Music and The New Intellectuals

Thus, if you go into the stacks of any major research library you'll find many more pages about Shakespeare than Beethoven, Balzac than Mozart, Dante than Bach, or Goethe than Brahms. Clearly, music is not held in so high a regard as literature. No doubt that this is in part attributable to the fact that writing about music seems more difficult than writing about literature. To go much beyond impressionist evocation of feelings and styles, you must learn something of music theory so you can discuss technique and structure in musical terms. When well done, such as Charles Rosen's superb The Classical Style, the result is as deep and illuminating as any work of literary analysis. But, on the whole, the intellectual community clearly does not believe the end is worth the trouble of actually learning how to think about music.

Thus, when the current crop of African-American academics prefers literature (and history) to music, they are simply following the pattern established by European intellectuals and academics going back to Plato. For, make no mistake, that is the intellectual tradition in which they operate, in which all of us operate (including the Afrocentrists). This tradition leaves them ill-equipped to consider African-American music, both in and of itself and as it has influenced American, and, for that matter, world music.

This situation is deeply odd and quite unsettling. Consider a remark Gates made in the introduction to Signifying Monkey where he says that "Black literature shares much with, far more than it differs from, the Western textual tradition..." The stories may be about black people, and they may also confront racism, but the manner of the story telling is largely derived from Western literary forms. That is to say, Black literature is a variety of Western literature.

That is most emphatically not true of black American music. Whatever it owes to classical music, and it owes a great deal, African-American music is not a variety of Western music. Nor, Afrocentric wishful thinking to the contrary, is it a kind of African music. It has gathered its various sources and tributaries into itself and reorganized them with such energy and originality that it functions free and clear of those scattered sources. African-American music is an autonomous and fundamental source of cultural vitality, one which has been prodding and driving American culture and society for about two centuries and which has, in this century, clearly assumed the leadership role. Not only has black music had a profound influence on white music in America, and in Europe and in Latin America, it has had a profound influence around the world. As Eldridge Cleaver observed 25 years ago in Soul on Ice :

And although modern science and technology are the same whether in New York, Paris, London, Accra, Cairo, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Peking, or São Paulo, jazz is the only true international medium of communication current in the world today, capable of speaking creatively, with equal intensity and relevance, to the people in all those places.

So, why aren't the new intellectuals front and center in trying to understand where, when, how, why, and what are the implications? Gates is, of course, free to study whatever he wishes. And, one by one, we must allow each of these intellectuals that same freedom. Unfortunately, when you look at their efforts as a whole, the music gets admiration and appreciation but very little analysis and understanding. While I don't doubt that the appreciation is sincere, I find myself forced to entertain grave doubts about their collective sense of intellectual responsibility for the deep and tangled truths of American culture. They see what they have been trained to see, not what is there. It is time that some of them undertake the hard work of learning about music, or at least encourage their students to do so.

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