The Musical Aesthetics of Blackness on Stage
Folded into the fabric of Black American musical aesthetics is the sonic history of a people. Samantha Ege describes the musical aesthetics of Black composer Florence Price as “an amalgamation of histories within histories.” Ege’s thesis on the music of Price explores the development of 20th century Black musical idioms. She ponders not only when, but how academia will listen to and analyze the music of Black American composers. She continues, “Delving deeper into Price’s use of a black musical idiom—i.e., a racialized musical language—requires us to engage in the metacognitive act of listening to how we listen. My exploration into Price’s integrated compositional approach against the dissonances cast by dominant listening practices strives toward decolonized hearings and rehearings of her aesthetic.” In order to appreciate the continued evolution of Black music, one must not only acknowledge that a distinct Black musical aesthetic exists apart from white music, but also determine new methodologies and value systems around performing, consuming, and analyzing this music.
The subversive nature of Black music defies genre, and so does Black theater. Music is a strong fabricator of Black cultural lore, history, and identity. The use of Black popular music is familiar and familial, making it a strong aesthetic choice to be integrated into other forms of public storytelling. Theater as the visual representation of Black bodies on stage, paired with the robust sonic identity of Black music, was a developing combination of artistic force as a part of the 20th century Black arts movement. The marriage of these two Black art forms engages audiences in a new type of Black theatrical storytelling; together, a liminal third space of storytelling is created. Such an innovative model of storytelling requires a resituating, a rehearing of Black theatrical and musical aesthetics, and, as Matthew Morrison calls it, “a race-based epistemology.”
In this paper, I present crucial musical elements of the genres utilized in three stage plays and demonstrate how such elements appear in the language, structure, and staging of the plays themselves. In August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I explore the characteristics of blues music and the blues singer as theatrical actress; in George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, I posit rhythm as its own character in the play. I argue that the aforementioned playwrights make the choice to specifically evoke Black musical aesthetics because of the shared access both music and theater have to Black storytelling.
Music in the Black Arts Movement
In conjunction with the Black Power Movement, Black art played a crucial role in the development of a Black American national identity during the 20th century. As critic and playwright Larry Neal writes, “Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic.” As a distinct characteristic of Black art, Neal explicitly connects the aesthetic appeal to the goals, morals and ethics of the work: “In a context of world upheaval, ethics and aesthetics must interact positively and be consistent with the demands for a more spiritual world. Consequently, the Black Arts Movement is an ethical movement. Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed.” He continues, “The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions between ethics and aesthetics in western society is symptomatic of a dying culture.”
Similarly, musicologist William Cheng’s book Loving Music Till It Hurts speaks to the relationship between beauty and justice, stating: “Beauty and justice, after all, have a mutual synonym in fairness, which connotes symmetry, balance, and equality. Yet, literature, film and pop culture have long highlighted rifts between aesthetes and activists – dewy-eyed stargazers versus steely-eyed advocates, flighty daydreamers versus boots-on-the-ground agents.” Such a dichotomy threatens to reduce aesthetically pleasing Black art to only valuable because of its beauty, and robs Black artists of their status as political radicals. Jennifer Lynn Stoever urges the field of sound studies “to consider black artists as theorists and agents of sound, rather than solely as performers or producers.” Music in the Black Arts Movement took an active stance towards justice, challenging artists of all kinds to think of themselves as ushering in both beauty and advocacy into the 20th century political landscape. As Christopher Small remarked in his performance studies book Musicking, “performance does not exist in order to present musical works, but rather, musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform.”
The academic conversation around the makings of a Black musical aesthetic is as varied as Black music itself. One common way is to describe Black musics through the language of motion; on descriptions of Black musical tendencies, Farah Jasmine Griffin writes, “Students of Black music such as Zora Neale Hurston, Christopher Smalls, Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Brent Edwards, and Robert O’Meally encourage us to think less in terms of adjectives and more in terms of verbs when describing black cultural practices including singing. These writers stress functions, effects, and processes in their descriptions of black music. They use words like stretching, reaching, conversing, sliding, imitating, swinging, rocking.” Similarly, author and critic Hoyt W. Fuller remarks, “Just as major black intellectuals have rejected the NAACP, on the one hand, and the two major political parties on the other, and gone off in search of of new and more effective means and methods of seizing power, so revolutionary black writers have turned their backs on the old ‘certainties’ and struck out in new, if uncharted, directions. They have begun the journey towards a black aesthetic.” The description of Black art as and on a journey demonstrates this art form as a middle passage in and of itself. Black music inherently implies movement; to participate in it is to traverse towards somewhere new, even if the destination is unknown. Unlike white art music, which often demands the audience sit passively and appreciate white European aesthetics, Black music is active, demanding a moral response from both Black and white audience members.
Though Black aesthetics continue to evolve, it’s important to examine the purpose and origins of such aesthetics. Oftentimes, philosophies around race are confined to the sense of sight. However, both oral history and aurality is are racialized. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line explores “the process of racializing sound– how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds– and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness.’” Stoever's sonic color line theory allows for a racialized rehearing of both spoken language and Black music. James Baldwin speaks to the development and necessity of African-American English as its own distinct language: “A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.” Language is therefore an integral part of the Black Arts Movement, as it communicates the unique history, experiences, and culture of a people. Similarly, the music of a people comes into existence to assist their language in expression and narrative. The development of Black music is interconnected to the development of Black language; as one medium of storytelling and sonic history develops, so does the other.
Staging Blues: August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is one of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle plays. The show features a cast of musicians and music producers making a record in 1920s Chicago. Based on the life of the “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey stars in a tale of exploitation, religion, agency, and art. The play demonstrates the struggle of Black artists working with white producers, explores the agency expressed by Black women blues singers, and interrogates “blues [as] a kind of ethno-historic rite as basic as blood.” Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom combines the storytelling inherent in both theater and music to present what was in actuality the liminality of Rainey’s blues career.
As established by the most popular blues singers, the blues aesthetic is a Black female one. The blues accomplishes sonic storytelling through requiring the singer to engage in acting. In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Daves observes that there is “a significant number of women's blues songs on work, jail, prostitution, natural disasters, and other issues that, when taken together, constitute a patchwork social history of black Americans during the decades following emancipation. Most often such themes are intertwined with themes of love and sexuality.” Davis continues, “For the millions of women condemned to jobs involving domestic drudgery, there was ‘Washwoman's Blues,’ and for all those familiar with the monthly ritual of scraping together pennies to pay the landlord, there was ‘House Rent Blues.’ ‘Jail House Blues’ acknowledged the inevitability of the prison experience in virtually every household of the black community, while ‘Backwater Blues’ was for those whose socially inflicted destitution was tragically compounded by floods and other natural disasters. And for all those who could be prodded to reflect upon the roots of their myriad pains of poverty, there was ‘Poor Man's Blues.’” Blues is a clear demonstrator of Larry Neal’s call to combine Black aesthetics and ethics; it is concerned with both individual and communal suffering, survival, and storytelling.
The claiming of the blues singer as “mother” is clearly on display in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Joy James defines a captive maternal as such: “Captive Maternals are self-identified female, male, trans, or ungendered persons feminized and socialized into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy. Captive Maternals are designated for consumption in the tradition of chattel slavery; they stabilize with their labor the very social and state structures which prey upon them.” Farah Jasmine Green describes this Black female voice as “a figure that serves the unit, who heals and nurtures it but has no rights or privileges within it – more mammy than mother.” White supremacist America often charges her with the burden of healing the nation, representing racial uplift, and offering “an alternative vision of a more inclusive America.”
Staging Rhythm: George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum
The Colored Museum is a play by Tony award winning director and playwright George C. Wolfe. The play, which premiered in 1986, features an all-Black cast and a bevy of common Black stereotypes and contradictions. An imaginative revolving set allows for quick transitions between scenes, effectively walking the audience through each “exhibit.” Most of the scenes lack a specified time setting, in order to demonstrate how these stereotypes and histories persist and reorient themselves over time. By setting the play within the shifting walls of a museum, the play is a retelling and critique of not only Black American theater and culture, but of the way Black American history is archived and displayed. Though not a traditional musical, different genres of Black music are incorporated throughout the show, including references to Black popular music.
As a setting, the choice of a museum challenges the legacy of archives and written history by highlighting the relationship between colonizer (the formal keeper of history) and the colonized object. He demonstrates the way in which formal archival processes make people, events, and lived histories into objects, particularly by highlighting every day Black experiences and common Black stereotypes. This museum effect, coined by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, not only creates the conditions so “ordinary things become special when placed in museum settings, but also the museum experience itself becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls.” Since the colonized subject is constantly in the process of construction and reification by the colonizer, what is othered constantly changes as the West evolves. This requires what is understood to be the colonized subject to be fungible and constructed by the context surrounding it. For example, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes how the ethnographer recontextualizes and reaffirms these objects when situated in a group, stating that “they are at their most documentary when presented in their multiplicity, that is, as a collection.”
By presenting a collection of Black caricatures as “fact” by way of their archival in a formal setting, Wolfe achieves Larry Neal’s vision of performing both aesthetics and ethics: “The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world. The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors’? What is truth? Or more precisely, whose truth shall we express, that of the oppressed or of the oppressors?” Wolfe’s catalog of Black characters interacting throughout time and space archive the progression of Black culture, and its resistance against white supremacy. Though the caricatures of Blackness persist, the context around them changes. As Amiri Baraka notes in Blues People, “The Negro's music changed as he changed, reflecting shifting attitudes or (and this is equally important) consistent attitudes within changed contexts. And it is why the music changed that seems most important to me.”
The Colored Museum displays several elements of African American music defined by musicologist Olly Wilson in “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal In African-American Music.” Wilson conceptualized five tendencies: “The tendency to approach the organization of rhythm based on the principle of rhythmic and implied metrical contrast…The tendency to approach singing or the playing of any instrument in a percussive manner…The tendency to create musical forms in which antiphonal, responsorial, or call-and-response musical structures abound…A tendency to create a high density of musical events within a relatively short musical time frame (i.e. fill up all the musical space)... and the tendency to incorporate physical body motion as an integral part of the music making process.” Wolfe utilizes these musical qualities throughout the play to access new methods of audience interaction and storytelling.
The show plays with the established expectations of traditional theater, first through its directed interactions with the audience. Beginning in the first exhibit “Git on Board,” Miss Pat gets the audience to chant “no drums” and invites them to sing with her. In “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” Miss Roj points out specific people in the audience as they snap along with her. The observer is invited to actively participate in the play in real time, rather than participating through passive consumption. This call-and-response method appears not only in Black music but in all forms of Black storytelling, such as in Black religious services. The play also experiments with the audience’s expectations through the use of song. Not only does the play utilize different genres associated with Blackness, such as Blues, spirituals, and gospel, but it heavily relies on even the references to Black musicians to build a strong sonic identity (The Temptations, Jimi Hendrix, The Jackson Five, etc.).
Rhythm is an integral part of The Colored Museum. This central theme of rhythm appears throughout the show, often being referenced by characters or used as driving force in the plot. Such a use of musical aesthetics in other forms of Black art is not uncommon; Toni Morrison utilized musical characteristics as a setting in her novel Jazz. In the forward of the book, she writes: “I had written novels in which structure was designed to enhance meaning; here the structure would equal meaning. The challenge was to expose and bury the artifice and to take practice beyond the rules. I didn’t want simply a musical background, or decorative references to it. I wanted the work to be a manifestation of the music’s intellect, sensuality, anarchy; its history, its range, and its modernity.” The improvisatory nature of jazz appears in the structure of the book, as the storytelling waffles back and forth between past, present, and future. Jazz represents adulthood and freedom for one character, while signifying danger and rebellion for another. In this way, jazz music itself is both a character in the book and part of the plot’s design.
I assert that Wolfe uses the Black musical aesthetic of rhythm as not only a setting and modality for storytelling in this play, but similarly, as a character in the play itself. The use of drums is consistent throughout the play. At some points the aspect of rhythm represents rebellion, while during other points drums directly oppose respectability. Miss Roj’s rhythmic snapping gives her immense power over injustice. These references construct a racial and cultural identity for the characters and their acceptance and/or rejection of these musics signifies their relationship to Blackness. The character’s interactions with Black music, Black celebrity, and Black drama prompt the audience to interrogate their own proximity to these cultural touchpoints.
A particularly striking scene is “The Party,” which features several characters who appeared throughout the show. Not only is Topsy Washington wearing her inner contradictions through her costume, but the scene displays how all of the characters simultaneously represent Tospy’s “colored contradictions.” This conclusion to the show displays the simultaneous embracing and critiquing of the contradictions of the past through the present liminality of theater.
Conclusion
In order to actualize the Black Arts Movement of the 20th century, Black playwrights experimented with sound in conjunction with visuals. The result is the construction of a Black sonic identity with a distinct Black visual language, a new modality of Black storytelling. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom details “the ways in which Black women have long been, themselves, fugitive thinkers, critics, and theorists of sound.” The Colored Museum uses elements of rhythm, call-and-response, and percussion in order to actively engage the audience in this new type of storytelling. These 20th century plays continue the evolution of Black aesthetics as a medium for Black ethics.
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