Issue 10

 Kousha Nakhaei
 Student of World Music

Immigration Music

When some people move away from their native land and move to reside in another country, they bring along with them their culture. In music, this could be material culture such as instruments, recorded music and sheet music, or non-material culture, like the music they carry in their memory such as music that they know, patterns of appreciation and understanding their music, as well as cultural-aesthetic values. Through immigration some aspects of the original culture may go through change in few different ways.

In the following lines I will write about some cultural-anthropological processes and some examples of the cultures that went through these. Going through these terms is a quick way of recognizing some of what might be going on in our culture. Then (in the near future, hopefuly the next issue) we will look at some aspect of our music and see if we can (for the heck of it) label them under the introduced categories.  

In talking about culture and music of a culture in immigration and its characteristics we have to be careful and aware that culture and music as culture are not unitary phenomena. If we read them literally, some of these terms assume that a group of people have one culture and that once a group of people immigrate, something happens to the music of that culture and music-of-immigration is created. But musical and culture are really organic, ever-changing combination of relationships within different layers of a society and across cultures. It’s also important to realize that these changes are partly result of and also reason for our individual decisions, preferences, tastes and choices regarding what music we listen to and what we buy, what we hear and watch.

We also have to take care when talking about our ongoing culture. Just like when we are too close to a picture we have a hard time seeing the whole picture, writing and commenting about our culture is often difficult and limited. It is easier to observe cultural change through history and write about what music of a group of people went through after immigration when some time has past and trends established. Also don’t forget that to a large extent our community-in-immigration is really young, (most of us have been born in Iran, not even first generation Persian-Canadian). All of this makes writing about our culture-of-immigration and music-in-immigration very difficult.

After moving to a new land, the immigrant community having brought with them their culture, face a foreign culture. They might stay isolated from the culture of the new land and continue cultural contact only among themselves, or they might come in continuous contact with other culture, and completely replace the new culture for what they brought along. In most cases, though, depending on the circumstances of the immigration, cultures end up somewhere in between the two extremes.

In many musical cultures, there is a tendency for continuation of original styles and values from the homeland. Continuation in close tandem with homeland is often possible through continuing infusions and contacts. For example there is a considerable Indian population in Trinidad who were brought over for labour by the British. There is little regional difference between the musical practices of Trinidadian Indians compared to their homeland.

The early settlers in Canada were the French and the British, who brought along their folk songs and dance music. Over the years due to relative isolation from the homeland, the culture in this side of the Atlantic Ocean developed differently from the homeland. Musical culture was mainly transmitted orally through generations and thus there was room for variations in text and melody. Same songs went through different variations in the New World compared to the homeland (called Folk Processes). Sometimes these variations are so drastic that it’s hard to recognize the same tune. Such variation can also be found in technique and style. Such is the case between Cape Breton fiddling and original Irish fiddling. As is the case with lots of East Coast music making, music can become a trademark of cultural identity.

As a natural condition of oral transmission, some songs get lost over time, probably as they become less relevant for the members of the culture, and eventually fall out of practice. Sometimes a piece of music is forgotten in the homeland, but survives among the immigrated population outside its original birthplace. This process is called Marginal Survival. There are some songs among French Canadians that can be traced back to the Renaissance Europe. The same songs have fallen out of practice in the land where they came from.

Usually when there is a tendency for continuation, music making does not stop and settlers start making music relevant to their experience, a large part of which is themes of missing the homeland and its beauties.  


When there is more contact across cultures, these new experiences change the culture in more drastic ways. A lot of what makes up the musical culture of the Americas is the hybrid musical genres that have been created through continuous cultural contact. Acculturation is the broad term that explains the creation of new culture due to such contact. Reggae and Salsa, for example, are in many ways hybrids between European and African musical aesthetics, evident in instrumentation, rhythmic drive, texture and formal and social structure. Similarly Metis culture is a very interesting mixture of French and Native American musical aesthetics and social structure. This could be called a sort of syncretism or creolization.

Imitation and parody are also an important part of cultural contact. In the 1800s, Black sharecroppers working in cotton plantation farms would entertain themselves by imitating the White plantation owners, dancing and making music mockingly. On the other hand the white society had great fun imitating Black music, accent, and dancing. In Minstrel Shows, “black face” white actors would imitate the stereotypical “Negro” characters. This popular entertainment genre eventually resulted in creation the musical forms that in some ways resulted in the creation of Jazz.

In many cases in the history of music of the Americas, the relationship of the cultures coming in contact has been that of cultural, economical and political dominance. Music is one of the domains that expresses such relationships. European colonists who settled in America usually discouraged or prohibited Native Americans from performing most genres, and in some cases European church music was offered as a replacement. Different groups and communities responded differently to these restrictions, some embracing the new form (called appropriation ) such as some Native American communities in Northern Brazil who actively participate in Protestant hymn singing, and even hold hymn writing competitions.

Some times members of a community cease to practice their earlier culture, and do not replace it with anything else, such as some Native American communities that simply stopped making music, merely listening to recorded music from the radio or cassettes and records. This is called deculturation.  

Much the same way that many cultures in immigration can speak and understand their native language and that of the new land, bi-musicality can be a result of cultural contact in immigration.

Very often, musical practice of a culture, consciously or unconsciously, represents and reflects their cultural identification. To many Afro-American cultures, the African/Black heritage is very pronounced in their musical practice. When music consciously and strongly represents its practitioners’ self-identity, it’s ladled as cultural patrimony.
  
In reality many of these processes may be happening simultaneously in different levels of population in immigration, and eventually create cultural identities in immigration. These are processes that cultures go through, inside and outside the native land. Especially in cultures with a rich heritage such as ours, there are internal forces of preservation of traditions as well as those embracing the new forms and change. After all the path our culture will go through in the future is largely decided by our individual choices in the different circumstances we face in immigration. Also important are organizations supporting and promoting cultural activities.

In the next issue we will look at some cases of our musical activity in immigration.