Black History Month may be a creation of the USA, but why not go further out and further back – much further back? Jon Silpayamanant takes us back to Saint Yared in Ethiopia in the 6th century for a ride through the centuries that could transform some of your ideas about music history and provide some alternative starting points.
I’ve chattered about my endless fascination with Jon’s amazing site, Mae Mai, but this deserves a special mention. The exclusion and erasure of Blackness means we lose some essential parts of music and human history. It’s an injustice and becomes the foundation for still more injustice and violence. That’s not confined to the USA, even acknowledging the USA’s history of slavery and inequality.
Or to put that more simply: we aren’t a whole community without restoring Black contributions to music. It makes everything we do in music richer – including the latest bleeding-edge electronic music concoctions. I mean, I’m inspired listening to Saint Yared and (later) the Abassid Era, even around a millennium and a half later. There’s some perspective.
Jon found many of these resources while working on Arabic music theory, he says, partly because they simply weren’t left out. So check the full guide here, and I suspect – like me – you’ll discover your music education really omitted a lot. I never regret what I learned, but I am eager to find out what I didn’t learn.
I don’t want to speak for him, though – all his notes here are important, in terms of really decolonizing the history. And if I get repetitive, it’s because this is worth considering over and over again.
Early Black Musicians, Composers, and Music Scholars (505-1505 CE)
St. Yared of Axum, Ethiopia kicks things off, 505-571 CE. He’s technically the first published Black composer, with hymnals still used by the Orthodox Tewahedo churches for Zema chant. That’s Oriental Orthodox – the same larger grouping that includes the Armenian Orthodox, among others – but not to be confused with the Eastern Orthodox. This puts Yared in a significant role in early notation, including contributions to mensural notation in that tradition.
In any event, that music remains in Ethiopian practice today. In context, it sounds something like this – this being outside my tradition/knowledge area, if someone has a better example, sound off:
Here’s an extended lecture on the topic:
There is a lot to discover on St. Yared. And there’s also apparently a coffeehouse and restaurant named for him in Fishers, Indiana outside Indianapolis, which also has a surprisingly detailed history on him. I do say, never do musicology on an empty stomach or half-asleep, so I approve.
There’s also Lorenzo da Firenza, who is well known to Italian Ars Nova fans but often not known as a Black composer – is another great fan. Now, realizing you may not be up on your Trecento composers, Lorenzo gives us major bangers like “Non perch’i’ speri, donna”:
Since I brought up the topic of living wages in music, Henry VIII apparently decided John Blanke deserved one, and paid him a solid 8 pence a day. (Just adjust that one for inflation. These guys even had health care! More Taubronar, also on the list, likely got wages from King James IV of Scots, including documented doctor payments, though I gather that particular health care was unsuccessful and he died. See Jon’s site for more.)
There’s a lot more – I cherry-picked a few where I could include easy examples. But dig further for a varied timeline, including the likes of singer Sarirah al-Ra’iqiyyah, a singing slave who was eventually freed after the assassination of her slaveholder. (The topic of slavery in pre-Islamic and early Islamic courts, and the institution of qiyāri is a subject that could be a dissertation topic, and indeed has been a dissertation topic – see Lisa Emily Nielson at the University of Maine, who later wrote a book out on Oxford University Press.) Or there’s the famous writer Al-Jahiz, best known for his Book on Animals, who also provides a detailed picture of musical performance in the 8th and 9th centuries. Or there’s the great oud innovator Ziryab, plus the unparalleled Ibn Misjah of the Ummayad Caliphate.
Go check the full guide, and I’d love for this to expand, be a point of discussion, and be a way we realign some of how we present music history:
Early Black Musicians, Composers, and Music Scholars (505-1505 CE)
Consider this: what if we didn’t only describe Black music as being related to dance music and groove? Without divorcing any of the formidable contributions of Black artists there, what if we corrected that understanding to include some of the most significant contributions to scholarship, composition, and musicianship across a huge swath of territory not only in Africa but around the Mediterranean and southwest Asia? That’s not simply a point of view – that would be completely in line with our knowledge of the work from that history.