Music in the American Diasporic Wedding , livre ebook

MUSIC IN THE AMERICAN DIASPORIC WEDDING
MUSIC IN THE AMERICAN DIASPORIC WEDDING

EDITED BY
Inna Naroditskaya
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2019 by Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Naroditskaya, Inna [date], editor.
Title: Music in the American diasporic wedding / edited by Inna Naroditskaya.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031205 (print) | LCCN 2018038314 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253041791 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253041760 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253041777 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Wedding music-United States-History and criticism. | Folk music-United States-History and criticism. | Intermarriage-United States.
Classification: LCC ML3551.9 (ebook) | LCC ML3551.9 .M87 2019 (print) | DDC 781.5/870973-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031205
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Cover page photo, courtesy of WSPhotography, Chicago.
To Zhenya and Pavlik
CONTENTS

Foreword: What a Wedding Song Tells Me / Alejandro L. Madrid
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Say YES to US: Music in Diasporic Weddings / Inna Naroditskaya

1. Theoretical Perspectives on Weddings, Locally and Beyond / A. J. Racy

2. Negotiating Gender, Community, and Ethnicity: Balkan Romani Transnational Weddings / Carol Silverman

3. Dissonant Love: Music in Latina/o Diasporic Weddings / Lorena Alvarado and Frances R. Aparicio

4. Tambura Music, Flags, and the Deterritorialization of Ritualized Violence at Croatian American Weddings / Ian MacMillen

5. Like an Erhu Player on the Roof: Music and Multilayered Diasporic Negotiation at a Taiwanese and Jewish American Wedding / Meredith Schweig

6. Song, Sevdah , and Ceremony: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Music and Community Cohesion in Bosnian American Weddings / Tanya Merchant

7. Soulful Same-Sex Wedding, Aretha Franklin, Love, and the Politics of (Un)freedom / Nina C. hman

8. Trying to Get the Gig: Ethnic Weddings from the Musician s Perspective / Michael Allemana

9. Jewish Wedding Music in the Neo-Klezmer Era / Hankus Netsky

10. Sound Unions: The Work of Music Specialists in Chicago s South Asian Wedding Scene / Kaley Mason and Ameera Nimjee

11. Mountain Weddings in Chicago / Timothy J. Cooley

Index
FOREWORD
What a Wedding Song Tells Me
ALEJANDRO L. MADRID

I PRESS PLAY and the music blasts out of the speakers. It is a song that starts with the three most recognizable bars from Richard Wagner s Treulich gef hrt (the famous Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin ) sung by a female choir to a piano accompaniment that quickly morphs into a full-blooded pop song. The march-like piano harmonies become a circular sequence in G major (I-vi-ii-V7)-the c rculo de sol as Mexican popular musicians call it-the voice of the backing singers becomes child-like, and a bass and electric guitar join the ensemble to achieve the sound of early 1960s US rock-and-roll and British Invasion bands. The lyrics begin, Quero me casar contigo / N o me abandones / Tenha compaix o / A coisa que eu tenho / Mais medo na vida / saber que um dia / Posso perder teu curacao (I want to marry you / Do not leave me / Have compassion / The thing I am / Most afraid in life / Is to know that one day / I can lose your heart); it is the warm voice of Roberto Carlos back when he was considered one of the rising stars of Brazil s Jovem Guarda. Listening to this song in Saint Petersburg, Russia, thousands of miles away from Guaymas, Mexico, where I lived when I heard it for the first time as a kid in the early 1970s, in a completely different social, cultural, and personal setting, makes me rethink the affect and meaning I used to associate with it.
The nineteenth century and its Romantic legacy have colored our modern understanding of marriage as an institution. Roberto Carlos s Quero me casar contigo seems to dwell on this cultural/historical heritage. The song s almost naive, upbeat feeling and apparently innocuous lyrics celebrate this wedding-pun intended-between romantic love and marriage; it shows the romanticization, sanitization, and even universalization of a specifically Western understanding of an intercultural practice with an otherwise very complex history (the intention to appeal to a sense of universality seems clear in the use of Wagner s music as a universal index of sorts of the wedding ritual). Paying close attention to the song one realizes it could also obliquely comment on many of the other social and cultural functions (both pragmatic and symbolic) that weddings and the institution of marriage perform. N o fale nem de brincadeira / Nem pense nunca nunca / Em me deixar assim (Do not even joke / Or think about ever ever / Leaving me like that) in the voice of the male singer is not only an expression of the man s desperation about losing his beloved woman, but it also implies that the woman should relinquish her agency and her right to leave the man, whom she may or may not love, upon his request. Romantic love in fact conceals a series of larger gender dynamics and power struggles that marriage as an institution is intended to reproduce-and as such, the c rculo de sol mayor, the song s harmonic sequence, with its unavoidable circularity and inevitable repetition, works as the perfect metaphor of the reproduction of these dynamics. In that context, the male s proposal-to get married in order to avoid losing her ( A coisa que eu tenho / Mais medo na vida / saber que um dia / Posso perder teu curacao )-actually reveals one of the oldest purposes of marriage: masculine dominance and the female body as possession. Moreover, it unintentionally underlines that historically and transculturally, marriage and weddings have been precisely about the transfer of property in one way or another. However, listening to this music in detail in Saint Petersburg, a place I now get to call home for three months of the year precisely due to my marriage to a Russian woman, makes me think of what weddings and marriage do in the everyday life of diasporic individuals. In retrospect, listening to Roberto Carlos s song also made me reevaluate how my own wedding, as my wife and I planned and prepared it, and as an actual space of transnational encounters-with a bride and a groom coming from two countries different from where the ceremony took place, with attendees from several nationalities who fluidly moved back and forth between several languages, and with the active participation of my Russian in-laws via Skype-was also a space for the negotiation of how a wedding and a marriage could be emotionally and symbolically meaningful diasporically, beyond the reproduction of the values the institution may sanction locally.
It was music, especially my emotional and historical connection to a song, that made me wonder about these issues. Therefore, I find particularly appealing that the subject of this book is precisely to investigate how diasporic individuals use music in weddings to negotiate a number of everyday dilemmas that life in their new homes present them, from questions of individual and collective identity to concerns about citizenship and national belonging at a historical moment in which globalization makes the boundaries between them increasingly blurred. The themes explored in this volume range from multiculturalism to interethnic alliances, from inter-diasporic weddings (as Inna Naroditskaya calls them) in a foreign land to what I would call trans-diasporic weddings (among individuals from completely different diasporic experiences). It would be easy to take a congratulatory stance in the name of multiculturalism and write about these nuptial rituals in a celebratory tone, as if they were bringing peaceful resolution to interethnic conflict. However, besides the problematic that individual couples may bring into these unions, they could also be seen as dangerous by persons whose cultural horizon is narrower and less cosmopolitan due to more rooted experiences of place. In that sense, conservative folks may see these weddings and marriages as sources for the erosion of the essentialist values about nation, citizenship, and community they may hold dear. Evidently, weddings could be spaces of serious cultural contention. Music, with its perennial power to transcend borders and be reinvented, provides a perfect site and excuse for the exploration of the intersection of the emotional and the political in these rituals, because, to use Roberto Carlos s lyrics in a more critical manner, weddings are n o pra falar de brincadeira .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LOVE OF MY PARENTS , their boundless devotion to family, filled my life, the life of my sister, and our sons. Their romance, complex, uneasy, everlasting, through complex migration, aging, and losses, guided me in this project on wedding as a moment of celebration and joy. Only a moment but the one that marks a high point in the lives of people acros