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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 crowd of men, women and children are gathered in a courtyard, and more are in the street, squeezing into the gateway and sitting on the walls, or in rickshaws which have stopped for the show. An array of instruments – large and small gongs, xylophones, keyed metallophones, a bowed instrument, a bamboo flute – is spread out on the raised stone floor of a pavilion where a woman sings; players not absorbed in the music smoke and chat on the fringes. The only real light on this hot dark night is projected onto a white sheet stretched on a carved wooden frame at which a man sits, moving flat leather puppets of fantastical shapes while speaking their parts and singing songs; he also directs the gamelan, as this collection of instruments is known. At times one single instrument creates a shimmering background; at others the group produces loud snatches of repetitively-twirling melody. The musicians don't use notation but watch the screen, laughing uproariously with the audience at the comic bits. Shows like this traditionally last all night without a break, with the puppeteer being the only one never to leave his place. The spectators come and go freely, knowing the story and format so well that they can decide which parts to watch, and when to go somewhere to doze, lulled by the background music which fuses magically with the buzzing and humming of insects.
ON a visit to Java in 1971 I stayed with a cultured and musical family. The father listened for hours to gamelan music on the radio, and extolled its subtlety and power. Among the many beautiful ways he found to describe it, the most memorable was ‘like raindrops falling from leaves after a shower’. Writing in 1937, the Dutch author Leonhard Huizinga gave a similarly poetic description: ‘There are only two things one can compare it with: moonlight, and running water. It is pure and mysterious like moonlight; it is always the same and yet always changing, like running water.’ The aquatic metaphor common to both descriptions is not far-fetched, as at least one sound in the gamelan actually has an aquatic origin. One of the drums derives its name, and many of the sounds it produces, from ciblon, a game in which children slap the surface of water.
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.
Why do we sing and what first drove early humans to sing? How might they have sung and how might those styles have survived to the present day? This history addresses these questions and many more, examining singing as a historical and cross-cultural phenomenon. It explores the evolution of singing in a global context - from Neanderthal Man to Auto-tune via the infinite varieties of world music from Orient to Occident, classical music from medieval music to the avant-garde and popular music from vaudeville to rock and beyond. Considering singing as a universal human activity, the book provides an in-depth perspective on singing from many cultures and periods: Western and non-Western, prehistoric to present. Written in a lively and entertaining style, the history contains a comprehensive reference section for those who wish to explore the topic further and will appeal to an international readership of singers, students and scholars.
Seventeenth-century singers lived and worked in a continuing present, and the historical baggage they carried with them probably extended only to re-used music from a generation or two earlier and memories of more recent legendary local performances. The works that music historians see as significant landmarks such as Euridice, Orfeo and the other early favole in musica would have been just larger-scale realisations of the kinds of theatrical creations that were part of an Italian singer’s normal working life. The reimagining of polyphony as solo song had been part of the singer’s skill set for perhaps a hundred years before composers began to write what we now recognise as monodies. There may perhaps have been a sense of liberation at not having to go through the process of converting polyphony into solo song, but from a technical point of view the vocal delivery cannot have been very different. Singers always had to be aware of the verticality of harmony, or they would have got lost when extemporising. They were also aware of having a special obligation towards the poetic text, and this would have been enhanced by their experience of the more declamatory recitative. There was plenty of instruction available about how to deliver texts or high-speed ornaments, but the detail of how these things were really achieved is not yet visible in the surviving sources. The seventeenth century saw the triumph of the virtuoso and virtuosa, but the art was not just in the velocity of the divisions. This becomes more evident towards the end of the century, when we have the reflections of older singers looking back at the singing of their youth, and we are able to fill in some of the gaps with evidence of devices such as portamento, messa di voce and rubato. None of these (and many other subtle additions to the stylistic repertoire) has an identifiable point of origin: our sources are always conservative and retrospective, leaving us to speculate.
The moment we step outside the Anglo-American popular music area we are left with a myriad of traditions and stars, some of whom are world famous but a far greater number of whom enjoy fame, even adulation, within their own countries but are now beginning to be appreciated on the world stage. Some of these singers and their traditions are in a state of permanent reinvention (Bollywood, for example), others represent individual strands within a well-established national heritage. Only a small selection can be presented here but the joy of discovery can continue well after reading about this handful (on the whole, the better they are known the less needs to be written about them here). We begin by a brief look at singing in Germany and France, then we examine two major non-European vocal cultures: Egyptian singing as personified by Umm Kulthūm, and the phenomenon of Bollywood. As an indication of the variety of singing to be found across the globe, we have taken two circles of latitude – the 42nd (north) and 22nd (south) parallels – and included brief snapshots of some of the vocal cultures to be found along these imaginary lines which connect Spain to China and Mozambique to Brazil. Part of the discovery is realising that many of the singers in these genres and territories have had a greater worldwide impact than their more circumscribed fame suggests, and this can only increase with the power of the World Wide Web.
On the strength of their musical artistry, poetic gifts and immense charisma it seems strange and unjust that these singers are less well known than a great many inferior anglophone superstars and one is left wondering if it all might come down simply to the matter of language. Yet several other major world languages are involved in the ensuing discussion, including German, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. The small sample, the criteria for selection and the argument that the singers are not as well known as they might be are all somewhat contentious.