Micah's World Tour Blog

Scottish-American Folksong at the Fringe

[Don’t listen to the track yet!  I’ll tell you when.]

After Amsterdam, the Whiffenpoofs found ourselves, much to our delight, in Scotland!  After two days at the Blair Estate, an old castle (where else, really?) filled with scotch (it’s a cultural experience!), port (it’s just delicious…), and all things that are lovely, we made our way to Edinburgh for a day at the Fringe.  I saw three shows: a play about LSD written by a friend of a friend of a friend (kinda trippy), an a cappella quartet from South Africa called Soweto Entsha (great performance, their choreography easily made up for their tuning), and a Scottish-American folksinger named David Ferrard. 

David had a lovely voice that flowed like a burbling stream, and he sang folksongs from Scotland and from the United States, as well as some of his own, accompanied by his acoustic guitar.  The juxtaposition of these three acts alone is pretty striking (the Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world, at least so they claim), but I’ll briefly discuss David Ferrard’s performance, because it really touched me in a way that many concerts don’t.

David played in the basement of a pub called the Royal Oak, and with about 20 audience members (and the requisite 20 pints), the concert was warm and intimate.  David introduced each song with a story, as folk songs are meant to be introduced, about the time and place the song came from and why it was written.  Particularly, he noted, folk songs are not just about entertainment - they’re about the issues that face a society in any age and every age.  He took us on a journey, from old Scotland and its ballads extolling gallantry, decrying injustice, and being angstily in love to the new world of America, and its ballads extolling gallantry, decrying injustice, and being angstily in love. (Coincidence? You decide.) 

First, he played “Comin’ Through the Rye” (think Catcher in the Rye, fer ye angsty high school freshmen at heart), weaving together many versions, with the famed Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet’s, being the most obscene.  Next came “The Bonnie Earl of Murray,” which eulogized none other than the Bonnie Earl of Murray, who was murdered by the Earl of Fife, if I’m not mistaken, many hundred years ago during a blood feud (that involved sleeping with the Queen…angst).  Following that we learned about “Bonnie Prince Charlie” (everyone gets to be bonnie in Scotland, apparently), which lauded Bonnie Prince Charlie’s noble yet ill-fated Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the two perspectives on the song, a patriotic version by a woman poet Lady Nairne, and another obscene version by Robert Burns.  Then we moved to Appalachia for the classic “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”, the angstiest one yet, and a medley of black freedom songs (arguably to illustrate how the combination of Scottish folksongs and African rhythms and instrumentation led to Appalachian music as we know it today, but I think really just because freedom songs are awesome.)  We finished the concert with “The Farmer’s Cursed Wife,” the quintessential song about laughing at someone else’s angsty relationship instead of focusing on your own.

But throughout the performance, David played us some of his own songs, and I think it is in his own writing that he synthesizes many of the issues that folk songs, Scottish, American, and otherwise, present, while situating himself within the Scottish folk tradition as a troubadour of sorts.  A Scotsman with an American mother, he sang a song called “I am an Immigrant (I’m From Here)” explaining his accent and origin and extolling the gallantry of immigrants who come from any land.  He sang a song wishing a loved one well as they leave on a train, which seems like a pretty angsty situation if you ask me.  Most poignantly for me, he sang a song called “Wildflowers,” decrying injustice and calling for peace (you can listen to the track now). 

Inspired by a period of dispossession in Scottish history, the words were open enough yet also scathingly precise enough to describe almost any situation of civil conflict; ethnic, religious, or otherwise, and they narrated the process that occurs when neighbors who have been friends suddenly turn on one another in the name of a larger cause, normally fear.  The music is simple and repetitive, yet deeply emotive (I heard it live with only guitar, giving the piece an even barer and more bereft quality than the recording), and as someone who hopes to use music to heal such situations, I was really moved by his music.  Here are the words:

In a field where the wildflowers blossom /All our men from the village were brought

In a morning, some say a few hours / All our men from the village were shot

Some shouted ‘cowards’, others cried ‘mercy’ /  ‘We are neighbours’, ‘Our children are friends’

Most stood silent in their final hour / And prayed into the wind

Some of their killers were there under order / Some from the village volunteered

Some took pleasure in pulling the trigger / Some followed their footsteps in fear

‘This is part of our people’s survival / We will never be victims again

They are animals, watch how they cower / It’s us or it’s them’

Chorus:

And the years pass by

And the wildflowers grow

In the fields where they lie

In a place once called home

When I was young everyone in the village / Knew each other by face or by name

None of the children I played with looked different / We laughed and we cried just the same

Then a storm raged from a distance / In its wake everything changed

Soon the smiled on our faces froze / And our tears fell like rain

Chorus

In a room in a far away country / Face to face with their killers we stand

Not a tear, none says sorry / For the loss of our men and our land

When the defense calls up their witnesses / Each swears their man’s not the one

How could men so quiet, so innocent / Kill so many in cold blood?

Chorus

David’s performance was wonderful - it took us on an aural and emotional journey to show us how much we all share as human beings.  Intellectually, what I’m about to say is pretty obvious, but after David’s performance, you really felt that though we come from different places, and divisions so mournfully easily overtake our communities, our aspirations are all the same.  In my book, that’s what music is about.

Hugh Masakela at The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam

Last Friday, I saw a performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The Concertgebouw is renowned as one of the world’s foremost concert halls, particularly for orchestras, and has the names of all the famous composers of the Western tradition emblazoned on the balcony, as well as many I’d never heard of, whom I assume to be Dutch composers. The audience, whose skin and hair was mostly of whiter shades, was seated in red velvet chairs after having sipped wine in the foyer, ready for a performance of Mozart piano sonatas. But the performer of the evening was Hugh Masakela – a black South African jazz trumpeter known for his social activism and his 1968 hit, “Grazin’ in the Grass” (arranged by the Duke’s Men my freshman year, actually). He was backed by a band of South Africans who played keyboard, bass, guitar, and drumset and a Senegalese multi-percussionist who played, among other instruments, the most amazing talking drum I’ve ever heard. Masakela led the show with his trumpet, vocals both spoken and sung about his life and experience growing up in South Africa and performing all over the world, and a guiro and cowbell which he played during other members’ solos.

But no African musical performance would be complete without its twin sister, dance. Even in his 70’s, Hugh Masakela could get low and expected us to do the same. The audience, conditioned by the hall and the classical etiquette of simply appreciating a musical monument in reverent silence, was a bit hesitant, though he eventually got us on our feet. But it was interesting to watch Hugh Masakela’s set, with its African-derived modes of discourse, fit into the very Western space we were in. By that, I mean, his set would have fit better either in a more intimate jazz club, where there could be more give and take between the performers and the audience, or in a large outdoor concert venue for a huge crowd of people who were on their feet and ready to dance and shout unconstrained by the watching eyes of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Yet here he was at the Concertgebouw, and after his first number paid homage to the great composers whose names graced the balcony (he did go to Manhattan School of Music for a few years for advanced classical study in trumpet).

Masakela gave a great performance, playing everything from standards to original numbers to South African freedom songs, and everyone loved it. But halfway through the concert, I realized one simple fact – it was Dutch colonists in South Africa who were responsible for Apartheid, and here was Hugh Masakela, an artist known for his activism against the regime, performing for a Dutch audience. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. Now I’m sure that this isn’t the first time a black South African has performed in Amsterdam. For all I know, Hugh Masakela has performed at the Concertgebouw before. But the symbolism was still powerful. And beyond that, it was clear that Masakela came as an ambassador of goodwill, holding strikingly little against the Dutch, as a people, or the specific members of the audience (at least as he showed in the concert). He demonstrated this most astoundingly in the jokes he would tell in between songs. He told us that he tried to propose to a beautiful Dutch girl here in Amsterdam in Afrikaans and she said he sounded like a small child (Afrikaans is a vastly simplified form of Dutch). Or he regaled us with the story of his birth in a small town outside of Amsterdam, with blond hair and white skin, but then one day he fell into a canal and was washed all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope, where the sea lions and the oil and mud in the water turned his hair and skin black, so that when an African couple was walking down the street, they saw him in the rushes and adopted him as their own. “But really,” he said, “my name is [insert exorbitantly long dutch name]. The third.” Obviously jokes like this are part of his shtick, which as an internationally performing musician for decades, he has honed to a science, but it still struck me that he was able to separate what I’m sure must have been many years of resentment against the Dutch from his performance that night, and connect with the audience through his humor and his music.

Perhaps Masakela’s main goal in the concert was not only to entertain, but truly to build bridges and educate. He ended the concert with the song Kauleza, a song I had actually learned from a recording made by his late ex-wife, Miriam Makeba. Kauleza is a song that children would sing in the townships to warn their mothers that the police were coming to raid their homes. Masakela told us the story of the song in an intimate way and had us sing with him the refrain of “Kauleza.” In doing so, he succeeded in transforming conflict by including us (a mostly Dutch audience) in the struggle of black South Africans for justice and equality. It was an impressive and powerful evening and I doubt anyone in the audience left unchanged.

The Preservation of Greek Folk Music

So after my brief yet beautiful sojourn in the Swiss Alps with my dad, I rejoined the Whiffenpoofs in Athens. I found them on the Acropolis, naturally, as we rounded the Parthenon from opposite sides.

I had many interesting adventures in Greece, many of the best ones involving ouzo and gyros. For example, Dionysios Bouzos took us out to a multi-course Greek dinner (better than gyros, if such a thing is possible) in Athens (his birthplace – obviously) and got us so drunk that we all missed our ferry to Mykonos the next morning. Also, it should be noted that this is part of a long tradition – when Dionysios took us out in New York City after our concert at Lincoln Center, we all slept through our flights to LA the next morning for the finale of the Sing-Off. Anyway, the point is, we ended up with an extra day in Athens (the next ferry wasn’t until the evening), and instead of staying at the hotel all day like ten of the Whiffenpoofs (an oasis of wireless, to be fair), I decided to explore the city. I set off toward the Acropolis and ran across a man who was selling buzukis in his crafts shop (a buzuki is a Greek traditional long-necked lute of sorts). Naturally, I stopped to ask him about the buzukis, which he had made in his own workshop, and after about ten minutes of conversation, he told me, “you know, there is a museum for traditional Greek music right down the street – you should take a look at it.” I did not know that, so I was thankful for his advice, and he gave me directions (it was hidden quite well around several corners – there’s no way I would have run across it in the course of my own wanderings) to the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments: The Fivos Anoyanakis Collection and Centre of Ethnomusicology.

The Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments was small but very well laid-out and packed with useful information. Its organization alone belied its deep academic grounding in the discipline of ethnomusicology, as the rooms were assigned on the basis of German musicologist E.M. Hornbostel’s foundational classification of musical instruments into idiophones (instruments whose bodies you hit to produce sound – bells, spoons, jangle-coated headdresses, etc.), membranophones (instruments with a membrane that vibrates to produce sound (drums, mainly), aerophones (instruments that create sound through the movement of air – clarinets, flutes, shawms, etc.), and chordophones (instruments that have vibrating strings that create sound (lyres, violins, buzukis, etc.). Each room had cases filled with old instruments used in Greek traditional music, and alongside each case was a field recording featuring that case’s instrument in the context of a song. In addition, each case had a well-translated explanation of how each instrument worked, and where it originated from. This last part was the most interesting to me, as the instruments in the traditional Greek  zikiya ensemble, the shawm and the daouli drum, go back as far as ancient Greece, but some instruments which are now seen as integral to a traditional Greek sound in the kombania ensemble actually originated elsewhere and were imported to Greece as late as the mid-19^th century, such as the clarinet. Greek music shares much with the melodic Arab and Turkish musical traditions from the Eastern Mediterranean, yet also much with the harmonic traditions of Balkan and other European folk musics (some Greek folk music even sounds Irish!), and it was fascinating to see which instruments originated where and whether I, with relatively, but not entirely untrained ears, could detect any of the original region in the resulting sound of each sample recording.  The track I selected, from a collection of folk music from all over Greece, is a particularly interesting example, I think, of a combination of Eastern melodicism and Western harmonic structure. 

Almost as interesting as the museum itself was the story of its founder, Fivos Anoyanakis. According to the educator who was working at the museum during my visit, Anoyanakis was a man who felt that Greek folk music was an important tradition that needed to be preserved against the forces of modernism and popular culture that were overtaking the world in the first half of the twentieth century. So for fifty years between 1940-1990, he and several of his companions traveled all over the country collecting traditional instruments and songs from the Greek countryside and cities. The Museum was his lifelong dream, and even though he was exiled from Greece at one point for being an accused communist (“people’s music” can be a dangerous tool…), Anoyanakis bequeathed much of his collection to the Greek Ministry of Culture to create the museum before he died. His one stipulation was that the museum be free of charge, as the music inside was Greek national patrimony which belonged to everyone. So I got to experience the whole thing for free!

According to the educators who worked in the museum shop, the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments is the only museum of its kind (of a national folk music tradition and its instruments) in Europe, and is a hub for European ethnomusicological conferences, a concert venue for traditional performances (with over 50 well-attended performances a year), and a school for traditional Greek music with hundreds of students and an ever-increasing enrollment. I would call Fivos Anoyanakis’ mission to preserve Greek folk music a resounding success.