Eureka! Sainkho Namtchylak, Night Birds (Was: catchiness, traditional music, (metronomically regular) beat, Sainkho Naimtchuk, Gregorian Chant)

by Xin Wei Sha
Here’s what I wanted to play for you :

Sainkho Namtchylak 
Night Birds
Lost Rivers album (1992)

No computer synthesis.
Riding the fold between human and nonhuman 

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On Feb 29, 2016, at 6:30 PM, Brenda McCaffrey <brendamc@asu.edu> wrote:

Hi Xin Wei,

This is ravishing.  Thank you.

Hmmm...how do you think our experience of gravity affects our musicality?

-Brenda

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 5:36 PM, Xin Wei Sha <Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu> wrote:
Dear  AME 531 Seminarians,

Thanks again to Dr. Garth Paine for a lovely set of exercises and ear- and mind-opening musical examples.   (I’ve asked for the names of composers and works.)

Let me offer a followup to the discussion we had…

(1) Re. “traditional” music.
The appeal to “traditional” music for different ancient cultures does not distinguish any  universals about  what is tuneful or rhythmic or “catchy” or musical: 

Mongolian Tuva throat singing

Sainkho Naimtchuk, one of the most extraordinary singers in the world

Sainkho Namtchylak - Order To Survive (Germany 2002)
then


And some example of “traditional” music:
Khoomii singing


(2) Metrically regular beat-based music versus other kinds of music — e.g. melismatic song

Talking about tapping toes to a metrically regular beat.  This is an artifact of very very recent invention — of electrical mechanical devices.   The notion of metronomic performance is very recent in human history:

Bonus, Alexander Evan. The Metronomic Performance Practice: A History of Rhythm, Metronomes, and the Mechanization of Musicality. PhD Dissertation, Case Western Reserve Univ., 2010.

If humans have vocalized and sung for say 5000+ years, then the notion of (mechanically periodic) beat occupies a pretty trivial portion of that time.     Beat-oriented music is of course quite common and widespread — even Sainkho Namtchylak sings songs with periodicity.  However as you can hear, she also sings music that is clearly musical, even passionately musical, but whose power and appeal is not based on beat.  This is not new, but ancient.

Gregorian Chant is a glorious example of music that is melismatic, rather than beat-based.  Gregorian Chant ebbs and flows, rises and falls with the intertwining of both the patterns of closed and open vocalisation of Latin speech and the inhalation and exhalation of breath which varies in length and intensity with the sweeps of meaning, syllabification, closing / opening of the nasal, vocal, lung cavities, the stresses of the poetry, all of which lead to a gentle irregularity.  

Singing, like bowed stringed musical instruments, is characterized  continuous flow, breath, but not beat.

One of the most ravishing songs of the past 1500 years is the opening of the Gregorian Pentecost Mass:
Gregorian Chant: Dominica Pentecostes: I. Introitus (Spiritus Domini)

(Domenica di Pentecoste, Introito VIII modo, Schola Gregoriana Mediolanensis, Giovanni Vianini, Milano, Italia)

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(3)  Also, even when the music clearly has temporal accent and pulse, it may not be “catchy” to your ear.  Appealing to “traditional” music won’t guarantee “catchiness-to-your-ear.”  I would hazard that to ears habituated to American popular music from the past 10-30 years, especially post iTunes, traditional Kabuki music may not be so catchy:
Azuma Kabuki Musicians Nagauta Music

And then it may – à chacun son goût (“to each his own taste”).  And therein lies the rub. :  musicality is as much a question of the putative subject (the listening “you”) as it is of object (sound waves, pieces of flesh pressing on pieces of wood or metal at specific times ), and the social-cultural context. ( Social-cultural-geological-cosmological context, if we read farther into Deleuze & Guattari, Simondon, Whitehead. )   Garth’s exercise introduces this subjectification by having one human be the “sensor” for the other.

(4)
In a sense, this whole year-long seminar is devoted to opening up to the universe of pattern available to us when we sail farther from the shores of habits inherited from combinatoric or mechanical, or graph-theoretic  tropes that have become frozen in by the reductive and simplistic forms of  late 20c computationalism.

A grand challenge for those of us who are doing research — adding to the sum of human knowledge using the technologies of our age, which are shot through and through with computational logic — is whether and how we can articulate media = matter + energy + affect with more poetry, nuance, breath.

Rather than reducing music (organized sound) and musical performance to formal computationally popularized patterns, what can we learn from organized sound and (live) performance to inform a more expanded notions of pattern, computation, articulation, language, representation … ?

Xin Wei