“To reimagine the world — that’s what music is to me,” proclaimed Jessie Cox on the first of two composers’ panels on the final weekend of Always, Already There: An Incubator for Afrodiasporic New Music. Held at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in November, this week long programme of lectures, roundtables and concerts, featuring music by 20 Afrodiasporic composers, did much to further this aim: in the words of organiser George E Lewis, to “smash the myth of absence”. (Take a look, for example, at the 363 Black composers listed in the MBC Living Composers Directory.)

Lewis himself has been tireless in such work. Always, Already There built on the bilingual (English/German) book Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, edited by Lewis and musicologist Harald Kisiedu, and published by Wolke Verlag in 2023. In 2020, Elaine Mitchener gave the first performances of Afrodiasporic composers in the new music section of Donaueschinger Musiktage, commissioning new works by Lewis, Matana Roberts and Jason Yarde (this was the first time Black composers had been presented there in the event’s 100 year history). And in 2023, Lewis, Anthony Braxton and Tyshawn Sorey were featured artists at the Darmstadt Summer Course.

Counteracting what Lewis called the “undeserved hegemony” of the US, composers featured at HKW had ancestry and lived or worked in Canada, DR Congo, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, Martinique, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the US. This also served, in Lewis’s words, to “deprovincialise” the so-called western tradition, which emerges as just one among many localities – part of “a new creolised and maroon identity for classical music writ large”.

Part of this work is historical. On the second day, Harald Kisiedu lectured on the Society of Black Composers. Following the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, cellist Kermit Moore co-founded the Symphony Of The New World, the first fully integrated orchestra in the US. In 1968, Moore, along with composers Dorothy Rudd More (his wife) and Carman Moore (no relation), co-founded the Society of Black Composers, with Fluxus artist Ben Patterson as president, organising concerts and discussions and connecting composers across the US.

In the months before the Society was founded, Kisiedu noted, students protesting segregation had just been massacred in Orangeburg, and Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy had been assassinated. Kisideu’s talk contextualised the Society within the Black Arts Movement and groups such as Chicago’s AACM and the St Louis based Black Artists Group.

Drawing genre boundaries was not part of the Society’s remit. It recruited musicians more generally associated with jazz, among them Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and Herbie Hancock. During this time, fierce debates spiralled about the meaning of ‘Black music’. Did it imply the use of certain ‘authentically African’ sound materials, and the absence of other ‘white’ or European materials? Was electronic music an ‘unnatural’ western imposition, or could it afford Afrofuturist visions, as in the work of Sun Ra? In a 1969 newsletter, the Society argued that “a common vocabulary or grammar is not even desirable among Black composers”. Debates concerning “which specific musical sounds and materials would be necessary to make Black music are no longer necessary. We know that because we are Black, we are making Black music”.

The Society folded in 1973, but the climate had already begun to shift. In 1971, Columbia issued the landmark LP The Black Composer In America, following this up with the ten-volume Black Composers Series (1974-1978), spearheaded by conductor Paul Freeman (and now available as a CD boxset). Reflecting the times, no women composers were featured, but they were central in the Society of Black Composers, among them Dorothy Rudd Moore and Tania León. (The former’s sombre, stormy Dirge And Deliverance, included on Kermit Moore’s 1980 Cellist album, is essential listening.)

Musicologists Eileen Southern and Samuel Floyd also did important work, founding The Black Perspective In Music and Black Music Research Journal respectively. Meanwhile, under pressure from student protests, universities and colleges began to hire Black musicians from Jackie McLean to Milford Graves. (Southern herself was appointed a full professor at Harvard in 1976, though, as Lewis noted, she expressed frustration that her white colleagues did not care about her work.) Likewise, the dismissive attitudes of white orchestral musicians to Black composers associated with jazz — such as the members of the London Symphony Orchestra during the recording of Ornette Coleman’s 1972 Skies Of America — are slowly fading. But there is still much work to be done.

The following day, a panel titled “Decolonising Electronic Music” emphasised the fact that existing histories of electronic music have tended to be almost exclusively white and male, beginning with Pierre Schaeffer and the GRM in 1948, rather than with Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (The Expression Of Zaar) in 1944, and almost completely excluding women of colour.

Of course, as Christina Wheeler pointed out, the criteria that determine what gets counted as electronic music are not neutral. Look at it another way and electric guitarists Charlie Christian, Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe deserve credit as pioneers of electronic music as much as Schaeffer and Stockhausen. In contrast to the resources available to such composers, Black experiments in electronics were often based on borrowed time, borrowed instruments, or serendipitous studio visits. Visiting Robert Moog’s studio in 1969, Sun Ra, according to his biographer John Szwed, tried to play a theremin “activated by touching a band of metal”. When it wouldn’t play, writes Szwed, the technician told Ra, “‘For some people there is a kind of skin resistance’. ‘You know what that means,’ Sonny joked. ‘Even machines can be racist!’”

As Leila Adu-Gilmore noted, acts of “radical reclassification” are needed to force recognition. (Gilmore, for instance, prefers to use the term ‘Northern European Christian harmony’ to ‘western’ or ‘tonal’ harmony in order to re-provincialise it.)

Another tactic is simply to make information available. Travelling and performing across the world, collaborating and documenting artists from numerous different countries, Cedrik Fermont’s work has been exemplary in this regard (see The Wire 440). Fermont’s ever-expanding database of electronic music from Africa and Asia is freely available online. As a collector, Fermont makes an important point: much of this work was already documented. Hugh Davies’s vast International Electronic Music Catalogue (1967), for instance, includes work from Eastern Europe, South Africa, South America and Japan. But historical memories tend to be shorter when it comes to creators who are not white.

Someone in the audience was reading Kwame Nkrumah’s Handbook Of Revolutionary Warfare. Not exactly the same kind of decolonisation as databases and albums — but perhaps not unconnected.

Day four’s panel focused on “African Art Music”, a term the contributors immediately called into question. As the moderator, South African composer Andile Khumalo noted, Christian missionaries imposed western music on colonised countries to stamp out what they regarded as ‘barbaric’ African cultural practices. To make music was to make music in the church, leading to the development of choral composition, in which western hymns, rewritten to fit indigenous languages, were also subtly altered through the inclusion of Africanised vocal stylings — glissandi resembling speech patterns and call and response; in other contexts, musicians could have been arrested for using such techniques.

As Njabulo Phungula explained, the concept of ‘art’ music relates to legitimacy conferred by certain types of classical training, automatically establishing a hierarchy with folk or popular traditions. African classical composers thus participated in a music constantly at odds with the conditions under which it was presented, even as they were forced to seek validation from those conditions.

Phungula and Khumalo live and work in South Africa, Phungula in Durban and Khumalo in Johannesburg. Often, however, African composers have to travel for wider recognition. Now studying at Duke University in the US, Monthati Masebe reflected on the problem of “what happens when an African artist moves abroad and comes with their music”, and the need “to be both globalised in taste and localised in palette”.

In their work, Masebe suggested, they try to keep these divisions as a source of productive tension, for instance in musical figures which move rhythmically against rather than with barlines. Elsewhere, they’ve developed a form of graphic notation influenced by the Ditema tsa Dinoko, a modern day Sesotho syllabary developed in South Africa for the siNtu or Southern Bantu languages. (This orthography indicates mouth position and syllable expression in ways that bring it closer to music notation.)

Nyokabi Kariũki noted the ways that contemporary African electronic musics develop in places outside official institutional sanction in Kenya, such as The Mist, which takes place in the abandoned basement of a Nairobi shopping mall. “Culture,” she observed, “bubbles up in places people choose to turn away from… springing up outside institutional spaces that determine memory and who gets to be remembered.”

The problem of institutions was further addressed in a discussion on curation. Daniele Daude, founder of The String Archestra and ComChor, offered important perspectives on the specific experience of Afro-Germans, noting a lineage that goes back to the 1986 anthology Farbe Bekennen (Showing Our Colours): Afro-German Women Speak Out edited by May Ayim, Dagmar Schultz and Katharina Oguntoye. This lineage also includes Oguntoye’s ‘intercultural network’ Joliba e.V, formed in response to the racial violence of the early 1990s, a time whose neo-Nazi and anti-immigrant rhetoric forms grim parallels to today. Duade’s work often takes place outside traditional classical venues: the conductor-less Archestra, for instance, organises a regular night in a Kreuzberg punk venue, emphasising existing community practice, rather than trying to force its way into indifferent or hostile settings.

As Cedrik Fermont noted, also at issue here are the barriers advantaging Global North over Global South: visas, flight costs, entry fees. The participants agreed that the situation won’t change if the boards, directorships, and most of the positions in the major classical institutions are still almost universally white and monocultural. That HKW is now run by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and that the events took place here, rather than a more traditional classical venue like the Philharmonie, is indicative. To build community must be collaborative, but change, if it’s to come, must also come at the top as well as from below.

In a composer’s panel on the final day, Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson warned that, following the US election: “We will have to fight for our creativity, which means to fight for our lives.” As Harald Kisiedu noted in his talk, the first jazz programme in Germany was established during the Weimar Republic, at Frankfurt’s Hoch Konservatorium. It was one of the first cultural institutions the Nazis closed down on assuming power. The fear of creolisation, of Black and Jewish influences on German culture, lay behind the Nazi condemnation and persecution of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art), influences already felt in both the serialism of the Second Viennese School, whose principal architect, Arnold Schoenberg, was Jewish, and the jazz modernism of works like Ernst Krenek’s hugely popular opera Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Strikes Up). What both these modernist trends were saying, Kisiedu noted, was that “the old world is finished”.

It’s at moments of real or imminent change that the forces of reaction most desperately rear their heads. As Kisiedu observed, in 1967, 70 per cent of white Americans thought the pace of change of Civil Rights was too fast. On the second night of these events, Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States. The same day, news came of a far right terror plot in Saxony to establish a Nazi regime.

Germany’s cultural institutions are hardly bastions of free expression. But events like Always, Already There nonetheless suggest a vision of that creolising identity against which today’s fascists lash out, threatening with deportation and ‘remigration’ those who ‘refuse to integrate’. As George E Lewis put it, “Afrodiasporic perspectives could lead to spiritual renewal in Europe to counteract the rise of fascism in Europe and the US”. At the very least, “it can no longer be said that there’s no such thing as an Afrodiasporic composer. We’re making you all into new experts in a new world.”

Some resources

Always, Already There booklet
MBC Living Composers Directory
The African and Asian Alternative Database
Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans oral history project
Dorothy Rudd Moore at the American Composers Alliance
Halim El-Dabh’s Ta'abir Al-Zaar

David Grundy’s review of the music programme of Always, Already There will appear in the forthcoming March issue of The Wire 493.