Carnegie Hall recently released the Timeline of African American Music, an interactive project led by ethnomusicologist Portia K. Maultsby. The timeline reveals the history of the genre and style of black American music from folk traditions to today’s popular music. Along with music, the project also charts the ways these genres connect, not only with each other, but with social movements, global networks, and evolving traditions. These links forge a path that addresses “African American expressions of blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul and hip-hop that are celebrated around the world .” This series explores the work of some of the academics who helped create the project.
Earl Stewart is a composer and professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He shares his expertise on African American music since the Civil War in an essay he co-wrote with Maultsby for the project. The two discuss the long lineage of music as it spread from the African continent to North America through the slave trade. Mixing their music with European musical forms, enslaved Africans—and later free people—developed sounds and styles, Stewart and Maultsby explain. “As freed people, Blacks and their descendants continued to create new and distinctive styles of Black music in the tradition of African music production that defined their unique African American identity.” That new identity formed the framework of jazz, funk and gospel, as well as classical musical traditions such as call-and-response.
Similarly, Yale University ethnomusicologist and author of Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat, Michael Veal, explores the cultural exchanges between the “Black Atlantic”, a network that extends “from the United States for South America, Central America and the Caribbean.” which changed the musical landscape mixing African music “with musical practices of Western European and Native American origin to form the foundations of the musical cultures of the African diaspora.”
Earl Stewart
Michael Veal
Resources
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University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for Ethnomusicology
