Draw Lebel the Bare-bones: Mozart and Charleston

by

Walter Rhett

M.A., Ohio State University and a Johns Hopkins University Fellow in Applied Behavoiral Science, 1986-87

     Wolfgang Mozart, born in 1756, composed music for soloists, small ensembles and orchestras, and his gift of writing intricately balanced lines of lilting melodies supported by flowing counter-melodies that resolve and change like images in a kaliescope has been enriched by time. His music is a monument to how the process of recognizing the immuatable qualities of great art is sustained by communities and how the meaning and appreciation of art is resoundingly deepened by history. Duke Ellington, who always told his audiences he "loved them madly," noted the power of time to illuminate gifts when he was passed over for the 1965 Pultizer prize. "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young," he remarked at what was clearly a racial slight by the Pultizer board. Duke was 67.

    Later, speaking to jazz writer Nat Hentoff, Duke said, "I'm hardly surprised. My kind of music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based music--classical music, if you will--is the only really respectable kind."

    Mozart's obstacles were different from Duke's, for sure. Their music differs, too. Yet they share a passion for exploring tone, swing, harmony, counterpoint. They both wrote furiously, compelling huge catalogues. They wrote in diverse forms and expanded orchestral techniques. They wrote for specific musicians and soloists. They wrote pieces commissioned by patrons. And they wrote music that reflected not only their own sensitivity, but also drew nearer the world around them.

  Mozart would have certainly understood Duke's passion for history, the cultures of cities, towns, and regions of the world, for capturing the life or world view of a place in music (as Duke did in "Black, Brown, and Beige," "Far Eastern Suite," "Caravan," or with Strayhorn's "A Train"), or for using music to elicit the mood and emotion of an experience ("Satin Doll," and "Mood Indigo" are examples).  According to Albert Murray, through music, Duke transformed the texture of the human experience. 

     Duke used the past and present, but he believed that music should always be a state of becoming. It is a special quality he shares with Mozart--and with all music of the great masters that lasts. The journey of their music--and their genius and gifts--is ever unfolding, leading to new places, offering the opportunity for new surprises, cradling new gifts, which await recognition and applause.

     From different eras, composing in different styles, traveling in different cities, Mozart and Ellington shared elements of a template common to artists who are gifted beyond their own born genius.  They are also linked by invisible but common threads that weave the cultural, political, and historical background of music.

     In Duke's background, James Ellington, Duke's grandfather, was born a slave in King and Queen County,Virgina, just south of Washington, D.C. The era of Mozart's life encompasses the height of the African slave trade that would have brought Duke's ancestor to North America and other Africans to South America and the eastward archepeligo of islands of the twin continents. The thousands of Africans imported to the New World begin their profound influence on the music and life of North and South American music and the islands during Mozart's life. While their genius is collective, their impact harder to discern, their lasting effects are equally as profound.

     Is it outrageous--even rhetorically, even more so, musically--to claim that the undocumented,  fragmented impact of a huge caste of foreign-born slaves--whose music was often at the time described as noise, unstructured, harsh rhythms without melody or intellect, unsophisticated, and carnal--could be seen as profound over time as the documented body of work, widely exposed, left by Mozart--who many agree is the world's greatest composer of any era and place? 

Charleston, A Place of Sites and Insights

      The city of Charleston, SC is an ideal place to examine Mozart's work against the background of the world's most significant economic institution and activity of Mozart's era, the African Atlantic slave trade and New World Slavery. That Mozart's and Duke's music resets convention, goes deeper, and breaks new ground without resting on its own laurels, is reason for Charleston to lead the examination of Mozart's work and life and times for influences and shared values from the global presence of Africa in the Age of Reason and Enlightment. Charleston, in music, architecture, law, trade, and worship is a colonial village which quickly merges as a global capital of the enlightment, often establishing itself by stretching, altering, and breaking the existing status quo. 

      Programs to highlight Mozart's gifts should also be careful to honor his process. Mozart's core values--creative freshness, new horizons, and music tying together aesthetic and history--should be used to uncover new relationships between Mozart's music and Africa past and present. In celebrating Mozart, his core values should be used as a platform for programs and performance, even if these cannot reach the heights which Mozart achieved in his music. 

     By this path, Mozart himself compells Charleston go beyond its usual denials, or its usual conventions of discussing Africa in terms of rice slavery, Gullah language and culture, and sweetgrass baskets. By the force of his own work, Mozart creates an opportunity for a catalogue of interactions, past and present; a discussion of similar elements of tone, structure, and form within the contrasting musical cultures; an awareness of slavery by the marking of events or experiences that surrounded Mozart; and an awareness of Mozart in the African community by recovered references. Already there are back channels open among independent and community scholars whose research adds depth and breath and new insights to the city's old canons about the African experience. A College of Charleston librarian from its North Charleston campus has developed and placed on the web an excellent timeline of Mozart's life paralled by timelines of key South Carolina, US, and world events, which include responses to the African presence.

     The newspaper, the Charleston Gazette, offers a snapshot of Charleston society the weeks before and after Mozart's birth on January 27th.

     James Laurens is dissolving his business partnership with Jacob Motte. (James is the brother of Henry Laurens, later named a United States peace commissioner, and sent to Paris to settle the matters of the American Revolution with France and England.)

     Deerskins are stable, being quoted at 14/6.

     Two Negro carpenters are available to be hired for entire coming year.

     On Mozart's birthday, the 27th, a "Parcel of choice, healthy grown Gambia Slaves just arrived on the Georgia Packet are to be sold at auction.

     In Jacksonboro, "at the public vendue," an auction of hogs, cattle, and cypress canoes includes 25 slaves, nearly all "country-born."

     The Library Society advertised for the returen of more than 55 volumes overdue.

     Ketch, a slave of Rev. Mr. Copp, ran away wearing leather stockings and a beaver hat. Ned, wearing negro cloth waist coat and breeches, ran away to a sea island "where he has fome relations" (family living there). Both Ned and Ketch "speak good English," according to their masters.

     Since November 1, 246,000 barrels of indigo had been exported.

The Power of Discourse and Community Exchange:

Mozart, Lowcountry Africa, and the Way We Perceive, Think About, and Value the World

     And what of the musical presence of Africans in Charleston at the time Mozart was busy writing his great compositions?

• As Mozart often accepted official commissions from governing officials (he was once concertmaster for the Archbishop of Salzburg), the city of Charleston employed and paid an African to be the city's ceremonial drummer (called a drum major) for official functions. The African drummer provided musical flourishes for honored guests, events, receptions, holidays, and other formal functions until 1865. He was accompanied by an paid African-American fife player, according to the research of a local music scholar.
  

A look at Mozart's compositions bring new questions and data to analyze.

• As Mozart wrote his operas, concertos, sympohonies, masses, African slaves in the Carolina lowcountry were developing a performance body of spirituals that described their work, faith, and history, sung by a capella chorus, accompained by newly invented instruments such as the banjo, beaded grouds, drawing upon a highly intuitively understood aesthetic based on a shared tradition of African community performance that covered timbre, polyrhythms, performance styles, and inner meaning. Why were the perceptions of these aesthetics and compositions so different? Why did earlier critics of African music fail so abysmally? Why did recogniton of Mozart's genius grow substantially over time?  What new language and terms, what new social content, allow the music of Mozart and Africa to gain fuller and fairer treatment? 
• Mozart was influenced by Masonic teachings. His opera, The Magic Flute, abounds with Masonic references. Did Masonic views effect slavery in Charleston?
• As a pianist Mozart performed works that he had thought out but never wrote down. How is this connected to the tradition of African improvising? Are their meta-music principles at work?
  

Mozart's works allow for reflections about the transcendant journey of the gifted and blessed, and about the highest levels of freedom. What is the meaning of freedom for Mozart in a time when Africans are being enslaved?

• The action of The Abduction From the Seraglio  takes place in Constanze, a Spanish noblewoman, Blonda, her English maid, and Pedrillo, a valet, are prisoners there, having been either shipwrecked or captured by pirates and sold into slavery. (Different versions of the libretto do not agree as these events occur before the curtain rises.) How do this and other operas (The Magic Flute has themes of slavery) reflect Mozart's view of human freedom--socially and philosophically? , a Spanish noblewoman, , her English maid, and , a valet, are prisoners there, having been either shipwrecked or captured by pirates and sold into slavery. (Different versions of the libretto do not agree as these events occur before the curtain rises.) How do this and other operas (The has themes of slavery) reflect Mozart's view of human freedom--socially and philosophically?
• Mozart, the servant-artisan, climbs the crystal stair of the inner passage of spirit and becomes the free-spirited creator. From his deathbed, he declares: "Now I must leave my art just as I had freed myself from the slavery of fashion, had broken the bonds of speculators and won the privilege of following my own feelings and composing freely and independently whatever my heart prompted." Do the lowcountry spirituals in their texts and context parallel Mozart's journey of inner freedom?
• One critic describes Mozart as being from those "deep recesses of the human spirit where opposites are identical." What are the ideals at the deepest levels shared by the musical opposites of Western and African music--seen through Mozart's compositions and the flourishing African-based music in the New World? How can this ideals and principles be applied to the experience of freedom, socially and spiritually? 
  

     As Mozart's genius is remembered, let not other genius be overlooked, forgotten, or lost. Let Charleston not do with slavery what Salzburg once did with Mozart--virtually forget the genius and overlook its contributions. For a heralded composer like Mozart who died and was buried in an unmarked grave outside of Vienna in the rain, Charleston, a city whose experiences of suffering and shunting--and of cultural flourishing, whose denial even today of its African genius, should provide a high tower of open arms that elevates its own legacy as declares the shared truths extracted from each step of reclaimed history. Harkening back to Spoleto's founding vision, and putting an old spin on to restore the metaphor, Charleston is a city that brings together two worlds. Charleston is a pluriverse, and it is time to open its "mutual estate."  The city is the perfect stage to link Mozart globally to the highest aesthetic of the African musical presence.

Notes

"Draw Lebel" is the name of an Carolina lowcountry rice spiritual sung by workers in the muck behind a rice mule. Its text addresses the blessed gifts of God evident in individuals, times, and places. It cites its belief in those blessings in the stanza, "the angels in heaven are coming down, coming down, coming down." Because this spiritual is sung while working, it refers not only to the second coming of Christ and the day of resurrection, glory, and revelation, but also to the outpouring of grace and mercy, the blessed gifts witnessed right now by those with strength of faith and open hearts who witness those touched by the Light.

Walter Rhett has been engaged in conducting, directing, administrating and writing about cross-cultural studies during his professional and academic life, creating paradigms, categories, comparisons and experiences that open up higher insights for how different cultures use diverse forms to share and express the same universal experiences. He is an urban historian, a citizen-scholar, a role in African society held by the griot, a title by which he is often referred. The success of his work depends upon its merit and community goodwill. Rhett organized Charleston's only centennial event for Duke Ellington's birthday, a concert presentation of Duke songs by Ann Caldwell. Currently he owns a Charleston touring company, Rhett's Charleston, through which his cross-cultural efforts are focused. E-mail him at walterrhett@yahoo.com. He is available to think outside the box, speak to groups, participate in panels, lead tours, and innovate in print. His company's motto is "looking at the past, leading the way."