A new shapenote tune! Finally!
I’ve been working on Catalina off and on for many months; the final breakthrough (though not actually the completion of the tune) happened down at All-Cal, where I generally had gorgeous views of Catalina Island from the hostel where I was staying.
We sang through the last draft at the last Swarthmore sing, and despite some serious typos in that draft, I was fairly happy with it. Can’t wait to sing it at the Western Mass. Composium in a few weeks. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what to say about the text: I took an Isaac Watts text (from 515 in the S.H.), but modified it heavily (most notably so that it went from being in Long Meter to being decidedly Particular – 8,8,8,8,8,8,8,6, to be exact).
I’m particularly proud of the engraving – thanks to the Fasolily list for advice and for getting together the new Sacred Harp font, which improves the look-and-feel considerably.
Hopefully soon I’ll have a new version of my Sacred Harp Lilypond template up.
UPDATE: This has been up less than a day, and I’ve already gotten good feedback and revised heavily. Changes include: A better alto line overall (with fewer fa-6s); a more reasonable treble line; a bit less dissonance in the tenor; some contrary motion added to the bass line. The link above, and also the link from the Music page, have both been changed (to version 0.9).
I’ve updated my Music page: the recording of my set of 13 miniatures for string quartet, The Labyrinth, at Night, is now available in both .wav and .mp3 (along with the score, etc.). If you’d like a recording of the rest of the Mandelbrot Quartet junior recital (including Schoenberg, Janacak, and Terry Riley) you can download that here (in .wav – warning, large file); I’ll eventually have all of that up on the Music page, including mp3s.
…that I’m in a totally foreign musical culture:
(This post could use some sound examples, but I’m not going to try to do that from an internet cafe; perhaps I’ll edit them in later.)
There’s this one piece on gyil in particular that’s been giving me fits.
Most gyil pieces give me fits, to some degree: I’m not good at articulating two independent lines, so my hands get tangled fairly often. But this piece is different: I can play the notes fine. Individually, I can play each of the pieces fine. What’s tripping me up is this: The beat is not where I expect it to be.
The trouble started when I was learning what Bernard calls the “melody” of the piece, which is what I would call the “rhythm” (in the Ghanaian sense), or the bass-line: A rhythmic ostinato in the lower part of the instrument that structures the rest of the piece. It’s a fairly simple ostinato — just single notes in straight “eighths” (in 2/4), but with every fourth note doubled in octaves (the same note, ever time). This doubling creates a very strong emphasis on that note, understandably — in addition to being the only doubling, it’s also both the highest and lowest note in the melody. So all my musical instincts say that that note must fall on the beat. Makes sense, right? But no: I’m told that that strongly emphasized note falls just before the downbeat of the pattern. (So, we’re more-or-less in 2/4, with the emphasis on the final eighth of the measure.
I cannot for the life of me hear it this way. I try, every time, to keep the beat where it’s meant to be, and every time my internal meter shifts back that last eighth note after at most half a repetition of the pattern.
Of course, that’s just the ostinato: The same thing occurs in the “song” (an actual melody in the upper register), and what Bernard calls the “solo” (a semi-fixed ostinato in the upper register). The solo, in particular, is just a disaster for me, because once again the beat is not where I expect it to be, but this time its just a sixteenth off! This effect is created the same way: an octave doubling on the lowest and highest note of the pattern that happens just before the beat, followed by a syncopated in-between rhythm. This in-between rhythm is considerably less syncopated if you understand the “measure” as beginning on the octave doubling. But, of course, when you do that, there’s just no way you can ever start the solo on time — it’s usually played coming out of the song, and (carrying over the beat from the song) if you try to put that doubled octave on the beat… Well, you’ll get really confused looks from all the Ghanaians near-by, is what.
Of course, this means that in order to correctly put the solo over the melody/ostinato thing, I have to do the following mental contortions: Somehow manage to hear the beat for the solo correctly, so as to start it on time, and then hold onto that beat when all my musical instincts are telling me that I’m exactly one sixteenth note off from the underlying ostinato. (Even though I’m not, for some values of not…)
It took me perhaps half an hour to manage this particular feat, yesterday, and then I was only able to hold onto it for a brief while. (It’s made more tricky by the fact that both the ostinato and the solo change in the usual Ghanaian pattern of AABA-BBAB; when I’m concentrating so hard on holding down the solo, I tend to forget where in the cycle I am, but if I try to listen to the supporting ostinato to recover I just switch back to my instinctive meter…) I was working with Jerome, and he was spectacularly confused. I play the ostinato while tapping my foot on what I perceived to be the beats, and he actually couldn’t mirror that back to me; but, of course, neither could I mirror back to him tapping my foot in the correct place.
Yup. Definitely foreign.
Hard to believe, but I’ve only got five days left in this country. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve flipped over from being totally ready to get home to absolutely panicking about so little time yet. I’m still stumbling across something new in every elicitation session, and god knows I could use another few years of seprewa tuition…
Most recent excitement:
- New favorite Twi word: “bumpy” (like the roads around here) can be either monka-monka (for a few large bumps) or monkye-monkye (for many bumps; pronounced ['mOncC)i ,mOncC)i]*). I’ve even gotten monkye-monka once or twice.
- The local English sometimes makes elicitation… interesting. For instance, as a by-product of the cot/caught merger in my dialect and the lack of rhoticization in Ghanaian English, every time I ask for the word “hot” [hOt], I get the word for “heart” [ha:t], as opposed to Ghanaian “hot” [hot]. Similarly, “bend” and “burnt” actually form a minimal pair for vowel length in Ghanaian English ([b@\nd]/[b@\:nd]), so I’m always saying the wrong one.
- I finally! have! proof! that the de-construction (which originally got me interested in Twi SVCs) involves object raising. (M3 de atar no gaw su, lit. “I held the shirt dropped on.”, for “I dropped the shirt.” The only way to get this is to have atar no raise out of the prepositional phrase headed by su, the complement of gaw. Without the de and the raising, but still with the su, the meaning is entirely different.) I’m excited. Um, no. Never mind. That’s really just a particle, on the end, and no movement ever occurs de sentences. Whoops.
- My seprewa is underway, but still not done. I sat with Kyerematen today as he finished sanding down the neck/sound-post and the frame of the resonator. He says the hardest part is getting the pegs to fit right, and that’s still to come.
- I think I’ve forgotten how to shake hands the American way.
*I’ll be using Conlang X-SAMPA for all IPA transcriptions from here on out. CXS is very nearly the same as X-SAMPA; Wikipedia has the basic differences here. Eventually I’ll try to get actual IPA working, but we’ll see.
Seprewa lessons continue to be simultaneously delightful and really frustrating. The upside is that I really like the instrument, and the music I’m working on is very pretty. (In particularly, I’ll be starting a lamentation song today that hovers in this bizarre Phrygian-Lydian modal world that is lovely, lovely, lovely.)
The frustrating bit is, of course, the usual clash of ways of learning and teaching. It took me several lessons of arguing to convince Kyerematen that there was absolutely no way that I was going to learn to improvise convincingly on this instrument just by sitting there playing the basic rhythms over and over again: Up until yesterday, his usual pedagogical method was to say, “play this!”, and then walk out of the room for ten minutes. Don’t get me wrong: I like Kyerematen quite a bit, and we’ve been getting along very well. But I’m just not going to learn that way — way too much Western musician in me, and also a lack of listening background in the seprewa tradition.
It’s proven impossible to separate out traditional seprewa music from highlife. Highlife is a popular music genre that originated in the early 20th century in Ghana, basically when seprewa tunes were displaced to guitar and combined with a larger ensemble. It sounds quite a bit like Latin jazz at first, given that they share the same roots (rhythmically speaking, at least). Anyhow, Kyerematen hasn’t really seemed to understand me whenever I’ve asked whether a song is “traditional” (or “old” or “folk”) or not: He happily confirmed that a certain song was completely traditional, an old folk song, and then I later found out that he wrote it in 1995. Either highlife really is just an outgrowth of older music, with no real discontinuity, or this is some effect of the extreme endangerment of the seprewa now.
Or it could just be the nature of seprewa music: The seprewa, as I’ve noted, was mainly the instrument of “troubadours”, travelling musicians whose social role mostly involved singing the praises of local chieftains while offering social critique and commentary through other songs. As such, the style mostly involves a repertoire of “rhythms” over which to write new songs anyway, so perhaps the idea of a separation between older tunes and newer ones just doesn’t make any sense, in this context.
Well, music more-or-less replaced linguistics as my primary activity this week, which was rather nice (for a change). I’ll strike a better balance next week.
I’ve had two days of actual seprewa lessons now, and aside from struggling to make my fingers pluck the right strings at the right times, I’ve had to work pretty hard to figure out exactly what sort of things Kyerematen is teaching me. “Pieces”? “Songs”? No — he calls them “rhythms”.
But, of course, a more precise description might be “genre-defining ostinati”. We sort of have this sense of the word “rhythm” in English, but mostly with regards to (various forms of) Latin American music — we talk about a piece using a samba rhythm, or a bosa nova, etc, where the defining feature of the entire genre is some gestalt of meter, characteristic rhythm, and chordal alternations. This is the same as the various rhythms I’m dealing with on the seprewa — each one exists in some meter (often highly obscured by syncopation and hemiola), and is characteristically a set of stressed notes within that meter articulating some “fundamental bass” (or, the Indonesian musician in me says, a “nuclear melody”). You can fit a whole variety of actual note patterns into a particular “rhythm”, with the defining rules being (apparently) that you must hit the nuclear notes on primary stress beats, and must play consonant intervals over the secondary stress beats. (With “must” meaning “mostly do, except when you don’t feel like it”.)
As an example and anecdote: I was working on learning the yamponsa rhythm (forgive me if that spelling is incorrect, I’ve only heard it said). I learned a basic version of the rhythm first, and then started to work on a variation. At one point, I was having trouble figuring out exactly what the rhythm (in the Western sense) of a pair of notes were — they were syncopated in a very non-intuitive way. So I asked Kyerematen — “What’s the rhythm of these two notes?” He gives me a blank look, and replies, “Yamponsa!” It was perfectly obvious to him, anyway.
After I had more-or-less got it, he reminded me that this particular variation was less a set thing, more just a way of arpeggiating that kept the character of yamponsa. You could do similar figuration in any rhythm.
As an example of a “rhythm”, in this sense: Dagombe is much, much easier to characterize than yamponsa. It exists in a four-beat cycle, with the stressed beats being 1, 2, and 4; the “bass line” seems to be I-vi-(rest)-V, which really just feels like V-I-vi-vi with the stress on the I. Watching Kyerematen improvise, he mostly kept that bass line intact, no matter how florid his ornamentation got. However, this was not true in yamponsa: Here, only the cadential figure (scale degrees 2-1) was kept intact, though the rest of the ornamentation hinted at the underlying chordal structure of the rest. So I suppose in any characterization of a seprewa rhythm you’d have to include some notation of just how fixed particular bass notes are: Some might need to be present, others might only need to be harmonized with, while others you can ignore entirely except when you come back to the basic ostinato.
This all reminded me very strongly of something I read regarding the Balinese calendar system. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s an enormously complex system of many independent cycles of varying length, all phasing against one another, like the ancient Mayan system on steroids. As a method for keeping track of time, its useless, but (according to this author, who’s name I currently can’t recall Clifford Geertz — thanks, Myles) that’s not it’s purpose. The calendar is used mostly for scheduling rituals and calculating fortune; it’s purpose is not to tell you what time it is, but rather what kind of time it is. This seems a fair characterization between the differences in Western and Ghanaian senses of “rhythm”: Western rhythm cares about durations in time; Ghanaian rhythm cares about kinds of time.