Lately I've been looking into African rhythm (Western or generally Sub-Saharan). Because after understanding the basics of how melody and harmony works, I want to get a better feeling for rhythm.
Japanese flute music is very comfy for me because the rhythm is free and intuitive and nature-sound-like, but at some point I want to be able to do things like playing modern music at a nice pace or just accompanying wadaiko in festivals. and my problem with that is that I hate metronomes. Really fucking hate metronomes. Can't stand the damn things. (I wonder how European Common Practice musicians trained rhythm before the invention of metronomes.)
It's not the clacking that bothers me, it's the deadness of fitting into a grid. This schoolroom feeling of it, this dictatorshipness (but I repeat myself). Even though rhythm is fitting into a grid? But it feels so different when it's someone playing the drums. I considered using the library's Volca Bass, or borrowing their Stylophone Drums, to have something more interesting than a clack, but in the end a drum backing track on youtube is much better for me, though still I feel like I'm missing something. I'm not sure I can explain it well.
When I tried once to explain briefly to a friend what it was all about, I found that with the exercise of severe economy I took 41 pages and 10,000 words.
(J.R.R. Tolkien) #relatabel#justlikeme#frfr
I think most people haven't browsed the History of Middle-Earth and thus don't know how much Tolkien struggled with executive dysfunction and how much of his work is unfinished. HoME is 12 volumes of unfinished, unedited, often contradictory material; it's not a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, a narrative of events in the realms of Arda, it's a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, I, Christopher Tolkien, will show the boxes and boxes of Middle-Earth manuscripts that my father started and never completed; it's a history of the work we call Middle-Earth, a history of revisions. And that's still not all of it! Most of the stuff that interests me was to be slowly published even later, in the periodicals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon, and occasionally in books like The Nature of Middle-Earth (2021). It's still not all published, by the way. Christopher and the Tolkien Estate editors involved with this describe it more to the note of “scratched the surface” or “tip of the iceberg”. Yes, this is the most famous name in fantasy and most of his material remains unpublished.
I don't really understand how to learn music. Or arts in general. Because I am a linguistics researcher I know how people learn languages (you don't really “learn” them), and I understand how people learn things like math or sociology, which is completely unlike language. But music is a bit like language and a bit like math. I'm having a lot of fun with musicology (the equivalent of linguistics, as opposed to language learning); but just like studying grammar is an entirely different skill and wholly unrelated to the process of becoming fluent in a language, or just like researching sports science is a different skillset and unrelated to becoming good at playing a sport, so also analysing the structure of music is an entirely different skill than actually being able to produce it. I understand how the former is done, but the latter? It baffles me.
Shinobue books will often have titles like “The joy of shinobue” or “Gentle shinobue for everybody”. Then there's the reverse psychology way of appealing to customers: Toki Tatara's Oni-ren (“demon training”) drills carry the implication that if you survive these intense exercises from hell, your skill level will go up. But does either rationale necessarily follow?
The shinobue is a very simple instrument used for folk music, not meant as something transcendent or intellectual like the shakuhachi or ryūteki. The other day I got the 5€ booklet Yamada Kaishi and Fukuhara Kan, distributed by Suzuki along with plastic instruments, often intended for children.
I was surprised to find, already at this level, a discussion of how the cross-fingering known as 0—nominally the same as a flattened 7—is actually not exactly the same pitch as 7♭, and that the difference should be used mindfully for emotional expression. Moreover the nuances are specifically noted as relevant for what I've been obsessing with for over a year, which is to play a good rendition of Sakura, Sakura in particular.
It's well-known by now that this haunting tune uses the uniquely crunchy Bulgarian style of folk choir, which leverages to great effect the “dissonant” intervals avoided by classical choirs (see this analysis by Wym). Japanese folk music doesn't really do harmony,¹ so the basic recipe here was to write a premodern Japanese-style song, then blend it with Bulgarian-style chanting. But—which “Japanese style”? Ohayashi? Jiuta? Joruri? Enka?
I understand how instruments are classified by the mechanisms they use to generate sounds, which influences the timbre. But in my mind I tend to think of the winds by how you, the performer, get the damn thing to make a sound.
Some of my audience may not be familiar with arthouse movies. There's a tradition in cinema that doesn't follow the conventions set by Hollywood, or other big-budget productions like Bollywood or Hong Hong cinema. The movies they make tend to be slower and not so engaging, no hooks or chekov guns, requiring the audience to actively pay attention. They are not so bound by the demands of studios and focus groups, so the directors get a lot more freedom, sometimes too much.
European (classical tradition) music: Unusual focus on harmony.
Middle-East (areally and broadly): Focus on modality.
African tradition (ibid.): Focus on polyrhythms and rhythmic complexity generally.
Indian: Long rhythm cycles, broader conception of “mode”.
Gamelan: Harmony not based on the harmonic series (strings/pipes).
Thai: Another type of non-string-based harmony.
I was thinking how one would characterise traditional Japanese music in broad terms like this, like, in a nutshell, what is emphasised in Japan more than elsewhere? I would characterise premodern J music by its restraint.
CEFAB [thinking even more] E-F-A is a tetrachord, and I guess I could consider B and C to be affixes (the notes are like, right next to each other). But what if you take B to be the “upper” tetrachord, then the perfect fourth would be… E, ooh you build the rest of the miyakobushi scale back to the beginning, because the tetrachord ends up B-C-E, which is, again, a miyakobushi tetrachord. Intervals are 1, 4, then 2 to change tetrachord, then again 1, 4. 1-4-2-1-4 is the miyakobushi scale.
So we could transpose Sakura to a Ryūkyū scale with… lower tetrachord E-Ab-A, upper B-Eb-E?
Shinobue books will often have titles like “The joy of shinobue” or “Gentle shinobue for everybody”. Then there's the reverse psychology way of appealing to customers: