Shell music

Anton Varela is a skilled Galician Gaita maker and performer from Ferrol in North Western Spain. His wife, Raquel Fontes, is equally proficient on cunchas, scallop shells used as scraped-percussion instruments. Here they are playing together during last week's Rencontre des Luthiers et Maitres Sonneurs in Central France. Notice the way Raquel strikes the shells together to accent main beats, scrapes to continue the rhythm, and never overdoes it - pausing at strategic places to give the music a lift. Moitas grazas, Anton e Raquel!

Haydn - and his source communities

We like to think of the "great composers" as God-like creatures who create music purely using their own imagination. But is composition mostly inspiration, or mostly perspiration?

Since March 31st is Joseph Haydn's birthday, his "London" symphony could serve as an example. Haydn composed symphony 104 while on a prolonged visit to England in 1795. The last movement goes like this:

While he worked for the Esterházy family in Eisenstadt, Austria, Haydn became familiar with the music of Croatian peasants in surrounding villages. One of the songs he learned was "Oj, Jelena, Jelena, jabuka zelena", which became the basis for the last movement of symphony 104. Since Haydn included a drone in the piece, he probably had heard the song played at dance tempo on the local "gajde" bagpipe. Below is a guitar version being taught to schoolchildren in Croatian Međimurje by Lidija Bajuk:



Should Haydn have informed his fans about the sources of his music? Written "trad, arranged by JH" on the manuscript? Perhaps offered to share some of the money earned from symphony 104 with the peasants from Eisenstadt?

How would we compare the situation in 1795 with the rights of source communities today?

communality on the radio dial

Long before the Internet, one trawled the airwaves - searching for treasure.

Community radio during the late 1960's had a profound effect on many listeners in the San Francisco Bay Area, including myself. Discovering that there were alternatives to standard political rhetoric and top-forty entertainment was an encouragement, opening vistas in unexplored directions.

Cese McGowan, Indi Higham and Hugh McAllorum were important radio voices at KTAO in Los Gatos during that time, but it was station manager Lorenzo Milam who was most influential, albeit behind the scenes. Lorenzo would assign a task to a DJ - for example to make a program about love songs from different cultures using the gigantic ethnic record collection at the station. Or organising a five day Javanese gamelan festival in December. Or an overview of African drumming, Norteño music, Irish bagpipes, political debate or renaissance poetry...

Through his work at KTAO, Lorenzo Milam was attempting to create situations for intellectual stimulation that he himself had experienced a decade before while volunteering at KPFA Berkeley. He writes:

How wonderful, then, it was, to find this communality on the radio dial. Those of us who had a love for Joyce and the Beats and Marlowe and Bach and Dallapiccola and Telemann and Louis Armstrong and Blind Gary Davis and the Music of Macedonia had, at the same time, an antidote to the world that had suddenly gone off the track. Here was a voice of reason, one beamed at us with gentle calm, telling us that it was, indeed, wrong to destroy the country that we loved for a single, dark, knock-'em-dead world view.

The devil's drones

Madonna has done it. So have Marilyn Manson, Ozzy Osbourne, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

Roncos do Diabo is one of many music groups that play around with the "sinfulness" of music. Their name means "the devil's drones", and their performing style is considerably wilder than most Portuguese folk bands.

Você quer dançar, diabinho?

Žminjska Polka

In 1999, Livio Morosin & Dario Marušić released the album "Bura Tramuntana". One of the cuts is "Žminjska Polka", a traditional Istrian dance tune in a new arrangement. "Žminjska Polka" became an instant hit on the Croatian pop charts, and is still heard regularly on tv, radio and at clubs. The CD received the "porin" award for best ethno-album in 2000.

Participatory traditions II

Another festival that accentuates participation above passive entertainment is "Rencontres Internationales de Luthiers et Maîtres Sonneurs" organized by "Comité George Sand" in Central France. As the festival title suggests, this started out as an international meeting of makers and players of traditional musical instruments. However, over the years it grew into perhaps the biggest informal gathering of people interested in traditional music and dance in France. It is difficult to decide whether the activities arranged by the festival committee itself are more important, or those that happen spontaneously in the campgrounds, the streets or in the pubs. Most participants would probably say the latter. See for yourself:



Since 1976, the festival has been held during the weekend closest to the Bastille holiday in the little village of Saint Chartier, about 15km from Chateauroux. However, this year it has been moved 5km away to the only slightly larger town of La Chatre. Read more about the festival at http://www.saintchartier.org

Intimate knowledge for everyone

One of the biggest attractions of social media such as YouTube is their 'show and tell' functionality. Being able to visually present phenomena directly from a source, without having to add additional analysis or description. Many crafts that were once known only to a select few are now suddenly available to anyone interested. This has had the effect of empowering people who otherwise could be heard only within local communities, but also bringing up the question of who owns various types of knowledge.
Finbar Furey is an Irish uilleann piper who became famous in the 1960s as an instrumentalist as well as a singer/songwriter. In a series of YouTube videos, Pauric Mather visits Finbar in his workshop, where Finbar shows his method for making reeds for one of the worlds most cantankerous wind instruments. "The pipes are a nightmare to take with with you", he says, but then gives tips on how players can keep their instruments going, even if they are traveling to Dubai or Texas: