My Fulbright Life
Transcript For: Current Fulbrighter Canyon Cody in Spain
August 04, 2008
Current Fulbrighter Canyon Cody discusses his Fulbright experience in Spain.
Schuyler: Hi and welcome to My Fulbright Life. I’m
your host, Schuyler Allen, and today we are joined by Canyon Cody who is a Fulbrighter
in Spain.
Canyon, thank you for joining us today.
Canyon: Thank you very much. It’s nice to be
here Schuyler.
Schuyler: So tell us, where in Spain are you?
Canyon: I’m based in Grenada. The idea was that I was
going to be studying about different music in Andalucia, but Grenada has been rich enough that
I’ve actually pretty much stayed here.
Schuyler: Great. And what kind of music are you
studying?
Canyon: The project was to study the
intercultural roots of Andalucian music, and usually it’s pretty much
associated with flamenco, and we’ve been studying the Arabic roots, and the
Indian roots, and the North African roots and Latin American roots of what is
now flamenco music.
Schuyler: Well, that sounds like a very rich
project. So what has been the genesis for your interest in this project? How
did it all start?
Canyon: Well, my family comes from Cuba and
music was always something that was a major part of my identity as a Cuban and
the confluence of different cultures in Cuba I think provided for a really rich
musical background and when I was studying about immigration and politics in
college, the connection between music and immigration is what brought together
this project. Grenada
was just the perfect location for it because of its history of centuries of
different cultures passing through and bringing their musical traditions and
their instruments.
Schuyler: That’s amazing. Were you a music major
undergraduate?
Canyon: No, I was an International Studies
major focused on politics, immigration, Diaspora, but I was fortunate enough in
college to have an interdisciplinary major so I did take quite a few music classes
while I was in university but I was mostly focused on international relations
and politics.
Schuyler: So basically you were able to sort of
fuse all your interests together in this program?
Canyon: Well, that’s the great thing about
the Fulbright proposal, that you are given the freedom to come up with as broad
and specific a program as you’d like and I was fortunate that they believed in
my program from the beginning even though the idea was to pass through about 12
centuries of Andalucian music in my short 9 months here.
Schuyler: So, I gather you’re a native Spanish
speaker, but did you have to learn anything like Ladino or any other languages
to do your project?
Canyon: Fortunately, the center where I’m
doing my research here in Grenada,
they have been, over the past decade, on a long translation project. A lot of
the original documents are in Arabic or in Hebrew—and there’s another
Fulbrighter who’s actually this year doing a project on translating manuscripts
and that has made my project a lot easier because my language limitations are
still at 2. We’re going to see after my Fulbright project if I can tackle a
third.
Schuyler: Now I’m really intrigued. What’s a
typical day in your life like?
Canyon: Well, the year was kind of split up
into 2 halves for me. The first year was primarily academic and I would do my
research at… there’s a center for documentation of Andalucian music here in
Grenada that has both a music library and just a history of manuscripts and
archives and I was doing my preliminary research there basically just to try
and get my head around the history of the different waves of immigration in and
out of Grenada and then how those correlated with the different changes in
music. So that you would see as the reconquest of Spain happened you would see certain
groups of Muslims moving to Tunisia and then there was a musical tradition
there that was related to Andalucia and then in 200 year a different group went
to Morocco and you see a completely different type of music and trying to make
the connection between the waves of immigration and the music. So that was
mostly a historical part.
And then, towards the
second half of the year I was working with musicians in Grenada. One, a quartet of Moroccan
musicians who play traditional Andalucian music, musicians who have their roots
in Andalucia from a thousand years ago, and have since emigrated back to Spain.
And then some Flemenco musicians here in Grenada. Grenada is primarily known
for the Habichuela
which are a flamenco family and I got to work with them and they were basically
my teachers for learning about flamenco music, this all being a very foreign,
both melodically and time signature-wise to my previous background.
Schuylre: I’m just curious; do you play a
musical instrument?
Canyon: Not a single one. I’ve worked with
musicians for the past 5 or 6 years; I’ve been producing albums with other
musicians and I really approach it from a much more conceptual and listener
perspective. On this album, I came out here to do the first half of the year,
the academic part, and then the second half we’ve been recording an album
trying to highlight these changes in Andalucian music and worked with about 20
different musicians in Grenada, there’s just such a rich population here, and I
work with them basically on conversational level, listening to things and
asking them questions, and rerecording. I think that I’m actually lucky to not
have any knowledge of instruments in my brain because when I listen I tend to
listen as a listener and not as a musician.
Schuyler: Interesting perspective. And so what
do you do in your downtime, listening to all this amazing music, all day long?
Canyon: Well, I have pretty much everyday,
for the past couple of months here, an appointment with musicians and they’ll come
and play over songs that we’re making, and then in my downtime I spend a lot of
it digesting. So, every hour that I spend with a musician recording, whether
it’s the kanun and or the cajon, I have to go
back and listen for 3 or 4 hours which in some ways is passive work. I’m lucky
I have a beautiful terrasa here in Grenada. So there will be those hot
afternoons where I try and calm down and I’ll be regoing over what I had
recorded in the morning, but I have actually not escaped from music for quite a
bit of time.
Schuyler: Wait, wait wait, what is the kanun and cajon for the uninitiated
listeners?
Canyon: Well the two major percussive
instruments in flamenco and Arabic music is the cajon which is just basically a
box that came from Latin America and that’s one of the examples of immigration
affecting music here. The cajon was the result of Spanish government, military,
and citizens going to Latin America, particularly during the wars of
independence in Latin America and then coming back from South
America with the cajon which is indigenous there. The other
instrument is the darbuka which is a hand drum which is used in Andalucian
Arabic music. So there’s not a lot that was difficult in terms of getting the
rhythm to work together. The rhythmic elements ended up blending really well.
The more difficult aspect was getting the tuning between flamenco music and
Arabic music to work together because flamenco is in a strange Phrygian scale
and Arabic music has a number of different scales that have nothing to do with
western notation so this was really a experiment for me to kind of broaden my
horizons and learn a new language. Not English or Spanish but another musical
language that I’d never had an opportunity to dive into.
Schuyler: So, what is a challenge that you’ve
faced that you didn’t anticipate, and how did you overcome it and how did you
address it?
Canyon: Well, the first bit of time here I
was just kind of overwhelmed by the immensity of the two cultures I was
studying, and in a lot of ways it’s been 10 cultures that have been involved.
The two primary cultures are the cultures of flamenco and the culture of
Andalucian Arabic music and within flamenco there are 20, 30 palos, which are
styles of music or styles of song within flamenco and any Spaniard, even if
they’re not interested in flamenco and they’re completely outside of it, just
from being around here started off with such a vast knowledge that it was
intimidating to speak with someone who wasn’t an ethnomusicologist or musician
and how much they knew about it and I felt I had so much catch up, I felt like
I got to a basic Spaniard understanding of flamenco maybe 6 months into my
trip. I think the difficulty that that was just time, I couldn’t rush it. It’s
not the sort of thing that you can train your ear faster or slower. I just
allowed the beginning of my trip to really not be as full or moving as I
expected it to be and then in the last 3 or 4 months it really picked up and we
just finished everything that I planned to do. So, I didn’t get too worried
that I was far behind by about half way through the year.
Schuyler: I think that’s excellent advice. I
think that it’s really interesting to hear that a lot of the grantees that I’ve
interviewed say that it’s important to get immersed in the culture and just to
allow that process to happen and things will sort of fall into place as you go
along and that sounds like what has happened to you. And so, if I were applying
to Fulbright for the 2009-10 cycle, and I was just about to start putting my
application together online, what advice would you give me?
Canyon: Well, I guess I should give you
advice from my second way around instead of my first because I actually applied
my senior year from university for Fulbright an didn’t get it, then reworked my
project a little bit, proposed basically the same project but with a lot more
focus and lot more detail of what I was going to do. I think the idea itself is
something that has to begin before everything. It has to be something that you
personally have a passion for so much, and is unique in a way that you almost
couldn’t not be chosen. Then the next way that you can make it a more
selectable program which I didn’t really do so well in my first proposal is the
methodology. You know, how exactly are you going to do these things. I said that
I was going to come here, and find musicians form these two musical cultures
and bring them together to record an album that incorporated modern electronic
elements, I think that the major question was, you know, who exactly are you
going to be working with. I had one contact that had written my letter of
support that I had met through email. But really having your year planned out
in your proposal. And if it deviates from that, that can be understandable, but
you know, in my second proposal there really was, you know, what am I planning to
do for the first three months, what am I hoping to change in that next half,
who are the people that I’m going to be working with, and I think that if your
idea is impressive and you have the 1, 2, 3s all in a line then you make a much
stronger application.
Schuyler: I think that’s excellent advice and I
think also that the sort of subtext of what you’re saying is perseverance is
essential in applying to Fulbright—
Canyon: I really wanted to do the project
and that was pretty much it. I think the Fulbright Commission realized I would
have applied a third time if they didn’t give it to me… it might have been just
so that they didn’t have to read the proposal again!
Schuyler: [laughter] But you didn’t, obviously,
write the same proposal twice which I think is really…
Canyon: No, no, no. We changed it, I mean
the second proposal was, other than the seed of the idea of intercultural
collaboration, I started it from beginning again.
Schuyler: I think it’s useful for our listeners
to hear that the second time around was the charm because you put a lot much
detail and attention into what it was you wanted to do and spelt it out for the
people who were reviewing it, and I think that that’s, regardless of what
somebody’s doing on Fulbright, excellent advice. How long have you been in Spain
now?
Canyon: I got here in September and so I’m
coming up right on the end of my term right now, and we finished our project.
The project proposal actually was to record an album and so I worked with all
the different musicians I was studying with and we recorded an album that is
kind of a fusion album between flamenco and Arabic music with modern electronic
and hip hop rhythms. One of the things I wanted to do was incorporate people
who aren’t musicians, like myself. So I’ve met a lot of people here who are
passionate about music and passionate about history and kind of wanted to
collaborate with that but didn’t study guitar or didn’t have the opportunity to
play an instrument growing up and one of the ways that I found to bring people
into music that are intimidated by it is through electronic manipulation, that
you can study an original text, a primary document of an old song that I found
on vinyl—that was kind of my first couple of months here, going around to
thrift stores and finding old flamenco vinyl and seeing what people were
listing to here 40 years ago and then sampling that and then manipulating it
and slowing it down and isolating certain frequencies and just really being
able to play with the sound itself and to get intimate with it even though you
might not be able to replay that music yourself on the original instrument.
Schuyler: I’d love to hear some of your music at
some point.
Canyon: I’m going come back… I’m coming back
home to see my grandma and we’re going to master the album and then the idea
from the beginning was you know, this is not my music this is cultural music,
this is Andalucian music. So we’re going to have the album up for free download
in November when the album comes out.
Schuyler: So it sounds like you’ve certainly
been refining and honing and expanding upon an idea that’s been long incubating
for you and what skills have you gained while you’ve been in Spain that you
intend to use once you’ve returned home, and what are your plans beyond? It
sounds like you’re going to produce this record, but beyond that, what are your
future plans?
Canyon: Well, in terms of the lesson from my
year here in Grenada is that balance between rushing and going too slow and
trying to find that medium between not trying to go past the details too much
and kind of respecting how complicated and immense the subject are that you’re
approaching and to do that without hurry and at the same time, keep… you know,
the Fulbright, alas, is not forever and at some point your project needs to be
over and about half way through my project I realized that I could do this
forever and could study on this project for as long as they’re going to keep paying
me but at some point you just need to realize when a project is going to be
done and \ finish it. And that was a great change about three months ago into
the project when I just saw that I really needed to change my speed and my
focus in order to get myself to “now we’re done.” So I’ll go back to the
states, and we’ll release this album and I’d really like to bring some of the
musicians from Grenada to the states and present this project to universities
and talk about immigration and how it’s affected music and then bring some of
the musicians to do a concert, kind of bringing together academic musical study
and performance so that someone can learn about the history and then really see
and feel the music right there in front of them.
Schuyler: Well, it sounds like you’ve raised a
really good point, that feasibility is critical to one’s Fulbright project, in
terms of thinking about how much time you have to get it done, but certainly
the experiences last for a lifetime, certainly beyond those 9 months.
Canyon: Really, I couldn’t be any more
appreciative of my time here. It’s really been a wonderful opportunity.
Schuyler: Canyon, thank you so much for sharing
your experiences today.
Canyon: Thank you very much as well
Schuyler.
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