In Conversation With Jacqueline Springer On ‘The Music Is Black’ Exhibition
Portrait of Tricky and other exhibits on display at V&A East. Image credit: Inside V&A East Museum’s inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black A British Story © David Parry for the V&A (23)
‘These are just fascinating stories of creativity, resilience and talent.’
Jacqueline Springer is one among a huge team that worked for four years in secret, developing a multi-sensory experience that showcases over 200 items across 125 years of music descended from African musical traditions. The V&A East’s inaugural exhibition, ‘The Music Is Black: A British Story’, unfolds the development of many British music genres including 2 tone, Brit funk, lovers rock, jungle, drum & bass, trip hop, UK garage and grime, documenting influential figures, political contexts, and social histories that unfolded the journey of Black British music — through to the modern day.
As lead curator of the exhibition, Jacqueline has been instrumental in shaping its vision and visitor experience. After reviewing ‘The Music Is Black’ an ‘imperative visit for lovers of British music’, TOPNOTE had the privilege to hear from her directly on the undertaking and execution of such a project, the complexity of what music is and means, and her hopes for the exhibition.
Find the full interview below.
Image credit: inside V&A East Museum’s inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black A British Story © David Parry for the V&A (20)
Interviewer: This is the V&A East’s inaugural exhibition. What does it mean to tell this story, and why is it so important to be told now?
It’s a great opportunity to foreground British Black music within the broader narrative structure of international Black music. And given that we're British, that it's a new museum, there's a way of utilising that novelty to have people approach a familiar subject with new eyes and ears. It's less about timeliness, but more about the worthiness of the subject and the opportunity – that a new museum exists. Among a raft of exhibitions considered to open it, this one crept forward.
Music is the great social integrator. So to be able to relate that through a curatorial fabric that looks at political and social history and allows people to see music beyond just their memories, but how it's interwoven through response to oppression, crimes against humanity, global conflicts, social incohesion and cohesion, is a really wonderful way to lay out the importance of music.
This exhibition makes clear that Black music creation hasn't always been centred around celebration and joy, and shares how integral oppression is to a lot of those music spaces. That’s a difficult balance to achieve…
Sometimes going to an exhibition could be the cherry on top of a day or the opening salvo to a long weekend. It's being able to tell something heavy about something some people may feel was the best time of their life, but also, to reaffirm if there is anything to do with joy or celebration. Joy is the opposite of sorrow, so these two emotions exist, and experiences bathed around both descriptors exist as well.
There's often an oversimplification as to what music means and what it is. The exhibition reminds people of its profundities and how it is integral to identity in so many ways – language, performative practice, dress, the boundaries of creativity and how you can alter them. …How collaboration births new genres and how displacement is integral to this story, through violence and a continental race to rich oneself at the hands of African transatlantic enslavement.
But also, how the cultures that existed right across Africa remained within the bodies and on the tongues of those who were captured and trafficked and enslaved, and how they intermingled with other enslaved people, as well as their enslavers and colonists. That creates these atoms of creative expression, this hybridisation… and from there we end up with samba or reggae.
The key links to the African continent are fascinating, but you cannot just say ‘Africa’. You've got to look at Africa, both before slavery and as a result of Britain's involvement. The biggest challenge was being able to provide space for this complexity and dissemination just through several objects, because most people are walking in expecting to hit 1970 off the bat. The first act is the deliberate framing of the exhibition, but it's also, I anticipate, a surprise for most visitors.
“Music is the great social integrator. So to be able to relate that through a curatorial fabric that looks at political and social history and allows people to see music beyond just their memories, but how it’s interwoven through response to oppression, crimes against humanity, global conflicts, social incohesion and cohesion, is a really wonderful way to lay out the importance of music.”
In the exhibition I watched footage containing interviews about and performances of jazz from passionate artists in the early 20th century. Why do you think jazz is regaining its popularity and influence as a contemporary genre, especially in London?
I think that there's an appreciation of live music…. Where you can actually see the cheeks of a saxophonist inflate with passion. They create sound through just a deployment of air. You've got social spaces, organisations like Tomorrow's Warriors, who've always prized jazz education and the support of young people to further their musical ambitions, which is expensive: the equipment, instruments, training, touring.
And so, I've never looked at it as being a revival, it's more a case for me of people catching up with the devotion of a musical genre that was the first rebel yell. Jazz, not rock and roll, was the first global youth music subculture that affected how people dressed, how they spoke. What was so beautiful about finding that footage in the BBC archive was that contrast in the scepticism from the interviewer. There was a real snobbery for jazz, because of its African-American origins, because it was embraced by young people, and also because it disrupted the orthodoxies of what constituted who could play, and what instruments.
There's a real celebration, but I think it's been ongoing, of jazz existing and being able to survive… because it needs to oxygenate through live performance, that exchange between artists and consumer. So when you have music that actually embraces jazz like elements of dubstep and Brit Funk – that funk is upbeat rebellious jazz – it disrupts the format, the formality, but so too did Bebop and hardbop. It's a lot like a grapevine. Jazz has got all of these little branches bulging with all of this fruit. It's always been present. It hasn't always had equal funding or opportunity. In many respects, if the mainstream thinks that jazz is having a renaissance, it's only because the mainstream dropped its attentiveness to it.
“The biggest challenge was being able to provide space for this complexity and dissemination just through several objects, because most people are walking in expecting to hit 1970 off the bat. The first act is the deliberate framing of the exhibition, but it’s also, I anticipate, a surprise for most visitors. ”
I think it has everything to do with how the music makes you feel. It's really beautiful to find the non-words for your feelings in instrumental music, and jazz provides that articulation in the nonverbal in music. And I say this because we're in a society where we've got more media than we'll ever digest, and more ways of actually consuming it than at any time. There's this instantaneous one-way dialogue. This is all very speculative, but there may be a way in which you can drown out the noise by having a supremely crafted noise take you musically, emotionally and intellectually somewhere.
What are your hopes for this exhibition?
My pleasure in having the responsibility of this exhibition is just the idea that people can leave thinking ‘these people walk among us, I could be sat next to them on the Elizabeth line’. Hopefully it raises the level of respect for Black British musicality across a number of different styles.
The very idea that a Super Nintendo could be perverted to create soul within grime, that a turntable could be utilised to hook up with another turntable, subverting technology. And of course, the steel pan, an anti-colonial instrument, because in the 1930s, Britain banned Trinidadians the right to use tamboo bamboo musically. These are just fascinating stories of creativity, resilience and talent. The fact that all of this is happening within a visitor's lifetime, within their parents’, their grandparents’… I would love that to create a level of pause for thought. Music is speaking to what's happening to us all societally.
I'm really grateful to every lender and donor for trusting in it, and for keeping a secret for four years. This is no mean feat. When it was deployed, it managed to surpass expectations of how such a story would be presented. I'm really proud of the collaborative work across design, across interpretation, giving a lot of information, in text as well as object form across a number of different worlds.
Items including Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar on display for the first time inside V&A East Museum’s inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black A British Story © David Parry for the V&A (21)
‘The Music Is Black: A British Story’ is on at V&A East until January 2027.