What I Learned This Week: 9/10/2018 - 9/14/2018

What I learned this week:  
9/10/2018 - 9/14/2018

-- A LOT about African Music.  I learned that African music (as a VERY generalized whole) is, in some ways, very similar to the music coming out of Western Minimalism.  Both are cyclical, repetitive, based on the notion of doing a lot with limited materials.  However, "African Minimalism" differs from Western minimalism in terms of designation, origin, and intention.  Unlike Western Minimalism, African music was not a response to any earlier movement.  While the Minimalists (Glass, Reich, Riley, et al.) wished to distance themselves from the more complex modernist movements of the previous generation, the music-making in Africa seems almost to have been born with language itself.  It seems to have been invented" alongside language itself.  There is also no term for "minimalism" in African dialects, so it differs in that regard as well.  Finally, African music-makers are not intentionally creating their music in an attempt to clarify, make accessible, or demystify the musical experience.  Unlike Western Minimalists who compose their music, African "composers" are composed by their music.  Their minimalist techniques are not chosen out of a large collection of options.  Their minimalism is the only way in which to make music.  The choices, creative liberties, etc. come elsewhere in the compositional/performative process. 

I also learned about tonality as a colonizing force in Africa, and how it does detriment to African music -- and African culture as a whole.  While African musics have their own tonal systems, colonizing missionaries insisted on teaching native peoples their Western tonal language. Dr. Agawu states that this was a form of "musical violence."  It was a means of asserting control.  These days, it's hard to know exactly what pre-colonial African perceptions of "tonality" sounded like, since the continent is now inundated with tonal music.  But we have some pure examples.  Likely, Africans used different forms of pentatonic scales.  There are no tonic/dominant relationships.  Their scales were likely derived from language.  It is a shame that this rich musical culture has been undervalued by European tonality.  While there is no reason to abolish tonality from African music entirely (many African composers identify with it), it is important to not forget what has been lost. 

-- Along those lines, I also read several articles/papers about African Music this week.  I read Gerhard Kubik's article on Africa in the Grove Music Online Encyclopedia.  The majority of the article was a narrative surrounding individual researchers, what they discovered, and how they went about discovering/notating their findings. My favorite discovery from this reading was how African composers use auditory stream segregation to their advantage in their music.  Auditory stream segregation is a kind of shortcut for our brains; if we are exposed to a running collection of many different timbres or registers moving at a fast speed, our brain picks out the similar registers and perceives them as their own group.  That's how we can hear those two "melodies" going on simultaneously in a Bach fugue, for example.  African drummers use this technique with their drums, exploring melodies that can be created within larger textures of sound.  It also serves a practical function in African music as well, letting players know what parts need doubling. 
I also read part of Kofi Agawu's book The African Imagination in Music, which taught me how I might go about approaching such a rich collection of cultures.  He stressed how music in Africa is more than just SOUND.  It's language, it's dance, it's group participation, it's the act of playing itself.  It's "incorporative, generous, and inviting."  It demands listener participation.  These are some of the core components of "truly African" music. 
Eric Charry's "Music and Postcolonial Africa" deals more with modern (and Postmodern) African politics and how they have shaped music on the continent in recent years (1970s and later).  He did, however, go into the deeper history of how European-born tonality spread during the colonial period.  It was used as a tool for instilling discipline upon African populations, introducing the notions of clock-based time, industrial values, and order in place of the more "frenzied" drumming.  Charry also mentions some shared sensibilities throughout the continent (participation, buzzing, steady rhythmic circles), he stresses just how beautifully diverse the continent of Africa is, and how much can be learned from these varying groups and traditions. 
Another article of note is Anna Maria Busse Berger's "Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s."  Berger tells the story of Franz Ferdinand Rietzsch, a German missionary who, while serving in Tanzania, discovered the music of the people and tried his best to write about it.  Rietzsch was a part of the Singbewegung tradition (a preservationist approach to music), as well as the field of comparative musicology.  He discovered that many aspects of African music resembled medieval music, and hoped to apply this finding towards teaching African people how to approach tonal music.  More so than his fellow missionaries, Rietzsch appreciated the musical traditions in Tanzania and wished to document and preserve them, rather than simply replace him. 
My favorite paper this week was by David Temperley, who attempts to use Western music theory to describe African music in his paper "Meter and Grouping in African Music: A View from Music Theory."  I learned about the Generative Theory of Tonal Music, conceived by Lerdahl and Jackendoff.  This theory presents some "preference rules" as they relate to metric schemata.  These are the kinds of rules that dictate how we discover the meter of a piece.  For example, the downbeat of a measure usually has a louder tone, the beginning of an onset, etc.  He then applies some of these rules to African music, and discovers that African music behaves very similarly to Western music in terms of meter.  However, there are some cool differences.  Africans, for example, are more likely to understand the idea of unsounded pulse.  They also are more willing to accept syncopations and asymmetry, and they are more likely to place their "strong beats" at the ENDS of groupings, rather than at the beginnings. 

-- Also brushed up on Minimalism by reading Keith Potter's entry in Grove Music on the subject. 

-- Finally, I had my first class for 20th-century topics this week, taught by Dan Trueman and Iarla O' Lionaird.  We are going to be taking a deep look into 10 albums written since 1970, and we're going to take the time to experience them on vinyl.  These albums all happen to be written by women.  I've heard of a lot of them, but the one they assigned to me is not one I am familiar with:  Björk's Vespertine.   I have a while to explore it, so we'll see what happens.

-- Speaking of vinyl, I'm reading a short book by Andrea Mazzariello called One More Revolution: A love song, on vinyl.  It's a poetic exploration of the medium that is the vinyl record and how it impacts our relationship with music and listening.  I'm enjoying it a lot.  It makes me nostalgic for the days when, in order to listen to music, you had to buy it in a store, interact physically with it.  While there are definitely perks to having digital access to music, I do find beauty in the vinyl record and hope the practice of owning and playing vinyls doesn't die out entirely. 

-- I'm also reading The Music of Phillip Glass by Phillip Glass when I have a spare moment.  I learned a lot about Einstein on the Beach this week, and I'm starting the chapter on Satyagraha now.  What a fascinating composer! 

-- I also watched Coppelia (Delibes) and The Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky) in preparation for Dr. Morrison's seminar next week.  I tried to find a performance of Little Humpbacked Horse by Pugni as well, but to no avail.

Listening To:  
-- African Rhythms by Ligeti, Reich, and Aka Pygmy groups
-- Home body / symmetry and sharing by Andrea Mazzariello with David Degge and mobius percussion (very pretty album that reminds me a lot of Stuart Wheeler)
-- An assortment of African music from all over the place.  I particularly like the album Cameroun: Flûtes des Monts Mandara and the Baka Pygmies album.  They seem to have a song for everything!