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Write-up Week 9 – Melody and Ornaments
Jon Fernquest, MUS678B Dr. Fairfield
WHY THE SUYA SING
This work is located even past Merriam on the social side of the ethnomusicology spectrum.
Music is held to be “part of the very construction and interpretation of social and conceptual
relationships and processes" (xiv). Music is the
social glue that holds together the world of the Suya
who are hunter-gatherers inhabiting the Brazilian
rain forest.
The Suya, despite having a simple social
organization, have complex and sophisticated
musical traditions. These musical practices are based
on a complex and exhaustive categorization of things
one can do with words (speech acts). For the Suya,
song is one mode of communication in a hierarchy of
different modes that includes: 1. “instruction” (saren)
covering speech acts such as a parent instructing a
child how to behave, 2. the telling of myths or “what
the old people tell” (metumji iuren), as well as 3.
“recitatives” or public instruction. Speech (kaperni)
includes 1. informal “everyday speech,” 2. the “bad
speech” or jealous speech of witches and selfish
people, 3. “angry speech” to make one’s feelings
known, and 4. “everybody listens speech” which is a
structured public speech of an elder in the public plaza with slow delivery of each phrase. Invocation
(sangere) is performed over the sick to heal them.
Song itself is broken into two fundamental categories: and individualistic “shout song” (akia) and
a collective communal “unison song” (ngere). Unison songs are sung together with voices and
individuality mixed together into a collective voice. The “mouse ceremony” which is mentioned often,
is a unison song. In shout songs, each male cultivates an individual style.
Song is a way of regulating communication, for instance between males and females. Anthony
Seeger relates that his ethnographic fieldwork would not have been possible, if his wife and himself
had not performed it as a team. The reason for this is that women will basically not talk to men in Suya
culture. When males become adults they are separated physically in the village from their mothers and
sisters. Communication with them is regulated by songs performed in certain places in the village.
Unison songs are for communicating with them collectively or communally in a group and shout songs
for communicating individually (74-8).
Some might look at social norms such as women only communicating with men under certain
prescribed ritual circumstances as being oppressive for woman. Some might propose that they be the
focal point for action that liberates these women from these oppressive social practices. Some might
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wish to replace them with a more liberated form with women and men freely singing together. I bring
this up because it is one way of looking at a musical event, namely the inputs or constraints from the
past that condition a musical event rather than the “affordances” or opportunities created for the future
by a musical event. This is an idea put forward by Tia DeNora in her book After Adorno. When Suya do
things with song and ritual, such as control dissension or attain a state of group euphoria they are
putting the affordance creating potential of music to work.
One interesting observation is that previous investigators have tried to cut out what they
considered extraneous “shouts, cries, weeping, and animal sounds” (shouting, comments, bird calls,
giggling) in order to isolate and separate out the real music. Seeger argues that these sounds are part of
the music and when edited out of the unison song, the Suya thought “it wasn’t euphoric, … it wasn’t
beautiful.” Like the cheering crowds at a live concert, these sounds are part of the overall effect. Other
interesting tidbits include the lip disk males wear in their lower lip which is “a central symbol of
masculine identity” which is supposed to get bigger and bigger over time as the male engages in less
and less subsistence activities, one wonders how they can even talk or eat (79). Another interesting
observation, given my research focus in sociology in the area of Punishment and Society and social
control is that “leaders have few institutional resources other than speech: there are no police forces,
immediately applicable punishments, or other clear forms of coercion. They rely on exhortations” (79).
In other words, song and ritualized speech is the Suya mechanism of social control and a substitute for
law and punishment. One wonders whether they also use banishment from the village as a sanction for
behavior that breaks social norms.
Ceremonies sometimes affect a “realignment of relationships” de-emphasizing the “everyday
sexual division of labor.” They sometimes replaced marriage relationships with “natal ties” to one’s
mother and sister, or in other ceremonies “the men took a few unmarried women for cooking and
sexual services on a hunting trip, leaving their wives at home” (75).
Moving on to transcription and musical analysis, the strange phenomenon of rising pitch in
unison songs is treated as a mystery to be explained and the result is an understanding of values
expressed through the sounds of music. Although Suya themselves don’t talk about it, the older and
renowned ritual specialists who initiate unison songs are said to have “big throats” singing tones at the
base of the throat much lower than younger singers. When the younger singers joined in, the pitch rose
until the older singer reset it again to a lower pitch (100-101).
YUNG ON THE GUQIN
Yung’s “Not Notating the Notatable” is about how leaving out some things from notation
empowers performers. This is in essence why notation never caught on in India despite many attempts
during the British colonial period to introduce it. I am so glad to get this paper since I missed it in my
literature review for my grad seminar in Sociology of China paper on the sociology of the Guqin.
The ideas of this paper add further support to the idea of Guqin as the musical embodiment of the
Chinese literati “amateur ideal” and practice of “solitary music-making.”
Hugo Cole’s music-making equation views notation as a form of communication “in which A
[composer] tells B [performer] what he is to do for the benefit of C [audience]” Notation facilitates the
expression of what needs to be expressed between A and B allowing a smooth and efficient flow of
information between the two. One might add also that seen this way there is a power relation inherent
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in notation. The composer’s score must be strictly followed and thus holds power over the conductor,
performers and audience. The conductor then uses this score to wield power over the performers and
the audience. In contrast, in Indian music there is no conductor or score of a composition, the
performers continue to wield power (note that this argument follows somewhat Adorno’s essay
‘Conductor and Orchestra: Aspects of Social Psychology’ summarized by Tia DeNora in After Adorno).
The Guqin notation described here was covered in my presentation for the ‘choose a notation’
class (see appendix #1). Details given in notation about how the Guqin is to be played are often either
omitted or ambiguous and this is done on purpose, rather than being an unintentional shortcoming. The
idea is to leave agency in many matters to the individual performer. For example, the pitch of some
notes is ambiguous and there is little direction on phrasing. Most importantly, notation does not attempt
to control “the interval of time between finger movements and the time necessary to execute a group of
movements.” The music only provides guidance on rhythm in “indirect ways” such as implying a
rhythmic pattern by calling for a given finger technique. On the other hand, faithfully reproducing the
mood (yijing) associated with a composition’s programmatic content is all important. This
programmatic content is given by the title, a literary preface to the composition as well as myths and
legends associated with the composition. The scholarly research process of musical interpretation or
“dapu” is central to this:
“A primary activity of the dapu process is to research and understand the programmatic content
of the composition, thus providing guidance to the player as he fills in the missing directives in
the notation.”
The “identity of a composition” is not the same for the Guqin as it is for a western musical
composition. In western art music the identity lies in faithful reproduction of the meter, rhythm and
phrasing given in the score of the composition, whereas in the Guqin composition identity lies in the
faithful reproduction of the mood and programmatic content of the composition.
IRANIAN MUSIC: ORNAMENTATION WITH SPECIAL TIMBRE
Caton’s “The Vocal Ornament Takiyah in
Persian Music” discusses the main ornament in
Persian classical singing, namely tahrir. This article
uses the melograph to investigate this ornamentation
acoustically. One thinks that this type of article, so
common in the past, may have gone out of fashion in
contemporary ethnomusicology journal articles that
are published today.
First, for some basic definitions. The Takiyah,
the essential sound element of tahrir, is defined as a
vocal ornament attached to a note that resembles Swiss yodeling or “sobbing” on a note for an
emotional impact. The base sound from which variations are made consists of “uh” with the mouth
open. The quality of the ornamentation is that of an “abrupt breaking or cracking heard between the
higher falsetto tone and the lower tone,” or “voice crackling.” A “tahrir” melisma which consists of
takiyah “sung in a continous chain” functions as “embellishment, phrase conclusion, melismatic
virtuosity, and emotional enhancement.” Tahrirs should be sung on long syllables not in the middle of a
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word, should not obscure the pronunciation of a word and comes at the end of a poem (43). The main
acoustical finding is that a takiyah note has a simpler "tone quality" than a normal melody note. This is
seen by "strong octave overtones for the melody and strong fundamental for the takiyah” (46).
Strangely enough, “tahrir” rather than “takiyah” is the term almost exclusively used to talk about
this ornamentation in works on Persian classical singing outside this technical article. Tahrir is
described as “a falsetto breaking or cracking of the voice in the form of a grace note above, and in
between the notes of the melody line” (Miller 1999:108-9). A family of similar vocal ornamentation
practices stretches from Spain to East Asia, and in Europe is known as the yodel. Spanish Flamenco
music is said to feature it and in India it is “smoother, taking on the form of slurs and slides rather than
clearly different notes separated by a cracked voice.” See map to the above right for the geographical
reach of the practice from Miller (2011).
At the very end of the article, there are attempts to make exact transcriptions of tahrir directly
from a Melograh, in typical Mantle Hood UCLA seminar style. The issue arises of whether western
notation actually does describe tahrir, that is if the notation was given to someone who was not already
knowledgeable about tahrir, without the audio, could they reproduce anything like a tahrir sound?
IRANIAN MUSIC: MUSICAL METER FROM POETIC METER
Complementing Y’s article on ornamentation in classical Iranian or Persian music, Tsuge’s
“Rhythmic Aspects of the Avaz in Persian Music” discusses the ways in which classical song inherits
its rhythm from classical poetry. The style of singing is said to have a rather unique “rhythmic texture
of unmeasured rubato” or “flexible rubato rhythm” a feature it is said to share with alap in Indian
music and taqsim in Middle Eastern music. Unlike these neighbors though, the Persian “Avaz” style is
the basic style and major part of Persian classical singing. Avaz is depicted in three kinds of notations:
1. western musical notation for the song, 2. poetic scansion for lyrics and poetic meter, and 3. poetic
scansion with elongated syllables ornamented with tahrir.
The article also outlines how the rhythmic dimension of classical Iranian song known as Avaz is
rooted in ancient poetic meter. Since the lyrics of many of these classical songs are classical poems, it
does seem natural that they would be sung or eniunciated in poetic meter. The ornamentations or
artistic deviations from this meter also seem quite natural, consisting for the most part of elongation of
syllables and parts of the text to add emotional depth. This is reminiscent of the practice of Buddhist
Sanskrit chanting of Professor Lee’s dissertation research in which, to create fancier versions of chants
for big money doners to temples, monks have lengthened with melisma the individual syllables of the
Sanskrit words of sacred until some are as long as 30 seconds in duration. This, of course, makes them
more unintelligible, but since they were in Sanskrit anyway, they were probably never intelligible in the
first place. Such artistic embellishment of the Iranian and Sanskrit texts does seem to be part of a
process of transforming literary texts into music.
REFERENCES
Miller, L. (2011). Music and Song in Persia: The Art of Avaz (Vol. 19). Routledge.
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APPENDIX #1
Qin Notation: Presentation on a notation system (1/24)
Jon Fernquest, MUS678B, Dr. Benjamin Fairfield
The Chinese 7-string zither, qin or guqin (ancient qin), is an ancient Chinese musical instrument
that has existed for over two millenia. From a very early date, the qin used an instrument-specific
notation that described finger motions and positions (or “articulations”) used to produce sound from the
instrument. This has been likened to a “choreography” of the fingers (Yung 1984).
The qin has had many notational systems over its long history (Gulik 1969). The qin notation is
just one of a family of similar notation systems used in Yayue (court or temple music) during the Tang,
Song and Ming dynasties. It was used for the 25-string Se zither, the predecessor to the Guzheng, as
well as for the Pipa and the Xun (clay ocarina) played in Confucian court music.
The earliest qin notation, known as wenzipu (prose notation), was used in Tang dynasty. This
notation preserves the earliest known qin composition entitled Youlan (Lone Orchid) attributed to Qiu
Ming (493-590) (Liang 1972:210-23). This notation explained finger movements and pitches with
prose so it was cumbersome and eventually replaced by a notation known as jianzipu (simplified
character notation) which arose towards the end of the Tang dynasty and remains in use to this day.
Jianzipu notation, the most important notation and present-day standard, consists of large
composite characters (cheng-wen) that represent one or more articulations, followed by smaller
characters (fu-wen) that provide instructions and comments related to the larger character. Each larger
character is composed of abbreviated characters (chien-tzu) that provide information on the
articulations in the larger character such as: a. manner of attack, b. vibrato, c. ornamentation, d.
connection between articulations such as a slide or glissando, and e. tempo. Rhythm was added to the
notation only recently in the 20th century by placing dots representing beats next to characters
(Lieberman 1977:61-62). To understand the notation, basic knowledge of the qin fretbord is essential:
QIN FRETBOARD:
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Situated close to the highest string are 13 hui,
or fret markers inlaid into the fretboard. The distance
between the markers is not like that of western
instruments such as the guitar or violin with
continually diminishing intervals, but rather the
markers are spaced symmetrically around the center
allowing the string to be divided in half, thirds and
fourths to produce the acoustic harmonics of the
string.
The Hui guide the fingers and are placed at the acoustically
important “nodes” of the string, which allows 91 harmonic pitches to be
produced (13 huis X 7 strings) by touching the string lightly as it
vibrates. This assumes normal Qin tuning of 5-6-1-2-3-5-6 (a moderate
type mode, neither too minor, not major in terms of mode color).
The thirteen hui along each string do not correspond to unique
pitches: "although thirteen harmonic pitches can be produced on each
string, in actuality only three different pitches are produced on each
string. For example, the C string produces only the pitches C, E, and G
in harmonics in various registers." Though there is redundancy in pitch
produced each has a unique timbre which is important in qin playing.
The Toronto Guqin Society’s Standards of the Guqin: An instroduction to the Chinese Seven-
Stringed Zither comes closest to an introductory textbook for the instrument. Notation is broken down
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into three categories of notation: actual (cheng-wen) and accompaniment or appending (fu-wen).
Accompaniment and appending notation works from already given information, usually one or two
previous characters of previous notation, and modifies or add information to it:
Actual Notation: 3 mandatory components (finger, string, hui/fret) with many optional modifiers
hand notation action
left top press, slide
right bottom pluck
Single String (on left):
slide down to
Instruction #1: left ring finger --------------------------- > 10th hui
pluck outwards on
Instruction #2: right finger --------------------------- > String 6
Multiple strings (on right):
Cuo (pinching movement, multiple strings plucked simulataneously by right hand):
Instruction #1: left thumb on 9th hui, string 4
Instruction #2: open string, string 7
Instruction #3: two strings 4 & 7, pinch inwards
ARTICULATION OF SOUND: FINGER ACTIONS ON STRINGS
The qin is famous for its poetic and artistic descriptions of how sound is
articulated and produced from the instrument with the fingers
(Gulik 1969:108-122). This includes likening the shape and
movement of the fingers to a bird holding a stick in its mouth or
to a dragon. As many as 26 varieties of vibrato are specified by
hand movement and thus may or may not be discernible in sound, which is a general
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problem associated with transcribing qin music (Yung 1984:511). There is an aesthetic of finger
motions that produces no sound and is thus accompanied only by silence. Only the performer and those
in his immediate vicinity would perceive this private dimension of qin music. Finger movements
provided in notation include such elements as: left and right, inward and outward (towards and away
from body) and up and down. Single strokes include (Yung 1984):
This has been an overview of qin notation, that necessarily has to provide some details about the
instrument because it is an instrument-centered notation. However, many areas await further
development for the final class project, including tunings, interval formulation and the myriad details of
how sounds can be articulated with the fingers.
SUMMARY AND RECAPITULATION
1. How does the system work?
The qin notation works by describing finger actions at different frets (hui) along the strings of
the qin.
2. What elements are accounted for in the notation?
Only the bare essentials of instrumental technique are accounted for in the notation, so every
notated qin tune there will be many possible renditions. Sometimes the words of a poem are
interlaced with the tune, for example by the famous Tang dynasty poet Li Po (699-762). These
words are usually sung silently or in the privacy of the scholar’s studio (Lieberman 1977:68-
73).
3. What is not included in the notation?
A description of the pitches produced by the qin as the qin notation is played is not included.
Rhythm is also not traditionally included. This provides a lot of leeway for interpretation.
4. What does the transcription show?
The transcription of a qin performance into a transcript that records the pitches, rhythm,
articulation, ornamentation and dynamics of a piece is known as Dapu (Yung 1985). The result
is often a western notation style transcription as found in most qin books (e.g. Yung 1997;
Lieberman 1977; Yeung 2016), but the process of playing directly from notation and thus
interpreting the notation in real time, is also called Dapu.
5. What does the transcription not show?
The process of notating pitch and rhythm in western notation leaves out the rich instructions in
the Chinese character notation on the actions of fingers and how to articulate notes.
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6. How would a transcription in western notation convey the sound differently?
Qin tunes are typically rendered in western notation. Sometimes only western notation is used
as in (Lieberman 1977). However, the standard for qin notation would have to be Yung (1997)
which supplements western notation with the original Chinese notation underneath.
Furthermore, for the student of qin an actual video of the performance of a piece capturing not
only the sound but also the finger movement would have to be judged essential to qin pedagogy
which often takes place over Skype nowadays (Yeung 2016; YouTube).
REFERENCES
Gulik, Robert van. 1969. The Lore of the Chinese Lute: an Essay on the Ideology of the
Ch’in. 2nd ed., Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan: Charles Tuttle and Sophia University (First
published in 1939.)
Lieberman, Frederic. 1977. A Chinese Zither Tutor: the Mei-an Ch’in-p’u. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Liang, David Mingyue. 1972. The Chinese Ch’in: its History and Music. San Francisco: San
Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Lui, Tsunyuen. 1968. "A Short Guide to the Ch’in." Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology. 1/2:179-204
Yeung, J. L. (2016). Standards of the Guqin: An English language introduction to the Chinese seven-
stringed zither = Ying yu qin tong chu jie. Fourth Edition. Toronto : Toronto Guquin Society.
Yeung, Juni L. Guqin Standards Performed, Toronto Guqin Society
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5F7B63C5E8CFD204
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL95D756AE30DFD7D1
Yung, Bell. 1984. "Choreographic and kinesthetic elements in performance on the Chinese seven-string
zither." Ethnomusicology 28, no. 3: 505-517.
Yung, Bell. 1985. "Da pu: The recreative process for the music of the seven-string zither." Music and
context: Essays in honor of John M. Ward. pp. 370-384.
Yung, Bell, ed. 1997. Celestial airs of antiquity: music of the seven-string zither of China. Vol. 5. AR
Editions, Inc., 1997.
Yung, Bell. 2002. "Instruments: Qin." In Provine, R. C., Tokumaru, Y., & Witzleben, J. L. (2002). The
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 7. East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea.
Yung, Bell. 2008. The Last of China's Literati: The Music, Poetry and Life of Tsar Teh-yun. Vol. 1.
Hong Kong University Press.
Yung, Bell. 2017. "An Audience of One: The Private Music of the Chinese Literati." Ethnomusicology
61, no. 3:506-39.
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FOR DISCUSSION:
[questions, prompts, queries, quotes, and/or other stimulating thoughts to share or pose to the group]
1. What functions does Suya song perform? Are they limited? Is there music for entertainment? For
lullabies? For protest songs?
About sacred things, creating society and recreating relationships. Formal music.
2. Do the Suya dress up with special dress for musical performances or wear their daily clothes?
Ornaments and body paint. A little bit like going to the opera.
3. Is there a separate word for dance and music?
4. What is the role of complements and 2’s ? The life cycle? Animals and plants?
4. How many seasons are there? 2, 3, 4?
1. The Suya is a hunter-gatherer culture which we can view as a mode of production.
How many modes of production or historical eras lie between our culture and the Suya?
Is Suya culture more “advanced” than modern industrial nation state culture in any way?
Is Suya music-making more sophisticated than western music-making?
In what ways is it more or less sophisticated?
2. How does song permeate the Suya lifeworld?
What percentage of the Suya lifeworld does Suya song permeate?
More or less than in the west or economically more advanced cultures?
3. Suya’s sing to each other in highly regulated ways that regulate relationships.
In what ways does song constitute a Suya social glue?
4. Does “why the Suya sing” address an issue at the heart of music-making, namely music’s potential to
transform the world? More specifically transform a society or group within a society? Are there
analogues in our own society? Such as the role of hymns in Christianity or chanting of monks in
Buddhism? Or the call to prayer and recitation of the Koran in Islam? What is the difference between
the function of music in these economically more advanced societies? Can you think of instances of
people singing to each other in our society or
5. What is the relation between song and subjective feelings and expressions of personal well-being ?
6. Which came first human use of language or human singing? Can one sing without language? What
would this consist of? Grunts? Syllables such as “Te Te Te...” ?
6. Do language and music form a continuum?
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RITUAL AND SOCIAL LIFE
“…it is in the effervescence of ritual that the individual concerns of daily life are transcended and
society is born.”
“Only ritual pulls us out of our egoistic pursuit of our own interests and creates the possibility
of a social world”
Is ritual performance in the contemporary world necessary yet difficult?
How many rituals with other people (social rituals) have you participated in recently?
Do you have any personal private rituals that you perform by yourself?
How are these different from the public rituals you participate?
Which do you prefer? Why? Can some private rituals become public and visa-versa?
Are rituals necessary to constitute your world? What happens when rituals suddenly disappear?
Such as moving to a new place, new job or way of life?
