Schreffler Perpetual Introduction (original) (raw)

2023, The Perpetual Introduction (Chanteys)

By presenting an introductory exposition of chanteys today, we are engaging with a cycle that has repeated since the subject was first formally introduced in the 1850s. Over the last 165 years, each decade has seen multiple such expositions, the density of which periodically spikes, but the substance of which has remained remarkably consistent. The burgeoning popular interest in chanteys of the 1920s, which resulted in the first commercial phonograph recordings and motivated the publication of numerous song anthologies, framed the genre in much the same way as innumerable undergraduate and master's theses, newspaper articles, and blog posts have since the #ShantyTok phenomenon of the 2020s. Reflecting on this, I recall a remark of which I have long been taken, made by Ghanaian highlife musician Nana Ampadu and quoted by Kofi Agawu in his book Representing African Music: "If I say I will tell you where highlife started, then it means I am going to…lie" (Agawu 2003, xiv). The "sea" in the title of our workshop is one such "lie," because we know that historical performers of "sea" chanteys called them only "chantey." We "lie" fully aware, as Ampadu was, that when expositing subjects to presumed uninitiated audiences the expositor must reduce, simplify, and frame in terms familiar. That chanteys have remained perpetually unfamiliar creates the curious phenomenon in this case of the Perpetual Introduction. So whereas we, too, cannot avoid "introductory" rhetoric, by concurrently making us conscious of that, to disclaim it as Ampadu disclaimed to ethnomusicologist John Chernoff, I hope to disrupt the cycle, as well as to offer some takeaways that point beyond the narrative pathways down which conventional introductions tend to lead.