World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I stumbled across this video today and it made me happy. You should watch it. Bobby McFerrin talks about the universality of the Pentatonic Scale and how audiences always respond to it around the world.
Jump ahead and I come to reflect on a piece in the NYT on “Twitterology.” The author, Ben Schott, reflected on the 140 character messaging system and pondered that in the future people would come to tweet short abbreviations of words, much like they did with the launch of the telegraph. His musings on words appear regularly in the NYT, and are worth a read in his blog
The connection Schott makes to words is interesting, as are McFerrin’s, but the more compelling I think are the ways in which language and music can be used in different contexts for subversion. Around the same time that Morse was inventing the telegraph in the 1830s enslaved black people in the South would sing Gospel songs and encode secret meanings to communicate unbeknownst to their masters.
In doing so they hijacked the religion plantation owners had used to justify slavery and laid the foundation for the vibrant spiritual tradition that would evolve a century later into blues. It’s indeed ironic that centuries after the British brought slavery to the Americas their musical heritage would traverse back across the Atlantic to inspire the UK roots of rock music (check out the BBC video below on the influence of American blues on Brit rock).
It would be interesting to see what Schott, Professor at Cambridge University, might have to say on this.
Thanks to my former professor from Princeton Albert Raboteau, pioneer in the study of Slave Religion, for passing on his wonderful perspective on race in American history.
