Noteworthy Things of the 3rd Week

We didn’t have enough time to cover Moroccan wedding music in class, although it is covered in our textbook. So here is a YouTube video I found of part of a Moroccan wedding, despite the video promotion in the middle. No, the high-pitched trilling is not a car acting up! It is the women doing zagareet cries, which our textbook says proclaim excitement. I like the intricately geometrical wall behind the drumming girl in orange. Next to her is a woman playing what I think is a bendir, a Moroccan frame drum that is the special domain of women. Unusually for both Arab culture and all the music-cultures that we have studied so far, all of the performers we see in this video are female. I suppose that I’m getting used to being at a women’s college, because it took me a while to realize this.



I stumbled on http://music.indobase.com/index.html while searching for nadaswaram items on Google. (The nadaswaram is a double-reed instrument similar to the oboe that is “the world's loudest non-brass acoustic instrument,” according to this site and Wikipedia.) This website has articles not only for each of fourteen different instruments used in Indian music, but also for various Indian classical singers, composers and playback singers, instrumentalists, and Indian music festivals. What a resource!

Last but certainly not least, I actually stumbled on this YouTube video while searching for tabla videos, but this video has not only intricate tabla but also Anoushka Shankar, daughter of Ravi Shankar, and Joshua Bell, Western violin virtuoso. Joshua Bell doesn’t get to show off his fabulous double stops in this very Indian collaboration – his only double stops are melody and drone – , but, like Yehudi Menuhin with Ravi Shankar in today’s class, contributes his artistry to the delightful whole. Notice that he stands rather than sits with the rest of the ensemble on the platform.