Legacy of World Music “Best wishes to a terrific musician, beloved teacher, and good friend,” says David Rosenboom, dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music. “What Alfred, and his brother Kobla [who himself retired four years ago], built over four decades with the West African program has been an important cornerstone of what we do at the music school. And the sophistication and rigor of world music performance here, West African as well as Indian, Indonesian and now other traditions, has really set CalArts apart from other music schools and conservatories. It’s always been one of the features drawing students here, regardless of their major.” The Ghanaian music artists Alfred and Kobla Ladzekpo came to the nascent California Institute of the Arts from Columbia University at the invitation of the university’s ethnomusicology head Nicholas England, who had been asked by CalArts founding music dean Mel Powell, at Yale at the time, to put together a performance program drawing on global musical knowledge beyond the classical Western repertoire.
The program England designed focused on three advanced—and very distinctive—music cultures: Indian, Indonesian and West African. The vertical cross-rhythmic and polyrhythmic percussion of West Africa, and its combination with song and dance, was already ingrained in the musics of the Americas— from blues and jazz to salsa and samba to other regional music derivations of the African diaspora—as a historical result of the transatlantic slave trade, which was run largely through Ghanaian ports. In their respective turns, the Indian classical tradition, distinguished by its complex linear rhythmic patterns and melodic structures, and the Indonesian gamelan tradition, which integrates music with dance, with its fluctuant, cyclical time and refined pitch consciousness, had increasingly drawn the attention of Western musicmakers throughout the 20th century—from Debussy, Maurice Delage and Albert Roussel to later, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, American composers like Lou Harrison, John Cage, La Monte Young and Terry Riley, who looked to Asia for musical know-how. (The latter four would soon become familiar faces on the CalArts campus.)
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Mel Powell, writing in an early Institute prospectus, described the music school’s global vision thusly: “The comparatively new field of ethnomusicology has already caused all talk of musical ‘exotica’ to become simply parochial. It is no longer merely eccentric to point out that, say, a Brahms-oriented cellist has much to learn from an African master drummer. Nor is it only abstract deference to the world’s contracting space that suddenly invests the music of the Far East with relevance. The meeting of East and West has been encouraged by the changing structures and tonalities of music in our own tradition... What we hear in the music of India or Bali not only merges with the discoveries of the modernists, but it also confirms that our common musical experience has been truncated. It’s perfectly clear now that we have been hearing less than we should.”
michael jang
clockwise, from left: The Ladzekpo brothers are joined by Nicholas England (right) and Beatrice Lawluvi (far right) during a West African drumming class; Pak Chokro; South Indian Carnatic music with (from left) T.H. Subash Chandran, L. Subramaniam, V. Shankar, Amiya Dasgupta and John Bergamo; Alfred (left) and Kobla Ladzekpo flank Nick England, founding director of CalArts’ World Music Performance Program.