Transforming Vòdún examines how musicians from the West African Republic of Benin transform Benin’s cultural traditions, especially the ancestral spiritual practice of vòdún and its musical ...repertoires, as part of the process of healing postcolonial trauma through music and ritual. Based on fieldwork in Benin, France, and New York City, Sarah Politz uses historical ethnography, music analysis, and participant observation to examine three case studies of brass band and jazz musicians from Benin. The multi-sited nature of this study highlights the importance of mobility, and diasporic connections in musicians’ professional lives, while grounding these connections in the particularities of the African continent, its histories, its people, and its present.
The Gangbé Brass Band song “Alladanou” makes specific historical, linguistic, and musical references to Benin’s precolonial, colonial, and postindependence histories. I use these references as a ...point of departure in exploring the relationship of the song to the royal court style of adjògàn. I consider how the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s framework of multiple temporalities illuminates the historical flexibility at play in Gangbé’s album Togbé. I conclude by proposing an analytical framework for analyzing “Alladanou” that proceeds from an interest in audience, relationality, the Fon concept of gbè (voice or sound), and resonance.
Transforming Vòdún examines how musicians from the West African Republic of Benin transform Benin’s cultural traditions, especially the ancestral spiritual practice of vòdún and its musical ...repertoires, as part of the process of healing postcolonial trauma through music and ritual. Based on fieldwork in Benin, France, and New York City, Sarah Politz uses historical ethnography, music analysis, and participant observation to examine three case studies of brass band and jazz musicians from Benin. The multi-sited nature of this study highlights the importance of mobility, and diasporic connections in musicians’ professional lives, while grounding these connections in the particularities of the African continent, its histories, its people, and its present.
Transforming Vòdún examines how musicians from the West African Republic of Benin transform Benin's cultural traditions, especially the ancestral spiritual practice of vòdún and its musical ...repertoires, as part of the process of healing postcolonial trauma through music and ritual. Based on fieldwork in Benin, France, and New York City, Sarah Politz uses historical ethnography, music analysis, and participant observation to examine three case studies of brass band and jazz musicians from Benin. The multi-sited nature of this study highlights the importance of mobility, and diasporic connections in musicians' professional lives, while grounding these connections in the particularities of the African continent, its histories, its people, and its present.
The recent emergence of the subfield of ecomusicology has raised provocative questions about theory and method in music studies, as well as relationships between sound, humans, and the environment. ...This paper responds to these questions through an examination of two albums by the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, informed by ethnographic interviews with Loueke and fieldwork in Benin and the U.S. Each of the two albums deals with a distinct set of musical materials and strategies to convey their respective ecological orientations. The album Virgin Forest does this through creating ambient atmospheres that blur the lines between human and animal sound, while the second album, Gaïa, deploys guitar distortion and "out-of-joint" grooves to channel an angry earth goddess. This analysis explores connections between the albums and concepts of sacred sound and interdependence in the Nichiren Buddhist practice that Loueke has adopted, and in vodun ancestral practices in Benin. I propose a concept of relational listening, building on Edouard Glissant's la Relation and Steven Feld's acoustemology, which embraces humans' interdependence with the environment while respecting the radical alterity of other beings, including human, non-human, and more-than-human. Loueke's music suggests that this relational listening necessarily leads to relational sounding: interactive improvisation.
CONCLUSION Politz, Sarah
Transforming Vòdún,
09/2023
Book Chapter
Odprti dostop
The world has changed a great deal since I conducted the research for this book, indeed even since I completed the dissertation in 2017. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the chronic crises of access to ...health care, vast holes in the mental health system, environmental degradation, and the legacies of racism across the world more glaringly obvious than ever before. Working musicians across the world, including in Benin, have experienced the complete disappearance of their sources of livelihood, and are only now tentatively beginning to travel and play concerts again. The pandemic has left scars—parents and elders lost, everyday
Independence from France in 1960 gave people in Dahomey-Benin an opportunity to reenvision their relationships to traditions of music and spirituality, and to the wider world, as they sought to work ...through and transform the inheritances of colonial trauma, particularly in the musical manifestations of hierarchies of social class, aesthetics, and economic and spiritual value. In order to better understand this process, this chapter explores in further detail the worlds of musical and extramusical discourse that set the conditions and possibilities for the creative interventions of musicians like Sagbohan Danialou, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, and the brass and jazz musicians who followed
