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In Reply to: Re: For our resident musicologists: recently, I've been listening to Senegalese, posted by Dmitry on February 23, 2007 at 07:17:20:
here for centuries.
In listening to old black music, I've never heard that syncopation which is so prevalent in many African, Carribbean, and S. American countries.
Perhaps slave owners prohibited it here but the Brasilian ones allowed drumming?
Follow Ups:
...for the most part over time for the reasons stated just below. (As an aside, it's interesting to note that steel drums came about as the result of a similar policy in Trindidad.) I think more significant than this though, is that in the Carribean and South American countries the African music was mixed primarily with Spanish and Portugese European traditions, two things that were largely absent in North America until fairly recently. Add to that the fact that each group of transplanted Africans was isolated from each other for centuries, and it seems natural enough that different traditions would morph from each of them.
dh
... well not actually, but Spanislamic... actually that's not so bad!
A lot of what we think of as Spanish is in fact the Islamic music (and before that Indian I think) that arrived with the Moorish invasion.
"There were two types of slave music in the United States: a secular music that consisted of field hollers, shouts, and moans that used folk tales and folk motifs, and that made use of homemade instruments from the banjo (which became a standard American instrument in the 19th century, largely through minstrelsy), tambourine, and calabashes to washboards, pots, spoons, and the like. From the 1740s, many states had banned the use of drums in fear that Africans would use them to create a system of communication in order to aid rebellion. Nonetheless, blacks managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies."From the PBS archives
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.Kurt Vonnegut
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