Tag Archives: Time

by | December 18, 2023 · 8:00 pm

Theravāda Buddhist music across borders

Theravāda Buddhist music of Thailand and China emphasizes the intricate relationship between time, space, synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and cultural memory. Synchronic structure acts as both an intermediary and a result of diachrony. In Theravāda Buddhism, music traces elements of cultural memory manifested in various types of ritual practice found in both China and Thailand.

Comparing the musical practices of these two countries enables an exploration of the similarities and differences in their musical characteristics within the organizational structure of their Theravāda Buddhist cosmological systems. Historical time in Theravāda Buddhist music, considered as “monumental time” or “social time”, correlates with spatial expressions of musical structure, highlighting the cultural affinities and contradictions that structure music in Theravāda Buddhist traditions across national borders.

Learn more in “Zhong, Tai Nanchuan Fojiao yinyue de jiegou erchongxing bijiao yanjiu” (A comparative study of the dual structure in the Theravāda Buddhist music of China and Thailand) by Dong Chen (Zhongyang Yinyue Xueyuan xuebao/Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music 2/171 [2023], 42–58). This Chinese journal is a new addition for 2023 in RILM Abstracts with Full Text.

Celebrating International Migrants Day on December 18 with music that crosses borders!

Listen to Thai Theravāda Buddhist monks chanting Dhammacakka Sutta below.

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by | April 26, 2018 · 6:00 am

Multiple Beninese temporalities

The Gangbé Brass Band’s Alladanou makes specific historical, linguistic, and musical references to Benin’s precolonial, colonial, and postindependence histories. These references can serve as a point of departure for exploring the song’s relationship to the royal court style adjògàn.

The Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s concept of multiple temporalities illuminates the historical flexibility at play in Gangbé’s album Togbé, and an analytical framework for analyzing Alladanou proceeds from an interest in audience, relationality, the Fon concept of gbè (voice or sound), and resonance.

This according to “‘People of Allada, this is our return’: Indexicality, multiple temporalities, and resonance in the music of the Gangbé Brass Band of Benin” by Sarah Politz (Ethnomusicology LXII/1 [winter 2018] pp. 28–57).

Below, the song in question.

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by | January 8, 2014 · 1:00 am

The music of the Temporalists

The music of the Temporalists

In The music of the Temporalists by Andrei Covaciu-Pogorilowski (Charleston: Create space, 2011), a Parisian drugstore owner and amateur pianist experiences a two-year mental trip as an avatar in a parallel (Temporalist) world in which music is cultivated as the art of time rather than the art of sound.

There he meets a musicologist called Jean-Philippe and an old psychologist, Herr Sch…; they teach him all they can about their musical theory and its cognitive aspects so he can transmit what he has learned to his own music culture.

Within this imaginary frame an alternative to the classical bar-rhythm theory is proposed, based on an empirical study of key phenomena of temporal discretization, including entrainment, chunking, subjective accentuation, pulsatory inertia, and temporal gap perception.

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