EXTENSIONS OF THE TRADITION

by William C. Banfield

Black American musicians in the discipline of composition have in recent years provided many examples of what might be called "extensions of the tradition." "Tradition" is a word that has been tossed around a lot - a word with a wide range of meanings, and sprinkled with increasing complexity when applied to musical experience. What is clear, however, is that legatees of Black American creative thinkers are both vindicating past blocked voices and forging new musical practice. They are also gradually becoming a real presence on the American concert music scene.

Black American artists are not alone in refining, creating, and being beholden to "tradition." We all take in, and are informed by, a wealth of musical information via technology, the media, and the volume of new musical texts printed and new music performed. As artists, our palettes are expanding, our responses widening.

When I began my own search as a composer for a personal musical tradition, for historical linkages to what has gone before me, I found I easily identified with the procedures, creative product, rhythmic conceptions, tonal language, sonorities, and motivic interplay of Black artists. Not only because I knew their music from my surroundings, but also because I felt their music reflected the contemporary "move" - it was the true music of our time. Even when it was couched in the most dense textures, I found the "drum beat," as it were, and felt "taken home."

The whole question of an accepted and expected "traditional" repertoire is an issue facing all living composers, and serves as a rallying point for change and growth. The acceptance of new works into this traditional repertoire is never easy, no matter if the composer's skin is white, black, green, or anywhere in between. However, many concert works created by Black composers, regardless of their musical worth, accessibility, intrigue, or challenge, have been overlooked or simply excluded by the American concert music industry. Little is said about the uniqueness, profundity, and richness of works by Black composers. Too often they are dismissed as either too "vernacular" (as in the case of William Grant Still) or too abstract and unapproachable (but any more or less so than many of the readily-accepted white American avant-gardists?).

Long before Gershwin, Blitzstein, Bernstein, and Copland even began the exploitation of a Black woman's bluesy groan, Black creators across the musical spectrum were notating and practicing a comprehensive Black aesthetic while simultaneously keeping company with Varèse and the avant-garde. Why is it that their pioneering efforts are ignored, but that when a Steve Reich decides to be moved by the distillation of a syncopated African drum we suddenly have a "new" movement called Minimalism? The many Black composers who fused European music with their own ethnic traditions into a cohesive language did so as a daily, common practice. Their pioneering efforts and eclectic voices deserve attention and recognition before "friends" of the Black traditions are invited to discuss on public radio the "newfound freedoms" they have "suddenly discovered" in the blues, jazz, or even rap music.

I am suggesting that credit be given here to the voices of earlier Black innovators such as James Reese Europe (1881-1919), whose experiments with the 100+ All-Black Clef Club Orchestra during the 'teens of this century included scorings for five pianos, ten drum sets, mandolins, harp-guitars, banjos, celli, and brass. Equally important is the work of Francis Johnson (1792-1849), Florence Price (1888-1953), and Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952). Duke Ellington's and William Grant Still's evocative and innovative pairings, voicings, instrumentations, and experiments were certainly as trailblazing as anything by Ives, Cowell, Varèse, or Cage.

The notion of a "canon" is also very problematic. Still, there does exist in the collective mind of conductors, teachers, and arts administrators a pretty well-defined and locked-down canon, a "greatest hits" list of musical works that maintain their popularity among audiences and performers. These works stay on the list for some very good reasons, but I'd like to suggest that some very good works are left out for some very bad reasons. And while no one can compel conductors, teachers, and administrators to add particular new works to the canon, casting the net for a "new catch" of new works is something I think any wise, sensitive, and informed appreciator can and should do.

During the last five years, for example, the American Symphony Orchestra League sponsored a nationwide search for symphonic works by African-American composers. As a result, an industry which had previously been sleepwalking around and over deserving Black talent has suddenly unearthed a rich vein of three generations of Black American composers. And this year's Pulitzer Prize was awarded to George Walker, the first Black composer to be so honored. Some say: "Too late, and still too few." Still, the musical landscape is beginning to look very "colorful." Are the gatekeepers of the traditional white American musical establishment prepared for the eruption of energy from this suddenly-released stream of African-American musical traditions?

And when we consider "traditions" and "canons," what about the inventive, pioneering work by contemporary Black composers? What about the wide variety of styles, and procedures devised and practiced by Black creators, not to mention those involved in improvisatory art, mixed media, multiple sound platforms, etc? Where does all that fit into the concepts of musical traditions and canons? Are these topics even mentioned in any serious way in circles where contemporary concert music is discussed?

Any discussion of musical innovators should include figures and events like Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, Roland Kirk, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus's experimental orchestras, Keith Jarrett, George Russell's Lydian Chromatic, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, George Clinton, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Me'shell Ndgegocello -and all the other Black American musical pioneers who continually push the sound envelope in both theory and practice.

While we can speak of including some of the works of these creators in the canon, we probably can't expect any of them to explode immediately onto the "Top Ten" lists of performers and audiences across the country. Even so, a short listing of true masterworks from these artists can serve as a glowing testimony to and reminder of the uniqueness, the musicality, and the native profundity of the Black American tradition. My list would include works by such contemporary composers as George Walker, Hale Smith, T.J. Anderson, David Baker, Olly Wilson, Tania Léon, Anthony Davis, Donald Fox, Adolphus Hailstorck, Hannibal Lokumbe, Regina Harris Baiocchi, and many others. These composers are all upholding the "tradition" and forging personal and profound voices which will impact American culture in some very powerful ways.

These creators - some by conscious choice, some by "hue association" - are, in Anthony Davis's word, "warriors." By their very presence, they are helping to define what American concert music is and should be. And the release of a significant number of new recordings on major labels (Chandos, Albany, Telarc, Teldec/Erato, CRI, New World, Gramavision, and Collins Classics) of landmark works by Black American composers has helped to place these examples of the Black American musical tradition in mainstream markets internationally. Recordings of these composers can only help, through their presence and power, to shape how future audiences will define the canon of American concert music. In view of these developments, I believe late 20th-century Black American composers are leading a quiet but forceful revolution in 20th-century art music. There is a connectedness of purpose, of kindred creative voices. A statement made by composer Jeffrey Mumford is very telling: "Being a Black composer is a subversive activity." As tradition-bearers, the work of Black American composers extends back and forth between West African encoding and Western European training, all the while infused by and comfortably compatible with the contemporary American experience. They are all extending the tradition - and their extensions are both the seeds and the end-products of the expressive experience we all can claim as part of the canon of truly American music.

William C. Banfield teaches African American Studies and music at Indiana University. A 1995-96 McKnight Visiting composer with the American Composers Forum, he received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest/Opera America commission for his new opera, Luyala. An innova Recordings compact disc of his music, titled Extensions of the Tradition: Chamber Works, has just been released. Portions of this article are taken from his book Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers, forthcoming from Scarecrow Press/University Press of America.