HONK!

A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism

Reebee Garofalo, Erin T. Allen, Andrew Snyder, Reebee Garofalo, Erin T. Allen, Andrew Snyder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429670619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism explores a fast-growing and transnational movement of street bands—particularly brass and percussion ensembles—and examines how this exciting phenomenon mobilizes communities to reimagine public spaces, protest injustice, and assert their activism. Through the joy of participatory music making, HONK! bands foster active musical engagement in street protests while encouraging grassroots organization, representing a manifestation of cultural activity that exists at the intersections of community, activism, and music. This collection of twenty essays considers the parallels between the diversity of these movements and the diversity of the musical repertoire these bands play and share.

In five parts, musicians, activists, and scholars voiced in various local contexts cover a range of themes and topics:

• History and Scope
• Repertoire, Pedagogy, and Performance
• Inclusion and Organization
• Festival Organization and Politics
• On the Front Lines of Protest

The HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands began in Somerville, Massachusetts in 2006 as an independent, non-commercial, street festival. It has since spread to four continents. HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism explores the phenomenon that inspires street bands and musicians to change the world and provide musical, social, and political alternatives in contemporary times.

Visit the companion webiste: http://www.honkrenaissance.net/

PART I

History and Scope

1

The Many Roads to HONK! and the Power of Brass and Percussion

Reebee Garofalo

The HONK! Festival was founded by members of the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band in Somerville, MA, as an independent, grassroots, anti-commercial festival of activist street bands. Because 30-piece marching bands are loud, acoustic, and mobile, and they can play anywhere at a moment’s notice, there is no need for stages or sound reinforcement systems at HONK!. There are no set-ups or sound checks to slow things down. Continuous music. Unmediated. Experienced directly. Little separation between artist and audience. Everyone is a participant. It’s not just the infectious participatory music-making; it’s also the unorthodox performance styles, the outrageous costumes, the progressive political spirit, the genuine camaraderie, and the sheer spectacle of it all. Did I mention fun? That too.

FIGURE 1.1 What Cheer? Brigade captures the spirit of HONK! in Davis Square (Somerville 2018)

Photograph by Peter Lee.

The Somerville festival houses and feeds hundreds of musicians for free, connecting dozens of local residents and businesses to some of the most arcane details of festival operations. It provides for multiple performance and parading opportunities in high profile public spaces, as well as tune-shares, discussion forums, and networking opportunities for more than two dozen bands from all over the world. The festival has also made it a point to showcase all-women bands, and to bring Haitian rara, Brazilian samba, and black New Orleans street bands into the HONK! orbit. Over the years, there has been a pattern of incorporating more activist elements and political actions into the fabric of the festival itself. Fourteen years later, the festival remains free to the public, and there are still no corporate logos, no incessant merchandising schemes, no outside commercialism of any kind.

Producing a festival like Somerville’s HONK! year after year requires considerable financial resources and the development of long-term relationships with local businesses, city administrations, funding agencies, unions, neighborhood groups, and progressive political organizations – groups who do not always share a common political outlook. As a result, the festival is, and always has been, full of contradictions – accepting funds, material goods, and logistical support from city administrations and business entities to produce a festival that is anti-commercial and does not allow corporate sponsorships; staging a parade with Veterans for Peace in the parking lot of a Veterans of Foreign Wars clubhouse; using the police for traffic management and crowd control, while (some) performing bands and invited political groups protest police violence. HONK! is sometimes a messy affair; political purity is not an option. The question is how well it manages the contradictions.

Challenges notwithstanding, HONK! has expanded over the years beyond anyone’s expectations. As of this writing, there are some 22 HONK!-related festivals around the globe: five in Brazil, two in Australia, two in Canada, one in Costa Rica, one just starting in London, and the rest in the US. The ways in which these festivals have developed recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome,” opposed in their paradigm to the metaphor of a tree, which imposes structure, direction, and hierarchy. “[U]nlike trees or their roots,” state the authors, “the rhizome connects any point to any other point” (1987, 21). Although developing HONK! festivals sometimes look to the Somerville festival for guidance and leadership, there is also a certain anarchic – rhizomatic, if you will – element to the way many of them have sprung up. Indeed, the original HONK! Festival itself can perhaps best be understood as a rhizomatic offshoot of other festival traditions and cultural practices.

Ironically, the common and contradictory ancestry for all of the bands that participate in these festivals begins with the military wind and percussion units that led invading armies into battle with strict discipline, precision routines, and terrifying sounds. This history encompasses the worldwide development of brass and percussion instruments and their deployment in the service not only of ritual, entertainment, and social interaction, but also militarism, imperialism, and religious conversion. Or as Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher put it: “As a result of militarization and colonialism, wind bands are among the most widely disseminated instrumental ensembles in the world” (2016, 1).

One might not expect that such a history, steeped as it is in militarism, could yield the unrestrained abandon of Caribbean carnival, the high energy dance music of Balkan and klezmer bands, the colorful performances of Indian wedding bands, or the joyful noise of New Orleans second line parades. Yet, this is what has happened and these are some of the formative influences of HONK!. History, as always, has a tendency to unfold in unpredictable ways.

While military bands have often been called upon to perform in civic and religious ceremonies, extending their reach beyond the battlefield, local populations have also been known to upend the military model, indigenizing (musical) instruments of war, and adapting them to local cultural practices. In short, “the flexibility of the instrumentation and its adaptability to a wide range of musical genres and performance contexts have ensured that bands are truly localized phenomena” (Reily and Brucher 2016, 1). It is the purpose of this chapter to interrogate these inversions of military tradition and intervention as a way of ultimately bringing us face-to-face with the phenomenon we call HONK!.

It should be noted that I am writing from the perspective of a member of the inaugural HONK! Festival Organizing Committee, and a musician in its host band, the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band. As such, I position myself as both a popular music historian, exploring the power of brass and percussion, and an active participant, discussing bands and festivals in which I have been directly involved.

We begin with a brief, global history of brass and percussion ensembles as tools of military intervention and their expansion into civil society as symbols of power and authority. As history progresses, we begin to see inversions of the military model, with more community-driven and life-affirming brass band styles and festival traditions. The more proximate US antecedents of HONK! – circus bands and street theater projects of the 1960s and 70s, as well as the formation of activist street bands thereafter – pave the way for the founding of the inaugural HONK! Festival as a local grassroots event, which subsequently resonates elsewhere, producing the global network of HONK! festivals that exists today.¹

HONK! and BOOM: A Deep History of Brass and Percussion

Thousands of years before the Christian era, armies in the area that is now India used percussion, primarily tympani and whips, to guide them into battle. The Parthians, from what is now northeastern Iran, added brass bells to this mix to produce a “deafening noise resembling the cries of ferocious beasts mixed with thunder” (Whitwell 2010 [1985], 5). Trumpet-like instruments appeared in paintings in the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt as early as 1500 BC, exclusively in a military context. The Old Testament is rife with passages about the use of “trumpets” in military operations. As early as the sixth century BC, Roman armies made use of the Greek straight trumpet (tuba), as well as a number of new trumpet-types such as the cornu, lituus, and buccina (Whitwell 2010 [1985], 20).

During the Crusades, European armies were fascinated by the overpowering sounds of the trumpets and tympani used by Arab Muslims in the Middle East during these religious wars. As such, these instruments became prized battle trophies, which exerted considerable influence on the music of the European armies. In the colonial period before the British conquered the Ashanti of West Africa, who also used horns and drums to signal their armies, battles of the bands often preceded actual military engagement. After a victory, the Ashanti could be heard experimenting with the European instruments they had captured (Boonzajer Flaes 1993, 14).

FIGURE 1.2 Drawing of a mehter band by Arif Mehmed Pas¸a published in 1863

Courtesy of Mehmet Sanlikol.

The large mehter bands, or mehterhane, of the Ottoman Empire, often mis-identified as Janissary bands referring to the infantry they led into battle, took perhaps the most decisive step in defining the contours of the modern military band. These fabled Turkish ensembles, which “consisted of two major sections, wind instruments (zurna, boru, kurrenay and later klarnet) and percussion (davul, kös, nakkare, def, zil and çevgan),” numbered as many as 200 players, depending on the status of their employer (Campbell 2012; Popescu, n.d.; Whitwell 2010 [1985], 135). “In the expansionist period,” according to Popescu, “the sound of mehter was a voice of terror to the non-Muslim peoples and a cry of awe for the entire population” (Popescu, n.d.). By the latter half of the eighteenth century, elements of mehter music – primarily Turkish bass drum and cymbals – had not only found their way into regimental bands throughout Europe, with woodwinds at their core, but also exerted a profound influence on classical composers of the period, including Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. And, not for nothing, the family that made the signature cymbals for the mehter bands was the Zildjian family, currently the largest producer of cymbals in the US (Campbell 2012).

The French Revolution pushed the development of the military band further into the modern era. According to Reily and Brucher, “The military band played an important role as an emblem of power for the new regime, and its performances projected the state into public spaces. Bands figured in public rituals that demonstrated power through spectacle” (2016, 9). As a measure of the importance of training musicians for military bands, it is worth noting that the Paris Conservatory of Music was originally founded as the École de Musique de la Guarde Nationale following the Revolution.

During this period, all of the major world powers organized large-scale bands for their armies, as military bands became instruments of power and control as well as symbols of modernity throughout Europe and across the globe. As such, they were also dispatched to the colonies and other global outposts where they were used to display “a clear hierarchy and labour structure, an orderly portrayal of power and military might, and dazzling modern technology in the form of bright, indestructible musical instruments” (Reily and Brucher 2016, 11).

So popular were these military marching bands that when Japan set about modernizing its military in the early 1800s, it all but invited them in. Having already embraced Dutch military music and field training techniques, the Japanese fêted US Admiral Matthew Perry and the two military bands aboard his “black ships,” both for their utility and the international prestige they conferred (McClimon 2016, 58), and “As with Japan, Korean brass bands were initially modelled on Western prototypes” (Reily and Brucher 2016, 28).

Prior to this time, brass instruments were of a fixed length, capable of producing only certain natural overtones. The invention of the valve in early nineteenth-century Germany increased the versatility and prominence of brass, with far-reaching effects. Now all the parts of a Western musical composition could be interpreted by brass instruments, and to the benefit of cavalry charging into battle, valved instruments could be played with one hand. From this point on, brass and percussion (with a complement of reeds and woodwinds) provided the foundation for military marching bands, which went on to achieve a striking degree of standardization.

Christian missionaries also tended to understand their role in military terms and often employed small-scale replicas of military marching bands to help them achieve their spiritual ends (Boonzajer Flaes 1993, 9). The Salvation Army’s brass bands are the most obvious surviving descendants of this tradition. So widespread were the forays of these mobile military and religious units, that in the colonial era, it would not be overstating the case to say that the first exposure to brass band music for most people in the world was probably from an invading colonial army or an evangelizing Christian mission.

Transforming the Military Model

In the European colonies, local musicians conscripted into regimental military bands and trained to play European military music and instruments to support local colonial armies were the same musicians who performed vernacular musics for local civic and religious events. Here we begin to see the subversion of the military model. In India, for example, the local military bands set up by the British colonists became integrated into the longstanding tradition of royal Indian processions. Over time, they gave rise to thousands of private professional brass bands, made up of lower caste, marginalized members of society, who currently ply their trade performing popular Bollywood hits for wedding processions (Booth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: History and Scope
• PART II: Repertoire, Pedagogy, and Performance
• PART III: Inclusion and Organization
• PART IV: Festival Organization and Politics
• PART V: On the Front Lines of Protest
• Index