How to Lament: The Book
How to Lament: A Guide for Musicians (google doc)
It’s funky and a little clunky, but it’s close enough that you’ll get the gist.
It stems from a simple idea: Some important musical genres in the 19th and early 20th centuries had direct contact with the old ritual lament, which left important traces on them. But which genres and which lament? And where did they all go?
There ain’t a lick of original research in this, for better or worse. As usual, I just took the work of fields who don’t usually talk to each other and smashed them together the best I could.
The book is really for musicians who, like me, were born too late to have any real contact with the old ritual lament. For many of us therefore, lament often lingers as an increasingly marginal counter-tradition. In klezmer, for example, the more free-form lament-y pieces like the kale-bazetsn and the doina, once considered the pinnacle of the craft, have faded in popularity as compared to the dance tunes. We just don’t know what to do with them anymore.
In the example of old-time music, it gets a little more complicated. The old free-form hollers are, like lament, lone gone, but the lament was mostly carried, as it is in many traditions, via the music of “others.” This once played an important role in preserving the lament’s subversive ethos. For better or worse, this “borrowing”, or stealing, gets complicated real quick and requires untangling to “hear”.
When we re-hear the lament, traditions become three dimensional and this gives us a chance to see our how our current ideas of “traditional” are insufficient. But instead of just declaring that “Everything we know is wrong” and flattening everything out in a po-mo kind of way, we can actually do the opposite- see how we are still very much caught in history, still trapped in the contradictions of the multiple traditions that we’ve inherited. We are still in history every bit as much as Naftule Brandwein or Tommy Jarrell was.
I include practical tips at the end that suggest how we can use lament to be more convivial and to cross boundaries without falling into commercial traps of self-expression. But of course “How to” is kind of provocative. It’s really about how to hear lament, in the hopes that the rest of it will take care of it itself from there.
And of course, there’s all kinds of the wacky bullshit that I love in there too.
Its still rough, citations are a mess, I need to add a bibliography as well as an entire appendix of songs that go nowhere but there is no real professional or monetary value to this endeavour, so the real goal is just to get the ideas out there and this book, umm, google doc, will get you there.
I’m no delicate flower, so please let me know where I goofed and help me make it better. Extra points if you can convince me its fatally flawed so I can throw it in the gar-bage once and for all and move on with my life.
One more thing: It isn’t lost on me that while writing this I often saw laments every night on the news. Does it feel a little crass to write about this as “a guide for musicians” during a time of such misery? Yes, it does. In my defense, the lament is not presented, as it often is, as a mere bauble that you can add to give your music a little local flavor. I tried to show how the lament’s history has been deeply entwined with our oldest ideas about nationalism and identity, and how grappling with it might give us, just maybe, a clue to a way out of that habit of thinking. As usual, Baldwin said it better:
“Americans cannot face reality, the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
James Baldwin