21869: (Arthur) Frantz Casseus by Marc Ribot (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Tttnhm@aol.com

Frantz Casseus by Marc Ribot - Bomb magazine

In 1965, at age 11, I wanted to play guitar: like millions of other suburban
kids, I heard a Rolling Stones record and thought it was cool. I had no
interest in classical guitar. Yet that's what I started studying, with no less a
teacher than Frantz Casseus, the acknowledged father of Haitian classical guitar.
And although I wound up playing music quite far from what Frantz taught me,
it was a good idea, a beautiful idea in fact, for reasons that don't make any
kind of sense but are true.

I'd known Frantz most of my life. He'd been friends with my aunt and uncle,
Rhoda and Melvin Unger, since the early '50s, eventually forming one of those
unlikely reinvented families that seem to grow out of the social fragments of
New York life. My aunt and uncle both attended the famously leftist City
College of the 1930s, met shortly thereafter and have been together ever since. By
the time they met Frantz, my aunt had become a pop songwriter and my uncle was
running a costume jewelry business in the Garment District.

Frantz was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1915. His childhood fascination
with the guitar was mystically fused with the death of a young aunt who had
helped raise him. It was the custom in Haiti to discard the belongings of those
who died from illness. "The sight of [Aunt Andree's] mandolin perched on what
seemed a pile of garbage—alongside the memory of her music—has never ceased
to haunt me . . . I burned with desire." (Marc Methalier, ed., "Essai
Bibliographique sur la Vie de Frantz Casseus," Mathel Productions, 1995) By the time he
emigrated to New York, Frantz had already established himself as an important
guitarist in Port-au-Prince cultural circles. But he had ambitions beyond the
repetition of a traditional classical repertoire for Haiti's cultural elite.

Frantz came to New York for roughly the same reasons James Baldwin left it.
Both needed to write about the place they were from and both needed to leave
that place in order to do so. Frantz came here with the ambition to compose a
distinctly Haitian classical guitar music, to fuse the European classical
tradition with Haitian folk elements as Heitor Villa-Lobos had done with his native
Brazil's and as Béla Bartók had done with Hungarian folk songs.

Frantz's assumption of what was to be a lifelong musical mission followed the
occupation of Haiti by the U.S. military (1915–34), when its cultural
integrity must have felt threatened. An editorial he wrote titled "Our Méringue Is
Dying" describes this: "Some with indifference, others with an indignant
sadness, have witnessed the disappearance of one of our most delicious national
dances which is like a precious pearl ornament of our folklore." The Haitian
Méringue "invites [one] to dance, contains a subtle and delicious melody. . . .
[Its] character, its simple and limited form, made it a dance with noble stature,
and even a classic." (Frantz Casseus, "Notre Méringue se muert," Haiti
Journal, 1944) Love and loss again, this time on a national/cultural level.

The rest of this article can be read at
http://www.bombsite.com/casseus/casseus.html