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What is classical music? This book answers the question in a manner never before attempted, by presenting the history of fifteen parallel traditions, of which Western classical music is just one. Eachmusic is analysed in terms of its modes, scales, and theory; its instruments, forms, and aesthetic goals; its historical development, golden age, and condition today; and the conventions governing its performance. The writers are leading ethnomusicologists, and their approach is based on the belief that music is best understood in the context of the culture which gave rise to it . By including Mande and Uzbek-Tajik music - plus North American jazz - in addition to the better-known styles of the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, and South-East Asia, this book offers challenging new perspectives on the word 'classical'. It shows the extent to which most classical traditions are underpinned by improvisation, and reveals the cognate origins of seemingly unrelated musics; it reflects the multifarious ways in which colonialism, migration, and new technology have affected musical development, and continue to do today. With specialist language kept to a minimum, it's designed to help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions which may be unfamiliar to them, and to encounter the reality which lies behind that lazy adjective 'exotic'.
MICHAEL CHURCH has spent much of his career in newspapers as a literary and arts editor; since 2010 he has been the music and opera critic of The Independent. From 1992 to 2005 he reported on traditional musics all over the world for the BBC World Service; in 2004, Topic Records released a CD of his Kazakh field recordings and, in 2007, two further CDs of his recordings in Georgia and Chechnya.
Contributors: Michael Church, Scott DeVeaux, Ivan Hewett, David W. Hughes, Jonathan Katz, Roderic Knight, Frank Kouwenhoven, Robert Labaree, Scott Marcus, Terry E. Miller, Dwight F.Reynolds, Neil Sorrell, Will Sumits, Richard Widdess, Ameneh Youssefzadeh
A scholar – and owner of a zither – pauses in his climb up a mountain; as a rich man he can afford a servant or pupil to carry his heavy instrument to the top. After a while he sits down cross-legged under a pine tree, places his instrument on his lap and begins to play for the gods – or for himself. The wind touches his strings furtively, and he might sing a poem or two, plucking the strings randomly to produce soft sounds: some evasive and questioning slide tones, and a sonorous buzz on the lowest string, reminiscent of the sound of a distant bell; or perhaps some clear and pure harmonics in the highest register, brought forth by touching the strings very lightly. All this is interspersed with contemplative pauses; the music merges delicately with the surrounding silence. The mist on the mountain serves as a reminder of the world's deep emptiness: vast crags and abysses mock the futility of human strife and ambition.
Is this a real performance? It might be, but more likely it's just a scene from our imagination, or from an old painting or ink-drawing portraying an age-old ideal of qin performance. Back in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), playing the qin, China's seven-stringed classical zither, was one of the four ‘gentlemanly skills’, along with chess, calligraphy and painting; one of the pastimes of Chinese intellectuals. Sage-like figures playing the instrument are a popular topic in classical lore; Confucius himself (551–479 BCE) was reputed to be a fine player. Steeped in both Confucian and Daoist philosophy, the qin is strongly associated with the natural world, and with its assumed ability to ‘sound the cosmos’. A performer playing on top of a mountain or in a bamboo grove remains a potent fantasy of what qin players try to achieve: they foster a dream of spiritual communion with nature, even to the extent of themselves vanishing at the end of their music. For thousands of years qin players have aspired to attain wisdom and redemption with their art, and through it to live in blissful harmony with their environment. These ideals are still cherished by some in China today.
The Chinese visual arts abound in pictures of outdoor zither performers – mostly men, but sometimes also women – playing their instrument in garden pavilions, or amid impressive scenery.
THIS book is a team effort, driven by a shared desire to illuminate and celebrate the world's great classical traditions. Its ancestry as a piece of crosscultural musical analysis goes back a thousand years, to the ‘science of music’ of the medieval Arab theorists. Its European precursors include the sixteenthcentury Swiss theologian Jean de Léry, who notated antiphonal singing in Brazil, and the Moldavian polymath Prince Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) who was enslaved by the Ottomans in Istanbul, became a de facto Turkish composer, and created the first notation for Turkish makam; also Captain James Cook, who made detailed descriptions of the music and dance of Pacific islanders in 1784. Meanwhile Chinese music was being admiringly analysed by French Jesuit missionaries – Chinese theorists had beaten their European counterparts in the race to solve the mathematics of equal temperament – and other Frenchmen were investigating the music of the Arab world. While serving on Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, Guillaume-André Villoteau made studies of Arab folk and art music, before going on to contrast those with the music of Greece and Armenia; his theories were then contested by the French composer Francesco Salvador-Daniel, who after a twelve-year musical sojourn in Algeria concluded, among other things, that Arab and Greek modes were one and the same. Long before ‘ethnomusicology’ was born in academe, the game was well established.
In recent years the ethnomusicologists’ findings have been magisterially presented in two great publications: in the ten massive volumes of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and scattered through the twenty-nine volumes of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But our book is, we believe, the first panoptic survey of the world's classical musics (I explain in the Introduction why we have settled on that somewhat contentious adjective). Although much of its information may also be found in Grove and Garland – many of its writers were contributors to, or editors on, those projects – its tight focus permits presentation in a single volume, rather than scattered through a six-foot shelf of tomes.
As editor I am deeply indebted to my writers, who have patiently put their chapters through numerous drafts in pursuit of non-academic accessibility, while in no way traducing their (often very complicated) subject-matter. I must particularly thank Terry Miller, whose resourceful problem-solving assistance has extended far beyond his own signed contributions; also his colleague Andrew Shahriari, for additional information on Persian classical music.