Presentation Imposes a Participatory Star

It is almost jarring to hear that a concept as natural at least to English speakers as music is not agreed upon by everyone. However, this discrepancy barely scratches the surface of concepts we take for granted that are foreign to many other parts of the world. In our assumption that our sense of music is the same as everyone else’s, we inevitably impose other music-related concepts on the same people with whom we hardly agree on the meaning of the subject in question. To most Westerners, the concept of music implies entertainment that stems primarily from an artist with a degree of virtuosity. Subsequently, every entertainer not only deserves but requires a spotlight under which to exhibit their talent. Music, in the predominantly Western sense, is an exhibition.

In addition to audience expectations for the performer, the audience has expectations for each other that are typically shared by the performer. A certain level of audience education is lauded with regard to audience decorum. This can range from refraining from talking on the phone during the performance or walking in front of the stage once the show has started to recognition that it is gauche to clap between movements at an orchestra concert. The pettier and more specific the rule, the more important it is to the most elite members of the audience. By knowing not to clap between the movements of a symphony, listeners demonstrate their possession of the skill that it requires just to receive the entertainment that is being provided. Furthermore, yet more privately, listeners automatically search for who they consider the most dominant player worthy of being listened to. However subconscious, there is a strict set of rules that accompany the sense of a concert that do not necessarily work with every type of music.

To return to the ostensible ambiguity of the term music, it is inevitable that people whose concepts of music diverge from ours will have entirely different concepts of how music should be listened to, or even if listening should be its primary response. While the sense of music that Westerners tend to accept is heavily presentational in nature, participatory music thrives outside the scope of most of our awarenesses. Our dependence upon a central figure in the performance inherently misses the inclusivity of participatory music. If, for example, a Zimbabwean mbira ensemble were brought to a stage, audiences expecting the sound of the mbira to come across the most might be disappointed to find out that the shekere took over. Concert sound might be inclined to boost the volume of the mbiras as much as possible. Furthermore, it is not typical for audiences to participate in concerts, yet dancing, clapping, and additional forms of expression are encouraged in participatory music. The absence of such aspects of the music removes the traditional sense of participation and puts it further towards the Western concept of presentation.

How do we reconcile expectations and cultural differences when people claim to want nothing more than authenticity? Are they really requiring their concept of authenticity, which has been framed by their own cultural constraints? Where is the line between authenticity and high-fidelity performance, and do listeners know the difference?

Luaka Bop

Legend has it that the name of this record label is as spur-of-the-moment as its history. Created in 1988 by David Byrne, Luaka Bop supposedly refers to a kind of Sri Lankan tea from the distributor, Luaka, called Broken Orange Pekoe. In an interview with David Byrne on the Official Luaka Bop website, he says that “the first concept was no concept” and that the only thing he knew was that he would be producing a lot of Brazilian music. Although his primary concern at the beginning was to produce music that resonated with him but felt was underrepresented or underappreciated by the American audiences he had become so familiar with through his work with the new wave scene, the label quickly expanded beyond its Brazilian foundations. The very first album produced by Luaka Bop, Brazilian Classics 1: Beleza Tropical, was an immediate bestseller, featuring artists from Gal Costa and Gilberto Gil to Caetano Veloso and Milton Nascimento. After producing a series of five or six Brazil-centric albums, though, Byrne began to take in Cuban music. After a wave of Cuban music, Luaka Bop expanded its horizons even further to South Indian music, French music, and AfroPean music, producing some of its best-listened to artists.

Among the prominent artists of Luaka Bop are Tom Ze, who has reached #44 on Billboard; Zap Mama, whose 2004 album, Ancestry in Progress, reached #1 on Billboard’s World Music charts, Os Mutantes, and Susana Baca, who has won two Grammies. Luaka Bop’s artists frequently score high on the Billboard charts and have a wide audience. More recently, the label has produced more new wave bands originating in the United States, such as Delicate Steve, who has reached #4 on Billboard.

Fittingly, the record label is housed in one of the epicenters of Manhattan’s music scene in Greenwich Village. The diversity of New York City is thoroughly represented in the records Luaka Bop has produced, not exclusively in terms of geographic identity, but in musical style, as well. Although its records are typically heavily electronically influenced, like Delicate Steve, Os Mutantes, or Tom Ze, there are a fair share of acoustic items that appear on its albums. Additionally, while the record label started out as a way to publish compilations that represent as diverse a range of sounds produced by a geographic region as possible, several albums have been produced that feature one artist or group.

Zap Mama is one artist who has published almost exclusively with Luaka Bop. Although she has the occasional acoustic piece, most of her music is heavily electronically influenced, like her song “Rafiki: DNA Remix” off her 1999 album, A Ma Zone.

Similarly, Tom Zé, who has also produced many records through Luaka Bop, has a very electronically influenced style, as demonstrated by his song, “Defeito 1: Gene”.

In contrast, Luaka Bop’s 2002 album, Cuisine Non-Stop, boasts a largely acoustic sound that represents a trend of French music in the early aughts to explore its roots. Lo’Jo, a French folk band with heavy North African influence, kicks off the album with their song, “Baji Larabat”.

The album continues to feature a Parisian comical singer-songwriter band, La Tordue, and a slew of French bands who embrace French folk music in different ways.

In his creation of Luaka Bop, David Byrne probably did not foresee the breadth of his publications, but he has managed to produce a fascinating, captivating, diverse range of music that has proven to hook the listener. It is difficult to pinpoint one particular genre or place in the world that Byrne has focused on signing, but perhaps that should shed light on the complexity of a category such as “world music”. In publishing such a wide variety of styles, Luaka Bop manages not only to win the adoration of its audiences but to make a statement about how much this world has to offer.

O Brasil: Festa Brasileira!

Walking into Hales, the most glaringly obvious absence in presentation was the decoration so scant it was almost imperceptible. Judging only from various comments made by the hosts of the event, the idea was to try to somehow reconstruct a Brazilian Carnaval. However, the gaping unfriendliness of Hales was hardly made welcoming, which definitely altered the reception of the event from the guests’ perspective. Had we been greeted with more bright colors and a setting that didn’t quite evoke memories of uncomfortable middle school dances, we might have been less timid dancers.

That said, there was music playing every second from when I arrived a bit before 8:00 to after I left at about 9:30. What lack of visual decoration there was was made up for by the energy of the musicians, the dedication of the hosts, and the vitality of the dancers. Seeing our reservations, the dancers consistently encouraged us to come closer, reassuring us essentially that there were no mistakes as long as we were moving. I arrived wanting to learn how to move to the music and left feeling more than satisfied with what had been so eagerly taught to me.

Feeling the syncopation of the music in person was much more real than listening to a recording. Since I have been dancing for so much of my life, perhaps my most effective and immediate method of attempting to understand music is figuring out how to move to it. By teaching the dance moves in such a way that exclusive partners were not required to participate, everyone had an equal chance of enjoying him or herself.

In terms of participation, it was difficult to discern the level of intimacy between the musicians, but the dancers created an environment that was highly encouraging of dancing with others. A huge part of the reason why I enjoyed the event so much was because I was learning from experience and thus laughing off mistakes with a group of people I already considered my friends as well as acquaintances with whom our degree of mutual familiarity was easily forgotten. In a similar vein, it was fun and somehow comforting to see that most of the attendees were some sort of combination of musicians and dancers. People generally knew how to clap along to the beat and feed off each other’s rhythmically accurate dance moves.

One of my favorite moments of the night was when a student accidentally became the leader of a dance routine he was partially recalling from our lesson before the event and partially making up. The group started with maybe five or six people, but quickly grew to somewhere between fifteen and twenty. Although looking around I only recognized a handful of people participating in this dance, it felt like teamwork. Due to a combination of these kinds of highly participatory moments and wonderful music, I had a fantastic time attending O Brasil’s Samba Workshop.

Sauti Sol – “Soma Kijana”: A Study of High Fidelity Recording

Just moments after hitting the play button, the listener is greeted warmly by mellow vocal harmonies playing off upbeat percussion and two guitars. Right away, an image of a band is firmly established. Furthermore, the positive tone of the song enhances a sense of intimacy among the members of the band, elaborating on their image as a group to cement them as friends who have fun together when they play music. By the end of the song, the singers challenge themselves to take the song further and further to the limits of their uppermost vocal ranges, causing an uproar of whistling, ululation, inventive noises of the mouth, imitations of chimpanzees, and bouts of laughter. Finally, once the song itself is over, the recording provides a continuation of the antics but without musical accompaniment. The band talks, laughs, and continues to make silly noises.

In addition to touchingly relatable moments of academic shenanigans, the song’s music video features clips of the band playing as a group with the singers all in a line as well as them smiling and dancing. As predicted by the audio recording of the song, as the vocals get more energetic, the band gets progressively sillier.

One of the most crucial elements of high fidelity music recording is the goal of making the recording aspect “invisible”. In other words, although the listener obviously knows that he or she is not observing a live performance, it is a distinct possibility that a live performance could sound exactly like the recording. Furthermore, musical and social cues in the recording prompt mental images of the band performing. Listening to a song like Sauti Sol’s “Soma Kijana” is highly conducive to such mental images, which are only reinforced by the music video. Furthermore, because recordings establish a degree of permanence to what has been recorded, it is not always intuitive to hear sounds that people make in real life in that context. The silly sounds that Sauti Sol makes are more indicative of a real life setting because they add a spontaneity that does not usually exist in recordings. Because of an overall air of participation, resulting intimacy between the band members, and the potential naturalness of their antics, Sauti Sol’s “Soma Kijana” is a prime example of high fidelity recording.

Afro-Brazilian Candomblé as Compared to Shona Bira

Looking at two rituals involving summoning of spirits through music and dance, both of which are fundamentally African, one would expect very similar ceremonies. However, despite the African commonality between Brazilian candomblé and Zimbabwean Shona bira, the ostensible similarity between the two ceremonies is purely on the surface. Candomblé is based on belief systems from a part of Africa that is nowhere near where the Shona live. Although the candomblé ritual of Brazil is largely modeled on African belief systems and rituals, the geographic distance between Western/Central Africa and the southeast African home to the Shona creates some crucial differences between the two rituals.

Perhaps the central element of both ceremonies is the idea of contacting spirits. While the Shona bira is focused around contacting deceased ancestors, typically for social guidance and counseling through the possession of a medium, the Afro-Brazilian candomblé involves contacting orixás, or African deities, and is less about open communication with the spirits than it is about musically facilitated communal worship. A bira might be held in order to seek counseling for a social rift in the community, but the strength of communitas present in candomblé is secondary to the individual worship of the contacted deities. In addition to seeking solutions that will ultimately benefit the community as a whole, the bira emphasizes a kind of personal connection that is not possible in the candomblé. Because only one medium is possessed during a bira ritual, the environment of lucid people is conducive to a high level of focus that encourages the formation of connections in the group whose stability is on the way to being renewed. Rhythmic or melodic interlocking, or the practice of finding individuals to complement musically, is the principal method of forming these connections. Participants seek others with whom to establish a musical relationship, which, at the climax, evokes profound feelings of intimacy and elation from a successful collaborative effort to produce something beautifully expressive.

Although also participatory in nature, participation in a Brazilian candomblé ritual is accomplished in a different manner. First of all, instead of there just being one person who is possessed, several participants may become possessed through the course of the event. While this possession proves to bring out a network of care in the non-possessed making sure that the possessed do not hurt themselves, the possession itself is an inherently individual activity that cannot be shared. However true it is that rhythmic relationships are established between participants of a candomblé, it is also key to note that the drumming is always performed exclusively by male experts, whereas the bira embraces neophytes and what they have to add to the mix as well as encourages female performers. It is these expert drummers in the candomblé ritual who have true control over the rhythms. They play with the rhythms among themselves. Similarly, where a real lead singer or sense of a lead performer is lacking in the Shona bira, there is a distinct lead singer in a candomblé who leads the call and response. Like the drummers, the singer has a level of expertise, considering he is usually the priest.

Nevertheless, the ceremonies do have their similarities. In addition to them both centering around the summoning of spirits, they are intrinsically musical in nature and place great value on participation. The candomblé is participatory in more than a musical and expressive sense; racial categories are minimized in the ritual, meaning that regardless of one’s race, one can partake and even be possessed. With regard to the summoned spirits, both rituals take to heart the personalities, likes, and dislikes of the one being summoned. In a bira, the deceased ancestor’s favorite type of music must be played, and in a candomblé, orixás are each associated with specific natural forces, foods, colors, musical preferences, and styles of dance. Additionally, they have their own personalities and sets of likes and dislikes that are all honored in the ceremony.

While the Shona bira and Afro-Brazilian candomblé have outward likenesses, further exploration into the values and practices within each ceremony reveals their crucial differences.

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

Juxtaposition of such imagery as flowers, barbed wire fences, and rickety train tracks offers a startlingly apt visual representation of the circumstances under which the blues, as a musical genre, was conceived in North America. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins was highly persistent in its usage of such imagery, from cheerful smiles of the toothless to train cars carving their way through a flower-spotted field where an encumbered boy went to seek solace from his troubles.

As keenly noted by Amiri Baraka in his writing on “Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz,” the more violent counterparts to the otherwise peaceful imagery carried deep musical significance in the inception of the blues. Perhaps one of the most important inspirations of and contributing factors to the beginnings of the blues was the idea of travel and movement which can be heard in the trudging blues beats. After a century of forced movement, African American people were finally given the illusion that their movement was their choice, as newly freed slaves spread themselves desperately around the country in search for new employment. Not only did this facilitate the branching out into several genres of blues among itinerant males who sang about being uprooted and their financial struggles; it meant that the women, who could easily find work as domestics or musicians in bars, initiated the standardization of the blues. In this strange new time, the blues provided a means by which African Americans could establish their identities and group identities within the larger picture of the daunting United States of America that seemed to solely be united around the common cause of shutting them out of the picture. For this reason, primitive blues very often expressed nightmarish recollections of slavery and the unjust. Lighnin’ Hopkins tells a story of a man having pulled over so as not to hit a pig in the road, getting stuck in the mud, and winding up being taken down to who he was told was the judge, but turned out to be nothing more than a butcher–a man who kills pigs for a living.

Interestingly enough, gender role stereotypes still bled into this highly unifying field. As argued by a singer in the movie, “Mahalia Jackson sang ” not like a powerful amazon of a woman, but “just like a man!” However, any separation within the genre did not take away from its quasi-holiness. Scant accompaniment of country blues song that intersperses highly expressive cries and moans throughout only places the singer closer to the divine and allows for a truly trancelike state of performance. Similarly, a harmonica player in The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins can be seen producing moans extraordinarily reminiscent of those produced by the human voice, which ties the genre to Indian classical music in an interesting and unexpected way, in that their sitar seeks to mimic the human voice seeing as it is considered the closest instrument to the divine realm. As Baraka points out, “Blues guitar was not the same as classical or ‘legitimate’ guitar: the strings had to make vocal sounds, to imitate the human voice and its eerie cacophonies.”

In relating the migratory aspect of the blues to the rawness of the human voice and the attempt to emulate that, the blues has a strong undertones of pilgrimage. A song in The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins begs an answer to, “How long it been since you’ve been home, children?” For Baraka, this pilgrimage might have been to Congo Square in New Orleans, which “was usually the only chance Negroes had to sing and play at length.”

Despite the fact that “the blues is hard to get acquainted with like death,” “you always hear it in your heart…that’s true blues.” (Quotes from The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins)

Konono N°1 – Paradiso

Not a second after I clicked play was I left to ponder the geographic region of origin of this piece. The instrument holding the melody sounded to me, at first, like a highly distorted mbira, but as the song went on and I thought about it more, it reminded me more and more of an electric guitar. At that point of over-thinking the instrumentation, the percussion entered only to further throw a wrench into the mix. Although I was uncertain of the exact timbre, I had been fairly certain that the piece was African because the original percussion in just the drum kit established a very clear soca beat right off the bat. However, addition of the whistle and eventually what, at least, sounded to me like a cowbell made me doubt the piece’s African origins and put it either someplace in the Caribbean or in Latin America. Ultimately, I decided that the rhythmic factor combined with what sounded like an mbira put the piece in Africa.

Rhythmically, the choice of a drum kit would suggest North American influence, but the beat itself has firm African and Caribbean roots. Since there are not even two rhythmic styles in question here, I would be hesitant to call it fusion. I would be less hesitant to call it syncretism, since the North American drum kit is not “native” to African music and nor are the cowbell or whistle, but I would be least hesitant to call it hybridity, since I do not really see the fusion of multiple styles but instead do see heavy influence from the Americas on the rhythm section.

In terms of the melody, the mbira is solidly an African instrument, but the element of distortion rings highly American or European punk to me. I was entirely unaware that there was such capability to distort an instrument as acoustic as an mbira. In this respect, I also see hybridity of punk and traditional West African music which features the kind of driving, circular melodies that I discussed in my banjo piece. Similarly to the rhythm factor, I am hesitant to consider this fusion because I would be unsure exactly what genre this combination produced. Nevertheless, I am significantly less hesitant to call this distortion syncretism, since while almost every type of music has a discernible rhythm section of some sort (even if that does not mean drums at all), distortion is a highly modernized effect that has only been employed by so many types of music. In other words, this distortion of such a traditional instrument seems far more out of place than a drum kit, since African music does feature drums, even if they are not drum kits.

Overall, I would call this piece a case of hybridity between African music and music from both North and South America.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony: A Review

“Music is something that would communicate to the people who otherwise would not understand.”
“It’s a prayer.”
“The thing that saved us was the music.”

While the connection between music and a word as strong and yet as vague as “power” may seem self-evident, this link could not have been better reinforced in the context of one of the most dynamic political movements the world has yet to see: South African Apartheid. In exploring the origins of the success of a movement that managed not only to reclaim equal footing but reassert political leverage after almost fifty years of racial domination over the vast majority, Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony recognized that it was imperative to delve into the vital role of music in unifying a people. As the documentary progresses, it becomes more and more evident that music was not just a reflection of the emotions and general dispositions towards the time period; black Africans during Apartheid harnessed the pride-inducing, symbolic, and most of all, unifying influences of music. Through emphasis on primary sources, crowds, and feet, Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony creates a thoroughly moving, uplifting documentary that inspired in me a desire to fight for justice.

The juxtaposition between historic video clips and current interviews wove together a story as cohesive and coherent as the body of people who created the history in the first place. While on one hand, viewers are able to visually comprehend the violence of attacks, hear the verbal attacks from white South Africans, and see at least some sort of reaction from other parts of the world, these blatant atrocities are complemented by perhaps more relatable interviews with first-hand observers who recount their memories of the time period. Furthermore, many of these interviewees are well-known cultural icons, such as Vusi Mahlasela, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela, who are also all, incidentally, musicians. Additionally, it was remarkable to see the continuity between the interpretations of each separate interviewee. It seemed that everyone knew the melody to every prominent song in the time period, if not the harmony as well. In that manner, music was clearly deeply engrained in everyone who felt any involvement at all in Apartheid. Likewise, although they each produce very different styles of music, Mahlasela, Makeba, and Masekela all underscored the invaluability and yet extreme vulnerability of language to a political movement–especially during a revolution. Throughout the domination process of Afrikaans, it was imperative for people to hold on to their native languages, from Zulu to Xhosa. Since music was already an integral part of the movement (and, even before that, because music is capable of making lasting impressions on people), it was largely up to musicians to retain these languages in the form of song.

Another, perhaps even more prominent, theme of the film is the crowd, which is tied to music through the rhythmic faculty of the feet. In nearly every scene where there was not a group of people united in song, dance, or listening to song, there were beautifully cinematic shots of feet either marching or jumping in unison. Consistently, choral music would play in the background, but these songs were relatively less forceful than the shots of the Toyi-Toyi during the march or the prisoners jumping up and down to the rhythm of a song they were singing. Although the mere act of singing with people is incredibly binding, it is not quite like tramping the earth at the same time and with the same force as tens of other people in the same situation. The significance of the earth component of marching or jumping was also illustrated in a music video of a group singing a song about ownership of the land, in which the group was featured in the middle of an empty, broad expanse. While the power of song tends to focus most on unifying people themselves, the added component of dance, march, and jumping introduces an element of permanence in the incorporation of pressing determination and drive into the earth.

By pinpointing such intricate details of invaluable aspects of the movement to end Apartheid and winding them together in an artful and personal manner, Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony manages to create a phenomenally inspiring film that, I think, is a necessary angle for fully understanding the energy and passion behind the movement that not only led to some sort of racial equality, but also the inauguration of a black South African into office shortly after the ending of the movement. Amandla! successfully captured and transferred the spirit of the revolution to its viewers.

A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke

Just three years before the release of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” another key figure in the music of the Civil Rights Movement published a revolutionary take on a classic love song. Etta James’s 1961 version of “At Last” (originally recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the early 1940s) quickly became symbolic of her as a performer, and although the iconic bluesy R&B hit retains its status as a love song, due to the circumstances, there might be good reason to believe that the “dream that I could speak to” James so passionately sang of meant more than just a love affair.

Intentional or not, the opening few bars of descending violins of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” evoke the same sighs of “we’ve been patient long enough” as Etta James’s rendition of an age-old song about a waiting game. Similarly, the timbre of those violins does have long-established associations with the expression of infatuation, perhaps with merely the idea of the change that is “gonna come.”

The addition of the lower strings to the violin melody, alone, introduces contrary motion and thus begins the filling out of the instrumental body to yield a richer, more confident sound. Come the trumpets, timpani, and introductory French horn, though, and the sound shifts to embody an altogether different connotation: one almost of regality and definitely of courage, determination, and leadership. While Etta James may have been swooning over a future scenario of integration and equality, Sam Cooke would have been gathering motivation to lead this revolution. Like any other revolution, unity played an integral part in strengthening morale and challenging the opposition to break a more solidified barrier. Musically, such unity caused by coordination stems primarily from the rhythm, and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” lays out a clear andante pace right from the very first line he sings. To have the very tempo marking fall under a category that literally translates to “walking” was probably no accident. Not only does Cooke lament having to “run ever since” he had been born, the simple act of walking was of fundamental significance in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Concretely, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 provoked African Americans to walk anywhere they could in order to protest the heartless and absurd racism of the bus companies. More generally, protesters marched for miles in their struggles to capture the attention of the less-United States of America.

Perhaps one of the most important lines to the message of the song is “It’s been a long time coming,” which emphasizes precisely the pent-up frustration of a waiting game as seen in many Civil Rights Era songs. Every time Cooke sings this line, he repeats long, but he also accentuates the word by making it the highest point in the melody of the line. Furthermore, the melody of the line, “It’s been too hard livin’, but I’m afraid to die,” rises to “livin'” and falls to “die,” illustrating Cooke’s sentiments on the matter. Also in that line, “die” is the only word that is melismatic, which gives it more of an extra-verbal sense of a sigh or a sob.

The trumpet backing of the lines, “I go to the movie, and I go downtown” has a similar effect as it did in the beginning: it evokes a sense of triumph for having taken such a risk. That it weakens with the line, ” somebody keep telling me don’t hang around,” symbolizes the power a statement of warning wields over the strength of even the most heroic of trumpets. Then, during the bridge, the tremolo of the strings resembles the tension and precariousness of the situation of an African American person willing to take the risk of standing up for him or herself. The tremolo gets stronger until the brother or friend refuses to take such a risk, and the descending strings following the verse represent the falling of spirits, further illustrated by Cooke’s cry out, leading into the final verse.

Nevertheless, the trumpets return in full gusto for the last verse, in which Cooke (the narrator) decides that “I think I’m able to carry on.” The final words of the song, “Oh, yes it will,” end it on a determined note that culminates with a powerful timpani roll and a bright, major chord played by the full, united orchestra.

Love Is All

Ever since I can remember, I have loved to sing, but until relatively recently, I was painfully shy. Somehow, as mostly all the other aspects of my timidness receded to the periphery, singing for other people has remained one of my most profoundly instilled fears. I have no problem singing with other people, but when it comes to singing alone, I freeze up.

Two summers ago, on my sixth year with my beloved summer camp, I got to spend a month in Peru with a small group of people who quickly became some of my closest friends. During the month, one of my counselors kept telling me that we would get hold of a guitar and have a sing-along, and while I expressed excitement, in reality, I was not feeling much more than dread. Nevertheless, be it for sentimentality or for altitude sickness, once we were settled into a circle on our final homestay of the trip, when the guitar was passed to me, I did something entirely unprecedented: I started to sing. The song was The Tallest Man on Earth’s “Love Is All,” which carried particular significance, considering this would be my last year attending my summer camp as a camper. After that night, hearing or singing “Love Is All” has not just inspired me to pine after my camp; it now symbolizes a significant turning point in my musical life.

Although the effects evoked by “Love Is All” include a slew of nostalgic, idyllic feelings about my summers at camp, the object I want to focus on is not my camp itself but the milestone of singing in front of an audience for one of the only times I can remember in my life. The sign is still the song, “Love Is All.” However, the surrounding semantic components have changed.

The effect of the sign whose object is my conquering a musical fear is a combined sense of accomplishment, embarrassment due to a residual fear of being observed artistically, and excitement from the sensory memory of the adrenaline rush when I was playing. In the frame of performing at camp, an icon could be the sound of an acoustic guitar. My camp is very music-oriented because it was founded during the 60s and has held on to the significance of folk music through the decades. Furthermore, The Tallest Man On Earth has a sound that is highly reminiscent of the minimalist folk movement of the 60s. Hearing an acoustic guitar automatically makes me think of my camp, and when I put an acoustic sound already reminiscent of The Tallest Man On Earth together with my camp, I intuitively remember “Love Is All.” In the frame of overcoming my fear specifically in Peru, an icon could be my sweater that I got in Cusco that I happened to be wearing when I was singing the song. When I look at that sweater, I immediately remember singing that song for my friends.

An index could be a sense of pride that comes along with listening to the song. In addition, when I think of endings to particularly enjoyable phases or events in my life, “Love Is All” sticks out as a song that represents those endings. Nevertheless, my feeling of accomplishment signifies a new beginning, so “Love Is All” manages to retain highly positive associations to me.