#ethnomusicology

Xaver Eckert playing the psaltery. Video by Associació Estudi del Moble.

The psaltery was a very popular instrument in South-Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, usually played by women. All bourgeois families tended to have a psaltery. They were often beautifully decorated and came in a case that was often also decorated.

Psalteries were very popular in Catalonia, the Valencian Country, and Italy. Below, you can see psalteries from 18th-century Catalonia, some of them inside their case, plus the last photo which is a psaltery from València. Click to see the image in high quality.

The monkeys continue to run loose in the circus of my discipline. As Rebecca Cypess writes:

"Yet this is all a sleight of hand. As one speaker explained, Palestine is really a synecdoche for all oppression, where “industries of oppression have been developed and tested and then spread throughout the world.” This includes not only conflicts in the region such as the recent war in Iran, but also in “Congo, Sudan, the recent embargo against Cuba, and the imprisonment of the Venezuelan president.” And the list continues: “climate destruction, capitalist extraction, racism, politicide, femicide, memoricide”—all are “branches of the same tree” with its roots in Israel.

Because at some point I want Mira to scare the hell out of the girls because she knows how throat singing (probably undertone to get it nice and deep) and surprises them by doing by accident in practice.

V/A [rec. Christos CLAIR-VASILIADIS]

"Musiques de l’Île de Pâques (Rapa-Noui)"

(LP. Anthologie de la Musique des Peuples. 1981 / rec. 1976) [CL]

Ja asks Jack a basic but essential question:

What does Likay mean to you?

I loooooved this!!! As a musicologist you often talk with music purists that think that traditional ways have to be ecstatic, still in it's place, never change. And that's just nuts because by actively trying to keep that "purity" you're already changing the natural course of the art, meant to change with its context. Plus you're choosing what is worth keeping and what not, creating an artificial canon. You're killing the culture. Culture is alive and it changes and adapts and that means a lot of things are going to get lost in the process yes. You can be sad about it, but it's a beautiful thing because that means the community is alive and actively creating art.

Ja explained it perfectly: yes, it can adapt, but that can only happen from inside of the community. When you already know Likay. Because if the changes are forced or external then that won't be likay.

Jack is partly right, Ja is judging him too soon. He's not letting him try. But the thing is, as Thanu said, Likay is not just a singing or dancing technique. Is their whole life. It's culture, family, tradition. You grow up in that community. You belong there or you don't, there's no in between. Ja can't separate his complex knowledge of Likay from what VIVA Entertainment is really asking him: to teach just the superficial aspects for a show and move on. But because the people from VIVA are not part of the community and have only an etic perspective they don't understand that depth and instead asked Ja to teach Jack Likay, and for Ja that's like asking him to teach the knowledge of a lifetime.

And that's why Ja tells Jack that he's misunderstanding him. He's not judging him nor thinking he can't learn a new technique. He's not talking about his life long experience to put himself on top. He's just trying to make Jack understand there's more to it than he thinks. Ja knows it's impossible for anyone to enter his world in just three months.

Then Jack starts kinda projecting his own insecurities about being just a pretty face with no talent and Ja realizes he has hurt him and apologizes.

I liked how Ja reassured Jack. He is talented, but he doesn't belong in Likey. Ja is an insider and can only see things from an emic perspective so he fails to make Jack understand that his words are not a personal attack. Likay is a whole new world that can't be learned in such short period of time.

Sir I’ve known ball since the texts were written

NDARA 🇺🇬

In this video, filmed at the Alur Cultural Festival in Kampala by @kogot.peter we see the ndara, a large log xylophone laid on the ground and played simultaneously by several musicians. The ndara is the traditional xylophone of the Alur, a Luo-speaking people living between Uganda’s West Nile region and the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Historically described as consisting of eight wooden keys placed over bundles of grass and positioned above a resonating pit, in contemporary contexts expanded versions are often found, featuring a greater number of keys, yet still recognized as ndara within the Luo-Alur tradition.