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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
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.
Ranged over the State House lawn are perhaps fifty musicians. Some are acrobats doing hand-stands, others are women's groups singing to the melodic thump of gourds. Two flautists, one playing left-handed, accompany a singer, his head tilted high. This is a naming ceremony, held for the president's new-born. The largest contingent is a mixed vocal and instrumental ensemble; one man plays a guitar while others pluck lutes. At the centre sit several women forming a chorus. Some gently strike a tubular bell, while in front of them are three xylophonists and a dozen men positioned behind tall harps: this combination of instruments marks out Mande professionals. There is no conductor, and there was no rehearsal, but the lead singers are clearly in command. One man, starting high in his range, sings a cascading and undulating solo line which the women's chorus finishes in unison. Now a celebrated female singer takes over, her strong voice needing no microphone. With their majestic sound and heroic content, the melodic lines float in free rhythm over an instrumental ground: this is performed in unison and yet not in unison, as each player mingles his variant, with some adding a virtuoso flourish. At the close, with one of the musicians announcing on his behalf, the president appears and presents money for distribution to all.
FEW people, if asked to identify the classical musics of the world, would readily point to Africa. However, the scene described above – if imagined in the setting of Africa's pre-colonial kingdoms and empires – does take on the courtly sheen of a classical tradition, and gives a hint of its existence. The reason most African classical-music traditions have escaped our attention is that they lack many of the usual markers. For example, African musicians have no use for notation – but then neither do classical musicians in many other cultures, except as a pedagogical aid. And should not a classical tradition be supported by a body of theoretical writing? In Africa, not only is the music transmitted aurally, the languages are too, so there is no written theory. Western listeners to African music typically notice constructs of melody, rhythm and metre that seem familiar, yet the musicians say nothing of these. In fact, an oft-repeated observation is that African musicians don't even count (as in identifying a downbeat), let alone think in terms of metre.