Tag Archives: World music

March 27, 2013 · 1:00 am

A lullaby for world music

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The term world music arose among academics in the 1960s as a way to promote interest in the study of diverse musics. By the 1980s, world music was a marketing category whose success was propelled by the interest and involvement of popular music stars; by the 1990s, it had become a booming commercial enterprise on its own. Critical and scholarly responses to this development involve two types of narrative: the anxious and the celebratory.

Creative responses have included examples like the inclusion of Hugo Zemp’s field recording of the song Rorogwela, available on the CD Solomon Islands: Fateleka and Baegu Music from Malaita (UNESCO/Audivis, 1990), as Sweet lullaby on the worldbeat CD Deep forest (Sony Music, 1992), where it was given drum machine and synthesizer accompaniment and backing vocals.

The marketing of tropes like green enviroprimitivism and spiritual new age avant-garde romanticism has created a situation where a “sweet lullaby” is a fitting metaphor for the soothing multicultural aura surrounding the industrialized globalization of music.

This according to “A sweet lullaby for world music” by Steven Feld (Public culture XII/1 [2000] pp. 145–171). Below, the official Sweet lullaby music video. Above, the 30th annual World of Music, Arts, and Dance Festival (WOMAD), which drew thousands of world music fans to Charlton Park in 2012.

Related article: Telek, Bridie, and schismogenesis

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February 6, 2013 · 1:00 am

Folk lexicon

weavers

Folk lexicon: Lexicon of the modern folk fan was published by Caffè Lena in 2013.

This free online resource provides information on the folk music scene as it has evolved (mainly in North America) since the 1950s. Categories include awards, folk festivals, instruments, musical styles, publications, radio shows, and record companies, along with discussions of terminology and corny nicknames.

Above, the Weavers were influential founders of the contemporary scene. Below, the group’s 1980 reunion at Carnegie Hall.

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November 26, 2012 · 1:00 am

Lloyd Miller and Oriental jazz

A multi-instrumentalist and multi-linguist who has lived and performed in Tehran, Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Stockholm, and Frankfurt, Dr. Lloyd Miller has been fusing jazz and world music since the early 1960s.

The California native finds that the modal music of Asia is completely compatible with the African American tradition. “It is all the same musical system,” he says. “The same spirit, the same feeling, the same notes, and some of the same melodic patterns and repetitive and mirroring phrases.”

Long documented only by rare recordings, Miller’s music can now be heard in the compilation A lifetime of Oriental jazz (Jazzman JMANCD 208).

This according to “Jazz in an unfamiliar key: The wanderings of Lloyd Miller” by Francis Gooding (The IAJRC Journal XLIV/2 [June 2011] pp. 9–13]). Below, a compilation of Miller’s broadcasts.

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October 24, 2012 · 1:00 am

Gnawa jazz

The Gnawa ma’llem (spirit master) Abdellah El-Gourd and the African American jazz pianist Randy Weston met in El-Gourd’s native Tangier in the early 1970s; over the next 30 years their interactions transformed their lives.

They recognized a common thread in slavery, as the Gnawa were originally sub-Saharan peoples who were mainly brought to Morocco as slaves. The two men collaborated musically, and Weston’s music was deeply influenced by the experience.

For El-Gourd, the great figures in jazz—both historical and contemporary—became symbolic ancestors; their portraits hang in his home next to those of Gnawa elders. Also due to his Western encounters, El-Gourd realized the importance of documenting his local laylaẗ tradition, a project that possesses him in a way that may be compared to the spirit possession of the laylaẗ ceremony itself, and which resonates with the way that Gnawa music has possessed and is possessed by the West.

This according to “Possessing Gnawa culture: Displaying sound, creating history in an unofficial museum” by Deborah Kapchan (Music & anthropology: Journal of musical anthropology of the Mediterranean 7 [2002]). Below, a brief interview with El-Gourd.

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September 26, 2012 · 1:00 am

Jazz and globalization

The music of the South Korean vocalist Na Yun-seon may be understood as challenging which sounds may be classified as jazz, and who may be included in its audiences.

Na may also be seen as negotiating the increasing freedom of jazz that stems from the proliferation of media globalization to imagine new interrelations between the political and economic hierarchies that influence the flow of such media objects. She thereby addresses a tension fundamental to the dynamics of globalization.

This according to “Jazz at large: Scapes and the imagination in the performances of Moses Molelekwa and Nah Youn-Sun” by  Jan Harm Schutte (Jazz research journal IV/1 [May 2010] pp. 43–56). Below, Na’s Calypso blues exemplifies some of the challenges that she proposes.

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August 22, 2012 · 1:00 am

Debussy and gamelan

Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music from a relatively small group at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle; he finally heard a full ensemble at the 1900 Exposition.

While he generally disapproved of the Orientalism of earlier Romantic-era composers, he found tremendous inspiration in gamelan music—not in its surface exoticism, but in the details of its structure, texture, and modality.

Exposure to Javanese gamelan music was one of the important catalysts in the flowering of Debussy’s mature style, and it left its mark on his work in a much broader and more profound way than is generally supposed.

“Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint that make Palestrina seem like child’s play,” he wrote, “and if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus.”

He also wrote of “Javanese rhapsodies, which, instead of confining themselves in a traditional form, develop according to the fantasy of countless arabesques.”

This according to Echoes from the East: The Javanese gamelan and its influence on the music of Claude Debussy, a 1988 dissertation for the University of Texas, Austin, by Kiyoshi Tamagawa.

Today is Debussy’s 150th birthday! Below, “Sirènes” from his Nocturnes, a piece in which Tamagawa demonstrates extensive influence of gamelan music; this influence is best discerned in the two-piano version presented here.

BONUS: A Javanese court gamelan similar to the one that Debussy heard:

Related article: Historic Balinese gamelans

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July 8, 2012 · 1:00 am

Grainger and world music


Today, on Percy Grainger’s 130th birthday, let’s recall his reflections on the two broad stylistic groups he discerned in world music.

Grainger believed that strong musical and human characteristics unite the musical output of the Nordic countries, which include Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and several others.

The melodic habits of Nordic music are more like those of China and other Mongolian countries than those of such European countries as France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Austria. The Mongolian-Nordic musical tradition favors solemn or spiritual unadorned melodies with long sustained notes, gapped scales, and a tendency to underlying polyphonic thought. The Nordic musical mind seeks inspiration in nature.

In contrast, the southern or Mohammedan tradition favors nervous, excitable, and florid tunes with quickly fluctuating notes, closely filled-up scales, and a tendency to seek surface complexity in technical passagework rather than in harmony.

This according to Characteristics of Nordic music, a talk broadcast on New York’s WEVD radio on 4 July 1933. Grainger’s talk is reprinted from a typescript held by the Grainger Museum, Melbourne, in Grainger on music (Oxford: Clarendon 1999, pp. 258–266). Above, Grainger with a radio microphone in 1928; below, some rare footage.

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March 8, 2012 · 1:00 am

Balkan studies

E.J. Brill inaugurated its series Balkan studies in 2011 with Staging socialist femininity: Gender politics and folklore performance in Serbia by Ana Hofman. The book examines the negotiation of gendered performances in Serbian rural areas as a result of the socialist gender policy and the creation of a new femininity in the public sphere from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, with particular attention to musical performances.

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March 3, 2012 · 1:00 am

World & traditional music

Part of the British Library’s Sounds project, World & traditional music features tens of thousands of recordings by ethnomusicologists and collectors, including those of the pioneering Africanists Peter Cooke (b.1930), Kenneth Gourlay (1919–95), Hans-Joachim Heinz (1917–2000), Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980), David Rycroft (1924–97), and Klaus Wachsmann (1907–84). This online resource is available free of charge for noncommercial research, study, and private enjoyment.

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January 19, 2012 · 1:00 am

Bluegrass discography

Maintained since 1996 by Charley Pennell, a cataloguer at the D.H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University, Bluegrass discography lists bluegrass singles, LPs, tapes, CDs, and videos by label, performer, and album. Resources for obtaining these publications are also listed.

Below, the legendary Foggy Mountain Boys perform Foggy mountain breakdown at the Grand Old Opry in 1965.

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