The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States

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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 soundscape; 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, physical, 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 Music 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 Multicultural 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 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 phenomenon 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 American 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 arrival of Europeans. Based on Christian doctrines of manifest destiny and scientific 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 obliteration of Native American peoples and cultures, practices and ideas surrounding race loom large among the formative processes in this country’s constitution. As Joseph King, who studies the work of African American authors, writes: Racial 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 centuries, 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 innumerable ways.

America’s vernacular music has, in fact, been shaped by African American culture 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 practices. 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 histories 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 collection 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 community 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 extraordinarily 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 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 regional 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 Minnesota Iron Range near the Canadian border. Moreover, we are aware of the general differentiations that are made between high and low culture, between fine and popular arts, distinctions that are liberally applied to music, literature, dance, and other cultural manifestations in the United States (see Levine 1988).

Music Patronage

What makes all of these American musical scenes and subcultures tick? Universities, conservatories, concert halls, theaters, and large arts organizations like symphony orchestras and opera companies are among the elite institutions that teach students, employ faculty, and contract professionals in the fine arts. In most countries, including the United States, institutions for the performing arts—for example, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Symphony Hall in Boston, along with places like museums and libraries—are not only venues for artistic production, they are also iconic national landmarks.

Arts institutions that support and stimulate musical production for public consumption involve large casts of players and producers, who themselves are products of extensive training. As such, high culture events such as opera, musical theater, or orchestral music are very expensive to produce. While large ensembles rely on ticket sales for revenue, they almost always need more financial support than they can generate from paying customers. Corporate support, along with subventions by cities or states, for such high culture is crucial for the mere existence of these ensembles and venues. Thus many arts institutions in the United States are funded privately, but often with major grants from state and local organizations, private philanthropy, and support from the federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ironically, although these institutions of fine arts symbolize American national culture, they have traditionally been dedicated largely to European artists and their works. When you attend a concert of symphonic music, an opera, or a ballet, or when you yourself study or participate in these kinds of productions, composers like Beethoven, Bizet, or Tchaikovsky, who are German, French, and Russian, respectively, are likely to be on the program. This stratum of musical activity, one that leans heavily toward the music of Europe, is most directly and openly endorsed by American institutions of higher education, by corporations, and by arts agencies. Without institutional support or patronage, few, if any, of these orchestras or opera companies would exist. While the great masterworks of Western art music play on in our music appreciation classes and our concert halls, music educators might ask, where is the rest of the music of the world? Where is music from the twentieth or twenty-first century? Where, in particular, is American music?

Occupying another side of the cultural spectrum from high-brow, Western art music are folk, vernacular, traditional, and popular musics. Such grassroots, community-based, low-brow musics are likely to be experienced in private contexts, for example in family rituals like weddings and religious holidays. Community musics sometimes spill out into more public venues such as restaurants, bars, parks, places of worship, or neighborhood festivals, contexts that invite a range of participants. One of the ways that community musics have become more public and accessible is through civic neighborhood fairs and festivals, which, in the United States have become among the most common contexts to welcome diverse music making.

Depending on where you live, your local musical landscape might include Mexican mariachi, Scandinavian polka, Buddhist music from the Thai temple, church-based African American gospel music, Middle Eastern dance or concert music, an American Indian drum, or old-time music from the Appalachian Mountains. Sometimes such music may be classified as folk or vernacular music by the people who play and appreciate it; but many kinds of ethnic and community-based music in the United States may be more accurately described as traditional, classical, sacred, or art music. Lumping America’s musical diversity into one convenient category tempts misrepresentation of both the music and the people who make it. Furthermore, even though some of these kinds of music and dance have been in the United States for a century or more, they are still often thought of as world music or ethnic music, something that is other than or outside of the mainstream. Although this attitude has changed considerably over the last few decades, the marginal status of many kinds of American music and of the people who play them is reflected in our cultural institutions, from the concert hall to the university to our public schools. This volume of essays suggests some different ways to think about American music and underscores the importance and pervasiveness of informal music making on local and regional levels.

Mass Media

Mass media are probably the most powerful force in music promotion and patronage in contemporary America. Radio since the 1920s, and major record companies beginning at the turn of the century, are two of the media that have promoted popular music in the United States. Beginning in the 1950s, evening and late-night television programs like The Tonight Show and The Lawrence Welk Show helped boost the careers of countless musicians. During the mid-1960s programs such as Shindig, Hullabaloo, and American Bandstand brought contemporary popular music to a teen audience, followed by Soul Train, which began its thirty-five-year run in 1971. Beginning in the early 1980s, MTV and later VH1 became the dominant new media to broadcast popular music to cable-connected consumers twenty-four hours a day with the new format of the music video—a miniature film the length of a pop song, which usually combines live footage of a singer or a band with a dramatization of some sort of storyline set in a particular context.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book, YouTube.com has emerged as a primary vehicle for the dissemination of music. This innovative 2005 site (purchased by Google in 2006) democratized access so that virtually any video clip, whether a commercial and professionally produced music video, an excerpt from a film, a snippet of a bootlegged live concert performance, or an experiment in someone’s living room, may be uploaded in a matter of minutes and made accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. The number of hits or viewings on most music available via Youtube.com is small (usually in the hundreds or low thousands) but some YouTube clips go viral: it took less than six months from its initial posting on July 15, 2012, for Korean PSY’s K-pop, hip-hop influenced Gangnam Style to eclipse the billion-hits mark.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of twenty-first-century digitally based media on the flow of music, because such technology enables not only the broadcasting of music but also communicating about music among musicians and their publics. YouTube.com helped revolutionize the ability to post all sorts of video material, from archival historic recordings to entire channels devoted to artists that range from Native American rock bands (like Redbone, for example) to the pop diva Beyoncé.² Social media such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and the app Bandsintown also facilitate instant communication about musical projects and events between musician and audiences. Music you may never hear on mainstream terrestrial radio (or even the satellite behemoth SiriusXM) may have a vibrant media presence online through technology that is virtually free and accessible to an international culture of creators and consumers. The co-evolution of music and technology not only facilitates communication of music and about music, it facilitates new possibilities for the creative process itself, something Aram Sinnreich, in his book Mashed Up (2010), has called configurable culture.

If, for example, you want to check out the Go-Go music scene in Washington, D.C., you will probably check in at www.tmottgogo.com (Take Me Out to the Go-Go) or try YouTube.com to see who has just uploaded a new old-school or bounce-beat selection. Should zydeco and Cajun music interest you, your Internet bookmarks might include cajunmusicnetwork.blogspot.com. For photographs, videos, and a very detailed calendar of powwows across the United States, you will almost certainly monitor www.powwows.com on a regular basis. Likewise http://fasola.org is for folks who enjoy singing sacred harp music. Arab Detroit (www.arabamerica.com) is a comprehensive website that keeps track of concerts, parties, exhibits, and events for people involved in that community; and anyone wanting to find an Irish-music session will surely check the internet for times and places where people meet to play (try http://www.cceboston.org). Social media and the ability to publicize the inner workings of a musical subculture are not only useful for the members of a particular subculture, they are also available to the curious student or adventurous musician ready to expand his or her soundscape. For example, in April 2011 students in Kip Lornell’s class Introduction to Ethnomusicology: Music as Culture, at George Washington University, investigated the uses of music during the Arab Spring for their group fieldwork project, by utilizing personal interviews, articles, blogs, videos, and music posted on social media. Surely the ongoing impact of technology and social media will only increase, both for enthusiasts and for those pursuing more in-depth research and scholarship.

UNIFYING THEMES AND ISSUES IN THIS COLLECTION

The literature on community music making, or what Mark Slobin calls micro-musics (Slobin 1993), both within academia and in the popular press and mass media, has accelerated exponentially in the last thirty years, bringing heretofore-invisible musical scenes into the public eye and ear. The fifteen ethnographic case studies in this collection bring attention to just a sample of the myriad musical communities in the United States and suggest a number of units that fit well into a semester course syllabus. The essays presented here are based on the combined methods of historical research and ethnographic fieldwork and present just the right balance of depth and diversity. Our authors write from varied perspectives, yet a number of themes exist that unify our collection of vignettes of American musical life. Most of the themes, questions, and issues examined in these case studies are relevant for other studies of music and community. Any of these themes might be used as points of departure for a special unit or focus within a course or for students’ independent research and fieldwork projects.

Thirteen Unifying Themes

1.  The inherent, complex intersections among music, community, and identity

2.  The role of core cultural institutions, including families, places of worship, and community celebrations that support musical activity

3.  The actions of individual musicians (both professional and amateur) who lead and participate in music-making activities

4.  The trends related to musical preservation, innovation, renewal, or atrophy that occur at different times or simultaneously within a musical subculture

5.  The ways in which music is transmitted among generations, sometimes skipping a generation or more

6.  The means by which musical performances articulate, challenge, and teach gender or age roles and other social constructs

7.  The evaluation of a group’s access to and use of mass and electronic media in the construction of community within and across geographical and political boundaries

8.  The phenomenon of music as a commodity in the commercial marketplace, on local, regional, national, or even international levels

9.  The role of regional and national sources of music patronage, for example, colleges and universities, museums and concert halls, festivals and fairs, and tourism management

10.  The importance of the fieldwork experience in shaping our view of the music, the way we represent musicians and communities through our writing and other productions, and in opening doors to collaborative research and production

11.  The porous, often flexible boundaries and eclectic constitution of American micro-musics that feature and depend on the participation of both insiders and outsiders

12.  The impact of political, economic, and cultural events as well as of natural disasters on a community’s music making

13.  The multi-sited aspect of many of America’s musical subcultures and the flow of music and musicians within diasporic communities that span the globe

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Several of the case studies included in this book explore the ways in which musical traditions are initially brought to the United States from outside our geopolitical boundaries and then adapted to fit a new environment. In his chapter on polka music in Wisconsin, Jim Leary traces the history and development of the music of Czech Americans who immigrated, along with millions of other Europeans, to the United States during the waves of immigration that occurred from the middle of the 1800s to around 1920. Polka, in addition to surviving the test of time among Czech Americans, became the official state dance of Wisconsin in 1993. Similarly, Ann Spinney’s contribution explores the range of musical performances that occur among Irish American musicians living in metropolitan Boston. In particular, Spinney focuses on the contexts for informal music making, from kitchen rackets to sessions that propelled Irish American music and dancing into the twenty-first century. Spinney’s chapter highlights the perpetual transatlantic flow of musicians and dancers between the so-called old country and the new world in networks of diaspora that are now an intrinsic part of Irish music and dance in the present day.

Henry Sapoznik, in his contribution on klezmer music, describes a musical genre brought to America by Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, many of whom migrated to the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Although klezmer music was a well-established cultural phenomenon among Jews in Eastern Europe, by the 1920s it took on a life and sound of its own in the United States. As the Jewish community in America embraced mainstream values and practices of the 1950s and 1960s, klezmer music went into hibernation. Since the mid-1970s, however, klezmer has experienced a revolution of renewal and has come to represent and express Jewish identity, not only in the United States but in Europe as well.

Mark DeWitt introduces us to Cajun music and culture, though not in its conventional hearth region of southwestern Louisiana and southeast Texas. Instead, Dewitt explores Cajun and zydeco music making in the Bay Area of California, from San Francisco to Oakland, where an expansive community resides with strong ties to Cajun culture that date to World War II. DeWitt’s study raises important questions about the roles that migration, regionalism, and family play in the (re)formation and continuity of musical communities in a new geographic location. DeWitt also addresses the complex relationship between so-called outsiders and folk revivalists and those with strong, direct ties to Cajun or creolized culture, so-called insiders. In many ways his study raises some of the same issues—for example, the emblematic nature of music—that Daniel Sheehy addresses in his essay about mariachi music.

Sheehy’s essay reveals just one aspect of a cultural exchange across the fluid geographical and conceptual Mexican American border that has been ongoing since the eighteenth century. By tracing the history of mariachi music in Mexico, Sheehy reveals a cultural phenomenon that was constructed by and through mass media—particularly film and radio—and used to represent a new, urbanized Mexican identity. When adopted by Mexican-American musicians in the United States, mariachi became a flexible category of performance that works in almost every context from ritual to festival and across the spectrum of social and economic classes. Perhaps like polka music in Wisconsin or Cajun music in Louisiana, mariachi has become emblematic of the southern and western regions of the United States, even for mainstream America.

Anne Rasmussen describes a vibrant Arab American musical scene in and around Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan, that took root in America’s industrial heartland in the mid-twentieth century and was later enriched by a post-1965 wave of immigration. Since the 1960s Dearborn’s Arab American musical community has received a continuous influx of immigrants due to social and political events in the Middle East that have caused the urgent migration of tens of thousands. With the current Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni, Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Saudi, and North African musical mix, Arab music in Detroit and Dearborn reflects an American musical microcosm of the contemporary Arab world. A transnational exchange of musicians and music media, from cassette tapes to cable television to social media, keeps musical trends circulating throughout the Arab diaspora; and the insistence of Arab families to keep their expressive culture alive in spite of social and political strife in that diaspora facilitates a bustling Middle Eastern musical subculture in midwestern America.

In his chapter on Americans from the West Indies, Gage Averill identifies the circulation of Trinidadian cultural expressions throughout the diaspora as essential to the creation of a pan-Caribbean ethnicity in the United States. The New York Carnival remains a well-established late summer event for Americans of Caribbean heritage, who use the preparation in the panyards and steelband music on parade as a way to celebrate and create community. Averill helps us understand how the summer New York carnival is a creative adaptation of the spring carnival events that happen in Trinidad and all over the Caribbean by considering the annual flow of practitioners and the rhythms of the community. In addition to responding to the practical and economic factors of Caribbean New York, this event helps promote the values of ethnic pride, education, and responsibility among the youth of the community.

Two chapters discuss long-standing, ever-evolving musical traditions among Native American and Mexicano people in the Southwest. In her chapter on matachines, Brenda M. Romero discusses a ritual music and dance drama that is maintained through performance by both native Pueblo communities and Mejicano populations of Hispanic heritage. The matachines music and dance complex that developed from the confluence of Hispanic and Native American culture in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico also reveals roots from medieval Moorish Spain, a detail that adds to the history and, as Romero writes, the lineage and contemporary authenticity of this cultural performance.

Describing another aspect of Native American performance, Jim Griffith portrays the evolution and current practices of waila musicians who reside in southern Arizona. Like matachines, a product of Native American and Mejicano hybridity, waila draws from the ceremonial and entertainment music of numerous local groups including the Tohono and O’odham peoples (also known as Pima Indians), the Yaqui, Mexican Americans, and country and western musicians and audiences. These chapters by Griffith and Romero, as well as the chapter on mariachi music by Sheehy, provide a sampling of the border culture of the American South—an area of the country rich in an array of performing arts that are often totally unknown or at least largely underappreciated outside of the Southwest.

As illustrated in the chapters by Griffith and Romero, the efforts to subjugate and often eradicate Native American culture following the discovery of America by European explorers were not entirely successful. In their chapter describing the music and dance practices of contemporary northern powwows, Chris Scales and Gabe Desrosiers demonstrate how these events have become ubiquitous and powerful forms of modern Native American popular culture. Emerging in Oklahoma in the early years of the twentieth century as a creative response to US federal government policies that attempted to suppress indigenous cultural and religious practices, early powwows were a unique cultural fusion of the music and dancing featured at Wild West shows and the ceremonies to honor Oklahoma Indian warrior societies. By the end of the century, the singing and dancing styles from these two contexts spread across North America, transforming and being transformed by local tribal practices, and emerged as vibrant and vital wellsprings of intertribal Native American creativity. Scales and his co-author and fieldwork consultant Desrosiers introduce the singing groups and dancers that travel the country to perform at powwow celebrations hosted by Native American communities across the Northern plains and beyond.

During the nineteenth century and prior to the immigration of massive numbers of European immigrants that has occurred since the Civil War, African American and Anglo-American musical practices set the foundation for American music. Two distinctive forms of Christian sacred music—shape note singing, a tradition located primarily (but not entirely) among Anglo-Americans in the middle South; and gospel quartet singing, which originated in African American communities of the mid-Atlantic and Southern plantation states—are the subjects of two chapters of our book. Both traditions are rooted in four-part harmony singing, but yield startlingly different results.

Ron Pen explores the Anglo-American tradition of singing from shape-note hymnbooks in central Kentucky. Through a historical narrative that begins before American independence and brings us up to the present day, Pen explores not only the history of this strong American musical tradition, but the evolution of the unique social context and performance practice of the communities he calls the fasola folk. Pen’s chapter examines not only the longevity of the tradition maintained through the continuous oral transmission of one relatively homogenous Christian Anglo American community, but also the emergence of a more recently self-identified community of shape-note singers of ecumenical heritage, ethnicity, and religion. Affinity practitioners, both performers and audiences, who participate in a particular music scene due to their affinity (or attraction and commitment) rather than because of ethnic or family ties is a theme of other case studies in this volume, particularly the chapter by Sarah Morelli.

The community of black American gospel quartet singers that thrived in Memphis, Tennessee, from the 1920s through the 1970s is the focus of Kip Lornell’s essay. Through his description of the social organization, the training, and the performance practices of quartets in Memphis, Lornell reveals a musical tradition that developed its own musical community. This community interacted not only with other types of gospel groups but also with singers performing in the realm of popular music. African American gospel quartet singing has been progressively overshadowed by the dynamic sounds of gospel choral music, and as a distinctive genre of a cappella, four-part harmony singing is all but extinct in the twenty-first century.

Immigration histories of Asian Americans reveal aspects of musical and cultural hybridity that capture American musical diversity in the contemporary moment. Susan Asai looks at the music making of Americans of Japanese heritage across three generations, but focuses on third-generation Japanese Americans, called nisei, and the ways in which they learn about, choose, perform, and experience music rooted in their culture heritage. Because of the eradication of much Japanese American cultural practice in the internment camps on the West Coast during World War II, young musicians of Japanese heritage do not always have the simple option of drawing from the traditions of their parents. Rather, as innovative individuals, every Japanese American musician must search for and define his or her own Japanese musical memory and expression. Asai introduces cutting-edge artists and their work in the jazz and avant-garde pop scenes of urban America.

Sarah Morelli introduces us to a music and dance scene in the San Francisco Bay Area located in the studio of North Indian kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das and his Chitresh Das Dance Company. Das began teaching this classical form of Indian dance, one that requires years of dedicated study, to members of the Indian immigrant community and interested American women in the 1970s. This was a time when India was beginning to make its mark on American popular culture, particularly in California, where there was both a large Indian immigrant community and a dynamic counterculture of young people, intellectuals, and artists interested in diverse forms of expression. Since the 1970s, Das has been teaching American women, some of whom have gone on to perform in national and international arenas, and to gradually fashion a unique fusion of North Indian and American modern dance. Morelli, herself a dancer and an ethnomusicologist, highlights the ways in which kathak dance empowers women but also interprets the ways in which issues of gender and authenticity intersect with expectations about race through this ethnic dance scene.

Finally, Riot Grrrls, a musical culture of and for women, is presented by Theo Cateforis and Elena Humphreys. Much like contemporary punk and straightedge, two other rock phenomena that emerged and flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, Riot Grrrl is also a movement that promotes independence, self-reliance, and takes a decidedly anti-corporate, staunchly feminist stance. While their essay narrates the origin and development of the New York scene, Riot Grrrl became a national musical and cultural movement with hubs across the country whose connections were facilitated by mass and social media that today are all but obsolete. The music spread by way of phonograph records or cassettes (usually self-produced), and the community connected through ephemeral magazines, called fanzines, created by and for the community. Although Riot Grrrl reveled in live musical performances, this movement also explored the possibilities of the Internet, most notably early listservs like The Well, that seem primitive today but were on the technological edge in the late 1980s.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

The contributors to The Music of Multicultural America are scattered across the United States and work in colleges, universities, and within in the public sector—places like libraries, archives, and arts institutions. Trained in the academic fields of ethnomusicology, folklore, American studies, anthropology, history, ethnic studies, and international studies and languages, we share a common interest in and commitment to music in the United States as it is most broadly defined. We have all been engaged in fieldwork among the communities we introduce. Some are players, singers, or dancers in the communities we describe. Although many do not share the same social and cultural background as the people we study and write about, a few of us qualify as insiders in these communities: Asai is a third-generation Japanese American; Romero grew up as a Mexicana in the Southwest; Sapoznik accidentally tripped over his own Jewish musical roots while playing American old-time music; and Spinney returned to her Irish American heritage though engaging in music and dance as an adult. Whether insiders or outsiders to the traditions we describe, all of us bring a valuable perspective to the cultures we have chosen to explore.

Whatever our status as researchers, we are all aware of the potential power of our positions as patrons and advocates for our consultants and their cultural practices. We inevitably became involved in the maintenance and development of a community’s cultural performances through playing, singing, dancing, and teaching. We have also stimulated and extended exposure to these traditions through the production of such documentary endeavors as conference papers, books, articles, recordings, and films, and through the presentation of live performance. Through our involvement as educators in festivals and concerts, our sponsorship of educational and public projects, and the documentation of musicians and their communities, we have assumed active roles as publicists and advocates. Many of the authors for this volume have worked in festival contexts, conducting research, acting as interpreters, building stages, writing grant proposals, advising, producing, and performing, sometimes alongside the people about whom we write. And many of us perform and teach the music and dance traditions we document. Advocacy, through the public presentation of community arts, has naturally become an extension of our fieldwork and publication.

Since the 1970s, multicultural festivals have become the primary context for showcasing diversity through the arts. Virtually every city in America presents celebrations of culture that are orchestrated and executed by local organizations. Such efforts to galvanize community energy and present it publicly lead to the institutionalization of arts agencies committed to the celebration of diversity and to education by, about, and for local communities. For example, since the 1960s the organization Urban Gateways has conducted educational and cultural programs that highlight the contributions of various Hispanic, African American, Eastern European, and other communities in the Chicago metropolitan area. In addition to the dizzying array of neighborhood and holiday festivals in New York, arts agencies like City Lore, the World Music Institute, and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance devote their energies full-time to the documentation and promotion of the culturally diverse communities of New York’s five boroughs. On the national level, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, held annually on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. This multicultural festival, which invites participation both from within the United States and from abroad, is mounted for ten days at the end of June and early July, and is supported by a triad of the Smithsonian Institution, corporate sponsorship, and money contributed by the states and countries that are featured each summer.

Sometimes festivals that showcase folk or ethnic music and musicians can be completely self-supporting, combining the efforts of grassroots organizers and planners with community and corporate sponsorship on a local level. For example, Milwaukee, with its large German American population, hosts an Oktoberfest complete with polka, bratwurst, and craft beer. This annual event draws tens of thousands of people to the city. Similarly, the German American community in New Ulm, Minnesota (hometown of the Bohemian American polka legend Whoopee John Wilfahrt), hosts an annual fair in October with local and regional polka bands that perform daily. Annual Arab festivals, in Detroit and Dearborn, are planned and presented every summer through a complex process of negotiation among the community leaders and artists in Michigan’s multifaceted Arab American community. And in Brooklyn, New York, during the late summer, people from throughout the Caribbean participate in a uniquely American version of Carnival (usually associated with the beginning of Lent in early spring) when many blocks are taken up with food and soca, steelband, reggae, calypso, and dance.

We invite you, our readers, to think about your own experiences with community music, perhaps through your families, among friends, and in your neighborhoods and cities. We encourage you to extend your classwork or research and to actively participate in a local music scene by attending a festival, joining an ensemble, signing up for a workshop, or volunteering or even interning at an institution that promotes diverse arts and local artists. Most of the authors in this volume have helped their own students identify and apply for internships in cultural and arts agencies like the Smithsonian Institution. This kind of work, also known as public sector or applied ethnomusicology (or folklore or anthropology), is one of the most exciting, satisfying, and increasingly popular ways to build bridges between musicians, communities, and the broader public.

EARLY STUDIES OF AMERICAN MUSIC AND CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE

The Music of Multicultural America speaks to an audience that is interested in both the sound of American music and in American music as a social and cultural phenomenon. We write with reference to a family of allied academic fields that includes American studies, ethnomusicology, folklore, and cultural studies. We build on a literature from American music, cultural geography, the study of world music, and scholarship on ethnicity and identity; a selection of important works from these fields is cited and suggested for further reading at the end of this introduction.

Until the 1950s, research by academic scholars about American music focused primarily on European-derived musical forms that were attributed to formally trained (usually male) composers and represented in staff notation. This is particularly true for historical musicologists who followed a Germanic model of scholarship that evolved in the late nineteenth century. These scholars often overlooked or deliberately ignored American vernacular and popular music, and most of them limited their research to the analysis of written or recorded musical works and the writing of biography. Although the paradigms of musicology have been under scrutiny for several decades by the scholars themselves, many musicologists continue to define the study and teaching of music history in terms of Great (European) Men and their Great (European) Works.

There were, of course, a handful of pioneering scholars, almost none of them academically trained in historical musicology, who worked outside the established scholarly boundaries of European oriented musicology. Beginning in the middle 1920s, Sigmund Spaeth wrote elegantly about popular music (1927); Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith coauthored the first book devoted to jazz (1939); George Pullen Jackson published studies of white gospel music in the southeastern states (1933); John and Alan Lomax wrote a study of the life and lyrics of the Louisiana-born songster Lead Belly (1936), and Alan Lomax’s collection of thousands of recordings from hundreds of practitioners has become an available archive and monument to American musical diversity. (See also the Lomax Collection online at www.research.culturalequity.org.) Ruth Crawford Seeger and her husband, Charles Seeger, were among the handful of activists who, during the 1930s, studied and taught courses at colleges and universities that included American vernacular music. They were especially interested in American folk music, and worked with traditions such as old-time fiddle tunes, children’s play songs, and Appalachian folk music (Crawford Seeger 1953).

The first edition of Gilbert Chase’s ambitious survey, America’s Music, helped challenge Eurocentric hegemony in the mid-1950s (Chase 1992). Chase, who initially was trained in historical musicology and also worked as a music critic and teacher, broadened the scope of scholarly discourse by including information about jazz and Tin Pan Alley composers. Subsequent editions of Chase’s book embraced even more styles of vernacular music as the author added facts and insights about black American and popular music. The trend toward inclusion has gradually escalated, and today we not only have much more balanced surveys of American music history that take race, gender, and ethnicity into account, but also specialized textbooks that are devoted to such vernacular forms of American music as jazz, rock, and folk.

Since the 1970s the number of scholarly books about American vernacular music (written by both academic and non-academic authors) has increased dramatically. Most of these books discuss a single topic, for example Bill Malone’s panoramic Country Music U.S.A. (Malone and Neal 2010) or the even more geographically focused Big Road Blues, a study of Mississippi blues by David Evans (1982). In 1972 the University of Illinois Press launched Music in American Life, the first scholarly series devoted exclusively to this subject. The first book in the series, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs, is Archie Green’s classic study of mining lore, songs, and music (Green 1972). Since its inception this series has published books on topics as diverse as Chicago soul music, cowboy songs, African American gospel singing, the music of Jewish immigrants, bluegrass, music at the White House, Kansas City jazz, and the definitive biography of country music legend Jimmie Rodgers.

In 1995 the University Press of Mississippi launched its own American Made Music Series with a particular emphasis on the South and a mission to reach a wide audience and not merely academics. Among the scores of titles in this series are books about jazz pioneer Wilbur Sweatman, zydeco music, Starday Records, blues tourism, and southern gospel music. A decade later Duke University Press announced Refiguring American Music, to publish bold, innovative works that pose new challenges to thinking about the nature and character of American Music. In 2012 Chris Scales (a contributor to this volume) published Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains in that series.

As the number of books and articles focused on music in the United States grows, many take a broad historical and developmental approach adapted from the field of musicology. These texts also tend to privilege musical products and producers (texts, recordings, repertoires, composers) over musical processes. For example, Richard Crawford’s fine textbook America’s Musical Life (Crawford 2001) provides students with a historical survey that looks back to the seventeenth century and considers primarily the music making of white European immigrants and Africans who came to the continent as slaves and their descendants. Other encyclopedia-style texts that have expanded the field of American music studies include the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music with its volume United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff (2001), and the Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nichols (1998). With articles on region and genre as well as on processes and issues that shape American music and music scholarship, including ethnographic fieldwork, by top scholars with contemporary perspectives and methods, these are invaluable resources.

Since we conceived of and began to work on the first edition of this book in the mid-1990s, new publications have moved the scholarship about American music forward. American Popular Music: A Multicultural History takes a cue from our book, but instead of sharply focused case studies, Glenn Appell and David Hemphill (2005) provide a sweeping overview that relates the story of American popular music from African American, European American, Latino, Asian, and Native American perspectives. Similarly, Norm Cohen’s edited volume Ethnic and Border Music: A Regional Exploration (Cohen 2007) consists of six essays, including Irish Music in America and Chicano/Latino Music, from the Southwest to the Northeast that cover their topics with a similarly broad stroke. In 2013 Larry Starr and Chris Waterman published a new edition of American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 that displays an increasing awareness of the diversity of our popular music traditions, most notably the importance of Latino popular music emanating from Los Angeles, New York, and south Florida.

We believe that Musics of Multicultural America, the first edition of this book, helped move the study of American music into new territories, as it raised questions about the very nature of American music. Certainly only a minority of the people who picked up a copy of the book expected to read about the music culture of Pima Indians in Arizona, Brooklyn’s steel pan orchestras, the Spanish-Indian musical mix found in New Mexico known as matachines, or Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan. Although The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States expands the number of case studies, we still believe that many of the issues and concepts that we raised in 1997 remain underexplored, underappreciated, and largely absent from most conversations about American music.

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY AND THE MULTICULTURAL MIX

The United States is home to people from across the entire world, creating a particularly rich and complex cultural landscape. On the West Coast the influence of immigrants from all over Asia is obvious, particularly in urban areas like Los Angeles and Seattle. The southernmost states form a border culture where the music, fashion, and food from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean permeate every stratum of society. In the so-called heartland of our country (the American Midwest), African Americans, as well as people of Northern European and Scandinavian heritage, share the map with Middle Easterners and people from Eastern Europe. The Northeast, home to populations of old world Europe, such as Italian and Irish Americans, also welcomes new families from Africa. With the help of various aid agencies, political and economic refugees find new homes in cities and towns across the country. Every large city in the United States, from Boston to San Francisco, is a complicated cauldron of ethnicity, race, nationalism, class, religion, and social affinity. The Music of Multicultural America challenges its readers to develop an enhanced awareness of American musical life that matches the diversity and complexity of the American population.

The study of America’s musical diversity not only provides a method for understanding our multicultural population; it also reveals the ways that peoples and cultures move around within the United States and between communities in various international locales. The movement of Mexican American peoples from the Southwest throughout the country has introduced a number of important Mexican American styles, including for example, conjunto, mariachi, and tejano, which are now readily heard in the North and East. As people of Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Czech, and Bohemian background permanently leave their northern homes and become full-time snowbirds, they bring with them the polka bands and dances that find new audiences in places like Arizona and Florida.

The popularity of Cajun culture and music illustrates that certain types of regional or ethnic music become trendy and undergo waves of popularity that extend beyond their place and community of origin. Looking into the history of Cajun music and culture reminds us of this community’s original migration from France to eastern Canada and then from these Maritime Provinces to present-day Louisiana and, as described in this volume, to California. Beginning in the 1960s and rapidly gathering momentum over the past twenty years, gumbo, button accordions, and two-stepping became chic. Hundreds of miles from the bayou, throughout much of the United States, not only have the sheer number of Creole, Cajun, and New Orleans–style restaurants increased dramatically but the interest in Cajun music and dance has mushroomed. The Washington, D.C., area, for example, supports weekly dances that feature creolized music. Nevertheless, even with today’s nationwide and international fascination with things Cajun, we rightly associate Cajun music and culture with southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. Even though music always seems to be on the move, styles like Cajun, polka, or mariachi (to name just a few examples) are inseparable from the places and the histories of their origin. The power of music to refer to these places and histories is one of the things that makes music so compelling.

For those who identify their heritage as originating outside of the United States, and others who are learning about their heritage through community performance, music invents homeland. Collections of essays on the performative power of festivals edited by Falassi (1987), and on the use of music in the construction of place edited by Stokes (1994), for example, along with many other studies of music and identity offer examples of the power of music, dance, festival, and ritual to actualize community through referencing its sights, sounds, smells, customs, and worldviews. George Lipsitz in Dangerous Crossroads (1994) extends the discussion to embrace mediated popular music in a global postmodern context and its power to communicate a poetics of place. Edited collections on music and diaspora confirm that music and musicians are ever on the move and that their networks are both local and global (see Witzleben 2013; Turino and Lee 2004; Um 2005; Ramnarine 2007; see also Clifford 1997). Whether remembered from over there or learned here, music has the power through lyrics, instruments, ornaments, scales, intonation and a host of other features to reference time and place in special ways. Furthermore, because listening, playing, and moving to music are all physical activities, the poetics of place, the sense of belonging, or the complex feelings associated with identity are activated through performance and experienced and remembered in both the mind and the body.

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF THE WORLD’S MUSIC

The study of world music has played an increasingly important role in college curricula, particularly since the field of ethnomusicology developed as an academic discipline in the mid-1950s. In liberal arts colleges, large universities, and schools of music, courses in world music and ethnomusicology have contributed to a more comprehensive study of music of all the world’s peoples. Such courses expand and challenge the focus of music programs on the select cultures of Europe. Courses that include music cultures of the world have also done much to satisfy the increasing demand within college and university-wide curricula for attention to histories and cultures outside the Western tradition.

Those of us who teach world music courses are challenged and excited by our assignment to teach the world in one or two semesters. Yet we can be frustrated by the marginalization of world music by some who consider western art music superior and any kind of global studies as extra, exotic, faraway, foreign, or mostly for fun. Although its influence is waning as many academic institutions address the need for a more global perspective in the areas of art, history, literature, philosophy, and religion, the dichotomy between the West and the rest remains an important principle for the ordering of knowledge in the academy.

The world music classes that fulfill the non-Western, global, multicultural, or world history requirements for students in colleges and universities across the country tend to survey select musical traditions of Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Native America. For various reasons, the serious consideration of world music traditions in the United States (for example Chinese music in America, or Chinese American music) has lagged behind. Over the past two decades, however, ethnomusicologists have expanded the purview of their discipline to include not only musical practices characterized by age, place, and purity, but also those rich with the complexities of the contemporary, the mediated, the transnational, and the postmodern, phenomena that have been identified and theorized by contemporary thinkers. In other words, scholars are increasingly looking within the United States to discover and explore the music of the world’s peoples.

Ethnomusicologists then, among others, have reinforced the fact that the New World is as rich a field of study for contemporary scholars as the Old World has been for historical and comparative musicologists and their colleagues. Thanks to the time and energy ethnomusicologists have invested toward the understanding of multiple musical languages in our increasingly interconnected world, they have much to offer contemporary study of American music. In the twenty-first century the discipline of ethnomusicology itself is characterized as much by theoretical and methodological approach as by geographical orientation. Taking a nod from anthropology, ethnomusicologists look at music in and as culture, as a fundamental activity of humankind, and they concern themselves with trying to understand the ways people use, practice, and ascribe meaning to music. Ethnomusicologists aim to gain insight into native systems of musical practice and aesthetics and to adopt a relativistic view of musical sounds and systems.

Some college students gain an interest in world music because of related coursework in anthropology, history, languages, religions, and literature. Or, they come into world music classes because their interest has been piqued by international artists and pop stars, such as Algerian rai singers Cheb Khaled and Rashid Taha or Nigerian juju musician King Sunny Ade, or Youssou N’Dour from Senegal, or Wyclef Jean of Haiti. Thanks to a variety of media like Spotify or Smithsonian Global Sounds, world music is now widely available. Students often recognize their own experiences in our classes because they have heard some so-called world music in their own backyard—a conjunto band on a Texas radio station, a salsa group performing at a New York City nightclub, klezmer music at a friend’s wedding, or the religious and holiday songs that accompany their own family celebrations.

MUSIC, ETHNICITY, AND IDENTITY

Building upon the interests of such sociologists and anthropologists as Melville Herskovits (1945), Milton Gordon (1964), and Frederick Barth (1969), studies of ethnicity as a profound and enduring social construct of humankind gained momentum in the mid-1960s. Scholars in fields ranging from music to political science developed a keen interest in ethnicity and race as keys to understanding the development of an American identity. Writers initially examined the old customs and modes of behavior that were passed down and inherited from generation to generation with an eye toward understanding the process of assimilation and acculturation in the New World. Their view was that these processes, together, served as a catalyst for the erosion of authentic old world traditions that resulted in the gradual meltdown of ethnic distinctions into the American pot.

As the civil rights movement and the modern feminist movement of the early 1960s legitimized difference, new academic paradigms emerged that focused not on the meltdown of tradition but on the constant reworking and re-articulation of tradition through idea and action. In the 1980s and 1990s, studies of race and ethnicity as social constructions were extended by numerous scholars from within ethnic groups, who, writing as insiders, gave voice to the complexity and richness of the process of identity formation. The establishment of numerous interdisciplinary programs and departments such as Women’s Studies, Africana Studies, or Ethnic Studies resulted from their work.

We now accept that categories of ethnicity, identity, and even race are far from static and largely constructed through social process. In spite of the fact that we are born into families, into socioeconomic classes, and into religious groups, our identities are largely constructed through the daily processes of personal interaction, choosing associates, and through participating in a wide range of social activities that include music and dance. Morelli’s interpretation of American women and the Indian classical dance world in San Francisco, and Scales and Desrosier’s presentation of intertribal powwow both get to the heart of ideas about race and ethnicity as they are embodied by practitioners and perceived by audiences and communities. Along with many of our case studies, theirs show how the sense of who we