Experimental Indonesian music and experiemental musical instrument.

Excellent music any way you slice it.

Melodic Rhythm

If you ever studied music formally, maybe you had a teacher tell you that the rhythm is the most important aspect. Even if you don't believe that, it's still a big part of the equation and for me it's always the first order of business.

When writing melodic rhythms we're trying to balance the two forces of repetition and variety. Most popular melodies are rhythmically simple yet this simplicity often hides sophistication that goes unnoticed by the uneducated listener.

In fact it's much more difficult and takes a lot more time to write something which is both simple and effective. So, for beginners its often helpful to start with something a bit more complex and work down towards simplicity.

With that in mind lets talk about melodic rhythm. One of the most basic melodic rhythms is a series of eighth notes. But normally, if you just perform a series of eighth notes, it will be boring at least rhythmically. How can we make a plan to insert some variety?

One way, which was recommended to me by my music composition professor, is to base the variety that you put in on an organized plan and not just randomly.

There are many plans but one common and effective plan is to base your insertion of variety and surprise on the golden mean which can also be thought of as the Fibonacci series but you do it in a special way.

If you're rolling your eyes because you've already heard about that, I'm not only going to talk about that so please stay with us. Don't worry, if you haven't heard about it before, I'm not going to get mathematical on you.

It's not difficult at all if you think about it as the 75% rule. Of course, in music there are no rules per se, only recommendations and guidelines. In the 75% rule, you compose an even rhythm such as straight eight notes starting from the beginning of the measure for arguments sake.

If you then determine where 75% of the distance from the beginning to the end of the measure is, you'll see it land on the "+of 3". So, instead of just going 1+2+3+4+, we want to change the "+ of 3" somehow. There are several different ways.

One is to perform it early, another is to perform it late, yet another is to not perform it or some combination of these. If we add further subdivisions of the beat, we could use 3e+a, 3e.., 3..a, 3e.a, 3... or a triplet. In this first measure that we're talking about my preference is to perform it late.

Now we have /1.+.2.+.3..a4.+.//
Continuing in this way for the second measure we would determine where 75% is, not from the beginning of the second measure but from the beginning of the first measure through the second measure.

If you do that, you'll see that the75% point of the span of 2 measures comes on beat 3 of the second measure and all of beat 3's off beats. So, how can we create variety on beat 3 of the 2nd measure?

One way is to tie the previous eighth note over to beat 3 as in /1.+.2.+..+.4.+.// I'll talk more about this in a moment. Another is to drop the "+ of 3" as in 1.+.2.+.3...4.+.//, or both. We can also place rhythmic events on the "e's" and "a's" whether or not the 3 or its "+" are present.

We could also play a triplet or tie over to the triplet instead of subdividing beat 3 into 16ths. I prefer 1.+.2.+.e+a4.+.//. Next, we continue applying the 75% rule but over the span of the first three measures which includes the first two we've already finished. This is what I meant when I said we'd apply the 75% rule in a special way.

As you can see, we didn't just find the 75% position of 4 measures. We are doing it at simultaneous levels of 1ms, 2mss, 3mss 4mss, etc... Over the span of the first 3 measures, the 75% region falls on beat 2 of the third measure and all of its off beats.

The variation we use here should probably be a repeat of one of the variations we've already used to help create unity. Which one to use is up to you. I choose to repeat the first one we created previously (a dotted eighth with a sixteenth) because we haven't heard it in a while.

Over the course of 4 ms, the 75% position is beat 1 and all of its off beats in the fourth measure. It's probably best to introduce a rhythm we haven't used yet to give it something fresh again.

One of the reasons why the 75% rule works is because the variety has been inserted at a different rhythmic position in each measure which is another way of approaching the need to insert variety and interest.

There are not many pop phrases proceeding from the down beat of the first measure to the last off beat of the last measure. Its filling up too much space and doesn't breathe. Pop phrases tend to be shorter with pauses between the phrases. The kind of process we've been talking about is much better for folk and classical styles.

Classical melody in particularly is often about the long phrase of 8 and 16 measures. Before we talk about making shorter phrases, there are other consideration that you may or may not want to implement. One concern is that sometimes it can sound too abrupt just jumping into the flow of the melody cold turkey.

You can work into the flow by starting with a few longer notes which also may get progressively shorter until arriving at the appropriate level of subdivisions. It also helps you not blow all your cookies at once right from the start.

In this case you can either add a few pick up notes in a pick up measure (also called an anacrussis) +.....4.../1.+.2.+.3..a4.+.//or rhythmically displace all the rhythms we've written to the right so we can insert a few longer note values at the beginning of the section //..+.....3...4.+./1.+.2..a3.+.4.+./1.+.2.+..e+a etc..

I want to talk about that tie from the "+ of 2". We might want to think about rhythmically displacing the phrase to set that tie over the bar line since having a rhythmic event falling on the downbeat of every measure sounds square and flat footed.

The kind of accompaniment rhythms you plan to use will influence your decision to include the warm up notes at all, or to place them before, on, or after the downbeat of the first measure. In jazz the bass and drums are often playing on the down beat already, so the pianist will often play on the up beat after the down beat so people can hear what the piano is playing.

If you want people to hear the entrance of the melody, you probably should avoid starting on the downbeat in that case or the up beat which is the "+ of 1". Unless it's an intimate setting such as only accompanied by solo guitar. Also, if any of the parts are busy such as if there are a lot of loud electric guitar strumming in that section of music, it will be hard for people to hear the entrance of the melody no matter where it starts in the section.

This consideration gives the composer more of a reason to start before the first beat with a few pick up notes. Also, for balance, if there is going to be a guitar or other improvisational instrument in the bridge that steps on the toes of the singer or melodic instrument, meaning its coming in before the actual start of the bridge, then the technique of starting ahead of the beginning of the section as in pick up notes, has already been used and will no longer be as much of a surprise and therefore less interesting if it has already been done.

This will give more impetus to start the melody after the downbeat in those earlier sections for varieties sake. Another thing to think aboutis that if you want to have short phrase lengths, starting after the beat is more conducive to that. An excellent example of short phrase lengths that breath is U2s tune "Where the Streets Have No Name" It starts; I want to run..................I want to hide.................

We've been honing things down making our melodic ability seemingly more simple but secretly more sophisticated. Lastly, I wanted to talk about 4 kinds of phrases or at least motifs; ones which start on the beat and end on the beat. Start off and end off. Start on and end off. Start off and end on.

Phrases or motifs that start on the beat are more conducive for beginning a chorus. Phrases that end on the beat are better for ending choruses. Phrases that start off the beat are better for starting verses. Phrases that end off the beat are better for ending verses.

Exemplary Choruses;

1+2+3+../1+2+3+4.//
On......OffOn.........On

1+2+3+../.+2+3+4.//
On......OffOff........On

1+2+3+4./1+2+3+4.//
On.......On.On........On

1+2+3+4./.+2+3+4.//
On.......OnOff.........On

Exemplary Verses

.+2+3+4./.+2+3+..//
Off.......OnOff......Off

.+2+3+4./1+2+3+..//
Off.......OnOn.......Off

.+2+3+../.+2+3+..//
Off......OffOff......Off

.+2+3+../1+2+3+..//
Off......OffOn......Off

Another example of short phrases or motifs depending on how you analyze them is Sting's song Fields of Gold; You'll remember me.........When the west wind moves...... Just straight eighth notes except for the last rhythmic event. Perhaps he decided that putting rhythnmic variety in on that first repeat would have been premature especially since the pitch changes on the last rhythmic event giving enough variety for those beginning moments of the song.

Achieving this kind of simplicity is something to strive for but is often quite elusive so if we climb back up the complexity ladder just a bit by breaking out of the flow of straight eighth notes a bit more than the 75% rule, at least the way we've been applying it, can give, then, it will be easier for beginners and amateur composers to come up with something viable.

A basic musical concept is repetition. If you've got some rhythmic cell at the level of the beat such as 1e+./1e.a/or 1.+a/ etc...we can call it "a". If you want to put another rhythmic cell on the next beat, there are only two options; repeat it as in "aa", or put a new one as in "ab." If we still need to fill up another beat we can get "aaa, abb, aba, or aab."

A return to previous material is another basic musical idea which "aba" provides. If we wanted to include a return to previous material in the other examples we'd minimally need "aaa b aaa", "aab a", or "abb a". Another concept to be aware of is the rhythmic rhyme scheme such as aaaa/aabb/abab/aaba/ or abcb. These last ideas of rhythmic rhyme scheme and return are good places for beginners to start because they're fairly simple but not so restrictive as the very short phrases like Sting and U2 are capable.

Music Composition/Songwriting How To 3

It's because a guitar has 6 strings of which 5 may be ringing plus the vocalist puts the number of voices near the acceptable ball park for complexity.

A vocalist with a pianist is another example for the same reason. We don't pair vocalist with only a flute player usually because then only two notes sound at the same time and fails most peoples criteria for sufficient complexity.

This also applies to song form which is where most books on music composition instruction start. A song can have one section that repeats which could be labeled AA.

Although it occurs in the classical repertoire, most modern people find it far too simplistic both as listeners and composers.

Another form is to have a first section with a contrasting section as in AB. The complexity has increased but not much and still fails the music psychology test.

After that comes ABA. This is just at the lower range of the acceptable complexity scale and you run the risk of boring more than half of your audience with something like this in my opinion.

When we come AA'BA'' we're making real progress. This is the form of a lot of jazz standards. The A's are called verses and the B is called a bridge and the whole thing is called a chorus.

This terminology is different when talking about pop music which we'll get to in a moment. The problem with jazz is that if each person takes a turn soloing over several repeats of the form then it fails the complexity test by containing too many sections of music.

AABA for the first statement of the material then AABA again for the first soloist and maybe played more than once. Then AABA again for the second soloist. and the third and the fourth.

So there's something like AABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABA etc.. That's 40 sections of music which is way beyond what most people will sit through especially if there's a drum solo.

Some people will "chunk" each AABA into a single section but that leaves 10 which is still too high.

Music and Semantics

Excellent article on music and semantics.

http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans9/reybrouck.htm

I especially like the musical plots expressed as graphics where he "metaphorizes;"

music as an expression of being in a container, expansion of a container, a container in motion, as moving from one container to another, depart and return to a path, taking an alternate path, of reaching a boundary, of breaking through a boundary, of breaking into another container, etc...

Hmmm... Music in a container would be in a certain form such as a passacaglia and perhaps stay in the same mode.

Moving from one container to another would be like changing in the middle of a passacaglia to a Red Hot Chilli Peppers type of tune.

Any other ideas?

Reaching a boundary might be like music developing but stopping short of the next expected development, but still one which might be considered outside of that particular form.

Such as music "progressing" from tonal to rapid changes of tonality, to atonal, to serial, perhaps not finally progressing to microtonal.

Any further suggestions?

I also just read another article about how in language parts of a sentence agree and in music the next motif or phrase will be in the same mode aka in agreement.

In language words can be plural and in music there are repetitions. That is the strategy for making words plural in Bahasa Indonesian. The word for child is anak and the word for children is anak-anak.

In language there are cases and in music there are prefixes, infixes and suffixes which may be similar to expanding or agglutinative transformations.

Another similarity is "dative": object toward which an activity moves. I think of goal tones in jazz.

Conjuctions are formed by transformational similitude.

In my notes I copied that verbs are represented in music by horizontal activity and that in music a noun can be seen as vertical activity.

But upon reflection that seems backwards. A chord has function the way a verb does and has an intrinsic action. That would be vertical not horizontal although chords eventually move horizontally.

I can’t think of a way horizontal activity could represent the "verbs" of music except for perhaps voice leading where in major the P4 wants to go to the M3 etc...

Expert and Real Music Based Systems

More recently, systems have been created which take input from actual music, even a live improvisation, and can create a meaningful response in real time. The computer takes the previous improvisation as input, performs transformations on it lightening fast and then gives a performance of its own nano seconds later. It’s these systems that are fooling experts, especially when they’re combined with a knowledge base such as a hundreds of licks which can also have transformations performed on those patterns as well.

The programmers don’t need to tell the computer to test for fitness before the computer puts out the music. If good music is used to initiate the system, then good music is coming out. Initiating an expert system with a fractal or a second order Markov chain just does not produce music as good as if it’s initiated with quality music. In that case, the computer is doing almost exactly the same thing that you’re favorite guitar god did to come up with all their albums. The computer listened to existing music and then changed it.

It’s not exactly the same though. A human’s musical cortex can be FAR more flexible and nuanced than a computer’s. And can process at a high level unconsciously and even while a person sleeps. But to get it that way takes tons of practice, intelligence and the capacity to memorize a lot of music. Yes, a computer can become an expert but it cannot do it at the same LEVEL of expertise that is possible by some very special humans and it cannot become an unconscious competent the way people can. If you ask some experts to teach you how to compose music the same way they do it, they can’t tell you. Or they say it’s all intuition. It’s not going too far to say that they actually consciously forgot how they learned what they do. They literally can’t remember. It was a lot of work and it has all been internalized. It’s proprioceptive now. Most of what they learned bypasses all of their conscious thought processes and takes a direct channel from the subconscious. It’s a huge benefit to them as a composer because everything has been streamlined. If you ask a computer how it’s composing music, there’s never a point in time when it can’t tell you exactly what it’s doing. That’s a huge benefit if you’re a student.

Experts are operating in the stratosphere and computers and beginning students are operating in the dust. If the computer was a beginning student, would the expert start at the level of the stratosphere in his lessons to it? A better approach might be to ask the question, “What parameters would an expert educator and musician give to a novice or intermediate student so that they can create a lot of good music quickly and easily but not get into too much trouble?”

It just needs to be good ENOUGH. If you demand the optimum, then yes, you need to study hard at Berklee for several years and pay the tuition. If you can double your investment after graduation it might be worth it. For some people it will work. For others it won’t. If you want to save time and test the market first with a smaller investment of time and money, yet still have your music take you and your listeners somewhere interesting then this course has what you need.
For the purpose of this course, what the real music initiated expert systems are doing is good enough for us at this point in time, until you can put in the practice to memorize a lot of music and acquire other compositional skills. Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’re musical cortex will create the desired output, although naturally it’s always fun to try.

The Evolutionary Approach
In the evolutionary approach the programmers say that being close to the style of songs that were put in is not good enough for high quality and creative new music. So, they extract sequences of notes that are conceived as melodic words within that style. Using them puts a limit on notes that can be adjacent to each other.

The “genes” of two different songs or two different styles can be mixed such as Bach and Jimi Hendrix and during the breeding process the computer introduces musically meaningful operations such as retrograde, inversion, transposition, augmentation, etc... This overcomes the truly horrible results with other methods that introduced "corruption" through random procedures. The genes in this case are the melodic and rhythmic series which are extracted from the music and not DNA.

The fitness of the results are judged by their adherence to voice leading rules. Some of the other rules used for evaluating fitness are the desired level of syncopation, melodic density, beat repetitions, the number of new notes, maximum interval sizes, the number of changes of direction, and types of note transitions. They also use "musical grammars" to narrow down the number of results that humans are given to pass or fail. Then about 1/3 of the weakest carriers of the material are killed off so the music would theoretically get better and better over time.
I wanted to say that I've met some people who resist thinking about their music consciously like the plague. Some people believe that doing it without thinking is best. But for many people, while they're trying to do that, their career is floundering and wasting precious time just like a lot of us have done. Some people are unconscious competents (they consistently write good music without thinking about it too much), some are conscious competents (who are good at explaining what the unconscious competents are doing) and some are incompetent (and need no introduction).
The unconscious competents can't tell us what they're doing. Hopefully that's who you're listening to. The conscious competents can tell us what the unconscious competents are doing. Hopefully they were our teachers. The incompetents hopefully aren't recording or teaching and god help that they're not us.

A few people have difficulty becoming competent through the conscious method. But it doesn't hurt them as a musician to try. Their intuition hasn’t gone anywhere just because they switched their brains on. If the unconscious method isn’t working for them, ragging on the people who study it consciously isn’t helping them one bit.
If you want to be a brain surgeon, you don't just wing it. You study hard everything that there is to know about it. If you have the instincts from listening and playing a lot of great music that causes you to write good music all the time or that allows you to break the "rules" for a good reason yet still come up with excellent music, then analyzing too much might get in the way. Most people aren't the Beatles.

For you to use the transformational methods that I’m recommending, it implies being able to either get your hands on a song book; in guitar tablature, traditional notation or some other way of presenting it. Or being able to transcribe the sounds you hear into notes on a page in some kind of notation. What kind of notation you use is not important. Actually, for some people, it’s not even necessary to use notation.

There’s a story about the origins of Jazz Bebop music. My friend Leandro from Argentina who I met in Bali told me an anecdote that he heard from an American musician. The story goes that the players who used to perform Bop had played the tunes so much and knew them so well, they would play musical games from the tunes when hanging out with their friends after a gig. They would challenge each other to try and play a song they knew backwards and if that was too easy, then they would try to play it backwards three times faster. According to him, that became the origins of Bebop. Clearly, they didn’t use pencil and paper to do that.

These transformational methods are what allowed them to come up with a new style of music and allowed me to produce more music than I needed for my first album. But I didn’t use an expert computer system. I did it on paper by hand. It was fast, fun and easy. I recorded a CD of metal gongs and xylophone music called "Garden of Contemplation" with Aparna Panshikar, a vocalist who was world music artist of the year in both Korea and India. It was under my Traditional Independent Record Label: Gongchime.

My arrangement of the "Kang Ding Love Song" and my composition "Vietnamese Melody" were forwarded at the largest independent A&R Company in the world, Taxi, to a Fitness and Yoga Meditation listing. In 2006 my tunes Vietnamese Melody and Champa were in the top 10 on the website Broadjam in the Asian category for several months. In 2007 my tune "Visiting Shaman" was in the #1 position in the Asian chart. Later my tunes Vietnamese Melody and Champa were accepted into a music library available to TV and film producers.
So, I’m convinced these methods work because they already worked for me and worked for the creators of Bebop. They can work for you too. Have a look at the compositional chart I used to create the music that was both forwarded and accepted.

How "The Write Song" Can Benefit You

This course is for people interested in learning more about melody composition. It has a lot of information which may be useful to both the novice and the professional. Even if you’re a professional, we guarantee that you’ll find more than one thing which you can put to use right away. Many people coming to my course have some background in guitar/bass playing, piano/keyboard playing, singing, percussion or have already studied songwriting/composition. If you’re tired of wracking your brain to come up with new stuff and you either don’t come up with enough material you like, just don’t come up with enough music period, or you’d like to come up with more music than you already do, then you are the person I’d like to reach.

Purpose
The purpose of this course is to educate our course takers about how compositions are put together and to provide a method of transforming existing music you already listen to into new material. We’re going to show you techniques that will allow you to take any and all aspects of the music you like, then tweak them to make your own but our focus is going to be on melody. However, you can also use these methods to compose music for the drum kit, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and keyboard part, as well as music for classical or jazz compositions. You can make the resulting music stylistically similar or entirely different than the original model. It’s up to you. The materials in this course can be used to compose music for pop, rock, metal, punk, classical, country, jazz, urban, rap, hip-hop, world music,…anything you like.

Why this book was written
We all have our favorite music, either on the radio, records, tapes, C.D.’s or on the web. Maybe you know someone who makes up their own music. Maybe you’ve wondered about what composers do or the order of steps involved. This course is a record of the learning I have acquired during my explorations into music composition. I realized in my early attempts to find information about composing music that there was a lack of some of the specific kinds of knowledge necessary to avoid the hit and miss method of my beginning efforts. Part of my problem was that I hadn’t listened to enough music analytically, a skill that’s not easy to acquire by oneself. I highly encourage you to analyze your favorite songs with whatever help you can acquire either through a university class, a knowledgeable friend, composition and songwriting books or private music teacher. I had looked at and listened to a lot of music but didn't know what to look or listen for even after working towards a Bachelors degree in music. Me and a lot of other people thought we knew but we didn't. I read all the books on writing music I could find but there were still some gaps in my knowledge that made composition an inefficient guessing game. Even the books on classical and jazz composition seemed to either leave things out, to lack an organizational scheme, used examples outside of my experience or were more technical than this present course assuming too much familiarity with the content. I’m really excited to share this course with others so they could possess, in one place, the important but elusive information to fill in the gaps left by other writers and teachers.

What you will get
Now I’m going to make some outrageous claims. This course is unique because there are students who are the inspiration behind this course that studied from the largest number of experts and studied more intensively with those experts than any other students who have ever lived. It might be an outrageous claim but it’s true. Now they have become teachers and are ready to teach us. Our new teachers have learned to consistently do what our favorite musicians do: to create new and effective compositions. And do it both quickly and easily. Even better than that, they can explain to us how we can also start doing that right away. I won’t tell you who our new teachers are just yet but it will become clear shortly. They won’t be teaching you everything that is normally taught in university composition courses whether pop/rock, classical or jazz. And yet what you take away will be good enough to make experts and the average listener believe that you too are also an expert. At that moment you will actually BE an expert.

Minimally, what you will need to know
Some knowledge of musical concepts is assumed to be possessed, the definitions of which may not be clear without demonstrations by a mentor in person. I’ve placed definitions to new concepts in close proximity to the words that introduce them and tried to make them as obvious as possible. Every attempt has been made to make definitions clear but because of the technical nature of the content they may not all necessarily be comprehensible to the uninitiated.

On the Ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood

Mantle Hood was born on June 24th, 1918 in Springfield, Illinois. He was an American ethnomusicologist. He specialized in gamelan music.

He created the first university program in America for ethnomusicology. He recommended that students actually learn to play what they studied, which was a new idea at the time. He studied piano and played sax in jazz venues while a teenager.

He moved to Los Angeles in the 30's and returned there after serving during World War II. For 5 years after 1945, he studied music under composer Ernst Toch and received a master's degree in composition in UCLA in 1951. He was also a Fulbright scholar and studied Indonesian music under Jaap Kunst in Amsterdam at the university.

He wrote a dissertation on pathet called The Nuclear Theme as a Determinant of Patet in Javanese Music in 1954. "He was a fellow at the East-West Center of Arts and Sciences and a Senior Distinguished Professor at West Virginia University." After his doctorate he spent two years in Indonesia and did field research through a Ford Foundation fellowship.

He became a faculty member at UCLA and made the first gamelan performance program in the U.S. in 1958. "This set of instruments (bronze gongs and metallophones) was cast in Java and given by the Javanese the honorific name Venerable Dark Cloud to describe its sound. It is widely regarded as the finest gamelan in the United States."

In 1960, he started the Institute for Ethnomusicology at UCLA. It inspired more than 100 gamelan groups in the U.S. In 1986 for his research, he received honors from the Indonesian government.

At the time, he also received the title of Ki meaning ‘venerable’ and was inducted into the Society of Indonesian National Heroes known as the Dharma Kusuma. He wrote many scholarly books, journal and encyclopedia articles. In particular he wrote The Ethnomusicologist in 1971, Music in Indonesia in 1972, and The Evolution of Javanese Gamelan and nearly 100 chapters for other books.

He could speak the Balinese and Javanese languages fluently as well as languages from the other Indonesian Islands. He retired in Hawaii in 1973 where he composed music, was editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and contributed to the Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Encyclopdie de la Musique. He came out of retirement in the 1980s to serve as Senior Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County until 1996.

He also created an ethnomusicology program there as well. He was a professor of music at West Virginia University and a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Wesleyan, Indiana, Drake and the University of Ghana. He was also president of the Society for Ethnomusicology from 1965 until 1967.

In 1999, he was the Charles Seeger lecturer at the SEM annual conference. "In 2002, Hood was awarded the prestigious USINDO award by the United States-Indonesia Society, which recognized his contributions to U.S.-Indonesia relations." Within Organology he was the first to propose a new category called electronophones for electronic musical instruments.

He married twice. His first wife was Shirley Hood and they divorced. His 2nd wife, Hazel Chung, taught Indonesian and African dance with who Dr. Hood collaborated in his research. In addition to his wife, of Ellicott City, survivors include one son from his first marriage, Marlowe Hood of Paris; three sons from his second marriage, Maiyo J. Hood of Shanghai, Mitro A. Hood of Baltimore and Made M. Hood of Melbourne, Australia and three grandchildren.

Southeast Asian Melody

Southeast Asia's melodic development is very similar to the Indian. But it gives a straight melody with an ornamented version and variations such as a rhythmically altered version all presented simultaneously. Voice crossing is integral to gamelan music. It’s used to maintain interest.

Sometimes the melody is played at different tempos simultaneously. Western melody is very goal oriented. Gamelan melody is not like this and is supposed to create a timeless feeling which it does quite effectively. Like the classical music of India and Korea, the introduction usually has a part where there is no rhythmic beat. The Kebyar form has a melody in unison during the intro with no beat or it occasionally plays interlocking rhythms alternated with melody played by different groupings of the instruments. It plays interlocking variations in subsequent sections. It also has a grand finale beginning slow and ending fast just like Indian and Korean music.

Before moving from the intro to the first section, the rhythm can completely break down while the musicians play fast but soft and making sure their part does NOT match rhythmically with anyone else’s as a transition. In the first section it has interlocking rhythms which is also found in the music of Africa, Cuba and Haiti though not as much in a melodic form but only in a rhythmic one.

Gamelan music is based on a cantus firmus similar to the occidental sacred music that was based on the ancient melodies of Gregorian chant. The scale is based on ten equal divisions and their first scale was slendro which is about equal to C,D,F,G and A. It’s a pentatonic scale. This scale is used in temple services which are a combination of Budhism, Hinduism in Bali and Buddhism and Islam in Java. It is considered more dignified and less passionate than the pelog scale which sounds angry or sad to the South East Asians.

Pelog was created after the Dutch invasion. The native people fought bravely for a long time but were cornered and about to be captured at which point the people who were still alive, of which there were a large number, committed mass suicide. The music created using Pelog is supposed to sound like the thunder of war and the clash of armies. It became popular very quickly and the forms that use it such as Kebyar, were never elitist music played in the courts of the king. It is a very recent development.

Pelog has three forms known as patet. The first is roughly equal to C, Db, Eb, G and Ab a kind of Phrygian pentatonic scale. Anything played in pelog immediately sounds exotic to westerners because of the flat second degree and the strange skipping of F and B(b). One instrument in the ensemble plays neighbor notes around the cantus in a tenor voice where the cantus note is the middle of three notes. There are several different kinds of interlock! ing rhythms in gamelan music. The first is just a repeated note. The second is in the range of a fifth and where the two rhythms coincide, they meet on the fifth. The lower voice of the interlocking rhythm is comosed after the cantus. The upper voice is composed after that.

The music has breaks and fill to add variety and to mark sections. Gamelan music has a colotomic structure where the largest gong marks the beginning and ending of large sections. Usually only the most experienced musicians play it, since its placement is so important. It plays every 32 or 64 beats, for example depending on the structure. Gongs for the colotomic structure are often gloriously out of tune with the rest of the ensemble. There are higher gongs which divide the structure further.

One set of gongs plays on the last beat of every measure. This is similar to Korean music which places the accent in the same place and very different from western musical practice which usually places the accent on the first beat of every measure. The rhythms usually coincide on the last beat of a measure and meet on the fifth as I said before. When the music gets fast the players divide the music between them in hockett so that each person takes a turn playing each note of the interlocking rhythm. This technique is applied to all instrumental ensembles even one made up only of flutes. The higher pitched and fastest instruments are played by the youngest members of the ensemble.

Playing in a gamelan orchestra is considered a community service. Songs are often named after the doings of animals. The cantus has definite methods for targeting destination notes. Just like classical and jazz. The most senior musician plays the drums and/or rebab, a bowed string instrument. Flutes play in unison with the rebab.

Gamelan Music

This article is about gamelan music. A Gamelan is a bronze orchestra found in various cultures in Southeast Asia which uses upwards of about 13 people.

Core Melody:

It has a core melody calledl Pokok in Bali and Balungan in java. It acts as a skeleton on which all the other parts are based. This is called heterophony but Southeast Asian heterophony is very unusual in that it doesn't have just a melodic line and then another with simple embellishments. It has several simultaneous embellishments that make the original melody virtually unrecognizeable in the new part to the uninitiated. Anyway, the skeleton is played on the Calung in Bali and the Slenthem in Java. It's also played on the Kenongs and Kempul in Java if there are enough of each. The skeleton is related loosely to the Cantus firums of church music and Gregorian chant where a sacred melody was placed in the bass and played two or three times as slow as the original then this became the basis for a new composition.

Melody:

Bali and Java have melodic cadences which are encluturated and not at all what westerners would consider to be a melodic cadence such as the leading tone in classical music going to a member of the next chord or chromatic notes resolving as in jazz. Bali and Java utilize a scale known as Slendro which was and is used in the religious services and edifices for Buddhist and Hindu in Bali and Buddhist and muslim in Java. The Slendro scale is considered to be more dignified and less passionate than the newer scale known as Pelog which sounds angry or sad to the Indonesians because it was developed after the Dutch invasion and a mass suicide of Indonesians upon the prospect of being captured. Pelog is thought to sound like the warfare and soldiers in an altercation. It quickly became popular and is a fairly recent development. The music of pelog of which the Kebyar style in Bali is an example, was never an elitist music of the courts. Balinese Kebyar using pelog is loud, fast, has a grand finale and uses a rhythmic breakdown as a transition after the introduction.

In Bali there are a set of instrumnts that play an interlocking rhythm which are tuned about a quarter step apart and this produces binaural beats. Bali also utlizes cymbals called Ceng Ceng which are not normally used in Javanese music.

The gamelan in Java accompanies performances of the puppet show known as Wayan Kulit usually retelling the Ramayana.

Gamelan composition is colotomic. In processs... More later....

Indian Ragas

Indian Ragas:

Styles of Traditional Indian Music are based on the raga which is a composed scale that traditional says may have different ascending and descending forms similar to the western melodic minor scale. However, ragam are not scales or modes. Ragam have characteristic phrases called pakad if there is only one or swarup if there are several. Indians choose contrasting ragas for the next piece in a performance unlike Turkish musicians who usually say the next mode should be a direct development or Arabian music where frequent modulations should go unnoticed.

The introduction in Indian music is a long, long improvisation without a set meter. The composed section is in a particular rhythmic cycle. It has improvisational elements similar to jazz. The final movement uses speed picking. The first part of the fixed composition is confined to the lower and middle octaves. The second part extends from the middle to the upper octaves. A good musician should be able to play for more than one hour and not repeat the same phrase twice. Indian music does not allow multi-layered compositions. They say it would be rude to speak while someone else is speaking.

The most popular Indian Thaats/scales are;

Bilawal C D E F G A B1/4sharp. Its basically a major scale with a very sharp leading tone. ,

Bhairav C Db E F G A B1/8sharp. It has only a slightly raised leading tone.

Khamaj C D E F G A1/8sharp Bb1/8sharp. This is India's mixolydian.

Todi C Db Eb F# G Ab B1/8sharp.

Kalyan C D E F# G A1/4# B1/4#. This is India's Lydian mode.

Kafi CDEbF# G A1/4b B1/4#.

The indications for sharpedness and flatedness are only approximate.

Ragas often have two notes that are emphasized, usually a fifth apart, each appearing in a separate tetrachord. Both Persian and Indian music may have changing tones like the two versions of the melodic minor scale but Indian music never modulates. (There may be some recent exceptions).

Ornaments of Classical Indian Music:

The primary ornaments in Indian music which are some of the more beautiful available to the modern composer are portamento, a short grace not of low intensity, encirclement by microtones sometimes played in a series, fast oscillation but slight pitch variation and a lesser frequency oscillation but greater amplitude of vibration, three repeated notes and Andola and Murahan which have no western equivalent.

Indian Improvisation:

Classical Indian improvisation involves using the common motifs for a particular raga and standard ornaments. Motifs are turned into variations by rhythmic augmentation, diminution, retrograde, inversion and an unusual technique of adding notes such as playing the first not of a motif then playing the first and second, then playing the first, second and third etc…until the whole thing is revealed. This is also done in reverse order and backwards. Motifs are also sequenced through rhythmic displacement and note order permutations such as 1234, 1243, 1324 etc…

The moods created by music are carefully controlled. Indian musicians say that some sentiments are appropriate for music and others aren’t. Sadness and joy are proper but humor is not. Humor is o.k. in the theater however.

Thats the end of this discussion on Styles of Traditional Indian Music.

About The Music

I compose music because its a big part of myself. If I don't put something on paper and play an instrument everyday, I will get cranky. Now, when I'm composing music, I start with the big picture and I mean really big.

In talking about it, it quickly veers into politics, sociology and the philosophy of religion. I ask what I'm trying to communicate. I'm usually trying to communicate something mystical, transcendant, infinite, communal and/or abundant.

I try to recreate a feeling of the mystical, transcendant and infinite through the use of drones, chimes, gongs and finger cymbals, and through the use of rhythmic cycles. I also try to create a sense of transcendence by including techniques and instrumental timbres foreign to my own roots of rock, jazz, classical, guitar, sax, violin and piano.

As far as the music communicating or, better yet, actually building and strengthening ties between community members, I try to write music with at least a few easy parts so that anyone, even children, can also participate and I try to have a high tolerance for change and diversity based on the needs of other people playing with me. However, even I have limits. I would like to create music for people's daily activities or at least tied to utility somehow such as when two people make love, exchange massage or good conversation.

I'd like to explore more dance and rave music. Sometimes, I try to mix quartal jazz piano voicings (because its good for minor and pentatonic music)

My Bio IV

I have written more music than I can count, as well as published articles on music composition, aesthetics and ethnomusicology (http://www.paradisemoon.com/thai_main/Huahin/thai_instruments_intro.htm). My music combines melodic motives from jazz, rhythmic motives from the Middle East, India, Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bali,

My Bio

I majored in music at Northern Arizona University. I studied music composition with Bruce Reiprich and Kenneth Rummery. I directed NAU preparatory school's jazz combos I and II and played bass in their big band.

I also played in NAU's steel drum ensemble under Steve Hemphill, president of the Arizona Chapter of the percussive arts society.

I have traveled to Miami and heard the Miami Cuban sound. I have heard; the blues played proper in New Orleans, Mariachi music in Puerto Penasco, Mexico, the traditional music in Korea and went to a traditional Piphat Mon performance at a temple in Hua Hin, Thailand.