FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Friday, July 21, 2006
Music's Power to Change
I often think about the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white passenger, resulting in a mass boycott by black Americans of the Montgomery bus and ultimately in kick starting the Civil Rights Movement in the States (the bravery of that act has come under the spotlight of discussion more recently since Parks' death in October of last year). And one of the things I find most interesting about this period of American history is the hypocritical nature of the way black citizens were treated by the US public at large as both unworthy of sharing schools, transport systems, bathrooms etc with their white peers and also as a form of entertainment. And this being the status quo for decades in a country that now parades itself as the leader of the free democratic world...
Black music did find its way to white audiences, though, and even as early as the days of Gershwin works that were clearly influenced by jazz traditions were repackaged as "symphonised syncopation" and so the branding suggested a safe, white origin to a music that was gaining popularity and would eventually become engrained in the consciousness of the West.
Of course, as years passed many black musicians came to the forefront of the American musical sphere, even when the country was in the grips of what was to all intents and purposes an apartheid - a period that had not yet shaken off the legacy of the forced slavery of West African immigrants. But, as Joseph Taylor points out in his article On the Note: Soul, this development of an interest in music by black Americans actually played a part in changing the perception of black people generally:
We continue to celebrate the wonderfully diverse history of 'black music' with awards ceremonies such as the MOBO's, but it does strike me that now might be the time to stop forcing a race-categorisation on the music that comes out of our multicultural world and accept that we in the 21st Century will always have a massive body of musical history weighing down on our creativity and to strive for originality and contextual significance is more important than a composer's / artist's skin colour. This is not to say that there doesn't continue to be a lack of equality in the music and arts fields (as discussed in articles such as Botswana: Women and Classical Music) but I firmly believe that these need to be addressed by concentrating on the art in question rather than the ethnicity or gender of its creator.
Black music did find its way to white audiences, though, and even as early as the days of Gershwin works that were clearly influenced by jazz traditions were repackaged as "symphonised syncopation" and so the branding suggested a safe, white origin to a music that was gaining popularity and would eventually become engrained in the consciousness of the West.
Of course, as years passed many black musicians came to the forefront of the American musical sphere, even when the country was in the grips of what was to all intents and purposes an apartheid - a period that had not yet shaken off the legacy of the forced slavery of West African immigrants. But, as Joseph Taylor points out in his article On the Note: Soul, this development of an interest in music by black Americans actually played a part in changing the perception of black people generally:
A lot of writing about rock as a social force in the '60s has been naïve or self-serving, but I think soul music really did help people change their attitudes about race. At a time when middle-class white kids anointed pop stars as their spokesmen and consciences, quite a few of those stars were African-American. In the late '40s and into the '50s, bebop had shown white intellectuals that blacks could create complex art - - that they could initiate an intellectual movement themselves. Soul music showed relatively affluent white kids that an entire race of Americans had been denied things in life they took for granted.
We continue to celebrate the wonderfully diverse history of 'black music' with awards ceremonies such as the MOBO's, but it does strike me that now might be the time to stop forcing a race-categorisation on the music that comes out of our multicultural world and accept that we in the 21st Century will always have a massive body of musical history weighing down on our creativity and to strive for originality and contextual significance is more important than a composer's / artist's skin colour. This is not to say that there doesn't continue to be a lack of equality in the music and arts fields (as discussed in articles such as Botswana: Women and Classical Music) but I firmly believe that these need to be addressed by concentrating on the art in question rather than the ethnicity or gender of its creator.
