MARIMBA ANI

Perhaps there is no better form of artistic expression than that of music to demonstrate the peculiar dynamics of the European aesthetic. The European mind responded to music in precisely the same way as it responded to every kind of phenomenon with which it was presented. Music was analyzed, dissected, “studied” and translated into the language of mathematics. It was written down, and then it could be “read” as one would read a mathematical equation. And true to the pattern of European development, the Intellectuals who created this new music were successful in introducing it into the culture as a whole because the culture itself was predisposed to value such an approach. With writing comes control, and with control, for Europeans, comes power. This is the nature of the utamaroho. This obviously is far more aesthetically pleasing to them than the creativity and spontaneity that results from the interaction between human emotion and the medium of music. In the West, an artist of African descent who has somehow miraculously inherited the genius of her culture, via her “ancestral memory,” and plays without ever having studied the tools of the European, is an embarrassment. It is like European science being confronted by the astronomical knowledge of the Dogon people. It exists, but it shouldn’t!

Centuries of tradition of the mathematization and rationalization of music have caused the European to forget its origin and how it is produced naturally – as opposed to synthetically (the mere imitation and description of music). Europeans created neither the first music nor the first musical instruments; they found them and made them objects of study. Because there was only one way in which they could understand this music with which they were confronted, they analyzed it, looking for “laws” of harmony, and melodic relationships. yet unable to hear / feel / comprehend the cosmic manifestation of sound (Even in the Middle Ages, music was the study of harmonics and proportion and, as such, was related to mathematics; (in an academic-technical, not a cosmic-metaphysical sense); Augustine’s De Musica was the standard textbook.) The Europeans then created a facsimile and style in which they excelled: i.e., a style that expressed all the power and control of the European aesthetic and value. They created the symphony–a technical and organizational masterpiece, the epitome of specialization in performance.

Their inventiveness, their uniqueness, their utamaroho expressed itself primarily within their “classical” dimension; the other expressions of music in European culture are primarily borrowed forms, adaptations, and imitations. The accomplishment of the symphony should not have caused Europeans to forget the origins of musical expression nor the plethora of differing styles more creative and spontaneous, which had demonstrated a greater elemental genius than the symphonic form, with its emphasis on structure. With this in mind the existence of the African musician who plays “by ear” is only a “wonder” in that it is perhaps one of the suprarational “facts” of human existence.

Again, it is the technical aspect of the craft that is emphasized in the European tradition, and as the technical order intensifies, its musical instruments become more and more mechanical, electronic, synthetic, and unnatural. Those who play them become better and better technicians, but their compositions would be just as mechanical, synthetic, and uninspiring as the instruments on which they were played if it were not for the utilization of the musical creativity and awareness of the African experience. In America innovation in music, dance, and language is influenced by African culture through the contribution of the Africans who live there. This influence is in turn exported to the larger European community. European culture can prepare an individual for the technical mastery of European musical instruments and machines, and is able to train a small minority to perform the music it has created -commonly referred to as “classical, or “good” music, commonly referred to among Africans in America as “dead” music. But European culture must rely on the creativity inspired by the African musical and expressive genius for the music and dance that most of its members enjoy. This circurnstance is directly related to the nature and ideology of the culture and to the radical differences between the two utamarohos.

In Ortiz Walton’s comparison of the African and Western aesthetics in music, he points to some of the trends in Western cultural history that account for the predominant mode of European music. He says that written music cannot be considered improvisation. We see that in the European’s attempt to plan and predict. he has lost the opportunity to develop the art of improvisation and spontaneity on which a vibrant and creative musical expression depends. European music, says Walton, “became highly rationalized with the Greeks.” (It remembered that Plato associates music with a despiritualized mathematics; both should be an important aspect of the education of the Guardians, because they help to encourage and develop the “proper mental habits.”) Later the Church further “rationalized” music in its attempt to control its content. He says that a system of notation began in the West with the Greek idea of ethoi, “which has been added onto in the following centuries, casting western music into a rigid, unalterable, fixed phenomenon.”^{[1]Ortiz Walton, “A Comparative Analysis of the African and Western Aesthetic,” in The Black Aesthetic, Addison Gayle, Jr. (ed.). Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., 1972, pp. 154-155.} Walton adds that the makers of European instruments reflected the European predilection for rationalization in

… a new technology of tempered Instruments…. Valveless horns resembling their African prototypes, and keyless woodwind instruments, were replaced by the highly rationalized and mechanical keys and valves. It Is difficult to comprehend these developments in the West except as a passion for the rational…

The order of the auditory world had now been transformed into a visual, mechanical, and predictive phenomenon. Now all a player had to do was look at the music and put the finger a certain place and out would come the sound that had been conceived long before in somebody’s head.^{[2]Ibid, p. 156.}

Max Weber talks about “rationality” in the development of Western, European music:

rational harmonious music, both counterpoint and harmony, formation of the tone material on the basis of three triads with the harmonic third: our chromatics and enharmonic, not interpreted in terms of space, but, since the Renaissance, of harmony; our orchestra, with its string quartet as a nucleus, and the organization of ensembles of wind instruments; our bass accompaniment; our system of notation, which has made possible the composition arid production of modern musical works, and thus their very survival, as a means to all these, our fundamental instruments, the organ, piano, violin, etc.; all those things are known only in the Occident, although programme music, tone poetry, alteration of tones and chromatics, have existed in various musical traditions as a means of expression.^{[3]Weber, pp. 14-15.}

Though Weber uses this principle of rationality to make claim to the “superiority” and “universality” of Western forms, he, according to Walton, indicates, as well, his own ambivalence towards the ultimate effect of the obsessive rationalism of Western culture:

Weber concluded that only in Western music is the drive toward rationalism a predominant concern. And his findings resulted in what became, for him, a central question: Why does efficiency of means in relation to ends (Weber’s definition of rationalism) result in a spirit of “disenchantment with life”—a state of being where life (or death) has no meaning.^{[4]Walton, “Rationalism and Western Music,” in Black World, Vol. XXII, No. 1, November 1973, p. 55.}

While in the West the tendency was for this “written,” controlled music to become elitist and for a passive audience to be “confronted” with a performance, in Africa the cultural priorities and values demanded a communal musical form in which there was no real separation between “performer” and “audience”: a participatory experience for everyone involved. Walton says,

Contrasted with the music-for-the-elite philosophy prevalent in the West, African music retained its functional and collective characteristics. The element of improvisation was developed rather than abandoned, and it found its way into Black music in this country. Similarly, the unifying element of audience participation was also retained.^{[5]Walton, “A Comparative Analysis of the African and Western Aesthetic,” pp. 159.}

There were most certainly forms of European music designed for communal participation (sometimes hundreds of singing voices walking through the European countryside), at earlier stages in European development. But the asili was such that this form would soon be eclipsed by those that suited an utamaroho craving power and an utamawazo constructing mechanisms of control. Communal and participatory music/art forms would be discouraged until they all but disappeared, since they did not reflect the ideological matrix/thrust of the culture. They were not “European” enough.

The emphasis on communal participation in African music gave rise to antiphony or the “call-response,” “question-answer” form that has carried over into the musical creations of Africans in the Americas, as Walton points out. Whereas control, technical precision, and theoretical complexities are valued in European classical music, rhythm and tonal variation are primary concerns in African music, and the symphony therefore has limited aesthetic potential to the African ear.^{[6]This point is made by Joseph Okpaku in New African Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Okpaku, New York: Thomas Crowell, Apollo Edition, 1970, p.18.} What few have understood, however, is that the African predilection for rhythm in its various complexities is not happenstance, but is intimately bound to African melanated bio-chemistry, and to the cosmic nature of the African world-view.^{[7]See Leonard Barrett, Soul-Force, Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., 1974, p. 83; Naim Akbar, “Rhythmic Patterns in African Personality,” in African Philosophy: Paradigms for Research on Black Persons, Lewis King, Vernon Dixon, and Wade Nobles (eds.), Fanon Center Publications, Los Angeles, 1976; and Kariamu Welsh-Asante, “Rhythm as Text and Structure in African Culture,” in The Griot, Fall 1990, on the significance of rhythm in African cosmology. This point is well made by Joseph Okpaku in New African Literature, Vol. 1, Thomas Crowell, New York, 1970, p. 18.}

It is only through contrast with other art forms that the peculiarity and uniqueness of the European aesthetic is made clear. This suggestion of contrast is compelling in an ethnology of the culture, in the attempt to counteract successful European nationalism that projects European ideology in the form of universals, as opposed to European choice and particularism. The development of a “science” of aesthetics in the West only helps to confuse the issue, and in the main it has been the particularly European brand of cultural nationalism that allowed European critics to “evaluate” African and other forms of non-European art. Joseph Okpaku offers us a prime example of the inevitable Eurocentricism that results from this presumptive posture. He quotes from Jones-Quartey, who is commenting on an event in which an African audience found a Western tragedy amusing. Jones-Quartey says that Africans have a “misconception of meaning,” and

that drama of any genre is pure entertainment (to Africans) and nothing else. But, secondly, and at a deeper level still, it is also possible that Africans are unwilling to isolate, or incapable of isolating, the one element of death or disaster from their trivial concept of existence as consisting of the dead, the living, and the unborn, and treating this element separately or differently.^{[8]Quoted in Okpaku, p. 18.}

Indeed, the “misconceptions” of self-appointed European critics of non-European aesthetic conceptions are, unfortunately, not usually so obvious as the above example. The writer’s characterization of the African conception of death as “trivial” would be simply amusing if such judgements were not so successfully supported by the apparatus of European imperialism.

In his article “Afro-American Ritual Drama,” Carlton Molette makes some perceptive observations on the European aesthetic by way of comparison. Molette points out that mimesis or imitation and mimicry are aesthetically pleasing to the African, while the European observer will often complain of what he calls “monotony.” Plato’s attitude toward “mimesis” is that it is an aspect of that natural human weakness that must be expelled from the official media of the State. For the European the “maintenance of reality” is crucial, while in African ritualism the form “is of much greater importance.”

As with the musical experience, the European audience is passive, while the African objective is total participation of the group. All of these factors, says Molette, are operative in the African-American church service, which he identifies as “ritual drama.” “The tradition… .aims at creating. . . an illusion of reality of time, place and character other than the actual one.^{[9] Carlton Molette, “Afro-American Ritual Drama,” in Black World, Vol. XXII, No. 6, 1973, p. 9.} African ritual drama creates the “eternal moment” that transcends ordinary time, joining the categories of time and place (hantu) into a single boundless, experience of spiritual communion: the ultimate meaningful reality.^{[10] Dona Marimba Richards, “The Implications of African American Spirituality,” in African Culture, Molefi Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante, (eds.), Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 1985, p. 213.}

And the lack of subjective identification that characterizes the European utamawazo, which Havelock applauds, can be seen as being dysfunctional to artistic expression and appreciation, as it prevents or limits the emotional involvement of the audience. The following comment of Molette reinforces our observations concerning the rationalistic conception of the human inherited from Plato and Christian theology:

The Afro-American aesthetic does not operate on the characteristically Euro-American assumption that all human behavior is either rationally motivated, resulting in elevated behavior, or emotionally motivated, resulting in base behavior. The Afro-American aesthetic places a very high value upon emotionally motivated behavior; or another term that mnight be used to describe it, I think more accurately, would be spiritually motivated behavior.^{[11]Molette, pp. 10-12; also Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, Transaction Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1974, pp. 197-199.}

Molette is accurate in his use of the term “spiritual” here, because it is this understanding of spirituality that is lacking and/or ignored in the European aesthetic and mythoform, especially in the last two hundred years. This is due not only to the rationalistic conception of the human psyche or “soul” but also to the confused European conception of “art-for-art’s sake”—an idea predicated on the assumption that there is value in separating the function of art from the life-blood of the group. Molette counters this with an outline of the purposes of Afro-American ritual drama. “One of these purposes is to celebrate the affirmation of a sense of community, a feeling of togetherness. .. based upon the assumption that we who are gathered here to participate in this event are and belong together.” (Molette’s italics.) This he says is frequently emphasized through physical contact, like holding hands. Euro-American forms, on the other hand, emphasize the individual, his uniqueness and differentness. The individual, then, is constantly aware of himself as “individualized” (Diamond’s term) and cannot easily perceive the group (which, therefore, often becomes “non-existent” for him). He perceives himself as an “observer,” distinct from that which he observes. But “a purpose of Black ritual drama is to create a total spiritual involvement” in the event. “Another purpose of Black ritual drama is to serve some functional, useful purpose. . . a funeral ritual is supposed to have a certain specific useful future effect upon the soul of the deceased brother or sister.”^{[12]Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, Transaction Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1974, pp. 197-199.}

This brings us again to the critical question of the cultural significance of European art. European art forms have an avowed purpose. Their goal is to represent a “universal,” “abstract,” and “eternal truth” (European truth). They are not designed to create an immediate cultural effect; and they are most definitely not inspired by a conception of oneness or communal feeling of the group. For, we are told, the European artist creates “art for art’s sake.” She is able to break out of the sociocultural limitations and definitions of the creative experience and therefore produces art that has no other purpose than that of expressing the artist’s own individual ego. This, we are told, is “progress,” just as Havelock regards the Greek conception of “knowledge” as a “discovery” leading to intellectual “advance.”

But this formulation is both intellectually and emotionally unimpressive. It is meaningless, incomprehensible, and confusing. Is it any wonder that elite art produced under the guidance of such a philosophy fails to reach the major portion of the culture, often has no cultural significance other than material power and tends toward spiritual demise? The “fine arts” in the West tend to become merely intellectual exercises. “Art for art’s sake” is peculiarly European and should be rejected as a critical standard in other cultures. Yet this very peculiar misconception has been one of the main tools used by Europeans in their criticism of non-European art. Sometimes surrounded by the terminology of a contradictory and superficially restrictive “universalism,” it becomes difficult to realize the severity of European distortion and self-deception. In regard to “the idea of art,” René Wassing, in the book African Art says: “Fundamentally it is a European idea developed in the mental climate of European philosophy and applied to the expression of European culture.”^{[13]Rene Wassing, African Art, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1968, p. 5.}

Universalism, so called by the European, is actually very particular, and these statements serve as evidence of the nature of the peculiar European utamaroho. Evidently, It never occurs to Wassing that he is talking about the European “idea of art” or that that idea used in the context of African art might be extremely misleading, to say the least. What are the indications that an idea of art exists in a culture? Its verbal documentation; its systematization; its translation into European philosophical terminology; its “objectification” or the attempt to isolate it from other aspects of culture, in the European habit, as with what is regarded by them as “religion?” This is a manifestation of the same ethos, displayed by Placide Tempels, who wishes to “teach” the Africans their own concept of being. It would be so much more helpful if “objective,” “open-minded” would-be culturalists like Wassing would put more effort into an explication of their own conceptions. (A few years ago I had occasion to attend a Haitian Art exhibit, at which the guest speaker [a European “expert” on Haitian Art] informed is that he was delighted to see this display, because when he first started going to Haiti, “there was no such thing as Haitian Art”; that he had in fact brought the idea to the Haitians.)

Of Africans and their art, Wassing says:

It must… be remembered that the artist did not consciously set out to create a work of art. They considered a piece a success if it fulfilled the task set, a task whIch was primarily functional. Whatever function a piece might have -economic, magical or religious – the aesthetic principle never became an end in itself, in the manner of “art for art’s sake.” Aesthetic appreciation and criticism of the material culture of Africa is a western invention founded on a discovery made not long before, the development of which runs parallel with the developing concept of art in western history.^{[14]Rene Wassing, African Art, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1968, p. 5.}

It is in statements about other cultures that Europeans reveal themselves most and the limitations of their own forms of thought. Wassing’s statement says a bit about African culture, while it inadvertently reveals much about the difficulties inherent in the European concept of art. Artistic creation tends to become identified with techical awareness. There is no doubt that the traditional African artist has set out to carve the most powerful ancestral stool or ceremonial mask that will best capture the nature of the spirit it is to express. His goal is both aesthetic and functional, and because the experience of beauty is intimately bound up with the manipulation of force or communication with the sacred, or gift-exchange, it is not less valid. Indeed, this is a more existentially real and spiritual understanding of “beauty.” If he were not writing for a European audience, Wassing would have to be prepared to defend a conception of beauty that is divorced from life; that is what is problematical. But he, in characteristic European fashion, has confused the abstraction with the experience. And it is easy for him first to be misled and then to mislead; because, in European loglc, first Europeans invent a concept, method, or “creed,” then it as a “discovery” about the nature of the universe – something everyone should know and utilize. The idea of “art for art’s sake” is not only a European aberration with little relevance outside of the European context, but it is of limited value within the culture itself and may indeed be symptomatic of a lack of creativity, spirituality, and vitality in much of European art.

Traditionally, the European discussion is not of “the European aesthetic” but of “Aesthetics,” and the discussants claim to be delineating the necessary rules and dynamics of a universal “science” of the beautiful. While Kant can say, on the one hand, that it is fruitless to seek a “universal criterion of the beautiful,” he can, at the same time, devote seemingly boundless intellectual energy to a “pure Judgement” and “analytic of the Beautiful.” But such philosophical and analytical discussions are always concerned with the consciously, intellectualistic “aesthetic” of the European. The generally unconscious or less conscious, nonintellectual aesthetic definitions and the images that appeal emotionally to the Europeans rarely surface in their academically oriented discussions of “Aesthetics.”

To get at these aspects of the contemporary European aesthetic one must look at what comes out of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, children’s picture books, magazine, imagery in ordinary language usage, and “fairy tales”—media that abound with cultural symbols (religious paintings, novels, comic books, and the like), the symbols of “popular art’ and of educational materials, and what is left of a European religious cosmology. If we take the “European aesthetic” to include that which is pleasing to Europeans, then we would have to include certain “feelings” with regard to other people, as well as certain forms of thought.

The European receives pleasure from a feeling of control over other people; this feeling is extended to the most “ordinary” participant in the culture through her identification with the European hegemony. Power is aesthetically experienced in the ability to manipulate others, and this desire has been culturally sustained and generated perhaps since the “Indo-European” experience. It is so deeply a part of the European aesthetic that even those who consider themselves to be free of the excesses and distortions of European chauvinism, critics of American foreign policy for instance, are not prepared to face the consequences of a dramatic depreciation in European power.

The Western aesthetic is, in this sense, tied to the European utamaroho (need for supremacy) and European ethic. And the European’s image of himself as the “adventurer-discoverer” who continually seeks new lands, peoples, and resources to conquer—all of this is emotionally pleasing to him. Similarly, as both William James and Arthur Lovejoy have pointed out, rationalism, the mode of abstraction, and the “idea of progress” and “evolutionism” are all aesthetically and emotionally satisfying to the European mind. They seem to fit. They are harmonious with the Western conception of the universe and are dictated by the asili of the culture.

European art is oppositional, developed through what Armstrong calls “a dialectic of polarities.” In his view, European art, therefore, can be understood as a series of competitions based on contrasts. “There are those arts which compete for gravity, those that compete with emptiness, and those that compete with silence.”^{[15]Armstrong, p. 114.} Here again is the asili of the culture revealing itself: the seed/germ that while unfolding dictates the style of each modality. Each contributing to ensure the overall organization of a culture dictated by a single-set of objectives, working to satisfy the insatiable utamaroho.

Through separation the self is isolated, oposed to “other,” and placed into a competitive relationship. The one who controls most wins. It pays to be aggressive.

The above is an excerpt from Yurugu. Permission requested.