Digital Imperatives and Musical Interpretation

The digital project gave us the incentive to try to do what we had not dared to do before: to re-create the music as best we could. In this sense, the collaboration provided the opportunity for a richer, historically inflected musical analysis. It is one thing to try to write about the music and the way it may have sounded. It is another thing entirely to try to create and record those interpretations. This task presented many difficulties, one of the most serious of which was to figure out how to best represent and interpret the cryptic and sparse music notation recorded by Mr. Baptiste. Musical notation is itself a technology that is situated culturally and historically within a specific context to specific ends.8 Thinking about musical production across writing technologies and platforms is important for disrupting the biases and assumptions that go along with the conventions of Western notation. The transcriptions in Sloane’s narrative could never be an accurate reflection of what was performed in Jamaica. What is more, we do not know whether Mr. Baptiste was transcribing the tunes or composing his own. The task of musical interpretation involved all three of us, but was spearheaded by David Garner, a composer with extensive experience transcribing music outside the Western art tradition. We circled the same problems again and again in a paralyzing dance, desperately trying to find cues in the text for how to make decisions. In which key or pitch center should the recordings be made? What is the best tempo for each tune? What instrument should the tunes be recorded on, and even if we choose a banjo, what type of banjo? With what kind of strings? What technique of playing should be used for each tune? Should there be any accompanying instruments added to the banjo? Each of these questions, and many others we confronted, raised issues both of interpretation and aesthetics. How could we traverse the insurmountable gap between the written notation and the experience of listening today?

We have a great deal of records, scores, instruments, and treatises on music in the Western art tradition to draw on to inform the decisions a musician makes when attempting to re-create a historically informed performance of, say, a Bach sonata. But we do not have the same resources and records for historical vernacular music, and particularly that of Africans and the diaspora. These traditions are not organized around writing practices and therefore did not generate textual archives. However, a perceived insufficiency of records should neither inhibit a serious study of these music histories nor an effort to imagine and try to understand what these important performances sounded like. At the same time, we knew from the outset that we would not be able to reproduce the tunes as they were heard in seventeenth-century Jamaica.

We realized that, even though recording the one true version of a given tune would be impossible, simply making some decisions and recording a version of the tune would be enough to spark conversations, interest, and perhaps even a few challenges to our interpretations. Armed with this minimal confidence, David set out to record something. He recorded dozens of practice takes on his smartphone as he crafted the optimal approach, a technique that has only recently become possible by the ease and quality of recording and sharing. The final recordings were made using professional audio equipment, but the immediate feedback of iPhone recording while learning the tunes shaped the results. The process began with making a couple of straightforward decisions. Because another engraving in the text portrays the earliest image of a banjo, we decided to use it as a primary instrument. David began playing the tunes over and over, allowing that repetition to vet an optimal approach. Instead of trying to choose a technique, banjo, string, and tuning that were most historically informed, he allowed the resonance of the instrument and his fingers to make those decisions. The decision was made first about which instrument to perform on, but the other decisions were mostly organic and embodied. When David would share his recordings with the rest of the team, we were surprised by how many opinions we had about what the music should sound like. Mary Caton, in particular, who has immersed herself in literary representations of early Afro-Atlantic music for her personal research, offered insights about instrumentation and rhythmic accompaniment that even she herself did not know that she held. The act of attempting to re-create the music brought forward historically specific interpretations that otherwise might have remained dormant and murky. Simply put, we did not imagine how much we did know about what these performances might have sounded like until we set out to play them.9

We discussed the fact that Sloane’s text explicitly invokes the presence of percussion through his injunction: “You must clap your hands when the Base is played.”10 From our broader knowledge of Afro-Atlantic music it seems certain that the “festival” documented here would have involved percussive instruments. Yet the notation did not clearly offer a sense of what an accompanying rhythm might entail. Using Digital Audio Workstation software and MIDI samples of percussion instruments from around the world, David was able to try out a number of different percussion sounds, timbres, and grooves, finally settling on rhythmic layers that complemented the character of each tune. Incorporating percussion involved a new layer of imagination and interpretation, so we decided to offer two versions for each of the songs, one that hews relatively close to the notation on the page and another that adds percussion or, in the case of Papa, uses a very different instrument—the mbira. This doubling serves several purposes. First, it allowed us to create a fuller interpretation, one that reaches toward the sound of the songs as they likely were played. Second, it highlights the very process of musical interpretation, so that listeners can understand explicitly how the notation has been turned into sound and also how two different interpretations, done according to slightly different principles, lead to a very different kind of musical experience and feel.

Just as the process of musical creation was informed by our use of digital technology to share and create musical sounds, we also considered the technologies that anchored the performances of the enslaved musicians in Jamaica: their instruments. In an effort to approach a more historically informed sound, we commissioned banjo-maker Pete Ross, who specializes in making gourd banjos based on historical documentation and images, to create a “Sloane banjo” for us that we could use to record new versions of the song. We now have the instrument, crafted to be as close as possible to the banjo depicted in the Sloane engraving, and we anticipate going through the same process using this banjo to re-record the songs. Its smaller size, higher pitch, and period-specific setup will inform new decisions and likely take the interpretation in a much different direction, perhaps requiring vastly different tempos, techniques, and approaches.

This process confirmed what we already understood as scholars who have all studied “traditional” or “folk” music. Tunes or songs in such traditions do not have a single authoritative version. Instead, the “real” ur-tune exists as a ghost, floating somewhere between the thousands of notations, recordings, and performances, its identity being informed and molded by each one. One version or one realization of “Papa” is far from a true representation of the work. However, with each new version of “Papa” that is created by musicians from varying backgrounds, tastes, and approaches, we take one tiny step in the direction toward understanding a bit more of what the tune really is.

Musical Passage in Contemporary Jamaica

The possibilities for ever widening interpretation became vividly clear during workshops in Jamaica in which musicians responded to the recordings from the Musical Passage website. These events confirmed our hope that by creating initial interpretations, we were simply opening up a process rather than offering a definitive presentation of the music. Organized as a collaboration between the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Institute of Jamaica by historian Matthew Smith and Jamaica Music Museum director Herbie Miller, the first musical workshop took place on March 17, 2017. It was led by legendary reggae guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith and his band Inna da Yard, along with guest artists Anthony “Sangie” Davis, Maroghini, Vivian “Scotty” Scott, and Samuel “Time” Williams. The musicians listened to the recordings from our website while on stage, having never before heard or seen the pieces. They began to rapidly learn and improvise on them live in front of an audience. The remarkable open-endedness and complexity of the interpretations that emerged from this one moment underscore that ongoing musical interpretations will be vital as a form of analysis of the texts themselves. During the workshop, we could see at work some of the very processes of listening and exchange that shaped the gathering documented in the Sloane book. Recordings of the event, which are now available on YouTube, document the musicians’ process of interpreting the music.11 This initial workshop was followed by a second event on the UWI-Mona campus in the following year. During this workshop, hosted by the Department of History and Archaeology on July 10, 2018, the University Chorale studied the song “Angola” and embarked on the process of developing an arrangement of the piece for the ensemble’s repertoire. Chorale director Shawn Wright built on Inna da Yard’s interpretation of the piece as he and collaborators explored using different Afro-Jamaican drumming patterns under the vocal music. In April 2019, the Chorale performed “Angola” at its tenth anniversary concert. These workshops have yielded important new insights about the historical inflections of the pieces and how they are heard within contemporary Jamaican musical settings.12

It is worth pointing out that it was not our digital intervention that brought about these performances in Jamaica; “Chinna” Smith and his band Inna da Yard never stumbled across our site online. Instead, human connections brought about the collaborative musical opportunity, thanks to the vision of scholar Matthew Smith and the institutional support from UWI-Mona and the Institute of Jamaica. At the same time, the recordings generated for the website were key to making it possible to transmit the songs easily to the musicians. Thus, we already saw the original site doing some of what we hoped it to do: generate new forms and spaces of interpretation. These, in turn, now have lives as digital objects of their own, connected to the Musical Passage website but also making their own way in the world. We now have to struggle with new questions, notably about whether to alter the original site based on new insights we gain or to allow it to remain as it is, while embracing proliferations and multiplications of the version. This is a difficult question, because from the beginning we also intended for people to dwell on and in the page, to slow down, to listen, and to take it in.

Creating a multimodal digital inscription of Sloane’s notation allowed us to perform the fragmentary and networked nature of the historical text and to open up new conversations, both musical and scholarly, about the document. The website was reviewed and published through archipelagos, an innovative digital journal created by Alex Gil and Kaiama L. Glover. Their interventions into scholarly publishing created an additional opportunity to invite voices from a variety of experts, initially during the review process, but especially later, when we revisited the project one year after its launch using the hypothes.is platform (web.hypothes.is), which allows for public commentary on websites. Through the metatextual capabilities of that platform, we were able to invite feedback and engage in rigorous debate with historians, musicologists, literary scholars, and others whose expertise collectively far exceeds our own. The resulting conversations changed our perceptions of the pieces yet again, provoking new insights and many new questions.13

The key here is that digital media allows us to simultaneously address the silences and the possibilities of this particular document. Sloane’s notation is a frustratingly scant fragment of what we know to be widespread and diverse musical performances by enslaved Africans in the Americas. It is a distorted window into a vast world. But despite frustrating limitations of the relatively brief notated inscription, shaped by enslaving colonists, it still testifies to the profundity of these traditions. The page of music, then, is a glinting part of a larger constellation of processes by which enslaved Africans transformed global music. Thinking of it in this way—and presenting it in digital format—allows us to understand that, even though Sloane’s book may initially seem like a static thing, embedded within it were the labors of many, many individuals. There, on the page, is not only the work of the engravers and printers, yes, but also that of Mr. Baptiste, and from there the musicians who surrounded him, and, around that, the broader world of religious leaders, of healers, of those who shaped, nurtured, and protected the community of the enslaved.

The same is true of the music that Earl “Chinna” Smith and his collaborators and the UWI-Mona University Chorale created when they drew on song upon song, artist upon artist, traveling across eras in sound when they interpreted the music. Music-making is a collaborative activity. This is why it was so rewarding to examine and explore the text together and attempt to transform it into an interactive interface that would allow for various inconclusive and performative explorations of the original source. Digital design allowed us to make plain what we normally have to strain to articulate: the centrality of these traditions and the important role of the artists in creating the modern world—from the British Museum, to the banjo, to living music cultures—and also the deeply collaborative and expansive modalities through which knowledge is created, shared, and contested outside of the print-centric linearity of Western historicism. Whatever new forms Musical Passage takes, as both a digital project and a part of a broader network of forms, what is most important for us is that it continues to act as a link both backward and forward, a connector of sorts, and a reminder of the processes of exchange and creation that are at the root of culture and therefore of life.