Peter Freeman

This example was really awesome. One of my favorite things about this is the space between slurred notes where the pitch drops just a little bit, almost implying some polyphony or a drone. very cool! I also love how repeated and varied rhythmic/melodic cells simultaneously create unity and variety. Each section seems related to the last one in it’s phrase structure (arch and ending) and pitch material, yet varied through shifting meters and melodic permutations. You get the feeling listening to this that it could go on forever and it would never get boring. Also, it exists fine on its own as a short piece, tantalizing and enticing the listener with hints of what could be, building enough to satiate us, but also only building just enough so that we keep wanting more.

Before taking this class, I would hear this and immediately assume this was indigenous Andean music. The quena, panpipes, guitar, charango, and percussion are all iconic of Andean music for me individually; when put together, they comprise the layman’s archetypal Andean ensemble. It’s interesting how the guitar and charango work together to make a kind of meta-instrument and the quena and panpipe work together to make another. This excludes the percussion to a greater degree that I think it was when ensembles were a large group of one instrument + bomba or something similar because there are many more different types of instruments privileged above it. Both meta instruments are pretty homophonic in texture, with the two winds often playing in parallel thirds and the strings strumming the same chords, even if in slightly different rhythmic patterns. I really enjoyed this, as well as the indigenous Andean examples, and found tracing indigenous elements in cosmopolitan styles more rewarding for this region than in Zimbabwe.

The super thick texture and participatory nature of this song make for some subtle, but compelling musical effects. Because not everybody attacks each note evenly and uniformly in time, a kind of swelling and arrhythmic pulsing occurs, divorced from any real meter or tempo. Certain held notes and phrases throb, permeating the piece and causing certain parts to jump out occasionally. This throbbing, combined with straight up staggered attacks (a product of drunkeness, perhaps?), create a slightly heterophonic element to the otherwise homophonous structure. Another interesting effect is the octave displacement caused by over blowing. This also breaks up the homophony, as octave jumps, and especially jumps that occur in the middle of a held note, give more independance to certain lines from time to time.

In this piece, certain indigenous elements have been kept and used while others have been discarded; this effects the aesthetic and structural qualities of the music. For instance, though an mbira and hosho begin the song, they are quickly joined by a guitar and drum set. This upsets the timbral balance created by having multiple mbiras interlocking and joined by the similarly fuzzy hoshos. Also, though the first mbira statement could be heard in four, the rest of the piece is pretty firmly in a three feel, simplifying and reducing rhythmic complexity and expression. Also, having so many more instruments creates a fuller and richer texture with more individual timbres to pick out in lieu of rhythmic parts. All this sets up the stage for the singer nicely; with such a rich and non-piercing texture and rhythmic consistency laid out, the vocal line emerges very clearly, obviously related to the rest of the musical proceedings, but firmly removed as well, elevated and priveleged.

What an absolutely gorgeous piece of music; this is really just beautiful. There is something really engaging about the 4 vs 3 feel and rhythmic interplay between the two mbiras and the hosho when it comes in. I find it very cathartic to try and hear and feel the different rhythmic groupings. I hear the opening with the first mbira in four with a kind of swing feel. I still here it in four when the second mbira comes in, but soon it switchs to a three, with the second mbira’s left hand laying out a strong bass line in three. It shifts back and fourth between three and four a little before the hoshos come in and it goes own in a glorious blaze of three. No matter what I perceive as the prevelant grouping, however, others are being played simultaneously, making for rewarding repeated listening. Lastly, it just seems like this music would be a total blast to play.

This is one of the most aesthetically interesting selections I’ve listened to this semester. For me, this is maybe the most viscerally charged pieces we’ve heard, a quality I really like, and it’s also very interesting musically for me. The rapid switching between the chest and head voice is a really powerful effect because I rarely hear vocalists (especially women, who are the predominant sex in these excerpts) sing in different qualities of voice in one song/piece let alone switching every note. The many constant and voice-switching lines interlocked to create a kind of rhythmic web constantly shifting depending on whether the singer would expand or contract or permute the cell they were singing or not. Most of the time a steady pulse was kept, though larger scale rhythm formations could be irregular. This rhythmic web was punctured and spiced up with short successive notes in the same voice-range, creating interest by having something grow out of the dynamic rhythmic texture. I also just have to say that I liked this one a lot; the vocal stylings are really interesting and effective. Not only are they viscerally pleasing, but structurally significant as well.

Playing gamelan on the set in Asia House was a real treat and privilege. It helped me bring together a lot of what we had been discussing in class about structure and timbre and the roles of the instruments. It was difficult for me to concentrate, however, on intensely listening and playing at the same time. I think I couldn’t do the two things very well at the same time for two reasons. First, I was tense because I was playing unfamiliar instruments in a musical style and notation system pretty new to me. Being a little tense prevented me from relaxing, which is important for me to open up my concentration to multiple things. Secondly, the nature of the parts I played weren’t conducive to either being played by sheer physical memory or so repetitive that I didn’t have to pay attention. The basic melody instrument I played had a repetitive part, but had a different line after three repetitions. If I tried to listen very closely to how all the different parts fit together while playing, I would lose track of how many repititons I had done. When I played drums, There were repetions with a variant on a larger temporal scale, making it necessary for me to keep reading the music for most of the time. Also, because I am less comfortable on drums than I am on mallets, if I stopped fully concentrating on the rhythms I was playing I would make mistakes.

The two words that I would use to describe this most would be modality and heterophony. My training tells me that this is very modal when I hear it because that among a certain set of pitches, any one could be the most important note of the pitch set at any time. This absence of pitch reference point and the repetitive phrases prevented the piece from developing in any standard common practice Western art music sense, but rather made it very cyclical for me. It seemed cyclical even though I know that the singer is improvising and reciting different poems whose form explicitly requires development (A/B/A’/B’). Perhaps my hearing it that way is dependent on my inability to understand the text.

I think it’s heterophonic because I hear the flute imitating the vocal lines, which satisfies the definition of heterophony as the same line being played in different ways or manners. Any edgings towards counterpoint were negated by the ending of phrases together.

I heard four voices in this piece. The two talempong players, the percussionist and the wind player. Of the two talempong players I discerned a kind of hierarchical relationship. One set of gongs tuned lower in range than the other seemed to feature more improvisation, complex rhythms and denser texture than the other, higher set that seemed to play much more repetitively and simply (at least on the surface). The addition of the wind instrument was an interesting one because it seemed kind of incongrous with what else was going on. Maybe I started thinking about this because we’re studying development in my composition class, but it seemed that the first section, where the woodwind wasn’t playing, that there wasn’t any development happening. There was variation and changing patterns, but no significant thinning or thickening of the texture of the piece to indicate that texture (which was altered by the addition of a 4th instrument) would be something that would change over the course of the piece. After a while, it seemed like the woodwind (which was playing highly repetitive motives) was going to keep playing for the rest of the piece. This made me think about the form I thought would occur (AB) with the B section being much much longer. An AB form unbalanced like that seems strange to me in the context of thinking of forms like that. To my surprise, the woodwind stopped just before the end, providing a kind of complement to the introduction.

The first thing that struck me about this listening example was how in addition to the tambura drones that kind of form a root-fifth-octave “chord,” the melody instrument kind of accompanied itself with it’s own drones. Though this isn’t out of the ordinary, it was odd that contrary to the notion of Indian classical music as devoid of harmony and counterpoint, harmony was implied and perceptible. The melody drone contained the standard root and fifth of the tambura, but there was also a major third, which created a major triad based on the root of the rag. Also, a little less than halfway through the selection, after a brief flurry of activity, the rhythmic intensity of the melody slowed a little and there was a major scale degree seven repeated a couple of times and then an almost country twangish descent from the major third down to the major second to root. For me, the scale degree seven implied a western style V chord, and the 3-2-1 a cadence to the tonic. This sense of harmonic resolution was further enhanced by the preceding flurry and subsequent slowdown; in western common practice tonal music, the slow, deliberate cadence is preceded by faster movement. The effect was very poignant.

All that said, I really enjoyed this selection. Here are a few other things that struck me as slightly unusual: the use of rapidly repeated single pitches, the unusual timbre of glissandi and sliding as compared with other melody instruments we’ve heard, and the use of rapidly repeating chords (kind of) with slightly varying top notes.