Black Musicological World-Making in <i>Who Hears Here?</i>

“What I want,” writes Kevin Quashie in Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, “is the freeness of a black world where blackness can be of being, where there is no argument to be made, where there is no speaking to or against an audience because we are all the audience there is. . . . ”1 In Who Hears Here?, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., invites us into a world where Black music is “of being,” devoid of defenses, justifications, or validations for its existence. Black creativity and intellectuality simply are, and Ramsey historicizes, theorizes, and “storifies” their various manifestations majestically.Who Hears Here? is a collection of Black world-making essays that read as a road map for a musicological life lived beyond the strictures of the discipline. Each essay reveals the cartography of a career that continues to traverse the oft-siloed fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and analysis, performance, public scholarship, and more. Additionally, Ramsey puts the precedents of my own practice as an African-descended scholar-performer in print, which is no superficial observation in light of the ways that intellectual genealogies of the African continent and diaspora are under-historicized in the written record.As a first-year undergraduate student, steeped in the white-maleness of my degree program at the University of Bristol, it is fair to say that I was oblivious to the possibilities of Black world-making along my path. I was yet to encounter the scholarship of Ramsey, Eileen Southern, Rae Linda Brown, and Tammy L. Kernodle alongside my readings of Claude V. Palisca and Richard Taruskin. I was yet to study the music of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nina Simone, and Bud Powell alongside Bach chorales and medieval manuscripts. I might not have questioned anything if not for my second year as an undergraduate exchange student at McGill University, where the twentieth-century music courses of professors Lisa Barg and David Brackett opened my eyes and ears to alternative canons that had been missing in my education thus far. Therein, I found a Blackness of being, and it was through this experience that I first learned of Ramsey and his work.Although Ramsey and I met in person only recently, his influence spans the course of my musicological path-making. When I was at McGill and in the early stages of considering options for graduate school, I remember Professor Barg telling me that “Guy” was at the University of Pennsylvania. It was said in that subtly reverential way, indexing the kind of scholar one would want to be in community with.I left Bristol for Philadelphia, ready to begin a PhD in ethnomusicology, or the anthropology of music, as the program was called when I applied. My choice to pursue that particular discipline stemmed from my misconception that this was the only route for the musical study of anything (or anyone) non-white. However, things did not go well for me at Penn; ethnomusicology did not hold the answers I was looking for, and the way forward seemed unclear. I sometimes wonder how different my time would have been had Ramsey and I met while I was there, but Ramsey was on sabbatical when I arrived. Would witnessing his work firsthand have presented an early intervention in my underdeveloped perceptions of musicology and ethnomusicology? Who knows? I left after a few weeks.My first reading of Ramsey's introduction to Who Hears Here? made me reflect on what might have been had I stayed. Leaving Penn was an enormous, catalytic decision. Further complicating my sense of whether this was the right thing to do was the fact that my journey took an unexpected turn afterward. I taught elementary and middle school music in Kuwait and Singapore and essentially severed my ties with academia. Nevertheless, through these new experiences, I learned, as Ramsey did, “that teaching can be an important extension of an art practice and certainly a powerful form of activism.”2 I map Ramsey's words onto my own practice of encouraging my students from incredibly diverse cultural backgrounds and musical levels to see and describe themselves as composers, and to not simply attribute that word to the old guys in the curly wigs, as I used to tell them.Alongside helping my students navigate burgeoning musical identities, I began to rediscover my own; the two processes were no doubt interrelated. I started playing the piano again—as in, really playing the piano—relearning Brahms rhapsodies and Bach toccatas before finding my home in a repertoire of culturally underrepresented composers. In 2016, I re-entered the PhD path, this time by way of Florence Price, at the University of York, with Professor William Brooks as my advisor. Under Professor Brooks's brilliant mentorship, I pursued musicology with a strong component in performance as research. Recordings and performances accompanied archival work and writings on Price, giving increasing definition to my identities as an academic and pianist. That Ramsey was a friend and mentee of one of the most influential Price scholar-performers—the late Rae Linda Brown—and helped bring Brown's posthumous monograph The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price to fruition is yet another example of his tacit influence along my journey.3 Brown's book was published in the late summer of 2020, which was also when I became “Dr. Samantha Hannah Oboakorevue Ege.”After York, I embarked on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford in the fall of that year, becoming the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. By that time, I was experiencing another one of Ramsey's lessons: “craft a life that will support your art” rather than putting “the pressure on your art to support your life.”4 Indeed, I am still learning how to enact this balance as my work as a Black feminist scholar-performer continues to grow. As I have written elsewhere, “The art of the Black feminist scholar-performer encompasses the conviction that there is a history of classical music (i.e., Western art music) to be told both from a Black woman's vantage point and the subsequent dialogue between research and repertoire.”5 And key to developing my performance projects in conversation with my written outputs—performance projects that include Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price (2021) and my upcoming reunion with the Boston-based Castle of our Skins string quartet for a program called “African Tales” in the 2024 Leeds International Concert Series—is the minimal pressure I aim to put on the art itself to uphold my livelihood.6 With this lesson, Ramsey teaches us that striving toward this balance can lead to some of our most personally and professionally transformative work.I have highlighted but a few of the many didactic gems that Ramsey presents in his introduction as he sets the stage for the essays that follow. These selected examples particularly resonated with me upon my first reading of the introduction. I was comforted by the directness with which Ramsey spoke to my experiences. His words allayed any lingering regrets that I might have had about cutting my Ivy League education short. Eventually, I went from dwelling on “what if” to being reassured of what is. An Ivy League postgraduate degree was evidently not in the cards, but in its place is a multifaceted career that would not be what it is today without the detours, disruptions, and meandering processes of self-discovery.At present, my research and repertoire illuminate classical composers of the early twentieth-century Black Renaissance, an era that predates what Ramsey frames as the Afro-modernism of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in his essay “Afro-Modernism and Music: On Science, Community, and Magic in the Black Avant-Garde.” If the Black Renaissance represented a time of rebirth, which encompassed racial uplift, the politics of respectability, and composers such as Price, William Grant Still, William Dawson, Helen Hagan, and Nora Holt, then the postwar period marked the transition from rebirth to a cultural coming of age. A bold Black aesthetic emerged, one that wasn't housed in a single sound but in a variety of voices, extending from all genres in which Black music-makers were active. It was a period that witnessed increasingly urgent responses from Black artists and intellectuals to “the experience of modernity, globalism, and anticolonialism as well as to the expanded sense of artistic experimentation and visibility of black expressive culture,” as Ramsey describes.7My work is now expanding to include Afro-modernist composers such as Undine Smith Moore, with others on the horizon. Castle of our Skins and I recently recorded Moore's Soweto (1987) for piano trio on our album Homage: Chamber Music from the African Continent and Diaspora.8 Little has been written on this largely dissonant, emotionally charged, and intricately crafted work outside of Moore's own commentary, but Ramsey discusses it in “Afro-Modernism and Music,” exemplifying the ways in which he conceives of Black music heterogeneously through an array of genres. Soweto, Ramsey writes, “attests to Moore's personal awareness of the civil unrest in South Africa during apartheid, and especially during the Soweto uprising of 1976.” Performing the themes of rage, racial terror, and remembrance that run through the three movements of this work has pushed me to new creative and intellectual heights, both as an artist and scholar. For Quashie, as it is for Ramsey, heterogeneity is an essential aspect of Black world-making, and I have found it thoroughly invigorating to expand my craft through a heterogeneous canon of Black artistry.As a classical music practitioner, I am regularly asked about the canon of Western art music—as if there can only be one, and as if it is something that I, too, wrestle with. But I feel no conflict, no sense of betrayal to the guys in the curly wigs, just the inspirative effect of fashioning a Black feminist world-making sphere. I do not wish to underplay the tensions that arise out of being a practitioner in predominantly white institutions or of simply being a Black person in the world—and Ramsey does not shy away from the harshness of these realities as he recounts examples in his own life ever so poignantly in essays such as “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade” and “The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Studies.”9 His anecdotes from in and outside of the ivory tower bring a much-needed realism to the fallacy of objectivity and apoliticality in how we go about our work. Yet, when Ramsey writes on Black music's “pasts and present,” I do not read the anti-Blackness of the world as the driving force behind his poetically rendered prose. Amid slavery, colonialism, imperialism, Jim Crow, and other forms of hegemony and apartheid, Ramsey enacts a Black musicological world-making, historicizing heterogeneous Black musical canons, upon which their variety invites us to build.I close returning to Quashie's philosophy of Black world-making, about which he says, “My difference from black pessimism might be in my attempt to displace antiblackness from the center of my thinking. That is, though I don't deny the terribleness of the world we live in, nor its antiblack perpetuity, I am interested in conceptualizing an aesthetic imaginary founded on black worldness.”10 This is a consistent thread that runs through Who Hears Here? Moreover, Ramsey gives us over a century of varied examples with James Monroe Trotter's Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878), Maud Cuney Hare's Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936), Alain Locke's The Negro and His Music (1936), Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans: A History (1971), and The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States, by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (1995). Building on these are Tammy L. Kernodle's amplifications of Black women's voices in the civil rights era, Kira Thurman's case studies of African American concert artists in Europe, Naomi André’s genealogies of Black opera, Matthew D. Morrison's theorizations of Blacksound, and A. Kori Hill's reframings of a New Negro modernism.11 This list is far from complete, but it serves to demonstrate the thematic connectivity I draw across the field in relation to Quashie's ideas.Quashie's note on displacing anti-Blackness from the center of his thinking helps me better understand why, as much as I do not deny the pertinence of Philip A. Ewell's work on music theory's “white racial frame,” I struggle to identify the Black world-making potentials of his scholarship.12 But, then again, I am not sure that I am the audience for Ewell's work compared to those who still need convincing of the discipline's structural anti-Black racism and have neglected the contributions of Horace J. Maxile, Jr., and Ellie Hisama, for example, not to mention the foundational work and world-making advanced even earlier by scholars and practitioners such as Southern, Floyd, Josephine Wright, Hildred Roach, Mildred Denby Green, Doris Evans McGinty, Dominique-René de Lerma, and Olly Wilson, to name a few. Now, that is not to say that I am “all the audience there is” for Ramsey's book(!), however, it is wonderfully special to feel seen and have my craft historicized across essays that emanate from a starting point of Black world-making. With his purview of “Black music, pasts and present,” Ramsey makes the deeply transnational and endlessly heterogeneous history of our work known. And in doing so, he writes us into the making of Black futurities and an even more expansive worldness.

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