The Afro-American Musical Legacy to 1800

Geoffrey Dean

Robert Stevenson, The Afro-American Musical Legacy to 1800, The Musical Legacy 54,
no. 4 (1968): 475-502.
-Pre 1900 and Negro Music focus often solely on united states.
-Chinese and Arabic have reference to them early as 724
-Subsaharan blacks were with Balboa in the pacific, Cortes, and other explorers. 1590s
-------Lima had 12,000 blacks and 2,000 white Spaniards.
-From mid 1700s to 1800s Significant representations in Uruguay, Chile, and Seven African
societies in Buenos Aires 1827
-In 1795 some of these chiefs wanted to welcome Viceroy Pedro de Portugal y Villena with
authentic and regional dances and dance music of the Congo region.
-Early explorers saw vast variety in sub-Saharan music.
-Senegal, Lower Congo, Angola, the Cape, and Mozambique differentiated based on
region.
-Venetian explorer Alvise Da Mosto denounced their instruments- tanbache (big drums) and
two string plucked instrument.
-Other Portugese explorers enjoyed the drums, ivory trumpets, and fiddles which played in
tune with eachother in a funeral for a congo member of the royal house.
-Relatione del Reame di Congo was the first full fledged description of Congo music, and
first translated into English. As reported by Duarte Lopes
-One example was a bell that depending on the note played would convey certain
messages regarding danger in war time situations.
-There were harp like instruments, flutes, and pipes
-Vasco da Gamas men were met by a group of men (Hottentots) who welcomed them with
flutes several hundred miles east of the cape of good hope.
-By 1497 Castanheda reports that they had obviously past monody into harmony.
-By 1586 the marimba had become a common and popular instrument in southeast africa.
-In 1580 they were documented having 18 keys in the Zimbabwe court. Then spread to
Angola and Congo and to the New World by 1680
-Giovanni Cavazzi (1621-1680) found the nsambi (guitar strung with palm fiber) and npugu
(ivory trumpets) painful, and the Angola and Congo dances to be morally reprehensible.
-The Portugese allowed themselves to incorporate these negro elements.
-Abundant impact of Negros on Spanish 16th-17th century literature, sculpture, painting,
music, etc...Black saint Negro Benedict of Palermo.
-17th century spanish theatre was abound in poetry imitating Negro speech. Three
villancicos from Gongora illustrate this.
-Sor Junana Ines de la Cruz also include negro characters in some of her eight villancicocycles.
-By 1698 the Calenda was one of the most popular dances in the Americas.
-Phillipe Rogier and Gery de Gershem were the primary composers at this time in Spain.
-Especially danced on Christmas eve to celebrate the saviors birth.
-Portugese composer/choirmaster Gaspar Fernandes traveled widely and in 1599 settled in
Guatemala.

-Characteristics of writing include 6/8 with constant hemiola shifts in 3/4- F is almost uniform
key. United States Negro Spirituals avoid triple meter and hemiola.
-Gomes Eannes de Azuzara refers to the first negro visitors to European soil singing songs
longing for their homeland.
-Gabriel Salvadar reported a prevalence of negro dance in supposedly Cuban province in
Puebla before 1670.
-Hans Sloane discussed the instruments and customs of his 1688 visit- Small gourds with
necks and strings of horse hair served as imitation lutes.
-In Lima 1551 African drummers were prevalent. Dancing in the street was so popular they
would become impassable so they were confined to certain plazas.
-Negro songs made it into a volume of songs from Peru in 1794. In this song
instrumentalists play a marimba while others dance to it.
-Around 1572 in Mexico, Negroes would gather around the famous Aztec calendar stone
and sing, play, and dance every Sunday afternoon.
-Lucas Olola led a ritual that mixed Aztec teponzatlis with African bambalos.
-By 1746 in Guadlajara Negroes would make the rounds at taverns to offer musical
-comedies at night no longer pretending to be doing sacred oratorios.
In 1693 blacks in Boston were meeting Sundays to sing a psalm.