Category Archives: Ethnomusicology

by | July 30, 2011 · 1:00 am

An early Gaelic manuscript

The manuscript Original Highland airs collected at Raasay in 1812 by Elizabeth Jane Ross, which is preserved in the archives of the School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, is now available for downloading at no cost, both in facsimile and in an extensively annotated typeset edition prepared by Peter Cooke, Morag MacLeod, and Colm Ó Baoill.

The earliest known staff-notated manuscript collection of Scottish Gaelic music, it contains  92 songs,  51 dance tunes, and 6 pibrochs; it probably represents well the musical repertory of Raasay, one of the islands of the Inner Hebrides. A major task for the editors involved locating, documenting, translating, and underlaying song texts which might have been known to Ross; she provided titles or first lines of verses or refrains for her airs, but not the texts themselves.

The Raasay residents James Macleod and his wife Flora were excellent musicians, and their niece Elizabeth Ross, who lived with them, was clearly a competent transcriber. Raasay was also the home of the great piper John MacKay, from whom Ross learned to play several pibrochs.

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by | July 17, 2011 · 1:00 am

Gazino aesthetics

The Turkish musical scene may be viewed in terms of three categories: alatürka, which refers to Turkish sociocultural practices; alafranga, which refers to Western ones; and arabesk, which denotes the culture of peripheral urban immigrants. The gazino, a type of nightclub, provides a common denominator for alatürka and arabesk music in an alafranga space.

While the gazino owner holds direct power over the content of the show, he may make changes on the basis of audience reaction. The performers also try to supply what the audience wants, and their aesthetics are further shaped among themselves when they perform backstage for each other. Vocal audience reactions also influence performers’ aesthetic decisions. The visual aesthetics of the gazino—the decor and the clothing of performers and audience members—provide the most significant alafranga elements.

This according to “Aesthetics and artistic criticism at the Turkish gazino” by Münir Nurettin Beken (Music & anthropology VII [2003]). Below, musicians and dancers perform at an urban gazino.

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by | June 9, 2011 · 1:00 am

Fiddle tunes of the old frontier

Part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory series, Fiddle tunes of the old frontier: The Henry Reed Collection is a multiformat collection of traditional fiddle tunes played by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, recorded by Alan Jabbour in 1966 and 1967, when Reed was over eighty years old. The tunes represent the music and evoke the history and spirit of Virginia’s Appalachian frontier; many of them passed back into circulation during the fiddling revival of the later twentieth century.

The collection includes 184 sound recordings, 19 pages of field notes, and 69 transcriptions of Reed’s fiddling with notes on tune histories and musical features; an illustrated essay on  Reed’s life, art, and influence; a list of related publications; and a glossary of musical terms.

Above, Reed with Bobbie Thompson (guitar) at the Narrows (Virginia) Fiddlers Contest, summer 1967. Below, Alan Jabbour performs a tune that he learned from Henry Reed.

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by | May 27, 2011 · 1:00 am

The beginnings of music

The eminent British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers, CBE (1873–1946), joined an anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait and Sarawak in 1898, and his studies of musical traditions in those places resulted in several articles. Like many of his contemporaries, he suspected that the study of ethnic traditions could help to tease out universals and illuminate the origins of music.

In “The beginnings of music” (Essays and studies presented to William Ridgeway on his sixtieth birthday [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913, pp. 560–582]) Myers provides detailed descriptions of the musical traditions of the Meriam people of Murray Island, Australia, the Vedda people of Sri Lanka, and the peoples of Sarawak. The Vedda examples suggest an evolution of the scale as a synthesis of steps, the Sarawak examples suggest scalar evolution as a filling-in of larger intervals, and the Meriam examples suggest a synthesis of the two approaches.

Myers concludes that the beginnings of music depend on eight factors: (1) discrimination between tones and noises; (2) awareness of differences in pitch, volume, duration, and quality; (3) awareness of absolute pitch; (4) recognition and use of small, approximately equal intervals; (5) recognition and use of larger consonant intervals, and awareness of their relationships to smaller ones; (6) melodic phrasing; (7) rhythmic phrasing; and (8) musical meaning.

The article was reprinted in Music, words and voice: A reader, edited by Martin Clayton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 21–23). Above, the Murray Island courthouse and community hall in a photograph from the 1898 expedition that Myers joined.

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by | May 25, 2011 · 1:00 am

Musicologica slovaca

In 2010 Ústav Hudobnej Vedy of the Slovenská Akadémia Vied revived the scholarly periodical Musicologica Slovaca: Časopis Ústavu Hudobnej Vedy Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (ISSN 1338-2594), thereby providing a standard platform for publishing the most recent results of domestic music scholarship in a peer-reviewed, biannual journal. In 1992 its predecessor, the irregularly issued Musicologica slovaca et europaea, replaced the original Musicologica slovaca, which started in 1969. The renewed Musicologica Slovaca, starting as volume 1(27), maintains the continuity of the previous volumes.

The journal’s broad orientation, with topics including music history, ethnomusicology, and systematic musicology, reflects traditions of interdisciplinary communication among specialized disciplines of music scholarship in Slovakia. Musicologica Slovaca is edited by the ethnomusicologist Hana Urbancová, the Director of the Ústav Hudobnej Vedy SAV. It is published in Slovak with English abstracts and keywords.

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by | April 24, 2011 · 1:00 am

Psychology and early ethnomusicology

Charles Samuel Myers, CBE (1873–1946), who coined the term shell shock during World War I, was among the psychologists whose work fed into comparative musicology and, later, ethnomusicology. He joined an anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait and Sarawak in 1898, and his studies of musical traditions in those places resulted in several articles.

“The ethnological study of music” presents a glimpse of how psychologists viewed ethnic music around the turn of the century. In this essay, Myers points out that unfamiliar music may seem as disorderly and meaningless as unfamiliar language, but in both cases sufficient study and habituation reveal inherent order and meaning. All music serves an expressive function, he states, and universal elements such as rhythm, harmony, scale, and tonal center may serve as bases for cross-cultural comparisons.

Myers goes on to argue that the documentation and study of non-Western musics is an urgent matter, as traditions are already becoming polluted by outside sources. Fortunately, he notes, the advent of sound recording has greatly facilitated this enterprise, making it unnecessary for the ethnographer to transcribe performances during fieldwork. Myers ends with step-by-step instructions and procedural recommendations for making field recordings with the Edison-Bell phonograph (above).

This essay appears in Anthropological essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in honour of his 75th birthday (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907, pp. 235–253); the book is documented in our most recent printed bibliography, Liber amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

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by | April 19, 2011 · 1:00 am

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann

 

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, the largest group worldwide devoted to the preservation and promotion of Irish traditional music, is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

With hundreds of branches in 15 countries on 4 continents, the non-profit organization sponsors  classes, concerts, and sessions in local communities. It also hosts a website, which accounts for its presence in RILM. A page on their site titled The music includes links to tracks from their CDs, recordings of sessions, and tracks from the Comhaltas Traditional Music Archive; video recordings of some of today’s foremost performers; selections from their own tune books, as well as other tunes from historical sources; a photograph archive; and Treoir, the Comhaltas journal.

Below, Emma O’Sullivan dances a reel at a Comhaltas event. Note that this is not the rigid-posture style popularized by shows like Riverdance, which is considered by many to be a more recent development; this style is known as sean-nós, which means “old style”.

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by | March 28, 2011 · 1:00 am

Publications of the Mantzaros Museum

The Filarmonikīs Etaireia Kerkyras (Φιλαρμονική Εταιρεία Κέρκυρας, Philharmonic Society of Corfu) launched the book series Dīmosieumata tou Mouseiou Mousikī “Nikolaos Chalikiopoulos Mantzaros” (Δημοσιεύματα του Μουσείου Μουσική ‘Νικόλαος Χαλικιόπουλος Μάντζαρος’, Publications of the Nikolaos Chalidiopoulos Mantzaros Museum) in 2010, in conjunction with the museum’s opening and the society’s 170th anniversary.

The first volume in the series, Exi meletes gia tī Filarmonikī Etaireia Kerkyras (Έξι μελέτες για τη Φιλαρμονική Εταιρεία Κερκύρας, Six studies on the Corfu Philarmonic Society), includes an overview of the society’s history, a report on its archive, and explorations of selected topics in its history.

Below, the Filarmonikīs plays for the Holy Friday procession, Easter 2010.

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by | March 11, 2011 · 1:00 am

Kumbaya: A song’s evolution

Having served as a beloved anthem during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, Kumbaya now serves as an easy punch line in jokes about naïve idealism. Various theories regarding its provenance have circulated, including a report that it was collected by missionaries in Angola and a claim by Marvin V. Frey that he composed it in 1939.

Archival documents at the American Folklife Center illuminate the real story. The earliest known evidence of the song is in a manuscript sent by Julian Parks Boyd to the Archive’s founder, Robert W. Gordon, in 1927; Boyd had noted it from a former student the previous year (transcription above; click to enlarge). The song’s structure matches that of Kumbaya, and its refrain is “Lord, come by here”. Further archival evidence demonstrates that the song was well known among African Americans by the 1940s, and that dialect performances gradually transformed “come by here” to “kum ba ya”.

This according to “The world’s first Kumbaya moment: New evidence about an old song” by Stephen Winick (Folklife Center news XXII/3–4, pp. 3–10). Below, Joan Baez performs Kumbaya in France in 1980.

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by | March 9, 2011 · 1:00 am

Take six: Early folk song manuscripts

Sponsored by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Take six is a searchable online database of the manuscript archives of seven of the U.K.’s most prominent folk song collectors— Janet Blunt (1859–1950), George Gardiner (1852–1910), Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954), Henry Hammond (1866–1910, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Francis Collinson (1898–1984), and George Butterworth (1885–1916).

Each of the archives has been completely catalogued and digitized. Most of the documents are songs and tunes, but other manuscript items, such as dances or correspondence, are also included. Many thanks to Tim Radford for bringing this resource to our attention!

Related post: An early Gaelic manuscript

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