Eric Charry:
MGMC Keynote
4/1/17

Interrogating Musical Identities

What is it that allows us to place music we’ve never heard before or draws us to claim a piece of music (or style) as our own? Musical instruments convey visual and sonic signatures, including their morphology and materials, timbres, tuning systems, textures, rhythms, and melodies. So do vocalists in their own ways. Musical identities across Europe are shaped within a shared tonal system by well-defined families of musical instruments with distinct national and regional traditions. European tonality is just one among many options used in West Africa, which has a seemingly endless variety of instruments (within readily identifiable families) and music cultures. How can one make sense of the great musical diversity in West Africa (related to its linguistic diversity), which, at the same time, clusters into regional and supra-regional cultures, independent of political boundaries? This question is further enriched by looking at state-sponsored attempts to create national cultures as well as how independent artists have shaped their own personal styles. In this talk I will examine case studies from Senegal (Youssou N’Dour), Mali (Oumou Sangare), and Nigeria (Fela Kuti), and expand the field to include one of the more radical extensions of African diasporic musical styles in the USA (Albert Ayler, John Coltrane). The aim is to interrogate the phenomenon of musical and cultural identity in Africa and its diaspora, taking account of how it has been theorized (civilization/culture, a changing same, and roots/routes). The case studies will bring us into the creative cauldron where deeply rooted and more recent cultural currents mix, touching on issues of ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, acculturation, and appropriation.