Klarinet Archive - Posting 000305.txt from 2000/05

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: [kl] Tone & Sitar & 'emotion'
Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 15:56:16 -0400

Dan's concern is whether "dark" conveys useful information. Others
of us are more concerned with the relationship between tone and
'emotional content'.
There is an excellent recording of CONCERTO FOR SITAR AND ORCHESTRA
(London Symphony, Previn conductor, Ravi Shankar composer & soloist, EMI
Angel Studio) that brings this tangled relationship to the forefront. I
recommend that people who are interested in this thread give the CD a
listen.

[This CD is not 'weird stuff' with seventeen-tone scales or anything
like that. It is plesing IMO to the western ear that also enjoys
Beethoven and Mozart.]

(1) According the to album liner, classical Indian music does not use
traditional western harmony or counterpoint. It uses simple stand-alone
melodies. The opening measures often state the melodic theme without
any rhythm or tempo at all, and then the remainder of the music
elaborates with rhythms and tonal variations. So you hear mostly tone
and melody without the other 'distractions' of western orchestral music,
and the emotional effects of tone become more obvious and more
effective.

(2) The Concerto was written as a study of 'East meets West'. Some
passages use a full array of 'western' instruments (strings, woodwinds,
xylophone, timpani, etc) except for brass, and these instruments repeat,
note for note, the same melodies that the sitar plays solo. The
emotions that I experience as I listen to the full orchestra vs. scitar
alone are completely different, often polar opposites. This isn't
accident, of course. Shankar wrote it this way.
The Concerto makes the point effectively that emotional content is
part of the music's fundamental structure -- a cause rather than an
effect. And therefore (once again) I feel that emotional terms such as
"dark" and "bright" do have fundamental musical meaning, albeit perhaps
ambiguous in terms of waveform, etc.
And, as I have claimed before, it bothers me to hear the two
concepts separated from each other.

(3) What is especially interesting is that the Concerto includes some
passages where the scitar and the rest of the orchestra _ARE_ in
emotional unison (and remind me of a Tchaikovsky climax, in fact). This
shows that the same instruments can head either in the same direction or
in opposite directions, depending on what emotions the composer choses
to build into the composition.

(4) As a postscript, I should add that the CD liner talks about the
scitar having an array of non-integral 'microtones' -- as opposed most
western instruments that have integral overtones. I don't know enough
about acoustics to know whether I am stating this correctly; but for
sure, a concerto like this one would be vacuous if the emotional
qualities (light, dark, fierce, calm, agitated, resigned, etc) were not
built into the composition itself and therefore demanded certain tones
in certain places. And hence players need 'emotional' words in order to
describe the tones and in order to communicate with each other, however
imperfectly.

I really do recommend that you (if you are interested in tone vs.
emotional content, and whether these qualities are causes or effects)
give a listen to this CD.

.....enough jabber, I apologize if I've carried on too long.....

Bill

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