The Structural Similarities The Relations of the Verbal Music

sorrow. They make the song relevant to their own experience as formerly a slave. They keep delivering the message of freedom through spiritual singing. Slave preachers and, especially, slave music and religious rituals kept alive a message of freedom in ways that sustained generations through the storm and through the night of the antebellum years. Harvey, 2011:48 The music of blues-jazz, as the later popular culture of African-American, is considered as the development of the spiritual songs. Burton Perreti, a scholar whose study is about the history of African-American music, stated that t he „blue’ notes is the derivation of the shout, moan, and bended notes of the black spiritual notes. Perreti, 2009:71. This historical relation can be seen in the metonymical organization between two verbal music. The fact that Baldwin’s describes the revival meeting as an opening before the story proceed into the jazz performance gives its own meaning. Baldwin somehow wants to introduce the importance of music for the African Americans. This can be seen in how the music and singing of the revival able to affect the people’s emotion although Baldwin does not make a lot of description. This is also probably the reason why the narrator is not involved to be the audience of the revival meeting and only observing from the distance. By the end of the story, the importance of music for African American is fully described in the jazz performance. This time the narrator is involved as the audience, even Baldwin makes specific description about his emotional experience in the end of the verbal music. Although jazz is a later musical culture, it still carries the old message of freedom. Baldwin states this message as a „tale’ that has a “new depth in every generation” p.139. That is, revival meeting represents the old generation and the jazz as the new generation ’s representative. In the analysis of revival meeting already stated that Christianity is not originally belong to the African Americans but they adopt it and makes them relevant to their experience. The performance of jazz actually also says the same thing. The song “Am I Blue”, for instance, is not written by African American writer. It is written by Akst and Clarke who both of them are white Albert, 1984:183. Sonny is described to “make it his” p.140 so that the song becomes relevant to his experience. In the description of jazz performance, Baldwin somehow seems to combine the two different cultures. Actually, this combination exists as Paul Harvey stated: During the interwar years, a number of musicians combined the blues and religious music. . . Some performers, chronicling their personal struggles in song, wavered between their roles as blues performers and preachers, unable to settle into either one. Harvey, 2011:105 The combination of blues and religious music results in the personal struggle of the musicians. In the story of “Sonny’s Blues”, this personal struggle can be seen in the jazz performance when Sonny struggles in the first set of playing. From the analysis, it can be seen that the archetypal relation of the revival meeting and jazz performance is laid on the music itself. How the music contains the message of freedom and become the medium of expression of the African American since the age of slavery. This message may refer to the blues as an original element in African American musical culture. This message passes through generations of African Americans, as blues element exists in the generation of spiritual music and later the generation of jazz. 45

CHAPTER V CONCLUSION

“Sonny’s Blues” written by James Baldwin is a work of fiction which employs music as its main theme. The story describes two music events which are the revival meeting and the jazz performance. Those two descriptions are considered as two different cultures and placed in different parts of the story. The way Baldwin described those two events implies that there is a relation between them. This study aims to reveal the relation. Since the author and the characters in the story are African Americans, therefore the context of the study is also set on African Americans. Based on the study of Steven Paul Scher, Notes Toward a Theory of Verbal Music , music may be featured in a narrative. It is a phenomenon which he called verbal music. Verbal music contains the evocation of music so that the reader also gets the musical experience when they read a narrative featuring verbal music. The descriptions of the revival meeting employ a re-presentational type of verbal music as it uses an existing song: “The Old Ship of Zion”. The verbal music tells about the narrator who watches the performance of revival meeting from the distance. It is described how he observes the three sisters and a brother conducting the revival. Although the revival is not conducted for the first time and the people have watched it for many times, the narrator notices that the music still impresses the people and even affects them emotionally.