[Host Note: I had to shorten the subject line... Ray had: Patterns and
Counting and what is lost by chauvinism. ...Rick]
Scott Ott wrote:
> Caught a bit of a story on National Public Radio this morning about a
> Lebanese flute player. He mentioned that traditional Western musicians
> measure the music by counting beats, but that the Arabic way is to
> remember the pattern. He then "spoke" the patte rn of a song and said,
> "that's a four/four beat". I wonder if the difference is substantive?
> What can the 'counters' learn from their pattern-minded colleagues and
> vice versa? (snip)
Scott,
This is a very interesting issue for me. I think you assume that a
western drummer who hears patterns, is musically illiterate and learns
everything by ear, is the same as a person from another culture who has
never thought beats. The beat, like literacy, in Western culture is
omnipresent.
But in the case of the Middle East this patterning includes not only
rhythm but pitch and story as well. I had a student who was a very
intelligent MD from the Middle East (Iran). She had trouble with hearing
the pitches in even the most simple scales and melodies from the West.
One day quite by accident I connected her to a poem from another Iranian
student that I also taught. The poem was in Farsi. She proceeded to
improvise in the most incredible melodies and rhythms. I asked her why
she did that and she said well it was the "water" and the "bird." There
were traditional ways of handling the texts that in no way related to the
Western "elements" of music. When she was in her own context she did very
difficult patterns that were learned from childhood. Patterns that any
normal Iranian would hear and know.
People raised in the European traditions would not hear much of what she
did because that was not the way their brains were "patterned" early in
life. She on the other hand could hardly match a pitch when played from a
Western piano.
I wonder how much expertise and knowledge is lost when various
Internationalist Philosophies march across the world removing people from
their contexts and making them forget what their peoples have been working
at solving since the beginning of time. I mean this in a political,
theological and today an economic marketing sense as well. Because these
unique differences are stored in human experience we only find out after
they have been abandoned and no longer taught to the children, that the
world has lost a great insight or gift.
I relate the lack of care that encourages such proselytization to
chauvinism. It can come from a lack of insight in any culture. Often,
because the West was the last great source of Empire and because all of
the Internationalist philosophies making the world today are Western with
Middle Eastern roots, we tend to think that chauvinism was also invented
in the West. But the inability to appreciate uniqueness or appreciate
differences is worldwide as the following story illustrates.
This is a story from Kurt Sachs the great ethno-musicologist who was
speaking to a Romanian peasant violinist. According to Sachs the violinist
was a great artist but within a non-literate brain structure. The
violinist was capable of the most intricate melodic structures and rhythms
and had a memory that was awesome. Sachs took him to a concert of the
Beethoven fifth symphony. At the end of the concert Sachs asked him what
he thought of this great Masterpiece. He said: "A lot of notes but
little heart."
Well, it wasn't his heart. But it certainly spoke to mine on the Indian
Reservation in 1954.
Regards,
Ray Evans Harrell,artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>