Cultural Appropriation and Music

 This post is about cultural appropriation, particularly in regard to music. It will take a while to get there so I ask for your patience.

Music is a human and personal expression. Every single musician has a personal approach to music and every performance is idiosyncratic. Every group of musicians has its own communal personality based on the skill, backgrounds, interactions and the style of the music. We know from from found flutes that music is at least 35,000 years old, but I suspect it is as old as the species. Just as there are no "primitive" languages, there are no "primitive" musical styles. 

Music changes over time. Knowledge passes from musician to musician through collaboration and explicit teaching. I was trained to play the flute in the classical tradition. I was a student of Frank Bowen, who was a student of Marcel Moyse, who was a student of Phillip Gaubert, who was a student of Paul Taffanel who studied under Vincent Dorus who studied under Joseph Guillou who studied with François Devienne. That partial chain goes back over 250 years. It is part of a tradition of western music that is as old as western culture. Western classical music has gone through various stylistic changes, but the chain is unbroken. In India, the tradition of raga has an even more consistent thematic history that goes back over a millennium. I am sure the same unbroken chains of musical tradition exist in almost every culture throughout the world.

Music is passed on by ear, personal instruction, and practice. In different times and places people have created notational systems for music. As with all notational systems, including written language, the notation is incomplete. Think about a play, say Shakespeare's Hamlet. The written play is fixed. There are occasional directions in the text "Enter LAERTES and OPHELIA".  In addition to the written play there is an unbroken chain of performance tradition passed from actor to actor and director to director. Despite this continuity, every performance of the play is different, often dramatically (pun intended). Every spoken word is interpreted by an actor who decides pace, emphasis, tone... Think how many ways there are to say "To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;". Within each tradition every generation, in fact every person, reinvents the tradition as part and parcel of performance and education.

Every work of performance art has an initial creator. Wanting credit for work and wanting to benefit from the fruit of our labor is an important human trait. Over time, virtually all performed art changes. This is true even when the only one who performs it is the creator. Over time phrases are polished, awkward parts added or changed, harmonies enriched... In folk music the  original creator is often unknown. Sometimes the author is unknown because the work is very old but I suspect the folk tradition also puts less emphasis on preserving the source.

In music, it is common that the original composition is only a structure. The composer intends for the performers to provide a complete piece on the basis of the structure. This is often visible in the music notation. In jazz, pieces are written as a melody with an associated set of chords (the changes). In performance this provides the basis for a set of variations. In Classical Baroque music, a piece may be given as a melody line and a figured bass, which is a bass line plus a set of chord symbols, much the same as jazz. In both Jazz and Baroque music the performers are expected to flesh out this skeleton and each of the players uses the written chords and melodies as a hints to guide their improvisation.

Because we are human, even brand new inventions are almost always based on existing objects and techniques. Jazz is only a hundred or so years old. It has grown and changed and now has multiple styles (New Orleans, BeBop, cool, fusion, free...). It originated from a number of traditions, most African based, including the blues. The Wikipedia list of  jazz contrafacts has over 50 separate jazz tunes based on George Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm". Wikipedia also has a partial list of uses of the Gregorian Chant "Deus Irae". There are over 40 citations including Haydn, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, George Crumb, John Williams and Jethro Tull. In current pop music, songs are often electronically constructed from individual sounds and phrases; "samples" taken directly from perviously recorded songs.

So... in music there are multiple traditions around the globe. Each tradition is constantly changing and each "piece" is subject to interpretation. Moreover, musical appropriation is rampant.

With the advent of radios, automobiles, and recorded music it became much easier to hear performances by people who live far away and have other musical traditions. When musicians hear new music, they imitate what they like and incorporate it into their own playing. This is how the largely African American traditions of blues, jazz, R&B... entered vernacular of white musicians and the commercial world of largely white owned corporations. 

The blues musician Robert Johnson has a known output of 29 songs. Eric Clapton has recorded at least 24 of them, including a tribute album. He has been respectful of the music and has given Robert Johnson credit. In fact Robert Johnson's fame has multiplied partly because of Clapton's work. That said, Clapton was a young white kid who heard, was affected by, copied, and helped commercialize the style.

In the U.S. there is a tradition of oppression and exploitation of black musicians. In general black musicians have been the inventors of styles and white musicians imitated. Note I say "in general". No one can deny the ingenuity and genius of, say Bill Evans, but the trend holds. A few years ago the New York Times published a photo with the headline "Is This the Greatest Photo in Jazz History?" The photo shows four musicians playing:  Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, and Charlie Parker. These are four of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived. The photo was taken on a Sunday night in a half filled dive. Neither Monk nor Parker had their cabaret licenses, which meant they were playing illegally. Cabaret licenses in New York were a means for the police to oppress musicians. Billie Holiday was hounded to death by government authorities, largely to suppress the song "Strange Fruit". Part of that hounding was taking away her cabaret license to reduce her ability to make a living.

The term "cultural appropriation" was coined in the 1970s. The Oxford language definition is "the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society."  As an old white man, I can be viewed as a member of a culture that is most likely to oppress and appropriate. As a human being and a musician, I can be knowledgable and sensitive to cultural appropriation, but I cannot avoid taking from other cultures. 

In 1901 a Japanese composer, Rentarō Taki, wrote a tune he called "Kōjō no Tsuki" as a music lesson. The song was popularized by a Japanese singer, Yoshie Fujiwara, in the 1920s. I have it in a book of flute tone exercises assembled by Marcel Moyse. That is part of how the tune become incorporated into the western classical tradition. In 1967 Thelonious Monk recorded a jazz tune "Japanese Folk Song" based on the melody. Monk's version is pure jazz with precious little Japanese influence other than the melody itself. The classical version collected by Moyse is simply the melody. In Japan there is a flute called the shakuhachi with a long and distinguished tradition as rich and complex as any other musical tradition (KODEN SUGOMORI (TSURU NO SUGOMORI): Mamino Yorita, shakuhachi player). I love listening to shakuhachi music, but I have never studied it. When I perform Kōjō no Tsuki" I play it as a theme with improvised variations. I will typically have variations that apply some of the gestures found in shakuhachi playing (pitch bends, short grace notes...) to the melody. Many other traditions including Irish penny whistle and blues guitar have "similar" gestures. Because I am not part of the shakuhachi tradition, it is unlikely that I perform these gestures in the same way that a shakuhachi player would. But I am me and I am playing my music the way I play it. I have stolen the melody just as Monk and Moyse did. I have stolen some gestures from the Japanese and,in other variations,  jazz traditions. My use of jazz gestures is probably equally inauthentic. I acknowledge the sources. If there were any money involved (there isn't) I would feel guilty that some of it did not trickle back to those who created the traditions.

Every single person speaks a unique language. Each person uses particular words and phrases. Each person has a particular way of telling stories. The way themes are introduced, the directness or indirectness of getting to the point, the arrangement of sentences; these are all particular and unique to each person. It is their idiolect. We understand each other because the overarching language allows these variations. We also criticize each other for not following our particular language norms (tenses, number agreement, we vs us, split infinitives ...).

It is the same with culture. Each of us is unique and particular. Because we live in social groups, we experience many of the same things as our neighbors and tend to conform to their patterns of behaviour. We also criticize others for violating norms.

People who study cultural appropriation say a line is crossed when members of the culture from which you have taken material find your use dishonorable. But culture is not monolithic. It is an aggregation of particular and idiosyncratic individuals. Who judges? Is it the most sensitive member of a group? Is it when a critical mass of people agree? When there is a critical mass, we can definitely agree on offense and appropriation. The "n word" and blackface are examples. I can definitely say that any white person who uses the n word or blackface is abusing culture in an offensive way and should be called on it. For general politeness, it is good to avoid offending even a single individual. My experience is that the most sensitive among us find a great deal objectionable. To submit to the most sensitive on every topic would be to freeze action. There are people who become incensed and offended when a stick of butter is sliced in an irregular fashion. When such a person is present, I curb my butter cutting. When they are not around, screw them. It's my butter and I'll slice it how I like.

Each of us takes elements from our complete surroundings. What we see and hear affects what we say and do. Each of us will sometimes offend others. Each of us will sometimes do things that violate even our own notions of what we "should" do. I try to be sensitive to others but, being a generally oblivious person, I probably fail often. I hope and expect that others will call me out when my behaviour is bad. I also reserve the right to disagree.

In my music I am going to continue to borrow what I find useful for what I am trying to express. I will try to be aware and sensitive to cultural background, but I cannot spend years studying each tradition I borrow from as I use it in my individual expression. From the background of other cultures I will undoubtedly misuse elements I have borrowed. I hope people point this out so I can learn and perhaps change what I do. In the end though, I am me. I will do what I do, and take my lumps when I offend others and they call me on it.