Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, chair, Department of Ethnomusicology, the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, photo by Patricia Williams
AfriClassical has followed the work of Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje for several years. Here we post an excerpt from a recent interview which appeared in the Institute for Signifying Scriptures:
December 8, 2015
Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje is Professor Emeritus, former Chair of the
UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, and former Director of the UCLA
Ethnomusicology Archive. Professor DjeDje is author, editor, and
compiler of several books, collections of essays, and recordings, a few
of which include Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures (2008); Fiddling in West Africa (1950s-1990s): The Recording (2007); Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music (1999); California Soul: Music of African Americans in the West
(co-edited with Eddie S. Meadows, 1998). She has conducted field work
in West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Senegal),
Southern Africa (South Africa and Zambia), and Northeast Africa
(Ethiopia and Egypt); the Caribbean (Jamaica); and the western and
southern United States, including California, Florida, Georgia,
Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. She has
also served as President and Vice President of the Southern California
Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology as well as Second
Vice-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. In addition, she has
been a board member on a number of professional music organizations and
has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH). For her publication on Fiddling in West Africa,
she was awarded the 2009 Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for
Ethnomusicology for the best book, and the 2010 Kwabena Nketia Book
Prize (the inaugural award) from the Society for Ethnomusicology African
Music Section for the most distinguished book published on African
music.
by C. Travis Webb
Q: Your most recent work deals with the cultural
(mis)representations of the fiddle. It’s a fascinating instrument,
because as you mention in your work, it is already the site of contested
representations within traditional Euro-American culture. The fiddle is
most commonly associated with a folksy, tap your foot and dosey doe,
down home southern good time, while the violin is associated with a
buttoned up, respectable, classical Victorian parlor, even though they
are, essentially, the same instrument. As you point out, though, this
popular history—fraught as it is with class tensions—entirely
white-washes the much longer history of the instrument, which reaches
back across the Atlantic to the 11th century African savannah. It seems
that the history of the fiddle in America, like the banjo, is yet
another example of how white cultural appropriation tends to presage
historical erasure. In this instance, the collective amnesia that this
was an instrument used by certain African cultures as long as it had
been used by European cultures, or perhaps longer—depending on whether
you want to count the Byzantine lyra as “European”? How did you come to
this history? Did your earlier work on African-American regional music
prepare you for your current research on the fiddle, or was it perhaps
something more intimate? Affection for The Mississippi Sheiks,
familiarity with the instrument itself? I’d like to understand some of
what brought you to the topic, before we head into the theoretical
thicket, as it were.
A: Actually, I became interested in African fiddling
during my first year as a graduate student at UCLA. J. H. Kwabena
Nketia, the instructor of the “Music of Africa” course who later became
my mentor, played a musical example in class to demonstrate a point he
was making. I don’t remember the point, but I was blown away by the
sound. It was East African music performed on the orutu (fiddle) by a Luo male singer from Kenya [1] (and here is another example of a performance of the orutu in the 21st
century). As a result of listening to that example, I wrote a term
paper on Luo fiddle music for the class. Nketia must have been impressed
with my findings because he encouraged me (a year later, in fall 1972)
to use the West African fiddle as the focus of my dissertation.[2]
I should add that when I began my graduate training in the early 1970s,
ethnomusicologists rarely talked about the “history” of traditional
music because many researchers did not believe such a history could be
documented. Since traditional music had generally been passed down or
transmitted orally, the usual print sources that one would find in
Western cultures were not always available; so this validated their
point. Therefore, in African music, we often focused on performance or
music making and sometimes the musician with little discussion of when
or how it all began. But these narrow views have changed in modern
times.
What’s interesting about this area of research is that while fiddling
is widespread in many parts of the African continent (e.g., North,
East, West, and even Central and Southern Africa), little is known about
the instrument. Nketia probably thought that since much research had
been conducted on drumming, this was an opportunity to bring attention
to indigenous African fiddling, an important but often-ignored
tradition. Although most African fiddles are constructed with one
string, the ensemble organization in each culture tends to be distinct
and the role and meaning of the tradition in each society also vary. For
example, listen to “Barrahaza” by Haruna Yaron Goge, a Hausa fiddler from northern Nigeria,[3] and “Nyun Taa Jilma” by Salisu Mahama, a Dagbamba fiddler from northern Ghana.[4]
When I began my graduate studies at UCLA, I did not associate string
or melodic instruments with Africa. I had been raised in a small town in
southeast Georgia. And knowledge of Africa was shaped by what I saw or
heard in the media, primarily Tarzan movies. Also, during the fifties
and sixties, there was no black radio where I grew up. The music we
heard on the radio was white country music by musicians like Eddy Arnold and Patti Page,
and my mother loved it! She woke up every weekday morning listening to
country music as she prepared breakfast and got ready for work. Of
course, she also loved the music of black musicians such as Count Basie,
Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway. But we only listened to black music
on weekends — on Sundays in church or on special occasions (e.g.,
birthday parties) when she and my dad invited friends and family to our
house. At those times, they took time to set up the Victrola record
player and pull out their precious 78rpm disc recordings and listen to
music late into the evenings.
Interestingly, my music education in high school and Fisk (I was a
music major) did not change my narrow and biased perception of African
music. In the first course I took on African music (at Fisk University
in 1968, which was a rarity for a black college at that time), my
professor, Darius Thieme, focused only on percussion whenever we
discussed instrumental resources, probably because he had conducted
research on music of the Yoruba of Nigeria where drums dominate.
Although the Yoruba perform the fiddle, which I learned later when I
began my research on fiddling while pursuing my PhD, this was never
mentioned during our discussions on African music at Fisk or UCLA.
Comments by email:
1. Dear Bill, Thanks for letting me know. I hope that all is well with you. Jackie
2. Looks really interesting.....will explore!!!! [Michael S. Wright]
Comments by email:
1. Dear Bill, Thanks for letting me know. I hope that all is well with you. Jackie
Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Ph.D.
2. Looks really interesting.....will explore!!!! [Michael S. Wright]
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