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"A Sound Legacy? The Making of Jamaican Music" — Sandra Richards Mayo
Probable
A study of the Alpha Boys' School built on fifteen interviews with its graduates, and the source for most of what this archive now says about Alpha.
It supplies the chronology: Justina Ripoll (Sister Mary Claver) opening the Alpha Cottage on 1 May 1880, the drum and fife corps in 1893, the Bishop's gift of brass instruments in 1908. It also makes two arguments that matter more than the dates. First, that music at Alpha was a product of discipline rather than of an arts mission: precision, repetition and routine were what the school was for, and a brass band teaches them efficiently. Second, that the legacy runs into the state as well as the studio, with Jamaica's military, regiment and police bandmasters all Alpha graduates at the time of her interviews.
It is also where Sister Mary Ignatius Davies' sound system is recorded.
At a glance
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- Probable
- Sources
- Sandra Richards Mayo, "A Sound Legacy? The Making of Jamaican Music".
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