Pulling at Harp Strings

Chapter 3 is the second of two chapters that outline and analyze the development of North Korea’s kaeryang akki—updated “improved” or “reformed” versions of traditional musical instruments. It extends the discussion of Chapter 2, critiquing the underlying ideology, which holds that Korean instruments should match Western counterparts, but that Western instruments must be subservient to the Korean soundworld, and introducing key musicians and institutions, and music pedagogy. Data from published resources is matched to the author’s detailed work with key performers in Pyongyang, interviews with musicologists, and evidence gleaned from notations and recordings. It notes how some instruments have disappeared from public view, and asks why this is so. The core of the chapter considers stringed instruments. Some instruments have been developed in multiple versions to match Western orchestral equivalents or to serve specific functions, while new instruments have also been created. The chapter also considers “reformed” percussion instruments.

Instruments of the People

Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters that outline and analyze the development of North Korea’s kaeryang akki—“improved” or “reformed” versions of traditional musical instruments. It identifies formational influences from the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. The underlying ideology, which holds that Korean instruments should match Western counterparts, but that Western instruments must be subservient to the Korean soundworld, is critiqued. Key musicians and institutions, and music pedagogy are introduced. Data from published resources is matched to the author’s detailed work with key performers in Pyongyang, interviews with musicologists, and evidence gleaned from notations and recordings. The core of the chapter explores wind instruments, looking in detail at the shawm (chang saenap), flutes (chŏdae, tanso), oboes (p’iri), trumpets and conch shells (ragak, rabal), and the accordion (sŏnp’unggŭm).

The North Indian Sarode and Questions Concerning Technology

In three previous issues of OS (10/1, 2005, 13/3, 2008 and 19/2, 2014) a range of scholars explored non-Western instrumentation in electroacoustic music. These issues addressed concerns about sensitive cultural issues within electroacoustic music. This article builds upon this discussion through an examination of a number of electroacoustic composer-performers using non-Western instrumentation. This discussion will include the voices of ‘Western’ electroacoustic composers using non-Western instruments or sounds sources. It will also document some of the work of non-Western electroacoustic composers who incorporate traditional material or indigenous instruments in their music. Special attention will be given to the complexity of being in-between musical cultures through a critical engagement with theories relating to hybridity, orientalism and self-identity. In particular, this article will focus on my own practice of composing and performing electroacoustic music with the North Indian lute known as the sarode. It will discuss both cultural and artistic concerns about using the sarode outside the framework of Indian classical music and question whether Indian classical music can ever be ‘appropriately appropriated’ in an electroacoustic context. Two of my recent compositions will be explored and I will outline the development of my practice leading to the creation of a new ‘hybrid’ instrument especially for playing electroacoustic music.

Song Cycles

Back in America, Barber happily focused on composing songs. Drawn to Rainer Maria Rilke’s French poems, he created five songs, Mélodies passagères. When asked, he said that he composed in French because he had fallen in love with Paris. He sang excerpts of the cycle to his friend, composer Francis Poulenc, who confirmed the accuracy of the prosody and admired the songs so much he premiered them in Paris with Pierre Bernac in 1952, which Barber attended as he was there for a meeting of the International Music Council. In 1952, Barber received a commission from the Ballet Society to orchestrate some piano duets he had composed, inspired by his childhood trips to the Palm Court in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Completed in Ireland, the ballet, Souvenirs, included a waltz, schottische, tango, pas de deux, and two-step; it was choreographed and performed by Balanchine, who danced with Nora Kaye, Jerome Robbins, and Tanaquil LeClercq. His love affair with Irish poetry also blossomed during this time, inspiring his most famous song cycle, Hermit Songs, settings of ten poems by Irish monks inscribed on the corners of manuscripts. The cycle was premiered in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress by Leontyne Price, with Barber at the piano. This chapter concludes with discussion of Barber’s one-movement orchestral work, Adventure, a television collaboration between CBS and the Museum of Natural History, which is scored for a mixture of recognizable Western instruments and non-Western instruments.

Bi-musicality and dialogical musicality: Influences of Javanese gamelan participation on Western instrumental learning

This qualitative research examines the influence of learning Javanese gamelan on aspects of musicianship, attitudes and approaches relating to the learning and performance of Western instruments experienced by a sample of UK university music students. In addition to benefits to musicianship, students delineated positive developments in attitudes and approaches to learning and performance. While bi-musicality may be the prerogative of only those who can maintain expertise concurrently in more than one musical style, the concept of dialogical-musicality is proposed as a construct emphasising productive inter-relationships arising from practical engagement with different musical styles at any level.

BBC Proms 2013: Gerald Barry, Peter Eötvös, Nishat Kahn, Frederic Rzewski and Mark Anthony Turnage

Mark Anthony Turnage's Frieze – performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, on 11 August – and Nashit Kahn's The Gate of the Moon, a concerto for sitar and orchestra – performed by Kahn himself with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton on 12 August – both raise the question of how, in a new piece, one can meaningfully reference other music. Turnage's work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society to celebrate the organisation's bicentennial and to share a programme as their most famous and, probably, greatest commission, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony; this shorter work, which is clearly modelled on the Beethoven in its general layout, is a sort of gloss in Turnage's own language on the older one. Kahn's concerto brings together an orchestra of western instruments and a single Indian one and aims at joining their indigenous musical languages in a meaningful way.

Unheard Complexities in Lou Harrison's Main Bersama-sama and Bubaran Robert

Central among Lou Harrison's pioneering East-West fusions, the works for gamelan and Western instruments are frequently cited either as exemplars of the composer's Californian, postmodern musical sensibility or as noteworthy instances of cultural hybridity. Close examination of Main Bersama-sama (1978) and Bubaran Robert (1976, rev. 1981), however, shows that these pieces can and should be understood for what they tell us about Harrison's deep engagement with melody. A self-proclaimed “melode,” Harrison has mistakenly been regarded as a West Coast musical dabbler, writing tuneful pieces that lack the complexity that characterizes the work of his East Coast contemporaries. Yet analysis of the pitch structure of Main Bersama-sama and Bubaran Robert reveals intricate compositional “games” similar to the pre-compositional strategies of composers more typically associated with algorithmic compositional methods. Because these intricacies lie beneath the melodic surface of the music they have largely been unheard and unappreciated in Harrison's work. The melodic nature of these games not only challenges the widely accepted depiction of Harrison as a mere “tunesmith,” but also shows that Harrison explored the ability of melody (as opposed to large-scale tonal or harmonic schemes) to create form and serve a central generative function in his music.