Wrap-Up

This class has opened my eyes to so many types of music that I otherwise would not have been exposed to. Even though I was already aware of the music of certain parts of the world that we studied, I was able to gain a much better understanding of them. I think that the one culture I learned more about than any other was Indonesia. I knew absolutely nothing about its music or culture before taking this class. The gamelan, though not something I could listen to for hours on end, was probably the one thing we learned about that I found most fascinating. Their instruments are so different from our own, and the way that the entire ensemble of instruments is considered a unit is vastly different from anything I’ve seen before. I found the shadow puppets intriguing as well. The detail that they put into them is so intricate, and it’s interesting how the way the puppets move is similar to the movements they make in their traditional dances.

As far as my own culture, this class made me realize that, in some ways, we have more in common with other cultures than we realize. Even after I visited a mosque, I still thought of the head covering in Islamic cultures as something that was imposed upon women. But after Dr. Vaneman made the point about women wearing hats to church, I was able to see this tradition in a different light. I’ve also discovered through this class how an idea can travel from one culture to another. I had never considered that the four measure phrases used in African music might have resulted from Western European influences.

After learning about so many types of music over the course of only a month, I would love to learn more about Chinese music. I didn’t get to hear much traditional Chinese music when I was in China because they have become so westernized, but I love how melodic their music is. It’s amazing how they have instruments that seem so simple, yet they are able to play such complex and beautiful music with them. I was especially intrigued by the single-stringed instrument they used. Its design appears to be so simplistic, yet the way in which it is played is anything but this. And aesthetically, I could easily see myself listening to their music just for sheer enjoyment.

Cool Stuff #3

Since we learned about China today, I thought I'd post a picture of me with my family on the Great Wall.

Now, for the videos...


I had to post a clip of a Beijing Opera performance. When I went to China, my dad and I wanted to see the Beijing Opera while we were there. Sadly, my mom hates opera, so we went to see the Chinese Acrobats instead. Maybe one day I will get the chance to see it live, but until then, enjoy what appears to be a wedding scene.






I absolutely love Coldplay, so I had to post this video. This is a recording of the Twelve Girl's Band playing "Clocks" on traditional Chinese instruments.




This is a children's gamelan in Bali. They actually won The Bali Festival of Arts in 2005 for this performance. I find it interesting how the audience reacts to the music and the movements that they do while they are playing.

An Interview with my Dad

This is an interview that I did with my dad. He is a musician and music teacher, so his answers may be a little different than most people's relatives.

1.) What kind of music did you listen to when you were in high school/college?

Mostly mainstream rock (Stones, Chicago, BST, Santana, Steppenwolf, etc.) and whatever orchestral classics I could find.

2.) How did you listen to music? (What technology did you use?)

I used to listen to my sisters’ 45 RPM singles along with a few of my dad’s old 78 RPM classical records, then vinyl LPs, then 8-track tapes in high school, and cassettes and LPs in college.

3.) In what sort of environment did you typically listen to music? (At concerts, on your own, etc.)

For rock, mostly with friends. I went to whatever orchestral, piano, and band concerts I could find in Bennettsville which is more than you might imagine.

4.) What did your parents think of the music you listened to?

Mostly they ignored it. My father did encourage the classical music, though.

5.) Were you exposed to music outside of your own culture when you were growing up?

Not a lot.

6.) How old were you when you started playing your instrument?

We started band at the end of 4^th grade in Bennettsville.

7.) What inspired you to learn to play an instrument?

My best friend Charles wanted to play trombone. Later he switched to sax and I had to sit in the low brass beside Eddie, but I stayed with it anyway.

8.) How did you decide to play the tuba?

Harold, our tuba player, quit to play football. I was the heir apparent. To this day my mother hasn’t forgiven the band director.

9.) What made you decide to become a music teacher?

I actually went to Furman Scholars day to look at the chemistry department, but by the time I graduated high school engineers weren’t in high demand. I came to know the music faculty through All-State Band and was comfortable with the people and the program there.

10.) Have your music preferences changed since you were in high school/college?

I appreciate the Beatles, whom I despised in high school (probably because their early stuff was so lame – I remember seeing their first appearance on Ed Sullivan.) I can appreciate at least some music in most genres now, except for Rap, Country/Western, and that stuff where they scream the lyrics.

Cool Stuff Friday #2

This is a video of a guy playing the charango, dressed as a ninja...from the neck up at least. Though I higly doubt that this man is a real ninja, he does seem to be a very talented charango player.





Here is a group like the ones we talked about in class. This Latin American group is performing on a sidewalk in San Diego. They pretty much play almost every instrument that we talked about today: the charango, some very large pan flutes, guitar, and several percussion instruments. The flute players also alternate between instruments like the videos that we watched in class. If you look closely, you can also see the CD's they appear to be selling.




In case you didn't get enough of Simon and Garfunkel meet the pan flute in class, heres a rendition of "The Sound of Silence.

Lastly, I wanted to post this video because it has several clips of an arperd and a golpeador playing the Imbabura Harp. It's very interesting to watch, and to see a harp with such a massive body that doubles as a percussion instrument.

Music and Gender

I was the only girl in my 6^th grade band class to play the saxophone. When I was trying to decide what instrument I wanted to play, I never thought to myself “I want to be the only girl in my section.” I just knew I didn’t want to play a brass instrument because I wasn’t too keen on buzzing my lips, I didn’t want to play flute because it was just too girly for me, and I’m not exactly sure why, but the clarinet just wasn’t my thing.

Pretty much every time I tell someone I play the saxophone, I get the response “Really? Why don’t you play flute instead?” Even now, when I tell people I’m a music major at Converse College, they ask “Oh, are you a singer?” Never has anyone who doesn’t know me guessed what instrument I play on the first try. Or even the 4^th try.

Every time I went to try out for our Greenville All-County Band, I was the only girl to try out on tenor saxophone. Every audition I went to seemed to follow the same pattern – the guys in the hallway would glance around the room sizing up their opponents. I would always catch little murmurs here and there whenever someone would leave their audition and the next guy would go in. Some guys seemed to be more intimidating than others, and a few of them were too cocky to even admit they had any competition at all. However, none of them seemed too worried about the 5 foot 1 girl trying out. Yet every year I tried out for County Band, I placed in either 1st or 2^nd chair. It took a few years for them to realize who their real competition was, but a few of them caught on. My junior year in high school, which was the last year I tried out, the 1^st chair tenor saxophone was a senior that I had beaten the two previous years. This time, I was 2^nd chair. He walked up to me at the clinic right before our concert and said “I finally beat you!” Even though I’m typically not the most competitive person you’ll ever meet, I did enjoy showing up a bunch of arrogant high school guys.

However male or female-dominated an instrument might be, I’ve seen plenty of exceptions to these rules other than just myself. When I was in 7^th grade, the two largest boys in the 6^th grade played flute in their band class, and they were better than all the girls. My Senior year in high school, though the alto saxophone section still consisted of mostly guys, two twin girls and I made up the low saxophones – one of them playing tenor with me and the other bari. The year before I joined marching band, our band had a girl who played sousaphone – definitely not an instrument that too many of us are brave enough to march.

Cool Stuff Friday!

As I was searching youtube for some "cool stuff" to post for today, I ran across something that I had no idea existed - The Native American Music Awards. Apparently, the Native American "Nammy" is equivalent to winning a Grammy, or at least an MTV VMA. Anyway, I thought this video was a great example of syncretism that we talked about in class. Though the music is very obviously influenced by Pop music, it contains several Native American elements, such as a Native American flute, a brief Powwow in the background, and the singer uses vocables in the song.




This video is of what is apparently called an "array mbira". Which I guess just means a really big mbira. Since it is cool stuff Friday, this one is really just for fun. Here is someone taking a traditional African instrument that we learned about in class and playing an arrangement of "Under the Sea" with it. Enjoy!



Hopefully most of you watched the opening ceremonies for the Vancouver Olympics, but just in case you didn't, here's a little part of it. It shows the Native people of Canada all dancing and singing together. I think my favorite part of the video is the giant drum like the ones used in the powwow videos that we watched in class, only much, much bigger. It's also interesting that the announcer points out that the dancers are mostly comprised of young people, showing that their culture is still very much alive in the younger generations. Unfortunately, embedding was disabled for the video that I wanted to post, but you can still see the dancing and drumming in this one.





And finally, I just couldn't resist putting a kora video on here. So here is a griot playing the kora.

My Experiences with Music and Religion

Growing up in a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, I have learned about many different religions throughout my life. The Unitarian Universalist church is founded on the idea that every individual person is free to embark on their own spiritual journey, wherever it may lead them. Because of this, I grew up going to church with Jews, Buddhists, Christians, Agnostics, and people of many other belief systems.

As part of our Religious Education program at my fellowship, my youth group traveled to several different places of worship. Each religion had its own musical style and unique way of expressing that style.

In the Catholic Mass we visited, the music consisted entirely of hymns sung by the whole congregation. Everyone in the church knew exactly when to sing which song, when to stand, and when and what to answer when the priest led a call and response. When I attended a Mass at a different church with one of my Catholic friends years later, it was exactly the same. This was fascinating to me, considering that in our fellowship we get a program each service telling us what hymns we will be singing and on what page – and the minister still announces the hymn and it’s page number, just in case someone’s still a little confused.

The African American church was vastly different from the Catholic Mass. The people there didn’t simply stand politely through the duration of the songs and sit when they were over, but they would all clap their hands together and move to the upbeat, rhythmic music. Every once in a while, one of the older members of the church would interject an “Amen” or “Hallelujah!” Growing up around people from many religions, I had always thought of the different denominations of Christianity to be basically the same with a few differences here and there. But witnessing the immense differences between the music of these two churches showed me that this was not the case.

The Buddhist temple that my brother attends has its own use for music. When several of us from my youth group went to the temple, the Buddhist nun there led us all in a meditation. The music that she used was not at all like the participatory music of the Christian churches, but instead an aid in meditation. It was very simple, calming music, and had virtually no rhythmic value.

As far as aesthetics, I think that these examples of music in religion reflect our own approaches to music in everyday life. The Catholic Church’s reverent hymns and structured liturgies remind me of the way that we are taught to turn our cell phones off and not clap between movements at a recital or concert.

In the African American Church, their lively, spirited gospel tunes that everyone can clap along to are emulated in the music that we dance to.

As far as the meditation music of the Buddhist Temple, how many times have you decided to kick back and relax to some Death Metal playing in the background? I’m guessing not many. Most people in our culture seem to agree that music that is not too rhythmically driven or fast-paced is what we find soothing.

My Musical Autobiography

As the child of a music teacher, I have been exposed to my fair share of musical instruments, both Western in origin and not so Western. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I remember my dad bringing home an assortment of African drums. He brought a small djembe home just for me to play. He showed my brother and I how to play a few very simple rhythms on them. Though my djembe-playing career was short-lived, my little djembe still resides in our living room near the fireplace.

These drums were not the first, and definitely not the last, instruments to enter our house. In 8th grade, I did a project on Austrailia in my English class. I picked this country in particular so that I could bring in my dad’s didgeridoo to show to all of my friends. It was not the most authentic didgeridoo, considering that it was plastic and much smaller than a real one, but it served its purpose. It was not until my Freshman year here at Converse that I would get to see a real didgeridoo. At the SCMEA conference, there was a whole session on the didgeridoo and aboriginal music of Australia. The man running the session had been playing the instrument for years and even tried to teach us certain techniques on how to play it.

The first time that I witnessed the music of a particular culture being played in its place of origin was when I went to Great Britain on a school trip in high school. We were heading up to Edinburgh Castle in Scotland when we began to hear the sound of bagpipes. When we came around a corner, I saw a man playing the instrument dressed from head to toe in traditional Scottish attire. As we turned another corner, I even saw a woman playing a bagpipe. The sound of the instruments’ drone could be heard our entire journey up the steep hill to the castle.

As far as my own musical preferences outside of Western Art music, I have loved listening to punk rock since my Freshman year in high school. I convinced my parents to get me a blue Fender Stratocaster and started taking guitar lessons so that I could learn to play the power-chord-driven songs that I loved to listen to. Though I enjoyed learning songs by The Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers, Sonic Youth, and many others, the band that truly stuck out among the rest for me was and still is The Clash. Not only do their lyrics have significant social and political messages behind them, but they are not tied down to a single genre. Though they are labeled as simply a “punk rock band,” the music of The Clash often clearly incorporates influences from reggae, African drumming, and many other genres.

And so, I leave you with my favorite Clash song. Trust me, the title is deceiving.