Autobiography of my life in non-Western Art music

I will start at the very beginning in this autobiography of my interaction with non-Western Art music. One of my earliest memories is of a fish-shaped instrument rubbed with a stick, which I was handed to investigate in the context of a music class that I took when I was three years old. Later I learned that this instrument is called the güiro and is often used in Latin-American music.

I was introduced to much non-Western Art music when I was in ChildrenSong of New Jersey, a children’s choral program in my area. During my first year, when I was a seventh grader, we had a televised workshop with an African drum group. Besides rehearsing and performing – in beautiful African costumes – various songs with us, the group taught us to step and clap like their dancers did and showed us many of their instruments. Their percussion was very complicated, sometimes featuring one of the drummers virtuosically.

The second half of my last year in ChildrenSong was Celtic-themed. In our workshop, we worked on our many Celtic and Celtic-influenced songs and were taught some English sword-dancing (with wooden yardsticks), including a sequence in which we interlocked the sticks. We commissioned and premiered an SSA arrangement of “My Singing Bird.” As one of the solos in our fundraiser dinner, I sang “Waly Waly” from a book of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English folk songs that I later sight-read through in piano practice. Some of our songs were in Irish Gaelic and accompanied by my brother on the violin. By the end of the spring, all this new background plus my family’s CD of some Scottish fiddle music inspired me to compose a simple melody imitating the Scottish style.

When I visited Converse as a prospective student last January, I got to sit in on last year’s Music of Diverse Cultures class (and be impressed with the class interaction). Dr. Vaneman was finishing up Indonesia and beginning Japan. She played an old video of a gamelan and some female dancers (who used very precise hand movements). She also played a recording of some Japanese flute music which was rather unmetered, very nature-like, and dynamically very precise and complex. We also watched a clip about Japanese puppet operas, which is a serious art-form in Japan. One man, off to the side, sang each of the puppet-characters, from a written notation whose exact meaning is jealously guarded and passed on from master to apprentice.

Last summer, my family went to the Shenandoah Valley Music Festival as part of our family vacation. The first concert, we heard the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which my father really enjoyed as we had lived in Slidell near New Orleans for a few years. The next night, we heard banjoist Béla Fleck and Toumani Diabaté, a kora player from a long line of Malian kora musicians who passed their expertise and music father-to-son. The kora is a large lute-like instrument made from a calabash and cow-skin and having 21 strings.