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Thought Experiment

  12/27/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

After four centuries, most Americans can identify a piece of music as African-American. Not necessarily performed by African-Americans but in the African-American tradition. Why is (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora
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Where are the Mozarts?

  11/21/2020       Pat Barrett      1 Comment

Looking at the history of Western music, certain individuals stand out as musical geniuses: Mozart, Bach. We recognize this phenomenon and marvel at it. These (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

The Truth of Cultural Exposure

  08/06/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

In my household right now we have 4 levels of cultural exposure. My wife was raised in a Black Pentecostal church, came from a small (Continue Reading)

Culture, Music of the African Diaspora

How a Colonial Perspective Works

  05/08/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Musicology in the West has relegated popular music to the non-serious realm. Therefore, African scholars, branded and sanctioned by metropolitan universities and departments of musicology, (Continue Reading)

Culture, Music of the African Diaspora

cowbell as cultural memory

  03/28/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Reading Sam Floyd, my suspicions rise over terms like “cultural memory.” I recall a disturbing conversation with a Prof. Woods, chairperson of the art department (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Culture, Music of the African Diaspora

Compare Calabar recitation to Havana homenaje

  07/28/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

 

African Diaspora, Music of the African Diaspora

In Praise of Afro-Pop

  07/06/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I sent this in when the program requested testimonials for a grant. The music of Africa has formed the base of a good deal of (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

(No Title)

  06/26/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The first 3 have the pulse I am talking about. I have used examples without vocals and the last two are nothing but drumming. The (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

If you cannot show it, is it real?

  06/26/2019       Pat Barrett      2 Comments

“Show” is not the best word. Thinking about African Diasporic music and the issue of the pulse, I was reminded of the issue of acquisition (Continue Reading)

Foreign language teaching & learning, Linguistics, Music of the African Diaspora

When it gets good

  04/18/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

You might notice how in many forms of African-derived music, a melody- and harmony-driven music will over the course of the piece devolve into domination (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Compare this to any Niger/Chad/Congo horn section

  04/13/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

At about 7:05 on this you will hear the horns take over and then play any recording of the music deeply written about by Simha (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Together – Apart: a view of Western music

  04/06/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Western Europe and West Africa have a lot in common in their musics and musical traditions but are also clearly distinct. Both regions and traditions (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

The beat of the washing machine

  01/09/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

One of the hallmarks – no, the sine qua nons – of the music of West Africa and the African Diaspora is what is popularly (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

The centrality of music to the Black religious experience

  12/10/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I’m sure I’ve written up this incident here before but cannot find it. It points to the centrality of music and esp of rhythmic music (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Music of the African Diaspora

Whither jazz without the church?

  10/08/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

NPR played a nice piece on currents in jazz, the dropping of the boundary between different approaches to jazz. They played a piece by an (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora, What I'm Reading Now

Across time: a favored distortion

  09/13/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Many decades ago I read and heard about the practice in West Africa of drilling a small hole in the shell of a drum and (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

The Musical and the Spiritual

  06/09/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

It has long been my vision of African-American music that the connection between the musical and the spiritual is so tight that this connection extends (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Then it comes crashing in

  11/27/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

A magical moment for me is when musicians are playing a piece of music straight and then, either insinuatingly or with a mighty shift, they (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Oops! Assumptions about African music

  07/31/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Recently I offered a friend several YouTube videos depicting Cuban street congas in response to our discussion about The Miami Sound Machine’s La Conga. Then (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

“a sort of symphony emerged”

  05/23/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Sometimes you come across something that smacks you right in the forehead, something at the back of your mind but never entirely brought out into (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

quick note on clave

  05/20/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Watch the topless man playing clave at and notice how he shakes the claves just a bit to maintain his place in the rhythm. This (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

What are they afraid of? This.

  05/20/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Here you see the combination of music and dancing in huge crowds, dancing with abandon and a lot of sexuality and some fighting, that scares (Continue Reading)

African Diaspora, Culture, Music of the African Diaspora

Resemblances between language and music

  05/17/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

These quotes are from Simha Arom’s African Polyphony and Polyrhythm …. for each type of procedure observed, there must be an explanation of how it (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, Music of the African Diaspora
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