Changing music to fit European models

While reading the selections from Jon Cruz’s book, I was reminded of my experiences in choir. Cruz quotes Thomas Fenner “Our desire is, not to obtain any song in a more or less changed or mangled conditions, as you surely do when you take it out of its foreordained and appropriate setting in some part of the complicated negro religious ritual, and adapt it to be sung as a regular four-part song by a choir or congregation, either white or black” (170). I have been in different choirs from junior high to university, and we sang some of these four-part black spirituals. It was unsettling to me when we would sing them because I thought we looked and sounded ridiculous. Our voices didn’t possess the depth of sorrow that was needed at least from my limited knowledge. I thought about the chapter in Deloria’s book on music and how the people transcribing the Indian music couldn’t get the rhythms or sounds right. I find it interesting that these same ideas existed in transcribing black spirituals, this idea of pressing the music into a European model of music, time signatures, notes and accents.

A few years ago I watched a movie called “Songcatcher” about a woman who goes into the Appalachian Mountains to document some of the music of the people living there. I don’t remember everything about the movie, but what stayed with me was how difficult it was to capture the music and put it on paper, transcribing a sorrowful piece of music like “Pretty Saro” on to paper with lines and black dots for notes and set rhythm. It just doesn’t portray the song’s sadness, timbre or accents. It’s difficult to represent a song perfectly. I know it’s important for folklorists to find a way to document music from different cultures and that really the only way to do it is within the paradigms of our own knowledge, but I wonder if there is a different way because things are lost by forcing the music into European models.

-Colleen Murphy