep logic (as in misogynoir), is that
reading unfair?
“Sound
is a transitory event in time, rather than an often more permanent mark on a
visual surface.”
Before delving
into a summary of the text, I feel it’s important to first situate this
critical intervention disciplinarily. Unlike most, if not all, of the texts
we’ve read thus far, Julian Henriques comes to us not by way of literary
studies, but instead from a Media and Communication background. His faculty
page at the University of London lists him as the head of said department, and
previously Henrique served as senior lecturer for
film and television at the Caribbean institute of media and communication
(CARIMAC), at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. I think it’s
useful to consider the ways in which this difference in disciplinary focus
influences or directs the particular type of inquiry Henriques makes. For me,
it was helpful to mark the distinction between how, for example, a scholar from
Communication thinks about rhetoric differently than one who is affiliated with
an English department. The difference to my mind is that the former is more
concerned with epistemology, whereas
the latter is concerned with hermeneutics.
That is to say the Communication scholar wants to examine the ways in which
knowledge is constructed through rhetoric; the English scholar examines what
meaning can be deprived through interpretation. Indeed, the title and content
of Henriques’ book suggests a strong critical investment in “ways of knowing,”
or epistemological pathways.
In his preface,
Julian Henriques frames the critical inquiry of his book Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of
Knowing in relation his previous work in film by stating, “What I
remembered of this work was how, in practice, auditory communication is as meaningful as the visual,
representational, and discursive forms of expression that are commonly
assumed to have the monopoly on meaning” (xi). With this in mind, this book’s
significance to some of the ideas and concepts we’re trying to work through in
this seminar is apparent. For example, so far we’ve been contemplating what are
the various types of relationships to be made between different modes of text?
How does the sonic and aural “interfere” with written and spoken text? And
indeed, what even counts as text?
For our purposes, Sonic Bodies is concerned with sound not
only in terms of pursuing alternate ways of knowing, but also how sound
produces a soundscape that seeks to
displace the hierarchy within which we make distinctions between what counts as
texts from which we can make meaning. To this end, Henriques proposes that we
begin to think through sound, as
opposed to merely thinking about
sound. In the YouTube clip below, Henriques makes a distinction between how we
usually think about sound in term of rhythm, pitch or timbre, as opposed to the
spatial dimensions of sound and the ways in which sound orientates us into ways
of knowing and experience (echoes of one of his scholarly influences, Sara
Ahmed). As part of our class discussion I would like us to explore this notion
of sound sculpture. It sounded jarring and disorienting to me, a lot like noise.
Why is that? And how does that underscore the keys points of Henriques’
arguments in terms of meaning making, etc.?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_zF0NVHWA
Henriques’ methodology for this project consisted
of observing audio engineers, disc jockeys and selectors associated with Stone
Love, one of the oldest and most established sound systems in Jamaica. It seems
to me that although the sound of the dancehall is Henriques’ object of study, a
part of thinking through sound requires an inquiry into the production of
sound. He states, “…listening to
sound is central to this methodology, followed by describing exactly what was heard of the processes and practices of
sounding. This leads to a theorizing
of sound itself…with a theory of sonic
logos” (xxxii). Through the processes of listening, describing and
theorizing, Henriques lights on the actual vibrations of sounds and their
relationship to the “vibes” of the dancehall as something that for him is
crafted through the mechanical production of sound by engineers, disc jockeys,
and selectors. And so, the production of vibes is not simply attributable to
sound, but to the process of sounding.
His definition of sounding is worth quoting at length. He writes,
Sounding is complex set of relationships that is
invariably expressed in several different registers at the same time. Most
often these registers are considered separately, isolated from each other as
with mechanical and social processes, or technological or psychological levels
of analysis, for example. The conceptual force of sounding is to refuse such dichotomies
in favour (sic) of an intrinsically relational approach (xxiii)
I
thought about how this definition of sounding
wants to resist the fixity of meaning on any singular or even dichotomized
terms. What would it mean to say we are
listening to sounding and not sound? It seems to me, from Henriques perspective
sound presupposes something finished
and self contained, whereas sounding is
asking us to listen for intersected registers, much like Lordi’s
resonances.Indeed, within his framework
of sounding, he also considers propagation
and this idea of disturbance embedded within sound waves that allude to
dynamism, and I’m assuming plurality of meanings. Later, Henriques goes on to
claim that “sounding is more dangerous than music. It asks more questions, has
greater disruptive potential-because it escapes the bars and all the other
confines of systems of musical meaning” (37). This formulation is exciting to
me, and I’d like to raise this point for discussion. Might we think about Rhianna’s video in terms of sound and sounding,
especially with the controversies surrounding the sound being mislabelled as
“tropical house,” about her words being unintelligible, and why there’s an
“Amercianized” version of the video attached?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL1UzIK-flA
The Jamaican Dancehall
scene, for Henriques, is “a unique living laboratory” in which to begin his
journey into sound because of what he defines as the immersive quality and
excess of sound in that permeates that space (xvi). And so, his journey into
sound takes on quite a literal meaning as he becomes engulfed in sound: its
production, circulation and reception. As a space of sonic dominance which Henriques defines as one that “explodes with
all the multisensory intensity of image, touch, movement and smell,” the
dancehall soundscape is occupied by sonic bodies on various terms- the
corporeal, the social, the epistemological, and the technical- all of which are
trying to make sense of sound at any given moment. In theorizing how these
bodies interact with sound while immersed in and dominated by it, Henriques
first identifies the material waveband
of sound which is the physical transference of soundwaves; second, the corporeal waveband which involves actual
physical response to the material wavebands; and last, the sociocultural waveband which seems to gesture toward the affective
response to a collective corporeal experience of the material, or the “vibes”
which erupts and moves through the session. Effectively, the link between sonic
bodies is always relational. Below Is a link to a popular sing by Beres
Hammond and Buju Banton. It is an homage to the dancehall, the sound selector,
and the vibes, and much of the intensity of feeling Henriques tries to get at.
From this
threefold formulation of how sound works on the body, Henriques asks us to
become attuned to the ways in which sound as sound-the actual auditory
vibrations- demands that we think differently than we do about images or text.
For Henriques, attention to sound relies more on feeling, process, movement,
and event. In other words, images and (written) texts have already marked out
meaning in ways that foreclose the very idea of non-meaning or
non-representation. That is to say images and text rely on codified ways of
knowing which are often not value-free. Because of the ephemeral and immaterial
quality of sound as distinct from the fixed nature of written text, Henriques
suggests that thinking through sound demands a continuous negotiation of
meaning, or rather a triangulated negotiation of meaning. His concept of
triangulation is the antithesis to “the way visual counterparts favor binaries”
or the way in which the eyes can only see in a straight line (265).
Henriques’ work
seems to be firmly situated in the field of Sound Studies, which as I stated at
the outset, is decidedly removed from the mainly literary based texts we’ve
read this far. In his introduction, he emphasizes that his “journey into sound
was from music,” to point out that his intervention is less concerned with a
specific form of sound than how society interacts with. By “form of sound,” I
mean music, song, poetry, etc. I’m interested in how he is able to call for a
privileging of sound that is able to do something entirely other than the
visual or the textual even without undercutting the value of the last two
forms. As such, I find there to be some points of intersection between his and
Lordi’s work. Where Lordi points out resonances between the literary and the
sonic, decisively not as a way to elevate one form over the other, Henriques
too does not suggest that the sonic assume a primacy over the visual and
textual, only that it affords a new way of un/thinking and un/theorizing
meaning.
However, I found
there to be some unresolved tension between how Henriques was thinking about
sound in seemingly rational (I may mean phenomenological here) terms, but at
the same time wanting to make a gesture toward the affective quality of sound,
at least in the event if its reception. And so he attributes some degree of
skill and intuitiveness to the sound men who are able to “engineer” the sounds
to their particular audiences. Further, he seems to suggest that it is the
sound that incites an affective response in the audience, when that isn’t
entirely the case. There are visual and other sensory stimuli that converge to
create a “vibes” in the dance that he doesn’t quite acknowledge or tease out.
Still, he does allude to the feeling
of sound that is precisely non-representational. But can the sonic be both
these things--rational and affective in the ways that he’s laid them out here?
Thus far we’ve mainly discussed the affective quality of sound, so what does
understanding the techniques and mechanics of the production of sound afford
us?
While I’m on board
with this new type of (non) literacy that Henriques proposes, I’m curious to
know how we can “port” this critical approach to our work, as all of us are
writers, whether creatively or otherwise. In writing about sound, even as
Henriques does, are we not relying on some structures of meaning making? And so
the highly technical ways in which Henriques talks about the engineering and
production of sound, the theories of listening and voicing, I find with his
reliance on such dense Eurocentric rational theory is itself making a case -
indeed making meaning - about all he claims thinking through sound does/can do.
I was also somewhat
put off by the heavy reliance on Western/Eurocentric high theory that
underpinned much of Henriques’ argument. I’m always a little skeptical when
theorists use high theory to interrogate low, or to use his word bass, cultures. I have ambivalent
feelings because it seems to be a sort of recuperative gesture and a way of
saying “this is worthy to be
discussed in these terms,” and at the same time saying “this is worthy to be discussed in these terms”
at the same time. I suppose in some ways Henriques’ approach can be considered
a worthwhile supplement (or complement) to the usual ways in which dancehall
culture has been written about/theorized. Still, what would it mean to develop
a theory of sound, sounding, and sound culture that take into account the
origins of the society that produces the culture? What would it mean to
theorize sound starting with/at the Caribbean or Black Atlantic or Global
South?
