Music Doesn't Know a color

The first-ever black student to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, W.E.B. DuBois, Class of 1890, once said "black music is the greatest gift of this side of the seas."

However, Ronald M. Radano, the first-ever Quincy Jones visiting associate professor of African-American music, spends his time in Afro-American Studies 154z "Black Music and the American Racial Encounter," critiquing the idea that music is racially based.

"The difference, as part of social imagination, is very real...," Radano says, explaining that while Americans don't have categories for "white music," they do for "black music."

"[But] anything performed by African Americans outside of the realm of classical music is 'black music'...so there are actually countless genres."

"My argument...isn't assimilationist at all...[but] music is a personal thing. Everyone feels they can make a commentary on music, because everyone has experience in it, as opposed to poetry or literature," Radano says, noting that the beauty of "black music" is that it is paradoxically the very same vehicle that enables racial transgression.

Radano greets the question of how it feels to be a white man studying "black music" with an expression that seems to say that he has been asked this question time and again.

"I have a flip question," Radano says. "How do you know I'm a white man? If we go by the 'one drop' rule, who's to say that I'm not just passing?"

While admitting that he probably doesn't have that "one drop," Radano argues that one's race should be irrelevant for the study of music.

"What I'm thinking today is to remove the study of 'black music' from some racially determined authority. If we were to treat 'black music' as a true academic field, there should be no racial pre-requisites for study. I'm trying to say, look, we're trying to say this is a serious academic endeavor. Let's get on with the work," Radano says.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, chair of the top-ranked music department, bewails the fact that Radano will be leaving after this semester to resume teaching at the University of Wisconsin and, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, to write a book: Lying up a Nation: Black Music and American Racial Encounter, which will develop the lectures Radano gave here at Harvard.

"[Radano] is very versatile; his scholarship cuts across several fields of scholarship," says Shelemay. "We've been delighted to have him."

Radano's life has been a cross-section of many genres of music.

"As the case with most musicologists, I started out as a musician," says Radano, who was raised in an upper-class suburb of Manhattan that he describes as "claustrophobic"--at least for an electric guitar playing teenager with hair grown down his back.

"That was the uniform of individuality, wasn't it?" Radano laughs. "It was, of course, a time when such independence and resistance to orthodoxy was encouraged socially and even institutionally."

After the high school fascination with rock and some jazz, Radano became interested in experimental "new" music and avant-garde jazz when he went off to Rowan College in 1974, where he studied the intersections of jazz and art music and visited Manhattan often to work with many in-house ensembles that were blurring the lines between types of music.

Ultimately, Radano chose to study Anthony Braxton's career, not to present another jazz biography but to employ his life and work as a lens for observing the confusion and fragmentation of post-World War II American work, an endeavor that Radano is still best known for, Shelemay says.

"Anthony Braxton...was a black politician, who was challenging everything, including the idea of racial construction and music as such," says Radano, explaining his interest in the jazz legend. "He is an autodidact.... But he is a product of the very rich cultural and intellectual setting of Chicago's south side. He is one of the leading thinkers and artists in the post-1960s jazz/'art music' intersection."

After obtaining his Ph.D., Radano worked at the Smithsonian Institution for three years, then went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is now a tenured associate professor in the Afro-American Studies and in the School of Music.

"It's a nice life," says Radano. "There aren't many people in my field, musicology, jobs have evaporated. I feel very lucky."

Radano says he encourages his students to focus on diverse aspects of music, much in the way he himself did. In his spare time, Radano goes to blues bars, seeing the Chicago blues bands which stop by in Madison on their way to Minneapolis.

"[Blues bars are] a racially diverse place...which is unusual, [because] Wisconsin in general is historically white," Radano says

"I have a flip question," Radano says. "How do you know I'm a white man? If we go by the 'one drop' rule, who's to say that I'm not just passing?"

While admitting that he probably doesn't have that "one drop," Radano argues that one's race should be irrelevant for the study of music.

"What I'm thinking today is to remove the study of 'black music' from some racially determined authority. If we were to treat 'black music' as a true academic field, there should be no racial pre-requisites for study. I'm trying to say, look, we're trying to say this is a serious academic endeavor. Let's get on with the work," Radano says.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, chair of the top-ranked music department, bewails the fact that Radano will be leaving after this semester to resume teaching at the University of Wisconsin and, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, to write a book: Lying up a Nation: Black Music and American Racial Encounter, which will develop the lectures Radano gave here at Harvard.

"[Radano] is very versatile; his scholarship cuts across several fields of scholarship," says Shelemay. "We've been delighted to have him."

Radano's life has been a cross-section of many genres of music.

"As the case with most musicologists, I started out as a musician," says Radano, who was raised in an upper-class suburb of Manhattan that he describes as "claustrophobic"--at least for an electric guitar playing teenager with hair grown down his back.

"That was the uniform of individuality, wasn't it?" Radano laughs. "It was, of course, a time when such independence and resistance to orthodoxy was encouraged socially and even institutionally."

After the high school fascination with rock and some jazz, Radano became interested in experimental "new" music and avant-garde jazz when he went off to Rowan College in 1974, where he studied the intersections of jazz and art music and visited Manhattan often to work with many in-house ensembles that were blurring the lines between types of music.

Ultimately, Radano chose to study Anthony Braxton's career, not to present another jazz biography but to employ his life and work as a lens for observing the confusion and fragmentation of post-World War II American work, an endeavor that Radano is still best known for, Shelemay says.

"Anthony Braxton...was a black politician, who was challenging everything, including the idea of racial construction and music as such," says Radano, explaining his interest in the jazz legend. "He is an autodidact.... But he is a product of the very rich cultural and intellectual setting of Chicago's south side. He is one of the leading thinkers and artists in the post-1960s jazz/'art music' intersection."

After obtaining his Ph.D., Radano worked at the Smithsonian Institution for three years, then went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is now a tenured associate professor in the Afro-American Studies and in the School of Music.

"It's a nice life," says Radano. "There aren't many people in my field, musicology, jobs have evaporated. I feel very lucky."

Radano says he encourages his students to focus on diverse aspects of music, much in the way he himself did. In his spare time, Radano goes to blues bars, seeing the Chicago blues bands which stop by in Madison on their way to Minneapolis.

"[Blues bars are] a racially diverse place...which is unusual, [because] Wisconsin in general is historically white," Radano says