Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Music Theory

on being a fannan asil…

I posted a bit about “authenticity” and the issues modernization and Westernization in indigenous Art Music traditions previously. Here’s a quote from Ali Jihad Racy’s article, “Musical Aesthetics in Present-Day Cairo,” that illustrates a broad pan-Arabic sense of some of the issues with descriptive phrases used in value judgments about musical activities: Common in Cairo [...]

Tagged , , , ,

Glossary of non-Western cello techniques?

I remember reading about a book years ago that cellist, Frances-Marie Uitti (she invented a playing technique using two bows so that she could play four part polyphonic music on the cello), that would be a technical manual on alternative 20th century cello techniques. What she ended up publishing was a chapter in the Cambridge [...]

Tagged , , , , , ,

Microtones

Calling a music microtonal is really such an unfortunate and misleading thing and belies alot of the assumptions that we make (in the world of Western Music) about how another culture’s music is organized. Basically we take as a standard Western diatonicism and when discussing other culture’s scale systems (the idea of a “scale” is [...]

Tagged , , , ,