Analytical Approaches to World Musics
ISSN 2158-5296
2011, Volume 1, No. 2
AAWM JOURNAL Volume 1, No. 2 (2011)
Volume 1, No. 2 (2011)
Fluctuant Grouping in a Silk-and-Bamboo Melody
John Roeder
Liuban is one of a constellation of old tunes (qupai) that are foundational to music of China, and in particular to the rich “Silk-and-Bamboo” music (jiangnan sizhu) of the lower Yangzi region. This essay highlights some of the extraordinary qualities of Liuban by treating its grouping structure not as fixed, but as constructed dynamically by the listener. A processive analysis shows how Liuban deploys its materials elegantly to suggest but then to subvert grouping function, creating fluctuant, protean sensations of beginning, ending, and continuation that are analogous to its gentle varying contour and pitch focus. It manifests not a fixed form but an almost self-antithetical process—a Dao, or path of natural action—through which a moment of maximal conformity simultaneously appears as a moment of maximal possibility. During the preparation for that moment, sensations of symmetry are infused with remembered asymmetrical qualities and vice versa. The analysis thus provides a dynamically oriented supplement to standard fixed-state accounts of the grouping structure of this melody. It also provides a productive basis for comparing Liuban with other qupai like Baban, and for understanding the “flowered” melodies that are derived from them, thus providing a new approach to this fundamental but as yet little-studied procedure in Chinese music.
The Hurrian Pieces, ca. 1350 BCE: Part Two—From Numbered Strings to Tuned Strings
Jay Rahn
The first part of this study concluded that on the basis of numbered strings and their pairwise ordering (from left to right and top to bottom) on cuneiform tablets, one can identify within h.6, the earliest known piece of music that is notated from beginning to end, structural relationships of similarity, adjacency, and analogy as well as statistical tendencies. Further, most of these tendencies appear throughout the other 34 earliest pieces, which are highly fragmentary, and these tendencies can be understood in terms of the structural relationships identified in h.6. Moreover, structural and statistical anomalies in h.6 are cognate with the features that tend to be shared by all 35 Hurrian pieces.
This, the second part of the study, shows how the numbered strings were tuned and how relationships of similarity, adjacency and analogy can be understood in terms of Gestalt Grouping Principles, i.e., as relationships perceived among the sounds produced by the tuned strings. Decisive in narrowing the possibilities of Mesopotmian tuning to 12 general cases is its well-formed (WF), specifically ‘2-Gap,’ structure. Consequences of 2 of the 12 kinds of 2-Gap structure include parallels with later music of ancient Greece and Europe as well as eastern and southeastern Asia. In both of these kinds of 2-Gap structure, the number of steps in the generating interval is (dm±1)/2, where dm is the number of steps in the modular interval.
These 2-Gap structures comprise a distinction between generic and specific intervals that amplifies relationships of sameness, analogy, and adjacency considered in the first part of the study. These relationships are further interpreted in terms of the Gestalt Grouping Principles of Similarity, Proximity, and Common Fate. In particular, Common Fate accounts for ‘motion’ among the string-pairs of h.6.
Voice-Leading Considerations In Edo-Period Jiuta-Tegotomono: A New Analytical Approach
Henry Burnett
This article seeks to clarify the modal voice-leading structure of Japanese Edo-period chamber music (roughly the music composed in both the kansai and kanto areas from 1690 to 1868), in particular that of shamisen jiuta tegotomono. In doing so, a new theory of modal organization is presented through detailed analyses of several important works within the genre, using Ishikawa Kōtō’s seminal piece Aoyagi as a case study. In addition, the article presents a detailed discussion of the voice-leading properties inherent in the in-senpō mode that governs virtually all Edo-period chamber music for shamisen, koto and shakuhachi, the so-called sankyoku ensemble, and which, up till now, has been little understood by both Japanese and Western scholars. In particular, the in mode is perceived in this new theory as a hexachord divided into two symmetrically related trichords that articulate a fifth relationship that operates as the background structure of the composition. Each trichord within the larger hexachord is then capable of being transposed in either a dominant or subdominant direction, thus expanding the tonal ambitus of the composition, creating new tonal centers and adding new chromatic pitch classes in the process. Lastly, the article illustrates how this music can be graphed, based on an understanding of the pitch relationships that inform the component trichords of the in-senpō mode. In so doing, all the pitch relationships within the composition can now be better understood as to their particular voice-leading functions giving us a clearer understanding of how this cultivated art music operates on a compositional level.
Tradition and Innovation in the Bānsurī Performance Style of Pannalal Ghosh
Carl Clements
Pannalal Ghosh (1911–1960) is generally credited with the popularization of the bamboo flute (bānsurī) in modern Hindustani classical music. While the transverse flute already had a long history in the music of India, there does not seem to have been any extant tradition of Hindustani classical bānsurī playing in the 1930s and ‘40s when Pannalal Ghosh was adapting the bānsurī for the North Indian classical stage. As a result, Ghosh drew from a variety of sources to create a style suitable for his instrument. While he ultimately came to be affiliated with the Maihar gharānā through the teaching of its founder, Allauddin Khan, theoretical analysis of his playing style reveals some of the diversity of sources from which he drew. This can be seen at the level of form of an entire rāg performance; form and structure of sections of a performance, including compositions, ālāp, jor, jhālā, and tān development; and at the micro level of melodic lines, embellishment, articulation, and rhythm. At the broadest formal level, the majority of Ghosh’s performances suggest a clear affiliation with style of vocal performance known as the Kirana gharānā. But while the very slow compositions featured in the first metered section of the performance (barā khyāl) are very much in the character of Kirana gharānā, his fast compositions for the second metered section (chhota khyal) were often highly evocative of sitār and sarod compositions. And while his unmetered ālāp and jor had a predominantly vocal character, his jhālā (fast concluding portion of the ālāp) and tāns appear to derive in part from plucked-string instrument styles. Further analysis of Ghosh’s performance style at the macro and micro levels, and a comparative analysis of his style and the vocal and instrumental models that he chose to emulate will serve to illustrate the manner in which Ghosh created a personal approach to the bānsurī through a synthesis of existing stylistic elements and his own original vision for the instrument.
Computational Models of Symbolic Rhythm Similarity: Correlation with Human Judgments
Godfried T. Toussaint, Malcolm Campbell, and Naor Brown
A novel approach to describing rhythmic relationships in music is introduced by means of three experiments designed to test computational measures of symbolic rhythm similarity against human judgments. The first experiment involves a group of six distinguished Afro-Cuban timelines that had previously been compared with respect to a variety of mathematical measures of rhythm similarity in the context of phylogenetic analysis of rhythms. The results support the hypothesis that the edit distance correlates better with human judgments, than does the swap distance. The second experiment concerns Mario Rey’s musicological classification of Afro-Cuban rhythms into two groups being derived from either the Habanera or the Contradanza. The phylogenetic analysis of these rhythms performed with the edit distance, as well as the human judgments, lend support to Rey’s two-group categorization. However, they do not suggest that the Habanera and Contradanza timelines play a unique ancestral evolutionary role in the generation of the two groups. Both of these experiments involved rhythms with identically sounding beats. The third experiment incorporated Middle Eastern and Mediterranean rhythms composed of beats with two different timbres (dum-tak rhythms), thus introducing the simplest form of melody possible into the comparisons. Incorporating the additional information provided by using different symbols for the two sounds (dum and tak) in the edit distance did not increase the correlation with human judgments. The results obtained here also uncover a novel quantitative approach to the study of a class of music prototypes, namely, the identification of those rhythms that minimize the sum of the edit distances to all the other rhythms in a category.