ethnomusicology readings

R

ripley

Well-known member
What ho, checking in after a long dissensus break to share some of my favorite ethno pieces:

"Midnight at the Barrelhouse: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now" is a kick-ass piece (short), transcription of a talk he gave. It's on JSTOR but (RIP Aaron Swartz) I'll just post link here
In it he goes from Flava Flav to Johnny Otis to Chingo Bling..

And the book he references _Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story_ is amazing. Both also deal especially with the politics of cross-racial musical experience, consumption, and participation.

Coming at that from another angle is Stephen Feld.

Two great pieces are:
Pygmy POP. A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis - which is partly about the "pygmy" music references in Watermelon Man, sampling, references, intellectual property and a lot of other good bits.

and

"A Sweet Lullaby for World Music" which is partly about Deep Forest using ethnomusicological field recordings, and I think also Solomon Mbube and 'the lion sleeps.'
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The five elements of pure music - harmony, counterpoint, melody, rhythm, and form - have only ever been properly explored by western culture. The history of western art music - the evolution from monody through polyphony, and then finally to homophony (Roughly 600 AD to 1900 AD) - is a reflection of the proper intuiting of the implications of the harmonic overtone series. No other culture has ever managed this, because no other culture was ever musically literate: There was no sheet music previously, and so no way to precisely bequeath to posterity one's advances. Not only that, but the west and the west alone provided the socio-economic and political institutions necessary for such an evolution to take place.
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
Deep Forest acted like they had the ethnomusicologists permission or acceptance for the sample. They had just walked into a library to find the record. Some guy even went back to the Solomon Islands or wherever it is looking for the lady singing on the original. Herbie Hancock acted like the pygmies didn't care about his primitive sampling because of some annoying stuff about black power. I am still waiting for the artists from the early Alan Lomax recordings to seek justice from Moby for his Play album back in the nineties. His "digging" for samples there involved walking into a Tower Records store and buying a cd box set titled Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey...
 
R

ripley

Well-known member
yes and the ethnomusicologist (Hugo Zemp) acted like he had permission to record songs and release them to the world. And lots of musicians act like they have permission to make use of things they hear and encounter in music. And lots of scholars, journalists, fans, and marketing executives like to make up categories or genres that they think map out something meaningful about music. Lots of those people (or groups of people) give reasons that reach into social and political as well as community, history or institutional claims. Some even go so far as to make neurological ones. Feld is pretty good (if sometimes jargony) at sifting through the different politics, stories, messages and effects of those moves.
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
luka said:
The five elements of pure music - harmony, counterpoint, melody, rhythm, and form - have only ever been properly explored by western culture. The history of western art music - the evolution from monody through polyphony, and then finally to homophony (Roughly 600 AD to 1900 AD) - is a reflection of the proper intuiting of the implications of the harmonic overtone series. No other culture has ever managed this, because no other culture was ever musically literate: There was no sheet music previously, and so no way to precisely bequeath to posterity one's advances. Not only that, but the west and the west alone provided the socio-economic and political institutions necessary for such an evolution to take place.
Click to expand...

stop quoting this ignorant racist shit-for-brains, and not even including quotes.

you think you're being clever but you're just spreading stupidity vibes.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
this isn't really ethnomusicology, but can anyone recommend more like this?
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IDMm7dsM96s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
doesn't have to be African (but it can be!). I recently discovered samulnori and I'm open to taiko and whatever, or any good nyabinghi records (I know the Ras Michael ones but that's about it). anything that's just straight up undiluted drums, nothing but drums with no melodic instruments, excepting voice

also, I was listening to Holger Czukay's (totally awesome) Canaxis LP and I wonder if anyone knows about the sample on Boat-Woman Song? I can only imagine it's from a field recording, which would have to be one of the first instances of indigenous music being sampled by a Western musician
 
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