Re: West Afrikan Akonting lute musik Old Time Herald web site

> taking your point about the absence of power structures in the new world,
> then those griots  who were transported could have disseminated their
> music and instruments to their peers irrespective if the latter were not
> in a griot genealogical line of succession since all such genealogical
> familial structures would have been broken up anyway.

I think the point is that griot music is a celebration of aristocratic
power.  If there is no aristocracy to compose and perform it for, why
would anyone preserve it?


> We have a parallel example [to the putative influence of griots on
> Afro-American folk tradition] with the bards and harpers of 16th
> century Ireland, who were exiled, killed and banned by the Cromwellian
> forces as part of the destruction of the Gaelic aristocratic clan
> order who were the patrons of the bards and harpers.

Name one who was killed or banned.  Lost their jobs, yes, but not that
many: this kind of music was in decline then anyway.  Some ended up in
Britain or continental Europe.


> There is no question that the fragmented survivors of this repression
> fled for sanctuary to the peasentry in the remote parts of the west
> of Ireland and then disseminated their musical traditions among this
> population, traditions that were once exclusively reserved for clan
> nobility.

There's a *lot* of question about it, and no positive evidence of any
such process.


> Thus historians are not surprised that the late 17th century and 18th
> century witnessed an explosion in rural Irish music composition,
> dancing, and instrument innovation.

You mean, for the first time some Irish music got written down.  That
does not amount to a creative explosion, it amounts to a (small) boom
in music paper.  When was that music created?  We just don't know.

We have a fair bit of evidence of what people in the cities were up to;
the gentry got their hands on an assortment of pieces of mixed folk and
art-music origins and started playing them on the violin, recorder and
(after 1725) the flute.  In the country?  Very few instruments known from
there at all until much later.  The early Irish pieces that got written
down are not the sort of thing that comes out of a rural folk tradition;
they're long, rhapsodic, complicated and have no function except as
listening pieces.  Assembling a paying audience for something like that
is not possible in a scattered rural community, and a harpist can't keep
going without being paid (strings are expensive, instruments enormously
more so).  Anyone who took their harp on tour through the bogs of Mayo
in the 1650s would have soon dumped it in a ditch out of despair.


> In Ireland between the 17th and 18th century new instruments based on
> European court culture, the violin, the transverse flute and the musette
> were Celtized by the Irish farmers and the descendents of the bardic and
> harping tradition (travelling musicians and dancing master/musicians) who
> adapted these instruments to indigenous Irish music.

Travelling dancing masters were an import of an English practice, not the
descendants of anything in Irish tradition.  The tunes they played were
a mixture of indigenous Irish jigs (mostly of vocal origin in Gaelic song)
and reels and country dances from Scotland and England.  The older harp
music was of no use whatever to them.

The poorer classes have quite a lot of use for some of the assets of
a departed aristocracy (like their gold and weaponry).  But when an
aristocracy declines or abandons its *artistic* assets, the chances
are their subjects won't care.  The Highland Scottish peasantry didn't
exactly rush to preserve piobaireachd after their lairds lost interest
in it: it just faded into near-oblivion.  Uncoolness was a much more
important factor in the decline of the Irish harp tradition than any
kind of direct repression, and becoming uncool among the rich didn't
make it in any way more appealing to the poor.

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