Category Archives: Ethnomusicology

by | July 11, 2023 · 6:00 am

Lunch break in Ho Chi Minh City

“After being in Vietnam for over two weeks visiting all possible leads on musical instruments, I was struck with a mild case of musical instrument information overload. One day, I wandered into the central part of Hồ Chí Minh to buy something for my lunch. There, I spotted the Hồ Chí Minh City Museum.

I deliberated, will I or won’t I go in? I supposed they were probably going to close for the midday intermission soon but I decided to give it a quick look. Entering the gates I spotted the ticket office, enquired as to their operating hours, and asked if there were any musical instruments on display. Yes, they were open and yes, they had musical instruments on display. Hip hip!

Wandering around the museum, I found that most of the few musical instruments were already entered in my notes. Therefore, I was thrilled when I stumbled upon the mõ đình, a log slit drum. My last steps were to be the gift shop where I looked eagerly through the books, hoping that one may have information on musical instruments. I was disappointed to find most related to the Vietnam War. I did, however, procure two inexpensive musical instruments–a song loan and a sênh suứ.

Upon leaving, I was surprised to notice one last hidden room down a small hallway. I found two instruments I’d never seen, read of, or been told about before – the chordophones đàn măng đôlin (similar to the mandolin) and the đàn octavina (comparable to the steel string guitar). Both had been adapted from their western equivalent, with a ribbed fingerboard, like the lục huyền cầm (Vietnamese Guitar). I never did get lunch that day, opting instead to visit the Traditional Musical Instruments and Costume Showroom, two blocks away. Sadly this showroom has since closed down.”

The above excerpt is taken from Terry Moran’s Vietnamese musical instruments: A monographic lexicon. (2020). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME), and read up on all the Vietnamese instruments he mentions here.

Above are two musicians performing in a coffee shop in Ho Chi Minh City. Below is a video of a musician playing the đàn măng đôlin, an Vietnamese instruments similar to the mandolin.

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by | July 7, 2023 · 6:00 am

Religious music and churches in Quebec

Religious music played an important role in the founding of Québec City. Activities aligned with festivities of the liturgical calendar, while public prayers, processions, and Sunday masses forged a social fabric in an atmosphere of religious fervor. François de Laval (1623–1708), the first Bishop of Quebec, founded the Diocese of Quebec and created new churches, schools, and charities. Quebec Cathedral has been at the center of musical life thanks to its institutional and educational role. Laval brought from France an organ which was installed in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de l’Immaculée-Conception in 1663.

During English colonial rule, church music was gradually adopted by locals or immigrants from Germany and Britain. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (1810) houses the oldest congregation of Scottish descent in Canada. Its origins date back to 1759, when the regiment of the 78th Fraser Highlanders of General James Wolfe’s (1727–1759) army was stationed in Quebec.

The churches were not only places of community where music was played and heard during services, but also provided the framework for ambitious musical initiatives that became the nuclei of ensemble concerts. For example, on 26 June 1834, Stephen Codman, the musical director of the Anglican Cathedral of Holy Trinity, invited 111 choristers and 60 musicians for a sacred concert featuring works by Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Cherubini, and Rossini. The popularity of European choral repertoire led to the creation of the Union musicale in 1866 and the creation of the Société Musicale Ste-Cécile in 1869.

Learn more about Quebec’s musical life in a new entry on MGG Online.

The image above is of Basilique Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Québec, and below is a concert choir performance at the cathedral.

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by | July 3, 2023 · 6:00 am

Ryuichi Sakamoto, pioneer of electronic music

Ryūichi Sakamoto was one of Japan’s most internationally influential musicians. Sakamoto’s career began in electronic pop music as a keyboardist with the band Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1978, and which triggered a boom for this genre in Japan. At the same time he released his first solo album Thousand Knives. His understanding of music, which transcended genres, became evident on numerous other albums combining pop music, ambient, jazz, and electro-acoustic music, ranging to early forms of house and techno. His works in addition include the operas Life (1999) and Time (2021). Sakamoto studied composition and ethnomusicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music from 1970 onward, where he first came into contact with synthesizers.

He is also known for his music for films by Nagisa Ōshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, 1983), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, 1987; The Sheltering Sky, 1990; Little Buddha, 1993), Pedro Almodóvar (High Heels, 1991), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (The Revenant, 2015), as well as for his music for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. Sakamoto’s final studio album 12–comprising 12 miniatures for piano accompanied by synthesizer sounds–was released in January 2023. He died in Tokyo on 28 March 2023 at the age of 71.

Look out for a full article on Ryūichi Sakamoto’s life and musical activities coming soon to MGG online (www.mgg-online.com).

Below is a video of Sakamota performing his composition Blu with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra.

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by | June 29, 2023 · 6:00 am

Afghanistan in peacetime

In September 1967 Mark Slobin, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, traveled to Afghanistan to spend 14 months studying and documenting the country’s musical traditions. He returned for additional fieldwork trips in 1971 and 1972.

Today, the information and materials that Slobin collected there comprise priceless glimpses of the region before successive waves of war and repression began to decimate its traditional culture.

Mark Slobin, a self-published website from 2021 (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2021-3963), presents his monograph Music in the Afghan north (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976) along with a reissue of Music in the Afghan north, 1967–1972 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, a website that was taken down in 2020 for technical reasons) and additional slides and super 8 footage from his research in Afghanistan.

As he describes it, “the material presented in this project is something of a fly in amber, a structure engulfed by the flow of history, but still showing the morphology and evidence of a kind of life that existed at a particular moment in time.”

Above, Slobin’s photograph of a rubāb maker in Mazār-i-Sharīf; below, discussing and sharing his documentation of Afghanistan in peacetime.

Related article: The Taliban and music: An annotated bibliography

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by | June 24, 2023 · 6:00 am

Forró and St. John’s Day in Brazil

June 24, the date on the Catholic calendar commemorating the birth of St. John the Baptist, is widely celebrated in northeastern Brazil. Festas juninas (June festivities, or St. John’s Day festivities) take place from early June to mid-July and are characterized by the presentation and representation of diverse cultural traditions of the region.

Forró, the typical music of this period, brings together diverse musical genres, dances, and a strong festive connotation. Forró emerged in the 1970s with strong contributions from artists of northeastern Brazil, who performed for migrants in the region including construction workers, maids, and middle class people nostalgic for regional rhythms. Although many forró musicians born before the mid-1970s acquired their musical competence outside of formal educational institutions, large segments of the younger generation attend schools of music (though not necessary in lieu of other learning strategies). Meanwhile, changes in the organization of professional forró activities are linked to the larger transformations of northeastern festas juninas since the late 20th century.

Read the entries on forró and junina music in the Encyclopedia of Brazilian music: Erudite, folkloric, popular (2010) in RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME). Also find the article “Musicians in street festivals of northeastern Brazil: Recent changes in forró music and St. John’s Day festivities” by Carlos Sandroni, et al. (The world of music V/1 [2016] pp. 159–79) in RILM Abstracts.

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by | June 12, 2023 · 6:00 am

Lost and found Balinese music

In August 1928 representatives from the German record companies Odeon and Beka were sent to Bali; their efforts resulted in 98 recordings of a wide variety of examples of Balinese music on 78 rpm discs.

Fortunately, expert guidance for the project was provided by the German expatriate Walter Spies, whose intimate knowledge of Balinese culture ensured that outstanding performances in a large range of genres were documented.

As it happened, at that time Bali was undergoing an artistic revolution. A new musical style known as kebyar was rapidly gaining popularity, and older ceremonial styles were literally disappearing, as their bronze instruments were melted down and reforged to accommodate the new style’s requirements; the Odeon/Beka recordings preserve several musical traditions that were later lost.

Despite the three-minute limitation of early recording equipment, these discs became invaluable archives of Balinese musical heritage; for example, the historically important composition Kebyar ding, once forgotten, was relearned from the recordings by the present generation of musicians, and some records of renowned singers are considered sacred by their descendants, who keep tape copies in family shrines.

These were the musical documents that inspired the young Canadian composer Colin McPhee, who first heard them in 1929. McPhee travelled to Bali in 1931 and remained there for nearly a decade; his activities included making painstaking transcriptions of Balinese pieces. McPhee’s own collection of the 1928 recordings includes most of the copies that are still preserved today, as they quickly went out of print and were discarded due to disappointing sales.

This according to the commentary by Edward Herbst that accompanies the CD The roots of gamelan: The first recordings—Bali, 1928; New York, 1941 (World Arbiter, 1999; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1999-38076).

Above, a gamelan gong gede group photographed by McPhee in the 1930s (UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and Colin McPhee Estate).

Below, two of the six discs devoted to Kebyar ding, with archival photographs.

More posts about Bali are here.

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by | June 8, 2023 · 6:00 am

Zilipendwa and nostalgia

Tanzanian zilipendwa is a look-over-the-shoulder metagenre whose musical subject is a moving target dependent on the current time reference.

The term was initially reserved for east and central African dance music chestnuts popular during the 1960s and early 1970s post-Independence period, but it recently encompasses the music of the mid-1970s through late 1980s, a time generally associated with the Socialist policies of Julius Nyerere.

Fans of zilipendwa are most eloquent about its value in their lives when making humorous generational distinctions with Bongo Flava, the region’s hip hop and R&B. Zilipendwa fans are also quick to demonstrate their affinity through physical expression, dancing a style known as serebuka, translated as “blissful expressive dance”.

Recently popularized on the television show Bongo Star Search, serebuka dancers take to the floor and bounce off the walls with a coterie of enthusiastic free moves and styles (mitindo) covering fifty years of popular music history.

Nostalgia for zilipendwa is far from being a melancholic rumination over days long past; it is enacted instead for the sake of health and community well-being. Zilipendwa is a conscious act towards musicking the values of a fading era, creating temporary autonomous zones where the perceived chaos and noise of neoliberal globalization are now waiting to rush in.

This according to “‘Rhumba kiserebuka!’: Evoking embodied temporalities through Tanzanian zilipendwa” by Frank Gunderson (The world of music (new series) III/1 [2014] pp. 11–23; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2014-17463).

Above, Msondo Ngoma, a group discussed in the article; below, the U.S.-based zilipendwa artist Samba Mapangangala. (Don’t worry—the music and dancing start soon, and they’re worth the wait!)

BONUS: Schoolboys getting down to zilipendwa in the great outdoors.

More posts about Tanzania are here.

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by | June 1, 2023 · 6:00 am

The first Karnatak music conference

On 27 May 1912 the first Karnatak music conference was convened in Thanjāvūr.

Hosted by the celebrated practitioner of Siddha medicine and devotee of Karnatak music Abraham Pandithar (above), the conference’s stated purpose was “to promote an academic interest in and to diffuse a knowledge of all that was best in the science and practice of Indian Music; to correct all conflicting notions in regard to Ragams and determine the precise and scientifically correct methods; to concert measures to the advancement of Indian music.”

At the conference Pandithar established the Sangeetha Vidhyalaya Mahajana Sangam; the group met five more times between 1912 and 1914, and its deliberations were published at his expense. Pandithar’s Sangam was to lay the blueprint for all Karnatak music conferences that were to follow, including that of the Music Academy.

This according to “A centenary of music conferences” by Sriram Venkatakrishnan (Madras heritage and Carnatic music, 25 May 2012; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2012-2705).

Above, the society’s group photograph, taken after the morning session (click to enlarge). Below, two of Pandithar’s descendants share music and recollections.

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by | May 28, 2023 · 6:00 am

Ligeti and Africa

György Ligeti freely acknowledged the influence of African music on his work—an influence that is seldom readily obvious, though it can be teased out by analysis.

After he listened to recordings of African drumming, Ligeti began exploring the use of various rhythms through multiplication of the basic pulse, a concept that resonated with the additive rhythms of the traditional music that he grew up with in Hungary.

In one of his few passages involving the use of an African-sounding instrument, the third movement of his piano concerto includes an Africanesque pattern played on bongos. He marked the part to be played very quietly, so rather than being foregrounded it serves almost subliminally to reinforce patterns being played simultaneously on other instruments. Unlike most African drumming, this bongo pattern evolves over time, so that its end is quite different from its beginning.

Ligeti’s works from the 1960s onward were distinguished by a palette of musical motives and ideas that he half-ironically referred to as Ligeti signals. Starting in the 1980s, he expanded this palette to include African devices along with others that share an extraordinary openness to external ideas and influences. He avoided copying these influences wholesale, instead working on a higher conceptual level. This abstraction implied an objective respect for the powerful ideas he was working with, as well as indicating a strong personality able to hold its own with them.

This according to “Ligeti, Africa, and polyrhythm” by Stephen Andrew Taylor (The world of music XLV/2 [2003] pp. 83–94; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2003-4435).

Today is Ligeti’s 100th birthday! Below, Mihkel Poll performs the concerto movement discussed above.

BONUS: RILM is a sponsor of the Ligeti Festival Transylvania celebrating György Ligeti’s 100th birthday! More information is here.

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by | May 11, 2023 · 6:00 am

Benin Journal of Music and the Arts

In 2022 the Music Programme of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Benin (Benin City, Nigeria) launched Benin Journal of Music and the Arts (BENJMA), an open-access online publication that is also available in complimentary print versions.

BENJMA is designed to publish at least one annual issue, and to undertake the publication of special issues when the need arises. The journal publishes well-researched scholarly articles in music and the arts to promote scholarship and support the dissemination of research findings at local and global levels, providing a forum for discourses on historical, contemporary, and evolving subjects. It aims to serve as a basis for the formation of future perspectives, the making of impactful predictions, and the galvanization of developmental ideas. 

BENJMA’s editors and reviewers have a wealth of experience in various areas of music and the arts, and the journal is open to any thematic area.

Below, excerpts from the Yorùbá ìbejì festival, the subject of an article in the inaugural issue.

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