Department of Music

Timelines are well known temporal organizers in various types of African diasporic groove-based musics. But what happens when they are deliberately cut, rotated, or staggered? This article explores some compositional techniques used by Orkestra Rumpilezz, a big band from Bahia, Brazil, that combines jazz with Afro-Bahian carnival and sacred music and that bases its compositions on traditional and modified timelines. The paper offers metric interpretations of the orchestra’s timeline experimentations and relates them to their stated goal to “dignify and demonstrate the high level of rhythmic complexity of Afro-Bahian music.” The main demonstration is that the composer’s experimentations with timelines are a technique to increase rhythmic complexity and to elevate the status of Afro-Bahian music. Additionally, I propose a way to expand existing timeline models to account for more subtle and implicit relationships of timeline alignment found in Brazil. The main goal is to discover how the orchestra’s claimed rhythmic complexity is expressed through arrangement. This is achieved by combining music theory, analysis, and ethnographic work in Bahia.

Combining historical, organological, ethnographic, and musical analysis, this article explores the relationship between three musical bows—the Angolan hungu and mbulumbumba and the Brazilian berimbau—in the context of the South Atlantic African diaspora. Our intervention crisscrosses scholarly debates about the survival and adaptation of African musical bows in Brazil and capoeiristas’ discourses about the Angolan origins of capoeira and the berimbau. We argue for a direct connection between the hungu and berimbau, calling into question any such link to the mbulumbumba, one first posited by Gerhard Kubik in the 1970s and reasserted by subsequent scholars.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

This essay considers the hotly debated U.S. border and its relationship to music historiography vis-à-vis the unconventional career of Gilbert Chase (1906-92), the first U.S. musicologist to take seriously the music of the Spanish-speaking world. I draw on his papers, housed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, to suggest that little-known facts of Chase’s scholarly perspectives can give us food for thought in the fraught present. Central here are two visions of “American music,” both rooted in politics. One, the concept of “Greater America,” dates from the 1920s through World War II and informed Chase’s scholarly vision early on. Another vision, one that effectively reinforced U.S. superpower status, grew out of the Cold War. Paradoxically, it is Greater America, which Chase abruptly abandoned—as did U.S. society at large—that holds out the greatest promise today.