/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/MUSIC-US: Exploring New York’s “Secret Cities”

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Mar 13 2001 (IPS) - New York is both a single, sophisticated metropolis and a patchwork of ever-shifting immigrant villages, making it the ultimate “musical particle accelerator”, where simply riding in a taxi cab can be an exotic encounter in cultural tourism.

Cultural homogenisation remains a real danger in much of the world, but it is also difficult for people to come into close contact with each other without some degree of mutual enrichment taking place. So, as long-time music critic John Pareles of the New York Times asked at a weekend panel here on ethno-musicology, who is really assimilating whom?

A writer who once lamented the “strip-mining” of local cultures, Pareles is now convinced that “purism is an illusion”, and a dangerous one, as well, if it leads to isolationism and paternalistic attitudes.

“It’s not good for any music to wish that communities were hermetically sealed,” he said in a keynote address to the gathering on ‘Local Music, Global Connections’.

“I used to worry that the West was starting to plunder musical resources as they plundered natural resources. But music can’t be stolen – only spread. Musical traditions are not hothouse flowers; they’re weeds, with deep, stubborn roots.”

The electric guitar, for example, considered by many as a “symbol of American hegemony”, has been adopted by musicians from Bangkok to Addis Ababa, but they are wringing sounds from it that US pop bands like Bon Jovi never imagined, he pointed out.

“In the end, popular music survives because people can use it, not because you preserve it in a museum somewhere,” Pareles argued.

The panel, titled ‘Crossing Cultural Boundaries’, was part of a three-day academic conference sponsored by New York University, the City University of New York and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

While all the speakers focused on ethnic sub-communities of New York, they covered a dizzying range of styles, from rumba and tango fusions to jazz, Yiddish klezmer, Chinese opera and “ice cream truck music”.

Jose Arevalo, a scholar of Latin-American and Caribbean music, used the case study of a group called J&V Mix to illustrate the entirely new sounds sparked by cultural collisions in New York’s increasingly multicultural Latin barrios.

The “J” stands for jibaro, Puerto Rican mountain music featuring guitar, cuatro, maracas, guiro and voice. The “V” stands for vallenato, which originated in Colombia’s northern coastal Caribbean region and typically uses guiro, the accordion, bongo and conga drums, timbales, bass, guitar and vocal harmonies. However, the Brooklyn-based group draws on a wide array of influences, including salsa, R&B, the Afro-Cuban cumbia and American pop, giving it a unique sound.

“The centrality of New York City as an arts and music industry centre, economic and financial centre, destination point for migration, tourism and so on, has well served New York’s myriad music communities, bringing together musicians and musics of diverse ethnic, racial, gender and class backgrounds into a space which enables new and creative musical experimentation and expression to occur,” Arevalo said.

“As various Hispanic national populations converge, the opportunity to share in the development of cross-cultural music formations becomes more pronounced and risky – often challenging and confronting tacit notions of national and cultural identity,” he explained.

The theatrical traditions in another legendary part of the city, Chinatown, were the focus of a presentation by Nancy Yunhwa Rao, an assistant professor of music theory at Rutgers University.

The Cantonese opera in New York dates back to at least 1889, and was popular with both locals and tourists until the 1930s.

In fact, Rao notes that “certain impressions of Chinese opera had dwelled in Americans’ popular imagination”, even if, as one white critic put it, the musical scales employed were often “dissonant to Western ears”.

Other panellists included David Cannata, who dissected the sometimes stormy relationship between the Argentine tango cross-over wizard Astor Piazzola and the US press, and Monica Hairston, who explored the influence of jazz on the traditional Jewish folk music called klezmer.

As Pareles succinctly put it, “European music is a little island – and I’ve gotten to like the rest of the world much better”.

He summed up his delight at New York’s rough-and-tumble street life with an anecdote about a 7th century Chinese poet who shocked a visitor by appearing at the door completely naked. When the visitor complained, the poet responded that “the universe is my house, and this room is my trousers … What are you doing in my trousers?”

In New York, Pareles concluded, whether we like it or not, “we’re all in each other’s trousers”.