The blog is moving!

 Thanks to everybody who has been keeping up with my blog, but just in case you follow with an RSS feed, I want to let you know the blog will be moving to my website. You can find today's entry on Malaysia over here: https://www.adameasonmusic.com/index.php/bloghome/world-composers/91-composer-for-every-country-malaysia

A Composer for Every Country: Cameroon

 At some time in 1472, the Lepidophthalmus turneranus (or ghost shrimp, if you're a plebian (not to be confused with the other two species of shrimp called ghost shrimp)) had one of their massive swarms they have every 3 to 5 years, bursting out of the mud for a grand shellfish orgy in the Wouri River. It was a grand time to be a ghost shrimp. At the same time, a group of Portuguese sailors arrived on the coast, made their way into the river, and couldn't help but notice the piles of copulating shrimp, and decided to name the river Rio dos Camarões, or "Shrimp River." This marked the beginning of a less than grand time to be African in the area which English speakers would mispronounce as "Cameroon."

Before we get to that colonial Cameroon, there are two human groups which formed the first cultures in the area. The first, the Baka peoples (or "Pygmies," but you'd do well to avoid using the term) settled the area probably 5000 years ago, or so. Hunter-gatherers of the Central African rainforest, their culture is undergoing rapid change due to increasing deforestation. They are also excellent fishers, and if you want to learn more about Baka fishing practices than you'd ever imaging, you can click on this link.

Afterwards, and alongside them, came a number of Bantu migrations, leading eventually to the Bornu Empire. This empire lasted from about 700AD to 1900AD, encompassing areas of Chad, Niger, and Sudan. The history of the Bornu Kingdom is known mostly through a text called the Girgam, or Royal Chronical. The long-lived kingdom finally fell in 1900 when the French won a decisive victory against warlord Rabih az-Zubayr in the Battle of Kousséri and captured the capital, Dikwa.

Is there much can be said about the region before 1800? Yes. Can I easily find that information? No. But the 1800s saw two big events - Modibo Adama led the Fulani people in a jihad and established the Adamawa Emirate, causing a large redistribution of the population in the area; and Sultan Ibrahim Njoya invented what is called Shumom, or the Bamum script, a written language that compressed the whole range of script evolution, from pictographs to phonetic script, in 14 years. The time was otherwise rather dark for many people in the area because the German colonizers ran a system of forced labor (I don't know why Wikipedia doesn't call it slavery) to lay down railroads, and introduce industry. The treatment of local Africans got so bad, one governor, Jesko von Puttkamer, was relieved of his duties. But don't worry, Wikipedia tells us he at least left a "splendid residential manor" behind.

Wikipedia was less than helpful with Cameroonian art. Literature is divided between colonial writers and post-independence (1960) writers. The city Yaoundé is rising as a center of various visual and performative arts exploring nature, ecology, and colonial fallout. Standout musical genres (beyond traditional music) are the enormously popular makossa and a dance craze called bikutsi. 

--- --- ---

Our composer today is Francis Bebey (1929-2001). Poet, guitarist, composer, mathematician, radio broadcaster... He had many talents. As a guitarist, he was influenced by Andrés Segovia while in Paris, and was hired by UNESCO to travel and document music of Central Africa. Stylistically, he blended elements of African, Latin American, and European classical music, leading many to consider him a pioneer of the world music genre.

A good introductory song to his pop-oriented style is The Coffee Cola Song. 

A Composer for Every Country: Indonesia

 The island nation of Indonesia is a tough one to write about succinctly. Not only is the country expansive, but every island has its own unique culture, and there are a LOT of islands. 17,500 of them, in fact, and 6,000 of them are inhabited. It's also a bit tough to find information on Indonesia in English. Not only is Indonesia apparently a bit of a lightning rod for "alternative histories" involving Atlantis, Lemuria, and cryptids, but the country's rich archaeological sites prove problematic for young earthers who search for creationist explanations for the Java Man. Also, there's a Java Man coffee house which sucks up a lot of prime Google pages, in case you want to learn more. The internet never fails to surprise.

In any case, fossilized Homo erectus skeletons suggest inhabitation started between 500,000 and 2 million years ago. Heck of a margin of error, but that's how archaeology do sometimes. For modern humans, there are two major groups of note - the Austronesian people showing up around 2,000 BCE and known for their pottery and woodcarvings, and the Melanesian people who were displaced by the Austronesian migrations.

As far as large scale kingdoms go, Indonesia is largely shaped first by Hinduism and Buddhism, and then by Islam. The Srivijaya kingdom really took off in the 7th century CE. Two kingdoms highlight the religious influences: the Saliendra kingdom, who were Buddhist and are primarily known today for the Borobudur Temple; and the Mataram dynasty, who are largely known for the Prambanan Temple. In the late 1200s, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom spread across Java, leaving a large body of terracotta works. The spread of Islam into the archipelago was slow, a process occurring over several hundred years. 

As one might expect, these religious roots had a dramatic influence on the arts of the kingdom, informing art with Buddhist and Hindu styles from India and south China. The influence of Islamic art is, for some reason, less well studied, but is present nonetheless. The influence can also be found in architecture, as can be seen in the candi structures on Bali or the temples in Java.

Christianity was brought by Europeans in the 1500s. While the Portuguese made first contact with the Indonesians, it was ultimately the Dutch East India Trading Company that became the dominant European force in the area. Not that they had an easy time of it. Rebellions against Dutch presence were frequent, and several leaders, like Prince Diponegoro, Tuanku Imam Bonjol, and Kapitan Pattimura have been canonized as national heroes and are pictured on their currency.

Getting into music, traditions are markedly different from island to island. Indonesia's biggest claim to musical fame is the gamelan, an orchestra of gongs and drums, but the styles of Javanese gamelan differ from the Balinese. Bali also has a traditional ceremony called the kecak, a ritual telling of the Hindu epic, Ramayana. Another distinct tradition is Sundanese folk music, from a minority group on the island of Java. Music and dance are often (almost always?) tied together, and two notable examples include the saman "Dance of a Thousand Hands" and the dances of the Mirangkabau peoples. Many of these musical traditions are still living, with new compositions being written for them, but Indonesia also has its own genre of popular music called dangdut which blends many of the traditional instruments with electronic instruments, while adopting a modern pop style.

--- --- ---

Today's composer is Dr. Gumgum Gumbira Tirasondjaja (1945-2020), a Sundanese musician, choreographer, and orchestra leader from Bandung, West Java. Dr. Tirasondjaja's music is a 20th-century reimagining of rural dance rituals. His compositional direction was dramatically influenced by Indonesian President Sukarno who, in 1961, prohibited Western popular music like rock and roll and pushed for a renewal of local traditional music. The most popular result of Dr. Tirasondjaja's studies was a dance called Jaipongang, combining influences from the Indonesian martial art, Pencak Silat, the masked dance, Topeng, and Wayang shadow puppet theater.

Apparently, Jaipongang wasn't the "right" Indonesian art, because the government did try to suppress it after its debut in 1974, but it survived and continues to survive to this day, although rather reduced in popularity. Here is a solo dance, Keser Bojang, which, due to my illiteracy in Indonesian and total lack of information in English, I can't find much to say about. The little I've been able to find tell it is a dance of "moving," that is "moving from one position to a better, more precise position." Given the sung accompaniment, I would guess the movements are also a form of pantomime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aEWmmbaCKU

Composer for Every Country: Nigeria

Editorial Note: I've decided to change my approach to writing these essays. If you've been a regular reader, you'll notice a lot of hotlinks. I don't intend, or even recommend, for the reader click and follow the links. They are mostly there for reference and to provide the reader an easy way to find non-Wikipedia articles for points of interest. If they prove too distracting, I'll move them to end-notes. I've also stopped embedding the music videos, and included them as a link only, because of copyright concerns I hadn't considered before. These blogs take a good amount of work, so if you feel like supporting the project, consider joining my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/creator-home. Thanks for reading!

--- --- ---

Here in the States, Nigeria has a bit of a reputation because of the infamous "Nigerian Prince" email scam. It's true, there are a lot of Nigerian scammers. But Nigeria also is home to the earliest evidence for iron smelting in West Africa, thanks to the Nok culture. The Nok date back to about 1500BC, and also created a number of terracotta figures that date back to 500BC, right around when they started iron smelting. The prevailing Medieval ethnicities in the area include the Igbo, who founded the kingdom of Nri, and the Yoruba peoples, who founded the Ife and Oyo kingdoms.  Of great cultural significance to the Hausa people is the Kano Chronicle, a collection of stories about the founding and list of kings of the city-state, Kano. Its authorship and date of collection remain in doubt, although at least one author thinks the work was written down in the 17th-century. Regardless, the Kano Chronicle stands as a rich source of tradition and literature.

After European contact, the germination of the slave trade led to a number of port cities in the Bight of Biafra. The 17th-18th centuries were a tumultuous time for the region, with infighting among the Hausa groups leading to the rise and settling of the Fulani, a previously nomadic Sahelian tribe. This political shift culminated in the 19th century when Fulani religious leader Usman dan Fodio led a successful jihad against the Hausa and established the Sokoto Caliphate, a kingdom lasting from 1804 until 1904 when it was broken up by the British. The firm establishment of Islam in the area also had clear artistic influence, which can be seen in fashion and visual iconography. 

British occupation and rule of Nigeria was established in 1914 and lasted until Nigeria's independence in 1960. The establishment of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria joined two previously established protectorates, Northern and Southern, as well as Lagos Colony, a port in southern Nigeria. This occupation brought a number of large scale changes to the culture. First, it led to the choice of English as the national language allowing communication and commerce across the nearly 500 different languages in Nigeria. Second, it brought Christian missionaries to the area which have culminated in a near 50/50 demographic split between Christian and Muslim Nigerians which, in turn, has dramatic implications for the country's politics. Finally, European style education, which had been introduced long before, was firmly established, leaving long roots in Nigeria's literature, art, and music. 

Since independence, Nigeria has vacillated between democratic and military rule and is quickly growing in economy and political influence. Musically (as artistically and culturally), Nigeria is so diverse that summary is impossible. Traditional music continues to flourish among the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa. Popular styles include palm wine, jùjú, apala, afrobeat... the list goes on.

--- --- ---

Our composer for today is Joshua Uzoigwe. Starting music very early, he drummed and played the oja flute as a child. He attended King's College Secondary School in Lagos, studying piano with Major J. J. Allen, winning prizes for his playing. He studied ethnomusicology under John Blacking at Queen's University at Belfast, and as a composer joined Nigerian, European classical, and a variety of other African influences to fuse a singular style. Mr. Uzoigwe was also a poet, and has a collection of memoirs detailing his life and work The Joshua Uzoigwe African Spirit Award is given in his honor.

Here is the first movement of his piano work, "Talking Drums," in which Mr. Uzoigwe applies his knowledge of Igbo drumming to the keyboard, performed here at Boston Conservatory in Berklee by pianist Kevin Madison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZgIvLZiMsI

Interview: Washington Plada

The following is an interview I conducted with Washington Plada back in August. The transcript has been edited for clarity, but since English is Washington's second language, I decided to keep his idiosyncratic grammar to better preserve the flow of his speaking and thoughts. As usual, if you are interested in financially supporting these interviews, you can follow me at my Patreon, linked below.

https://www.patreon.com/SoundOfTheTone

Adam Eason: Okay, it should be going. All right. So this is Washington Plada. He's a composer, also a guitarist from Uruguay and he's joining us for an interview today. So thanks for coming in. 

Washington Plada: Thanks for inviting me.

Adam Eason: Yeah, so I think to kick off with how many people have you met so far in Oregon who know where Uruguay is?

Washington Plada: Very few to be honest. And well, that's been a constant throughout the states. I think it's such a small country that it makes sense that not a lot of people know it. It's only three and a half million people. What are the chances that you meet somebody from Uruguay in the States? Small. 

Adam Eason: Yeah. Yeah pretty tight.

Washington Plada: A lot of people know us because of soccer. So soccer fans tend to know where it is and know the famous soccer players from there. Lately a few years ago the country was in the news, too, because of the Progressive President. It was maybe five six years ago when this president that was very progressive passed a lot of laws, like they legalize weed. They legalized abortion and gay marriage the same day. So that was kind of a big deal and it's always interesting when somebody asks me where I'm from and to listen, let them know and kind of spread my spread my heritage a little bit. 

Adam Eason: Yeah. So what's the musical education like in the country? How did you start with music? 

Washington Plada: It's not as widespread as it is in the States. I find it fascinating that here it's how, since a very young age they're for the most part introduced to music through Elementary School. I didn't have any classes of elementary school, in elementary school. I mean music classes. So I had something in... what is it? Like last year of middle school. We have only one class. That was all we had through middle school and high school as a music class. They told us about some composers and that was it. Yeah, no real music playing. No instrument playing or any of that.

Adam Eason: I got you. Yeah, it's music appreciation kind of thing.

Washington Plada: Yeah. Music appreciation. And then some of my friends played and I picked up a guitar and that's how I started rock and roll, had my own like cover band and then grunge, and my own grunge songs. Oh, yeah, so I play bass for that band. I'm not... I started with guitar and I'll call myself more a guitar player, but I always end up playing bass because now I want to. We always need a bass player and its like, "Ok, I'll do it."

Adam Eason: What's the music scene like there? I mean if you're doing like a rock band grunge band kind of stuff. 

Washington Plada: There's a lot. People play like, we all, I would say like 99% of the people, but everybody plays. Some more, some less but like there's always a guitar there and everywhere you go, to a party, you go to wherever your friends and there's somebody that plays and... music is... it's a very important part of our culture and yeah. I was always interested in classical music. I will go to every concert I could even though I lived in a very small city. Around like 30,000 people. So we didn't have many chances but I took all the chances I could but I didn't take the chance to study. Just any music more formal education in... When I was older after High School and I started, I went to a different city just for some days just to take classes in violin. I took violin classes for over a year and then I came to the States, so I couldn't continue. Yeah. Easier for me to continue my education here and started from the ground up going to Community College getting my... all the music theory and all this stuff. So that's how.

Adam Eason: Okay. So what what brought you to the states in the first place? Was it for music education or were there other reasons?

Washington Plada: No. No, it was love.

Adam Eason: Okay!

Washington Plada: Yeah it was... I was in Argentina. I was just doing some backpacking and I met some girl and we kind of hit it off, fell in love and spend some time there, travelling together. Well after, she was from here. So after a while we were like, well this internet thing is not working we'll move in together. And I decided to come to the States.

Adam Eason: All right, and that was to Oregon?

Washington Plada: No, it was to California, was in Santa Cruz. It's a small town like south from San Francisco? 

Adam Eason: Okay. Yeah.

Washington Plada: It's a beautiful beach town, beautiful. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, how long ago was that? Like, how old were you?

Washington Plada: It was 11 years ago? 2009. 

Adam Eason: Okay. Gotcha. And then you stayed in Santa Cruz for a while and you're just kind of hanging around like working there. 

Washington Plada: Yeah, I lived there. Primarily there, then a couple years in the Bay Area, San Francisco. 2017 I moved to Oregon. I came to Western Oregon University to finish my bachelor's degree. Now at the moment, I'm living in Eugene, Oregon. 

Adam Eason: Okay. Yeah. 

Washington Plada: I just finished my first year of the master program in composition here at the University of Oregon. 

Adam Eason: Okay, cool. So where did you go before Western Oregon University?  You were studying down in California at the time.

Washington Plada: Yeah, down in Santa Cruz I did a Community College. That's called Cabrillo, Cabrillo Community College. So I did my first two years there and then I transferred to Western Oregon and I finish those the remainder 2 years to get my bachelor's there. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, and that was for music as well?

Washington Plada: Yeah, that was for music composition. Yes, it was a cool program, gaining knowledge not only to classical composition but also to film music and jazz arranging. Very good program, it was very interesting. 

Adam Eason: Who was your teacher there in, California? 

Washington Plada: We had many teachers. What happens is when you go to a community college in California for the first few years, even if you go, you don't have private lessons. So I didn't have any composition lessons until I came to Oregon. So the first two years mainly was music theory and like, aural skills and music history. Yeah, nothing nothing... Nothing in composition. 

Adam Eason: Okay, was it kind of strange? Making the musical shift, I mean, because if you're playing in garage bands and pick up rock and roll bands and kind of things like that, I imagine most of that's by ear. And then going to something where it's all notated and then having to think maybe more abstractly rather than more aurally... was that kind of a difficult shift for you, or did you just kind of... sink into it? 

Washington Plada: Um, it was... it wasn't difficult. It was different. It was very different. But I think the training that I got from playing in rock bands actually helped a lot, because it's... I think it's a really good complement to what you see, mixing the oral tradition with or the listening tradition with the visual. I think it's more, it's more powerful and in my case it kind of like complemented each other. I didn't say that "Oh, wow. This is two separate things that they don't really like connect." I think they connect really well and even though like this, at least the little that I was studying, there was no room for playing by ear. It still helped. Yeah, but I didn't know anything when I started. So what can you imagine one little first year of violin? Like I knew the duration of the notes and not much more. Yeah, the interesting thing was that the little bit I studied, I studied in Spanish. So I had to learn all the names for the note durations for everything. I think that's that was the most difficult part. 

Adam Eason: That was the hardest part, the language part?

Washington Plada: The language. Yes. It's the new language. Yeah, but I caught up very fast. Yeah, it's fascinating, I mean, when you're studying something that you love, I think it's even if it's a little bit complex, you're excited to do it.

Adam Eason: Yeah. Sure. 

Washington Plada: Yeah it was, it was a good... It was a good challenge.

Adam Eason: Cool. And then you came up to Western Oregon University and you started studying... I'm sorry, I forget the professor's name that I met.

Washington Plada: I studied with mainly with Kevin Walczyk. He's a very well-known name in the band world. He's one of the... one of the top composers for the band world today in the in the US. 

Adam Eason: Okay. What drew you up to Western Oregon University. Was it him or another connection maybe? 

Washington Plada: Yeah, I... before I start, a friend came to me and said go to him. I really like the program because first it was a small school and, honestly, coming from a community college I was a little bit afraid to... a little bit afraid to land in a big school and fall through the cracks and not find my way. I was kind of used to a community college like when you have small community, everybody knows each other. The professors know the students it's kind of like it was an environment that I felt safe. This school I thought that would provide me that, that was one of the reasons but the other one was I'm very interested in different aspects of music. So this school program, I mean, like I said before like with the classical instruction plus the film plus jazz arranging and then they have Latin ensembles to play. It fulfilled a lot of... a lot of my interests. I thought it was... I visited other schools and they didn't really caught my attention like this one did and I can say that was a very... I made the right decision because I'm really happy about the education I got and all the things that were offered to me. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, it sounds like it was all kind of right up your alley. 

Washington Plada: Yeah, I loved it. It was great. I learned a lot. A bunch of really cool and dedicated amazing professors and also students that we keep in touch today. I know that I'm going to have some players for life if I need like finding some players to collaborate, and that's great. 

Adam Eason: Yeah for sure. So what kind of compositions did you start writing at Western Oregon University? How did you begin with your private lessons?

Washington Plada: So the first thing I brought to a lesson was some compositions that I had done on my own with guitar. But they weren't... they weren't notated. I had some software on my computer and I was like, plug my guitar in and started playing and get some rhythm going and then come and do the lead or some melody with another guitar. So that's what I... what I did was to, I transcribe that to a notation software. And what I did was instead of the lead guitar with the melody, I decided (audio glitch) instead. And with the help of the professor, I reworked it from there, from a more classical standpoint. So my first composition was this short piece for guitar and flute. 

Adam Eason: Okay. Yeah and were these still kind of... I'm trying to figure out how to segue into this because I know I asked for a commission from you while you were still at Western Oregon University and you wrote some cello and piano pieces that were based on kind of Uruguayan I guess... traditional musics? Like tangos and milongas and things like that. Were your first compositions sort of slanting in that direction already or were they just sort of naturally coming from that source?

Washington Plada: Yeah, so a big inspiration of my music. My idea when composing is to fuse traditional western music that we call classic, classical music with world music, the music from different parts of the world and... One of the music that I know the most is the music from my own country, the music, the most popular music there, it's tango that we share with Argentina, milongas and candombes. Candombe is the only one that is only from Uruguay. 

So a lot of my inspiration even unconsciously sometimes just slips in my music because these are... this is my musical heritage. So it's hard to know (glitch) that the music doesn't get involved when I'm writing. But I also do like the composition that you commission for me because the theme was Latin American Music, the concert you were putting on, I drew more influences using some of the rhythms and from those styles that I just mentioned in and using like, the rhythm or some kind of aspect in building, building upon those or as a source of inspiration for each of the pieces. 

Adam Eason: Okay. 

Washington Plada: That's kind of what I want to do with my music. It's so all the music kind of has some kind of World Music association, even if it is from the music or from the feelings or from the thoughts or bring some kind of mundane aspect if you can say that.

Adam Eason: Sure that makes sense. I'm kind of curious because I know that my piano partner and I, Dianne, had a little bit... it took a little while to kind of click into especially the condombe rhythms. I'm curious if you have found it difficult translating some of the stuff that happens naturally by ears. Sometimes there's a lot of details that get lost when you try to write it down. So I'm curious how you approach that problem, especially because if you try to hyper notate everything like some of Bartok's pieces, he tried to get every little nuance in there and it just looks kind of crazy. So I'm curious how you approach that issue. 

Washington Plada: Well, I... this is, this very... it's a very new process for me to kinda like translate things from one culture to the other, and mixing cultures so I learned a couple things through the process and even like working with your piece and with a previous piece that I also drew something from condombes. Condombes... It's a... It's an Afro rhythm. So it started as a dance and music that was playing with these three distinct drums. So they can become very complex rhythms that interlock when the three drums are played. So if you played one drum by itself, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but what you put the three together, the rhythms compliment each other. When they are not playing all together (glitch). 

For example, the chico that's being played is the first beat so the downbeat so it's like (demonstrates rhythm). So if you play by yourself, it doesn't make sense. But if you're playing with the other ones, for example, the bigger drum that place the down beats with the boom boom and when you play them together its (demonstrates rhythm). 

And what I tried to translate some of those rhythms to different instruments like piano, it can be really complicated to play because as Westerners with downbeats, for example, and that's something that is very, very strong in the western culture. And if you're not that familiar with us, you tend to kind of always want to give like a nod to the downbeat. So for example, if I give you the chico drum that doesn't have the down beat, I had experienced this before and when I had written some music kind of condombe using that rhythm, that people tend to grab the first note and give it to the downbeat it can be... the ensemble can be a little bit not on the same page. Yeah, so I've learned that things are very difficult to translate literally or there are ways to get the same effect but you can avoid the confusing notation or the confusing rhythms. It's a very fascinating experience how you sometimes you had to rework things. Of course, you don't think about this until it happens, right? Because it's like well... and then you realize that it's much more than just notation. 

You can have the best, the best player playing that and it's not that they cannot play, they can, but there's much more to they don't know, a certain feeling, there's the knowledge behind this, the culture that all that makes the music's not just notes on the staff. And a good player, this much more that you need sometimes to express what you really want to tell through their music and I think people that are trained in different traditions might, like... It might not come naturally for them. So I think you... you for example, you're a composer, too, so as a composer we have to build a bridge between what do you want to say and who's going to say it and make the link as a smooth as you can so the performer can catch without a lot of information or detail. Without writing an essay about what you want them to come to play. I think that's what we're doing, this show is when the players can play what's behind your mind without have to have a meeting for two hours telling them what you want, right? 

Adam Eason: Yeah, for sure. So kind of taking a little bit of a sidetrack. You also have some compositions that you sent to me that are sort of like meditation-centric sort of relaxation musics. And you said you've written them with like yoga or like massage or just kind of different things along those lines and it looks like you have those tracks up on Spotify. So what kind of drew you in that direction? And when did that happen? Like was this while you're at school before you're in school for anything? 

Washington Plada: This is a very, at least to me, is a very interesting story. So this is that's how my... How can I say this? My approaching music started predominant time in my life? So I was a professional cyclist back in Uruguay, and when I was 18 years old, I had an accident when I broke a couple vertebraes on my body and I have difficult to walk and I had like a two-year-long recovery with doctors, chiropractors a lot of stuff. Before that I had a contract to come and race for a professional team in Kansas in the US. And I didn't do that of course because I just couldn't come when they wanted me to come. So I couldn't do much during those two years, were a little bit, like, me in bed, me walking a little bit in the house. This was mainly when I need to do something else than cycling and I couldn't do much with my life.

So that's kind of when I found music, I found playing music for myself was a little bit of relief for my life, kind of a little bit mentally like, just to put my... my energy on something else and at the same time I started, I grab the guitar for the first time and that's what my first approach to music was like... Music made me feel better. It made me, kind of, give me a purpose. And at the same time when I was listening or practicing the guitar, laying down in bed or sitting down... my pain would go away. Maybe it wasn't... it wasn't really away. But my mind wasn't focusing on that, right? So that was the first time I realized the power of music and how music can be more than entertainment. It could take your pain away, either really physically or just distracting your mind.

But I didn't have any knowledge more than my own experience so that led me to start playing the guitar and then all the rock bands and whatever I told you they playing festivals and stuff like that, but I always been interested in how music can affect your... your mind, your body and so when I came to the states, when I was living in San Francisco, I found this kind of more internet University that taught a year-long certificate that's called Sound, Voice, and Music Healing. It's a one-year certificate and through CIIS is that it's a university in San Francisco. And there the education that we got it was... it went from very new age all like "woo, woo" to like scientific and everything in between, you know. We got new age people. We got monks. We got scientist, we got all kind of musicians. So we were exposed to many different modalities and different approaches, which was great, you know, because you pick or they're like, oh go deeper in the one that you really liked or wanted

So during the time I was having a lot of problems sleeping, and we had to get a final project going to graduate from the class for the certificate. My idea was to do something with music that I could play or something. So I started to compose music to try to help me sleep. I would go to a computer, write music and then at night go and try with myself. Yeah, it was like, "Oh, these are distracting, I don't like that. Those bells they're too loud." Okay, and go the next day. I adjust it, remove instrument, play another instruments and I came up with a set of seven songs that I presented as a CD together with no intention of anything else, just, that was something for me, to help me. And then after a while I was like, "Well, why not share it with the world?" So I decided to press like a hundred CDs and it turned out that a lot of people liked it and they went from New Age studios on the east coast in Buenos Aires, for example to yoga teachers and practitioners and massage therapists and like, at the time, I put in some promotion, put it on CD Baby and people were writing emails from different parts of the world saying, "Hey! Like, I like what you're doing."

So yeah, that's always been a big part of my big interest in music so it kind of goes parallel with my more academic music composing. I hadn't done anything yet applying all my new knowledge or my academic knowledge, though. Those songs are pre-music education. Yeah, it doesn't mean that it's not good because it's a different approach. So I'm gonna write piano, it's not like I write a thousand notes like in one second because that's not what it's about. It's more about an experience and I did trying it on myself with the the goal of relaxation and yeah. Yeah, I'm very interested right now I'm researching. I want to write an article... no, more than an article, it's a paper. How music can be used for... to help with stress and anxiety.

Adam Eason: Yeah. A music therapy sort of thing. 

Washington Plada: Yeah. I kind of really like, (unclear) being made and for many years and I'm, I want to back all that up with science and experiments. I found a lot of experiments done by universities on how music can help with postoperatory like pain, for many different reasons, so I kind of wanna (unclear) a little bit like everything I do and bring some research behind it maybe. I'm thinking that might become a book in the future and also bring my composition expertise and me, with all the all the science behind it. Maybe bring my composition expertise and to guide other people that want to make music with that purpose.

Adam Eason: I see. 

Washington Plada: Kind of tie it all together. Okay, that's kind of like still an idea that maybe... it's kind of a strong idea. So I don't know when that might happen, but I'm in the research phase right now. We're collecting papers, reading and just starting from from (glitch).

Adam Eason: Nice, so currently though you're at University of Oregon and for your master's program and are you studying with David Crumb? 

Washington Plada: I am, yeah, I'm studying with David Crumb. And also with Robert Kyr. 

Adam Eason: Okay, both. 

Washington Plada: Yeah with both. Yes, so when you start this program you have to have a year with each. Okay, and then at the end of your two years you pick... you pick one or kind of like, it defaults to the professor that has more more expertise in the area that you want to develop your thesis or your your big project. So yeah. Already it's been a fantastic experience. They are both like great composers and great educators. They both have tremendous experience, great composers it's been, like, wonderful. 

Adam Eason: Yeah. I know that David crumb is George Crumb's son. George Crumb, the kind of Avant-garde composer, and I haven't heard a lot of Robert Kyr's music but you and I met at the Oregon Bach Festival Composer Symposium, and he had I think one or two samples of his music played there and he seemed a little bit more... I guess romantic kind of feeling? How would you describe the differences between their styles and have you been gravitating more towards one or you trying to tie them together? 

Washington Plada: Actually their styles are very different. So their approach to composition is... I would say that in some level is very opposite, but not... It's not this is better than the other, but they're just different and they are both really good. So what I notice from the classes is that Robert Kyr focuses a lot on the emotions, what's the story behind what you want to write, how you can project all those feelings and emotions to the piece and maybe that ties a lot to what you're saying about the Romanticism in this case. I think that's what a lot of like romantic music comes from is all of... all these big emotions. And experience with Crumb is more focused on like the purpose of each note. There in a more like... How can I describe it? It's more... it's not so much all these stories more about like well, that's these notes go together here, is more like...

Adam Eason: Like how its constructed I guess?

Washington Plada: Yeah. I don't want to call it intellectual, but it's more... The approach is it's more about what's the purpose of each note there? How do I tie together how this relates to that, it's more about like the music and not so much like bringing this story into it. So I'm fascinated by both worlds and trying to put those two together, because I think if I can do that, that would be amazing. For me, I'm not saying that I'm going to be the best composer. I'm saying that I love both approach in there. So like but the good thing is that they both have very different approaches, but both of their music is amazing. There's no one way of doing things but I want to bring the best of those worlds and like have a purpose behind each note I put on my paper that is deliberately put there for a reason. And that note can bring the best emotional effect that I can bring. So I think that's if I can convey that I'll be happy. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, I saw you posted... I think it was the Delgani String Quartet? Is that right? You wrote something for for them. Can you tell me what can you tell us a little bit about that work? Kind of what brought it about and... yeah. 

Washington Plada: So through the University, through this program that I'm currently doing, they bring us amazing artists to work with. I really like that. So the Delgani String Quartet started working with us, so we had the possibility to write for them and we started writing the pieces and then came for... they work with us throughout the whole process. So since the inception of the song until the performance, we wrote elements like a little bit more than sketches, like an advanced sketch lets say, and then they came and they played it. We told them about the story of the our piece and what we're going to convey: what, why, where everything else, all the details. And then they played what we had so far. There was like between 20 and 40 measures for the first time we got together. And they gave us feedback about this work that doesn't work. Or you can do these to translate better your ideas. 

It was like an amazing experience. They are great people, amazing musicians and they're like wonderful to work with. It was really cool. So it was a group setting, they came, everybody presented their piece. And it's really nice not only to hear your piece, but you hear your classmate pieces because you're learning from that, too. What they're saying may apply to other pieces if it does not apply to this one. I'm sure you'd apply it to your next one that you are writing. So then they came a couple more times. One time they came at the 50% of the piece, and they came at the... a few weeks before the concert. So we had to have the piece completed and they went through to make last minor details and and then we have rehearsal with them. 

And the piece was performed. All that process was very eye-opening and wonderful to work with. As a composer, you don't have all the time, that input. So you, your commission, or you're writing something on your own and you don't have all the players there. Like, the feedback like from the cello players and viola, from the violins, they're each giving you specific things about how their instrument work, how you can notate it better, how you can make it sound better. That's amazing because it's bulletproof then, your piece. At the end of that process you have something of really good quality that, you know, that can be played. Yeah, of course, then we have different categories of players but that's a whole different story. 

Adam Eason: What's the story? What's the story behind the piece? 

Washington Plada: The Spanish title translates to "Never Again." This... that phrase was used during the dictatorship in South America in the 70s until early 80s. Mostly all Latin America went through a dictatorship and they were very sad and scary times. Lots of people disappear, a lot of torture, lot of no good things happen and the militaries were in charge and everything that they didn't like, it was severely punished. Even just for having, like books that they didn't like at home, you know? They would come and it was very sad and "Nunca Más" is started as a saying like, never again, never again.

We don't want that again. Last year, 2019, a lot of riots and protests against the government were happening in many countries in South America, in (Chile), in Colombia, in Bolivia. And there was this collective fear because all that was done with the military that were going to streets, and again we were seeing in Chile many people disappear. A lot of people got killed and seriously injured like with because the militaries were like shooting them on the streets. Like, Big Brother's here. It was very sad and happened in many countries.

And there was this Collective fear of the 70s again. Yeah, and people were really afraid that they were going to take over the government and there's a lot of people that are alive right now they're in the 60s that they went through like, their mom, their dad, their cousins, disappear then themselves. Like I had friends, my parents friends. They were tortured, some of them disappeared. So that fear is still very strong. So I titled that piece "Nunca Más" because it was hard for me to see all this happening in my, like, only happening in my country but happening in other countries that I had, like, a very strong connection to so what's my way of letting participating in saying "No" say "Nunca Más" to that from being in the states. I cannot fly there and go to fight because that's not possible for me right now. So my fight is through music and through music can be heard. To a lot of people, and it's my way of like contributing to Chili's fight. So that's what the piece talks about. 

So the piece in the first, in the beginning of the piece is very chaotic and it kind of wants to translate a little bit what's going on in the street. Is this fight, is this bombs, is this fighting between people, police like, trying to survive yelling and screaming for your rights? And that's what the piece tells about. The middle of the piece, it changes completely the mood goes to, like, very quiet and almost delicate sound. What I wanted to translate there it was what's going on in the... in the mind, it the heart of some person that is looking. They're kind of like, aside from all the chaos, but it's looking at everything how you see how everything gets destroyed, how your family, your friends get beat up, they die, and it's a reflection of like what's going on, you know, yeah. By the end of the piece, the chaos comes back and is the guy is like kind of wakes up is like whoa, like I need to like, you know, the realities here around me again, you know, he wakes up from the dream state, let's say. And the piece finishes in this fury. Really fast and and loud and the piece ends as the quartet playing as loud as they can on their instrument. Just like, that's kind of an end to that fight, but the same time the moment is the fight itself. Yeah. 

Adam Eason: Okay, that's 

Washington Plada: That's a really strong piece.

Adam Eason: It's pretty heavy. 

Washington Plada: Yeah, I'm really happy how it turned out.

Adam Eason: I was very struck by its expressivity when I watched the video of it. 

Washington Plada: Yeah people seem to like it a lot, I'm very happy with it. It was not an easy piece, it was challenging and the performers, the Delgani String Quartet, did such an outstanding job, they can take whatever you throw at them. They get it. They play every single note how it needed to be, it was like perfect. I couldn't ask for more. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, they they definitely killed it at the performance. It was pretty awesome. Okay. Well, we're being up at the end of time, actually. It's always a little surprising how fast these hours can go. So I guess I'll just end with if you were to name a musician or a composer that like you think basically every Uruguayan would know. Like, maybe they don't like them, but they just know them. Who do you think that composer or musician would be?

Washington Plada: Does it have to be from my country, or...? 

Adam Eason: I mean just like just as a general like oh, yeah, everybody's heard of this person. 

Washington Plada: Wow. I didn't see that coming. That's a good question, it makes me... I don't know, it's not easy, but... Wow. Well, I would say definitely Carlos Gardel. 

Adam Eason: Gardel. Okay. Yeah.

Washington Plada: Yeah, he's a tango singer. Everybody knows him. That's kind of an icon of Uruguay, Argentina, South America. When you talk about tango, it's hard to not talk about him because he, in the singing tango, he is... He's the best. Yeah, even though he died like a long time ago, even if you asked to young people, they would know who he is. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, he did a Por Una Cabeza, right? 

Washington Plada: Yeah. And many many more. Yeah. Yeah. Well known all over the world, known in Uruguay, but a lot of people know him. If you know tango, you probably think about two and I think those two are probably Gardel in the singing style and Piazzolla in the instrumental tango, those are kind of like... Of course, there are more in the instrumental tango, but if you set up a he's probably one of the most well-known. Yeah, so he brings kind of like more classical. 

Adam Eason: Right, right. Also jazz and stuff.

Washington Plada: Jazz and stuff. So I think it covers more ground. The other people that play tango that they are great orchestras, that's only like in that style.

Adam Eason: Gotcha. Cool. All right. Well, I guess that's that's all for today. Thanks for joining us. It's been a really good talk with you. 

Washington Plada: Yeah, thank you for inviting me in, this is great. And I love talking about, like, mostly about my heritage and my country, it's nice to like, be are an ambassador. Yeah. Be a humble ambassador for my country and my music. Thank you. It's a pleasure. And let's see if we can collaborate soon enough. 

Adam Eason: Yeah, of course! Yeah, do something together.

Washington Plada: I know that I have to say that I love the collaboration we did together. That concert is still going to happen? Like when the Latin American concert. Are you still thinking about it? When all this clears up? 

Adam Eason: Yeah, it's a little bit hard to say. We did most of the program that we wanted to do. So it ended up being like 75% We had like the Piazzola, your pieces, Ginastera, a little bit of Ponce, but we didn't quite have enough time at that... Like this was early/late December and we were going to do a couple more pieces and then covid hit so we had to kind of shelve some things but we got most of the programming we wanted. 

Washington Plada: Well, maybe if you do another one maybe I'll come up with something new for that. 

Adam Eason: Yeah that we are. All right. 

Washington Plada: And thank you. 

Adam Eason: Thank you. 

A Composer for Every Country: Papua New Guinea

It really says something about not just the breadth of colonialism's reach, but also the dearth of its creativity that there are countries called "Guinea" on opposite sides of the globe. Apparently, New Guinea was named by Yñigo Oritz de Retez who thought its inhabitants were similar to the inhabitants of African Guinea. Hm. I wonder what those similarities might be... I guess we'll never know (Guinea's etymology eventually leads back to "Land of the Blacks"). I don't want to rib the guy too hard, because as an explorer and seasoned seafarer, de Retez did a heck of a lot more with his life than I have, but still. Naming countries wasn't his forte.

Papua New Guinea is about half of the world's second largest island, the other approximately half, called... let me see here... Western New Guinea? Seriously? Ok, fine. Western New Guinea is part of Indonesia. As it turns out, Papua New Guinea is probably the most culturally diverse country in the world, containing a whopping 840 living languages and just as many customary communities, which the majority of the country's inhabitants still live in.

I have to say, I am again disappointed to find that most of the history of Papua New Guinea starts post-colonialism. It makes sense, because the tribes didn't have writing, but surely their oral histories must count for something, yes? Like, you could even say "Oral accounts tell such and such," with the understanding that oral histories have their own form of distortion. But we've got what we've got, I suppose. 

So it goes like this: the northern half of what would become Papua New Guinea was colonized by Germany, and the southern half was colonized by Great Britain. In 1905, Britain transfers its control of British New Guinea to Australia and it is renamed Territory of Papua. Then, in 1914, Australia takes German New Guinea shortly after the outbreak of World War I. After WWI ends, the League of Nations said Australia could retain control of German New Guinea, now called Territory of Guinea, but that, for some reason, the Territory of Papua was only an external territory of Australia but still legally British. Even though the Brits gave it to Australia. End result? Papua and New Guinea, from the end of WWI to 1949, were both controlled by Australia, but required two separate administrative systems. People looked at that and nodded and said, "Yes. This is acceptable."

Throughout all this, nobody asked what the local tribes thought of all this. To be sure, nobody asked the local tribes what they thought about the Japanese coming in an taking control of the area during WWII either. In any case, after WWII, Papua and New Guinea were combined into Papua New Guinea, settling many a bureaucratic headache but also cutting off a number of opportunities for petty corruption, and the region achieved independence in 1975. Interestingly, the Papua New Guinean government did seem to ask local tribes what they wanted, and settled on a type of tenure called "customary land titles," which gives indigenous people inalienable tenure over their traditional lands.

--- --- ---

Today's composer is George Telek (b.??) from the village Raluana on the northernmost point of New Britain, an island to the east of Papua New Guinea. Local legend has it that, as a child, Mr. Telek chewed on a sacred betel nut and was granted dreams of his ancestors which gave him the basis for his music. While George Telek is still rooted in his village life, he is the first Papua New Guinean to achieve international fame in music. The National Broadcasting Corporation began putting out recordings of local talent in 1977, and Mr. Telek recorded 5 solo albums with them. Later, in 1986, he met Australian rock musician David Bridie, and had a long and fruitful career working together with him. The song below, Tatabai, is the result of this collaboration between the two artists.

George Telek and David Bridie, Tatabai

Composer for Every Country: Benin

While the borders of today's Benin encompass a number of pre-colonial tribal and imperial zones, there's one in particular I want to address: the Kingdom of Dahomey. This Kingdom was made up of the Fon ethnic people and they controlled a chunk of the southern coastal area of Benin-to-be from about 1600 to 1894 when they lost the Second Franco-Dahomean War and became a protectorate of France. They were a very militaristic kingdom, their military including both men and women, and fought with two of their political rivals, the Oyo Empire and the city-state Porto-Novo, to control gold mines in the area.

They also caught and sold slaves. They were usually war prisoners or criminals who, for whatever reason, weren't chosen for their rituals involving human sacrifice. I'm not particularly equipped to deal with any nuances of the Kingdom of Dahomey's slave trade, but I bring it up for a couple of reasons - first, it does a disservice to the victims of atrocities to flinch away and ignore the worst elements of human history; second, and related, there are not a few foolhearted Euro-Americans who, out of ignorance or spite or both, cling onto African slavery as a smokescreen to deflect responsibility away from European and American crimes against humanity.

So the Kingdom of Dahomey made money by selling slaves? Ok, that's bad. But you know what? It was the Europeans and Americans who bought and sold them again, and they kept the receipts. In an uncommon instance of an African-American being able to trace their ancestry back to a particular place, the show Roots found that musician Ahmir Khalib Thompson was descended from a slave on the boat of one William Foster, the captain of the last slave ship taking slaves from the Kingdom of Dahomey to the US as part of a bet made by Timothy Meaher that he could sell them after Thomas Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1808. Take a moment to let the full implications of that story sink in, and then we'll move on to more pleasant topics.

There's more to Benin than slavery, of course. Due to the country's low literacy rate, oral tradition is still alive and well, and the country has a flourishing and diverse music scene. Everything from native tribal music, Ghanian highlife, French cabaret, rock, reggae, rumba are all played in the country. For a time in the 1970's, Benin was one of the premier hotspots for funk in Africa. During my searches for Beninese music, I also came across a number of artists who are still creating new music within tribal styles and genres, which is cool to see.

During the course of writing about Africa, it occurred to me I hadn't come across anything resembling an avant garde, whatever that may mean to Africa. While I haven't found anything like that in music so far (at least, in sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa is a different story), there's plenty of visual artists and clothing designers across the continent who are experimenting with what their cultures have to offer, and what it means to be a citizen of whatever country they are in when the borders of them are so blatantly artificial. In 2010, Benin's Ministry of Culture initiated a Biennial Foundation project called Regard Benin. You can check out some of the results of the 2012 exhibit at their website here: https://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/regard-biennale-benin-benin/

--- --- --- ---

Today's composer is Lionel Loueke (b.1973). A guitarist and vocalist, Mr. Loueke started guitar at 17, working for a year to earn the $50 needed to buy the instrument. Poverty compelled him to try and find solutions to the problem of replacing strings, using everything from vinegar to clean his strings to using bicycle brake cables (not recommended, they broke his guitar neck). In 1990, he went to the National Art Institute in Côte d'Ivoire, then the American School of Music in Paris, Berklee College of Music, and finally the Thelonious Monk Institute (now known as the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz). 

The list of musicians he has worked with is extensive, but he currently belongs to a jazz trio called Gilfema with Massimo Biolcati (Swedish-Italian) and Ferenc Nemeth (Hungarian). The song posted is "Wishes," from his second album Mwaliko.

Lionel Loueke, Wishes

A Composer for Every Country: Australia

 Australia - land of Steve Irwin and 1000 ways to die of poisonous critters. Fun fact. Australia has the second most venomous land snake in the world. It's called "the common brown snake." Can you guess why? That's right! Because it's brown, and it's common. As it happens, Australia also has the first most venomous land snake in the world, the inland taipan. Don't worry, though, because the inland taipan is not particularly aggressive. As opposed to the THIRD most venomous snake in the world, the coastal taipan, which is very aggressive and is ALSO IN AUSTRALIA. I didn't even get to the spiders, and I'm not gonna.

Australia is kind of odd in terms of population density. Clocking in at 3.3 people per square kilometre, it's one of the three least dense countries in the world. But, in the way that statistics don't always tell the whole story, almost everyone lives in a city on the East coast, with Melbourne having a density as high as 21,900 people per square kilometre. When Googling around about this, one of the more commonly asked questions is apparently "Why is Australia's population so low?" I didn't check the answers, but if one of the reasons isn't "all them snakes," well... I'll just pretend its because of all them snakes.

Culturally, Australia is split between the cities, founded mostly by British colonies, and Aboriginal tribes. The cities are among that group of countries, including the US, Canada, and Great Britain, which share enough words we can pretend we all speak the same language. It is common knowledge in the US that Australia was settled largely as a penal colony, but like most popular histories, this is only part of the story. One part that is often missing is, England settled Australia as a response to losing the American colonies after the Revolution. The implication is, the American colonies must have also been, at least in part, a place for England to dump their overcrowded prisons. This will give me some pause the next time I feel like ribbing Australia for their raison d'être.

Like a lot of indigenous peoples post-European contact, the Aboriginal tribes are in rough shape. Disease, warfare, and the arrival of various invasive species (dogs, cats, rats, and mice) proved disastrous culturally and environmentally. Lately, however, it seems like the Aboriginal and European peoples have reached something of an accord, if tenuous, and co-exist more or less peacefully. While Aboriginal peoples do speak English, native languages are also in use, although the diversity of languages is much reduced. Of the 250 or so languages recorded by the first European colonists, only 130ish are still in use, and only 13 of those are not considered endangered.

While the Aboriginal people are also somewhat present in US common knowledge, the Torres Strait Islanders are not. The Torres Strait Islands are located off the North coast between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Two main language groups are in use: Kalaw Lagaw Ya, and Meriam Mir, with a Torres Strait Creole used to facilitate trade. The tribes' cultures share an overlap with Papuan and Australian Aboriginal cultures. Song and dance is central to the Torres Straight Islander's sense of history, being the main storytelling medium.

--- --- ---

Because of the sharp division between the European and indigenous cultures in Australia, I wanted to write about a couple of different musicians. From the indigenous side is the Warumpi Band, an Aboriginal country group founded in 1980. Their debut single, "Jailanguru Pakarnu," was the first rock song to be written in an Aboriginal language, in this case, Luritja. Another hit of theirs, "My Island Home," achieved global reach during the 2000 Summer Olympics closing ceremony when it was sung by Christina Anu, a Torres Strait Islander.

Warumpi Band "Jailanguru Pakarnu" 

From the European academic side, there are many to choose from, but I decided on Miriam Hyde (1913-2005). A pianist, teacher, and poet, she developed a professional solo career in London, 1933, with a recital at Holland Park. She went on to debut her Piano Concerto #1 with the London Philharmonic in 1934 and her Piano Concerto #2 in 1935. As a teacher, she worked with the Australian Music Examinations Board from 1945-82 giving workshops, exams, and teaching materials through that time. She continued performing right up to the end of her life, and gave a performance of her 2nd Concerto at the spry old age of 89 with the Strathfield Symphony. The video I've linked is from an interview she gave in 1991, when she was 78, and includes her performance of a solo piano composition she titled "The Fountain."

Miriam Hyde, "The Fountain"

Composer for Every Country: Togo

 Togo's pre-colonial history is not particularly well recorded, even compared to the countries I have written about so far. There have been some references to oral histories within the tribes that occupy Togo, but there are no strong griot traditions in the same way as, say, Senegal or Mauritania to help consolidate information. The country is also rather far from Islamic regions in Africa, so there was likely not a lot of travel to the area by the major literate centers of Medieval Africa. Nevertheless, it is clear from the archaeological record that tribes had entered what is now Togo by at least the 11th century, and that movement and trade was quite active along the coastal areas.

Not long after Europeans arrived, the coast earned the nickname "The Slave Coast," for reasons which should be obvious. My reading about the Ewe people, who constitute about 1/3rd of the population, states that the tribes were largely decentralized and had a resistance to consolidating power amongst shared ethnic lines. As such, the Ewe were as involved in the slave trade as they were victims of it due to internecine tribal warfare. I'm sure the European powers didn't complain about the arrangement. 

Somehow, for reasons I can't find, Togo didn't become a protectorate until 1884, when they signed a treaty with King Mlapa III of Germany. It occurs to me that this is around the time the Ashante finally fell in Ghana, so it could be that the main powers struggling for supremacy in the area, Britain, France, and Germany, had their hands full over to the West. The fall of the Ashante and the subsequent border drawings definitely played into the creation of German Togoland, but that doesn't explain why the area wasn't claimed earlier. *shrug* 

Togo eventually became a colony in 1905, being exploited for labor and taxes until World War I, when France and Britain invade and form a brief condominium of the area until after WWII, when the West chunk of Togoland went to the British and was incorporated into Ghana, and the East chunk stayed with France and became Togo as we know it today. Politics have since been a back and forth between various strongmen and coups, the longest running leader being Eyadema Gnassingbé who ruled under a one-party system from 1969 until his death in 2005.

Because African nation borders were drawn by European powers over pre-existing ethnic regions (I hesitate to say boundaries), they aren't very useful for grasping African cultures. With that in mind, I'll start spending more electrons on the tribes themselves, although there is no way I could possibly get to all of them. The Ewe, mentioned above, are a strongly patrilineal tribal culture. The chief of the tribe is always male, and his family is the "owner" of the land the tribe lives on. I put this in quotes because "ownership" doesn't do justice the the relationship between the family and their land, which is considered an ancestral gift that be neither bought nor sold.

Their religion is Voodoo. Yes, that Voodoo, the same one that shows up in Haiti, and let me tell you, the cosmology of Voodoo's gods, goddesses, and spirits is intense. Like most Americans, my only contact with Voodoo was through Hollywood which, uh, lets say... Doesn't do justice to source material even when the authors are present. That said, Christianity and Islam are present, although in the minority. Now that I think about it, this is the first country where the indigenous religion outnumbers the two major religions. Curious.

Artistically, the Ewe are known for their kente cloth, a style of striped patterns made from interwoven cotton strips. Most music centers around drumming, and it is thought that good drummers inherited the spirit of an ancestor who was good at drumming. They also have several styles of dancing, from Agbadza, a traditional war dance which has since transformed into a dance to celebrate peace, to Bobobo, a very recent tradition based on 1940's and 50's Highlife songs, and danced for political rallies and important events like funerals.

--- --- ---

Today's composer is King Menseh (b.1971). Known as "The Golden Voice of Togo," King Menseh has developed a strong international career based largely out of Paris. His music is strongly influenced by Ewe and Kabye drumming, which is mixed with reggae, funk, and Afropop. Besides being a singer-songwriter, he has also acted with the Ki-Yi M'Bock Theater, a professional troupe of musicians, dancers, actors, and puppeteers based in Côte d'Ivoire. King Menseh also founded a philanthropic group, Foundation King Menseh, devoted to the care and education of orphans in Togo. I can't seem to find the lyrics to the song I've posted, but he tends to sing about the orphaned and the oppressed.

King Mensah- Mousoekeo

Composer for Every Country: New Zealand

 I've decided to drop the Smelting Pot articles for now, because... well, because if I only do one country a week for this series, I'm going to be writing it forever. This left me with some choices about where to pick up for a second article a week, and I decided to go to New Zealand and work West towards Asia. The Polynesian and South-East Asian cultures tend to get left out of music discourse (with the exception of Disney's Moana, I guess) so it seems a good pairing with Africa.

New Zealand! Land of the Maori, the British, and Peter Jackson's hobbits. I was surprised to learn that the settling of the islands is recent. Like, Medieval Times recent. Current evidence points to Polynesian settling in the late 13th century. To put this into context for my Anglophone readers, the first settlers in New Zealand didn't show up until AFTER Notre Dame Cathedral was finished. This makes New Zealand the last of the large islands to be settled by humans.

The indigenous culture, the Maori, might be somewhat familiar because their distinctive tattooing, called moko, attracted many American and European artists and writers, making the Maori a prime target of the noble savage trope. Despite suppression of the Maori culture during the early 20th century, the people hung tough and now look to stay. The Maori language has made a come back, as well (we'll look at that more with my composer of the day) and is now an official language of New Zealand. Somewhat curiously, the Maori took to writing very quickly once it was introduced, and most of their previously oral traditions have been preserved in book form.

Europeans arrived only slightly later than the Maori. Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer, sighted the islands in 1642, and the UK signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori in 1840, making the islands a colony a year later. There's not too much to add about the European side of things, so instead, here is a list of flightless birds native to the islands: the kiwi, the kakapo, the weka, and the takahe. These are all birds that lost the ability to fly, largely because of the lack of humans; specifically, the lack of animals that like to follow humans around and eat birds and bird eggs, like rats, cats, and dogs. Well, jokes on them, I guess. The kakapo, at least, got their revenge when one of the few remaining birds, in a pique of evolutionary frustration, proceeded to mate with the back of Mark Carwardine's head. 

--- --- ---

Our composer of the day is Te Kumeroa Pewhairangi (1921-1985). While she was a composer of songs, Te Kumeroa lived a life that extended far beyond music. She was also a teacher of the Maori language, tutoring the Maori club at Gisborne Girls' High School and then teaching Maori studies at Gisborne's University of Waikito. She also spearheaded the Tu Tangata program in cooperation with the Department of Maori Affairs, which helped reconnect urban at-risk Maori youths with their family tribes, and she was a key leader in the kohanga reo movement, which aims to revive and revitalize that Maori language in schools.

Two of Te Kumeroa's songs topped the New Zealand charts: Poi E and E Ipo. Poi E stands out for a number of reasons. Scored by Dalvanius Prime, a Maori entertainer and mentor, Poi E's style is a blend of hip-hop, gospel, funk, and show-band elements. Unable to receive backing from the major New Zealand labels, Dalvanius Prime produced the song himself on his own label, Maui Records. Its popularity was achieved kind of by accident. The song had no radio or television marketing, but received a brief new story on a local network. It suddenly shot to the number one spot on the charts, and remains something of a cult classic in New Zealand culture. The group which sang the song, Patea Maori Club, was made a one hit wonder on the back of this tune.

Patea Maori Club - Poi E

A Composer for Every Country: Ghana

The name "Ghana" translates from the Soninke language to "Warrior King." That name seems apt, considering local kingdoms fought off the British for about a hundred years. There were two kingdoms which had substantial power in the area when the Europeans arrived: the Kingdom of Dagbon, located in the Northern area of what is now Ghana, and the Kingdom of Ashanti, which covered much of the south and central parts of the region. 

The kingdoms have roots in two different ethnic groups. The Kingdom of Dagbon was first founded in the 11th-century by the Dagomba peoples. Their history is divided into two kingdoms, with the first being known only through oral histories told through drum chant. The Second Kingdom of Dagbon started around 1700 when the capital was moved from Yendi Dabari to Yendi due to conflicts with another tribe, the Gonja. This kingdom lasted until 1888, when they agreed to become a neutral zone between British and German controlled areas, and then were decisively defeated by the Germans in a massacre known as the Battle of Abido.

The Kingdom of Ashanti was descended from an ethnic group called the Akan, settling along the coast between the 10th and 12th centuries. The kingdom itself coalesced in the 17th century when King Osei Kofi Tutu I consolidated a confederation of Ashanti city-states against a nation called Denkyira, defeating them in 1701. Following their victory, King Tutu began expansion through military strength and diplomacy. Apparently, the Ashanti peoples have attracted a great deal of study, particularly by British authors. I have to suspect some of this interest sprouts from the Ashanti giving the British army a run for their money for the better part of a century, but that's none of my business.

There were other, smaller kingdoms in the area, as well as a number of loosely organized tribes. Thus, like other African countries I've looked at so far, it makes less sense to say "Ghana culture" than it does "cultures." One cultural element which is fairly common are adinkra symbols, a collection of icons which are used on fabrics, pottery, walls, and architecture. These symbols make reference to a number of ideas, proverbs, and aphorisms which, when combined, create a wealth of communications. It seems adinkra cloths were traditionally worn by spiritual leaders during funerals and other religious services. 

--- --- ---

Our composer for today is Dr. Ephraim Amu (1899-1995). He received his early musical training from Karl Theordore Ntem, getting organ lessons in exchange for farm work on Saturdays. In 1916, he left for college, travelling 150 miles on foot to get to Abetifi. Graduating in 1919 and taking up a teaching position at a middle school in 1920, Dr. Amu was immensely dedicated to giving his students the best possible education. One story tells of him buying a 5-octave organ in the city of Koforidua, about 18 miles from his school. While he was able to transport the organ by train most of the way back, he ended up having to carry the organ on his head for a whole night to get the organ back to the school.

Musically, his primary focus was writing for chorus, typically setting scriptural passages in the Twi and Ewe languages. He also strove to incorporate local styles, rhythms, and instruments in his music. This occasionally got him in a bit of hot water with some people, as one minister, Rev. Peter Hall, found it unacceptable to see Dr. Amu preach a sermon while in traditional African dress.

The work I am sharing is Alegbegbe, a setting of John 3:16. 

Dr. Ephraim Amu, Alegbegbe

Interview: Casey Ray Parrott

The following is a transcript of my interview with Casey Ray Parrott on Aug 03, 2020. He is a visual artist, primarily a painter, currently living in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area of Texas. He has been a good friend for quite a long time, has become quite an accomplished painter since I have known him. I encourage you to check out some of his work at his website.

https://www.caseyparrottart.com/xnfvi1zmi2pchhu2axr3o5w4zcp0m3

In addition, he and I discuss his time working for My Possibilities, a non-profit dedicated to assisting people with mental and physical disabilities in the North Dallas area. You can learn more about what they do here:

https://mypossibilities.org/

For myself, as much as I love interviewing, providing the video, transcript, and closed captioning is a time consuming process. If you enjoy these interviews and would like to support them financially, consider becoming a Patron at my Patreon site, where you can choose to give a monthly donation. In addition to making future interviews possible, Patrons will receive access to my works in process, including scores, MIDI demos, and revision videos of upcoming compositions and arrangements. You can find my Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/SoundOfTheTone

Adam: Hello everybody. This is Casey Ray Parrot, an old friend of mine going back to good old college days. I guess they weren't all good old college days, depending on which days...

Casey: Some were terrible. 

Adam: He is a visual artist mostly you paint, I think. Yeah, is most of what I've seen and I guess the first question, which is on everybody's mind. What do you think of Bob Ross? 

Casey: I mean, there's some interesting stuff that he does. He's made the comment, I've created this so that no one has to paint all the little nooks and crannies in the rocks. I get it, but I also love painting the nooks and crannies and rocks. 

Adam: Sure. 

Casey: Hey, to each their own. I love the guy and when I needed a good nap,  I'd watch this show. 

Adam: Yeah. 

Casey - Yeah. It's not because of his work 

Adam - His voice. 

Casey - Exactly. Puts me to sleep every time. 

Adam - Yeah, so for my interviews, I've been starting from, like, literally the very beginning and it seems like a pretty good place to start. Do either of your parents still have any of your drawings that hang on the fridge?

Casey - Oh, yeah. 

Adam - Yeah? 

Casey - Oh, yeah. I don't know how many my dad and stepmom have right now, because they're cleaning out their house last I heard. But my mom has paintings and drawings since I was 18 months old. She said that's when I started drawing people, like heads and hands with fingers, at 18 months. I don't know that I believe her anymore, but that's what she says and I'm going to just say thanks Mom. 

Adam - Yeah, sure sure. So when... like how far back is your memory for like your first things that you remember drawing? 

Casey - Oh, man. Pre-K? Yeah, I remember doing stuff in the daycare my sister and I were in. Actually most of my cousins were in, we kind of took over this day care. But I remember distinctly, you know the table where I sat and I would draw houses trees, you know, the typical houses and trees that everyone does add 4 and 5, but that's when I remember it. 

Adam - Okay. Do you remember at all, like, what kind of things you were drawing? Was it just sort of what was around you? Monsters?

Casey - Monsters... at that time, predominantly dinosaurs and then Ninja Turtles. I, For the longest time kind of gravitated towards the nonhuman side of things. if I were to ever iterate some superhero version of myself, he was always some kind of animal. 

Adam - Yeah. So this may be a bit of a reach. Do you remember at all if you had encountered those stop-motion dinosaur videos? 

Casey - Yeah. Absolutely. Those were totally in my visual DNA. I mean, I just love dinosaurs and then I remember having a huge paradigm shift when Jurassic Park came out because I thought "That's not how dinosaurs stand! That's not how they move! But... Wait a minute...

Yeah, that's really cool."

And so you can see the Paradigm Shift be affected even in my artwork where I started thinking about actual anatomy and physiology as far as my figures go. Figurative work was kind of the staple of all my sketchbooks. Because I didn't paint until I was 14?

Adam - Yeah and Jurassic Park was mid-. 

Casey - 1993. I was eight. Seven or eight. 

Adam - Yeah. Cool, and then so... you didn't paint until 14. I'm trying to think because you went to Booker T Washington School right? For high school. 

Casey - Yeah, so I attempted a Bob Ross style painting on the outside of my manila folder to show the teachers during my interview that I could that I could try to paint. I never really pushed outside of Elementary and Junior High art classes. I never sought to get extra education. So it was a challenge and even then I didn't like the way they taught me to paint. Though,now, I look back and think "Dang if only I had listened then I might be better today."

Maybe.

Adam - I can relate. 

Casey - Yeah. 

Adam - What were classes like at Booker T?

Casey - Awesome. I mean the art class. The normal education we had to do because of national federal and state mandates. I had good teachers. Physics was probably the most enlightening as far as relating to art though. And I think it had everything to do with the instructor. But my art classes were hard because I'd always been allowed to just make my own stuff with no criticism. No interjections. No teacher really.

Even when I was in elementary and Junior High they were like, "You're so good just do whatever," and I think that hurt me. And the preparation. But when I got to high school, I mean they said "No, come on. You can do better." And there were people that were way better than me freshman year and that was… was disheartening. 

Yeah, because I thought I was creme de La Creme and I found out I was maybe 1% milk, you know, freshman. And I got much better being in that environment. I mean, what was really cool is that there was no real competition between the artists in my classes that makes a big difference. 

Adam - Yeah. 

Casey - I mean, you had people that were far superior technically and even in their expressions, than most of the other class and they usually kind of shut away as they didn't talk to a whole lot of people. But for the guys that were really good but still genial it was a huge help because then at that time we could build on each other and only complement and that's again another paradigm shift. It was incredible to have that. 

Adam - Do you remember which teachers from that time that stand out to you?

Casey - My painting teacher who actually went to SMU, John Hernandez or Juan Hernandez depending which culture he's in, he’ll change his name. Cool guy. Ava Couchite, who was my printmaking teacher, and just her introduction was really great. And then another painting teacher George Mosley who left after the first semester I had and I think he had some internal drama at the school, but there was... he didn't say much but when he would come in on our still, on my still life, and he would just say "Why do you do that? Try this." The way he approached me. I mean dishevelled everything I was doing and I said, okay. I need to try this. 

Yeah, and then I really had to lean on his instruction of... "This is new to me. Where do I go?" "Like just try it."

Adam - Yeah. 

Casey - It was great. I was like, sure thing boss. Yeah, but then he disappeared and we had like this litany of substitutes that just you know, they were subs and we're the same so...

Adam - Were they mostly influential in their teaching approach or were there stylistic things that you picked up from them that you can kind of still see today?

Casey - So I would say most of it is technical. However. I think John Hernandez definitely tackled something stylistically when I was painting. He says "Look you have really good colors. I like this, but you need to stop blending." Which is a technique, but stylistically there's something about leaving brushstrokes that just helps magnify the painting and I mean when he said that it really just kind of hacked me off and like, “Dude, just leave me alone.” 

But again, that's one of those things looking back like I wish I'd held on to that because it would have... it could have kind of jump-started the way I paint now, maybe a little earlier. And then Nancy Miller and Charlotte Chambliss who were both drawing instructors. Drawing and design really pushed me to work bigger and more loosely.

I had this terrible habit of working super small and super tight almost like a photograph. And I didn't know this but you know, when you do that, it makes everything kind of feel flat. There's no movement within the surface, and they really challenged me that way. Then Charlotte Chambliss really pushed more finding a focus. Like, "What is it? What narrative are you wanting to go at? What are you trying to evoke how can we put emotion and thought?” and I didn't have her until my senior year. So it was just kind of like dang, I wish I had you more in my tenure here, but still I gleaned a lot from her and the short time that I had her she was great. 

Adam - 00:10:14 > 00:10:15

What about other students from the time and have you kept up with anybody or...?

Casey - So there are few people that I follow up with on social media and mostly Instagram. Like there's one guy who was one of the cream of the crop, Jeannot Quenson. Born from France. So he just, you know, he came with a heavy portfolio before anyone else. He's now doing like 3D painting with VR technology. And as I think he's in the Pacific Northwest doing a whole bunch of album art music and then when he got into this 3D paint, I mean the stuff he makes is trippy but impressive. A couple of other people that I do keep up with don't make art anymore.

The majority of the people don't make art they're just kind of in the art community and dabble but...

Adam - Heavy attrition rate. 

Casey - Yeah, sadly. I am curious if that's in most areas of study or just hours. 

Adam - Yeah. I don't know I mean… it seems like a lot of the people I knew from high school who were in Orchestra and were doing really well they kind of stopped in college and I think a lot of it just has to do with, I mean, they weren't going for a music major and college sucks up all your time and energy and it's sad. Like you wish that people had more time to kind of play around with whatever creative endeavors they've got but that seems to be kind of what happens to a lot of people 

Casey - That's sad.

Adam - I guess speaking of college then, what drew you to Southern Methodist University?

Casey - I mean… Throughout high school I did the art thing. Predominately, I mean it's what I like to do, but it also got me out of my home high school. So I didn't have to do sports. I didn't want to do sports with anybody just you know a ton of insecurity. But then maybe about junior year started thinking maybe I'll go into the mission field. I'll just be a missionary for the rest of my life. But you know, I'll go to this really cheap local Dallas Mission School and go from there. 

And see midway through senior year I had my first kidney transplant. I've suffered from kidney disease my whole life and had a transplant which, I mean, man. When they talk about having brain fog disappear and chemical rebalance, the world changes quite literally overnight. So my outlook physiologically became a lot more open, and my ability to perceive became a lot clearer. 

And I thought well, you know and in the recovery time, I was watching a lot of The Lord of the Rings DVDs because they just come out with the third movie had just come out in theaters. And so I was busy watching Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and all of the added DVD stuff all the extra content the design process. They went through all the different galleries they exhibited. I was just so jazzed to see this this fantasy stuff and it just... I went through so many sketch books as I was downing barbecue chicken and gaining so much weight after this surgery. But I felt like that God told me to go to SMU and I had one of those "Hmm moments like wait a minute… Hold on, are these the drugs are these the new meds? You want me to go from the cheapest school in Dallas to the most expensive school in the state and to do what now?” and I just had this unction that it was art, and I thought “What?” 

So that's what I did. I did a 180 and I applied maybe the last day that I could apply for SMU, got in, and then decided to major in art. I think going to SMU there was a lot more to learn through the college experience than just art. I think had I known about it I might have gone to an atelier or maybe gone to a different school that really focused on Arts because SMU sends all of their art money to the museum and not to school. So... and that's fine. I mean that's their prerogative, but you can... I think it shows 

I think it shows and even one of my professors said you should have gone to you know, Art Institute of Chicago or something, which is a great compliment coming from that particular Professor, but anyway, that's how I got there. 

Adam - I landed in SMU almost by accident. So I'm kind of curious, like what is SMU's reputation within Dallas? Like, as a local growing up there.

Casey - I'll put it this way. When I got into SMU, I found out you know, my best friend, Matthew, who you also know very well, was going... and I don't know how we didn't communicate that before we both got accepted, but I started telling people. "Hey, so I'm going to SMU, you know fall 2004." A lot of people say “That's great. What are you gonna do?" 

"I'm gonna go for art, you know, like painting."

"Painting like walls?"

I would stop and think wait a minute. You should be smart enough to know what SMU is. Check. But you don't know what an art degree is? So I think most people think very highly of SMU. They look at the Ford Stadium, just the name SMU and everyone's eyes kind of like, oh, wow, "Okay, you must be rich." kind of thing. 

Like well, you know... strike two I'm not rich by any means. I'm a poor kid from East Dallas. So I think people like the name but there's not a lot of association with the art school there. I don't know how much that's changed really, and I think that's kind of the drawback that you know, my professor wanted me to go to a school where the art program was an immediate beneficiary of all income to the school. SMU's just... that's just not their priority. 

They have it and it's a good program. I learned an exorbitant amount and I had quality professors through and through but you can tell that it's just not... 

Adam - A little rough around the edges 

Casey - A bit. I mean the maze downstairs was enough to say you don't care about your student body. 

Adam - Yeah. It is interesting. Because it's like... for people who don't know the the Meadow School of the Arts is kind of the central arts building that houses all of the arts: music, dance, theater... visual arts. I frequently ran into theater people dancers, obviously other musicians because that's what I was there for. We rarely saw you. Like, the painters, the sculptors. 

Casey - No, we were locked away in the old Museum because the old museum is what became the visual arts department. So a majority of our drawing classes and everything took place in the old museum rooms, and then you had one group of studios kind of clustered in the upper mezzanine. And the only way to those were through several locked doors. And then I lucked out on the undergrad studio and it was again behind several locked doors that faced the north side, and then if students weren't in there, then we were just generally locked up in the different studios. So I mean everyone passed through our world to get to music and theater but not so many stop. Not a lot of interaction. We're not particularly friendly on the whole 

Adam - So from Booker T, Washington, you had already kind of had your pride bubble popped a little bit. 

Casey - Yeah. 

Adam - Did you encounter further frustrations with that going into Meadows? 

Casey - Absolutely. We had to do a foundations class and I went to the office and said hey,

you know, I'm from the Arts Magnet downtown. Is there any way that I can skip the foundations class? I've already done this for four years and they immediately laughed at me and said no, everyone does it and then that was the end of that conversation. 

There was... I said, I can't apply for this? They said no, you have to do foundations first. Period. End of discussion. So that was a blow, that was a big blow but you know... I got sick first semester with you know, bilateral pneumonia and missed, you know, two and a half weeks of class. I'm glad that I had a foundations course and I'm really glad that I went because I met some of our mutual friends who are still very dear to me today through that class, and one of my mentors who is still a dear mentor today through that class and I learned a lot.  It was a lot of deeper end knowledge. 

There was a lot more exploration into the art world and what it meant to be an artist through that course than I ever received in high school and that's not a knock on my high school teachers. I think that's just the nature of moving up and levels of education. I can say affirmatively that my art education was levels beyond what I went through in high school. 

So there was that. I had two professors outright tell me I was lazy. And I was baffled. I thought I was just poor because I couldn't afford... like in printmaking, I couldn't afford a whole bunch of copper plates to keep trying different images. I was always trying to perfect and make the best masterpiece and that wasn't the point so he called me lazy. But when he saw the way I painted he said "Now I know how to help you print," and he led me into a method of printmaking that to this day I wouldn't be a better painter without having gone through that type of printmaking.

And the other was the ceramics professor of all things. I did a bunch of clay stuff in high school, but when I got into ceramics that kind of rocked my world because we didn't have wheels in my sculpture classes in high school that was just for ceramics, but I took ceramics because it pushed me and helped me understand form a lot better and how to conceptualize form and the same professor said you know, “I like where your head is going, but you're very lazy. You need to put more work into this.”

And then the same Professor who told me to go to a better school. Within the same semester, maybe even the same week told me "You're better than I was at your age, but I wanted it more," and that messed with me because I'm like wait, how do I want it more? I don't know how to do that. And then another time during one of our six hour painting classes, he said "If you only realized how asymptotic you were you would no longer be an asymptote."

I thought, “So you want to explain that to me?” And so, you know, he drew out an asymptote and said look you are a parabola that is ever increasing towards the y-axis, but you will never cross it. Well, it's technically impossible, but I get what you're saying. But again, he left... he kind of left me in that spot. And I'm really glad that he did because it pushed me to want to be better and I'm at that place now, you know as I mentioned before we started recording. I'm at the place where I want it more and I'm searching, I'm sojourning for. How can I communicate that on my canvases, on my surfaces. 

So yeah, there were a lot of deep life lessons that I learned from my art professors that's like, they still haunt me in the studio sometimes for my benefit, sometimes to my detriment because I get hung up on what was said instead of using that as fuel to go forward.

I hope that answered your question. 

Adam - So still kind of going chronologically, you graduated from SMU. The next thing that I personally can remember, I think there's some time in between then and this, is you ended up teaching a kind of... I don't know how to describe it... as a special ed kind of course? 

Casey - So that came probably about 3 years after graduation. Three years? Yeah, that sounds about right. And in the interim I stayed at smu as a contract laborer for the art department and got into a company, Glazer's, they're a Wholesale Distributor. I got into that company. With the promise of "Hey do six weeks of stocking liquor for us and then we'll get you in the Art Department making displays for different big liquor companies." They pay artists to create sculptures and I'm like, okay I could do that. It's booze. It's art. Fun. 

But the guy that hired me was fired like right after I started, and no one was privy to our conversations of being put in the art department. So all of the sales reps and all the managers just kind of laughed when I mentioned it and they're like, do you even know how to operate a dolly? Like yeah, I've moved multiple hundred pounds sculptures and equipment with dollies, more than liquor. But when I told him I went to SMU they just kind of laughed me up and down. I thought well, this is a dead end. Even if I do get the art department, if I have to work for these guys, I don't think it's going to be worth it at the end. 

So I... you know kind of absconded overseas for a little bit. I was dating someone overseas. Came back and I was just looking for something better, still doing a bunch of the contract stuff. Turned to beer and that didn't, it just didn't help further down the road. And didn't do a whole lot of art. I kind of stopped the arts thing. I think my focus was on, you know, having this relationship and thinking I was going to get married to a foreigner and you know, these very romantic ideas that I lost focus big time.

And I started going back towards the art world when I worked for a framing company and was moving up their corporate ladder. When... actually my cousin, who also went to SMU, called me and said "Would you like to teach an art class at my special needs program?"

I said tell me more, this sounds interesting, but I don't know that I'm qualified. So I checked it out and I got in and at first they just kind of needed me to be… I'm like an assistant to the instructors there and it's... the program was for adults who have aged out of high school. So 18 on up. I think our youngest client (we didn't call them students) our youngest client was 18, and our oldest at the time was 66.

Just to give them a place to go but what they wanted from me was to do art classes. And not just like kitschy arts and crafts things just to keep keychains, whatever. Those are fine to keep people busy and to teach some manual dexterity skills, but they really wanted to find out who the artists were in this community. And that was actually a big struggle. Not for the artist, but for parents, for other teachers and programs involved with our community. Because they thought, “Wait. Why are you trying to teach them Fine Art?”

I said because clearly these five individuals are visual artists. You may think of them as only having autism or down syndrome... and their parents don't think they only have autism or down syndrome, cerebral palsy, but they thought surely my child isn't that creative? 

And I said, "No not only does art soothe them, but they are incredible visual artists This is how they process.”

And I had one student in particular that… I mean she should have been in museums. She was so gifted. All I did was help her kind of process drawing. I'd have her copy a lot of the old masters and Renaissance paintings just to see where she was and to see where she gravitated in her output. And she had this ability to... and it could have been our printer quality, how everything pixelated, but she took that and she pixelated her images. So it was so much more than pointillism because she would do dots on dots on dots kind of, you know, stipple her values and she just did it. 

If I were to introduce to her a new color theory concept she kind of gave me this quizzical look and I thought okay, out the window. I'd step away just to let her paint, you know process. I'd come back, like, holy smokes. You got it. You did it. You took my poor instruction and turned it into incredible artwork, you're every professor’s dream student. 

She's so gifted and we had several others. I mean some there was one girl who came in, one young woman, and I was really impressed. Just by the way, she painted this landscape. I mean, it was almost kind of like a Monet but without all the individual strokes. She just had this incredible movement and how she painted and I was very moved by it. 

So when her dad came to pick her up, I pulled him aside and said, "Did you know how well your daughter can paint?" and he says, "Oh, I know. She loves art. " I said "No. No, this isn't 'I love art.' This is 'I know how to paint.'" And I showed him what she made and he started to cry. And I thought. All right, I got to go because I'm gonna tear up that this is affecting people this much. 

So it was really cool. I mean there had to be varying sides to what I did with my art Department because of the government pay, like, so many hours had to be a day hab based instruction. And so what I did is I use the elements of the arts to teach people hand building skills, manual dexterity, cognitive and memory skills, that kind of thing, and it all had to be tiered per level of understanding or ability 

So that was challenging because I'd never written a curriculum and so I had to draft a curriculum that was art based but not about art output, because we just didn't have the time or facilities in my opinion, too. Why get everyone to make bowls? We tried. We did molds, we did ceramics, we did glass slumping. I mean we did and we had the resources to get it done whatever we wanted to get done. But every time they would make an educational shift in the program I'd be the heckler saying that's not going to work for us. Sorry. 

What I'm being told to do from the upper. Is it going to work from what you middles want? But then I had complete freedom in the afternoon to do whatever I wanted, so I use that time to train artists, you know, we were going to get into the community, we were going to do portfolio building, have group shows etc. But there were just so many demands coming from every different direction and I was a yes-man, and it was just me so...

You know we... and we had some help with adding on some other teachers, but they always got pulled in. Another SMU Alum came and did music therapy and she and I developed a showcase so our visual artists could showcase their work, but then all of our performers could showcase on stage to a live audience. That was pretty killer to be a part of that, having to be manager and art teacher and facilitator. There's just too many hats. And I was just getting to the point...

I had a guy with CP who had very limited range and control in his dominant hand. But I thought hey, let's try to use painting. I want you to copy this to try to get a little bit more control. So I had to be scientific about it. Just trying different ways and different methods and we finally got to a place where he was able to make some impressive calculated strokes. 

They got to the point where he was building scenes and Landscapes just from shapes, kind of Cubism, but not. It was beautiful and I saw, you know, he didn't have this drastic change in motion, but you could tell he was gaining control and because of that was gaining confidence, so he came to Art once or twice a week just to hang out and give me a hard time because we could do that. 

But it was it was a... it was a phenomenal season. You know, I wish I hadn't been such a yes-man about everything else and just focused on the art part because I learned a lot,

you know, then the attempts to explain something and the aftermath was like, "That was so abstract. I don't know who would have understood what I said." But to have these students take that, reorganize it like wonkavision and then create something spectacular. 

Adam - I remember seeing one of those exhibits. It was pretty awesome. I guess starting to turn a little bit more towards your own artistic output. I can actually... I think I see the map of Middle-earth behind you. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's it. I know that Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, various fantasy things figure pretty heavily in your life. 

And when I say “heavily,” I mean you actually read and remember parts of the Silmarillion kind of. 

Casey - Oh, yeah.

Adam - Yeah, right, like that extra step that most don’t make it past the Hobbit right? To learn... 

Casey - I had to learn some Elvish terms in different languages. 

Adam - And I remember at your senior exhibit there were some scenes there that were kind of more fantasy oriented in terms of what you were painting and I know like that kind of subject matter has come up. How else does this manifest as you paint? 

Casey - So it's a really pointed question. You're kind of hitting the eye of my current storm. You know, I did a lot of figurative work and I loved the fantastic. I loved the very romantic scenes that you see in a lot of German and especially French painters. Just you striking a pose. And that kind of goes back to my days of my sketchbooks. I love figurative work, you know, from dinosaurs to Teenage Mutant Turtles to Predator, to… when I finally got into high fantasy, I started drawing elves and Dúnedain and orcs and all that stuff. 

I even turned in one of those assignments in my freshman year and I was totally nervous because I thought "This isn't fine art!" but it fit the criteria of the homework and the professors were really stoked about it and I thought "Hmm. Do I bunk this and just go the illustrative route?"

Part of the problem, too, is, as much as I love illustration, I don't want to be known as just a fine arts illustrator, or "was an illustrative fine artist" kind of thing. I don't like isms and titles. They tend to pigeonhole me. I get caught up in the minutiae of isms. But with a fantasy it became this all-encompassing aspect. It wasn't just in my art. 

I found… you know, I was healthy in college, and I found that I liked being physical. I really enjoyed being... not necessarily athletic but, I like fighting. And not to beat the crap out of people. I just enjoyed the movement. I enjoyed the art and the science 

Adam - We had a couple light saber fights together. 

Casey - I had several bruises for a long time. I think our friend Allee still has a welt 

Druvhan and Nathan also learned quickly, if I remember. So there was that aspect and I think... wanting to be a good guy, you know wanting to be the Aragorn, Legolas, or Luke Skywalker, I had to find something to fight for. So I couldn't just go pick a fight because that was the thing to do. You know being in the art school, it could have been very easy to lose to a whole bunch of jocks that predominated on campus. 

But in appreciation, wanting to have the good fight and you know, even that kind of matching up with my faith. What is the good fight? How do we go about that? How do we endure and press on? That kind of led to more study of armor, architecture, weaponry, that kind of thing. How are these things designed? How does that look in art? What can these shapes and designs and patterns evoke? What can they symbolize?

You know movies particularly. Everything has to be so simplistic and readily recognizable, right? I think a lot of that's kind of transitioned into art in general. Everything has to be immediately recognizable for it to be understood. But what I gained in my painting classes, my art classes at SMU and since then is, I don't want it to be easily recognizable. I don't want this to be a symbol. I'm not painting iconography, but I want something to capture the attention that allures and invites an audience in. 

So there are some symbols, there are some designs that are very good at that. And then trying to find out how that could incorporate. Whether it's a surcoat blowing in the wind or a cave or is it the pattern on the samurai's armor. I think I've only done one or two of those. You have one. But trying to think of it as an artist is... okay. What values and what shapes and what colors can I use to invite the audience into my piece?

Because ultimately what I want is to give a sense of atmosphere, a place of belonging, that kind of real intimacy that comes from real spaces. Whether you're indoor, outdoor. And I think that was something that grabbed me about Tolkien is his ability to describe a landscape and to make you feel like you're in an actual landscape while you're reading the book.

I love it. He doesn't give a lot of description about clothes or about the armor. He doesn't, you know pull a George RR Martin with "and the gilding on the hilt of Oathkeeper was..." No. He gives evocative expressions or directions of to what something might look like that's worn or held.

When it comes to landscape, he gives you these very almost billowing descriptions of the world around you, because that's what he was writing about was saving this world. So for me, that's something that even now it's... Landscapes alone don't cut it. Figures alone don't cut it, you know, I might do a figurative painting or landscape paintings, but to me there's still something about the two becoming one, there's something about man and his place on earth that is very profound 

Even in our space race, we long to go to Mars. But we were born here, right? And we have the ability to take care of this place and make it better again. I think we should.  So how do I evoke that. And I don't do a lot of paintings about, I don't know, contemporary problems as we see it. But invoking contemporary issues into landscapes whether that's just mountains if it's, you know, trees... I like adding the little details of fantasy of a mysterious figure holding a torch.

Why a torch? We have flashlights these days or we have modern lanterns that use LEDs. There's something about fire to me that feels more alive than LED. LED is far brighter and far more efficient than a kerosene soaked torch. But there's something more romantic and alluring to me about fire. It feels more natural. It feels more integral and still distinct to the landscape. 

So I'm still working on my narrative. I'm still looking for that one liner that I can give that's just kind of that evocative image of everything else I'm doing. Because I think that will help me in a… in an essence be like a capstone to why I paint. Because it's… I got stuck in the rut that I had to paint one thing. And that drove me crazy. It did! It's like, well if I can only paint this one thing it's like, I don't want to be known for this one thing. 

I just I want... would rather be known as a good painter than a good painter of trees. "Oh, yeah, he does trees super well!" it's like. Mazel Tov who cares? That's just one aspect. I want to be known as a good painter. Did I use my colors well? Did I have a strong composition that I present what I was conceptualizing in an effective manner? Did I draw my audience in? That kind of thing. And not everyone buys that stuff, you know, it's like making art for artists. 

But yeah, I think for me, that's the greater challenge to rise to.

Adam - Yeah, trying to walk that line. 

And then there's… I don't know if this sounds... I guess it's probably not insulting but like… there is some overlap, too, with your faith. Because I know you're a big fan of CS Lewis, who is also a fantasy writer, sci-fi writer, and you go to I guess it's a synagogue?

Casey - Yeah, Messianic synagogue, Jews that believe Jesus is the Messiah and I'm not Jewish but, you know, my wife is and some of my dearest friends are, but it's a place for them to stay culturally Jewish and believe in the Jewish Messiah.

History has not been kind. Anyway, so yeah...

Adam - I think we're seeing some of that pop up again. 

Casey - Oh, yes. MmHm, very strongly. 

Adam - And I think what's interesting to me about some of the works of yours and the past few years in particular. There are some kind of CS Lewis-like paintings. Like some of them are directly I think inspired. Like a painting of basically Aslan the lion, right? I think there is one that was very popular of a lamppost and the snowscape. 

Casey - Yeah that one people really wanted that one. I didn't... I just had fun painting it.

Adam - But I think, In the way that CS Lewis would write with Christianity sort of under the surface, these symbols kind of riding and delivering that message there. There's some of your paintings that seem to operate similarly where you'll see it's a tree and the light. And if you don't as a viewer know anything about  Casey Ray Parrot and his faith, you'd be like "It's a pretty tree in the light."

And then, understanding more about your biography, you might go, Oh, there are some symbolisms and layers to this. How much of this is conscious and how much of it is like… Just part of how you operate visually?

Casey - That's a great question. I'll answer your last question first. For me, I look at everything as a painting  Right now, I'm looking at my closet doors in the office. And just what I do is, I break it down into shapes and the colors and I think what colors would I make to create this? 

What would I need to do just to replicate what I'm seeing? 

So just in that first layer of perception and perceiving... that's the same thing… of perception is painterly, I'm thinking of brushstrokes. I'm thinking of you know, big brush versus a little brush, soft edge, hard edge kind of thing and that's all just kind of turning on the surface. 

But then when I sit and meditate, you know in that process just think that's really cool. Seeing how powerful light is. And that even you know, even if it's dark outside, I can still see shapes that I can still perceive, I can still move around and it just gets me thinking about not necessarily just principles from scripture but actual verses that talk about light, that talk about space, God as light, you know the beginnings of creation. That kind of thing.

And you know delve into that. What does that look like scientifically with what we know? How does He know? How does that compare? Does it matter, you know all kinds of those questions and so they're all those ramblings. I start kind of building up images and I think “What is it that's so powerful about this to me? What is it that strikes me?”

Conversely, sometimes I think how could I preach this? And I think sometimes those become the weaker images. When I try to get a message across. "Hey! Aha! Look over here!" you know. And those become the most frustrating pieces to make because I'm not really invested in it. It's not my relationship with God. It's not my relationship with my abilities or my perception. So takes me out of the game.

Some commissions are that way, I may be able to give my technical ability, but some commissions still feel flat to me. And that's... that's a personal problem. That's... I don't know how many artists feel that way. So, you know, some people do commissions and like my God, you're just you're so good. How do you do that? Here, take my brushes, you know, just...

But for the pieces where it's a deep churning, you know, I feel like it's part of the narrative of my life. Those are the ones that are usually the longest to paint because I go through it more, it becomes more personal therefore it's more precious. In meaning, not necessarily in output, but I want to convey that I want to render what I'm seeing and experiencing in a memorable and powerful way, technically, creatively all that kind of stuff.

And that's really where putting in the full effort as an artist comes in. How much research are you putting in? How much understanding of composition of shape and mass, value, temperature, color? Most people don't think about that even people that come off of you know, Instagram, "I'm an artist!" and like "Cool, you're drawing."

That's great. That's fundamental. That's not everything. I want to challenge you to keep going, you know, don't stop, keep going because real artists struggle through all the fundamentals. 

And so I think in doing that it's led me to look at other artists and how they create. For one to look and make sure that I'm... before I read any blurb about the art on the wall. Like if I'm in a gallery, I want to look at the piece, I want to see how it's made after I've taken a big picture. 

Then I'll want to come up and see, Where are your layers? How is your process? How have you crafted this image and then say "I think this is what it means." and then I'll go read the blurb like, aha. Okay I missed it. Or no, I'm right on it. Great. Okay, my cognitive abilities are still a little sharp. 

Because then I can take that back to the studio and really start to wonder. Okay, how would this be better layered? Is this a glazing thing? Is this an impasto thing? And where would these techniques fall in the painting that are going to make the focal piece an actual epicenter? I don't want to just be like "hey, that's nice," but I want to be like, "Whoa. I'm feeling everything being affected because of this right here."

So I think doing that and for me, it's kind of like with Tolkien. It's the land and the landscape in which God operates to the scriptures. You had these very powerful images in the Old Testament and the New Testament of God as these different things, you know. We have the typical images that become super trite like a lion, which, when I did Aslan, I thought "I don't want it to feel like hey, it's a lion but a good guy." I want to feel like "hey, this is kind of scary."

You know, there's even a line where he says “Good, yes, but not safe.” He's not safe. You know,  there in the Psalms particularly, because that is art within scripture. They are strictly poems that refer back to the scripture that they had at that time. Most of which was just relating back to the creation story of Genesis. Right? 

So you have these very beautiful images and then how these writers process that same literature in their time and how it affected them and what they were able to craft. So even mine is still kind of derivative of their derivation of the actual text. But to get back to that and say hey I want to be like these guys, these psalmists. I might not be writing something but I'm creating a virtual poem here for people to experience that depth of relationship with God. 

And I think there's some paintings where I've been able to break through, I think, when someone has a positive mostly emotional response. I don't think that we give emotions much credit in our society unless it's negative and... it's a shame but I remember painting one, right after I left my job teaching special needs adults. I left because my wife got pregnant and we were expecting our first baby girl. I needed to stay home. 

And so I had a solo show just a month before all that was supposed to happen and I quickly had to scramble and paint some oil paintings for this last minute show and I don't recommend it to anybody. But I painted this piece and I just remember being so impressed by the movie Interstellar. And I just was just thinking what a striking image and it felt like I was being jettisoned out of the known world and to quote Elsa "Into the unknown." Which is very scary. 

I remember feeling the same thing at the end of college. Like I don't know up from down. I don't know left from right. I feel like I'm in space. So when I caught that I said no wait, this is similarly known territory, you know… to know not what to expect. Right? Let's move on. 

And so I painted this kind of jet stream, you know, the rocket trail leaving the atmosphere and going into space and I had this gradation of blues following that and just got deeper and deeper and darker and darker, you know scarier and scarier as the jet stream went vertical the jet stream went off the canvas which, they tell you never do that. Never have a line go off the canvas and I said, screw you. I'm gonna do it anyway. That's what my painting's about, dang it.

And I loved it for all the pieces that I did for that particular solo show. That was the one that...I think my wife even said, "This is the path you need to follow, this kind of thinking, this kind of processing, this kind of creating.”

And then a fellow musician, fellow artist. I mean, he's one of the most gifted musicians I've ever met in our congregation. I didn't see it but his mom said, "So when he looked at your painting he just cried," and she said "I need to buy it for him so that he can have that just because he said it helped him in his music." 

And I thought oh man, I mean that's a blessing that my art could be something that inspires someone that good, you know and his music career. And that came from this, my personal journey of "I need to leave where I'm at and go into the unknown." And that's a beautiful image for anybody, which is really cool that it can be a beautiful image for anybody. But for someone who's in the same faith, they know that the unknown is really God, this great expanse of "we know so little of who He is."

We know His character. We know that He's trustworthy and all that but the older you get, trust becomes scarier and scarier. Or I'll say it this way. It costs more and more. And so to catch that kind of depth I don't know if it's possible, but I want to try. I want to try to catch that. 

Exactly and I'm not there yet. I think that's what makes me mad is that I'm not there yet. Go figure Mr. Impatient over here. But that's my aim is to capture, evoke that sense of presence, that sense of atmosphere. 

You know, you go back to even like Thoreau and just how poetic he got about God and then really just about nature. But he got poetic about God because of nature at first, the way that he would talk about the deity and everything. It's pretty cool and it's a nice segue for me. 

Casey - 00:57:19 > 00:57:20

It's like, that's great. But because of what I believe I believe in an actual person with a name who lived on this planet, it comes a little different than just the ethereal.

and then I think “Okay. Well if Jesus Is God, how to get from that mundane of human to the expanse of Eternal? The fish swims through the ocean, but the ocean also swims through the fish kind of deal. 

I'm still exploring how all that works, but there's something about the landscape. There's something about the natural that is so scary to us and that's known but also how to evoke the element of the unknown in that. We don't face cosmic storms and our atmosphere protects us from solar flares, but my God, what would happen if they didn't? 

Adam - Yeah. Believe it or not. We're actually coming up on time. So I'm going to end with something that actually worked pretty well in my last interview. On the count of three who's the first artist who jumps to your head three two, one.

Casey - DaVinci.

Adam - Why DaVinci? 

Casey - I don't know because I think I was just thinking of him. His draftsmanship is just unmatched. Close to unmatched. There's some other really good draftsmen. But I think it's how he thought of the world and how he imagined things to be. He would observe the human figure and think I think it looks like this on the inside and then would look at a corpse on an examining room table. That is how it looked on the inside. Okay. 

But that he would take that to inventions. You know, where there was the submarine or the machine guns, flying machines. Futurama did a great commentary on all that. But at a time when imagination wasn't upheld, you painted what your patrons wanted you to paint and you did it their way, he stuck it to him. 

You know, he spent a majority of his time perfecting one image, good for him. But she's this big. But you know, his striving for that for his own personal work, his ability to imagine and craft and for those drawings to remain intact and to be as powerful as they are to the art community, to the science community even, that's just incredible. 

I mean the Vitruvian man. Gosh, I mean it's just a beautiful image, but also some of his other paintings,  he did paintings of apocryphal scenes, but the brilliance of his that he left unfinished. Yeah, and for that day and age that was taboo. Nowadays, that's a particular kind of genius to be able to say I can't do anything else to this. I'm going to leave it and just let it state its effect. 

It's really powerful. 

Adam - Yeah. Well, I guess that'll wrap it up. Thanks for sitting down to talk with me and share your thoughts for whoever watches this or reads it because there will be a transcript, closed captions and all the rest of that. Yeah, so, thanks for stopping by. 

Casey - Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking with you again 

Become a Patron!