Reviews for Music In Puerto Rico

The average rating for Music In Puerto Rico based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-15 00:00:00 Lisa Richardson Author rolls through 1970s Ghana, gets initiated into two indigenous drumming groups, produces 172 pages of must-know business about West African culture and its music. Book stands tall as an investigation of music-as-cultural-lens, as author has lucked out and found himself (white, musically-inclined academic) in a place (Tamale, Ghana) and with people (the Dagomba) who express their cultural system almost literally through their aesthetic system. Author gets busy clearing up misconceptions about African music and its role in African life. Think African culture is musical? Go further, author encourages, and proceeds to show how inseparable the African character and African morality are from music, which its performers use as an "explicitly moral" social tool to bring its communities together and acknowledge their mutual humanity. Heady stuff, and author well-prepares you with the precise prose of an academic and the vigor of an initiate before you get there. The drumming system author spends the most time on is the Takai, a suite of dances built around contrasting rhythms that intersect with each other at key points in the music. Within these rhythms, there are common beats, but there are also gaps, as though each player is listening to a rhythm that no instrumentalist states. A master drummer improvises over these rhythms, exploiting the syncopated beats and gaps, but in such a way that he/she ties together the supporting rhythms and leaves spaces for dancers, who are free to dance to the unmarked beats the orchestra knows are there but has left for them to play. A master drummer cannot play without supporting drummers, or, in many cases, without the dancers; and so a community creates an event in which everyone participates and everyone is necessary, the success of the performance being judged by the success of the event. Because the musical event is actually a social one, with real dialogues between dancer and drummer (and these drums literally talk, like call folks' names, say words, impart instructions, and what have you), the aesthetic choices of its participants takes on a moral color, as conversation at a party might. What a drummer plays matters. Dancers should move with respect for the drums, not be overly showy or pretentious. In this way, a musical performance reflects not just a musician's skill, but their character (Banning Eyre reached the same conclusion in his In Griot Time) and validates their role in their community, even as it validates the community's role in everything else. Author posits it's important to see this is an attitude toward music that "Western" cultures could learn, not so important to think of it as something they've left. Know why author posits such? Cause he's a fucking optimist. And count the books on one hand that look deep into the African state of things and don't try and build hope on a pile of misery. There ain't none of this, "Things are gonna get better, if we can just educate/send aid to/end corruption in/distribute condoms for/completely restructure Africa." The end message there is that Africa would be terrific if it wasn't Africa. Without buying into b.s. notions about how simple and uncluttered a non-Western "ethnic life" (author's words) should be, he has nevertheless acknowledges that in Tamale he found a useful approach to living that he didn't find stateside. Then he put all that down in a book, and not a page of it is dispensable. Goodreads you don't have enough stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-09 00:00:00 Rodney Baron This book has the largest number of bookmarked pages of any book I own.