In the near future, I might present on the fediverse some audio or video material of me playing traditional Okinawan (
utasanshin), Korean, Persian, Japanese or Alpine Central European music. Feel free to consider these publications as an invitation to a friendly, stimulated and respectful conversation about music.
In view of some unpleasant experiences I've had in my life, I feel the need to announce the conditions under which your responses to it fulfill my demands of respect. I'll insist on your adhering to them. After all, it's me opening up these spaces for conversation and inviting you in. Thanks for taking care.
- If you feel "strangeness" in these traditional musics, please say something like "It sounds unfamiliar/strange/foreign to me, because it's the first time I've heard such music". But please do so only if you show interest at the same time. Without your interest, your statement will be of no value. Don't forget: The purpose should be the conversation between the listener, you, and the musician, me. Please "respond" in the sense of making a dialogue happen—instead of "react" as in influencer reaction clips.
- Do not kill the conversation in an arrogant way claiming that you're the expert and that you already understood everything about these musics. Implicit to that, do not explain these traditional musics with modern western music theory concepts. They won't do them justice. Crucial concepts would be missing, like hâl (certain emotional states) or ho-heup and ki-ai (certain body movement/breathing and awareness work), just to name some. Refrain especially from using the terminologies "microtonal" and "xenharmonic". I'll show you why. People formed by modern western musical education (Jazz schools included) understand the so-called twelve-tone equal temperament (12ET) as the norm. They brand all other tonal systems as off-norm, applying the terminologies "microtonal" or "xenharmonic" to latter (go ahead, just look these words up, and see for yourself in the definition of these words). They tend to forget that 12ET was an arbitrary design choice made by some individuals, quite recent actually, and adapted by only some groups of some societies. Yes, it has been mostly adapted by the music industry. But 12ET is not a norm, it's not universal, neither geographically nor temporally. It even doesn't represent "Western" nor "European" culture.
Now that we don't have 12ET in the traditional musics, what do we have then? While 12ET is not following natural principles (you cannot tune your instrument according to it without using a modern device called "tuner"—to be purchased), the traditional musics do follow natural principles. Which is a matter of course. To be able to recreate the same tonal system over and over again (imagine yourself tuning your instruments), you have only the laws of mathematics, physics and acoustics at hand. We're talking about
consecutive 6000 years of tradition of using advanced instruments here. For all that time there were no tuners around.
At a musical showing two days ago, I was asked about the pitches I'm playing on the
taepyeongso. This question is a very interesting one, because there's so much useful (and very old) knowledge related to this topic. I'm always happy to share this knowledge. It was also not the first time for me to do so. So I started to answer: "They're based on natural harmonic intervals...", but I couldn't talk further. I had to put up with a wall of objections from three persons. "No, they're not natural!" "No, they're weird!" "No, they're microtonal!" "My friend studied Jazz, he knows!" They were confirming each other. I was (metaphorically speaking) kicked out of the conversation. That was not fun.
The day after, I told my friend who was at the showing how I felt. She understood and told me that she would pay attention from now on. The thing is that I don't blame her and her Jazz musician friends. It's not their fault. It's the educational system's fault. It trains us to show intellectual strength/superiority all the time instead of interest and practicing the art of listening. And it teaches us to create an unnecessary trench and hierarchy between "us normal ones" against or over "them strange ones", like when I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher twenty years ago, and the music professor at the educational school was showing us "Swiss" future teachers a recording of Korean court music only to harden "our" common feeling of strangeness towards it... That was another moment when everybody except me was agreeing, not even considering that some people, like me, would feel actually very familiar with that music. I guess they could never imagine that I spent every summer on an
alp (alpine pasture) hearing my uncles playing
Alphorn and singing
Naturyodel until I was six years old and then two years in Japan hearing and singing Japanese children's songs.
What I could have shared when being asked about the pitches of the
taepyeongso... well, I believe it's very rich and nourishing. But that's up to you to decide for yourself.
So, the traditional musics use natural pitch intervals. And yes, modern western science considers them as such, even calls them "pure", in contrast to impure ones to which 12ET intervals belong.
The Persians made up catchy names for the natural pitch intervals used in traditional musics:
- 2/1 hangâm or hengâm. The word means time, hour or season and describes well the periodical usage and character of this interval. Apply the analogy between the time domain and the pitch domain here, and you got a very important natural principle in music.
- 3/2 chireh. The word means prevailing, dominant or victorious and describes well the convincing character of this interval which is, just like hangâm, immediately recognizable when the two pitches spanning the interval are played simultaneously. Thus, hangâm and chireh are used to tune instruments.
- 4/3 dang. The word means share or part and describes well that this "part", combined in a sequence with the chireh interval, actually fill up to a complete hangâm interval.
- 32/27 vostâ-ye qadim. This word means the position of the middle finger on the neck of a lute. It's achieved through the so-called up-and-down principle. This principle puts hangâm and chireh intervals in a sequence and is described in ancient literary works, of which the oldest found is Chinese, where it's called sān-fēn sǔn-yì (balance of trisection method).
- 9/8 tanini. This word means resonant, reverberative or tonally nice. It's the smallest and most frequent interval in 5-tone (pentatonic) songs formed by the correct tone class (zhèng yīn jí in Chinese). It's also achieved through the up-and-down-principle. And because it's a small interval, it's very easily trainable and body-memorizable with your vocal organs. The meaning of tanini refers to that.
- 256/243 baqiyeh. This word is borrowed from Arabic and means remainder or remnant. This interval appears in your tonal system if you extend your 5-tone system to a 6- or 7-tone system by continuing the up-and-down-principle. This "remainder" together with the tanini interval fill up to a vostâ-ye qadim interval. A hangâm interval can in consequence also be filled up with only the intervals tanini and baqiyeh (five and two of them, respectively).
All six pitch intervals mentioned above are irrefutable due to the natural principles moulded into them. All traditional musical instruments can play them.
Some cultures added to those intervals a seventh interval, to make the music even richer. The Persians call this interval
mojannab, a word which is borrowed from Arabic and which means bended, turned aside or hit sideways. It's not natural, thus its value cannot be defined exactly. Instead, it's variable and can take a value within the range of about 112 and about 182 cent. It actually varies strongly between songs (or modes) and also between groups of musicians (or regions or epochs). You find the
mojannab not only in the middle east and central Asia, but also in cultures such as the Kanuri in Niger (
example) , the Korean (
example) or the Okinawan (
example) who incorporated it into their own cultures through trade contacts.
Before I end this post, I'd like to point at these two academics who mention in their work how power has been used in modern history to discredit people using tonalities other than 12ET (In case you'd like to hear others talk or write about this topic):
- Yannick Wey - "Transformations of Tonality: A Longitudinal Study of Yodeling in the Muotatal Valley, Central Switzerland"
- Kofi Agawa - Tonality as a colonizing force in African music
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philosophy #
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utasanshin
