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  "Music opens a window on history," says Kay Kaufman Shelemay, in whose office hang a painting of Ethiopian musicians, from her own collection, and a traditional rendering of the story of Solomon and Sheba, from the department's archives. Jim Harrison |
An Africa on its feet economically might more easily share its cultural riches with the rest of the world. Few scholars at Harvard know more about those riches, or how hard it can be to sample them, than Kay Kaufman Shelemay, who chairs the department of music, which she joined in 1992. She still speaks with intensity about the chance encounter with Ethiopian music in 1970 that transformed her studies from a consuming interest in Western art music to a passion for world music, folk music, and anthropology. Three years later, she pursued that interest to its origins for her doctoral research. "In finding Ethiopia," Shelemay says, "I found my field, ethnomusicology," and in finding that intellectual focus, she also found "not only a husband but a revolution"--an intellectual, personal, and political odyssey recounted in her 1991 book, A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey.
Shelemay's scholarship has as its center communities within communities, a situation to which Ethiopia is uniquely hospitable. "Ethiopia," she says, "is the country no one wants to acknowledge as part of Africa." Isolated by a rugged highland plateau in the Horn of Africa, it was colonized, if the term applies at all, only during the Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941. Otherwise, it was ruled by a succession of emperors from biblical times until 1974, when Haile Selassie was deposed. Shelemay went to study the country's anomalous cultures--particularly the Ethiopian Jewish community, Beta Israel--not its politics.
She traveled by bus and horse to Ambober, a small Beta Israel village, where she witnessed the rituals performed on the eve of the New Year, as the glow of an oil lamp lit a silkscreen of Jerusalem while five priests, in white gowns and turbans, chanted a prayer service in Ge'ez. The musical accompaniment included a repetitive rhythm on a flat, circular metal gong and a large kettledrum, "covered with the same bright, flowered cloth I had seen in Ethiopian Christian churches." As a foreign researcher, Shelemay was granted access to many rituals normally little attended by women, and she was able to tape-record all the ceremonies to which she was invited.
In 1974 she married Jack Shelemay in Tel Aviv, and the couple returned to his home city, Addis Ababa, where Kay resumed her research as "a revolution of hope" began. But as shifting curfews enforced by excitable soldiers made civilians loath to leave their homes, she began frantically shipping research materials out of the country.
In 1975, as she became interested in studying the music of the Ethiopian Christian Church, the new government nationalized all the land and buildings in urban centers. Local militias, called kebele, were charged with preserving order throughout the capital. The revolution veered toward becoming a bloodbath as the militias and their opponents fought in the streets. In December, Kay Shelemay left for the United States. To get her remaining tapes past the government censor, she played him a recording of tezzeta, a type of sentimental Ethiopian love song. It would be three years before her husband would be permitted to join her .
Even though she was now cut off from the sources of her research, Shelemay harvested the materials she had gathered to produce a series of articles and books on Ethiopian musical and religious culture. Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, based on her dissertation, untangled the intermingling of Beta Israel and Ethiopian Christian liturgy, revealing the Beta Israel to be not some isolated outpost of Judaism in the heart of a Christian nation, but rather practitioners of a hybrid religion, descended from a centuries-old Ethiopian Judeo-Christianity--a controversial finding during their emigration to Israel under the Law of Return.
"One reason I was able to work during the revolution is that I was a musicologist and everyone thought I was harmless," Shelemay says. "But music opens a window on history." Another such window opened as a result of her frantic 1975 researches. With Peter Jeffery of Princeton, Shelemay edited and published between 1993 and 1997 the three-volume anthology Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant. Among its revelations: although indigenous sub-Saharan African music was thought to exist only orally, this particular Ethiopian music, at least, has a long-established form of notation, dating from the sixteenth century, when Islamic invasion threatened the Church, forcing its adherents to invent a way to record its vital traditions.
Having "lost my field for many years," Shelemay remains interested in Boston's vibrant Ethiopian community, with its churches, restaurants, and frequent dance parties. "There are a lot of immigrants here who were displaced by the revolution," she says. "So I've been able to follow my work from Africa into the African diaspora," the subject of a recent graduate-level ethnomusicology seminar.
Nothing brought Africa nearer to Harvard than Nelson Mandela's visit to Tercentenary Theatre, for which Shelemay arranged the rousing introductory drumming chorus. ("You made me feel at home," Mandela told the performers.) Less dramatically, the scholarship of her faculty colleagues on the Committee on African Studies (see "African Studies") sustains her ties to a country she has not visited since 1978. "Just in the humanities," she says, "the quality of the people who are here with African specializations and interests is extraordinary."
Now, as Shelemay completes a textbook on world music in North America and introduces a new Core course, "Soundscapes: World Music at Home and Abroad," she is beginning a new research project, on the influence of Ethiopian culture on Italy (Ethiopians first visited Rome in the fifteenth century, she notes, and Ethiopian chant was performed at the Ravenna festival last year) and vice versa. As always, she says, she is engaged by "borderlands, where people and cultures run into each other." With her term as chair of the music department coming to an end, and a sabbatical year in prospect, Shelemay plans to cross a significant border of her own by returning to Ethiopia in 2000, to resume her fieldwork there for the first time in more than 20 years.
Even as Shelemay has documented written musical notation where none was known to exist, one of her fellow humanists at Harvard has been probing Africa's oral cultures. K. Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophy, is currently working to connect Africa's philosophical traditions to those of the rest of the world, extracting evidence of early African thought from secondary sources within the culture, most notably from the spoken word.
Appiah--coeditor with Henry Louis Gates Jr. of The Dictionary of Global Culture and of Encarta Africana, a CD-ROM encyclopedia of Africa--says that for a philosopher accustomed to the written tradition, his new inquiry is a fascinating challenge. "The construction is analogous to what Plato was doing," he says. "Plato made famous a man called Socrates who existed entirely in the oral mode. Socrates spoke and Plato wrote it down. But Plato had to decide what to write down. In shaping his account of what Socrates said, he was shaping fundamental philosophical questions. And that's what we're doing, asking which of these questions are worth continuing with, which of these answers are worth holding on to."