Dawn RitchA FRIEND HAS been arguing with me for 10 years about reggae music, and I am finally ready to concede the point. He says it is the principal cause of violence and bad temper in the country due to the bassline and driving tempo.
A music teacher had long ago told me that just from a glance inside a piano, one could always tell when it was used to play reggae. All the felt on the base hammers would be worn away while that on the melody would be in a virtually pristine condition.
My friend, a building contractor, says that the reason construction sites are always fractious and violent is the reggae and dancehall blaring from a tree. The music is not calming, he says, quite the contrary. It sets hearts pounding.
WAR FOOTING
Now, in recent weeks, another music teacher has made the same point to me, namely that reggae music is a contributory factor to violent crime in the island.
Between all the drumming and the screaming in reggae, the Jamaican population is perpetually kept on a war-footing.
Worse yet, she said to me, that singing is not taught in our schools any longer, nor is music. Also, she pointed out that nobody sings in the churches either, just the choirs and some five or six strong, but not necessarily tuneful, voices in the congregation.
Readers must note that this is a drastic change from the era of the 1950s and 1960s, when secondary schools had music on the curriculum, and competent people to teach it. St. Andrew's High School for Girls' alone has about five piano teachers. Indeed the head of music education there, Mrs. Ouida Hylton, prepared students to take music exams at "O" and "A" Levels.
Wolmer's High School for Boys had the most able, Sidney Morris, as music teacher, and the Girls' School had Mrs. Hazel Lawson Street. The schools even had musical instruments piano, violin, flute, guitar, clarinet and there was an obligatory 40-minute period each week for music theory, practice and appreciation. These days you are lucky to find a keyboard, much less an instrument in our schools. And the 40-minute music period has been replaced by what is becoming equally common knife brawls in the schoolyards.
Once there was even a Jamaica School of Music. It was founded by Mrs. Vera Moody, the sister of Norman Manley, founder of the People's National Party.
Subsumed in the 1970s under the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA), the Jamaica School of Music has disintegrated into squalor.
The roof leaks like a sieve, and the air-conditioners don't work well and are never fixed. There is a piano, but no stringed instruments because "roots music" is the focus of tuition at there.
This is a sad irony because the Jamaica School of Music started as a conservatoire in the European style. This was where Willard White studied with Marion Nawakoski, professor of singing, and one of the distinguished bass voices of Covent Garden in the United Kingdom. The Hungarian cellist, Frantisek Smetana, also taught there.
Steven 'Cat' Coore of Third World learnt cello not only with his mother, Rita, but with Pablo Casals, the great international cellist. Every year Cat attended the Pablo Casals International Festival in Puerto Rico.
One of the smallest islands in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is home to one of the world's great international music festivals. On the other hand, here in Jamaica, we have reggae music festivals where increasingly the best artistes and acts aren't even Jamaican.
Jamaican Denis Brown, at one time violin tutor, became director of the Jamaica School of Music, and his wife, Jeanette Cross, taught singing there as well. But times were changing. In 1972 Michael Manley came to power and somewhere between Rex Nettleford and Pam O'Gorman, the music school slipped into terminal decline.
Official policy now became a drive to establish a cultural training centre. Out of that came the EMCVPA at Arthur Wint Drive which took over the School of Music.
Official cultural thought was now steadfastly against anything European, and that certainly included classical music. The deliberate decline into which our music has since plunged in this country is the inevitable outcome.
I could never have imagined that one day nobody would think it important to offer academic training in the area in which our people are naturally gifted.
Nobody takes the DJ aside today, and tells him that his "pitch is flawed". Bob Marley didn't have a wonderful voice, but he sang in tune. He didn't sing sharp or flat. People could also understand the words he was singing. And when he was done, they had a tune they could hum, and did.
NO EXPOSURE TO TRAINING
Many musicians today don't know what a score is, or how to read it. Thus, we have a faltering local music industry which cuts and pastes tracks from one album to another endlessly until somebody comes up with a new rhythm track. Then a new round of covers begin.
What is the rationale behind depriving Jamaica's school children of training in classical music, and deliberately allowing the national school of music to become ramshackle?
As the great and uncontested intellectuals of the Caribbean, the czars in control of our cultural definition probably thought that classical training would rob Jamaicans of their natural creativity in music. Yet most people are agreed that 40 years later our local reggae music has become repetitive, and is not as good as it was. Whatever caused that decline, it certainly wasn't exposure to academic training in classical music.
In the first flush of youth, all things can look bright and shiny, but they only stay that way with diligent maintenance. No maintenance is possible without even a passing familiarity with academic training.
It's a pity therefore, that an earlier PNP Government threw training out the window for Jamaican musicians. All the more so since it was Michael Manley's aunt who started the Jamaica School of Music in the first place. It was a blatant and cruel disregard for a critical part of the Manley family heritage in this country, and purely because classical training wasn't politically correct at the time.
The reality is that without having the foundation of music theory, harmony, counterpoint and music history, it is impossible to produce adequately trained and literate musicians. The problem is that most reggae artistes are music illiterates, for whom a note is only something to be distorted by the greatest volume possible.
There must be cause for alarm when much of popular music becomes almost purely percussive, when music forgets to sing. Combine that with a misogynistic philosophy driven into every reggae lyric, and the result is a social wasteland in which people have very little sense of self-control. It's a cultural revolution, both white and black, in a spurious cause, and going nowhere fast.
People need to start singing again, even if it's nursery rhymes.
FOOTNOTE
This column extends a warm welcome to Louise Bennett-Coverley, the redoubtable "Miss Lou", and wishes her a very happy visit. I am an ardent admirer of her poetry, early stage work, and her Weltanschauung.
