Friday, January 28, 2011

A cousin sent me a “link” to a 2007 film clip about the piano and the “black keys” on it.

My hope is that you will click on the link below and watch as much of it as you wish. Then please come back to read my report, if you will.

Amazing Grace - Just the Black Notes  click here

The film captures Wintley Phipps, a well-known singer and musician and president of the “U.S. Dream Academy,” an association which exists to benefit the children of parents in prison. It appears as though the featured event was a huge concert in a large auditorium, put on to raise funds for the association.

When I watched this presentation the first time, I muttered involuntarily in Spanish, under my breath, “Calmarselo, Señor Tomasito, calmarselo.”

Seldom have I seen such brazen fabrication. The entire premise is preposterous, a hoax, a myth, a construct, an outright lie.

Mr. Phipps makes the claim that “all . . . well almost all . . . Negro spirituals are written using only the black keys.”

Bunk. Balderdash. Bullshit. Just not so.

My base authorities are Miss Elva Whitney, the music teacher in the ‘40s at Fort Lupton Grade School, and Mrs. Carlson, a blind music teacher from whom I took a few piano lessons in that era.

The consistent teaching was that Negro spirituals, much like the Old Testament, have come to us originally from oral tradition. Not written but spoken, sung.

Original Negro spirituals were not “written” using the piano. The musical score was not “written,” it was passed down through generations.

The music was created in tribal sing-along situations, first in west Africa and then among the enslaved blacks of the Americas. They were oral. Using the voice or voices. They were sung a capella. There may well have been percussion accompaniment – drums. The piano just wasn’t there at the inception of what we know as the Negro spiritual.

Imagine, if you will, an African tribe having possession of a piano and imagine, further, the transport of that instrument from jungle camp to jungle camp.

Even more of a stretch is the idea that the indigenous people would look at the black and white keys on the instrument and make a qualitative judgment: “The black keys are better. So let’s write all our songs using only the black keys.”

Why are the black keys supposedly better? The inference by Mr. Phipps is that they are better because of their color. They are black like his skin.

Imagine Mr. Phipps looking at a zebra and making the qualitative judgment, “There is a black-and-white striped animal. The black stripes are better, though, because their color is like the color of my skin.”

Imagine Mr. Phipps looking at a checkerboard. He will come to the conclusion that we should play checkers using only the black squares. The black squares are better because they are black like his skin.

Here’s the deal. The white keys on the piano are in the “major” key. The black keys are in what we call the “minor.” The white keys are more numerous (a majority) and the black, less numerous (a minority). A racist perspective can be developed using this thinking.

The black keys themselves are shorter, narrower and smaller, positioned higher and further from the player. This is simply practical, a way to facilitate learning and playing of the instrument. The black keys are used by the pianist to achieve sharps and flats, and in the cases where something is to be played in minor chords.

Shockingly, Mr. Phipps, an accomplished musician, doesn’t seem to realize that anything that can be played on the black keys can also be played on the white keys – and vice-versa.

“Almost every Negro spiritual was written using only the black keys,” he says. Bunk. In the first place, he doesn’t know “all” Negro spirituals – can’t possibly. Secondarily, it is patently racist to think that a composer would choose to use this piano key or that, based on its blackness or its whiteness.

When the Negro spiritual came to the Americas, the lilting melodies fit quite naturally into lyrics with classic Christian themes. Hence, we have a wealth of deeply meaningful, beautiful compositions such as “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”

I tried “Swing Low” on our piano at home. Using my one-finger, seek-and-peck method, I could play it – on the black keys or the white, interchangeably. So much for Mr. Phipps’ fallacious presentation.

I’ve learned through this investigation that there is such a thing as the “slave scale,” also known as the “pentatonic scale,” using the five black keys. Even this doesn’t support the Phipps assertion that “almost all” Negro spirituals were “written using only the black keys.”

Do we think there was convenient access to pianos all over the South’s cotton plantations? Almost every slave family had a piano in the shack, right? Would the men who captured people on the Slave Coast in Africa have said, “Sure you can bring your piano. We’ll store it aft?”

Oh, and if the potential composer of Negro spirituals ventured up to the mansion, the mistress of the house would say, “Yes, you can play my piano – but you can only use the black keys because your skin is black.”

Is Mr. Phipps really this dense? Or does he really think the rest of us are this dense?

I once saw a piano in Las Vegas with all gold keys. It was said to have belonged to Liberace. I’m sure the great Liberace made sure to use only the “black” keys when he played spirituals. He couldn’t possibly play spirituals on a piano with monochromatic keys, could he?

Or how about Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder? Did they really know the “difference” between the black and white keys?

Once upon a time half a century ago I went to a Fats Domino concert at a bar in Cheyenne. During the event, two legs of the piano fell off the edge of the stage and the instrument ended up at a crazy tilted angle. Mr. Fats did not let this unusual condition interrupt the rock and roll.

Because of the crazy angle, I could see plainly. The pianist was definitely using all the keys – regardless of their color. As you older people will recall, Fats Domino was black.

Using the reasoning asserted by Mr. Phipps, Fats should have used “only the black keys.” After all, the black keys are there for Negroes to use, right?

-0-

Word of the Week: Racism. Webster says this word is a contraction for racialism, and racialism is a doctrine or feeling of racial differences or antagonisms, especially with reference to supposed racial superiority, inferiority, or purity; racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination.

2 comments:

  1. The video never says that "they used a piano"...or composed while looking at any keys. He actually used your exact example that the songs were learned and passed down...The Pentatonic (minor) scale that you and Phipps both referred to was the premise of the thought, I'll take some liberties to say I think he was trying to say and actually said what a great thing for the tune to come from Africa (black slaves) and the words from a while man (captain of the ship). That part we can know is historically accurate....

    It was a blend of black white...

    You can play almost all songs on the major scale....but the reverse isn't so...

    Its interesting that it does provoke people just to mention the black and white keys on a piano....we have a long way to go..

    I have a friend who just came from South Africa where they have Blacks, whites, and colored's. And rarely do they all work together. The colored's are a mix of black and white and neither will accept them...

    its a strange strange world we live in....

    and as always pardon my grammer, spelling or any other miscue in my writing

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ethos, Pathos and Logos

    Credibility, Emotion and Logic

    Some would argue, thus missing a vital lesson to be learned.

    * The Sophists did not believe in objective truth, including objective moral truth. They did not think, in other words, that anything was absolutely “right” or “wrong”; instead they viewed all actions as either advantageous or disadvantageous to the person performing them.

    So long as the majority is suppressed of such education, knowledge and realizations. You will continue to see a multitude of such performances.

    *Book 1 The Republic

    ReplyDelete

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