On his book Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz
Cover Interview of December 04, 2008
Lastly
I’d like the book to be seen as a love song of sorts to the immense achievements of Afro-Latin music. Its pervasive, and still invisible, presence in so much of everyday life in America is still not fully appreciated, I think, even though this state of affairs has finally begun to change. We are talking here about an extremely supple music, classical, serious, ecstatic, playful, operating in myriad genres performed everywhere from the street corners to the concert halls. Its enormous influence at all levels is still, even now, written out of most musical history books. But I see the book also as trying to establish that even enjoyment and leisure can be forms of protest when they bring us face-to-face with the clashing outlooks of former colonial encounters that are continually replayed in code, and at the level of musical form. People never entirely forget the traumas of the past. They are looking for salvation from the dreary pursuit of spoils. The African presence in the new world has found a way to live, and is profoundly ethical in its resistance to the big commercial now. In a world of religious extremes, it gives us a different kind of ritual – the rituals of secular pleasure.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
I’d like the book to be seen as a love song of sorts to the immense achievements of Afro-Latin music. Its pervasive, and still invisible, presence in so much of everyday life in America is still not fully appreciated, I think, even though this state of affairs has finally begun to change. We are talking here about an extremely supple music, classical, serious, ecstatic, playful, operating in myriad genres performed everywhere from the street corners to the concert halls. Its enormous influence at all levels is still, even now, written out of most musical history books. But I see the book also as trying to establish that even enjoyment and leisure can be forms of protest when they bring us face-to-face with the clashing outlooks of former colonial encounters that are continually replayed in code, and at the level of musical form. People never entirely forget the traumas of the past. They are looking for salvation from the dreary pursuit of spoils. The African presence in the new world has found a way to live, and is profoundly ethical in its resistance to the big commercial now. In a world of religious extremes, it gives us a different kind of ritual – the rituals of secular pleasure.
© 2008 Timothy Brennan