Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
85
result(s) for
"Tenzer, Michael"
Sort by:
Gusti Putu Madé Geria’s Theory for Balinese Gamelan
The contents of a set of undated, handwritten notebooks by Balinese musician Gusti Putu Madé Geria (1906–83) are first assessed in historical perspective. He was in effect the first Balinese musicologist, but his work evokes older anonymous lontar (palm leaf manuscripts) of Balinese scribes, themselves heir to traditions of Hindu-Buddhist thought. Some of his descriptions of instruments and ensembles mimic the discourse of high priests and invoke unseen worlds. I will briefly consider their relationship to specific lontar and to Tantrism (Bandem 1986, Becker 1993). Geria’a analytical thinking dwells in a network of ideas bridging his precolonial umwelt with an inchoate Indonesian modernity. He invented a witty cornucopia of terms in Balinese for instrument functions and melodic patterns where none previously existed in oral tradition. His lexicon is a product of his insight into particular linear-intervallic structures and their motile impulses. Geria in effect provides a theory enabling close readings of “classical“ Balinese gamelan repertoires, which teem with these patterns. I introduce a selection of them, amplifying (and culturally decoding) Geria’s classifications and notations with a more granular but, I aver, ethnographically relevant approach. The last part of the paper sorts Geria’s terms by lexical field: the natural world, emotion or character, action and perception, and the unseen world. Finally I compare Geria’s lexicon with my own published work on the same musical material, assessing the epistemological gaps within each and between the two.PEER REVIEWER: Ed GarciaVIDEO CREDITS (left to right and front to back row in Part IV): Walker Williams, Putu Ichi Oka Swaryandana, Michael Tenzer, Oscar Smith, Iljung Kim, and John Lai. Videography, recording, and editing, March 2023: Jason Winikoff.
Journal Article
Transforming African Musical Cycles
This exercise in speculative music theory juxtaposes two celebrated African cyclical structures of very different origin—the Zimbabwean mbira dzavadzimu tradition’s Nhemamusasa (the kashaura, or primary part, only) and the recording of the vocal Hindehu from the Central African Republic—and hypothesizes deep structural connections between them. Rhythm and grouping, and the idea of directed compositional process—specifically, the process of transposition—are highlighted. I depart from a hunch that the cycles, even with different numbers of pulsations and available pitch-classes, are based on compelling principles of equivalence. The presentation moves step-by-step from one piece to the other, using transformations that leave most crucial structural features undisturbed. Bookending this process are detailed analyses of the two pieces themselves. The exercise raises questions about musical ontology and the history of compositional practice, and the subsequent discussion considers the findings in the light of several music theory rubrics. It also contextualizes those findings in terms of diverse strands of African ethnomusicology research.
Journal Article
Chasing the Phantom
Balinese composer Dewa Alit (b. 1973) splits his time between home and abroad, absorbing many kinds of music. His latest gamelan work (2016) is Ngejuk Memedi , from the Balinese ngejuk , to chase, and memedi , a feared phantom of the Balinese unseen world that takes human form. It animates his evolving desire for a “broader conception of what gamelan is, one based on its relationship to other cultures” (Alit in Tenzer 2011, 134), while submitting to the phantom-like elusiveness of the goal. In analyzing part of Ngejuk Memedi , this article argues for an emergent musical supra-culturalism embedded in innovative rhythmic practices. In Alit’s case, three strata of metrically dissonant parts are superposed in a continually changing relationship. His procedures are suggestive of those of other contemporary musicians from around the globe, whose kinship with Alit comes into focus once one delimits the intellectual and aesthetic desiderata they have challenged themselves to explore. Often notated by composers but transmitted and performed orally, such music is highly conceptual but deeply embodied in felt groove. Its signature element is the juxtaposition or layering of complex, asymmetrical periodicities that are rare or unknown in source traditions, but trace to ideas circulating from African, Indian, Western and other art musics that have become common currency. In these intersecting senses, they comprise a new phenomenon.
Journal Article
Meditations on Objective Aesthetics in World Music
This essay opens a dialogue between ethnomusicology and neo- Darwinism as promulgated by biologist Richard Dawkins and others. The first half engages quantum physicist David Deutsch’s much-discussed The Beginning of Infinity (2011), which integrates neo-Darwinism with the epistemology of objective knowledge developed by Karl Popper. Along the way Deutsch suggests that aesthetics with universal reach, akin to scientific facts, must be discoverable. Both Deutsch and Dawkins argue that traditional (meaning nonpost- Enlightenment) societies squelch unfettered knowledge creation in order to preserve themselves, and hence are unlikely to develop objective knowledge. Yet ethnomusicologists show that music can express social values but also point beyond them to unsuspected realms. If there exist aesthetic facts with universal reach in traditional music, can they be identified in these realms? Can ethnomusicology be an arena for discussing such questions? The second half of the essay engages in an analysis of a Ba-Benzele Pygmy tune in search of its objective aesthetic properties and their implications.
Journal Article
REVIEWS
Some observers have aptly compared it to the \"learned style\" of the string quartet; and one delights to imagine how enchanted Haydn would have been. Since it happens to be from Bali, the genre has lured increasing numbers of international students in recent decades - hundreds or perhaps even thousands by now who have made the pilgrimage there to learn and practise and eventually disseminate it throughout the West and Japan. Gray is one of many Balinese and foreign students who apprenticed at the feet of I Wayan Loceng (d. 2006), a brilliant, wry, demanding, and charismatic teacher, and generational heir to the historically crucial regional tradition of Sukawati village. Subsequent chapters address each point on the continuum at length and from several angles, including copious staff transcription, the voluble comments of teachers and players, and the author's own analysis.
Journal Article
Generalized Representations of Musical Time and Periodic Structures
Here, Tenzer discusses challenging approach to the study of musical time and \"periodic structures.\" Drawing on his experience as a performer and composer of both Balinese gamelan and Western art music, he proposes a theory that \"engages the study of musics of the world. It is a parsimonious framework for categorizing such instances. In the course of presenting it, however, he nonetheless alights in the real world of music from time to time, mentioning actual genres to refuel and to barely hint at the kinds of relationships between culturally distant genres that could ultimately develop.
Journal Article
Identity and Genre in Gamelan Gong Kebyar: An Analytical Study of Gabor
Gabor is a piece for Balinese gamelan gong kebyar that deploys concurrent textural layers moving at different speeds, organized around a slow melody measured by recurring patterns of gong strokes. The melody, drumming, gong patterns, layer figuration, and tempo vary throughout the work, creating not only sectional articulations but also moments that Balinese find deeply expressive. Specialized ethnomusicological studies that analyze music such as this aim to link emic perception and terminology to those of outsiders. But by prioritizing the views of “others,” such analysis rarely achieves the depth and particularity toward which theorists strive in their unselfconscious, value-invested approaches to individual Western works.
This essay is a collaboration between an ethnomusicologist and a music theorist in search of ways to achieve richer analyses of non-Western music. We first address methodological issues that pertain to Gabor: what its essential features are, how they can be appropriately represented, and what theories those representations entail. The ontology of a Balinese “composition” is negotiable at multiple levels that bear crucially on what insider and outsider analyses deem structurally essential. We begin our study by comparing insider and outsider transcriptions, candidly assessing the possibilities and paradoxes they present. We then apply cross-cultural listening strategies, involving basic perceptions of tempo, interval repetition, and pitch focus, correlating our findings with insider perspectives. By integrating these and other analytical observations, we obtain a specific and broadly accessible appreciation of Gabor and of the possibilities of its kebyar style.
Journal Article
Africa Stand Up!—and Be Counted Among Others
While this clarifies metric identity, the extraordinary variability of tempo characteristic of the genre causes the tactus to shift repeatedly among metric levels, while the music discursively progresses to different cycles of varying dimensions-but can also leave cyclicity in the dust more than is commonly known. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of this line of thinking would be an evolving capacity to make statements about geographically and historically distinct musics that share certain temporal properties, hence to glimpse human production of temporalities in their fullest contexts and varieties and so to synergize with an anthropology of music.
Journal Article
