Fall 2000 Volume XXX, No. 1

Life with Fatha by Jeff Taylor Seven Steps to Piano Heaven: The Artistry of Sir Roland Hanna by Mark Tucker Visualizing Modernity and Tradition in Copland's America by Gail Levin Mark Tucker by H. Wiley Hitchcock Local Music/Global Connections Conference by Ray Allen ISAM Matters Reviews Country and Gospel Notes by Charles Wolfe Rediscovering the Sylviad by Douglas A. Lee Seeger Scholarship by Marc E. Johnson Zygotones by George Boziwick ISAM Home

Local Music/Global Connections by Ray Allen Since the first Europeans settled in lower Manhattan in the early seventeenth century, New York has been a global city, a transnational crossroads of people and commerce, of culture and art. Three and a half centuries of immigration have maintained the city’s essential international character as the early Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek, African American, Puerto Rican, and Chinese communities have made room for the new immigrants from Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the former Soviet Union. Today four out of every ten New Yorkers are foreign born. Whether arriving from South America or South Korea, newcomers carry with them traditional ways of life, ranging from language, food, clothing styles, and religious practices to music, dance, crafts, and family celebrations. As cultural baggage goes, music is among the most portable, cherished, and enduring expressions of identity. More than any other traditional art, music and dance have been the key symbolic forms through which immigrant groups have maintained their cultural distinctiveness and nurtured ties to their old country heritage. Greek New Yorkers celebrate their Greekness when they dance to traditional wedding music in Astoria, Queens; West Indians experience their Caribbean roots when they “pull pan” through the streets of Crown Heights during Brooklyn Carnival; African Americans express their southern and African ancestries through a rousing gospel shout in a Bedford Stuyvesant church; and Irish Americans recapture their Celtic past at a lively ceili session in a West Bronx, Riverdale pub. While traditional music and dance foster in-group pride and community solidarity, they also open up the possibility for cross-cultural dialogue and fusion. During the past century, community music making in New York unfolded in clubs, dance halls, churches, outdoor festivals, and other public settings where musicians, dancers, and fans of diverse backgrounds could meet and mingle. This direct, face-to-face exchange of musical ideas and practices, reinforced by the proliferation of ethnic recordings and radio broadcasts, has encouraged the development of multicultural repertoires and innovative hybrid styles. At the same time, progressive community musicians have self-consciously absorbed the sounds of the modern city, from jazz to avant-garde composition, blending tradition and innovation to create provocative new styles. Local Music/Global Connections will bring together scholars, students, arts programmers, and musicians for a three-day conference devoted to the interdisciplinary study of New York City’s diverse music cultures. Moving away from models that view urban folk music as old-country survivals in isolated “ethnic” enclaves, we will embrace a dynamic perspective that places transcultural and transnational exchange at the center of the musical enterprise. We will explore how the urban environment serves as a crucible for the transformation of traditional styles and practices into new forms of cultural expression that shape the contours of group identity and the cultural politics of daily urban life. New York City, North America’s most diverse metropolitan center and the hub of complex global networks, provides the ideal setting for the study of local music making in the modern world.