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someTitle 3 - 1 - inTroducTion Kip Lornell and Anne K. Rasmussen The Music of Multicultural America is a collection of fifteen essays on music in the united states that, together, present a sample of music making in a variety of American communities. One of our goals is to introduce the diversity of musical styles, genres, and repertoires that constitute the contemporary American sound- scape; another is to highlight the role of music making in community life. using the methods of historical research, oral history, and ethnographic fieldwork with musicians and their audiences, all of the contributors to this volume investigate how people make and experience music on a local level. E Pluribus Unum, the Latin phrase meaning “Out of many, One,” is the motto that has both described a nation of immigrants and provided the country with a guiding methodology for governance. Although this maxim has served as the idealized expression of the nation’s identity for more than two hundred years, the assertion that America is a diverse, multicultural nation of immigrants has always been a tenuous claim. Our policies regarding immigration, our continuous renegotiation of political, physi- cal, and ideological borders—indeed our very notion of “American-ness”—are all issues that are subject to public debate and constant reinterpretation. The dialectic between “many” and “one” fundamentally informed the groundbreaking volume Musics of Multicultural America, which we edited and schirmer published in 1997. Our new, updated, and expanded volume, with its more descriptive title The Mu- sic of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, continues the conversation. The tension between the competing notions of American music either as a streamlined product of the American melting pot or as a diverse collective that is inclusive, eclectic, and dynamic continues to be at the heart of our work. in many ways our collection, because it focuses on music making in America, critiques the hegemony of Western european art music in college and university curricula, by, as deborah Wong put it in the first edition of our book, “Just Being There.”1 An alternative to the standard canons of music history, The Music of Mul- ticultural America also moves beyond established histories of American popular music characterized by chronological studies of musical styles, offered in courses such as “Jazz History” or “The development of rock ’n’ roll.” Our case studies
The Music of Multicultural America : Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, edited by Kip Lornell, and Anne K. Rasmussen, University Press of Mississippi, 1989. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cunygc/detail.action?docID=4438728. Created from cunygc on 2019-08-21 12:18:28. C op yr ig ht © 1 98 9. U ni ve rs ity P re ss o f M is si ss ip pi . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . introduCtion4 invite readers to think about American music in ways that are inclusive, nuanced, and complex. created by communities with a common history, social bond, or agenda, musical activity that falls outside of the generally recognized categories of mainstream American music is woven into the fabric of our culture and plays on, largely unnoticed by the general public. Throughout the united states, regional, grassroots, community-based musical cultures not only exist, they thrive! WHO mAKes AmericAn music? The impact of the continuous influx of “new” Americans from all over the world remains just as important today as it was around 1900, a time when the phe- nomenon of immigration to America, at that time mostly from europe, is widely recognized as the single most important aspect of the nation’s formation. Whereas immigration was conceptualized as a one-way process in the past, many Amer- ican immigrant communities today are thought to be part of larger diasporas with relatives, friends, and ancestors located in real and imaginary homelands and various locales throughout the world. The gradual settlement of American territory by a crazy quilt of immigrants, mostly from europe but also from Asia, Africa, the middle east, and central and Latin America, was facilitated at first by the management, removal, and annihilation of a multicultural collective of First nation peoples: American indians, who thrived in north America prior to the ar- rival of europeans. Based on christian doctrines of manifest destiny and scientif- ic principles of darwinian determinism, the european exploration and settlement that gave rise to the nation’s multicultural motto, E Pluribus Unum, was based on practices of both inclusion and exclusion. it is precisely this mix—who and what is “in” and “out”—that informs our constructions of individual, community, and national identity, and, as we show in this volume, music is central to this process. Parallel to the ongoing process of european immigration and the near oblit- eration of native American peoples and cultures, practices and ideas surround- ing race loom large among the formative processes in this country’s constitution. As Joseph King, who studies the work of African American authors, writes: “ra- cial hierarchy and American national identity grew up together” in a land where “whiteness was overtly assumed to be a defining characteristic of ‘American’” (King 2001, 145). The end of the civil War in 1865 marked the beginning of the nation’s commitment to an egalitarian society and the birth of an ever-developing, although sometimes uneasy, recognition of the innumerable contributions that new-world Africans and their descendants have made to American culture. in this postwar period and throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centu- ries, African American expressive culture became one of the most distinguishing features of American life and especially of American music. Qualities of “African American-ness” helped differentiate America from its european ancestors in in- numerable ways.
The Music of Multicultural America : Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, edited by Kip Lornell, and Anne K. Rasmussen, University Press of Mississippi, 1989. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cunygc/detail.action?docID=4438728. Created from cunygc on 2019-08-21 12:18:28. C op yr ig ht © 1 98 9. U ni ve rs ity P re ss o f M is si ss ip pi . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . introduCtion 5 America’s vernacular music has, in fact, been shaped by African American cul- ture since enslaved Africans first arrived. musical techniques and elements like call and response, improvisation, and bluesy intonation, which sound so familiar to us in the twenty-first century, were originally African American musical prac- tices. moreover, since the first decades of the twentieth century and the advent of recording and radio, formative African American musics like blues and jazz have influenced almost all types of American popular music. it is impossible to imagine what American music would sound like today had it not been affected so profoundly by the presence and contributions of African Americans. An Anglo American/Afro American dichotomy has, thus far, shaped most his- tories of American music. in our volume, however, this model is diversified with a more finely nuanced and inclusive map of American musical terrain. in fact, a desire to move beyond the simple black-and-white picture of American music provides the strongest impetus for this book. Furthermore, we want our collec- tion to transcend the folk/art, Anglo/Afro, secular/sacred dyads that informed the initial establishment of an American music canon, if a canon does indeed exist. We strive to look beyond labels created by the music industry, from race records to iTunes, categories such as jazz, rock, popular, gospel, folk, hip-hop, and blues, along with other twentieth-century genres, that have defined but also limited the taxonomy of America’s music. As co-editors, our interests in America’s musical diversity grew naturally from our initial encounters with American music histories, our academic training, our personal engagement with mass media, and by way of our own ethnographic fieldwork and scholarship. Anne rasmussen’s work among Arab Americans led her to wonder about music making in any number of “unsung” communities, even that of her own scandinavian grandparents in the midwest (see rasmussen 2004). Kip Lornell’s work documenting an array of American vernacular musics convinced him that broad categories of American music were neither numerous nor subtle enough to describe the musical landscape he found within the united states (Lornell 1989 and 2002). Our long-standing interests in regional and com- munity music, fueled by emergent trends in scholarship, inspired this project when it began in the mid-1990s and continue to motivate us today. diversiTy And AmericAn music readers of this volume will surely have their own ideas about American music. it is well known that music in the united states is indebted to the european and African cultures that were originally imported and implanted in American soil from the early 1500s through the mid-1800s. African and european musical roots have become entangled at various points in history to produce such extraor- dinarily popular and influential twentieth-century hybrids as jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and hip-hop, styles of music and musical subcultures that have not only become
The Music of Multicultural America : Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, edited by Kip Lornell, and Anne K. Rasmussen, University Press of Mississippi, 1989. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cunygc/detail.action?docID=4438728. Created from cunygc on 2019-08-21 12:18:28. C op yr ig ht © 1 98 9. U ni ve rs ity P re ss o f M is si ss ip pi . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . introduCtion6 monumental features of our own landscape but that are also played and enjoyed worldwide. As artists, audiences, consumers, and students of American music, we recognize distinctions between classical music, folk or vernacular music, popular music, religious music, music for the stage, and so forth. We also realize that re- gional differences exist among the musics created in the united states: that music created by Acadians in southwestern Louisiana (or the san Francisco Bay area) is very different from the music created by Finnish Americans living in the minne- sota iron range near the canadian border. moreover, we are aware of the general