#BTColumn – Nicholas Brancker and the Arts

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Ralph Jemmott

Let me first congratulate Nicholas Brancker on his award of Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.

The academic laurel is for his contribution to culture.

Nicholas Brancker and I tolerated each for two years when he was my history student in the sixth form at Harrison College.

He told me that his father, who was my senior at Harrison, wanted him to become like himself, a lawyer.

The father George Brancker had won a Barbados Scholarship in 1956, the same year as Erskine Sandiford, Richie Haynes and Louis Wilshire.

The father thought his ambition for the son required an academic training and Nick ended up in the History class.

It was clear from the beginning that Nick had no interest in becoming a lawyer and only marginal interest in the discipline I was paid to teach.

He once told me in class: “I can leave school now and work for more money than you.” I did not take offence because money has never been a prime motivator in my life and I was sort of enjoying what I was doing.

Besides after a while I did not take Nicholas any more seriously than he took me. Of his father’s ambition that he should become a lawyer he once said, “can you imagine me walking down Broad Street in a jacket and tie holding a brief case and wearing socks?” I never quite understood the socks part.

Nicholas Brancker’s expressed interest was Music, Music and more Music. Janice Millington came to teach at H.C. on the same day as myself in September 1970.

When she realised that I had a love for classical music, we spoke a lot. She once gave me a recording of Brahms symphonies Nos. 2 and 4.

One day we were listening to a piece of classical music I had recorded on tape, when a male teacher stopped by my desk and hearing the piece of Baroque music, (Corelli’s Christmas Concerto) asked if the Governor-General or somebody famous had died. When he left, I leaned over to Janice and said, “Good God, Janice, the Philistines are upon us.”

She nearly died laughing.

Janice Millington convinced me of the prodigious talent of young Brancker. In the history class, I quickly realised that he was better left alone to pursue his own devices.
Children are born with different abilities as well as different levels of ability.

It was a happy confluence of events that a generation of creative students were at H.C when Janice came to reach in 1970. Before that, Harrison College was a school for bright ‘bookish’ boys and the few who excelled in sports, cricket, football and athletics. Generally speaking, it was by no means a site of artistic creativity or aesthetic longings.

Janice Millington was not just a music teacher she was quite an intellectual who read in areas outside of music.

Brancker is a musician but he is also a thinker. He addresses musical creativity in a way and with a depth that is greater than most.

On Brasstacks Sunday of August 30, he talked about how he managed to impose Emile Straker’s Beautiful Barbados melody on a J.S. Bach Prelude. He says that he does not particularly like being called a ‘genius’ but it is clear his talent goes to a higher level.

Nicholas Brancker has a very native perspective on music, native to his person that is. He sees musical creativity as ‘hard work’ and not just a source of making money.
(Like teaching NIck).

He noted on Brasstacks that “you not only have to have a musical vocabulary but the skills to execute the vocabulary.” This is clearly a person who brings thought to what he is doing.

Too much of Barbadian creativity is lacking in depth of perception and reflects a pervasive mediocrity which we have come to accept, perhaps in search of ‘a level playing field.’ It may also reflect a vacuous element in Barbadian society where in Brancker’s own words we confuse taste with excellence. This specifically relates to a lack of gravitas in an education system characterised by materialism and often pointless credentialism.

One has to be careful about critiquing cultural production.
Art, be it music, dance, painting, literature or flower arrangement, is a very subjective thing.

In Barbados you don’t want to discourage creativity even when it is obviously poor.
It might improve if you work hard at the craft. Similarly, one must be wary of appearing to be so high brow as to ignore the simple creativity of the folk.

However, we operate a wider world and a wider marketplace. Our cultural production must reflect a competitive excellence.

On one CBC ‘Stan Home’ episode a performer’s song proclaimed to the world that he looking for a girl to “wuk up pun”. Is that all we have to sell to the world.

RPB himself is quoted as saying: “We need to be making music that is broader than just juck and jam and jump and wave. It is ok to make music for mas, but there is nothing wrong with making a song that can be played at morning mas on Sundays in the genre of soca music.”

My own aesthetic is too Eurocentric to envisage the latter. However, I agree that we have to broaden the scope with regards to the music we are making.

As Brancker said on the Brasstacks Sunday program, we are not creating enough work that is inspirational, that helps us get through what ever it is that we are going through, when in his word “yuh feel yuh gine shackle out.” It is so easy to feel ‘shackled out’ these days.

We continue to misconstrue the notion of culture, which we equate with song and dance, at the expense of the cultivation of progressive values, attitudes and sensibilities.

In fact we may be pursuing a culture much of which may be coarsening our sensibilities. Today, an older and wiser Nicholas Brancker is asking of his fellow artistes; What are you doing it for? This indicates that it has to be more than about making money and having fun. Too much of our artistic output is substandard. Too many artistes are satisfied with passing popularity.

One panellist commented that we in Barbados get by doing just enough but he suggested that in a competitive world in the arts as in other things, just enough is not good enough. Dick Hebdige author of ‘Subcultures: The Meaning of Style’, has written that in the Arts, a ‘Classic’ is a body of intellectual and imaginative work which over time has retained its major communicative and aesthetic power.

We need to create Art that will endure.

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.