A bunch of "Blog" entries. I cant see if anyone else has written anything- does that mean no one has written anything, or that I cant see it...
First Suporish Performed by Academy of Maqam From Music of Central Asia vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks Country of Origin: Tajikistan,Uzbekistan Year of Release: 2006 Label / Archive: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Duration: 1:06 Track Catalog Number: SFW40521_116
July 10, 2009 I downloaded the song today and have it on repeat while I do other internet errands and reading. I find the melody very catching and soothing to listen to. I’m starting to become a little concerned that I will have trouble extrapolating the many layers of the song into something coherent enough for our class to perform. I’m concerned that I will only be able to pick out a basic structure that might not preserve the integrity of the piece. It is more complex than I first realized. I didn’t even notice the stringed instrument on my first listen! Yikes. In terms of the vocal melody, I find it tempting to sing along, but I am noticing that the performers ornamentation is difficult to emulate from a western trained perspective. I found the performers website which gives an explanation of the song and the text IN EGNLISH. I can’t seem to find a text in the original language. I’m concerned that when I sing this song I will go by what I hear using my English language ears and butcher the language.
Notes from the performers website: http://www.akdn.org/aktc_music_invisible_face_of_the_beloved.asp Invisible face of the beloved: Classical music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks
The Academy of Maqâm Abduvali Abdurashidov, Founder and Director of the Academy of Maqâm, playing the Sato. The Academy of Maqâm takes its name from the venerable tradition of classical or court music that spans the core Muslim world from Casablanca, Morocco, to Kashgar in western China. The founding vision of the Academy belongs to Abduvali Abdurashidov, a Tajik musician and scholar who has brought new vitality to the performance of maqâm through a critical and historical study of its music and poetry. Established with support from the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia and located in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, Abdurashidov’s academy models itself on an older ideal of Islamic learning in which the study of music is inseparable from the study of poetry, prosody, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. The performers who join Abduvali Abdurashidov on this recording are all students in the Academy of Maqâm. Both their raw talent and rigorous training are amply displayed in the vivid performance of Maqâm-i Râst that comprises the entire seventy-minute compact disc.
Maqâm-i Râst is one of the six maqâms, or suites, which constitute the systematically organized repertory of Central Asian classical music known as Shashmaqâm (six maqâms). In the Shashmaqâm, instrumental pieces, lyrical song, contemplative poetry, and dance are all bound together in a vast yet integrated artistic conception of great refinement and profound beauty. The roots of Shashmaqâm are linked most strongly with Samarkand and Bukhara - historically multicultural cities where performers and audiences have included Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Central Asian (Bukharan) Jews. Shashmaqâm performers were typically bilingual in Uzbek - a Turkic language - and Tajik - an eastern dialect of Persian - and sang poetic texts in both languages. During the Soviet era, however, the Shashmaqâm was cloned into two distinct repertories - ”Uzbek” Shashmaqâm, with exclusively Uzbek-language poetic texts, and “Tajik” Shashmaqâm, with exclusively Tajiklanguage poetic texts. In both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the local version of the Shashmaqâm came to serve as an important symbol of national cultural identity. This cultural symbolism has become still more significant in the post-Soviet era as the independent nations of Central Asia strive to define themselves socially and historically. Suites or cycles consisting of instrumental and vocal music organized by melodic mode and meter are characteristic of all maqâm traditions, and the concept of the suite is one of great antiquity. The Shashmaqâm, however, is not mentioned in medieval or early modern literary sources, and its origins remain a mystery. The dating of handwritten collections of song lyrics compiled by singers suggests that the Shashmaqâm began to assume a canonical form toward the end of the 18th century, and evolved into its present form around a hundred years ago. This form includes some 250 individual pieces divided into six constituent suites. Each suite is named after one of the traditional melodic modes of maqâm music: buzruk, râst, nawâ, dugâh, segâh, irâq. These melodic modes - each characterized by typical melodic motifs, intervals, and initial and final pitches - provide the basis for many, but not all, of the pieces in the six suites. Each suite also includes pieces in a secondary melodic mode, and modulations from one mode to another help to hold the attention of listeners through the juxtaposition of contrasting melody types. In Maqâm-i Râst, for example, the initial piece, Sarakhbor (from Arabic khabar, “news”), proceeds through a series of short songs (tarona) to the subsequent piece, Talqin, whose title designates an asymmetrical “limping” rhythm (known in Turkish music as aksak). Talqin is set not in râst, like Sarakhbor, but in ushshâq, a mode whose “minor” sound contrasts with the “major” sound of râst.
Contrasts of mode are amplified by contrasts of rhythm and meter between one piece and the next. In a typical procedure, a single melody is subjected to different rhythmic and metrical treatments in successive pieces, creating a series of variations. In Western music, a similar procedure was used by Baroque era composers - most famously, Johann Sebastian Bach - to compose suites whose rhythmic and metrical transformations assumed the form of popular dance genres: allemande, courante, sarabande, gavotte, minuet, gigue, and so on. Performers of Shashmaqâm must command a variety of skills. They must have a powerful voice that extends over a broad range; they must play the tanbur - the longnecked lute that singers traditionally used to accompany themselves; they must have a large repertory of poetic texts from which to draw song lyrics; and most important, they must understand the principles of setting poetic texts to music. These principles are contained in the traditional system of prosody known as aruz. The aruz system comprises a complex of quantitative meters, each with its own metric formula analogous, for example, to iambic pentameter or hexameter in English. Skilled performers understand how to accommodate the quantitative verse meter of a poetic text to the metric cycle (usul) and melodic rhythm of a particular musical genre. Syllables of verse are designated as long or short, and these long and short syllables are grouped into formulaic patterns, for example: U - - - U - - - U - - - U - - - (short-long-long-long; short-long-long-long, etc). With the scansion established, metrical verse formulas can be set to musical phrases with corresponding long and short rhythmic values. The result is that in performance, poetic texts are rhythmically stylized, making comprehension difficult for listeners who do not already know the words. Shashmaqâm singers, however, have traditionally drawn on poetic texts that are well known to their listeners. Indeed, the lyrical expressiveness of the maqâm is first and foremost a means of conveying the sublime beauty and allegorical power of spiritual poetry. These texts belong to classical Islamic poets such as Hafiz, Jâmî, Nawâ’î, Hilâlî, Amirî, Bedil, Mashrab, and others who wrote in Persian and in a literary form of Turkic known as Chagatay. The texts, composed in classical forms such as ghazal, mukhammas, mustazâd, and rubaî, are redolent with symbols drawn from Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam. The most salient of these symbols is the figure of the beloved, which, while described in human form, alludes metaphorically and mystically to the invisible presence of the divine.
Many of the poetic texts sung by Abduvali Abdurashidov and his Academy of Maqâm belong to Hafiz, the great 14thcentury Persian poet from Shiraz. The rich allegory, multiple levels of allusion, and sophisticated use of double entendre make Hafiz notoriously difficult to translate. English translations tend to reflect the literary sensibilities of their own time. The translations provided in these notes make no attempt to mirror the meters or rhyme scheme of the Persian but, rather, strive to remain as close as possible to the language of the original text. The best known of the Hafiz poems included here are set to the melody of Sarakhbor-i Râst (track 2) and Nasr-i Ushshâq (track 11). Both are available in many English translations, perhaps the most enduring of them the work of Gertrude Bell (cf. “The Glow of My Love’s Red Cheek” and “Vain to Seek the Key to the Hidden” in Hafiz, The Mystic Poets, Skylight Paths Publishing, Woodstock VT, 2004). A Word from Abduvali Abdurashidov, Founder and Director of the Academy of Maqâm These days, no one in Tajikistan needs to be convinced of the extraordinary importance of Shashmaqâm - the classical music heritage of the Tajiks. Much of the credit for this should go to the President of Tajikistan, Emomali Sharifovich Rakhmonov. His understanding, vision, and decisiveness in creating a new approach to the Shashmaqâm have energized our society at the beginning of the 21st century. At a time when the Shashmaqâm seemed to be fading, the President took sensible and timely steps to provide support. He funded new artistic and educational organizations, created a special “Day of Shashmaqâm,” and mandated the organization of children’s studios throughout the country devoted to the study of Shashmaqâm.
Like other forms of classical music in the East, Shashmaqâm was traditionally taught and learned through a system of “master-disciple” (ustod-shogird) oral pedagogy. The master-disciple system not only facilitated the transmission of knowledge and experience but also provided a framework for musical creativity and evolution. Beginning in the late 1920s, however, Soviet cultural strategists introduced European musical forms and genres into Central Asia - symphony, opera, ballet, oratorio - together with a system of music education in which students learned music from notation, rather than by ear. The Soviet Union’s official cultural establishment viewed this new musical life as a promising substitute for “backward” indigenous music. Now we understand that this model was misguided. Classical music from Asia and Europe both have their own unique qualities, their own self-contained worlds of thought and feeling. And how fortunate are those who have a place in their soul for maqâm as well as Mozart! The erosion of the traditional master-disciple system had an adverse effect on our classical music, and it was the idea of reanimating this system in a contemporary setting that inspired me to found the Academy of Maqâm. I observed that in Iran, India, Azerbaijan, and other Asian nations, many master musicians have their own schools, and students are free to choose whichever school best suits them. I wanted to create a school where students would learn not only to perform maqâms of the past but to master the principles and techniques that would allow them to compose new maqâm music. In the Academy, I emphasize that the seeds of musical creativity and evolution are contained in the knowledge passed on to us by our musical forebears. A fundamental aspect of the Academy’s curriculum is the study of maqâm as a musical cycle or suite. I learned from my own experience that performing and listening to the maqâm as an integral cycle can lead to an entirely different understanding and experience of the music - to a kind of self-purification. You cannot get that experience simply by listening to individual pieces extracted from the cycle, which is how maqâm is mostly performed these days.
Today we live in the 21st century. Much has changed, but traditions more than a thousand years old continue to thrill and delight us. They reflect the variety of the world and enrich our ability to transmit to one another our most beautiful and precious feelings and thoughts, while filling us with optimism and hope for the future. The art of Shashmaqâm has emerged on the world stage and is enjoyed by listeners in many countries of Europe, North America, and Asia. The Academy of Maqâm is proud to contribute to the preservation, development, and dissemination of this remarkable art.
First Suporish (Bedil, d. 1721) The suporish marks what Abduvali Abdurashidov describes as a “first ending” to the cycle - a point of possible repose. The valedictory gesture is brief, however, as the cycle continues into a lively finale. All instruments are destroyers of the heart, All melodies are melodies of the heart.
I spent time yesterday transcribing my song. It was a festival of ridiculous technology. I recently bought an ipod touch. I had installed a digital piano application on a whim but actually found it very useful checking pitches. I decided to transcribe the basic pitches first, and to revisit the piece later to try to transcribe the subtle inflections and ornamentations. Though I don’t know how essential the inflection is to the music, it is easier to conceive the piece right now without ornamentation. It is Db pentatonic, starting on a Bb. The melodic pattern is a three-beat isorhythm - I wasn’t sure the best way to think of the counting. For the sake of notation, I wrote it out in 3/4. This puts an even set of rhythms in each measure, though I don’t think I really feel it in any particular meter. There is not particular emphasis on any beat in the rhythmic accompaniment.
The clip I found is at http://oyate.manykites.org/artists/wixondunn35/wixondunn06.html There is a phone number on the site to order a complete cd. I dialed the number, which belonged to a Lakota Sioux from South Dakota. He had acquired funding to travel around the US making recordings of Native American music. I ordered the cd of Darrel Wixon Dunn, which apparently is 30 minutes of singing but also talking about the music. That is the part I am most interested in - I am hoping it will shed light on the context of this music. I am considering trying to contact Darrel Wixon Dunn this week to discuss the role music played/plays in Wampanoag culture. I don’t know if I’ll be able to track him down or not.
I’m getting a little confused regarding the form of my piece: is it a sean nós, or is it a ballad? I can’t find information regarding its origin, which disappoints me. It has also made me think a lot over the past few days about how I am going to teach the song. Dr. Baxter has asked us about the modifications we might make to recreate the timbral quality of the performer, so I need to make a (final) decision about which version I am going to use. Every time I think I’ve settled on one, I change my mind because I like them all! :)
My last entry contained a lot of information about the sean nós, but since the piece might actually be a ballad, I thought I’d write a bit about that.
Though originally of French origin, ballads are often associated with British and Irish musical styles. It appears as though “Most, but not all northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of fourteen syllables…However, there is considerable variation on this pattern in almost every respect, including length, number of lines and rhyming scheme, making the strict definition of a ballad extremely difficult.” That last sentence gave me hope – I was beginning to feel rather frustrated at my inability to discern the form of my piece!
One thing seemingly characteristic feature of all ballads, however, is that they “are narrative in nature, with a self contained story, often concise and relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic. Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas, as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas.”
A major difference between the ballad and the sean nós is that they (normally) accompanied and unaccompanied, respectively. Commonly used instruments include the harp, violin/fiddle, bodhran (“bow-rawn,” as in “take a bow” – a drum that can be tuned), wooden flute, tin whistle, Uillean pipes (Irish bagpipes), and to a slightly lesser extent, accordion/concertina, guitar, banjo, and bouzouki (big mandolin).
I’ve been working on transcribing my song. It fitted well into 4/4. It has a steady beat to it, so the rhythmic part is pretty consistent. The notating of the notes wasn’t too hard, but getting the text without knowing the language was very challenging. I assume that this song is sung in Wolof. Some pronunciation was even hard to put into English. I started to write in Korean first. I could get the closest sound with Korean because Korean phonetic elements are very similar to the sounds of the lyrics. In the beginning, while I was transcribing, I was focused on the notating the notes and getting the right rhythm. I listened to it several times and got the text by using the transcribing program. I found 50% speed was perfect. I found 25% was too slow - it made it even harder to listen if the song was too slow. After I got the notation, I was listening to the drum variation. The song has such a cool drum variation to it. The basic beat was steady, but the drummer was so good at improvising to the beat, that it made me wish I could play the drum well. It sounds so much richer with drum. They used the polyrhythmic drumming system. After I read more about the Senegal music history, I could picture how this is sung. I can picture them moving their body to the drumbeat and how griot is playing his kora and singing his solo.
I was double-checking my notation for the chorus part. I found some mistakes on rhythmic notation while I was playing back my notation on the keyboard. It is a simple but very unusual non-western rhythmic combination. When I clapped to this rhythm, it seemed work fine, but it wasn’t right when I played it on the keyboard. I had to play many times to get this rhythm right. Now I’m very confident with what I have. This exercise made me appreciate the uniqueness of the song much more. Now I am pretty confident that I got the chorus part correctly notated! Next, I need to work more on the solo part, which doesn’t seem to fit in the meter. It is very free flowing in rhythm, so hard to notate. I also felt the solo part has the most native Senegalese melody: it was slightly atonal, clearly getting away from the key of the song. Embellishments on the melody are also going to be hard to notate. The transition from solo to chorus sounds abrupt, maybe because it involves coming back to more tonal part of the song, or maybe the recording/mixing quality was not the best (you can almost hear where they added separate tracks.)
This entry is mostly me journalling through the nitty-gritty of refining notational elements in my transcription:
The cd is still not here. I am getting anxious. I am online now trying to find telephone information for Darrel Wixon Dunn. I found a listing in Mashpee, MA, which should be him but I have to pay $1 for the info. It appears to be an unlisted number. I feel like a stalker. I’m listening to the track again, and for the first time (what have I been doing?) tried singing along. Why haven’t I been singing the whole time? I immediately was able to detect discrepancies in nuance between what I was singing and what he is singing. First, almost all his “H” sounds have a stop sound, made in the back of the throat. His “W” sounds often, but not always, have a distinct emphasis. Trying to sing and clap the part as he does, putting the song just after the beat, proves difficult on my own. I find myself repeatedly putting the song on the wrong side of the beat. A transcription question comes to mind. Should I write this out with everything on the beat and include instruction that the text or accompaniment should be offset slightly? Or should I write it out with accurate rhythms? That would be much harder to read. I’ve tried singing it exactly with my clapping, and I find that it doesn’t have the same enchanting effect. The last time through the cycle he sings much softer. I am now trying to notate exactly how much offset the beat is. It is irregular, which makes me think that it is not intentional but perhaps a stylistic effect of being so comfortable with the music? The voice seems to be behind the percussion by a 16th note most of the time, every once in a while by a 32nd note, and just a couple times it falls right on the beat. Okay, now that I’m really focusing on the rhythmic details I’m noticing that the first beat of the pattern is the one that is almost always delayed, while the 3rd 8th note tends to line up exactly. The last beat of the (3/4) measure is sometimes on and sometimes off. Actually, I think the last beat is on, but it always comes on “Hey” which because of the vocal inflection becomes just slightly late. Okay okay okay, I’ve been playing around with Finale notation software for a while and now think that some of my thoughts were wrong. It is really important to the feel of the song that there not be too rushed a feeling in the opening notes - the second note of the cycle, “o” comes right with the accompaniment. So I think the first beat of every measure is offset by a 32nd note. Whew. That was laborious. It feels much better now. Not totally natural, not in the groove like Dunn, but I think pretty close to rhythmically accurate.
Irish music is often characterized by its time signatures. Common time signatures/music forms include the “single jig (12/8 time), double jig (6/8 time), reel (4/4 time), hornpipe (swung 4/4 time), slip jig (9/8 time), and occasionally versions of polkas (2/4 time) and mazurkas or waltzes (3/4 time). All of these tune styles have corresponding traditional dances.”
Music has always played an important role in all levels of Irish culture. Even today, Ireland’s landscape is dotted with icons of instruments, and both the Irish coat of arms and the Irish passport have a harp on it. It seems that renewed interest in Irish music began after Ireland was no longer part of British rule and the interest seems to be going strong ever since.
Some think that Irish music influenced American folk music (e.g., bluegrass, etc.), but others feel that that notion is a misconception, because Appalachia did not have a large Irish population (apparently, most of the immigrants there were actually of Scottish and English descent). However, scholars do seem to agree that Irish music did have a direct impact on the US folk music revival in the 1960s, and that the reverse was also true (that US musicians influenced Irish folk musicians as well).
Though I don't know why this particular song would be sung, I have been reading up on Bruno Nettl's study of the Blackfoot Tribe to get a sense of what possible options there might be. There might be no correlation at all, but I'm using information on the Blackfoot people because it is accessible.
In the Blackfoot tradition, certain songs would be associated with specific objects (like medicine bundles), concepts, dances, actions, or during gambling games. Songs are also differentiated by association with a person, story or event. There is no concept of more-musical or less-musical. Apparently Blackfoot music doesn't have the same performance-based connotation that it does in many other cultures.
During the 1950’s in Germany, the East German regime promoted folk music as long as it was what they saw as an expression of pure German tradition, and a tool for spreading party propaganda. I searched more on music in Germany in 1950’s era and discovered that there was sense of “nationalism” among many musicians. My assumption is that the song was sung in order to represent the rise of German nationalism and the industrialization of German society in this era. This piece was also represent many different cultural influences such as Austria, Germany and etc.
Posts
A bunch of "Blog" entries. I cant see if anyone else has written anything- does that mean no one has written anything, or that I cant see it...
ReplyDeleteFirst Suporish
Performed by Academy of Maqam
From Music of Central Asia vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of
the Tajiks and Uzbeks
Country of Origin: Tajikistan,Uzbekistan
Year of Release: 2006
Label / Archive: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Duration: 1:06
Track Catalog Number: SFW40521_116
July 10, 2009
I downloaded the song today and have it on repeat while I do other internet errands and reading. I find the melody very catching and soothing to listen to. I’m starting to become a little concerned that I will have trouble extrapolating the many layers of the song into something coherent enough for our class to perform. I’m concerned that I will only be able to pick out a basic structure that might not preserve the integrity of the piece. It is more complex than I first realized. I didn’t even notice the stringed instrument on my first listen! Yikes.
In terms of the vocal melody, I find it tempting to sing along, but I am noticing that the performers ornamentation is difficult to emulate from a western trained perspective.
I found the performers website which gives an explanation of the song and the text IN EGNLISH. I can’t seem to find a text in the original language. I’m concerned that when I sing this song I will go by what I hear using my English language ears and butcher the language.
Notes from the performers website: http://www.akdn.org/aktc_music_invisible_face_of_the_beloved.asp
ReplyDeleteInvisible face of the beloved:
Classical music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks
The Academy of Maqâm
Abduvali Abdurashidov, Founder and Director of the Academy of Maqâm, playing the Sato. The Academy of Maqâm takes its name from the venerable tradition of classical or court music that spans the core Muslim world from Casablanca, Morocco, to Kashgar in western China. The founding vision of the Academy belongs to Abduvali Abdurashidov, a Tajik musician and scholar who has brought new vitality to the performance of maqâm through a critical and historical study of its music and poetry. Established with support from the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia and located in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, Abdurashidov’s academy models itself on an older ideal of Islamic learning in which the study of music is inseparable from the study of poetry, prosody, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. The performers who join Abduvali Abdurashidov on this recording are all students in the Academy of Maqâm. Both their raw talent and rigorous training are amply displayed in the vivid performance of Maqâm-i Râst that comprises the entire seventy-minute compact disc.
Maqâm-i Râst is one of the six maqâms, or suites, which constitute the systematically organized repertory of Central Asian classical music known as Shashmaqâm (six maqâms). In the Shashmaqâm, instrumental pieces, lyrical song, contemplative poetry, and dance are all bound together in a vast yet integrated artistic conception of great refinement and profound beauty. The roots of Shashmaqâm are linked most strongly
ReplyDeletewith Samarkand and Bukhara - historically multicultural cities where performers and audiences have included Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Central Asian (Bukharan) Jews. Shashmaqâm performers were typically bilingual in Uzbek - a Turkic language - and Tajik - an eastern dialect of Persian - and sang poetic texts in both languages. During the Soviet era, however, the Shashmaqâm was cloned into two distinct repertories - ”Uzbek” Shashmaqâm, with exclusively Uzbek-language poetic texts, and “Tajik”
Shashmaqâm, with exclusively Tajiklanguage poetic texts. In both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the local version of the Shashmaqâm came to serve as an important symbol of national cultural identity. This cultural symbolism has become still more significant in the post-Soviet era as the independent nations of Central Asia strive to define themselves socially and historically.
Suites or cycles consisting of instrumental and vocal music organized by melodic mode and meter are characteristic of all maqâm traditions, and the concept of the suite is one of great antiquity. The Shashmaqâm, however, is not mentioned in medieval or early modern literary sources, and its origins remain a mystery. The dating of handwritten collections of song lyrics compiled by singers suggests that the Shashmaqâm began to assume a canonical form toward the end of the 18th century, and evolved into its present form around a hundred years ago. This form includes some 250 individual pieces divided into six constituent suites. Each suite is named after one of the traditional melodic modes of maqâm music: buzruk, râst, nawâ, dugâh, segâh, irâq. These melodic modes - each
characterized by typical melodic motifs, intervals, and initial and final pitches - provide the basis for many, but not all, of the pieces in the six suites. Each suite also includes pieces in a secondary melodic mode, and modulations from one mode to another help to hold the attention of listeners through the juxtaposition of contrasting melody types. In Maqâm-i Râst, for example, the initial piece, Sarakhbor (from Arabic khabar, “news”), proceeds through a series of short songs (tarona) to the subsequent piece, Talqin, whose title designates an asymmetrical “limping” rhythm (known in Turkish music as aksak). Talqin is set not in râst, like Sarakhbor, but in ushshâq, a mode whose “minor” sound
contrasts with the “major” sound of râst.
Contrasts of mode are amplified by contrasts of rhythm and meter between one piece and the next. In a typical procedure, a single melody is subjected to different rhythmic and metrical treatments in successive pieces, creating a series of variations. In Western music, a similar procedure was used by Baroque era composers - most famously, Johann
ReplyDeleteSebastian Bach - to compose suites whose rhythmic and metrical transformations assumed the form of popular dance genres: allemande, courante, sarabande, gavotte, minuet, gigue, and so on.
Performers of Shashmaqâm must command a variety of skills. They must have a powerful voice that extends over a broad range; they must play the tanbur - the longnecked lute that singers traditionally used to accompany themselves; they must have a large repertory of poetic texts from which to draw song lyrics; and most important, they must understand the principles of setting poetic texts to music. These principles are contained in the traditional system of prosody known as aruz.
The aruz system comprises a complex of quantitative meters, each with its own metric formula analogous, for example, to iambic pentameter or hexameter in English. Skilled performers understand how to accommodate the quantitative verse meter of a poetic text to the metric cycle (usul) and melodic rhythm of a particular musical genre. Syllables of verse are designated as long or short, and these long and short syllables are grouped into formulaic patterns, for example: U - - - U - - - U - - - U - - - (short-long-long-long; short-long-long-long, etc). With the scansion established, metrical verse formulas can be set to musical phrases with corresponding long and short rhythmic values. The result is that in
performance, poetic texts are rhythmically stylized, making comprehension difficult for listeners who do not already know the words. Shashmaqâm singers, however, have traditionally drawn on poetic texts that are well known to their listeners. Indeed, the lyrical expressiveness of the maqâm is first and foremost a means of conveying the sublime beauty and allegorical power of spiritual poetry. These texts belong to classical Islamic poets such as Hafiz, Jâmî, Nawâ’î, Hilâlî, Amirî, Bedil, Mashrab, and others who wrote in Persian and in a literary form of Turkic known as Chagatay. The texts, composed in classical forms such as ghazal, mukhammas, mustazâd, and rubaî, are redolent with symbols drawn from Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam. The most salient of these symbols is the figure of the beloved, which, while described in human
form, alludes metaphorically and mystically to the invisible presence of the divine.
Many of the poetic texts sung by Abduvali Abdurashidov and his Academy of Maqâm belong to Hafiz, the great 14thcentury Persian poet from Shiraz. The rich allegory, multiple levels of allusion, and sophisticated use of double entendre make Hafiz notoriously difficult to translate. English translations tend to reflect the literary sensibilities of their own time. The translations provided in these notes make no attempt to mirror the meters or rhyme scheme of the Persian but, rather, strive to remain as close as possible to the language of the original text. The best known of the Hafiz poems included here are set to the melody of Sarakhbor-i Râst (track 2) and Nasr-i Ushshâq (track 11). Both are available in many English translations, perhaps the most enduring of them the work of Gertrude Bell (cf. “The Glow of My Love’s Red Cheek” and “Vain to Seek the Key to the Hidden” in Hafiz, The Mystic Poets, Skylight Paths Publishing, Woodstock VT, 2004).
ReplyDeleteA Word from Abduvali Abdurashidov, Founder and Director of the Academy of Maqâm
These days, no one in Tajikistan needs to be convinced of the extraordinary importance of Shashmaqâm - the classical music heritage of the Tajiks. Much of the credit for this should go to the President of Tajikistan, Emomali Sharifovich Rakhmonov. His understanding, vision, and decisiveness in creating a new approach to the Shashmaqâm have energized our society at the beginning of the 21st century. At a time when the Shashmaqâm seemed to be fading, the President took sensible and timely steps to provide support. He funded new artistic and educational organizations, created a special “Day of Shashmaqâm,” and mandated the organization of children’s studios throughout the country devoted to the study of Shashmaqâm.
Like other forms of classical music in the East, Shashmaqâm was traditionally taught and learned through a system of “master-disciple” (ustod-shogird) oral pedagogy. The master-disciple system not only facilitated the transmission of knowledge and experience but also provided a framework for musical creativity and evolution. Beginning in the late 1920s, however, Soviet cultural strategists introduced European musical forms and genres into Central Asia - symphony, opera, ballet, oratorio - together with a system of music education in which students learned music from notation, rather than by ear. The Soviet Union’s official cultural establishment viewed this new musical life as a promising substitute for “backward” indigenous music. Now we understand that this model was misguided. Classical music from Asia and Europe both have their own unique qualities, their own self-contained worlds of thought and feeling. And how fortunate are those who have a place in their soul for maqâm as well as Mozart!
ReplyDeleteThe erosion of the traditional master-disciple system had an adverse effect on our classical music, and it was the idea of reanimating this system in a contemporary setting that inspired me to found the Academy of Maqâm. I observed that in Iran, India, Azerbaijan, and other Asian nations, many master musicians have their own schools, and students are free to choose whichever school best suits them. I wanted to create a school where students would learn not only to perform maqâms of the past but to master the principles and techniques that would allow them to compose new maqâm music. In the Academy, I emphasize that the seeds of musical creativity and evolution are contained in the knowledge passed on to us by our musical forebears. A fundamental aspect of the Academy’s curriculum is the study of maqâm as a musical cycle or suite. I learned from my own experience that performing and listening to the maqâm as an integral cycle can lead to an entirely different understanding and experience of the music - to a kind of self-purification. You cannot get that experience simply by listening to individual pieces extracted from the cycle, which is how maqâm is mostly performed these days.
Today we live in the 21st century. Much has changed, but traditions more than a thousand years old continue to thrill and delight us. They reflect the variety of the world and enrich our ability to transmit to one another our most beautiful and precious feelings and thoughts, while filling us with optimism and hope for the future. The art of Shashmaqâm has emerged on the world stage and is enjoyed by listeners in many countries of Europe, North America, and Asia. The Academy of Maqâm is proud to contribute to the preservation, development, and dissemination of this remarkable art.
ReplyDeleteFirst Suporish
(Bedil, d. 1721)
The suporish marks what Abduvali Abdurashidov describes as a “first ending” to the cycle - a point of possible repose. The valedictory gesture is brief, however, as the cycle continues into a lively finale.
All instruments are destroyers of the heart,
All melodies are melodies of the heart.
END OF COPY AND PASTED FROM their website
July 16, 2009
ReplyDeleteI spent time yesterday transcribing my song. It was a festival of ridiculous technology. I recently bought an ipod touch. I had installed a digital piano application on a whim but actually found it very useful checking pitches. I decided to transcribe the basic pitches first, and to revisit the piece later to try to transcribe the subtle inflections and ornamentations. Though I don’t know how essential the inflection is to the music, it is easier to conceive the piece right now without ornamentation. It is Db pentatonic, starting on a Bb. The melodic pattern is a three-beat isorhythm - I wasn’t sure the best way to think of the counting. For the sake of notation, I wrote it out in 3/4. This puts an even set of rhythms in each measure, though I don’t think I really feel it in any particular meter. There is not particular emphasis on any beat in the rhythmic accompaniment.
The clip I found is at http://oyate.manykites.org/artists/wixondunn35/wixondunn06.html
There is a phone number on the site to order a complete cd. I dialed the number, which belonged to a Lakota Sioux from South Dakota. He had acquired funding to travel around the US making recordings of Native American music. I ordered the cd of Darrel Wixon Dunn, which apparently is 30 minutes of singing but also talking about the music. That is the part I am most interested in - I am hoping it will shed light on the context of this music. I am considering trying to contact Darrel Wixon Dunn this week to discuss the role music played/plays in Wampanoag culture. I don’t know if I’ll be able to track him down or not.
I’m getting a little confused regarding the form of my piece: is it a sean nós, or is it a ballad? I can’t find information regarding its origin, which disappoints me. It has also made me think a lot over the past few days about how I am going to teach the song. Dr. Baxter has asked us about the modifications we might make to recreate the timbral quality of the performer, so I need to make a (final) decision about which version I am going to use. Every time I think I’ve settled on one, I change my mind because I like them all! :)
ReplyDeleteMy last entry contained a lot of information about the sean nós, but since the piece might actually be a ballad, I thought I’d write a bit about that.
Though originally of French origin, ballads are often associated with British and Irish musical styles. It appears as though “Most, but not all northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of fourteen syllables…However, there is considerable variation on this pattern in almost every respect, including length, number of lines and rhyming scheme, making the strict definition of a ballad extremely difficult.” That last sentence gave me hope – I was beginning to feel rather frustrated at my inability to discern the form of my piece!
One thing seemingly characteristic feature of all ballads, however, is that they “are narrative in nature, with a self contained story, often concise and relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic. Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas, as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas.”
A major difference between the ballad and the sean nós is that they (normally) accompanied and unaccompanied, respectively. Commonly used instruments include the harp, violin/fiddle, bodhran (“bow-rawn,” as in “take a bow” – a drum that can be tuned), wooden flute, tin whistle, Uillean pipes (Irish bagpipes), and to a slightly lesser extent, accordion/concertina, guitar, banjo, and bouzouki (big mandolin).
I’ve been working on transcribing my song. It fitted well into 4/4. It has a steady beat to it, so the rhythmic part is pretty consistent. The notating of the notes wasn’t too hard, but getting the text without knowing the language was very challenging. I assume that this song is sung in Wolof. Some pronunciation was even hard to put into English. I started to write in Korean first. I could get the closest sound with Korean because Korean phonetic elements are very similar to the sounds of the lyrics. In the beginning, while I was transcribing, I was focused on the notating the notes and getting the right rhythm. I listened to it several times and got the text by using the transcribing program. I found 50% speed was perfect. I found 25% was too slow - it made it even harder to listen if the song was too slow. After I got the notation, I was listening to the drum variation. The song has such a cool drum variation to it. The basic beat was steady, but the drummer was so good at improvising to the beat, that it made me wish I could play the drum well. It sounds so much richer with drum. They used the polyrhythmic drumming system. After I read more about the Senegal music history, I could picture how this is sung. I can picture them moving their body to the drumbeat and how griot is playing his kora and singing his solo.
ReplyDeleteI was double-checking my notation for the chorus part. I found some mistakes on rhythmic notation while I was playing back my notation on the keyboard. It is a simple but very unusual non-western rhythmic combination. When I clapped to this rhythm, it seemed work fine, but it wasn’t right when I played it on the keyboard. I had to play many times to get this rhythm right. Now I’m very confident with what I have. This exercise made me appreciate the uniqueness of the song much more. Now I am pretty confident that I got the chorus part correctly notated!
ReplyDeleteNext, I need to work more on the solo part, which doesn’t seem to fit in the meter. It is very free flowing in rhythm, so hard to notate. I also felt the solo part has the most native Senegalese melody: it was slightly atonal, clearly getting away from the key of the song. Embellishments on the melody are also going to be hard to notate. The transition from solo to chorus sounds abrupt, maybe because it involves coming back to more tonal part of the song, or maybe the recording/mixing quality was not the best (you can almost hear where they added separate tracks.)
July 19, 2009
ReplyDeleteThis entry is mostly me journalling through the nitty-gritty of refining notational elements in my transcription:
The cd is still not here. I am getting anxious. I am online now trying to find telephone information for Darrel Wixon Dunn. I found a listing in Mashpee, MA, which should be him but I have to pay $1 for the info. It appears to be an unlisted number. I feel like a stalker. I’m listening to the track again, and for the first time (what have I been doing?) tried singing along. Why haven’t I been singing the whole time? I immediately was able to detect discrepancies in nuance between what I was singing and what he is singing. First, almost all his “H” sounds have a stop sound, made in the back of the throat. His “W” sounds often, but not always, have a distinct emphasis. Trying to sing and clap the part as he does, putting the song just after the beat, proves difficult on my own. I find myself repeatedly putting the song on the wrong side of the beat. A transcription question comes to mind. Should I write this out with everything on the beat and include instruction that the text or accompaniment should be offset slightly? Or should I write it out with accurate rhythms? That would be much harder to read. I’ve tried singing it exactly with my clapping, and I find that it doesn’t have the same enchanting effect. The last time through the cycle he sings much softer. I am now trying to notate exactly how much offset the beat is. It is irregular, which makes me think that it is not intentional but perhaps a stylistic effect of being so comfortable with the music? The voice seems to be behind the percussion by a 16th note most of the time, every once in a while by a 32nd note, and just a couple times it falls right on the beat. Okay, now that I’m really focusing on the rhythmic details I’m noticing that the first beat of the pattern is the one that is almost always delayed, while the 3rd 8th note tends to line up exactly. The last beat of the (3/4) measure is sometimes on and sometimes off. Actually, I think the last beat is on, but it always comes on “Hey” which because of the vocal inflection becomes just slightly late. Okay okay okay, I’ve been playing around with Finale notation software for a while and now think that some of my thoughts were wrong. It is really important to the feel of the song that there not be too rushed a feeling in the opening notes - the second note of the cycle, “o” comes right with the accompaniment. So I think the first beat of every measure is offset by a 32nd note. Whew. That was laborious. It feels much better now. Not totally natural, not in the groove like Dunn, but I think pretty close to rhythmically accurate.
Irish music is often characterized by its time signatures. Common time signatures/music forms include the “single jig (12/8 time), double jig (6/8 time), reel (4/4 time), hornpipe (swung 4/4 time), slip jig (9/8 time), and occasionally versions of polkas (2/4 time) and mazurkas or waltzes (3/4 time). All of these tune styles have corresponding traditional dances.”
ReplyDeleteMusic has always played an important role in all levels of Irish culture. Even today, Ireland’s landscape is dotted with icons of instruments, and both the Irish coat of arms and the Irish passport have a harp on it. It seems that renewed interest in Irish music began after Ireland was no longer part of British rule and the interest seems to be going strong ever since.
Some think that Irish music influenced American folk music (e.g., bluegrass, etc.), but others feel that that notion is a misconception, because Appalachia did not have a large Irish population (apparently, most of the immigrants there were actually of Scottish and English descent). However, scholars do seem to agree that Irish music did have a direct impact on the US folk music revival in the 1960s, and that the reverse was also true (that US musicians influenced Irish folk musicians as well).
July 21, 2009
ReplyDeleteThough I don't know why this particular song would be sung, I have been reading up on Bruno Nettl's study of the Blackfoot Tribe to get a sense of what possible options there might be. There might be no correlation at all, but I'm using information on the Blackfoot people because it is accessible.
In the Blackfoot tradition, certain songs would be associated with specific objects (like medicine bundles), concepts, dances, actions, or during gambling games. Songs are also differentiated by association with a person, story or event. There is no concept of more-musical or less-musical. Apparently Blackfoot music doesn't have the same performance-based connotation that it does in many other cultures.
During the 1950’s in Germany, the East German regime promoted folk music as long as it was what they saw as an expression of pure German tradition, and a tool for spreading party propaganda. I searched more on music in Germany in 1950’s era and discovered that there was sense of “nationalism” among many musicians.
ReplyDeleteMy assumption is that the song was sung in order to represent the rise of German nationalism and the industrialization of German society in this era. This piece was also represent many different cultural influences such as Austria, Germany and etc.