Made it!

Hey everybody,

I'm here! Everything went very smoothly during my travels here. Tremendously easy flights. I basically just walked through customs and was in my hotel room within an hour after stepping off the flight. Weird.

It's really funny being back to a place after having been away for two years. I end up just kind of stepping back into the pace of life here. Honestly, it feels really good. It's nice to know that I can get from point A to B without any troubles and know how to get decent cheap food. I was expecting this to be much more difficult, but here I am, just getting down to business.

I'm staying in the Asylum Down neighborhood of Accra... terrifying name for such a nice part of town. Getting back into Ghanaian food again, something I have missed over the past couple of years. Eating lots of fufu (paste of yams, cassava, plantains etc.) and banku with groundnut soup and fish. Just had a lunch of plantains with beans (called Red Red). Still working on perfecting my hand-eating skills as everybody seems to think that I'm doing it wrong, haha! I'm not sure if they're just shocked that a white person is eating fufu or if I actually have some work to do. All well. Fair enough. Makes for some funny conversations. The best part is that eating like this every day will cost me under 6 dollars a day!

I've run into a lot of people that I know from last time and it looks like this is not going to slow down. I've even started making some contacts with some of the people whom I hope to interview! This is a huge relief for me. I am confident that the "web" actually will open up. Last night I attended a "Night of Tributes and Songs" for a well-known and highly respected scholar on African music who passed away recently. Lots of brass band music, singing and spoken tributes. It was actually quite moving even though I had never met him and I got a number of additional ideas for how to go about my fieldwork. There will be many other events around his funeral over the next couple of days and I am hoping to attend a number of them. Might even end up heading out to the Volta Region this weekend.

It looks like I will end up staying with a family in Madina, near Legon, just north of Accra starting tomorrow. A number of people have been very helpful in getting me set up closer to the university where I hope to be doing a lot of my research. We'll see how this ends up working out, but I am hopeful. It also looks like I might be making the trip over to Cape Coast sometime during the middle of next week. Interviewing is about to begin and I get more and more excited as the time comes!! Time to nail down the final list of questions and make some basic interview plans (all of which will self-destruct of course... this is the nature of interviewing, but it's good to have a basic framework).

I kind of have the day off as there is not much in terms of fieldwork for me to be doing right now. Tomorrow there is a memorial service for the same scholar in Legon and I might make the early morning trek over there. Lots to figure out right now in terms of scheduling stuff and coordinating my plans around the funeral events, so I have quite a few calls to make today.

All things considered, things are going quite well. I can tell already that time is going to fly and before too long I will be headed home. No time to lose!!

Ok, off to buy a coke. I am pathetically dysfunctional without caffeine and there are definitely not any coffee shops around here (which is a good thing). That's all for now... Hope everybody is well.

Patrick

oh boy...

To be completely honest with you I'm a ball of nerves right now. Frankly I don't have any clue what is going to happen while in Ghana. It's a humbling experience getting ready to hop on a plane tomorrow without any certainty as to what I will find. I think that's a part of the deal though.

So many last minute questions. Am I really ready for fieldwork in another country by myself? What if I make a fatal error and all of my "participants" decide that they don't want to work with me? What right do I have to study Ghanaian art music? Only a handful of people actually know that I'm coming to meet with them. My hope is that from the contacts that I have a "web" of sorts will open up and I will be able to meet with many more. What if the web does not open up? What if I find myself "dead in the water" so to speak? These are some of the last minute questions running though my head, but I think that this is exactly the way that it's supposed to be. There is so much up in the air right now, but from talking with others this is just the way it goes. I know that something will happen, and something tells me that it will be good. Guess we'll find out soon enough, eh? I think that I've kind of forced myself to have these doubts just to balance HOW INCREDIBLY EXCITED I AM!!!

Amidst all of this there is some amazing news: Tomorrow is my last day in Edmonton for 9 weeks. Please don't take it personally Edmonton, but you are not my favorite place in the world. Forecast for Edmonton on Sunday: high of 47 degrees F with a mix of rain and SNOW. High in Accra, Ghana on Sunday: 92 degrees F with a chance of thunderstorms. Yep, I'll take that. : )

Patrick

One week till departure...

So, here we go one more time...

I thought that it would be a good idea to start up another blog to document my time in Ghana this summer. This is the space I will use to stay in touch with friends and loved ones while I am away over the next two months. Please contribute with comments and questions... after all this is a worthless endeavour "without a little help from your friends."

What in the #$@& am I doing? I have asked myself this question numerous times over the past few months. Well here's the basics and then we'll get into the hard stuff... after starting my MA program in ethnomusicology here at the University of Alberta I decided that I should base my thesis research upon West African art music. This general category of music peaked my interest last time I traveled to Ghana. After meeting a number of Ghanaian composers based around the University of Ghana in Legon in 2008 I was hooked.

Over the past two years I have learned about the origins of this music. West African art music came out of the Christian church as church leaders (missionaries and Africans) slowly learned that hymns in a European style didn't always work for their congregations and that indigenous music wasn't actually Satan embodied in rhythm. Composers began to integrate their "traditions" within their church compositions and wallah, West African Art Music (WAAM- I claim full responsibility for this acronym) was born. Over the past few months I have continued to look into WAAM and have become more and more interested in what this MUSIC DOES. Despite its undeniable origins in Western colonial missionary work I am intrigued about what it achieves in the context of modern West Africa for those who are involved in its composition and its performance. It is no longer always tied to the church and it has become something completely new. It is doing something today and judging from what I have learned I'm pretty sure that it is playing an important role in the lives of certain composers. All of this comes from a fundamental belief of mine: Music is important in this world of ours for what it DOES in our lives, not for how nice it sounds or how perfectly it is played. How does WAAM function in the lives of modern composers and performers? Where is it going and why?

I am intrigued by how a musical tradition that clearly originated as a Western phenomenon involving aggressive and culturally unconcerned colonial and missionary powers can be reconfigured to serve a specific purpose in the lives of those who were culturally oppressed. Now the tricky part is that nothing in this world of ours is unidirectional. Complex webs exist within issues like this and the road is never straight. There will be contradictions within those whom I speak with I want to map the complexity that surrounds this type of music, to show the ways that it has been used to assert various African (nationalistic, Pan-African and ethnic identities) as well as what is REALLY going on. As many have pointed out to me these boundaries (nations, continents and ethnicities) are often constructed. Do they really exist or do people just build up their worlds to make it seem as if they do? What is really going on here? Sure this music has been used for nationalistic purposes following the tumultuous transition from European to African power over the past century. However, what holds the communities together right now? I suspect that something else is going on here. Something makes this community (which I will probably end up redefining as I go) tick.

Now, all of this said, this blog is NOT going to be academic. And frankly I'm not allowed to share the content of my interviews or details of my interactions with people outside of my thesis. So basically, I am posing a lot of questions that won't be answered in the context of this blog. I recognize that my choice to travel to Ghana over the next two months is motivated by my personal life as much as my academic life. This is a place for me to share more of the personal side of this trip and to stay in touch with those whom I care about.

Music does something and I want to better understand how this happens. To illustrate this I want to share an experience that I had this afternoon. I was walking home from the train bummed out about how much work I have to do tonight and just generally not too happy about life. That's when I heard the bagpipe. (Cheezy I know... keep reading please and try not to laugh too hard). A lone bagpiper was playing Amazing Grace and other tunes on the steps of the Alberta legislature building. Just a random guy, no official event or kilts or anything. Just a guy in jeans walking back and forth next to the giant columns looking out over the pools and legislature grounds. I sat down for a moment along with ten other strangers around the dry fountains and listened until he decided he was done and packed up and walked away. What happened here??? Frankly it was an incredibly profound moment for me. And judging by the number of people with video and digital cameras pointed towards the man, it was profound for others too. I was reminded that music accomplishes something in our lives and that it exists beyond the books and the scores. This lone bagpiper (cliche as it is) and his music DID SOMETHING in the lives of 10 strangers today. I truly believe that music functions in the life of a community in ways that nothing else can. It fulfills a specific purpose. And I am pretty sure that what it does occurs between people, in a community, not just within an individual person. What purpose does it have? This is hard to see in such an individualistic society as our own. But I am convinced that it is still there. It is quite more evident in a place such as Ghana where music IS about the community, PERIOD (well most of the time). Music is a process of being together

I use this example to point out how amazingly excited I am for this project. This experience was a simple reminder of what I am doing and why I am excited about this summer as I try to understand what music does in the context of modern Ghanaian art music. Now, the trick is to keep my mind open, to not place constructs around what people tell me and to get into their world, to understand what is really going on, not what I want to be going on. A tremendously difficult task, but it has been done by many people (scholars and friends) before.

Now, just to keep this interesting I will share all of the little adventures along the way. Consider it a bribe for agreeing to read things like I have shared above. Yes, I will share the contents of my dinner and my latest battles with viruses, parasites, bacteria and all of the other things that North Americans deal with when traveling to Ghana. Please read and comment and ask. Until next time....

Patrick