L. M. Gottschalk's "The Banjo" on a banjo

Comment by Strumelia on September 12, 2013 at 10:58am

Mara, maybe you and i could form a team as Fashion Consultants to MinstrelBanjoNing.... they obviously could use a little female input here!    BWAHAHAHAhahahaha...

Comment by Mara Eagle on September 12, 2013 at 9:14pm

Ah! Thanks for pointing me towards the Eugene List recording. How fascinating that List was drawn to Gottschalk given his other playing of Shostakovich. I guess Shostakovich put a lot of Russian folk music into his compositions too so that would suggest a certain connection between the two composers. Gottschalk must have seemed like an American bumpkin composing these pieces at the time. Given his origins I can't help but associate this piece with the tradition of French Acadian music in Louisiana which later found the diatonic accordion to be a useful vehicle for its music tradition. Those clomping base notes would work nicely on a button box! I also like the relationship you mentioned to early marching band music... West African dance... it makes sense.

There is so much new information (for me) in your posts that it’s been hard to process. Amongst many things that are beyond my knowledge—one thing I don’t understand is how Gottschalk’s piano compositions, The Banjo and The Bamboula, can be truer to the ‘essence’ of 19C banjo music than are the transcriptions found in the Minstrel instruction manuals. It seems to me that Gottschalk and the various transcribers of the Minstrel repertoire have much in common. Both appropriate African-American banjo into a Europeanized musical structure expressed in written composition. Neither hides their integration of European influence, nor in retrospect (to me) seem to have ‘misunderstood’ black music—but just the opposite: the integration of a European approach is what made it appropriate to white performers and audience members of the time. I can easily imagine the possibility of “The Banjo” having emerged from a stylistically Minstrel source. To my ears, Gottschalk’s composition is as Europeanized as any minstrel tune, and that isn’t a bad thing, it’s what makes it so conflicted and interesting.

As far as a repetitive groove on an improvised theme is concerned in Gottschalk and in minstrel tunes, these written compositions are inevitably static unless the player takes liberties of improvisation—(but tell me if I am wrong, because I am making an obvious assumption not being familiar with the written record of ‘The Banjo’ or ‘Bamboula’). Today, players of minstrel banjo are confronted with at least two historical layers: the one being the preexisting, independent and assumed ‘primary source,’ the other being the instruction manuals which are historical objects in and of themselves. There is certainly a bias towards maintaining the purity of the written manuals today, rather than viewing minstrel songs as melodic structures to be interrupted and thwarted with jibber jabber, random yelling and product selling—as in medicine shows and street performance. For this reason I mentioned Uncle Dave and Gus Cannon, because they do seem to constantly deviate in order to story-tell and entertain. I suppose Dink Roberts and Lucius Smith would also be good examples of players who (again to my ears) combine melodically dissonant banjo and vocal parts—both parts being ever-shifting—divergent and responsive.

Anyhow, the black shirt does set off your beautiful banjo nicely...

 

Comment by Strumelia on September 12, 2013 at 10:10pm

The actual surviving minstrel instructional books can neither have their purity maintained nor have their purity sullied by anything we say or do, since they indeed exist as historical objects -they don't change or respond or have reputations to defend or positions to prove.  They are each simply a snapshot in time and place and author, a single sliver of the pie.  When we play music we have so many choices- we can happily and passionately play music exactly as written in old books, or else adapt various music sources to our personal passion, infused with improvisation and imagination, goofiness, call and response, dance, costumes, laughing, shouting (masquerading as random, heh heh), bones, drums, accordions, pianos, musical saws...much as musicians likely have done for centuries.  But that's the beauty- both musicians and non musicians alike being able to create or contribute to music making in whatever way they find enjoyable or inspiring.  In the end music is always about joy, emotion, and passion. 

Comment by Dave Vinci on September 13, 2013 at 7:48am

Really interesting commentary and facinating performance!  I have always thought of the pieces in any instruction book as a point of departure for the student.  Each piece in the book is frequently included to be a vehicle to learn a particular technique.  In some cases the "original" piece has be reworked a bit to highlight that technique so that the piece in the book is not intended to be an "accurate" rendition of the original.  Frequently the original tune is simplified to facilitate the student's learning processs and to get the student to the point where they are playing something recognizable and close to what they would hear the professional musicians play.  This keeps them interested and willing to keep on learning to play the instrument.  I see no reason why the surviving tutors like Briggs, Buckley and the rest are not doing the same thing.  I doubt that the were written to preserve and document those tunes.  The final goal for the student is to learn the basics and then develop his/her own style or sound either imitative or interpretive.  Seems to me that Gottschalk’s composition (and Paul's marvelous playing) is trying to capture what he was hearing the banjo players doing.  The piece has this improvizational quality that I always found facinating that you still can hear whenever a musicial is just noodling around with different sounds and melodies and not playing a particular tune.  Don't tell me we don't all do this more often than we'll admit to.  Just my take on all this... or maybe I'm just making it all up as I go along. :-)

Comment by OK-4 on June 4, 2015 at 11:36pm

So what is wrong with playing ANY nice tune on the banjo? I don't get the criticism here.

Changing the topic slightly: Check out Batchelder's "Imitation of the Banjo for Piano" (1854). Aside from the introduction, it is a transcription of banjo music, not piano music. Every note can be played stroke style. The score even (in my opinion) reflects playing a triplet of three "G"s by jumping between open 5th string and fretted 1st. I believe Batchelder was holding a banjo in his hands while setting that score.

But... Gottschalk's tune is nicer than Batchelder's.

Comment by OK-4 on June 7, 2015 at 10:42pm

"Nice" was an unnecessary qualification... I should have said: nothing wrong with playing ANY tune on a banjo, and serious rebukes should only come from paying customers or a captive audience. 

Clawhammer in the 1850s? Why not? The stroke-style movement plus fifth string begs for bump-a-ditty.

The Batchelder piece published in 1854 pre-dates all of the banjo tutors. Since it was an imitation (on piano) of what minstrel performers were playing up North, it was trying to capture a sound *characteristic* of the instrument in performance. So, Batchelder is not imitating what a banjo player might have worked out in the parlor: no Irish jig or waltz or polka.

So, I think the Batchelder piece is useful for figuring out what stage performers in the early 1850s were doing with the banjo. Overall Batchelder's score does not seem (to me) to be a radical departure from some of what you can find in the tutors.

Batchelder's score covers just one octave: from the open third string to the fifth fret of the 1st string. Nothing up the neck.

Some measures are much like clawhammer, others aren't.

It reflects constant use of the fifth string, unlike some of the tunes you find in tutors. There are many triplets, just like the tutors but unlike clawhammer. It emphasizes rhythm over melody. Most measures are filled with 1/16 notes structured around four strokes by the index finger (I am describing what you discover if you try to play it on the banjo): so the default is two bump-a-ditties per measure, but there is enough syncopation and variation to break away from bump-a-ditty most of the time.

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