Performer: Scottish Fiddle Orchestra, John Mason, MBE, conductor
Origin: Scotland
Orchestration: String orchestra
I am reminded of my friends who teach physical education telling stories of kids adventures (and complaints) during the social dance units in their classes. There were always tales of girls not wanting to dance with that one boy with poor hygiene (or who hadn't yet discovered good hygienic practices), not a balance between the sexes, thus two boys or two girls had to dance together, and kids disliking the musical selections (usually during line dance).
Although social dance in the more traditional sense is much less a part of Midwestern culture (those things that kids go to after the Homecoming game aren't really social dances in the way that we see above), social dance has been in the past. Line dances, reels, balls, and so forth existed for courtship, for socialization, and for community and community building. Today, our kids get gussied up for Prom, and perhaps the Homecoming Dance, but there is no longer the barn raising dance, or the town social, events where people get together and dance socially and together. Even though people do dance at the Wausau Wednesday night summer concerts on the 400 Block, they don't do so in organized fashion.
In some ways, the role of role play and socialization involving musics is to provide a way for these traditions to remain in the cultural consciousness, whether we engage students in social dance as above in PE or music classes, one of the very positives that can come of the role player is the continuance of these traditions.
Instrumentation: Standard big band w/extended Latin percussion
I am not exceptionally conversant in world musics that include regeneration and creation, with the exception of Latin, Cuban, and Mariachi styles that are fused in with big band jazz. I enjoy big band jazz a great deal along with its various options and extensions, especially the more Caribbean and Central American styles.
The The Funky Cha-Cha is a Sandoval chart that I've known for a great time and have taught to my jazz bands as well. I initially heard a high school big band from Texas play it at Midwest with Sandoval soloing with them. It was a fabulous performance. This type of music fits within typical big band structures, but it utilizes dance percussion other than the drum-set as the engine that drives the time, much like our various Salsa and Mariachi examples in the listening texts. It is certainly representative music of both styles, big band and Salsa, that is to be danced to. As I listen to the percussion groves, they grove as one would expect within Salsa music, but over the top is the big band instrumentation. I think it's a delightful fusion.
This gives us a vehicle to teach world musics to our students, because it uses a structure, the big band, that is exceptionally familiar to high school band students, but it fuses Latin dance and grooves into the structure. With the chart and groves, the kids are regenerating world music, but with the improv sections, students also get a chance to also create world music. You'll notice within the solo sections, even the dance percussion parts get a shot at a solo section while the rest of the rhythm section keeps that good dance time underneath.
Performers: Clergy and the Faithful celebrating/attending 1941 Easter High Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows, Chicago, IL, the Rt. Reverend Fulton Sheen, PA, narrator.
Origin: Rome, Catholic Church-Latin Rite
Instrumentation: Voice, organ, orchestra
One of my main reasons for my preference for the Contextualist Philosophy of World Music Education (still referencing Week 1's readings all the way out here in Week 4) is why things work they way they do in a particular culture. One of my big interests when it comes to other languages and cultures is idioms. Things do not often translate word-for-word or even meaning-for-meaning. I studied Biblical Greek back when I was a budding seminarian in the ELCA (yes, that happened, but I only made it two years), and I was fascinated by the translation of John's Gospel. In John's Gospel Jesus performs seven signs. Or he does seven miracles The English words signs and miracles are used rather interchangeably within translations and between translations. Yet, the Greek is consistent: σημεῖον. The standard translation of that word has two definitions, 1. Signs 2. Miracles. The first definition goes deeper, talking about miracles that were signs of Jesus being the Christ. I argued that this was an idiom that we were missing in the translation by being so haphazard about which word it is; it's actually both. English does not have a word for "miracles that are signs," but Greek does, and it's the one that is used in John's Gospel. The folks in the article that said, "Oh, just change the words. That's what I do when I have a song from another culture that I want to use," are willfully causing their students to miss out.
Now, I'm starting this discussion in the hopes that they're at least using translated English words, but if they think the native words are too hard to learn, might they also think that finding a translation is also too hard? Might they just chuck the native text into Google Translate and hope for the best? Do they look for some "Anglicized" text on the web? Do these teachers have any idea what they're actually teaching their students when they do this?
I know from experience, both in trying to game the Greek translation game, and from my foiled attempts to read Zakhov Vs. 07 from the Russian translation that is floating about the web, that Google Translate does not get the job done. There's just enough in common between Greek grammar and Russian for me to tell that I had no chance with comprehending the Gulyashki book pitting his Soviet Bloc answer to James Bond against 007 himself. I'd have to go to Australia or New Zealand (I think) to track down a rare English copy of the tale.
Which brings me to the above video of the Catholic Mass in Latin. One of the Catholic Church's supposed aims with the Latin was to have one language for the Church so that everyone would hear the same Mass said the same way throughout the world. However, as not everyone learned Latin, this didn't work quite as planned. With the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the vernacular was permitted, but linguists, the Faithful, the Clergy, and Rome have continued to argue over accurate translations. Pope Benedict XVI gave more broad permissions for the Mass prior to Vatican II to be celebrated, and a new English translation of the current Mass was approved, changing texts for Catholics throughout the United States. Except that it didn't make things better because it was a more literal translation instead of a more idiomatic one. Et cum spiritu tuo does not have an idiomatic translation in English. Post Vatican II, it translated as "And also with you." Now it is translated as "And with your spirit." This makes less sense in English because we don't think idiomatically in that type of separation.
Other confusions came about. The word "consubstantial" replaced "of one being" in the current translation of the Nicene Creed. After the first time a church I worked at prayed the current version of the Creed, one of my choir members asked me what consubstantial meant. I told him "of one being." He rolled his eyes and asked why they changed it.
So this is just a basic demonstration of the issue of "just change the words." Even if you change them to a translation, what is the accuracy of the translation? What guarantees are there that it is translated correctly within the musical scope of the melody? And if you're not going to change the words to a translation, you might as well not even bother. I come down in the Authenticity as Continuum camp.
This week I was hoping to write on my experiences at the Divine Liturgy and discuss them within the framework of structure. Alas, last night, my wife asked me if I was familiar with the "oldest song in the world." I was not, but her academia friends had been passing around a link from the Open Culture website about it. I am not familiar with the site, nor do I have the ability to comment on its authenticity, however, I was fascinated by the implications for our coursework. Serendipity being something I believe in over coincidence, I thought I'd use this for our blog this week. The .MIDI track is relatively boring and dry, and gives us a limited sense of the rhythm, etc. It also gives us no sense of improvisation, structure, and rhythmic cohesion. One of my observations of Liturgical Chant, and this is within the scope of the Divine Liturgy, the so-called "Tridentine Mass" (now titled by Pope Benedict XVI as the "extra-ordinary form"), and even the Islam Koran recitations we've been quizzed on is that the rhythms and pitch changes are dictated more by the text than by the printed notes. The length of the half-note in relationship to the quarter is informed by the rhythmic relationship, but then it is executed by the words in the text, the meaning of the syllables, and the pronunciations as well. I became more keenly aware of this when participating in the Divine Liturgy in Church Slavonic last weekend for my field work project as Lord Have Mercy is sung very differently than Hóspodi pomíluj even though they use the same musical score.
This is supposedly a more musically accurate performance of the Sumarian hymn, although, again it lacks text to inform the structure. I find no scholarship that indicates whether or not there actually is text to be sung, however, every indication is there. There does appear to be some sort of improvisational section in the rendition, and they do seem to conform to our text's assertion that they are composition within a structured architecture and not something completely free composed.
So, on to the particulars that I should have started with:
Title: Hurrian Hymn No. 6
Performers: Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and Richard Crocker
Performers: Royal musicians at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton
Culture: British
Orchestration: Full orchestra plus herald trumpets
Earlier this summer a viral video of and "epic low brass" recording of the theme from Game of Thrones went around the web. It was recorded by the best professional and studio low brass players in New York City, and it was glorious. I've read the first two books in the Song of Ice and Fire series and I've seen, albeit two seasons ago, the first two series of the HBO show. As I write this blog post, I'm revisiting the first series through the generosity of my in-laws, and I'm hoping to be caught up by the end of summer. The theme is rustic and rural on the HBO series, but the NYC low brass version was epic and powerful. It evoked the power of the Iron Throne, the nobility of Ned Stark, and the imperial ideas of Joffrey Baratheon, despite his rather youthful and despicable antics. The use of the brass has always conjured a sense of regal in Western music. One of my favorite expressions of this brass fanfare to conjure the sense of regal monarchy in Western music is Walton's Crown Imperial. I got to perform the band transcription at Wisconsin as an undergrad, and while I've never conducted the standard transcription, I've used the Bocook reduction for commencement ceremonies. It creates that sense of "English regality" that the Crown Imperial was designed to evoke (it was written, after all, for the coronation of HRH Elizabeth II's father and used for her coronation as well). The video that I've selected is from William and Kate's wedding of three years ago. This particular video begins with the ministerial party, His Grace +Rowan, and the other officials processing from the Abbey, and at about 0:45 into the video, the herald trumpets announce the royal couple, followed by their procession accompanied by the Crown Imperial with extra fanfare augmentation from the herald trumpets. Our text for this week speaks of these occasions where the instrumental selection in non-Western cultures evokes a sense of the regal, of rank, and of place in society. In Anglo and American cultures, we use brasses to evoke the regal and to introduce ceremony, whether it be monarchs, their children, as well as commencement exercises, and other such formal ceremonies. There is even a chart indicating how ruffles and flourishes (fanfares and drum patterns) are deployed for American state officials, with the President receiving four ruffles and flourishes followed by Hail to the Chief.
Variations on a Korean Folk Song by John Barnes Chance
Performed by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Wind Symphony
Orchestration was originally for concert band
Culture of origin was Korea
Variations on a Korean Folk Song is a staple of the wind band repertoire composed in 1965 by John Barnes Chance, a white American male from Texas who served in the 8th Army Band in South Korea. The piece is a warhorse of band music, although it is no longer considered to be performed as much as it should be. A discussion on this piece of music is appropriate for the parameters of this course, and specifically to this week's readings. One of the things our readings insist is that as music teachers, we must be aware of popular music from our students' cultures, as well as work to include culturally diverse programming. It could be argued that because Variations on a Korean Folk Song is based upon the Korean folk song "Airirang" that it meets the need to include more culturally diverse musical programming. However, this piece was composed by someone who was not Korean, nor was he a part of Korean culture. In the position of Contextualism in the Reimer reading, we are warned against ethnomusicology misrepresenting and/or misappropriating musics of another culture, and we are warned that such a thing is intrusive and potentially more dangerous than the damage that colonialism causes.
Because I have a large population of Hmong and Laotian students at Wausau East, we have discussed searching for and programming music of those cultures with the bands. I have repeatedly been told by my Southeast Asian students that they would welcome such action, but only on the musical and educational merits of the programming alone. They do not want to be patronized. I think this connects directly to the fears of the Contexualism position in Reimer's chapter this week. Is a piece like Variations patronizing of another culture, and should we continue to program it for its cultural diversity, it's musical merits, or should it just be relegated to the back shelf of the Band Library?
