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A Brief Sketch of African Music

  04/03/2022       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

African music as found in the western half of the continent has an overall shape despite major distinctions from north to south. This music came (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora
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The Reshaping of a Musical Culture

  01/29/2022       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Joseph Holloway writes in Africanisms in American Culture that the slaves brought with them their musical culture. That resulted in them reshaping the European American (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Carried along in the rhythm of the music

  11/20/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Sitting here listening to a series of performances of Agbadza, the ever popular Ewe dance music, I realized the nature of that pulse, what many (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Heavy Metal in Africa

  11/19/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

A Togolese heavy metal group is making itself known. Heavy metal is associated more with White audiences in the U.S. and even has an association (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Trace it back

  11/06/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Take a rhythm in any current song of the Americas and Europe. Trace it back until it disappears. Where was that last point found? Take (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

A Breakthough Insight, I think………..

  08/20/2021       Pat Barrett      1 Comment

A couple of nights ago I had put on a CD of rhythm and blues. My wife and I began slow dancing between the kitchen (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Double consciousness – we all possess it now

  05/11/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

For decades, going back to W.E.B. Dubois writing in The Atlantic , African-Americans have told of the double consciousness they carry within: who they are (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

Tapping Into the Sacred Force

  05/02/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The title of a 2013 blog item here dealt with that sense that musicians may be “plugging in” to a force field for the energy (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

What there is pattern, there is intention

  02/01/2021       Pat Barrett      1 Comment

When artists bypass rules and structures, their work can sound chaotic to anyone expecting the traditional patterns of rhyme, harmony, rhythm, tone, pitch, scale, mode, (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora, Pat's World View

Calling the moves

  01/26/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Square dancing is directed by a “caller,” a person who calls out the next move: do-si-do, swing your partner, etc. I thought of that when (Continue Reading)

Music of the African Diaspora

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

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

The Pulse

  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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLwmYI09Lw&t=422 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 (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
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