| Etkilendikleri |
Who We Are
THE FIREANTS began as a trio playing traditional Cajun and Tex-Mex music. We still play traditional musics though we rearrange tunes a lot. Often we write lyrics for instrumental pieces or we write melodies to go with poems or fragments of letters or bits of overheard conversation. The oddest conjunctions often feel right--we combined Sence You Went Away by African-American poet James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) with a contemporary Forró tune from Northeastern Brazil. And New England poet Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening goes very nicely with the tango Hernando’s Hideaway.
In addition to modifying traditional music, we compose new words and music though it seems that composition is not so much the creation of something new as it is the rearrangement of pre-existing ideas and forms. Maybe it’s that there is a continuum of material--at one end is the attempt to recreate as faithfully as possible music that we’ve heard elsewhere. At the other end is pushing the musical elements around enough to believe we’ve made it all up.
As we understand traditional music, each performance is an active re-invention. Melodies are often skeletal structures that change with each playing. Lyrics (at least when sung solo and even when partially memorized) are often spontaneous and improvised. When one of us sings solo, there is the opportunity to change the words according to the moment--how you feel, who’s in the audience, what’s the news of the day. In these ways, even the most often played piece of traditional music is constantly made new. It’s exciting not knowing exactly what you might do until you’re actually doing it. Our thinking on the matter of renewal and freshness in traditional art is reflected in Albert Lord’s book The Singer of Tales.
The deepest influence on our music comes out of the communities of the Caribbean basin, especially those which mix African and European ideas--Cajun, Creole and Zydeco music from Louisiana, Conjunto from Texas, música norteña, jarocha, purépecha and huasteca from Mexico, the Cumbia from Colombia and, even more, the Colombian regional style known as Vallenato, Calypso from Trinidad, Son from Cuba, Bachata from the Dominican Republic, Scratch from St Croix, Forró from Northeastern Brazil. We’ve also been influenced by the Black string band music of North Carolina and Virginia and by the Chicken Scratch and Gu-achi music of the Tohono O’odham people of Arizona.
We’ve had the honor to meet and learn from many musicians including Canray Fontenot, Bois Sec Ardoin, Dewey Balfa, Dennis McGee, Santiago Jimenez, Jr., Valerio Longoria, Nick Villareal, Elliott Johnson, Cleofes Ortiz, Pedro Dimas, Juan Reynoso, Antonia Apodaca, and Joe and Odell Thompson. Other musicians we’ve not met have touched us through recordings of their music, especially Cuban guitarist, singer and composer Miguel Matamoros and Colombian accordionist, singer and composer Lisandro Meza.
While the sounds we make may sometimes be strikingly different from the music of these people we’ve named, and while we often depart from the regional sounds we love--sometimes consciously, sometimes unwittingly--we strive to honor the traditional musicians and communities whose musics we love. And we hope our playing can keep alive some of the spirit of traditional music. It’s a spirit that knows life and music as one, that breaks down barriers between people, that knows we’re all in this life together.
Educational Programs
In addition to performing for dances and public events, the Fireants offer talks, lecture demonstrations, and workshops on a variety of musics from around the world. We can tailor programs to the interests of individual groups. In addition to doing programs with the entire group, we offer workshops and talks that make use of one, two, or three members of the group. Whether a single one of us or the entire group presents a program, we focus on hands-on activities for students or adults. Sometimes we direct workshops in which participants build simple wind, percussion and stringed instruments from around the world. Once instruments are built, we then create ensembles to perform the musics. We also offer workshops on community dance traditions. In many cultures dance and music are inseparable. As one older Cajun musician told us, “It’s just about impossible to play if nobody’s dancing--the music doesn’t exist if there are no dancers.”
Some of the musics we’ve focused on in our workshops include: Kahluli of Papua, New Guinea; Australian Aboriginal music; Cajun and Creole music from Louisiana; Central African music from the Kongo and Rwanda; the northern Mexican and Texan corrido and conjunto traditions; Quebecois music of Canada; and Basque music in the United States.
We are amazed by the variety of music on this earth and in our workshops we strive to help people take pleasure in this multiplicity. Recognizing that while music is not a universal language, it is a universal phenomenon, we are fascinated by the many ways people find meaning in sound. There is a famous story concerning the first Balinese gamelan orchestra to perform in Europe. The Balinese musicians played at a world exposition in Paris in the late nineteenth century. The French hosts, wanting to show the Balinese something they might enjoy, took the visitors to hear a concert given by a large brass band--trumpets, cornets, trombones, tubas. After the concert, someone asked one of the Balinese musicians if he liked the music. “Oh, yes, I liked it very much,” the musician said, then went on, “But oh, what sad music, I’ve never heard such sad music.”
Few Europeans would call brass band music--marches and polkas--sad, but so they seemed to a Balinese musician, a person from a very different musical culture. How do we find meaning in music? How is sound linked to our feelings? What is society’s role in our musical beliefs? These are some of the questions the Fireants ask in both performance and in workshops. |
