Koromanti

For the namesake ethnic group, see Coromantee.

Mr. Baptiste's transcription of the "Koromanti" songs, published in 1707. The three songs are separated by double bar lines

"Koromanti" refers to three separate songs from 17th-century Jamaica, which are the earliest extant songs of enslaved Africans. They are also the earliest examples of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic music. ^[1] The music was transcribed by the otherwise unknown Mr. Baptiste in 1688 during a festival, upon the request of Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist Hans Sloane. "Koromanti", alongside transcriptions of the songs "Angola" and "Papa", was published in Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica in 1707. ^{[2] [3]}

References

Citations

1. Dubois 2016.
2. Rath 1993, p. 701.
3. McNeill 2019.

Sources

• Dubois, Laurent (8 August 2016). "Circle Unbroken". Duke Magazine . No. Special 2016 Issue. Retrieved 17 March 2024.
• McNeill, Brian (23 May 2019). "Who was Mr. Baptiste?". VCU News. Virginia Commonwealth University . Retrieved 17 March 2024.
• Rath, Richard Cullen (October 1993). "African Music in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transition". The William and Mary Quarterly . 50 (4): 700–726. doi:10.2307/2947472. JSTOR   2947472.

Further reading

• Blackburn, Robin (1997). The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. London: Verso Books. pp. 347–349. ISBN   978-1-85984-890-6.
• Lingold, Mary Caton (2020). "Digital Performance and the Musical Archive of Slavery: "Like Running Home"". Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. 49: 109–125. doi:10.1353/sec.2020.0009.
• Lingold, Mary Caton (February 2021). "In search of Mr Baptiste: on early Caribbean music, race, and a colonial composer". Early Music . 49 (1): 49–66. doi:10.1093/em/caab002.
• Roberts, Helen H. (1926). "Possible Survivals of African Song in Jamaica". The Musical Quarterly . 12 (3): 340–358. doi:10.1093/mq/xii.3.340. hdl: 2027/uc1.b4440340 . JSTOR   738243.

External links

• Interactive website with recordings and commentary of the Mr. Baptiste's five transcriptions
• Modern realization of Koromanti #1
• Modern realization of Koromanti #2