Simha Arom

The Use of Play-Back Techniques in the Study of Oral Polyphonies

T he transcription of recorded polyphonic and polyrhythmic music presents a special difficulty-that of separating each vocal or instrumental line from the whole in such a manner that each may be transcribed and analyzed separately, yet be examined within the overall context of the work. The transcriber of polyphonic and polyrhythmic music, then, faces two discrete problems: determination of each musicians part, and the coherent relation of each part to the others.2 The recording process which I have conceived and implemented solves these two problems by isolating the separate parts and localizing their points of imbrication within the polyphonic texture. Once cognizant of all of the individual parts and their relationships to each other, a synthetic reconstruction of the polyphonic piece becomes possible.

Polyphonies et polyrythmies instrumentales d'Afrique centrale : structure et méthodologie

Typologie des polyrythmies et des polyphonies. Organisation et notation du mode pentatonique africain. Examen systematique des quatres types envisages : polyrythmie stricte| polyphonie par polyrythmie : le hoquet| polyphonie par instruments melodiques| polyphonies et polyrythmies associees

An interactive experimental method for the determination of musical scales in oral cultures

The contrapuntal vocal polyphony of the Aka Pygmies is based on a pentatonic scale but the nature of this scale is difficult to determine by ear. To overcome this problem and to circumvent difficulties of articulating such abstract concepts as musical scales which, for the Aka, are not subject to verbalisation, a method based on the use of a synthesiser was conceived and applied in a series of experiments among the Pygmies. In these experiments, polyphonic music of their own culture was simulated with different underlying scale models and submitted to their cultural judgment. This method was shown not only to cope with the initial problem but also to provoke a series of non-verbal interactions that open new dimensions for the study of cognitive aspects of musical systems in oral traditions.

Corroborating External Observation by Cognitive Data in the Description and Modelling of Traditional Music

Any repertoire of traditional music - i.e., considered by the members of a cultural community to be part of their collective heritage - may be said to behave like a formal system. In the great majority of civilizations with oral traditions, musical systems do not give rise to abstract speculation. The theory which underlies each of them is not formally expressed, thus remaining implicit. In such a context, to describe the systematic organization of a given repertoire amounts to unearthing the rationale of (1) the principles and rules by which it is governed, (2) the ways in which it functions. Modelisation consists in eliciting the minimal utterance to which each performer ultimately refers, when actualizing any one of the musical pieces in the system, or - in a multipart music - any of its component parts. The validity of both description and modelisation results from the interaction of Western conceptual tools and the criteria of relevance obtained from pronouncements by the recipients of the tradition. Formulating the theory of a musical system requires that at each stage of the investigative process the natives cognitive grasp of musical practice and its symbolic imports - whether this grasp is conceptual or metaphoric - be corroborated by the data gathered through observation. In this paper I describe three case studies of research among “living laboratories” of African culture bearers, each of which illustrates a principle of such collective cognitive systems.

African polyphony and polyrhythm: A classification of African polyphonies

INTRODUCTION For many European musicologists, the word ‘polyphony’ describes a technique of the art of composition that belongs to their tradition alone. In the Western world, polyphony dates from the end of the first thousand years AD. It blossomed in the school of Notre-Dame of Paris around 1200, particularly in the organa of Perotin. It has since been established, in various forms, as one of the fundamental techniques of composition in European Art music, of which it was at one time the principal characteristic. If the idea of polyphony is accepted in such a narrow sense, it cannot be applied to the music of any other civilisation, whether this be the orchestral ensembles of Bali or the choral and instrumental ensembles of Black Africa. Let us quote the radical crew expressed by Pierre Boulez in the Encyclopedie de la Musique published by Fasquelle: The evolution of music in a polyphonic direction is a cultural phenomenon that belongs exclusively to the civilisation of Western Europe. In the various musical civilisations that preceded it, even those that rested on theoretically solid foundations, true polyphony, the principle of independent part movement , which characterises Western counterpoint, is not observable therein whatever certain musicologists say. In so-called exotic musics, one frequently finds […] all kinds of superimposition but these are caused by simultaneous relationships in time, and not independent movement of parts. ( Enc. Fasquelle 1958: 1, 584, ‘Contrepoint’) This typically ethnocentric opinion differs fundamentally from that of Jacques Chailley who, in the Larousse Dictionnaire de la Musique , recalls that ‘until very recently, polyphony was regarded as an invention of the learned Western world, where it was first mentioned in a treatise attributed to Hucbald in the ninth century.’