Tony Perman: Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life

Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists Podcast series. And I'm very pleased to say that today we have Tony Perman on the show. We'll be talking about his book, Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life. Tony, welcome to the show s. s

Tony Perman:

Hi, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Well, thank you for being on the show. Can you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Tony Perman:

Sure. So, I teach at Grinnell College and I've been here for about 10 years and I grew up in Illinois, which is not too far from Iowa, which is where Grinnell is. And I teach at the musicology and I got into it mostly as a performer playing music which led me into academia.

Marshall Poe:

Oh, is that right?

Tony Perman:

Yeah, which we can talk about in a minute if you want. I'm not sure what else you want to know about me-

Marshall Poe:

Actually, I'd like to talk about it now.

Tony Perman:

Okay, all right.

Marshall Poe:

Tell us about you as a musician.

Tony Perman:

Well, so I grew up like, I suppose, a lot of Midwesterners who play music, it's mostly classical music is all the educational opportunities. So, I was a singer and went to Kenyon College in Ohio to do singing, to do vocal performance and music, classical music. But I got, I don't know if disenchanted is the right word, but it's not really the music I listened to, I just liked making sound. So, I ended up in London and hooked up with this Zimbabwean musician, Chartwell Dutiro, and learned Mbira with him and joined his band and just fell in love with it and toured around with him for a little bit. And then [inaudible 00:01:42]-

Marshall Poe:

So, you actually toured with the band? You were-

Tony Perman:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a little bit.

Marshall Poe:

… in the band touring?

Tony Perman:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Tony Perman:

Playing Mbira in the UK and in North America a couple times. And then-

Marshall Poe:

That must have been an amazing experience, I have to say, for a kid from Illinois.

Tony Perman:

Yeah. Chartwell passed away a couple years ago but I think his openness to having somebody like me in his band really changed the trajectory of my life in a lot of ways. So, this book, in a lot of ways, and my whole career is a product of that quirky happenstance of joining his band and touring around.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. But before we go there, let's talk about how you got to Grinnell. How did you get to Grinnell?

Tony Perman:

So, Grinnell is the third-

Marshall Poe:

Other than you needed a job.

Tony Perman:

That's the main reason, I needed a job.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Tony Perman:

And I had a couple other jobs beforehand. I taught at Bowdoin College in Maine for a couple years and Pomona College in California for a couple years just as visiting gigs and then entered the liberal arts world and then Grinnell had a job opening and I just ended up there.

Marshall Poe:

Okay.

Tony Perman:

Most of the music faculty at Grinnell perform and do scholarship and live in both worlds. So, I think the fact that I play and write is of one reason that it works out well.

Marshall Poe:

Do you still play?

Tony Perman:

Yeah. So, I teach an ensemble at Grinnell, a Zimbabwean Mbira ensemble and so I play and teach that as part of my job.

Marshall Poe:

It must be wildly popular. I would take that.

Tony Perman:

Oh, yeah. It's fun. I think the students who find it love it. It feels intimidating at first because it's usually so new for most of the students. So, they have to be brave. Once they are, they usually stay.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Well, Grinnell students are brave.

Tony Perman:

They are, yeah.

Marshall Poe:

I'm not sure I was the bravest Grinnell student, I graduated in '84, but I would like to have taken that class. So, let's turn back to this interesting intersection of your personal experience and Zimbabwe and Ndau. So, this is really how you got into it, by meeting Zimbabwean musicians and suddenly you were like, "Hey, this is cool."?

Tony Perman:

Yeah, because I went to England to do graduate school, to study at the musicology but not to study Zimbabwe, that wasn't really on my radar. It was just meeting Chartwell and then playing with him shifted my focus. But when I went to do my PhD and thinking I would do research on music in Zimbabwe, I decided I didn't really want to write about the Mbira because, on the one hand, that's what I play, I'd like to keep that as just something I do but also it is perhaps the thing that's most written about and most attended to in Zimbabwean music.

There's a lot of scholarship on the Mbira, there's players all over the world and there's so much else happening in the country that I wanted to do something else, not Mbira. And then I just traveled the country thinking about what should I do and ended up in Chipinge which is where the Ndau community is, that's the center of the Ndau speaking area of Zimbabwe and fell in love with the music there and fell in love with the community and was fairly openly received. And so, I stuck around and that's where my research focus really shifted to that part of Zimbabwe.

Marshall Poe:

That's a great story, actually. It's a nice organic story about how you found yourself in the context of these people doing this thing and became one of them and then went on to actually study what they do. Seriously, that's a great story.

Tony Perman:

Yeah, it was really a profoundly positive experience the whole way through.

Marshall Poe:

That's great. This will sound like stereotypes but I have some friends who study Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and they claim to me that Sub-Saharan Africans are the happiest people on earth.

Tony Perman:

Yeah, I would have to think about that. I don't know if I [inaudible 00:05:43].

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I don't know if that's true but they're like, "They're just very happy. I don't know why but they're very happy people." So, let's talk a little bit about ethnomusicology. I'm a historian, what is ethnomusicology?

Tony Perman:

If I'm being flippant about it, I just think of ethnomusicology as the study of music but it emerged as the filling in the gaps of other older studies of music. So, you have historical musicology which is the history field but it focused, historically, almost entirely on Western European art music. You have music theory which has focused also mostly on Western European art music but in an analytical sense, comparable to linguistics of what's [inaudible 00:06:29]-

Marshall Poe:

Actually, just to interrupt you, I have an acquaintance who is a musicologist, a music theorist and, as far as I can tell, he's a mathematician.

Tony Perman:

Yeah, music theory is a very mathematical field and we get a lot of double majors in music and math and that really appeals to it. But ethnomusicology emerged mostly to pay attention to all the rest of the world's music. But a better answer than just the study of music, it's really the study of music in context, the social importance, political importance, the meaning of music beyond sound itself. So, trying to connect musical sound to something, whether it's politics, religion, social dynamics. There's so many different kinds of ethnomusicology now so it's really anthropological in a lot of ways. Especially in the United States, the methodology is drawn more from anthropology, really, than from other musical fields like theory or historical musicology.

Marshall Poe:

Mm-hmm. Well, an important part of your book is the affective component in musical performance. And I can speak to this directly because music in situ, being performed, it's a very emotional experience. I don't want to get too biographical but I was listening to my Spotify playlist and they played a song that I hadn't heard in 20 years and I started crying.

Tony Perman:

For me, that's where it's at. That's why I get into this and what I'm passionate about. Music has so much impact emotionally but you can't always put that into words.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that's tough.

Tony Perman:

So, that's what I see as the fun part of doing ethnomusicology is trying to put into words those experiences, those affective experiences of music that is the whole reason we play or listen that we don't usually need words for. You don't need to explain why you cried, you just know you cried.

Marshall Poe:

Right. Yeah, I just cried. I don't know exactly why I did but it just happened and I was very shocked by it, to be honest with you, yeah. So, it's music and performance in situ that is what's being performed. And so, there's this other interesting word in your book that I wanted to talk to you about, musicking, because we don't have a verb in English to music. We should.

Tony Perman:

No, and that's why I like ethnomusicologists. And that comes from a guy named Christopher Small, he was the first person to use that in the scholarship, in English. Lots of languages have gerunds or verb versions of music, but English, we can say dancing or playing or acting, but music doesn't really work and not every ethnomusicologist likes this word. I actually had a long conversation last week with a colleague of mine who just hates that word. Like, "We should just stick with the ones that we already use instead of making up new ones." But I love it because-

Marshall Poe:

Oh, I'm also making up new words where there's something lacking. That's why we have language so we can make this stuff up because it accurately describes the experience which is not just listening to music or watching a performance because you are in it.

Tony Perman:

Especially when I'm teaching, I think, students, especially students who aren't necessarily active players, they counter music through things, whether it's recordings. And so, they think of music as a thing, as an object or as a product and I really want to put their energies into thinking about as a process, as an experience that's happening in real time. So, turning into a verb, for me, lets me put the emphasis on the doing as opposed to the thing that's done. So, I use it all the time. Some of my students love it, some of them, drives them crazy but …

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, well I think, I don't know if it's a neologism anymore, but it's a very useful one and I will drop it into my daily vocabulary. So, let's talk a little bit about the book. So, how did you actually conduct the research? How did you decide to go where you went and to listen to whom you listened to and to talk to the people that you talked to?

Tony Perman:

Yeah, that's a-

Marshall Poe:

Talk about that.

Tony Perman:

That's a good question. So, my initial encounter in Zimbabwe was in the capital city, Harare, through the Mbira which is this instrument I learned with Chartwell in England. But I knew, when I got there, that's not what I wanted to do research on so I just traveled around and I ended up in Chipinge which is a town of almost 20 to 30,000 people. And this is 2001, I was just exploring the country and I just lived there for a couple of weeks. And in those two weeks, I hooked up with a lot of musicians. It's musically really different from the rest is Zimbabwe, it's linguistically quite different, it's geographically really different, it's up in the highlands and the mountains and I just really loved it.

And so, then I shifted my dissertation work to focus on that area. Basically, I just showed up in 2003 and rented a room and then just hung out and slowly got to know musicians. And I stayed for about two years and just developed this network of musicians and I felt really welcomed. So, I don't know, it just felt like the right place to be. I ended up doing lots of different kinds of research, the book is only about one particular kind of spiritual musical practice but there's all sorts of other music that I write about in other contexts, a different kind of Mbira. There's a lot of drumming styles and then singing styles and then there's this ceremonial practice. How it was just the richest experiential musical space in the area was just such a fun, complex, serious, but also playful musical space.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm thinking about the way that I experience music and that is, in my own life, I go to concerts occasionally, they were in bars or stadia. And I was telling my daughter that I saw the Rolling Stones once and they were about the size of an ant because I was 1,000 yards away from them but I was at a concert with them or I listened to music through headphones on Spotify. What is the musical experience like, this is a silly question, for the Ndau? How do they do music?

Tony Perman:

Well, it's variable. Some of it is exactly like the things you're describing, maybe not stadium with tens of thousands of people but you'll go to concerts and there's pop music, there's hip hop derived music, there's guitar band music, there's a lot of gospel music. Those things would maybe be more familiar to the average American listener. But there's other kinds of music making, the more that I write about, that are really different and I don't think there are that many contexts in the United States that are comparable in the sense that it's an intimate setting, either inside a house, a small house, I don't know, maybe 20 feet diameter circular house or it starts there and then goes right outside the house packed with people.

The ceremony that's the center of the book, there are probably, I don't know, 150 people there. So, it's quite crowded in the house and it usually starts at dusk and then there's ebbs and flows but, at its heightened moment, everybody is contributing something. So, nobody's the audience. Not everybody plays the drums or sings the songs, those are more specialized but everybody's maybe clapping or ululating in appreciation or clearing the center of the floor for people who are dancing or they're dancing themselves. So, everybody feels like they're contributing to the actual event as opposed to being performed for by someone else.

Marshall Poe:

Spectator.

Tony Perman:

Right. There's no spectator. And if you are a spectator, over time, eventually somebody will urge you to do something. Not everybody does, some people just aren't that into music or they don't feel very good at it and they don't do as much but they're still doing something. You can clap your hands, sing a chorus, stomp your feet when things are really going well, something, and then other people carry on the main labor, playing the drums, singing the songs, keeping things going, keeping the energy up so that it can sustain itself all night long.

Marshall Poe:

Mm-hmm. And this is part of a ritual, if I can call that a ritual, or a ceremony. Is there a set … I'm thinking set list, that's the wrong word. Is there a song cycle that they perform, these are songs known to everyone, is it improvisational or?

Tony Perman:

In a way it's all of the above. It's not a set list. It's not like, before it begins, okay, we're going to do this [inaudible 00:15:32].

Marshall Poe:

Well, the reason I mentioned that, sorry to interrupt, is that I remember going to Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas where they would list the things we were going to sing upfront. Okay, at this point, we're going to sing this, we're going to sing that. Yeah.

Tony Perman:

There's a core repertoire. They'll know these are probably the songs we'll draw from and there might be a few that will start with this and this and this. But it depends, in large part, on which spirits show up. And oftentimes, the spirits themselves will start the song. Not always, sometimes somebody else-

Marshall Poe:

Yes, talk a little bit about these spirits. How does this happen? How does it manifest?

Tony Perman:

Primarily-

Marshall Poe:

Because I was going to say no spirits showed up at Holy Cross Lutheran Church.

Tony Perman:

Well, Maybe you went to the wrong church. [inaudible 00:16:22]

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I probably did. Good point, yeah.

Tony Perman:

So, religious life in these communities. And Zimbabwe's interesting because a lot of people in the country attend ceremonies like I described and live their spiritual life through spirits. But a lot of the country is also extremely Christian and it's a very publicly Christian country much more so than the United States that you just see Christianity and hear Christianity everywhere, on TV, on the radio, walking down the street and it can be somewhat antagonistic at times through the history of colonial missionization that gets complicated. But in the Ndau community, there are spirits of your ancestors, which are family spirits, and those are usually much more private. They're just for your family really, they're not really big public ceremonies which they are in other parts of the country.

The main spirits publicly, these social events that I'm describing, there's different words and different parts even in Ndau. I call them madhlozi, some people call them mashave but they're spirits of outsiders and there's different kinds. And so, one reason you don't know what you're going to play is it depends on which spirits show up, there's different categories of spirits. So, I have written about four because the main ceremonies I went to had these four categories of spirits but there's lots of other ones that I don't write about at all and they each have their own repertoire, their own drums, their own mediums. So, usually, you know in advance, you hire mediums or you have relations with mediums, you say, "We're going to have a ceremony, please come," and then you play.

Let's say they're madzviti spirits or the spirits of South African Gaza-Nguni or you could say Zulu soldiers from the 19th century. They traveled into what's now Zimbabwe in the 19th century, died there and now come back as spirits. So, you play these specific dramas for them and those mediums know they have those spirits and they'll probably welcome the spirits. So, you play music, you take snuff, which is actually hugely important. Without the snuff, the spirit that wakes them up and they just play music. And then, eventually, through the dancing, they go into trance and the spirit wakes up. That's the word, the verb typically used, they wake up within them and then it's the spirit now you're interacting with. And the medium, the living person usually has no memory of events afterwards so they might ask you how it went when it's all said and done.

So, in the moment, when the spirit's there and they're the ones dancing and they might then tell you, "Oh, let's do this song, this is one of my favorites," or something like that. And then, variable, it can take 10 minutes or an hour depending on how happy they are or what difficulties in life led to having the ceremony in the first place or if you just want to say hi and keep just dropping an email to somebody, just keep up good relations like, "Hey, I'm going to forget about you, come and dance for a few minutes," and then they dance and then they'll leave. And then all those spirits might leave after an hour or two and then a whole new set of spirits will come.

So, the ceremony that's the main sight of the book, there's four spirits. The first ones show up around 4:00 in the afternoon and the last ones leave around 10:00 a.m. the next morning and that's a pretty typical timeframe actually. So, it's the music that engenders trance and then the trance allows the spirit to take over the body of their medium with the medium's permission and then the spirit becomes in charge of that body and mind.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. So, just to be clear then, these media, I don't know what the plural of mediums-

Tony Perman:

I just think mediums.

Marshall Poe:

Mediums.

Tony Perman:

Otherwise it sounds like I'm talking about [inaudible 00:20:08].

Marshall Poe:

These mediums are known to the community.

Tony Perman:

Oh, yeah. And you know in advance like, oh, we want these spirits to come, we should invite these people.

Marshall Poe:

How do you become known as a medium?

Tony Perman:

Well, the initial experience, you obviously might not know that you will be a medium as you get older. Although most people think that the spirit that you have, you're born with that spirit, they don't arrive later. So, everybody has a spirit but not everybody becomes a medium. So, at some point in your life, you'll probably get sick or injured in some way that the doctors can't help you with. So, then you go to an herbalist or a spiritual healer and say, "This is happening. I'm sick, I don't know what's going on," and they'll say, "Well, it might be your grandfather or it might be this madgiti spirit who wants you to be a medium for them and so we need to figure that out."

So, then you'd have a ceremony specifically to figure that out and then go into trance and then that spirit emerges and then everybody around them will say, "Who are you? What's up? What are you doing?" And then they say, "Oh, I'm so and so. I want this person to be a medium, here's the things I expect them to do to nurture this relationship." And so, then, from that point on, you can choose to be a medium and honor that spirit and do the things they want you to do which might mean don't eat this food, don't wear these clothes, maybe quit that job or not. And if you don't, you'll probably just keep getting sick and you just have to deal with that so most people choose to listen. And then at that point, then people know and then you learn to foster that relationship. It's a skill, so you get better at it. But early days, it's really difficult and can appear very violent. But older, experienced mediums, they can get that spirit to wake up quite quickly.

Marshall Poe:

Mm-hmm. So, a family or a group of people will essentially hire a medium and say, "Okay, we want you to come."?

Tony Perman:

Yeah, yeah. So, this ceremony, the community invited several mediums, several of whom actually had several spirits and they knew in advance these are who we hired for this event. And so, they're taken care of, they make special food for them, make sure there's beer for them or alcohol for them if they need it. Increasingly, in the 21st century, you might pay them and then that's their job. Just like you might hire drummers or singers to play the music, that's their job. So, everybody has a job and those are the main ones.

Marshall Poe:

Mm-hmm. Are these, it's bad American analogy, are these all ages shows?

Tony Perman:

Oh, absolutely. They're way more all ages shows than show in the US. And especially these madhlozi events, they're really open. I show up and I just can go to one if I'm invited. My main host at these, a guy named Davison Masiza, who was my Mbira teacher, that's how I got to know him. Whenever there was a ceremony and he's like, "Oh, you should come," and then I would go. And it is literally all ages shows from infants on mother's backs all the way up to senior citizens who, once they sit down on the floor of the roundhouse, they're there all night because they can't really get back up. And the kids can come and go as they want and, usually, once they fall asleep somewhere, somebody will then take them to a different house so they can sleep but they're welcome to be there for as long as they want.

Teenagers are coming and going, often going, and they might play a different kind of music out of earshot just for a teenage party, quote, and at the same time of playing dance music, flirting with each other. And it's maybe not that dissimilar to church and how some young people feel about it in that it's just this thing you have to do and it can get a little boring if you go all the time and so they don't really want to be there. But some of them are really into it, especially if they're really into the music.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Well, at Holy Cross Lutheran, they would take the fidgety children like me to the basement.

Tony Perman:

Yeah, that's one thing. I think this feeling of being disrupted, it's pretty hard in these events. Kids aren't going to disrupt it and it's so loud, the kids are usually incapable of disrupting it and they might leave and they might cry. And if they cry, then the mom will take them out and figure out why they're crying but they're totally welcome whenever they want to be there.

Marshall Poe:

And let's talk a little bit about the music itself. So, what instruments are being played?

Tony Perman:

Drums and shakers. Occasionally, a whistle too but there's drums and each kind of spirit have different drums so there's multiple sets of drums. So, when the majiti come, you have, they look like tambourines but they don't have jangles on them but they're small frame drums and you play those because they come from South Africa. Then they might leave and then the japuna come who are old, they're female spirits and then you put a drum on the ground, it looks like a bass drum on its side and then you use your elbow to change the pitch and you play with one stick and then you can have a tune. And then they come and go and then the mhongo come who are mermaid spirits and then they have a set of, I don't know, it's like timpani, a set of round drums that are tuned differently. So, you can play melodically on those drums and then those are for those spirits.

And then they might go and then the drayungu come and they don't really have a drum yet so you pick any one of those drums you already played but you play it differently and they have their own rhythm. And all of those drums are accompanied by people playing shakers which keep the beat and tell the dancers [inaudible 00:26:10]. And then on top of that, people will sing, they have multiple singing parts, there's different kinds of whistling which are mostly the equivalent of applause in a way and that's about it. You don't really play any melodic instruments during these ceremonies. There are melodic instruments people play for fun but they're not ceremonial instruments, it's all drumming and shaking.

Marshall Poe:

Uh-huh. Can anybody play these drums or are there actual performers or are there highly-prized drummers like, "Oh, we have to get him or her. She's great."?

Tony Perman:

Yeah, all true. Davison Masiza, who's my host, people really like having him at ceremonies because he is such a good drummer. But they'd also tell me I could play the drums and then I would fumble around and play for a little while so it's not restricted to the best players. But what often happens is, at the beginning of a ceremony, before you really need those spirits to show up, you'll let the novices play. So, that might be when I would play and you fumble around and people dance and sing but the stakes are low because they know you're not going to be good enough to really get the spirits to come but it's okay because we're just warming up.

So, then the novices might play, the younger drummers who are enthusiastic but not very skilled play and then, over time, they'll step aside and then the really good drummers will take over and they'll play the exact same patterns, just better. And I think being better actually has consequences. More likely the spirits will get into it and more likely they'll show up, more likely the ceremony will be a success. So, anybody is welcome to drum but you won't be able to drum for long unless you demonstrate some competence.

Marshall Poe:

Right, right. And so, can you talk a little bit about the drums? Who makes them? How are they made? Are there drum shops like, oh, he makes the best drums or do they make their own drums?

Tony Perman:

They make their own drums and there's different makers who, oh, he makes the best drums. So, it's not really a shop. And especially the ones for the mhongo and the madgiti, where they have their own specialized drums, they're fairly sacred things. So, you don't just make drums when you feel like it, you usually make drums because this particular spirit says you need to make some drums, find somebody to make you some drums. Then you'll make a whole set and then you'll have a ceremony to consecrate that set of drums and name it. And so, I had a set of drums made and they just stopped short of that, they weren't sanctified and they weren't consecrated so they're just drums.

Marshall Poe:

Right, right, right.

Tony Perman:

And there's different attitudes. There's not a consensus about anything I've said so far but, for some people, that's really serious, you don't just play around to these drums. So, for instance, if I ask somebody, "Can you show me how to play these songs?" They're like, "Yeah, sure but I'm not going to do it on my drums because we're not bringing the spirit," so they'll play on old plastic jerry cans or something. Other people don't seem that concerned about that and they'll play the drums whenever they feel like it.

Marshall Poe:

And you said that the drums have names?

Tony Perman:

Yeah, you can name the set of drums the one who does it or something like that.

Marshall Poe:

Uh-huh. And can you apprentice yourself to a drummer? Like, "I really have this aspiration to be a great Ndau drummer, can I apprentice myself to you?"

Tony Perman:

That's a really good question. It's not that formalized, the education system. And usually, if you have that, oh, impetus or motivation or be in your bonnet, you just have to do this, it's attributed to the spirits. Like, "Oh, you're really interested in drumming, you must have a spirit who's a drummer." But it's not always that cultivated, you have to demonstrate your seriousness about it. So, kids aren't always that encouraged. It depends on who your family members are but it's often they're sneaking around and playing when they're maybe not supposed to and that demonstrates to their family, oh, they actually really do want to know how to do it. And then somebody who's a really good drummer will and they'll often sit next to them at ceremonies and pick it up and then somebody will usually foster that interest.

So, often, it's children of drummers who become good drummers or children of Mbira players become good Mbira players. There's no formal apprentice program but, if you are motivated and stubborn and resilient, eventually somebody will really show you the ropes.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, like much of life.

Tony Perman:

Yeah. But I think about that when I teach Mbira in the United States, students enroll in my class and then I'm very patient with them and they have this hour and this day and this hour and this day. And maybe they're into it, maybe they just want the credit or something different to do but I'm catering to them because they're enrolled in my class. Whereas, if I were an Mbira player in Zimbabwe and my kids were interested or the neighbor kids were interested, I wouldn't really cater to them in that way until they really demonstrated that they were going to work.

Marshall Poe:

And then it would be worth your time.

Tony Perman:

Exactly, because it's not a paid position, usually. You're doing it out of both kindness and the desire to have the next generation also be able to do these things. People who teach the neighborhood kids how to play the drums aren't usually paid.

Marshall Poe:

No. No, they're not. No, they're not. Now, you talk in the book a lot about the meaning of these ceremonies and the music. Meaning is a very slippery word because things mean different things for different people. Can you talk a little better about what these ceremonies mean to the people who participate in them?

Tony Perman:

Yeah. As an ethnomusicologist, that's where my main questions are drawn, it's that question of what meaning is based on my conviction that music is deeply meaningful in lots of different ways for lots of different people. And so, what I'm trying to get at is how complex that simple question you just asked is, what this can mean. It's really complicated, it can mean all sorts of things. I don't know. The simplest way to answer is, the meaning is it has effects for people as they build towards the future that are built on the past. All these spirits come from different time periods and from the past and those spirits use their experience and often the traumatic events that led to their deaths prior to becoming spirits to help the living prepare for a better future spiritually, socially, politically.

It can be so much like helping bring rain or making sure childbirth is successful or that their crops work. It could be tangible like that but it could also be more intangible of ensuring healthy social relations among the living and between the living and the dead and between different communities of the dead, all of which really emerges in the here and now. The doing of the music and the playing and the dancing and the communing, the success of that moment is what helps ensure that the future will be good or better and that the past was worth it and has some effect on [inaudible 00:33:47].

Marshall Poe:

It was worth it, that's right, yeah. So, it has a instrumental value in the sense of, I'm thinking in the Christian context again, pray for this and you might get that. I was always told not to do that but …

Tony Perman:

No, there is an instrumental component to it but I think that's maybe a secondary motivation. The main, I think, motivation is nurturing healthy relationships between people but also between people and their spirits. Because these spirits, the madhlozi spirits I'm describing, they're not the only ones. There's also a god and there's also the ancestors and there's more powerful spirits but these spirits protect those spirits. I had a friend who was one of my main interlocutors who worked for the government, so he thought about things in government metaphors and he's like, "The spirits are like parliament in a way. You as constituents go to them with your troubles and they might talk to the presidents, the spirits might talk to God but you need to have a healthy relationship with your representatives so that they will represent you."

So, you want to keep them happy. What makes the spirits happiest is dancing. So, you have a ceremony, you invite them, give them an opportunity to dance and hang out with their friends because it's always multiple spirits at the same time. Sort of a you scratch my back, I scratch yours. You make the spirits happy, they'll protect your ancestors and try and make your life a little better.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. So, we talked a little bit about how music is an emotional experience. What kind of affects, plural, do you see at these? Do people cry? Do people laugh? What did they do?

Tony Perman:

Yes, all of the above. It really depends on what led you to have a ceremony, it depends on the circumstances of your life. In chapter five, I write about this guy, he prepared to have a ceremony for a long time but, right before the ceremony, a member of his family died which is a very sad event. And typically, when you're grieving in this period of bereavement, you don't play music, you don't play drums, you have silence as out of respect. But he'd also put a lot of money into preparing for this ceremony in a moment of real hardship and poverty and he knew he couldn't do it again anytime soon so he was really caught.

So, he did it anyway and some people at that event were super joyous and having fun because they got to dance and play and be with the spirits and be with each other, it's like a party. So, they were laughing and there were good musicians at this ceremony so it was really good. So, that just generates all this positive affect but he was grieving and crying because he knew he was actually being disrespectful and he was hoping he could have it both ways but he failed. And so, he knew he was going to have to have another ceremony, which would cost more money, mostly to apologize for having this one because it was seen as disrespectful. And other people could be crying because they could be remembering the spirit who died, who might be emerging in some other context.

So, that's one reason I find this music so fun to write about and talk to people about and do is it's not like there's happy music in major keys that you know everybody's going to be happy when they hear it or sad music that is accompanied with, I don't know, sad movies and it's in minor and slow, you know everybody's going to cry-

Marshall Poe:

Right, Leonard Cohen stuff.

Tony Perman:

Yeah. The same song can engender a broad range of affective responses depending on the circumstances of the performer and the listener and the moment it's being played. I think it's super cool, I think it's-

Marshall Poe:

Well, that happened to me the other day. While I was walking down the street, I was coming back from the gym and this song just appeared and I knew that I was in a kind of emotional state. I knew that I was and then the song showed up and I was like, "Wow." On another day and another time, it would've done that but, at that moment, yeah, it did it.

Tony Perman:

And what I really appreciate about people at the ceremonies is they're openness to those experiences. They're open to going in a trance or they're open to crying in public or they're open to just being moved in ways that maybe I'm not. I'm-

Marshall Poe:

Right.

Tony Perman:

… Midwestern about the whole thing.

Marshall Poe:

Well, actually, I have two more questions. One is, these are exhausting experiences, do you have a hangover after you're done with them? Do you have to recover for a day after you've …

Tony Perman:

I do.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah?

Tony Perman:

I was often surprised at how some people didn't seem to because, some ceremonies, the really serious ones in moments of real turmoil could go around for two days or longer. So, yes, they're exhausting, you sleep when you can. If somebody drove to the ceremony, might sneak out at 2:00 in the morning and go sleep for an hour or two and then come back, something like that. Then the next day, at least for me often, I'll go to bed at 10:00 in the morning and then just have a fitful day or two of sleeping and weird times. It's more like being jet lagged but it's so invigorating if it goes well that you can recover pretty quickly because it's just really-

Marshall Poe:

Mm-hmm. Sure, sure, sure.

Tony Perman:

… really fun.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. And then my final question is, I don't know if it's a question, it's more of a proposition. I don't think we have this in American life, do we?

Tony Perman:

Well, I think we do. Some people do but not very many. And I think it's something that's really been lost whether you want to blame capitalism or, I don't know, I don't want to go there, [inaudible 00:39:49].

Marshall Poe:

I don't know who you'd blame but I won't.

Tony Perman:

There are spaces, like some churches really celebrate the worship experience and use music to really generate these kinds of euphoric or ecstatic experience.

Marshall Poe:

Mm-hmm. Ecstatic experiences, yeah.

Tony Perman:

I think some pop music like raves.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that's a good point.

Tony Perman:

There's some kinds of jam bands, they're really about generating those shared in the moment experiences. There's some kinds of old time music, I don't know if you ever go to contra dances, those are really about in the moment experiences. They don't commodify very well and it's hard to [inaudible 00:40:24]-

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, they don't.

Tony Perman:

So, they happen but they're behind the scenes and they're not on Spotify. You can't buy these experiences, you have to work at them. So, I think they exist all over the world but some places have been better about nurturing them and just really foregrounding them and some places, maybe like the US, neglect them a little bit.

Marshall Poe:

You make a very good point about the difficulty of commodifying these experiences because, in the United States, things tend to continue if they can be paid for or if people are willing to donate their time for them. And if they can't be paid for and people won't donate their time to them, then they're not going to happen and you're in [inaudible 00:41:04] Netflix.

Tony Perman:

Well, what happens, they might happen out of sight. I think there's a lot of musical experiences that are comparable, they're not on the radio, you just don't see them. So, you have to be related to somebody who does them, who teaches you how to do them and then you might do them but nobody around you might even know it.

Marshall Poe:

Right, right. The one place where they are commodified and that is the jam band experience. When I was young, I used to go see the Grateful Dead, I've never seen Phish but I know that people get very into that and I had some experiences at rock concerts, I can say that.

Tony Perman:

And I think people who aren't Deadheads or Phishheads might ridicule those experiences or not understand them.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that's lame. Yeah.

Tony Perman:

But I think those have the same power because-

Marshall Poe:

They definitely do. They absolutely do.

Tony Perman:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Tony Perman:

And healthy.

Marshall Poe:

They're healthy and they're fun.

Tony Perman:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

I'm too old to do it now.

Tony Perman:

Fun is key.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Tony Perman:

Fun is key. I think the ceremonies wouldn't survive in the same way if people just didn't have a really good time. They're serious, the dead visit, the spirits are there, they have consequences but they're really fun and that's why people-

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, they are totally fun. Yeah, no, I agree with you completely, that's great. Well, Tony, thank you very much for speaking with us today.

Tony Perman:

Oh, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something I spent so long on.

Marshall Poe:

Okay, all right. Take care.

Tony Perman:

All right. Thanks, bye.

Listen to more episodes of the Grinnell College Authors and Artists Podcast.