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Your schools marching band is gathered on the football field, ready to play. Each note they perform, every rule, custom, and procedure they followfrom watching the conductors baton to having their uniforms pressedis a part of what ethnomusicologists refer to as a musical system.
When you approach a new kind of music, find out what vocabulary is used to describe it. Much music can be said to contain the following elements:
These can provide a working vocabulary for discussing and analyzing any kind of music.
Asking a few fundamental questions about a cultures musical system can open up a unique window into the fundamental philosophical, religious, and artistic concepts that shape peoples everyday lives. For example, drums and rhythm have always been a central part of music throughout the Indian subcontinent. Drums exist in a variety of shapes, styles, and sizes. They are played with sticks, hands, or fingers and they accompany dancing and singing.
One of the manifestations of the Hindu god Shiva is Natarja who represents the movement of the universe. The small drum in Shivas hand symbolizes the audible space that fills the universe, the sound of creative energy. So rhythm, drum, and music are manifestations of fundamental Hindu beliefs. At concerts of Indian music, audiences listen to drummers raptly and follow their complex rhythms in cycles. Western audiences, used to rhythmic patterns of two, three, or four beats, get lost while Indian listeners can follow these cycles (some more than half an hour long) with the greatest of ease, using hand gestures (a wave of the hand, a count of the finger) to track the divisions of metric cycles. These cycles reflect cultural ideas about time that are documented in writings on music from Vedic times (1500-1600 BCE). These writings express time through circular imagery, such as the wheel of a chariot, the sun, the eye, or the human life cycle.
As you ask questions about the musical system, find out how people learn music and how they acquire knowledge of their tradition. Is music restricted to certain people or transmitted through a master-apprentice system? Rarely is music open to just anyone who cares to play it. Professional musicians have a vested interest in setting standards and limiting their competition!
In India, musicians who want to play professionally must align themselves with well-respected family-based schools known as gharanas. Indeed, observing changes in this tradition, such as accepting nonhereditary students out of financial necessity, offers a unique angle on the fragility of family lineage in the modern world as well as the revival of Hindu culture among middle-class Indians in the post-Independence period.
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