Posts tagged music

In 2005, I traveled to Kashgar, China, to teach an American Culture course for students from Kashgar Teachers' College. Each morning, before class, the Uyghur students gave us hour-long Uyghur culture lessons. If I have learned anything about the Uyghurs, it is that they are very proud of their culture, especially their traditional music and dance. Even with the recent conflicts that have errupted there, bringing unprecedented global awareness of the Uyghurs, there is still not much to be found on the Web about their vibrant culture. However, I just discovered this web site out of the U.K. that is the most comprehensive site I can find on Uyghur music, including images of their traditional costumes and instruments, as well as a plethora of excellent recordings (including The Twelve Muqam, a piece of music that takes twenty-four hours to perform!). The thing my students asked of me before I came back to the States was that I tell America about Uyghur culture, so it is my pleasure to honor their request. Oh, and one more thing: the Uyghurs love America. They would want me to tell you that, too.

asia, music, musicology, performing arts, uyghurs

Christy:

Uyghur music embraces several distinct regional styles, product of the geography and complex history of the region, whose oasis kingdoms, separated by mountains and deserts, have been subject through the course of history to rule by many different outside forces. The musical traditions of the southern oasis towns of Khotan and Kashgar are more closely allied to the classical Central Asian traditions of Bukhara and Samarkand, while the music of the easternmost oasis town of Qumul has closer links to the music of Northwest China. Each of the region’s oasis towns have to this day maintained their own distinctive sound and repertoire, but they are linked by a common language and overarching culture, maintained by constant communication through trade and movement of peoples. Musically there is much to link these local traditions, in terms of instruments, genres, styles and contexts. The most prestigious and well-known genre of Uyghur music are the large-scale suites of sung, instrumental and dance music known as muqam. In addition to the muqam the Uyghurs maintain popular traditions of sung epic tales (dastan) and other forms of narrative song (qoshaq, leper, eytshish and maddhi name), suites of dance music (senem,) instrumental music, musical genres linked to the rituals of the Sufis, and a large repertoire of folk songs which commonly dwell on the suffering of life on earth and the torments of frustrated love. . . .

One of the paradoxes of Parkinson's disease is that it seems to build up in its sufferers both an extraordinary need to act, and a simultaneous blocking of action. Medications, like the L-DOPA made famous in Oliver Sacks' 1969 account Awakenings, can get many such patients 'unstuck' (though it's more harrowingly complex than just that). But sometimes the unblocking can be brought on by seemingly far subtler treatments: by music, by the visual cues of another person's normal gestures.

brain, disease, gestures and postures, medicine, music, presence, walking

Nate:

One patient, who was so eloquent on the subject of music, had a great difficulty in walking alone, but was always able to walk perfectly if someone walked with her. Her own comments on this are of very great interest: ‘When you walk with me,’ she said, ‘I feel in myself your own power of walking. I partake of the power and freedom you have. I share your walking powers, your perceptions, your feelings, your existence. Without even knowing it, you make me a great gift.’ This patient felt this experience as very similar to, if not identical with, her experiences with music: ‘I partake of other people, as I partake of music…’

The only downside I see to this is if stairwell music winds up with as bad a rep as its elevator cousin.

architecture, behavior, buildings, design, disciplines, exercise, music, visual arts

Nate:

So how does one design a building where people actually use the stairs? There are three key features.

1) Fewer turns between the stairs and the closest entrance.
2) Stairs with large surface areas (not too narrow and steep).
3) Create a view, either up, down, or across, from the stairwell. No one wants to walk up a tiny, white box.

The Booth School of Business staircases meet all of these requirements (perhaps it’s no surprise the building won a major design award last year). For those who can’t build new stairwells, there are a few other nudges to try. Displaying motivational signs in the lobby and throughout the building, and playing music in the stairwell can increase stair use. Together, these two nudges can increase usage by as much as 9 percent. Hanging artwork on the stairwell walls, closing elevators occasionally, and offering incentives like fruit are also known to work.

I love the premise of this piece: you're the editor of the world's coolest, hippest, tastiest music magazine, but your preteen daughters love Hannah Montana. What to do? What I love even better is the culture-making themes here: the only real solution to deficient culture is better culture, in this case Brandi Carlile. And best of all, being exposed to Carlile's intelligent, soulful, honest music has inspired a 10-year-old budding songwriter. Go Jordan! Go Brandi! And go Dad.

consumption, cultivation and creation, family, music

Andy:

[When] our 10-year-old Jordan started to sound a little like the snotty teenagers she was watching on TV, Hannah Montana and Wizards were outlawed. Soon after, we were fortunate enough to be guests on the Cayamo [singer-songwriter cruise ship], and I made the family a mix of Cayamo artists for the drive down—Lyle Lovett, Patty Griffin, Kathleen Edwards, Over the Rhine, John Hiatt. But it was Brandi Carlile they kept wanting to hear. By the time we saw her concert, my girls knew most of the words. At Emma’s ninth birthday party (a lock-in at the Paste office) she cranked up “The Story” for her friends like it was the latest Miley Cyrus hit. The requests for Radio Disney stopped, and I overheard Jordan telling her friends she doesn’t think Cyrus is a very good singer anymore.

So when Brandi recently came within half a mile of our house last week to play a pair of intimate performances at Eddie’s Attic, I took them to the early show. It was the first real club concert for my kids. Eddie’s has a no-talking-during-the-performance rule, and my usually very loud children abided. . . . They mouthed all the words except when they couldn’t resist singing along. When Brandi started clapping, they clapped. When Brandi told the audience to stand, Emma stood up on her stool with her hands in the air.

Jordan wrote her first song a couple of days after the show. She won’t sing it to me yet, but the lyrics are great. She began guitar lessons earlier this year and is headed to girls rock camp this summer. Emma is saving up her money for a guitar now. When they think of a future rock star, the image is of a down-to-earth Carlile instead of a glammed-up Ashley Tisdale.

I think the growing global popularity of more overt uses of Auto-Tune in music production is actually a good thing, at least to a point, in that it isn't using the computerized pitch correction to create a perfect but still "real" version of a pop performance (as real as the women on the covers of glossy magazines); instead, it's embracing the artificiality of the process to create something new. A few years back, I heard a great song by a British musician, whose name escapes me alas, who had trained his voice to mimic the Auto-Tune effect naturally. And why not? It sounded cool.

computers, cyborgs, music, technology and change, voice

Nate:

Vocal runs that would sound bizarre without Auto-Tune have become necessary to create some now-common effects. The plug-in facilitates something analogous to a human-machine duet. Raskin has recorded with countless major vocalists, including best-selling rapper Lil Wayne. He says that, ‘99 per cent of all pop music has corrective Auto-Tuning.’ But when artists flamboyantly foreground its use, they sing and simultaneously listen to themselves being processed. Lil Wayne records with Auto-Tune on – no untreated vocal version exists. In an era of powerful computers that allow one to audition all manner of effects on vocals after the recording session, recording direct with Auto-Tune means full commitment. There is no longer an original ‘naked’ version. This is a cyborg embrace. In Cyborg Manifesto (1991), Donna Haraway notes that ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.’ Auto-Tune’s creative deployment is fully compatible with her ‘argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.’

Will the crunchy sonic artifacts of the MP3 audio compression process become as beloved as the warm crackle of vinyl records or the lulling hiss of magnetic tape? For some listeners, it already is.

context, cultural worlds, music, noise, technology and change

Nate

:

[Stanford music professor Jonathan] Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way.   He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.   In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality.   He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with…

Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like [...] The context changes our perception, particularly when it’s so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it’s more than the convenience of listening to music on the move.  It’s that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception. All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It’s mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won’t be obvious to them.

I recently gave a talk where I made the case that art is important precisely because it is "unuseful." What I should have said more clearly is that as unuseful as it is, art is also essential. This address by Karl Paulnack to the parents of incoming students at Boston Conservatory is must reading for anyone who cares about music, art, or culture. (It has been burning up the Internet, but I can't find a canonical version, so I've linked to one that, unlike most of the versions online, does not incorrectly say that it was given to the students themselves.)

art, changing the world, education, music

Andy

:

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

The cultural fall and rise of the traditional funeral dirges performed in the Volta region of northern Ghana: brought low by Christianity and recording technology, brought back by the same.

africa, death, ghana, music, religion, technology and change, voice

Nate

:

Speaking of parting, it is only rarely that dirges are heard in Kawu nowadays. Two factors are contributing to their decline: firstly the fact that many churches discourage their use, preferring edifying hymns instead. The reason behind this, I am told, is that the dirges reflect a pre-Christian worldview and as such are to be eschewed by true Christians. A second factor has been the coming of electricity to the villages halfway the nineties, which has led to loud music taking the place of the dirges during the wakekeepings. Elsewhere I wrote that “culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself”, yet at the same time I can’t help but lament the imminent loss of such a rich vein of Mawu culture.

However, during my last fieldtrip there were some signs of a renewed interest in the genre. For example, one pastor told me that he had been reconsidering the rash dismissal of the dirges by his church. Realizing how important the dirges had been in containing, orienting, and canalizing the feelings of loss and pathos surrounding death, he felt that the Christian hymns did not always offer an appropriate replacement. Another hopeful event was that I was approached with the request to help record a great number of dirges in Akpafu-Todzi in August 2008. This was not just to record them for posterity (although this was part of the motivation), but also very practically so that they could be played at wakekeepings. I gladly complied with this wish of course. The result is a beautiful collection of 42 dirges, sung by eight ladies between 57 and 87 years of age. The first time the dirges were played at a funeral they sparked a wave of interest.