Music is social
Words by Jonathan Henderson
Orchestration of those words by Dan Mahoney
One of the best parts of being the editor of COA is I get to spend time talking to my colleagues about the work they do at the college. What a gift, being forced to spend time listening to really smart, engaging people talk about their passions.
I loved my time as a college student—once I actually accepted that role—and I wanted to be nothing else. I spent many years getting my BA, many more getting my MFA… I would do it all again. The spaces where talking and listening and learning happen are charged spaces, magical spaces, (un)safe spaces. Spaces like that have always been a draw for me. COA is a space like that.
Enjoy the Reciprocity
—Dan
Kaira Ba outside a recording session.
Music has always been social for me… a social process and a social act. I've never really been motivated by my own virtuosity, though I do pride myself in having developed a craft. I love to practice the craft I've developed over years, and I have some amount of facility—or even expertise at moments—but virtuosity has never really appealed to me as an end in itself.
What I love most is to be in the creative pressure cooker with a bunch of people trying to figure something out together. And I love the social dynamic that comes through those kinds of collaborative art projects and music projects. That's what, in a sense, pushed me towards ethnomusicology, because it's the study of music as a social and cultural phenomenon. It's collaborative.
Working on Futurity [a collaborative musical performance produced at COA in 2023, co-taught with Joanne Woodward & Paul Newman Chair in Performing Arts Jodi Baker] was such a good model of collaboration and reciprocity for me... It was deeply collaborative in a genuine way. Jodi and I facilitated the thing and made it possible to pull off, but the students took real responsibility for major components of the work we were making together. Margit Hardi ’24 choreographing, Hanako Moulton ’25 and Kaia Douglas ’25 doing vocal direction, and costumers Elena Brotz ’24 and Pigeon Voigt ’24... People took on these huge pieces of work and committed fully to the process. Through that, we were able to create something that was just so much cooler than it would have been if Jodi and I tried to micromanage all of the different parts. It becomes so rich when you are pulling from a bunch of different, and sometimes disparate, perspectives.
Jonathan Henderson performing in Cakalak Thunder.
There's a word in Portuguese, Antropófago, that translates as cultural cannibalism... [Brazilian poet, Oswald de Andrade, wrote a poem in 1923 called the Cannibalist Manifesto celebrating Brazil's history of "cannibalizing" other cultures into their own diverse cultural mix.] In the 1960s bands like Os Mutantes and the entire Tropicália movement built an aesthetic around this principle... They were eating widely from musicians across the globe, then making it their own. Caetano Veloso famously said of the Tropicálists, "We were eating the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix."
That sort of movement is something that I prioritize in my teaching. Paul Gilroy, who was an influential academic for me, wrote a book called The Black Atlantic where he advocates for attending to the routes of music and culture rather than the roots. This action is about thinking through how culture develops as a process of circulation rather than as disseminating from some pure, imagined point of origin.
Open the ecosystems
I've had many formative moments as a musician; being in Cakalak Thunder was one of them.
Cakalak Thunder was a musical group/radical street band formed in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2003. We went strong for around 15 years. There were probably 80 people who cycled in and out of the band over that time. This was during a moment in time [the early 2000s] where there was a real uptick in street actions… the anti-globalization movement, the anti-war movement were having large-scale demonstrations. For us, it was an amazing way to participate in those spaces by showing up with a well-organized crew to contribute something specific. We would work with organizers to help conduct people in one direction or another because, when it comes down to it, people will follow a marching band.
There were other people doing this eclectic marching band music for popular liberation. The Infernal Noise Brigade from Seattle was a big source of inspiration. They were born as part of the mass protests against the WTO in 1999. Drums and concussion grenades. A bunch of bands cropped up after those protests... It was a great experiment in collective organizing… a great learning experience in and of itself. Originally, Cakalak was making our own music until a dear friend, who had been living in Stockholm studying samba with an Uruguayan teacher, came back to Greensboro and taught us samba via Sweden, via Uruguay. The band learned samba like a game of telephone. But that experience got me so interested that I sought out Brazilian teachers in the area and, later, traveled to Brazil to study the music.
Samba music offers a certain accessibility that very few other musical styles do because you really can start at square one and contribute to some great music very quickly without a ton of experience. You pretty quickly get to be part of the band and help create this big ensemble sound, which then means you can be of service to events happening in the community. Ellie Oldach ’15 works for an organization called First Light in Bangor. They were having a big symposium at the Penobscot Theatre and Ellie wanted us to come and play. So, we showed up outside the theatre and when the symposium ended, we led the participants on a march through Bangor down to a park where the Burnurwurbskek Singers [a Wabanaki drumming and singing group] welcomed the crowd with a series of songs. It was a great way to let our students be of service to this organization and throw themselves into a social situation they probably wouldn't have sought out otherwise.
First Light is a collective effort across more than 65 non-native land-holding organizations in the Wabanaki homelands now called Maine. They work closely with the federally-recognized Wabanaki Nations through their collaboration with the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship. First Light’s aim is to relearn the history of the lands, recenter Wabanaki voice and decision-making, and return land to Wabanaki Nations.
We've been fortunate to have amazing musicians come to campus. This fall [2024], we had Debashish Bhattacharya, a virtuoso innovator of the slide guitar from India, and Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band, from Burkina Faso, came last spring. Both were amazing concerts to host. When Baba Commandant came, I was teaching a class focused on independence movements in Africa from the 1950s through the 1980s, and the relationship between those movements and popular music at the time. The morning after Baba Commandant’s performance, the band visited our class and the students had the opportunity to perform the musical repertoire we had been working on for them. And Baba Commandant knew all the music we were playing—particularly Bembeya Jazz National’s Armée Guinéenne, which was an iconic song from their parents’ generation. They were so delighted to hear our students play this music—they ate it up, and gave great feedback that was super generous and supportive.
That kind of interaction [that sort of reciprocity] is just so special, when artists come to campus and students can interact with them... It creates such memorable moments—touchstones those students will remember for a long time... moments loaded with meaning. This is what we, as a community, gain when we crack open our little ecosystems and invite other people in.
[In a devastating blow to the music world, Mamadou Sanou, vocalist and leader of Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Bang died of malaria in Burkina Faso in November 2023.]
The inflated tear
My dad has played saxophone for 50-plus years. When he was 13 and a budding sax player, he was walking through a shopping mall in suburban New Jersey when he heard this wild sound coming from the other end of the building. He followed the sound and found Rahsaan Roland Kirk standing on a tiny stage in the food court with four saxophones and a nose flute strapped to his chest. My dad listened to him play, and after the gig he went up to Kirk and asked how he could learn to play like that... Kirk told him, “Start with two.” Since then my dad has played tenor and alto sax at the same time.
It's a super distinctive thing… he's a great musician. His presence in my life has been one of the greatest influences on me as a musician and as a teacher… His love of playing was always available to me throughout my childhood and music was omnipresent. He's a great resource and I've been fortunate enough to have a variety of great teachers and resources in my life.
When I came to COA, I wanted to make space for other faculty to come and teach music. It's valuable for musicians to learn multiple perspectives; a variety of mentors and teachers makes for better musicians. We have great visitors here. Adam McLean teaches folk music ensemble, music theory, and musicianship classes. Ryan Blotnick teaches guitar performance and jazz improvisation classes—he’s a phenomenal player. Mike Bennett's taught a world percussion class for many years, and Caroline Cotter has just started teaching a great songwriting class. We've had Christina Spurling and Richard Hsu co-teach a chamber music class... a lot of variety.
All of these people are professionals who work in the fields they are teaching, so they are able to share these really specific skills they've acquired with their students. Another cool thing that we have recently gotten up and running is an applied music lesson structure which allows students to take one-on-one lessons with a private tutor for credit. In winter term, we have 12 students studying one-on-one with a host of amazing local teachers.
It's an exciting time to be here because of all that is happening in and outside of the classroom. I'm thinking again of Futurity and how my friend Mark Dixon sent a bunch of hand built electroacoustic instruments from North Carolina for our students to play during the show… What a gift. The students were able to weave these instruments into the production, and Mark was able to see the instruments he built living in a way he had never conceived of. That sort of exchange [that sort of reciprocity] in an expanded classroom setting is difficult to do, but it is easier to do at COA than in other places. I'd really like to lean into that aspect of the college more and more. We do this experiential, experimental, immersive kind of work with the students because it creates such profound experiences for them, that then reverberates out into the community. For people who saw Futurity, it echoed within them for quite a while after those performances. That's intoxicating. I think those kinds of experiences really can be life changing.
