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).
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.
I’ve finally started in on my secondary, personal purpose for this trip: Studying some local music.
Given that I play in the gyil (West African xylophone) ensemble back at Swat, I knew I’d be studying that some here; I had my first lesson yesterday. I’ll be studying 6 hours a week with the inimitable Bernard Woma (and/or his associate Jerome). It’s a bit of a drag to haul out to his house in Gao-gao (about 1.5 hours by tro-tro each way), but so far well worth it: I’ve started a few basic pieces. Hopefully I’ll have good calluses before too long, though — I got a nasty blister within the first half hour of playing, yesterday.
But even more exciting for me is that I’ve just begun to study the seprewa, the Ghanaian equivalent of the Malinke kora and the instrument of the Ghanaian “troubadours” going back to the 1600s. It’s a stringed instrument, a “lute-harp”, and considerably less well-known than the kora, which it differs from in number of strings (10-15 for the seprewa, 21 for the kora) and the make of the resonating body (wood for the seprewa, calabash gourd for the kora). Otherwise, it seems to me to be very similar: Played almost identically, always solo as an accompaniment to the voice, and used mostly in praise and storytelling.
Unlike the gyil (and other Ghanaian music), it is a fully diatonic instrument; the gyil uses a version of the pentatonic scale. (It’s not clear to me exactly how the seprewa scale was tuned, traditionally: It’s very possible that it was tuned significantly differently from the Western diatonic, but these days electronic tuners abound, and force it into more-or-less equal temperament.) The seprewa has a very bright sound, comparable in volume to the Western harp, I’d say. My teacher is one Kyere Matin, at the University of Ghana (Legon) music department, and so far he and I are getting along famously.
I especially like that, for Kyere Matin at least, the process of teaching seprewa inevitable starts with building one. So, yes, I’ve just purchased an instrument (inevitable, really); he’ll start work on it tomorrow, and hopefully finish it over the weekend. I’ve asked to be included in the process as far as possible, but at the moment it seems like that will mostly just be observing. In the mean time, I’m starting to learn on his instrument, and enjoying it greatly.