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We are working on a new website that we hope to put online soon.

One new feature is the inclusion of EMA – Ethno Music Atlas, an interactive map of world music made ​​from original documents submitted by users.

Anyone wishing to contribute is welcome and can use the contact form or write directly to etnomusicologica@hotmail.it

Festa!

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Dozan Fujiwara & Steude Quartet, Festa, Denon, COCQ 84926, 2011

What is a Japanese music? And what a Western one? And again: it is more Japanese a musician who plays the koto zither or a punk singer, although both were born and raised in Tokyo or Osaka?

The last work of Fujiwara Dōzan raises these and other questions, like, however, it makes the vast majority of contemporary music in Japan, as well as in other Asian countries.

Therefore, it is not useless to ask questions about tradition and modernity in relation to traditional music today, right through the case of Festa, and do it in a strictly ethnomusicological context. Indeed, ethnomusicological conceptual tools help us to make an effective analysis of a complex reality such as that of the musical cultures of contemporary East Asia – Japan, the two Koreas, China and Taiwan.

The end-blown flute shakuhachi is one of the best known Japanese traditional instruments in the West. The word indicates the type of end blown shakuhachi flute in bamboo, with a notch mouth. The modern instrument used by Fujiwara, has five holes, four on the front and one  at the back; ten sizes are commonly spread: the smallest one of about 39 cm., the largest of 91 cm. The standard model has a length of 54 cm. and produces as a base note d.

Extending over two and a half octaves, this flute has a rich variety of techniques: partial finger hole closing, subtle changes in embouchure, up and down head movements, repeated notes with different fingerings, portamento and much more.

This flute is one of the three main instruments in the urban music of the Edo period (1603-1867), together with the koto and the shamisen, the long necked lute.

Appeared at least in the early seventeenth century as a ritual tool of a  Zen monks’ sect, the shakuhachi gradually spread in  urban and folk music too.

These three major instruments are also used together in a sort of chamber music called sankyoku (on the instrument and its history, see Blasdel 2005, Tsukitani 2008 and Sestili 2001).

The trans-contextualization of the Japanese end-blown flute, started by the so-called modernization (1868) and continued until today, has allowed this versatile instrument both to perform successfully different genres and in various contexts (Seyama 1998).

Fairly well known is the case of ‘contemporary’ music (Iwamoto 1994), but the genres now involving the shakuhachi range from salsa to the new age. Yet the traditional repertoires are frequently performed and highly regarded (Sestili 2002).

Dōzan Fujiwara, born in 1972, reaches with Festa his eighth recording effort. Disciple under a prestigious Tozan maestro, the living national treasure Hōzan Yamamoto, Fujiwara completed his studies at the Tokyo university of the Arts.

Classically trained, he follows the footsteps of his master and many other traditional musicians. Yamamoto, for example, in 1964 played shakuahachi in Clarinet-player Tony Scott’s Music for Zen Meditation, and introduced in 1967, his art at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Similarly Fujiwara, besides the classical repertoire, has pursued for over a decade collaborations with artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and other european musicians.

Festa, performed with the Steude quartet, whose line-up is composed of members from Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, presents a program of great interest, representative – as mentioned at the beginning –  of the Japanese music life.

Alongside some of his original compositions (Minor, Gekka chikuin, tracks 1 and 15) and some by arranger Ōshima Michiru (Lune, La festa, tracks 9 and 16), Fujiwara and the string quartet deal with European classical repertory, a piece for shakuahachi ( track 8), a piece by a famous Western-influenced Japanese composer, Kosaku Yamada (1886-1965) (track 2), and an arrangement of a Kazakh folk song (track 17), in the ‘lesson’ proposed by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. It is ‘natural’ to Fujiwara grappling with Flow my tears (track 3) by John Dowland, proposing one of the orchestral suite by Bach, BWV1067 (tracks 4-7), continuing in the challenging Koku (track 8) – from honkyoku, the original solo repertoire for shakuhachi flute – although ‘transcripted’ for shakuhachi and string quartet – and finally tackling up on the fascinating arrangement of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances (10-14), innervated by the use of different sizes of shakuhachi.

Discs such Festa must necessarily lead the opposition traditional music / western music to be rebutted in relation to Asian countries. And it’s nice that this happens with such an ambitious and successful work.

Daniele Sestili

References

Blasdel Yohmei Christopher, The Single Tone. A Personal Journey into Shakuhachi Music, Tokyo, Printed Matter Press, 2005.

Iwamoto Yoshikazu, The Potential of the Shakuhachi in Contemporary Music, “Contemporary Music Review”, 8/2, 1994, pp. 5-44.

Scott Tony, Music for Zen meditation (Tony Scott, clarinetto, Yamamoto Hōzan, shakuhachi, Yuize Shin’ichi, koto), Verve, V6-8634, 1964 (cd 817 209-2).

Seyama Tōru, The Re-contextualisation of the Shakuhachi (Syakuhati) and its Music from Traditional/Classical into Modern/Popular, “the world of music”, 40/2, 1998, pp. 69-84.

Sestili Daniele, Il racconto dello shakuhachi. Come uno “strumento dello Zen” divenne strumento musicale, “Avidi lumi”, V/13, 2001, pp. 22-25.

Sestili Daniele, Shakuhachi, il piacere del gesto-suono. Incontro con Mitsuru Saitō, musicista ed etnomusicologo, “Il giornale della musica”, febbraio (168), 2002, p. 35.

Tsukitani Tsuneko, The shakuhachi and its music, in Alison McQueen Tokita, David W. Huges (edited by), The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music 7, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, pp. 145-168.

Music Freedom Day 2012

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On March 3 will be celebrated the Music Freedom Day, an event conceived by Freemuse.org, an independent organization that deals with the free expression of music composers and musicians from around the world.

Born from the first World Conference on Music and Censorship held in Copenhagen in 1998, manages its activities from the Danish capital and among its main objectives want to document the violations of freedom of expression made by governments, political or religious powers against musicians and composers.

The Music Freedom Day provides many events around the world dedicated to the theme of censorship and anyone can join with shows or other initiatives.

In Italy, Freemuse is supported by independent radio Hibrido Radio, a network dedicated to world music that this year will offer two days of concerts and debates in Bologna.

Etnomusicologica supports this event by inviting musicians who have already scheduled a concert for that date to show the logo of Music Freedom Day to raise awareness of their audience and spread a message of freedom.

New links to world’s sounds

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While updating our link list we found News and Noise a blog on the role of culture and arts in society and current affairs. It is very interesting the post about the recent revolution in Egypt and the role of songs and musics in this kind of events.

Purely ethnomusicological, mcseychelles is the blog of a young French student in ethnomusicology at the University of Montreal who shares his research experiences via web. Many curious and interesting news about the various musical traditions of the archipelago.

Luso Music is a collection of videos that tell us about the music of the Lusophone countries, about 210 million people around the world.

We just want say thank you to all the people that shares their passion

17th International Seminar in Ethnomusicology

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The 17th International Seminar in Ethnomusicology will be held in Venezia and hosted, as usual, by Fondazione Cini.

The meeting will focus on

Ethnomusicology, evolutionary musicology and the neurosciences

with the participation of the major Italian and international specialists.

“Since its inception, ethnomusicology has investigated mental processes concerning music making and listening to music, which is evidence of its positive, interdisciplinary tradition.
Indeed the first ever ethnomusicology research centre, the so-called Berlin school, created in the early 20th-century in a climate of evolutionary comparativism, was housed in a university institute of psychology. By the 1930s and George Herzog’s studies on the musical languages of various native American societies and, subsequently, also the inquiries of his two most illustrious students, George List and Bruno Nettl, ethnomusicology was specifically dealing with the relations between music and language and the multiple levels of phonic and rhythmic forms in various cultures. Moreover, at the end of John Blacking’s most celebrated book, How musical is man? (1973), the author claimed that music can provide an unadulterated image of the mind and the general patterns of interaction between people. Then, of course, there was the very broad current of ethnological, psychological and ethnomusicological studies on the relations between music and abnormal states of mind, which flourished especially from the 1960s to 1980s.

Particularly in the last twenty years, there has been a further growth in the field of neurosciences (but also neuropsychology, neo-evolutionary musicology, biolinguistics, paleoethnology, etc.), as well as in the scientific study of cognitive processes and music in relation both to the mechanisms implicit in those processes and another communicational expressive forms of human behaviour (even compared to those of other animal species), especially language and its phylogenesis. Progress is made almost daily in this field of studies thanks to the growing potential of information technology and the possibilities of studying and experimenting with cerebral processes due to the introduction of new clinical instruments. This has led to the publication of works like The Origins of Music by Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker and Steven Brown (2000), Music, Language and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel (2008) and The Singing Neanderthals by the archaeologist Steven Mithen (2005). Such books have been remarkably popular, while terms and phrases such as cognitive neurosciences of music, musical processing, cognitive musicology, musical cognitivism, biomusicology, musilanguage, etc. now sound familiar to musicologists, especially those who work on systematic and intercultural aspects and have always been interested in human musicality – i.e. ethnomusicologists.”

Voice and Sound of Prayer

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Last year, when the “Voice and Sound of Prayer” was announced, the idea was to promote an annual study day on a specific theme connected to the relationship between voice and prayer (with reference to an individual liturgical tradition, the musical culture of a given geographical area and a specific European or non-European ritual form).
Promoted by the Intercultural Institute for Comparative Music Studies and coordinated by the ethnomusicologist Girolamo Garofalo from the University of Palermo, the Study day is intended to include not only scholarly papers by leading experts but also a concert of the highest standard to illustrate some of the repertories being discussed.

The Study day will develop in two directions by concentrating on both written and oral music. On one hand, there will be a focus on the written musical sources – Byzantine, Italian and Greek manuscripts – in Italian libraries and archives (e.g. the Vatican Library, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the Biblioteca Marciana, the Messina University
Library and the Library of the Greek Abbey of Grottaferrata). The subsequent overview will be updated in the light of recent studies and at the same time specific issues concerning some particularly interesting manuscripts will be explored. On the other hand, by crossing over the musicological approach and the ethnomusicologist view,
there will be a focus on some themes that bring together the Byzantine chant with the expressive modes and dynamics of transmission typical of oral traditions. In this sense one very stimulating prospective enquiry concerns the “oral elements” that surface in the written sources.
Moreover, there will be a special emphasis on the liturgical musical practice of two absolutely unusual, specifically “Italian” traditions pursued in the Greek Abbey at Grottaferrata (founded by St Nilus of Rossano in 1004) and the Greek Catholic diocese of the Arbëresh (Albanians) in Sicily. The diocese consists of five towns, the most
important being Piana degli Albanesi. Its still oral liturgical musical tradition goes back over 500 years ago to when, after Constantinople fell into Ottoman hands, there was an enormous exodus of Greek and Albanian people from Albania and Morea (Peloponnesus) to Sicily and other southern Italian regions.

Marranzano World Festival

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This week in Catania, take place the preview of the fourth edition of the Marranzano World Festival.

This edition is dedicated to plucked chordophones in Sicily and around the world and the preview of these days

shows and introduce the topics scheduled for this April 2012 edition.

The sound of musical instruments as a bridge between local and global, between ancient paths and new experiments. The long history that binds the  sicilian mandolin with the iranian setar, the

african kora, the greek tzouras, and many other plucked chordophones.
The spirit of the festival is well represented by the final concert  “Sicily meets the World”, with the performance of several artists, members of  the different tradition

related to the use of plucked chordophones around the world.

The World Festival Marranzano also supports a project of the NGO CO.PE (Emerging Cooperation) in Tanzania: a program to reduce the incidence of disability and improve the living conditions of

disabled children in the area, with the construction and the start of a rehabilitation center at the Health Center already operating in

Nyololo village.

Sound archives of the CNRS – Musée de l’Homme

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Sound archives of CREM is now online. This new resource come from a long research prject started by André Schaeffner in 1932 with the foundations of the Sound Archive at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro.

Hosted by the collaborative platform Telemeta, allows who is interested to search trought 3700 hours of published materials as well as 3500 hours of unpublished field recordings.

Intangible Cultural Heritage

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The 2003 UNESCO convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage was an important starting point for safeguarding human practices and expressions that risk to disappear.

Thanks to the activities of governments, organizations and groups of experts, the list is continuously updated and virtually anyone can propose and promote a cultural heritage that needs protection.

Italy appears on the list with the  Sicilian Puppet Theatre, Opera dei Pupi  and the Sardinian pastoral songs Canto a Tenore.

From Unesco website is possible to download the kit on intangible cultural heritage, a useful tool for the promotion and general awareness about this issue because the intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in the maintenance of cultural differences.