Shelemay, Kay

Daedalus

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 Performing the Humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium  (Article begins on next page)The Harvard community has made this article openlyavailable.Please share how this access benefits you. Your storymatters.Citation Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2009. Performing the humanities atthe Ethiopian Millennium. Daedalus 138(1): 105-109.Published Version doi:10.1162/daed.2009.138.1.105Accessed February 18, 2015 1:16:19 AM ESTCitable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3292405Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASHrepository, and is made available under the terms andconditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as setforth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#OAPT he performing arts, sometimes re-garded as separate from the humani-ties, in fact bring the humanities to life.1Through performance, the writ-ten word travels from the mind’s eye to the lips and to the ear; painting andsculpture suddenly spring into motion;and music takes wing from the imagina-tion or from a score to ½ll all availablesonic space. A moment of performance,at its best, gathers together various do-mains of human expression, a sensoryexperience able at once to narrate histo-ry, enact social relationships, symbolizesystems of belief, and generate feelingsof fear, comfort, or joy. While the hu-manities are generally conceived as thedisciplines spanning ½elds of knowledgesuch as literature or philosophy, they si-multaneously provide the basis for muchof human behavior and patterns of in-teraction expressed through the arts.Music and its performance, in particu-lar, convey these multiple domains ofknowledge as well as provide “audibleentanglements,” shaping both individ-ual imaginations and broader commu-nities.2Performance tells us less about proce-dures than it does about processes. Ideal-ly, performance incorporates spectatorsDædalus  Winter 2009 105Kay Kaufman ShelemayPerforming the humanities at the Ethiopian MillenniumKay Kaufman Shelemay, a Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy since 2000, is the G. Gordon WattsProfessor of Music and professor of African andAfrican American studies at Harvard University.She is the author, most recently, of “Soundscapes:Exploring Music in a Changing World” (2001,second edition 2006) and editor of “Pain and ItsTransformations: The Interface of Biology andCulture” (with Sarah Coakley, 2007).© 2009 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences1  The American Academy of Arts and Sci-ences’s Humanities Indicators Prototypeexpressly excludes the arts from the scope of the humanities. See Humanities Indica-tors Prototype, http://www.humanities-indicators.org/statement.aspx: “Scope of the ‘Humanities’ for Purposes of the Hu-manities Indicators” (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008). My essay en-gages and takes occasional issue with thatexclusion. I acknowledge the Radcliffe In-stitute for Advanced Study, the John SimonGuggenheim Foundation, and the NationalEndowment for the Humanities for fellow-ships that supported a leave year during which this essay was written. I thank Ellen T. Harris, Steven Kaplan, and DanielMekonnen for helpful comments.2  Jocelyne Guilbault, “Audible Entangle-ments: Nation and Diasporas in Trini-dad’s Calypso Music Scene,” Small Axe(17) (2005): 40.Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd  12/15/2008  9:54 AM  Page 105106 Dædalus  Winter 2009KayKaufman Shelemayon thehumanitiesand performers alike, reaching out fromthe present to extend both into the pastand the future, reaf½rming existing col-lectivities and creating new ones. Take,for instance, the September 8, 2007, per-formance in Washington, D.C., to markthe advent of the Ethiopian Millenni-um.3More than ½ve thousand D.C.-areaEthiopian immigrants4turned out forthe concert, which provided a bracketedmoment for members of the Ethiopiandiaspora community in D.C. to reaf½rmtheir identities as Ethiopians, in solidari-ty with (but also in opposition to) othersdispersed around the world. That Ethio-pians in the homeland marked the pas-sage of the millennium with a celebrato-ry concert, too, provides fascinating datafor comparative studies, discussed brief-ly in my conclusion.The D.C. concert was divided intothree parts: sacred music (zema) of theEthiopian Orthodox Church; culturalmusic (bah∂lawi), a category subsumingtraditional secular instrumental, vocal,and dance styles; and modern or popularmusic (zämänawi), incorporating aspectsof international musical genres and in-strumental resources that have enteredinto Ethiopian musical experience aspart of twentieth-century transnationaldiscourse and cultural circulation. Eachsection reinforced the signi½cance ofmusical styles named and conceived asseparate musical categories derived fromthe Ethiopian homeland. But the con-cert didn’t simply map an idealized land-scape of musical styles from the past orevoke nostalgia for the Ethiopian home-land. Through performance it brought to life the humanistic domains of reli-gion, ethnicity, and nationalism, whichcontinue to engage diaspora Ethiopians.The concert allowed the EthiopianAmerican community to acknowledgethe complexities of its diaspora identitythrough performances by some of itsmost talented musicians, more than 150of whom are permanent residents ofWashington, D.C.5T o start the event, a group of ten D.C.church musicians led a forty-minute performance of a section of the Ethio-pian Orthodox holiday ritual music. In traditional white turbans and flow-ing vestments, they sang their chants in the ancient Ethiopian liturgical lan-guage, Ge’ez, accompanied by tinklingof small, metal sistra, the swaying ofprayer staffs, the beating of two largekettledrums, and graceful dancing. Attimes, the high, piercing ululation byhundreds of women seemed to weld 3  The Ethiopian calendar, based on a RomanJulian model, runs approximately seven-and-a-half years behind the Gregorian calendar adopt-ed in the West. Thus the Ethiopian millennialyear began in early September 2007, both inEthiopia and in its diaspora.4  Members of the second largest community of late-twentieth-century African arrivals to the United States, Ethiopian refugees and emi-grants began to leave their homeland in largenumbers in 1974, following the overthrow ofthe Ethiopian monarchy and subsequent revo-lution. Nearly a million Ethiopians are estimat-ed today to live in diaspora, with the majoritysettled in the United States. The Washington,D.C., metropolitan area is the unof½cial centerof Ethiopian life in North America. See Solo-mon Addis Getahun, The History of EthiopianImmigrants and Refugees in America, 1900–2000:Patterns of Migration, Survival, and Adjustment(New York: lfb Scholarly Publishing llc,2007).5  I am currently building a collection of oralhistories recorded with Washington, D.C.,musicians of Ethiopian descent to be depos-ited, along with recordings and video footage of their performances, in the Archive of FolkCulture at the American Folklife Center of theLibrary of Congress. I am grateful to the JohnW. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress for their generous support of this project.Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd  12/15/2008  9:54 AM  Page 106this concert audience into a congrega-tion. The majority of Ethiopians living in diaspora are Orthodox Christians,propelled into exile when their histor-ic church lost its preeminent position, as the emperor at its head was deposedand Orthodox Christianity forfeited itsstatus as the of½cial religion of the state.The reestablishment of their churches in the United States and the continuedperformance of the Ethiopian OrthodoxChristian liturgy at once lend life andrenewed vigor to a venerable belief sys-tem and the institutions that sustain it. An ensemble of four traditional Ethi-opian minstrels, two playing six-stringed lyres (krar) and two playingone-stringed bowed lutes (mas∂nqo),began the second section of the concertwith two hours of cultural music. Thelyres and lutes sounded traditional, pen-tatonic Ethiopian melodies in unison,with individual instruments ornament-ing the tunes in slightly different ways,giving rise at moments to an intense het-erophony. A ½fth musician tapped tradi-tional rhythmic patterns on an electron-ic drum machine. This mainly tradition-al instrumental ensemble accompaniedseveral well-known Ethiopian culturalsingers, who sang in Ethiopian vernacu-lar languages, in alternation with livelyperformances of Ethiopian dances by atroupe of three men and three womenwho changed costumes after each num-ber to represent various important Ethi-opian ethnic communities. Competing ethnic identities, whichalways simmered beneath the surface of pre-revolutionary Ethiopian nationallife, have become a looming politicalissue in Ethiopia since the 1974 revolu-tion and an even more sensitive subjectunder the post-1991 federalist policies.The Ethiopian diaspora, which incorpo-rates Ethiopian immigrants from a rangeof ethnic backgrounds, continues to en-gage with its various ethnic and region-al heritages on multiple levels: ethnici-ty is at once a marker of identity as wellas a source of dissent within intense dia-sporic political processes. The concertannouncer in D.C. underscored thestrong political valence of cultural mu-sics performed on the millennial occa-sion by remarking at one point duringthe show, somewhat ironically, “Thiswill go on until we get through all theethnic groups.”After a long intermission, duringwhich a large, raised bandstand waserected center stage for the third part of the show, a brass-dominated jazzband of the sort that has accompa-nied popular music in Ethiopia sincethe late 1960s took its place.6As the band sounded the well-known instru-mental introduction to “Tizita,” themost popular Ethiopian musical sym-bol of nostalgia and longing for thehomeland, the beloved Ethiopian sing-er Mahmoud Ahmed suddenly ap-peared and began singing. Mahmoud,7one of the only Ethiopian musicians not resident in the D.C. area to performat the concert, sang several sets of popu-lar music. He bounded around the band-stand, dressed in Ethiopian traditionalwhite jodhpurs and tunic, topped by aWestern-style vest prominently bor-dered in the colors of the Ethiopian flag.If Mahmoud’s dress signaled a strongconnection with the Ethiopian nation,his songs about the homeland, as well as rousing dance pieces accompanied by syncopated, Ethiopian rhythms, Dædalus  Winter 2009 107Performingthehumanitiesat theEthiopianMillennium6  For an overview of the impact of moderniza-tion and international musical trends in twenti-eth-century Ethiopia, see Francis Falceto, A Pic-torial History of Modern Ethiopian Music (AddisAbaba: Shama Books, 2001).7  Ethiopians are traditionally known and re-ferred to by their ½rst names.Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd  12/15/2008  9:54 AM  Page 107108 Dædalus  Winter 2009KayKaufman Shelemayon thehumanitiescompleted his transformation into anational symbol. While the culturalmusicians in the second section of theconcert had performed Ethiopian eth-nic identities, it was made clear thatMahmoud Ahmed was performing theEthiopian nation in this third and ½nalsection.8Each of the three sections of the mil-lennial concert was carefully delineatedfrom the others across all expressive do-mains; each incorporated different per-formers, distinctive musical repertoires,contrasting costumes, and distinctivestyles of staging and choreography. Yettaken together, the overall progressionfrom sacred Christian music to the pan-oply of secular ethnic styles to music anddance from the popular domain broughtto life the Ethiopian humanities. In thecourse of the evening, the performancehighlighted realms of distinctive Ethi-opian religious practice; the music, po-etics, folklore, and art that have arisenover the course of Ethiopian history;and the acknowledgment of present re-alities in exile, of life today lived a greatdistance from the historical motherland.T his millennial concert, of course,spoke loudest to an immigrant gener-ation, which, at the beginning of thetwenty-½rst century, remains closelywedded to the musical and cultural past, drawing their shared, formativemusical experiences from Ethiopia. But make no mistake: this concert was engaged equally with the present.Many diaspora Ethiopian OrthodoxChristians continue to pray in church-es that sustain their traditional litur-gy. Those who can afford to do so hireminstrels to sing, play, and accompanydancing at family weddings and cele-brations, giving rise to an active circuitof musicians who travel to perform formembers of Ethiopian communitiesfrom Atlanta to Los Angeles to Seattle.Even the diaspora’s younger generation,many American born, attends publicconcerts mounted to showcase Ethio-pian popular singers in the larger Ethi-opian diaspora urban centers. Theseevents, like Mahmoud Ahmed’s sec-tion of the Millennium concert, fea-ture a large dance floor, insuring that the concert turns into a dance party. Performance helps bridge challeng-ing transitions at times of dispersal, conveying memories of the past whilealso providing a communication medi-um to enact and celebrate multiple as-pects of everyday life. In such moments,performance has the capability to em-body ideas and sentiments of impor-tance to individual and collective well-being. The Washington, D.C., Ethiopi-an Millennium concert just describedcould onlyhave taken place in the Ethi-opian diaspora in America; its size,scope, and range of contents emergedfrom distinctively Ethiopian Americansensibilities at the 2007 millennial mo-ment. Indeed the major Millenniumconcert held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,was a very different affair, featuring theBlack Eyed Peas, a multiethnic groupfrom Los Angeles with musical roots in hip-hop.9A second Addis Ababa mil-8  Among the recent ethnomusicological studies that have explored music’s deep en-gagement with political life, see Kelly M.Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Jocelyne Guilbault, Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).9  See “Peas at Ethiopia’s 3rd MillenniumBash,”ap Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Septem-ber 7, 2007; available at http://cbs5.com/entertainment/Ethiopia.s.Coptic.2.459395.html.Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd  12/15/2008  9:54 AM  Page 108lennial concert a few weeks later pre-sented Beyoncé Knowles, the Ameri-can pop star of Louisiana Creole andAfrican American descent. At the dawn of their new millenni-um, Ethiopian Americans sustain dualidentities and sensibilities. The Mil-lennium concert provided a moment in which they could come together andperform their heterogeneous musicalworld, de½ning their diaspora experi-ence through Ethiopian modes of per-formance at the same time. That the millennial moment literally performedthe struggle to be Ethiopian in America,in domains ranging from religion to ethnicity to politics, sheds light on thepower of performance and its role inbringing the humanities to life.Dædalus  Winter 2009 109Performingthehumanitiesat theEthiopianMillenniumBook_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd  12/15/2008  9:54 AM  Page 109

Performing the Humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium

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Performing the Humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium

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