Musics of the World

The song El Aguajal could be classified as chicha, a form of Peruvian popular music which “articulated the ambiguous identity of second-generation Andeans in cities,” and became popular in the 1960s. Chicha music was influenced by cumbia, a Colombian genre of dance music characterized by a simple duple meter with a hallmark rhythmic ostinato played on a scrapper or shaker, and wayno melodies, which have a one-eighth note two-sixteenth note rhythm. Chicha bands usually included a lead singer and musicians playing electric guitar, bass, keyboard, and Caribbean percussion instruments, such as timbales, congas, and cowbell.  

The song starts out with two guitars dueting on a minor arpeggio pattern. There are two percussion instruments in the background providing sort of a drumroll, one making a high-pitched tingling noise, the other making a lower tapping noise. Wind sound effects are played. Then the wayno beat comes in. One guitar plays backup chords while the other solos. Next, keyboard made to sound like an organ comes in. The song goes through several chord progressions – this is a long instrumental introduction, and it has built a thick texture, with the percussionist(s) adding rhythmic elaboration from time to time. Finally a man begins to sing a solo. The effects on his voice make it glossy and echoing. The song clearly has a closed structure, and is designed to be presentational music, with lots of variation to keep the audience interested.

By contrast, Nunca Pense en Llorar could be classified as technocumbia, a genre which developed from the roots of chicha. Whereas chicha bands were fronted by male vocalists, female singing stars have a prominent place in technocumbia, and this song has a female vocalist. The song starts out in duple meter – another feature of technocumbia. Also typical of technocumbia, the song prominently features the synthesizer, and uses studio recording techniques such as reverb and compression, especially on the guitar, to create a glossy pop sound. Additionally, the song seems to be about love – a popular topic for technocumbia music. Like the last piece, this song has a closed structure. Band members take turns taking solos, another strategy to keep this presentational music interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmOKsDb3AY

I listened to Siku Lento Edith and Siku Ligero Egenio. This sort of music is characterized by a whole group of people playing an Andean woodwind instrument, and one drum. A Western tuning system is used. The texture is dense, and there are maybe 15 people in the group, playing three different parts. None of these parts seems to be an “official” melody line, but there is definite harmony in these pieces. So I’m not sure if the pieces are homophonic or polyphonic. Both pieces have a strong 4/4 rhythm. The quality of the tone is very airy and sort of whistly. The songs are fairly soft, and have little to no dynamic variety. Structurally, at least in the first song, the song can be broken down into three or four parts, and there are maybe six cycles of all the parts. I’m not sure if the musicians have agreed in advance how many cycles they will play, so I’m not sure if I would call the piece cyclical or linear. The first song has a set ending, but the second one sort of just fades out.

From listening to ‘Lambango’ and ‘Ala l’a ke’ , I was able to pick out a few characteristics in this style of music.

The first song sounds slightly eerie to my Western ear – probably the repeated use of a note and the note a half-step above it (which I guess reminds Americans of JAWS?) and the fact that the instruments aren’t playing the exact same pitch. Perhaps it’s in a different tuning system. This song, like the second song, seemed to be sung in Arabic, and reminded me of the call to prayer in that there was a soloist singing long phrases with elaborate ornamentation. However, this soloist was a woman, and in addition to the woman’s voice, there was an interlocking spoken part by a man. The two stringed instruments were also playing interlocking parts, and one seemed to play the core melody while the other played elaboration, including scales. There was a sense of rhythm, held with what sounded like a stick being tapped on a floor, but it was a little loose .

The second song had a stronger sense of rhythm, and even used syncopation. It is mostly 4/4, with some sections in 3/4. A percussion instrument creates a buzzing noise. One stringed instrument plays the core – pretty much one chord – while another plays elaboration, including scales. A soloist sings, and also hums along to the elaborating instrument. Like the soloist in the first song, he sings in a nasal style.

Javanese and Balinese gong ensembles are known as gamelan. They are usually associated with courts, and take up a large amount of space, having up to 40 people. Gamelan is more of a classical art music, while talempong is more informal, and happens in villages. Talempong usually have5 or 7 people.

West Sumatran gong ensembles are known as talempong. They have more instrumental and ensemble variety, but some might say they are not as complex as gamelan. Instruments used included the talempong – a brass kettle gong, talempong batu – stone talempong, talempong kayu – wooden talempong, and talempong jao – Javanese talempong. There are different kinds of talempong styles. Talempong pacik, the processional style, accompanies processions at weddings, communal harvests, and ritual baths. The musical styles features interlocking, and is highly cyclical. Talempong duduak, the seated style, occurs more as an accompaniment or background to ceremonies and work parties. It has more of an emphasis on melody than talempong pacik. Both gamelan and talempong have extremely cyclical melodies.

Some musical features of gamelan are the lara and the pathet. Lara roughly means scale, and there are two main laras used – the slendro, with 5 equidistantly placed tones, and the pelog, with 7 non-equidistant tones.  Each scale has a system of 3 pathet, or mode. The mode is a subset of scale which can determine which pitches the emphasis is on, the register level, and melodic formulas. Gamelan, like talempong, can be processional, or seated. For example, gamelan beleganjur accompanies processions during temple anniversaries and cremations.

I really enjoyed the music for this week. The piece with examples of yodeling was my favorite. (For those responding- what was your favorite song and why?) This piece had only vocals with no accompanying instruments. The first example was just one woman singing. I was struck by how it reminded me of Bobby McFerrin, in that the harmony she was singing sounded less like the vocal lines you normally hear in Western music, but more like an instrumental accompaniment, like what a guitar would play as accompaniment to a voice. The melodic lines she sang sounded like the melodic line someone in an a capella group imitating an instrument would have to sing, in that the intervals between notes are large and quick enough that in Western music, humans don’t attempt to sing that way. But of course, the fact that she was yodeling – singing some notes in her chest voice and some in her head voice – changed the texture. Her melody was cyclical. Each example of yodeling added one more woman, so that by the end, the music had a beautiful lush and dense texture. The melody seemed to be polyphonic. Sometimes it seemed like one woman’s line was supposed to be more important than the other lines, but then it would fade back in to the rest. The ranges got larger as more women sang. At first, when I listened to multiple women singing, I didn’t think they were really singing together, but sort of over each other, but when I listened to it again, I heard how the rhythms and melodies fit together. As more voices were added, some women sang bass lines in lower ranges, while a smaller amount of women sang things up top. Some women began to sing in unison. Overall the music sounded pretty familiar to me, in that it seemed to use a Western scale. I thought this music was incredibly amazing and beautiful, as well as somewhat sad – just very soulful. Did it remind you all of instrumentation as well?

 I really enjoyed the first piece – it was so powerful and ornate. The second piece was harder to hear, and the third piece was somewhat boring and corny – and I will explain why.

The first two songs use a non-Western tuning system which divides the scale into more than 12 semitones. The third piece seems to fit much more closely with only using 7 notes like in a Western scale – the trills do introduce notes outside this group, but the singer never ends on one of those notes, and never holds one for a long time. The rhythms are extremely free in the first two songs, but a little less so in the last song – especially when the piano comes in, almost holding to a 4/4 meter.

The first two songs are created by a solo voice. The third has a voice, a drone, and then a piano near the end. The singers are using their chest voices, and, of course, they are all men. Women don’t sing the call to prayer in this culture. In the first two songs, at some times the melody sounds major, or minor, but often it sounds like neither – this is also related to use of a non-Western tuning system. The melodies are both ascending and descending. In the first piece, some of the phrases begin with a fourth, followed by long runs. Otherwise, the melody doesn’t seem to have much repetition, but I might just not be picking up on it because this kind of music is not a familiar to my ears. In the first two songs, most of the phrases are quite long. I guess I would classify the melody as conjunct, because it is moving in a stepwise pattern, and not using big intervals. The singers in all the pieces have a nasal tone, with lots of vibrato. Occasionally, however, they end a phrase on a sustained note which seems neither flat, nor vibrating. I’m not sure how to describe it – it sounds like the noise when two people sing exactly the same note in a way that makes them resonate. But how can you resonate with yourself?

The first piece has a monophonic texture. The last starts out with a biphonic texture – a drone with the singer singing a more elaborate melody above it. I’m not sure how to characterize the middle one because it is more of a recording of a time when two people were singing the call to prayer separately, and the melodies were not meant to go together. In the third piece the vocal melody is much less ornamented – it has less trills, the phrases are shorter and cover less of a range. It sounds corny because of the echo. By contrast, the first piece seemed to be recorded in a room with good acoustics, while the second one seems to be a recording taken outdoors. The drone also sounds electronically generated, and just generally bad, except for the interesting harmonics generated. In the third piece, the melody has much more repetition – although there are slight variations, the singer basically sings a pair of two phrases – the first ascending and the first descending – three times. Then there is a different section, and then the singer goes back and sings the pair again. It’s much less interesting to me because of that repetition.

To me, this style of singing is very powerful, and it sounds somewhat sad and lonely. It makes me think of the desolation of a desert. All this music has the purpose of calling Muslims to pray, and I wonder if the music is considered to be divine, to be given from Allah.