Black String Theory: A Cinematic Journey into A Black String Player’s Universe.
Image Credit: @raphaellovaski
Image: Throw Down Your Heart Documentary Poster
Today my spirit was moved by Dr. Lisa Beckley-Roberts. A day of all days after one of the most tension filled times my mind could comprehend, my body gave up. Throw down your heart Danielle, deny what it is saying to you. You’ve procrastinated this long the least you can do is show up. I cried uncontrollably, that blood organ of mine beats inconsolably at having to log on to zoom. Why did my Professors choose to have us sit through the online portals when lives like mine are staring down doom? Unconscionable.
I hear the university is recommending that professors not cancel classes for election week. I had a discussion about mental health with some professionals for instructional excellence. The podcast we discussed had a hot take for educators: design and build space for grace, require students to be on their mental health tip. And it slips from my mouth, my dark brown lips the irony of us having to meet during such a volatile time as if things are just fine. Peachy. Keen. Despite all the the nods of white appearing heads on my computer screen, I know my self, scholarly and brown skinned, has yet to be seen. Or heard, but I trust that my words are felt in another dimension.
See there lies a tension in between their worlds, lived realities and mine. Before, years ago, I would respond in kind. I lie to myself thinking that I can explain their humanity to them, one that wasn’t intended for Africans. Ones who lift up stringed instruments, bowing out melodies from around the world into different kinds of grooves. It causes a sonic breakdown of the very humanity often sung about, as it is designed to be flawed in its justification of injustice and inequities. Please, oh pretty, pretty please I beg you to stop with the anti-Black pleas to separate yourself from whiteness. There is no rightness in a Black man Supreme Court justice swearing in white woman hell bent on turning back the clock to Originalist’s time. Representational intersectional politics will surely be the death of me, a Black woman violist, well before it touches the well-worn hem of your redemptive white Christianity.
Image:The Violinst- A Cinematic Portrait by Sheng P
In her article “Cinematic Journeys to the Source: Musical Repatriation to Africa in Film” Dr. Beckley-Roberts discusses the way film can be used to hold the memory of African in African descended peoples displaced from the continent. Her writing is an offering, a study on how performance facilitates opportunities, and their limitations, for repatriating the songs, instruments, and spirit of African people back to those who in which it rightfully belongs. She writes of the musical memories of the descendants of enslaved indigenous Africans, “Some are masked so well that they are no longer recognizable as African even to practitioners. This is the case with the banjo, which found its way into Anglo-American folk music.” Now there are ways for us to remember that require 90 minutes of our time, short bursts of filmic reminders flood the inter webs that serve as brief upsets into time, some new and others old, to the lies we were forced to hold in our bodies.
In that Heritage and Sound Studies class, we talked about the film Throw Down Your Heart, and Bela Fleck’s travels to Africa to learn about the banjo with experts. He filmed it so that other white folks like him would remember the instrument belongs to those Africans who were enslaved. I asked about who is centered in these filmic narratives, how does repatriation, a sonic giving back, restoring the facts of Eurocentric Americanized musical miseducation. How can we combat this? Dr. Beckley-Roberts said something so profound to me.
She asked, “What if Fleck’s privilege to learn form African musical masters was repayment toward an ancestral debt?” This particular story should be told, even if misconstrued and infused with white musical genius. I turned to Dr. Matthew Morrison wrote on twitter today, “vibrations are about energy (like it or not). And (for me) energy is about spirit. So (musical) vibrations are about the transferral of spirits and energy.” Ah, I’m not alone, there is some thing else communicated in portrayals like Fleck’s SXSW film, more to those complicated emotions that I feel. As Dr. MaDMo says, “It’s real and tangible.”
So, what happens when non-Black people participate in recognizing their participation in a narrative that violently removes Black people from their sonic genius and sounded memories? Even now my heart grows weary recalling how anti-Black my musical experiences were, leading me to cling to Glinka, Dvořák, and Prokofiev as saviors to my musical humanity, thinking that there wasn’t such compositional brilliance in people who looked like me. Foolish. How many non- Black string teachers developed the necessary racialized empathy required to feel horrified at their complicity in instructing their brown skinned student violinists, cellist and guitarists develop such a vibrational identity? This work demanded of educators to undo this is more than music history lessons that stuff a Black composer into the repertoire once a semester, or the casual pre-lesson assignment to compile a list of all the Black violinists one’s might find. God forbid one’s hearing of concerns about diversity is reduced to a mere whine when it’s truly the voice of a malnourished spirit.
We all know of some Black child who learned about her Africanized history from film or song. I guess my point is, did it sound like “Black Gold,” or was is more like watching 12 Years A Slave? Did she think about it was imprinting musical map on to her subconsciousness, one that was revived through an inherited generational trauma at the pluck of that first cheap A-string? Can you hear it, thumping in your bones, buzzing in your ear cavities like me? Sounds a rumbling and bumbling towards an equitable musical vision that both where you and I can just be.
