"Mors janua vitae"...

I started on this blogpost nearly two months ago, but could just as well have written most of it two days ago…

I sit bleary-eyed at home finally having taken one more step into the future...as the New York Times Magazine article of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, "The Worth of Black Men, From Slavery to Ferguson" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/magazine/the-worth-of-black-men-from-slavery-to-ferguson.html  exacts itself with predominant force upon my muted emotions. The article begins with a discussion of the Tyre Glen Papers (housed in the Rubenstein Library at Duke University), an annotated document listing the monetary valuation of black male slaves purchased by Glen, who was a walking parade of paradoxes--slavetrader, tobacco planter, abolitionist and antisecessionist!! The article shifts from the revelation of the value of male slaves in North Carolina and Virginia in c.1850--to the killing of black men in the United States in 2014 with "similar paradoxical discursive etiquette", that smooth and abrupt motion of attempted reconciliation to two terrible transformations: the valuation of human lives in terms of finite mediums of exchange, and its polar opposite--sanctioned killing in the name of supposed "order". 

This evening (12 October 2014) I am to perform a solo recital of music for solo violoncello works of African-American composers--George Perle*, Tania Leon, James Lee III and Adolphus Hailstork (*Perle is not African-American but of Jewish ancestry; his name and work is given associative honorific inclusion on this program without need of further explanation.) Perhaps it is the fatigue of having performed last night or the added activity of hosting my girlfriend from Atlanta on this [that] crowded weekend of musical activity, but having read this article casts my impending performance into an even newer, more profound and still yet more disturbing light and perspective. The title of the program, "Mors janua vitae: Music of Progress and Process, Memory Projected Into The Future".

 It is a program whose works and earliest performance is connected to both personal loss (of my friend and longtime colleague, former St. Aug's and NCCU choral director Richard Banks) and premiere of two new works: "Abraham's Sons: in Memoriam Trayvon Martin" (2013) by James Lee III, and "Sonata for Cello" (2012) by Adolphus Hailstork. The program's works move swiftly and briefly (save the Lee and Hailstork) between meditative contemplations of the brevity of life and the length of memory in terms of sound, silence, and whatever else is transacted within the mind and heart of the listener. It is in the Lee work that the force of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts' article meets the content of my performance: while the shooting of Trayvon Martin and trial of George Zimmermann and unprecedented publicization of the shooting via social media is now more than two years' past, the immediacy of the Lee work provides a somber soundtrack to a familiar African-American tenor (not in the musical sense here...further irony notwithstanding): the value of black male life in American history appears to ebb and flow, or "crest and trough" from high value...to no value. The fortunate guise of James Lee's (III) work is that it focuses on the universal HUMAN tragedy of the Trayvon Martin shooting, and it received presidential commentary and "familial endorsement"...


From two months in retrospect, we now move to mass nonviolent demonstrations on the interstate freeways and thoroughfares of our major cities and on social media networks, where the mantra is chanted "I Can't Breathe"!!  My choice of the above program was to pay quiet homage to Trayvon Martin, but while I was preparing both notes, rhythms and "musical expressions", Eric Garner and Michael Brown would leave this world under violent and racially motivated circumstances.  The quiet and sad irony which descended upon me during the late summer months led me to post this introspective question: "How far removed am I...from Trayvon, Eric, Michael, Emmett, Medgar, Harry Moore and other names both famous and obscure but too numerous to count and list?? (even though they should be…'maybe that's the next "QUILT Project" which contains its own resident irony, as a project, that is).

I have learned through my love of reading and speaking with "the elders" about history and its lessons...that acts of race violence committed in the past usually tended to cause the black community to galvanize and garrison for additional attacks.  Of course, that was at a time when the sense of fear and ignorance was strongly tied to the legacies of slavery and postwar violence…that is, the Civil War.  150 years have nearly passed since then...and there is incontrovertible evidence that "change has come", but in this present time the forces once regarded as "evil" in the 1860s (slaveholders, planters and businessmen who openly profited off of slave labor and production) have been replaced by forces who are replications--not of the "Old South" depicted in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Gone With The Wind", but of the vilest slice of Wall Street and the privatized "corrections" system…who obviously are collaborating with the police and district attorneys at the local, county, state and national levels.

Now...half of that previous sentence doesn't smack me in the face each morning. But it does for hundreds of thousands of black men who look like me, (sometimes) act like me, (maybe) dress like me, laugh like me, love like me, cry like me, sacrifice like me (although the media dare not let you see that on primetime television!!), and like me, one day at a time...try to keep from unnecessarily dying.

As I ponder what next to do musically with "Abraham's Sons: in memoriam Trayvon Martin" of James Lee III, my questions become thankfully simple.  Who ARE---"Abraham's Sons"? In the present-day sense, we all are through the Biblical (and original Hebrew) covenant made with Abraham which extended to humanity "in the numbers of grains of sand on the seashore".  The Abrahamic covenant extends to the other Old and New Testament covenants which followed it through Moses, David and culminate in the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth.  But my American question is more difficult to ask and answer, and I am convinced that its difficulty lies in how obviously clear the lines of conflict have twice again been drawn when we consider the tragedies of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.  Another obvious irony: allegedly illegal tobacco products served as the means, motive and law enforcement "opportunity" to continue the tradition of black male profiling, and for the arresting officer to overreact in ignorant fear followed by lies and administration deception, leading to a "no indictment", slapping the families and the public coldly in the face.

Yes, "America needs some air"…I will try and once again make the music of Tania Leon, James Lee III, Adolphus Hailstork and others provide some sort of "air passage" for the emotions that still await a potential encounter of expression.

Get some air the best way you know how, America…"by any (positive, faithful, beneficial) means necessary"…

Peace…

Tim

"In The Beginning…well, I'll try to get us as close as possible"!!

Okay, here is some of what I've discovered thus far, but much of it indeed poses far more questions going forward than it definitively provides answers.

The British freelance journalist and historian Miranda Kaufmann (www.mirandakaufmann.com) has provided me a starting lead from the following bibliographic source, ‘Courts, Blacks at Early Modern European Aristocratic’, Encyclopaedia of Blacks in European History and Culture (2008),Vol. I, pp. 163-166 (edited by Eric Martone):

Europeans had employed black musicians and entertainers at court since at least 1194, when Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI (1165-1197) was accompanied by turbaned black trumpeters on his triumphal entry into Sicily. In 1470 a “black slave called Martino” was purchased to be the trumpeter on board the Neopolitan royal ship Barcha. Henry VII of England employed a black trumpeter named John Blanke, who was paid 8d a day in 1507. Henry VIII retained Blanke’s services. The Westminster Tournament Roll of 1511, which commemorates the celebrations that marked the birth of a short-lived son to Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon, depicts a black trumpeter believed to be Blanke.

Elizabeth I had a “Lytle black a more” boy at her court and Anthonie Vause, a black trumpeter, was employed at the Tower of London in 1618. A Moorish “taubronar” or drummer devised a dance with 12 performers in black and white costumes for the Shrove Tuesday celebrations at the court of James IV of Scotland (1473-1513) in 1505. Teodosio I, Duke of Bragança (1510-1563) had ten black musicians, who played the charamela (a wind-instrument). A 1555 list of galley slaves belonging to Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574) of Florence included a moro negro described as a trumpeter. In 1713, Frederick William I, later king of Prussia, asked for “several black boys aged between 13 and 15, all well-shaped” to be trained as musicians for his military regiments.


In my own Google image searching, I came across this shared sketch of royal musicians in Portugal (c.1522)…

Of course they are wind and brass players, but instrument specifications notwithstanding they ARE of dark skin, and their matching hats and uniforms suggest they play (and work) for a common employer.

The royal trumpeter, John Blanke, was known to have been the court musician of King Henry VII and Henry VIII of England.  The Oxford Dictionary of Biography provides this about him:

His surname may have originated as a nickname, derived from the word blanc in French or blanco in Spanish, both meaning ‘white’. Blanke was part of a wider trend for European rulers to employ African musicians, dating from at least 1194, when turbaned black trumpeters heralded the entry of the Holy Roman emperor Henry VI into Palermo in Sicily. It has been suggested that Blanke arrived in England with Katherine of Aragon when she came to marry Arthur, prince of Wales, in 1501. Between 1507 and 1512 Blanke was one of eight royal trumpeters under the leadership of Peter de Casa Nova. The first payment to ‘John Blanke, the blacke Trumpet’ was made in early December 1507, when he was paid 20s. (8d. a day), first by Henry VII and then from 1509 by Henry VIII.  The images extracted from the 60ft-long Westminster Tournament Roll, shows six trumpeters, one of whom is Black and is almost certainly John Blanke. All the trumpeters are wearing yellow and grey, with blue purses at their waists. John Blanke is the only one wearing a brown turban latticed with yellow. He is mounted on a grey horse with a black harness.

While I have yet to locate stringed instruments represented in preserved royal tapestries, it is encouraging to learn of the presence and activities of persons having dark-skinned (presumably African or Arabic) ancestry working as musicians. 

The French mulatto swordsman, violinist and composer Joseph Boulogne, le Chevalier des Saint-Georges (1745-1799) is often misnamed Le Mozart noir because of his precocious accomplishments, which occurred in the fencing school first, then in the musical salon. By the time Saint-Georges was establishing himself as the finest swordsman in Paris, Mozart, eleven years his junior--was already "on the road" as a Wunderkind with Papa Mozart and sister Nannerl in search of an ever-elusive better court appointment than that of Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg.  At the same time that Saint-Georges and Mozart were making their respectively challenged ways around class and caste-conscious Paris (and more of Europe for Mozart), Ignatius Sancho (c.1729-1780) was apparently doing the same in London.  Less is known of his musical compositions than those of Saint-Georges, but both men served as unique eyewitnesses to British and French sociopolitical developments.  Sancho witnessed and wrote about the Gordon Riots of 1780, which were largely religious and politically charged.  Saint-Georges nearly lost his head (literally!!) when he was arrested and imprisoned (and awaiting execution) at the height of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.

Lest we fear that this blog will only deal with Euro-African isolated music history, please know that Barzillai Lew served in the Continental Army in Massachusetts during the American Revolution as a fifer (the instrumental equivalent of the piccolo).  In his book celebrating the Harlem Renaissance, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar makes mention of Harry Lew, who played pre-NBA basketball with the Harlem Rens in the 1930s, who was of the same family…'music and basketball were to be found in the same family tree!!  

I wrote a paper, "Mishaps, Misnomers and Misconnected History: Ludwig van Beethoven, George Bridgetower and Rodolphe Kreutzer"...and read it (!!) for a Black History Month lecture six years ago. Instead of repeating information discovered about George Augustus Polegreen Bridgetower (1778/1780-1860), I'll just dedicate the next blog post to that paper.  It's worthwhile to read…'once the football games get too predictable!!  

Peace…"CQN"