Third sound of the African Empire
Originally published in the TLS August 06, 2004
A number of years ago I received a phone call from a fellow who had written a musical -the book to a musical, that is. He was looking for a composer to write the music. I'm afraid he was something of a crank -the kind of person who starts off by hectoring you on the qualities he doesn't want in his musician. His show would be set in the 1890s, he said, and he wanted to be sure that any music I wrote would show no sign of the awful influence of jazz, blues, or rock and roll. I don't remember just how I put him off, but his comments made me think about how difficult it is to imagine writing music without the influence of jazz, blues, or rock and roll -music, in short, before Western music had been colonized by Africa.
African music (and I use "Africa" here as shorthand for those territories from which slaves were brought to the New World) has so permeated our consciousness that removing it would require some kind of brain-wipe. But my cranky gentleman had a point -African musical influence had not had a sustained impact by the 1890s, nor yet by the early 1900s, despite the popularity of ragtime. Up until the First World War, black music was still a bit player on the American stage.
After the War, that situation would change radically and with astonishing rapidity. By 1930, there was no popular music in the United States -with the possible exception of Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy -that did not bear witness to the transformation wrought by black musical culture.
The suddenness of the shift to an African-based music parallels some of the great cultural shifts of the past. The Renaissance perspective-based painting style spread from Florence to the rest of Europe within a few decades, as did Caravaggio's Baroque in the early 1600s. Neo-classicism in both music and art swept Europe in a few years after 1750. While on holiday in Umbria a couple of years ago, I stumbled on another such story. The Etruscans were making charming and to our eyes original artefacts, until they saw what the Greeks were doing, at which point they became, almost overnight, a Greek colony -at least in respect of their art. The colonization of popular music by African culture was a similar event. From this perspective, the musical avant-garde of the twentieth century now looks like an arriere-garde, trying vainly to hold back the tide, retreating to ever more isolated redoubts, like university-sponsored electronic music labs. It isn't just that jazz and blues had become popular, although of course they had.
Rather, the language of music had changed. There was a new vocabulary, a new syntax, a new grammar, and they made a common language for black and white artists alike. I use these big words -vocabulary, syntax, grammar -advisedly. Integration of African music into Western music was not an additive process. It was nothing at all like nineteenth-century composers making use of folk tunes -nothing at all like Dvorak's symphony "From the New World". It involved instead a reordering of musical priorities and a reimagining of how rhythm works.
Rhythm in African music is a composite of simultaneously occurring layers; polyphonic textures of rhythmic patterns. The European polyphony which reached its apex in the music of J. S. Bach involves a complex set of rules and procedures to make music in which several melodic lines maintain their independence from one another while still agreeing, in the moments when they line up, on coherent progressions of harmonies. African polyphony requires that different rhythmic layers should maintain their independence, should be heard as distinct, and yet in combination should create a rhythmic whole greater than its parts. A useful term for this phenomenon might be the one with which Salvatore Mannuzzu titled his 1995 novel, Il terzo suono, by which he refers to a third sound which appears unbidden from the superimposition of two other sounds. The "third sound" is evident in even the most basic forms of rhythmic polyphony derived from African music. The most basic example I can think of is Queen's "We Will Rock You". Here, the drumbeat layer stresses the backbeat - beats two and four -while the melodic stress is in counterpoint to it, on beats one and three. To appreciate the effectiveness of the third sound, imagine its absence: sing a new melody that places its emphasis with -not against -the backbeat: We WILL, we WILL, rock YOU.
The third sound is not a quality that combines easily or naturally with the Western European tradition, whose notation system, for one thing, makes the writing down of rhythmic polyphony almost impossible. (There is an unintended benefit to this -what cannot be written down must to some extent be improvised.)
Somebody somewhere had to figure out a way to make it work, and in the process create a new kind of music. Compare Puccini's Madama Butterfly to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. In the former, Japanese music is present as a kind of local colour. No deep or even shallow understanding of Japanese music is necessary for a successful performance of "Un bel di vedremo". Porgy and Bess is another matter entirely. The melody of "Summertime", for instance, is designed to inhabit a rhythmic plane different from its accompaniment, a quality that happens to fit with the feeling of freedom expressed in the words ("Then you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky"). Operatic performing tradition has still not come to terms with this; operatic performances of "Summertime" are always unsatisfactory, no matter how beautifully sung, since they never capture the rhythmic polyphony, the third sound, of a jazz performance. To test this, listen to, for example, the Houston Opera recording. You will hear the conductor -in impeccable operatic tradition -follow the singer's every pause and wait for her next downbeat. Listen then to the Louis Armstrong / Ella Fitzgerald version of the song, a nice comparison because the producer Norman Granz gave them an accompaniment closely based on the original score. But here the rhythm of the accompaniment (actually consisting of at least three rhythmic strands) plays with an independent consistency, while the trumpet and then the vocal lines play freely above it.
I realize that what I am proposing is to some degree counter-intuitive. "Summertime" certainly sounds more like Puccini than it does like African drumming. This is partly because African music is the permeable kind of colonizer: it allows itself to be penetrated by its conquests and to mix with them. Up and down the Americas there are dozens of different results of the mixture between African and Western styles, blues, jazz, son, samba, reggae, bossa nova. Bossa nova is the most recent of these African/Western hybrid forms, and we know the name of the man who did the putting-together: Joao Gilberto, who, in his seventies, still performs. In the United States, the progenitor of the new kinds of music was the blues, and we will never know the original genius who put it together, although that nameless person is one of the great figures in twentieth and now twenty-first century music.
Were African music an intentional force it could not have chosen a better place and time to do its colonizing than the USA in the 1920s, the very moment when the instruments of musical mass media -radio, records and film -were coming into their own. By 1930 these instruments were ready to amplify the new music loudly enough for it to be heard around the world. The African conquest now begins a worldwide expansion. With the great sounding board of Western media to direct it, it reaches everywhere. The results so far, sadly, lack the creative spark of the USA in the 1920s, or Cuba in the 40s, or Brazil in the 60s. In the course of extensive ethnographic research (consisting of meals at ethnic restaurants with appropriate popular music playing over tinny loudspeakers) I have come to the conclusion that all over the world today local melodies are being installed over simple harmonic patterns defined by an electric bass, while some sort of rock-based drumbeat fills the rhythm track, producing unsustainable mutants rather than productive hybrids.
An exception is Africa itself, for generations now colonized by hybrid forms of its own making as influences have bounced back and forth between the continents.
In music from Cape Verde, where Brazilian music has recombined with local forms, or in Angola, where Afro-Cuban music introduced by Castro's troops has influenced the local popular culture, new forms of the terzo suono may be on the way.