Boggle.

[ariadne3]

So, Sean Williams (the ethnomusicologist faculty at Evergreen, now I'm really sorry I never took a class with her,) came to do a short unit on music, how to teach it and how to use it to cement classroom community, as well as a quick mini-rundown of a slice of Indonesian culture. She brought her Angklung and dogdog (vowels same as in Spanish,) and had the class learn one of the traditional fertility songs. It was SUPER fun. She explained to us that the place where she had lived had people who were so tuned to musical jokes (there are many in a town angklung performance; it's all about sex, and makin' stuff grow, you know,) that they would bring popular music riffs into it, and occasionally break out into pop songs.
I was curious about whether I could find anything on trusty ol' youtube. This is kind of brain hurting, but I like it.

Comments

[fjorlief.livejournal.com]

Is the brain hurting part that they are playing Mission Impossible? Are there other (non-western) bits on YouTube? I guess I should go look. The sound is amazing and wonderful. Like, but unlike, gamelan music, but with the similar feel to me of music that is going on forever, but we just "tune into it" from time to time. Can't put it into words better than that, but I felt it the first time I saw a live gamelan concert, and have felt that at some Dead shows, kind of a tapping-into the music that underlies ordinary reality. Thanks for sharing this.

[ariadne3.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I probably should have said that. We learned one of the traditional patterns in class today, which was A LOT like the sort of neverending but continually fluxing patterns in gamelan. I really want to see one of the community music gatherings now, where the do traditional stuff with western-influenced improv, as Sean said happens often. It's brain-hurting in a good way.

Each one of those rattles, by the way, is one tone. The bamboo sounding tubes are tuned to be one octave apart on each angklung. The cultural shorthands and analogies that come from this are neat; one of them is that, for instance, if a kid misses school, the teacher might say "we missed your note yesterday." This is because angklung music is incomplete unless everyone participates. There is also a shorthand metaphor of holding the right hand as though it is holding the corner of the angklung (where it is held to make it sound,) and shaking: it means that someone is prattling on and on like the continual tremolo of a shaken angklung.
Super neat stuff. We're doing music every Friday, emphasizing the importance of bringing music into curricula.