Preface

Summary

The inception of the journey that finds its conclusion in this book is a personal experience stretching into the distant past. As a Peace Corps music teacher in Freetown, Sierra Leone in the late 1960s, I was overwhelmed by the dynamic energy, rhythmic complexity, passion, and power of the African music and dance witnessed in performances of many different peoples that populate the forests of this verdant land. Whether it was the intense, strained incantation of a trio of Mende women (punctuating their song with rattling rhythms of a calabash wrapped in a net of beads), or the cross-rhythmic excitement created by a pair of small drums, a deep bass drum, and the metallic jingling of attached rattles, or the layered cross-rhythms of a quartet of Temne marimbas, or the sweet, luminous sounds of a Mandinka harp (bathing the cry of a tall singer in flowing white robes rapping a calabash dish against his chest with rapid fillips of ringed fingers), this distant music stirred enveloping curiosity. It tapped my unbridled pleasure in unexpected musical beauty. In my final year at Harvard, I had begun studying composition with Billy Jim Layton, and with the intention of continuing my studies as a graduate student when I returned to the States, I wondered how I might recreate the thrill of this music by capturing the unique excitement and complexities of its rhythms and sonorities.

Later, I was to discover that my desire to recreate the musical sounds of an exotic world for a Western audience fell in line with attitudes shared by other composers, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Henry Eichheim, Claude Debussy. But if there is a universal predilection to imitate what is admired and held in high esteem in art, this desire is tempered for those whose own work surpasses the ordinary and becomes a model for others to emulate. Slavish imitation is the road to disaster, and Ravel's rebuff of composers treading the path of overt and undisciplined exoticism during the first decade of the 20th century calls attention to this kind of misstep. Similarly, I believe, writing about exoticism in Western music can fall into the trap of overemphasizing the obvious, implying that the preeminence of an exotic musical work rests on the presence and quality of its allusion.