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.
Alexandra T. Vazquez’s “Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music” presents an interesting inversion to the ways in which I have previously imagined Performance Studies’ relation to performances (both the event, its recordings, and the art being performed). Vazquez’s work presents performance as something continually alterable and interpretable, even from the moment of creation. Her beginning close reading of Ignacio Villa’s performance introduction, sets the tone beautifully for the ways in which she frames listening in detail as “an introduction and an invitation” (7). Here the musical works as a frame to “the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present of Cuba as much as the creative traditions that impact and import from it” (4). As you’ve pointed out Oscar, listening in detail is largely tied to the recrafting of an individualized national identity, even in the face of uniting and often silencing nationalistic narratives. While this blog post asks if this is particular to Cuba, I wonder if the idea of listening in detail is necessarily attached to placement within the diaspora? What, if any, level of separation is necessary in order to listen to a cultural artifact in detail? This question arises from the quote, “Details are things we learn to live on, imagine off, and use to find other kinds of relationships to our parents’ natal locations” (13). Does this locate the homeland as the “detailer” and outsiders as necessary listeners and analyzers of the detail?
ReplyDeleteI love this idea of "who is doing the listening"?
Delete-Candice C.R.
The work of listening in detail brings the course back into focusing on notions of sound in a variety of ways and the importance of giving sound action verbs. While Oscar notes specifically that listening in detail has elements that may be strict to understanding Cuba’s relationship to music, it is just as important to understand the way that when you listen to Cuban music, there are aspects of a broader diasporic conditions within the sounds. I think Oscar makes a really good point that due to Cuba being closed for many decades, that some Cuban Americans only found Cuba accessible through the relationship of music. What’s important to note is that Cuban Americans and Cubans are not the only ones who experience emotion from the music, but it may be important to note that they may be the only ones who can hear sounds of their homeland. With Cuba being open to Americans once again, will it change the way we listen to music or just add to the music we’re already listening to. What will be the similarities between Cuban American and music directly from Cuba? Will we be able to hear elements of similarity, or will there be a departure in the music? A question that I have for this book, is it fair to separate the Afro-Cuban from Cuban music as a whole or does it limit our abilities to fully listen to the music because of the distraction of ways in which the music is divided by the combination of cultures? Or is Cuban music a part of a conversation of whatever we denote black music as and Latin music? We haven’t had an opportunity to discuss dance as much in the last few weeks, but how does dance and the visual fit in with the sounds of Cuba? Lastly, something I brought up a few weeks ago when thinking of people who comes from urban areas, but specifically for Cuba, what sounds are indigenous to the island that are the most important elements that appear in the music? As a true sociologist, I still wonder how sounds are complicated by class positions. This semester has been thrilling and I thought I would be moving towards more of a closure of the way I listen to music and a variety of sounds, but the more works we read, the most I have begun to complicate the way I understand what happens in the sonic realm.
ReplyDeleteCandice C. R.
The dichotomy hearing-listening reminds me of the philosophical dichotomy "simple apprehension-aesthetic experience," which is a fundamental notion of Hegelian aesthetics. The aesthetic experience implies the put into practice of a refined set of intellectual coordinates that makes possible the aesthetic experience, while the simple apprehension, in its most basic form, involves the pure mediation of our senses. Anyway, as it has become my habit in this seminar, I wonder about the subjective applicability of “listening” among subaltern collectivities. Should we assume oppression and inequality from aesthetic standpoints? What could be the ethos of an everyday performance for survival? Or an everyday listening for survival?
ReplyDeleteOscar, you pose some very interesting questions. For me, listening in detail revolves around the receptive experience. Music, thus far, as we have discussed in class is not purely a sonic interpretation. Instead it is how the body processes, reacts, and translates the musical performance in tandem with the music’s prose and the musician’s intent. It’s the details—those subtle variations within music—which we look for to find distinction and meaning within the music. “Details,” as Velazquez states “are for many of us, wonderfully disruptive fissures that crack many a foundational premise behind all sorts of narratives.” (20)
ReplyDeleteWhat I found most interesting about Velasquez’ book is that she continuously draws on the question: what do the United States and Cuba have to do with each other? If we consider the African diaspora as a fluid exchange of creativity and historical archive, Velasquez beautifully narrates between Cuba’s political and social movements and American musical influence. There seems to be a call-and-response motif where we see in chapter two Machado’s political tyranny and relations with the US which invoke a social response. As the University of Havana is closed due to emerging political protests the musical group Orquesta Anacaona led by Concepcion Castro and her sisters is born. Velasquez claims, “The assembly of young women musicians…was (and often still is) in itself a defiant act against the proper, official comportment required by gender, racial identification, nation, and institutional belonging of the times.” (98)
As the Orquesta begins to play in the Caribbean United States, and Europe, they blended a mix-tape of genres from rumba for jazz, to swing where the audience sees collaboration as a symbol of hope, and of cognizance. While I respect Velaquez’s exploration of Cuban music, I agree with you Oscar, where I wonder how listening in detail applies across a larger spectrum. How do we develop the scholarship necessary to find the commonalities of music across genres and across historical connotation? Velasquez urges us to consider “how music presents itself to analysis” (9) but instead I’d like to delve into what the analysis means not just to the individual, but rather a collective audience. If we consider music’s narrative intent, what is the story that is mutually understood, and, how is it understood outside of historical and political reference? Do the details translate the same?
Post-Class Reflection:
ReplyDeleteI feel like this week was the perfect week to read this text, considering how much coverage Cuba has had on the news lately. I was watching news stories where journalists were interviewing European tourists in Havana and they were saying things like "I wanted to come back and visit one last time before the embargo ended and everything changed." "Cuba is a place out of time, and restoring ties with the US will change that," etc. It was really the perfect example of NOT listening in detail. I'm troubled by the way the US media is talking about Cuba, but I can't explain exactly what they're doing or why it's especially troubling. It made me realize what's at steak with Vasquez's project. She's not overstating the way Cuba/Cuban culture is reduced to a homogeneous whole in American--maybe global? or Western?--imagination. And doing that does something--erases or makes invisible/inaudible the differences in the details? I'm not really sure exactly what's happening to Cuba in the American imagination right now, if anything is changing, and what that is doing, but it seems important and I think listening in detail is a good way to combat this tendency to make Cuba invisible/inaudible by conceptualizing it in inaccurate, romanticized, or too-simple terms.
But back to the class. The listening activities we did were really wonderful. I am not sure that my critical listening skills are developing or that I'm learning to listen in detail the way Vazquez does, but I am at least less shy about talking through what I'm hearing. It's really good practice, because I'm hoping to bring some of these skills into my own classroom and start asking students to come up with critiques, arguments, or impressions of sonic texts that specifically address sonic elements of those texts, and before I'm ready to do that, I need to feel able to talk about the shift in "Cuba Linda" between the piano intro and the vocal/drum performances. I thought anchoring the song to the album art was a helpful way to perhaps emphasize elements of both that the artist was trying to make evident. The piano is blurry, in the background, but it looms large, while the drummers are separated from each other (drummer is separated from himself). The drum is foregrounded but given less space. These visual details helped me hear the instruments in different ways--not so much battling for supremacy in the song as negotiating a slightly fraught but still impressive, lovely, moving collaboration.
This is the post-class reflection I feel the least sure about now that I've written it. Not exactly sure I'm saying quite what I mean or that I'm really getting at anything important, but I feel like I'm making an attempt at doing something different here, so there you have it.
Cheers to Oscar for another really great presentation! I'm blown away every day by how impressive all of my classmates are! It's been a really fun year of presentations so far.
Hannah, I think you're really getting at your own evolution throughout the semester, I'm dealing with the same thing. Coming from a sociological background and not having a critical musical ear in the academic sense, to merging my academic ear for music and my personal ear for music. I think, thinking about Cuba in the American imagination is an important thing to think about as we digest the work of Vasquez and the artists that she highlights. When looking at any diaspora, how do we reconcile our American imagination with the importance of our own identity constructions.
DeleteFollowing class, I'm still interested in the way that identity construction complicates our listening ear and the digestion of cultures through their music. Does developing a listening ear truly allow us a similar experience as those who have one immediately?
-Candice C.R.
Some thoughts that I accumulated during/after last week’s class:
ReplyDeleteI was really struck by our brief discussion of the vocal tone quality of the singers in the Cuba Linda recording. In western choral traditions (“academic,” liturgical, classical, etc.), blend is everything: singers are chosen and arranged in orders based on creating a smooth, unified sound. I’ve always noticed how other community singing traditions didn’t worry about that particular quality as much, or valued other vocal qualities. There’s something really different about trying to make a dozen people sound like one voice, on the one hand, and on the other getting a dozen people to sing together but nevertheless as individuals. Choral moments in music always end up saying something about community, I think, because that’s the nature of ensemble singing: it evokes the stances and feelings of the multitude by having a subsection of that multitude performing together. Difficult to extrapolate further than this about what the vocal timbre favored by Cuban ensembles might say about Cuban community, but I’ll leave this comment here as food for thought.
About the piano intro to Cuba Linda: my first thought upon hearing it was that it drew upon and paid homage to a tradition of classical and Romantic piano-playing, while also subverting, enriching, and exploiting that tradition to incorporate specific elements of jazz, and possibly even a Cuban piano tradition? I don’t know enough about that topic to say much more. But there’s a definite decision to start the track with some piano playing that might be recognizable to listeners otherwise unfamiliar with Cuban music. Later on, the piano comes back (at around 4:26), this time more obviously working in a Latin-jazz-inflected idiom. This creates a kind of through-line in the piece, whereby the piano sort of helps to connect different musical traditions, or perhaps shows how they’re not best thought of as separate at all.
Towards the beginning of class, we talked about close reading versus listening in detail. I feel like that would have been a good moment to return to one of the many threads running through this course, which is that reading itself almost always already has a sonic dimension. One of the things I’ve taken away from several of our discussions is that reading and listening should not ever really be thought of as divorced, or opposed. I’ve often thought that our English classes, both at the high school and college level, should be more explicit about the role of listening in reading. Question is how that would be implemented. There was a time when English instruction also encompassed areas more overtly sonic: public speaking, poetry recitation, etc. Historically that stuff got moved over into Communications or even drama departments, and English has become the terrain of a kind of textual study more focused on the written. If I was more erudite I would turn to the legacy of Derrida here, and this also of course demands a further investigation of what “the written” even is.
Laura,
DeleteI really love the way you compare multivocality and a more blended sound. I, like you, don't know what to extrapolate from this, but it's a great detail to pick up on. That's basically where I'm at as I work toward critical listening practices--picking up on noteworthy details. What to make of them will be our next step as critical listeners, I think, but I appreciate you bringing this detail to our attention so we can continue to think through what we might be able to make of it.
Coming out of last week’s class a couple of things still stick with me. One stems off of the discussion centered around the “differentiation” made between mainstream jazz and Cuban or Latin jazz, and how it ignores the shared space of New Orleans and the patterns of migration that brought Afro-Cuban music and African-American music into contact and helped lead to the formation of jazz. Talking about this I’m reminded about hip-hop and in particular Juan Flores’s From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, which pulls explores the importance of Afro-diasporic culture(s) to Puerto Rican music. Like with jazz, Flores looks at how patterns of migration and shared space of the Bronx led to Puerto Rican contributions to early hip-hop. And yet, in many narratives about the genre, Puerto Ricans can get omitted and when we think about Puerto Ricans in hip-hop, we think more about Latin hip-hop. I think that both of these instances speak to how American hegemony can bleed into music and certain groups can get excluded when thinking about how music becomes claimed as American.
ReplyDeleteI’m also still interested in the question raised of “Have you ever thought about what happens in Cuba?” (Vazquez 205). This question, and the idea of both homeland and exile changing resounds with me because, during AWP in Los Angeles I was with a couple of writers of Cuban descent, one of whom has been to the island a couple of times and shared that many young people in Cuba embrace the shifting relationship between the US and Cuba if only because they’re tired of the current situation in Cuba. She brought to the forefront the danger of nostalgia, of expecting to return and have everything be the same (a narrative that we can see within music from time to time). It was a reminder that we need that question and music that asks that question when thinking about Cuban music.
Post Class Response:
ReplyDeleteA portion that stood out to me in Listening in Detail was Vazquez’s use of Graciela Perez as a means to provide political commentary on not just women in music but women in university and the academy as well.
“The subversive intellectual might disappear from representation but moves into other temporary locations. Such shanties do not get the privilege of permanency, but their foundations are always detectable”(93).
Vasquez deliberate uses “she” and female pronouns through the introduction to this chapter, and while highlighting the political power of a musical figure such as Perez that was somewhat under the mainstream in terms of mainstream canon, she highlights the power of female (nonwhite) scholars that function in the same, powerful way. It’s not that Perez is overlooked or lost: “She is a runaway who does not want to disclose her whereabouts”(93). Perez also mentions a life from Farah Jasmine Griffin’s book, “If you can’t be free, be a mystery….Mystery is the thing we do not know, cannot solve”(125). How does this “mystery” performer function or look like in the contemporary? Who could be a modern day example of this? I found this subversion extremely provocative, and I’m interested in what others may have thought.