The art music of Haiti has remained a relatively untapped field with regard to critical study and concert performance, and Largey’s excellent new book, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism, should generate considerable interest, especially in the community of Latin American and Caribbean musicologists. Largey, an associate professor of musicology at Michigan State University, is also the co-author of Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (1995, rev. 2006), which has earned wide esteem among scholars.

Vodou Nation concentrates on the historical, political, cultural, and racial dynamics affecting artistic musical production and reception in Haiti from the end of the nineteenth century to the early 1950s and on the group of composers who sought a national musical style. At the origin and center of this quest lies the tension between the mulatto elite (lelit milat in Creole or Kréyol), who struggled to uphold ties with French culture, and the peasant blacks, or nwa (noirs), former slaves who maintained religious and musical practices of African origin in the tradition of Dahomey, which we now term Vodou.

Largey focuses on the progress of art music or mizik savant ayisien originating from the mouvement indigène or mouvement folklorique, a constellation of ideas conceptualized by the eminent Haitian intellectual Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969), which, as a reaction to the invasion of Haiti by the United States in 1915, proposed a national culture and musical aesthetic. As Largey defines it, musical nationalism had a precursor in composer and band leader Occide Jeanty (1860–1936), prototypical proponents in Ludovic Lamothe (1882–1953) and Justin Elie (1883–1931), and a modern representative in the German-Haitian ethnographer and composer Werner Jaegerhuber (1900–1953). Their efforts are examined not only in the context of internal socio-political dynamics, but also in comparison to contemporary Pan-African ideologies sponsored by black intellectuals in the U.S., and against the backdrop of North-American commercial musical enterprises exploiting a desire for exoticism by naïve and condescendingly racist audiences.

The book opens with an introduction defining the crucial issues affecting Haitian art music and proceeds more or less historically through the stages of development of the nationalist style. In colonial times Haiti had a reputation as a center for European music. (The influence on Cuban music exerted by black Haitian musicians exiled after the slave rebellion of 1791 has been well documented.) After the Revolution of 1804, the country, with pride of place as the first black republic in the world, founded the Ecole National de Musique in 1860. Largey immediately addresses a central issue affecting Haitian mizic savant ayisien, namely the perceived conflict between an intent towards higher artistic values (defined by Price-Mars as moral purpose, superior technique, and perfected beauty) and the vehicle for these goals, an inherited European art music model, with its deliberate separation of art and popular musics. Of course, in the case of Haiti, popular music is also black music laced with the forbidden contents of Vodou.

The first chapter, “The Politics of Musical Ethnography,” develops the ideas of Jean Price-Mars, who under Largey’s examination appears as a towering polymath comparable in his overarching social influence to the Brazilian Mario de Andrade (1893–1945) and, more controversially, the Mexican José Vasconcelos (1882–1959). Price-Mars equated the maturity of the nation with a rejection of cultural imperialism through the search for a true Haitian identity in folklore. In so doing, Price-Mars addressed multiple aspects of Haitian culture and society. Although a member of the elite himself, Price-Mars sought to overcome the elite’s preoccupations with internal variations of race and color to reach an embracing national identity. Consequently, the mizik savant ayisyen needed to assimilate Vodou to claim any national authenticity.

Through the succeeding chapters Largey points out how the best-known composers of mizik savant sought to create beautiful and viable music through selectively appropriating Vodou musical materials, decontextualizing them, and suppressing those which suggested ideas in conflict with elite values. Largey maintains a dispassionate and balanced account of how the composers juggled the political advantage of using music to display rebellion against succeeding German and American imperialistic designs, the assimilation of Vodou elements without disturbing the elite bourgeois sensibilities, and the professional limitations imposed by a small Haitian market and a racist international circuit.

What emerges is a fascinating demonstration of how successfully the European art music paradigm was transplanted to the colonies and the dichotomy that arises when colonial art music purportedly expressing universal values confronts a reception at the metropolis ruled by local, uninformed, and frequently racist perspectives. (In the white North-American and European spheres, Latin American composers succeeded when they provided an exotic experience to the white listener. This repeats itself to this day.) Largey’s examination of the cases of Lamothe and Elie deserves to be expanded to deal with the whole of the Latin American region through the twentieth century.

Lamothe and Elie pursued creative paths parallel to those of European composers like Chopin or Liszt, through salon piano genres original to their culture such as the meringue and the contradanza, which they sought to elevate to high artistic refinement. Largey reflects on the issue by inserting the opinions of Carl Dalhaus, who qualified dance music as trivial due to the absence of necessary formal amplitude and development. Largey correctly points out the permeability between art and popular music in the Haitian salon and the value inherent in such permeability. It is only very recently that the postmodern musicological approach subscribed to by Largey can evaluate the artistic products of Latin American and Caribbean countries, especially those with a substantial black musical culture. For example, he makes a particularly successful use of the concepts of “recombinant mythology” to understand the role of Occide Jeanty as a precursor of musical nationalism in Haiti, and he defines Jeanty’s understanding of musical nationalism with commendable clarity.

Unavoidably, a music professional will wish to have a sense of the music itself. A piece of art music will mirror not only the composer’s cultural, social, and political circumstances, but also his or her personal reaction conveyed in musical values. Largey does include some score segments, and he points to peculiarities such as the quintolet and the alternation of 2/4 and 5/8 meters. Summary performances of these segments suggest that the included Haitian composers had uncanny melodic sense and rhythmic elegance. Still, Largey barely touches on the musical style and the musical symbolisms embedded in the artistic choices of the composers. A second stage in the study of Haitian art music is warranted, for even with all its accomplishments Vodou Nation is barely an introduction to a very complex problem. Equally, although usually not expected in a book of this nature, a bibliography of scores and recordings separate from what appears in the general bibliography would have been most useful for performers and critics who will view this book as a first guide to the achievements of Haitian art music.

Largey also deviates from the ostensible subject matter midway through the book to address the representation of Haiti in operas by black American composers. This disgression undoubtedly can be extrapolated to shed light on the black Atlantic identity and its reception, but it does not address Haitian art music per se. Later on, the chapter on Werner Jaegerhuber deals mostly with his quest to document Haitian musical folklore, and how his method may or may not have represented authentic Vodou expressions. Meanwhile, Largey neglects to observe in any depth how the work of a modern ethnographer like Jaegerhuber transferred to his artistic compositions. Jaegerhuber’s intriguing life and professional decisions give him a persona comparable to that of Béla Bartók, and the reader will wonder what the artistic results actually were. Having said this, without these contextual matrices, no eventual analysis of the music will make any sense or offer any depth. In this respect, Largey’s book will prove invaluable to scholars and performers seeking to understand the internal workings of the compositions.

Tantalizing contextual questions arise but remain unresolved in the book. Perhaps Largey trusts the reader will seek answers elsewhere, even in his previous writings. He does not develop the relationship of the Haitian meringue with the Dominican and Venezuelan merengues, which could reveal the nature of the music exchanges between Haiti and other nations of the Caribbean basin. The Dominican and Venezuelan forms show musical similarities but also critical differences with the Haitian meringue. The same can be said of the relationship between the meringue and the Cuban contradanza and danzón. Lineage and originality in the Haitian contributions to these genres within the national identity remain enigmatic without this information.

Largey makes virtually no reference to any potential musical relationship between Haiti and that other near by, originally French colony, Louisiana, or to the impact someone such as New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (partially of Haitian descent) may have had in developing models for the studied composers. Nonetheless, these observations are not leveled against the book, but arise as a testament to the spectacular cultural wealth of Haiti and the whole Caribbean basin, and the tangled cultural relationships between European, North American, indigenous, and African threads.

Notwithstanding these omissions, Vodou Nation stands as a superior achievement. The book gives credence to many Haitian intellectuals who have defended Haiti’s pioneering political and cultural position in the world. It reveals Haitian art music as a rich field of negotiation between cultural and racial polarities in a quest for national identity, and it tests the fruitfulness of specific analytical tools for understanding the music of the Caribbean and the Americas as a whole. The old controversy among art music professionals is whether “musical quality” can stand separately from its context while being informed by the context’s cultural symbols. Art of great intrinsic quality may not be read correctly by an antagonistic audience, or perhaps art has no perceivable quality beyond the reception of an understanding audience. This reception may be fluid, dependent on historical time, location, and favorable scholarship. Haiti provides an ideal case study of artistic genres arising from communities affected by economic, political, and racial subordination. In carefully analyzing the circumstances surrounding the creation of art music in Haiti, Largey has also summarized important concepts for approaching a sympathetic reception of this music. In so doing, the book supports an argument for the reunification of ethnomusicology and musicology departments everywhere, and for the study of traditional musics as part of any art music curriculum. Vodou Nation is heartily recommended.

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[Review length: 1734 words • Review posted on November 21, 2006]