The tiny island of Carriacou in the southeastern Caribbean has long attracted the attention of anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists. Researchers have been particularly intrigued by the island’s Big Drum Nation Dances, a ritual music/dance complex that involves the honoring of ancestors associated with various African peoples or “nations.” In focusing on string bands in Carriacou, Rebecca S. Miller reveals dimensions of this island’s music culture that have received relatively little discussion to date. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2001, her study is a finely crafted ethnography of a variety of string band and vocal traditions that are rooted in community life and staged in an annual Parang Festival.
One of the greatest strengths of this study is Miller’s skill in examining contemporary musical practice in the context of Carriacou’s distinct history. With a current population of approximately 6000, Carriacou is a dependency of the nearby larger island of Grenada. For more than a century and a half, limited economic opportunities have forced many people to migrate in search of work, and this pattern of emigration, along with such disasters as Hurricane Janet (1955), has seriously affected the continuity of the island’s musical traditions. However, there have also been successful efforts of revival, such as the initiatives of the Marxist People’s Revolutionary Government, which administered Grenada and its dependencies from 1979 until the United States invasion in 1983.
Miller structures her book around the Parang Festival, which is held every year in the main village of Hillsborough on the weekend before Christmas. This event was established in 1977 by a Carriacouan benevolent association which, after the 1979 revolution, called itself the Mount Royal Progressive Youth Movement. In creating the festival, the association aimed to provide an island-wide forum for local expressive culture and to use the event’s proceeds for charitable causes, in keeping with the value of mutual aid in Carriacou. During the festival, musical groups from different villages participate in competitions, which formalize traditional inter-village rivalries.
On the opening Friday night of the festival, there is often a non-competitive performance by a quadrille group from the village of L’Esterre. Miller uses this appearance to present an excellent analysis of the quadrille, a set dance that originated in France during the late eighteenth century and developed as a creolized genre in various forms throughout the Caribbean. Along with tracing European- and African-derived elements in the Carriacouan quadrille, Miller discusses the islanders’ “cultural ambivalence” toward the genre. While some Carriacouans (especially older members of the community) perceive the quadrille as an integral part of local culture, others associate it with European colonialism. From 1989 to 2000, the Friday night of the Parang Festival also featured a competition between a cappella vocal ensembles called “Hosannah bands.” Miller examines how festival organizers attempted to revive this Christmas serenading tradition but implemented judging criteria that emphasized a polished church choir sound, in conflict with the local aesthetics of the practitioners.
Miller devotes the bulk of her study to the Sunday night string band competition, the highlight of the Parang Festival. Due in part to the success of the festival since the 1970s, string band music is a central part of community life in Carriacou, performed throughout the year in rums shops, at home parties, and during other occasions. Bands with such instruments as the violin, guitar, cuatro, banjo, triangle, chac-chacs (maracas), and a barrel bass drum play a wide range of genres, including local “break-aways,” waltzes, polkas, calypsos, and American country western songs and popular tunes. Miller offers accounts of string band performances at an anniversary fete and a Christmas serenade before examining the Sunday night competition itself. At the festival, some ten bands from throughout the island compete by playing both a “test piece” (usually a Christmas carol) and “choice piece,” which consists of a preliminary song and the much-awaited lavway or melée. Lavways are composed by the bands and, generally through indirect references, offer witty commentary on indiscretions committed by members of the community during the past year. Miller suggests that these performances serve as a form of social control, but in a manner that is ultimately accepting of human frailty and that reinforces community bonds. She also argues that diverse musical elements of the performances articulate a postcolonial Carriacouan identity that affirms both local cultural roots and a sense of belonging to the wider Caribbean.
Carriacou’s musical relationship to the larger Caribbean is, in fact, a key aspect of this study. Since the 1990s, there has been a tremendous output of monographs on specific forms of Caribbean music. An important challenge in this scholarship at present is to address more fully the myriad interconnections of musical forms in different parts of the Caribbean. Miller contributes to this discussion with comments on string bands elsewhere in the region, particularly in Trinidad. Trinidad’s string band tradition is derived largely from the immigration of Venezuelans during the nineteenth century and today is associated mainly with parang, a genre consisting of traditional Spanish-language Christmas songs. Miller suggests that string band serenading may have been imported from Trinidad through Carriacouan migration, but also notes direct connections between Carriacou and Venezuela via migration and radio broadcasts. Though Carriacou’s Parang Festival is modeled on Trinidad’s annual parang competition, its songs are sung in English Creole to music that differs from that of Trinidad—a distinction that Carriacouans often emphasize.
Miller’s ethnographic precision, her experience of performing with a variety of musicians in Carriacou, and her detailed musical transcriptions and analyses enable her to capture the complexity of musical form and meaning in this island community. Moreover, her enthusiasm for her subject matter and her crystal-clear prose will make the book a pleasure for students and general readers, as well as specialists. This study is highly recommended for anyone interested in Caribbean music, string bands, or music revivals.
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[Review length: 970 words • Review posted on May 22, 2008]