Linguomusicology and the Mystery of Overtone Singing

When asked to recount some aspect of my childhood on countless college applications, the story that I repeatedly chose to convey followed my musical journey growing up from “being rocked to sleep by the circular, mathematical clarinet lines of Ivo Papasov” to my fixation on Encarta’s sample of “interwoven melodies of an Inuit lullaby” on our prehistoric desktop computer. Another story that, through repetition, I designated as a crucial element of my identity, was my early fascination by language. Legend has it in my family that my first word, excluding nursery words, was avocado (I have yet to either confirm or deny this). From Kindergarten to fifth grade, half of every school day was taught in Spanish. Following the close of an unforgettable first year of college—especially the second semester—the significance of these two areas of interest as foundational blocks of my self has only been solidified.

Disregarding momentarily that as a new college student, I have forgotten how to spend abundant free time and have consequently found myself at Barnes and Noble for the past three days in a row, a particularly enlightening trip two days ago left me to contemplate the convergence of my two primary fields of interest, music and language. It was raining, and otherwise I would have been home alone for nine hours straight. I had already perused almost the entire library of cookbooks in the store and spent an hour skimming through New Non-Fiction. As usual, when I exhausted Non-Fiction, Fiction, and other miscellaneous reference books, I strolled over to the trivia section like a child might waltz into the kitchen just before dinner to snatch a cookie from the jar. As if the entire bookstore knew that another one of my persisting childhood quirks, among countless others, was a quasi-obsession with random general knowledge and tricky word puzzles, I skulked over to the single bookshelf that sat awkwardly across from that boasting tomes of translations across Swedish, Urdu, and Hebrew and plucked the Epic Book of Mind-Boggling Lists from the shelf. After half an hour of reading about obscure conspiracies, poisonous animals, and the fast food industry, I came across a list entitled, “10 Fascinating and Unusual Musical Techniques”. Among the descriptions of drumming on frozen lakes and pseudo-slide guitars played with spoons, I noticed a pattern. By far, most of the techniques on the list exemplified extraordinary control of the mouth or vocal tract. Making a mental note to myself to look up some of the techniques when I got home, I shut the book and left the store. Just until the following day, of course.

Truthfully, it was not this book that launched my curiosity about the manipulation of the vocal tract in music. Recently, I discovered a piece by a collaborative band (Colombia and London) called Ondatrópica that featured a remixed Cumbia accordion against highly rhythmic guttural beatboxing. Needless to say, I was shocked and intrigued by the utmost virtuosity of someone able to uphold the structure of a piece just with his mouth. However, the budding linguist in me admired the range of sounds he could make more than anything else.

When I got home from the bookstore, I scrambled to look up the list of techniques I had just read about, from “Tennessee beatbox” eephing to “Indian scat” konnakol. With each video, my fascination grew deeper. Although the variety of techniques bear some resemblance to one another, what does not cease to amaze me is how unique each one is.

Eephing

Konnakol

Among the types of music on the list that I previously had not known, there was one that I proudly recognized and had been puzzling over for a long time: Tuvan throat singing. Last night, though, while sharing the fruits of my recreational research (geek is an understatement) with my parents, I accidentally stumbled upon a musical anomaly that seems to have no explanation.

Like agreeing to perform with Chris Thile in front of a significant portion of your college despite your typical paralyzing stage fright, immediately to forget what it felt like to be on stage with one of your newgrass idols (yes, this happened this year, and I am still mortified), I have no idea what I searched to make this groundbreaking discovery. Okay, so it’s probably not groundbreaking to anyone but myself, but the connection between what I found and the methods I have been using in my pursuits of historical linguistics continue to blow my mind.

It started with coming across a video of a Xhosa woman demonstrating a vocal technique they call umngqokolo, which bears resemblance not only to Inuit throat singing, but also to the overtone singing I had previously thought to be exclusively Southeast Asian and North American. Intrigued by the apparent independent development of such an unlikely form of expression, I googled something along the lines of “overtone singing Tuvan Xhosa,” only to be presented with even more remarkable results. As it turns out, overtone singing has cropped up in various locations within four continents. Furthermore, judging by the lack of information on the internet specific to their origin, it is likely that these styles developed independently. If that is not astounding enough yet, the throat singing that produces overtones requires such precise manipulation of five places of articulation that a fraction of a centimeter off base will yield no results. These places, however, are not just the tongue, lips, and jaw, but also the velum and larynx: the soft palate (the last part of the mouth before the uvula) and the vocal folds themselves. While you let that marinate, here are samples of some of the techniques of throat singing or overtone singing found all over the world.

Tuvan Throat Singing

Umngqokolo

Inuit Throat Singing

Uzlyau (Bashkortostan)

Sardinian Throat Singing

Because I have always been one to resist settling for the “better” or “more feasible” option and instead push for a compromise, choosing any one of my fields of interest over another has been difficult. I am, perhaps, most interested when my interests seem to converge. Regarding this musical discovery, I have more questions than I do proposals, but my primary interest is how one would even attempt to determine the origin of these methods. My incipient linguistic tendencies desperately want to reconstruct proto-overtone-singing forms and compare the sounds and techniques used in each to attempt to create a family tree, yet such a method seems unlikely. How old are these techniques? Like the concept of zero, the ability to prevaricate, or the apparent innate nature of nursery words like “mama” and “dada,” could an art form as delicate and rare as overtone singing have evolved independently?

Presentation Imposes a Participatory Star

It is almost jarring to hear that a concept as natural at least to English speakers as music is not agreed upon by everyone. However, this discrepancy barely scratches the surface of concepts we take for granted that are foreign to many other parts of the world. In our assumption that our sense of music is the same as everyone else’s, we inevitably impose other music-related concepts on the same people with whom we hardly agree on the meaning of the subject in question. To most Westerners, the concept of music implies entertainment that stems primarily from an artist with a degree of virtuosity. Subsequently, every entertainer not only deserves but requires a spotlight under which to exhibit their talent. Music, in the predominantly Western sense, is an exhibition.

In addition to audience expectations for the performer, the audience has expectations for each other that are typically shared by the performer. A certain level of audience education is lauded with regard to audience decorum. This can range from refraining from talking on the phone during the performance or walking in front of the stage once the show has started to recognition that it is gauche to clap between movements at an orchestra concert. The pettier and more specific the rule, the more important it is to the most elite members of the audience. By knowing not to clap between the movements of a symphony, listeners demonstrate their possession of the skill that it requires just to receive the entertainment that is being provided. Furthermore, yet more privately, listeners automatically search for who they consider the most dominant player worthy of being listened to. However subconscious, there is a strict set of rules that accompany the sense of a concert that do not necessarily work with every type of music.

To return to the ostensible ambiguity of the term music, it is inevitable that people whose concepts of music diverge from ours will have entirely different concepts of how music should be listened to, or even if listening should be its primary response. While the sense of music that Westerners tend to accept is heavily presentational in nature, participatory music thrives outside the scope of most of our awarenesses. Our dependence upon a central figure in the performance inherently misses the inclusivity of participatory music. If, for example, a Zimbabwean mbira ensemble were brought to a stage, audiences expecting the sound of the mbira to come across the most might be disappointed to find out that the shekere took over. Concert sound might be inclined to boost the volume of the mbiras as much as possible. Furthermore, it is not typical for audiences to participate in concerts, yet dancing, clapping, and additional forms of expression are encouraged in participatory music. The absence of such aspects of the music removes the traditional sense of participation and puts it further towards the Western concept of presentation.

How do we reconcile expectations and cultural differences when people claim to want nothing more than authenticity? Are they really requiring their concept of authenticity, which has been framed by their own cultural constraints? Where is the line between authenticity and high-fidelity performance, and do listeners know the difference?

Luaka Bop

Legend has it that the name of this record label is as spur-of-the-moment as its history. Created in 1988 by David Byrne, Luaka Bop supposedly refers to a kind of Sri Lankan tea from the distributor, Luaka, called Broken Orange Pekoe. In an interview with David Byrne on the Official Luaka Bop website, he says that “the first concept was no concept” and that the only thing he knew was that he would be producing a lot of Brazilian music. Although his primary concern at the beginning was to produce music that resonated with him but felt was underrepresented or underappreciated by the American audiences he had become so familiar with through his work with the new wave scene, the label quickly expanded beyond its Brazilian foundations. The very first album produced by Luaka Bop, Brazilian Classics 1: Beleza Tropical, was an immediate bestseller, featuring artists from Gal Costa and Gilberto Gil to Caetano Veloso and Milton Nascimento. After producing a series of five or six Brazil-centric albums, though, Byrne began to take in Cuban music. After a wave of Cuban music, Luaka Bop expanded its horizons even further to South Indian music, French music, and AfroPean music, producing some of its best-listened to artists.

Among the prominent artists of Luaka Bop are Tom Ze, who has reached #44 on Billboard; Zap Mama, whose 2004 album, Ancestry in Progress, reached #1 on Billboard’s World Music charts, Os Mutantes, and Susana Baca, who has won two Grammies. Luaka Bop’s artists frequently score high on the Billboard charts and have a wide audience. More recently, the label has produced more new wave bands originating in the United States, such as Delicate Steve, who has reached #4 on Billboard.

Fittingly, the record label is housed in one of the epicenters of Manhattan’s music scene in Greenwich Village. The diversity of New York City is thoroughly represented in the records Luaka Bop has produced, not exclusively in terms of geographic identity, but in musical style, as well. Although its records are typically heavily electronically influenced, like Delicate Steve, Os Mutantes, or Tom Ze, there are a fair share of acoustic items that appear on its albums. Additionally, while the record label started out as a way to publish compilations that represent as diverse a range of sounds produced by a geographic region as possible, several albums have been produced that feature one artist or group.

Zap Mama is one artist who has published almost exclusively with Luaka Bop. Although she has the occasional acoustic piece, most of her music is heavily electronically influenced, like her song “Rafiki: DNA Remix” off her 1999 album, A Ma Zone.

Similarly, Tom Zé, who has also produced many records through Luaka Bop, has a very electronically influenced style, as demonstrated by his song, “Defeito 1: Gene”.

In contrast, Luaka Bop’s 2002 album, Cuisine Non-Stop, boasts a largely acoustic sound that represents a trend of French music in the early aughts to explore its roots. Lo’Jo, a French folk band with heavy North African influence, kicks off the album with their song, “Baji Larabat”.

The album continues to feature a Parisian comical singer-songwriter band, La Tordue, and a slew of French bands who embrace French folk music in different ways.

In his creation of Luaka Bop, David Byrne probably did not foresee the breadth of his publications, but he has managed to produce a fascinating, captivating, diverse range of music that has proven to hook the listener. It is difficult to pinpoint one particular genre or place in the world that Byrne has focused on signing, but perhaps that should shed light on the complexity of a category such as “world music”. In publishing such a wide variety of styles, Luaka Bop manages not only to win the adoration of its audiences but to make a statement about how much this world has to offer.

O Brasil: Festa Brasileira!

Walking into Hales, the most glaringly obvious absence in presentation was the decoration so scant it was almost imperceptible. Judging only from various comments made by the hosts of the event, the idea was to try to somehow reconstruct a Brazilian Carnaval. However, the gaping unfriendliness of Hales was hardly made welcoming, which definitely altered the reception of the event from the guests’ perspective. Had we been greeted with more bright colors and a setting that didn’t quite evoke memories of uncomfortable middle school dances, we might have been less timid dancers.

That said, there was music playing every second from when I arrived a bit before 8:00 to after I left at about 9:30. What lack of visual decoration there was was made up for by the energy of the musicians, the dedication of the hosts, and the vitality of the dancers. Seeing our reservations, the dancers consistently encouraged us to come closer, reassuring us essentially that there were no mistakes as long as we were moving. I arrived wanting to learn how to move to the music and left feeling more than satisfied with what had been so eagerly taught to me.

Feeling the syncopation of the music in person was much more real than listening to a recording. Since I have been dancing for so much of my life, perhaps my most effective and immediate method of attempting to understand music is figuring out how to move to it. By teaching the dance moves in such a way that exclusive partners were not required to participate, everyone had an equal chance of enjoying him or herself.

In terms of participation, it was difficult to discern the level of intimacy between the musicians, but the dancers created an environment that was highly encouraging of dancing with others. A huge part of the reason why I enjoyed the event so much was because I was learning from experience and thus laughing off mistakes with a group of people I already considered my friends as well as acquaintances with whom our degree of mutual familiarity was easily forgotten. In a similar vein, it was fun and somehow comforting to see that most of the attendees were some sort of combination of musicians and dancers. People generally knew how to clap along to the beat and feed off each other’s rhythmically accurate dance moves.

One of my favorite moments of the night was when a student accidentally became the leader of a dance routine he was partially recalling from our lesson before the event and partially making up. The group started with maybe five or six people, but quickly grew to somewhere between fifteen and twenty. Although looking around I only recognized a handful of people participating in this dance, it felt like teamwork. Due to a combination of these kinds of highly participatory moments and wonderful music, I had a fantastic time attending O Brasil’s Samba Workshop.

Sauti Sol – “Soma Kijana”: A Study of High Fidelity Recording

Just moments after hitting the play button, the listener is greeted warmly by mellow vocal harmonies playing off upbeat percussion and two guitars. Right away, an image of a band is firmly established. Furthermore, the positive tone of the song enhances a sense of intimacy among the members of the band, elaborating on their image as a group to cement them as friends who have fun together when they play music. By the end of the song, the singers challenge themselves to take the song further and further to the limits of their uppermost vocal ranges, causing an uproar of whistling, ululation, inventive noises of the mouth, imitations of chimpanzees, and bouts of laughter. Finally, once the song itself is over, the recording provides a continuation of the antics but without musical accompaniment. The band talks, laughs, and continues to make silly noises.

In addition to touchingly relatable moments of academic shenanigans, the song’s music video features clips of the band playing as a group with the singers all in a line as well as them smiling and dancing. As predicted by the audio recording of the song, as the vocals get more energetic, the band gets progressively sillier.

One of the most crucial elements of high fidelity music recording is the goal of making the recording aspect “invisible”. In other words, although the listener obviously knows that he or she is not observing a live performance, it is a distinct possibility that a live performance could sound exactly like the recording. Furthermore, musical and social cues in the recording prompt mental images of the band performing. Listening to a song like Sauti Sol’s “Soma Kijana” is highly conducive to such mental images, which are only reinforced by the music video. Furthermore, because recordings establish a degree of permanence to what has been recorded, it is not always intuitive to hear sounds that people make in real life in that context. The silly sounds that Sauti Sol makes are more indicative of a real life setting because they add a spontaneity that does not usually exist in recordings. Because of an overall air of participation, resulting intimacy between the band members, and the potential naturalness of their antics, Sauti Sol’s “Soma Kijana” is a prime example of high fidelity recording.

Music and Identity: An Exploration of Natacha Atlas

Born in Brussels, Belgium to a Moroccan-Egyptian-Palestinian father of Jewish descent and a British mother who had converted to Islam, Natacha Atlas is a case in point that culture as an overarching label by which to categorize people neatly is a useless construct. Because each person belongs to so many cultures, just a fraction of which are geographic, an attempt to limit a person to one culture inevitably excludes others that the individual might see as more significant parts of him or herself. Due largely to her Judeo-Islamic background, Atlas has referred to herself as a “human Gaza Strip,”[i] a reflection on not only her own perception of her identity, but her struggle to convey to her listeners an identity that she feels is representative of her cultural makeup. Although the publicized description of Atlas’s work tends to emphasize a fusion between Middle Eastern traditions and common elements of Western music, her range extends far beyond the confines of a hemispheric binary. Not only has she sung in Hindi in addition to her native Arabic, English, and French and composed music to Turkish poetry; musically, although her style may combine recognizable elements of musical genres from the Middle East and the West, in doing so, she inevitably creates her own genre. To relegate her music to a Middle Eastern-Western fusion is to ignore its central personal nature. Natacha Atlas’s music should not be considered a fusion of any kind but a manifestation of her multicultural identity.

If identity is an expression of what an individual considers to be the most relevant components of his or her entire self[ii], a judgment of character imposed by someone other than the individual cannot be considered an identity. With relation to a musical genre, assigning the entire region of the Middle East a uniform label assumes the region has the same body of traditions or habits throughout. That view makes about as much sense as reducing any and all types of music not produced in the United States of America proper to a catch-all “world music” category, which suggests a uniformity that does not exist and implies exclusion of the United States of America from whatever this “world” may be. On a personal level, a musician like Natacha Atlas creates works that are an accumulation of musically rendered quotes from her life’s environments and experiences since childhood. Because her music is an auditory representation of her self, the use of such widely reaching geographic categories inevitably imposes elements of an identity that she does not see as part of herself. The Middle East as a geographic body encompasses not just Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine, but a whole array of countries from Oman to Saudi Arabia. Musical genres aside, Omani music—as an equally indiscriminate classification—sounds very different from Egyptian music.

Although often placed under a Middle Eastern umbrella, music from the countries in the Middle East varies dramatically. For example, the first noticeable distinction between traditional Omani[iii] music and Egyptian[iv] music is the instrumentation. While the traditional Omani music as seen in “Omani Men Playing Traditional Music at Muscat Festival 2011” highlights a double-reed wind instrument called the mizmar[v] that produces a far more nasal sound, the flute played in “Egyptian traditional folk music: Mohamed el Sayed 2” is very soft, gentle, and more malleable than the sound of the mizmar. Furthermore, even though both are very percussive due to scant or no other accompaniment, the role of percussion in the two styles differs. Omani percussion drives the piece but does not embellish much, whereas Egyptian percussion favors intricacy and is far more dynamic than Omani drumming. As a result, the flute in the Egyptian piece can only be considered the focal point due to its unique timbre, but the mizmar is very clearly being embellished upon by vocal and percussive accompaniment in the Omani sample and therefore stands out as more of a main instrument. The differences between the traditional music of two countries considered to be part of the Middle East demonstrate the uselessness and impersonality of “Middle Eastern” as a descriptive musical category.

Due to the inclusion of a diverse body of cultures in a category like “Middle Eastern”, what is being categorized is highly susceptible to stereotyping. A 2001 article on ABC News entitled “Natacha Atlas Mixes East, West on Ayeshteni” documenting the release of Atlas’s fourth album worries that “the Arabic language might make all of this sound too exotic for some folks in the Western world to grasp,” but reassures readers that “Atlas manages to make music that is surprisingly accessible while retaining its inherent allure.”[vi] Such a reductionist take on the world inevitably falls into the familiar pattern of romanticizing a so-called “pure” and “untouched” Middle East whose allure stems merely from an inability to relate to the region and its forms of expression.Everything about Natacha Atlas’s music combats this over-simplistic mindset of exoticism in proving not only that music produced in the Middle East can be beautiful to non-Middle Eastern ears, but furthermore that music is rarely as clear-cut in classification as it may seem.

In the event that Natacha Atlas covers a song, she not only avoids conforming to genres she has been known to perform in but also simultaneously avoids providing the same interpretation of the artist whose song she is covering. In 1964, Françoise Hardy released “Mon amie la rose”, a French early rock song about aging and finitude. Hardy, herself, has admitted to being a very shy person, and this timidity is evident in her performance of the song. Fitting in with the theme of awakening from slumber, Hardy’s beautifully simple voice carries in a dreamlike state and is accompanied by a chorus of angelic voices. On the other hand, on her 1999 album, Gedida, Natacha Atlas performed a cover of the song in a mildly similar yet ultimately very different interpretation. Rather than illustrate the state of wonder about time passing in a way that conveys a kind of enchanting confusion, Atlas’s vocal approach paints a picture of determination to find answers. Embellishment and resonance that are lacking in Hardy’s interpretation evoke a novel sense of confidence, but also a sense of desperation in her moan-like cries. The brief entrance of hand drums, a riq or tambourine, and a flute mark the addition of a belly dance style into the mix, which then evolves into a synthesized drum beat reminiscent of walking or a journey. Finally, the introduction of an organ just before the bridge, where Atlas begins to sing in Arabic[1], fully turns this rendition into a personal story. Because of the instrumental, linguistic, and stylistic choices Natacha Atlas makes, she leaves a very personalized imprint on every piece of her music.

Rather than approach Natacha Atlas’s music in terms of its geographic roots, it is more useful to take note of her stylistic choices that go into its production. To avoid introducing irrelevant labels, the music should be seen as a kind of self that is comprised of its own set of musical habits. As the use of catchall geographic habits has proven not only to exclude more pertinent pieces of information but also to mislead with irrelevant information, the habits that are most valuable to analysis of the music of artists such as Natacha Atlas are rhythmic, instrumental, and emotional. After years singing and belly dancing with London-based music collective, Transglobal Underground, Atlas produced her first album, “Diaspora,” in 1995. It boasts eight songs in Arabic and one instrumental piece, all of which are primarily acoustic, yet are largely driven by a variety of dance hall beats. Although elements of belly dancing music are evident in the instrumentation and, most obviously, the language of a song like “Yalla Chant” and the percussion is reminiscent of 1990s hip-hop in the United States of America, it is difficult to consider this interaction fusion because that requires ignoring the totality of the end product. While listeners may readily pick out familiar rhythms or instruments from around the world, such as finger cymbals, they will be far less inclined to assign genres such as rock, pop, or hip-hop. Natacha Atlas’s music does not so easily permit fitting into such predetermined formulae; instead, it is the plurality of musical inspiration that is a reflection of herself and therefore makes her music so unique. Ultimately, it is not the region of influence that defines Atlas’s music; it is the stylistic choices she makes with relation to instrumentation, mood and rhythm.

Products of fusion are often transparent in their syncretic elements. Fusion listeners will not simply overlook what is unfamiliar to the preconceived or expected category of music but instead become acutely aware of what is being fused. In the case of a group like Baka Beyond, who simply superimpose Celtic reels and riffs over Cameroonian Baka songs and rhythms that are reminiscent of sounds in nature, syncretism is obvious. That is not to say that what they produce is primarily uncomfortable or not beautiful—it is just easily broken apart into its fusional components. If Natacha Atlas’s music were considered exemplary of fusion, one would expect obvious discrete sources of inspiration. Instead, the end product presents an entirely fluid combination of instruments, rhythms, and moods that can only be described as natural. Following the release of her 2008 album, Ana Hina, Atlas said that “It isn’t a conscious effort to go, ‘I’m just going to fuse this all together’…It just sort of happens naturally. You just do what you do, ‘cause that’s what you do.”[vii] The unlikely timbre of an accordion, for example, in Ana Hina’s “Beny Ou Benak Eih” or Halim’s “Marifnaash” is not perceptibly out of place in any way, although it is not an instrument typical of any kind of music native to the Middle East. While fusion typically lends itself to being broken apart into components, it is difficult to do so with Natacha Atlas’s music.

The first instrument heard in “Marifnaash” is almost imperceptibly an electric guitar. By distorting the sound to better blend with the timbres and ranges of the rest of the instruments, the familiar sound of the electric guitar is lost. With the loss of that familiarity, categorization of the instrumentation as strictly “Western” or strictly rock becomes less definitive. By the first verse of the song, an electric bass can be heard playing a funk riff under Atlas’s mellifluous voice, a gamut of percussion instruments including hand drums and a drum kit, and an accordion. What is heard, however, is not strictly the funk, the Arabic lyrics, or the distorted electric guitar as separate entities, but a melodically and rhythmically complex composite creation. Because all of the instruments used in this particular song are of so many different origins and used for such a wide range of styles, it is impossible to pinpoint one or the other as the main instrumental idea.

As technology further and further enables globalization to occur, the tendency to squeeze people and their artwork into boxes augments in order to make the rapidly interminglingworld a neater place. Although people have instinctively sought to make the world as simple a place to understand as possible for millennia, the time to recognize people for a more composite sense of their selves is long overdue. Instead of asking what a piece of music becomes out of its geographic context, perhaps it is more pressing to consider what it is when bound to nothing more than a geographic context. Too often, the labels arbitrarily assigned to individuals or groups of people are taken as legitimate criteria by which to categorize them, which is more limiting than informative. In forsaking musical classification solely on a geographic basis, listeners are pushed to consider the music, itself. Once the music can stand on its own, external factors can no longer distract from its pure analysis as an independent entity. Until amusical criteria are abandoned, much is lost by way of personal musical intention on the part of the individual artist.

 

 

[1] I unfortunately could not find a translation of these lyrics.

 

[i] The Village Voice. “The Human Gaza Strip” http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-08-21/music/the-human-gaza-strip/ 21 Aug 2001. 4 Apr 2014.

[ii] Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008. Print.

[iii] “Omani Men Playing Traditional Music at Muscat Festival 2011” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAwT6UY6ZrQ 12 Feb 2011. 6 Apr 2014.

[iv] “Egyptian traditional folk music: Mohamed el Sayed 2” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y855h5Oxe8 19 Jan 2009. 6 Apr 2014.

[v] Oman Centre for Traditional Music. http://www.octm-folk.gov.om/meng/instrument_mel03.asp

[vi] ABC News. “Natacha Atlas Mixes East, West on Ayeshteni” http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=105519 7 May 2001. 4 Apr 2014.

[vii] NPR. “Natacha Atlas: Acoustic Takes, Arabic Classics” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98560834 21 Dec 2008. 4 Apr 2014.

Homenagem a Iansa

The way the song starts out, it sounds like one person is going to be the vocal performer, accompanied by some percussion instruments. Although his voice probably stands out the most amongst all the others that come in, there is a definite sense of participation that I had not anticipated at the onset.

Percussively, I was interested to feel a familiar beat to ones I have heard as played by Trio Mocoto, Elis Regina, and in “Samba de Orfeu.” Now that I think about it, I am far less surprised to find a recurrence of this rhythm because all of the aforementioned artists or pieces of music have somehow involved Samba. However, I had never seen the three as remotely similar because they all have such different interpretations of Samba.

I also found the scant accompaniment to the vocals very valuable to the musical message of the song. By just backing a singing group with instruments meant to keep a beat, the element of trance is much more apparent. The repetition of a driving beat is brought out among the unity of the voices, the combination of which symbolizes community devotion to a common cause–in this case, religion.

Afro-Brazilian Candomblé as Compared to Shona Bira

Looking at two rituals involving summoning of spirits through music and dance, both of which are fundamentally African, one would expect very similar ceremonies. However, despite the African commonality between Brazilian candomblé and Zimbabwean Shona bira, the ostensible similarity between the two ceremonies is purely on the surface. Candomblé is based on belief systems from a part of Africa that is nowhere near where the Shona live. Although the candomblé ritual of Brazil is largely modeled on African belief systems and rituals, the geographic distance between Western/Central Africa and the southeast African home to the Shona creates some crucial differences between the two rituals.

Perhaps the central element of both ceremonies is the idea of contacting spirits. While the Shona bira is focused around contacting deceased ancestors, typically for social guidance and counseling through the possession of a medium, the Afro-Brazilian candomblé involves contacting orixás, or African deities, and is less about open communication with the spirits than it is about musically facilitated communal worship. A bira might be held in order to seek counseling for a social rift in the community, but the strength of communitas present in candomblé is secondary to the individual worship of the contacted deities. In addition to seeking solutions that will ultimately benefit the community as a whole, the bira emphasizes a kind of personal connection that is not possible in the candomblé. Because only one medium is possessed during a bira ritual, the environment of lucid people is conducive to a high level of focus that encourages the formation of connections in the group whose stability is on the way to being renewed. Rhythmic or melodic interlocking, or the practice of finding individuals to complement musically, is the principal method of forming these connections. Participants seek others with whom to establish a musical relationship, which, at the climax, evokes profound feelings of intimacy and elation from a successful collaborative effort to produce something beautifully expressive.

Although also participatory in nature, participation in a Brazilian candomblé ritual is accomplished in a different manner. First of all, instead of there just being one person who is possessed, several participants may become possessed through the course of the event. While this possession proves to bring out a network of care in the non-possessed making sure that the possessed do not hurt themselves, the possession itself is an inherently individual activity that cannot be shared. However true it is that rhythmic relationships are established between participants of a candomblé, it is also key to note that the drumming is always performed exclusively by male experts, whereas the bira embraces neophytes and what they have to add to the mix as well as encourages female performers. It is these expert drummers in the candomblé ritual who have true control over the rhythms. They play with the rhythms among themselves. Similarly, where a real lead singer or sense of a lead performer is lacking in the Shona bira, there is a distinct lead singer in a candomblé who leads the call and response. Like the drummers, the singer has a level of expertise, considering he is usually the priest.

Nevertheless, the ceremonies do have their similarities. In addition to them both centering around the summoning of spirits, they are intrinsically musical in nature and place great value on participation. The candomblé is participatory in more than a musical and expressive sense; racial categories are minimized in the ritual, meaning that regardless of one’s race, one can partake and even be possessed. With regard to the summoned spirits, both rituals take to heart the personalities, likes, and dislikes of the one being summoned. In a bira, the deceased ancestor’s favorite type of music must be played, and in a candomblé, orixás are each associated with specific natural forces, foods, colors, musical preferences, and styles of dance. Additionally, they have their own personalities and sets of likes and dislikes that are all honored in the ceremony.

While the Shona bira and Afro-Brazilian candomblé have outward likenesses, further exploration into the values and practices within each ceremony reveals their crucial differences.

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

Juxtaposition of such imagery as flowers, barbed wire fences, and rickety train tracks offers a startlingly apt visual representation of the circumstances under which the blues, as a musical genre, was conceived in North America. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins was highly persistent in its usage of such imagery, from cheerful smiles of the toothless to train cars carving their way through a flower-spotted field where an encumbered boy went to seek solace from his troubles.

As keenly noted by Amiri Baraka in his writing on “Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz,” the more violent counterparts to the otherwise peaceful imagery carried deep musical significance in the inception of the blues. Perhaps one of the most important inspirations of and contributing factors to the beginnings of the blues was the idea of travel and movement which can be heard in the trudging blues beats. After a century of forced movement, African American people were finally given the illusion that their movement was their choice, as newly freed slaves spread themselves desperately around the country in search for new employment. Not only did this facilitate the branching out into several genres of blues among itinerant males who sang about being uprooted and their financial struggles; it meant that the women, who could easily find work as domestics or musicians in bars, initiated the standardization of the blues. In this strange new time, the blues provided a means by which African Americans could establish their identities and group identities within the larger picture of the daunting United States of America that seemed to solely be united around the common cause of shutting them out of the picture. For this reason, primitive blues very often expressed nightmarish recollections of slavery and the unjust. Lighnin’ Hopkins tells a story of a man having pulled over so as not to hit a pig in the road, getting stuck in the mud, and winding up being taken down to who he was told was the judge, but turned out to be nothing more than a butcher–a man who kills pigs for a living.

Interestingly enough, gender role stereotypes still bled into this highly unifying field. As argued by a singer in the movie, “Mahalia Jackson sang ” not like a powerful amazon of a woman, but “just like a man!” However, any separation within the genre did not take away from its quasi-holiness. Scant accompaniment of country blues song that intersperses highly expressive cries and moans throughout only places the singer closer to the divine and allows for a truly trancelike state of performance. Similarly, a harmonica player in The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins can be seen producing moans extraordinarily reminiscent of those produced by the human voice, which ties the genre to Indian classical music in an interesting and unexpected way, in that their sitar seeks to mimic the human voice seeing as it is considered the closest instrument to the divine realm. As Baraka points out, “Blues guitar was not the same as classical or ‘legitimate’ guitar: the strings had to make vocal sounds, to imitate the human voice and its eerie cacophonies.”

In relating the migratory aspect of the blues to the rawness of the human voice and the attempt to emulate that, the blues has a strong undertones of pilgrimage. A song in The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins begs an answer to, “How long it been since you’ve been home, children?” For Baraka, this pilgrimage might have been to Congo Square in New Orleans, which “was usually the only chance Negroes had to sing and play at length.”

Despite the fact that “the blues is hard to get acquainted with like death,” “you always hear it in your heart…that’s true blues.” (Quotes from The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins)

Ladrang Kembang Lintang

Almost indiscernible pitches open this gamelan piece, accompanied by a suling that sounds eerily close to a woman’s voice. While the gongs are arrhythmically introducing themselves in a wind-chime-like timbre, the suling plays a melody that sounds much like the overtone series. Until the rhythm is regularized, the gongs play what sound like little explosions or an auditory representation of the bits of wax that drip off of a melting candle. Although these explosions seem fairly random, the coordination they involve is impeccable. How do the musicians know when to come in if there is no established meter? Who are they looking to if there are no percussionists evident?

As the quivering suling comes to a close and the rhythm is regularized, the synchronization of the musicians in implementing this new rhythm is astounding. They manage rapidly to create fascinatingly detailed intricacy that paints a picture of a tessellation or a mandala in my head–probably because of this significant idea of coincidence. Both gamelan pieces and tessellations or mandalas are highly intricate and follow specific patterns that make the entire piece.

Fascinatingly, when I drew out a visual representation of the suling melody in the beginning, it looked like a fragment of an EKG or a heart rate monitor. I wonder if that was somehow (subconsciously or not) intentional on the part of the original conceivers or interpreters of this piece. Was the suling supposed to sort of represent the lifeblood of this piece?