Thanks again to Peter Kirn for featuring one of my resources at Create Digital Media (CDM).
Read the full piece here: https://cdm.link/celebrate-black-history-month-in-music-by-traveling-back-to-the-6th-century/
Black History Month may be a creation of the USA, but why not go further out and further back – much further back? Jon Silpayamanant takes us back to Saint Yared in Ethiopia in the 6th century for a ride through the centuries that could transform some of your ideas about music history.
I’ve chattered about my endless fascination with Jon’s amazing site, Mae Mai, but this deserves a special mention. The exclusion and erasure of Blackness means we lose some essential parts of music and human history. It’s an injustice and becomes the foundation for still more injustice and violence. That’s not confined to the USA, even acknowledging the USA’s history of slavery and inequality.
Or to put that more simply: we aren’t a whole community without restoring Black contributions to music. It makes everything we do in music richer – including the latest bleeding-edge electronic music concoctions. I mean, I’m inspired listening to Saint Yared and (later) the Abassid Era, even around a millennium and a half later. There’s some perspective.
Jon found many of these resources while working on Arabic music theory, he says, partly because they simply weren’t left out. So check the full guide here, and I suspect – like me – you’ll discover your music education really omitted a lot. I never regret what I learned, but I am eager to find out what I didn’t learn.
by Peter Kirn of Create Digital Media (CDM)