informations

Type
Séminaire / Conférence
durée
29 min
date
8 octobre 2015
note de programme
TCPM 2015

In traditional First Nations musical expression, the formal structures of music often hold both spiritual and political meanings beyond the songs themselves. As frameworks for composition most often referred to as “song making” these forms are amazingly flexible, and provide song creators from novice through experienced a means to produce culturally relevant musical while expressing personal creativity. The two styles that I would like to present and contrast are Plains Indian War dances and Iroquoian Eskanye Ganiseh, also known as women’s social dance songs. Each exists within a formal musical structure as music for dance, and performances usually feature songs of antiquity side by side with those that are newly composed. Plains War dances are the same songs that are used at powwow events (although they can also be used in other contexts), and at their most basic level are made up of a theme and variations moving down a pentatonic scale, broken up by sung 16th note rhythmic cadential patterns. The overall formal structure is a strophic ABB, and the cadential patterns are quite set, with minor variations from tribe to tribe and region to region. This all fits over a constant unchanging drum beat (other than accents and dynamic levels). Where creativity comes into play is through melodic variation, rhythmic variation, and Native language text—ultimately the key element in the melodic structure, as the melody must compliment the text in a way that the listener cannot only understand it, but also be energized in their dancing. This is accomplished through laying the text/melody onto the drum part using a technique where the main word stresses are always a 16th to 32nd note off from the heavier drum beat, giving the song a kind of forward motion, as opposed to the stereotypical bum-bum-bum-bum that many people assume is common to Native American songs.

Eskanye Ganiseh is in some ways quite similar to Plains War Dance styles, but with a number of key differences. The form is usually AA1BA1A2 (as a complete song) and each phrase is finished off with a cadential pattern of Gaina Wiiya Heya. In traditional contexts, songs are sung in repeated pairs, and complete “set” is seven songs (seven pairs). Instruments used are a single water drum and cowhorn rattles, and those parts are set and unchanging. Where musical creativity comes into play is through the creation of text and melody, and like Plains music, the melody is adapted to the text. In this tradition, texts and melodic fragments can be drawn from completely outside of the culture, and songs based on everything from Hank Williams tunes to Old MacDonald had a Farm are in current circulation.

My goal with this presentation is to explore just how song makers do their job, and specifically how a kind of implicit knowledge of song form influences their creative practice. Research methods used are almost entirely fieldwork based, and include long and detailed conversations with song makers, as well as participant observation in dances. As composer/performers, song makers are inspired by everything from melodies and texts learned from dreams and visions to commercial music from television ads, and somehow are able to fashion workable songs inspired by these disparate sources. In this case, a fairly strict musical form seems to be a key to their ability to utilize melodic and textual sources from outside of their culture to enrich their own.

intervenants

Les médias liés à cet évènement

Metaphors of Creative Practice: Navigating Roots and Foliage in Southern Vietnamese Traditional Music - Alexander Cannon

Traditional music in southern Vietnam does not sit idly on the sidelines of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and modernity. Musicians travel from Long Xuyên to Hồ Chí Minh City and then fly to Bangkok, Dubai, and Seattle, interacting with a

8 octobre 2015 27 min

Vidéo

Jesper Nordin’s Sculpting the Air (2014-5): An Experiment in Technologically-Augmented Orchestra Conducting - Baptiste Bacot, François-Xavier Féron

8 octobre 2015 33 min

Vidéo

Investigating performative approaches through the analysis of ‘Performing Scores’: Cathy Berberian sings Circles - Giovanni Cestino

In the rich landscape of studies about performance as a creative process, the investigation of such preliminary phases that go before the performance itself (i.e. the study process or the rehearsal practice) presented themselves like a more

8 octobre 2015 30 min

Vidéo

Versions, Variants, and the performatives of the score: Traces of performances in the texts of Anton Webern’s Music - Thomas Ahrend

Most research on the creative process of Anton Webern’s music has focused on the sketches, thus emphasizing the compositional process in the narrower sense. Less attention has been paid to the fact that especially for most of the works comp

8 octobre 2015 31 min

Vidéo

Modes of collision: Alberto Favara in the process of transcribing Sicilian folk songs - Francesco Del Bravo

The analysis of creative process in music through written sources intertwines often with hermeneutics [Kinderman 2009], in a way not dissimilar from philological studies, whose basic purpose ―although many attempts to delimit or to unbind i

8 octobre 2015 28 min

Vidéo

Ligeti and Romanian folklore: Citation, palimpsest and pastiche as creative tools - Bianca Temes

The paper aims to gain fresh perspectives and to challenge standard thinking on Ligeti’s appropriation of Romanian folk music, drawing on very recent findings at the Sacher archives. By absorbing Romanian folk music in various ways during t

8 octobre 2015 24 min

Vidéo

The genesis of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 101: ‘Lost sketches’ and ‘Working autograph’ - Federica Rovelli

The researcher who desires to reconstruct the genesis of a particular work of Beethoven often bumps into the problem of the lack of correspondent sketches or drafts. Several examples – such as the op. 27, no. 2 piano sonata (first and secon

8 octobre 2015 30 min

Vidéo

Créativité et design sonore : étude de cas - Andrea Cera, Sébastien Gaxie, Nicolas Misdariis

Le design sonore est un champ du design relativement récent qui consiste principalement à prendre en compte la dimension sonore d’un objet au cours de son processus de conception – le terme objet pouvant être pris au sens d’objet tangibl

8 octobre 2015 29 min

Vidéo

Introduction (FR) - Nicolas Donin, Hyacinthe Ravet, Jean-François Trubert

8 octobre 2015 14 min

Vidéo

Creativity and Sound Design: A Case Study - Andrea Cera, Sébastien Gaxie, Nicolas Misdariis

8 octobre 2015 29 min

Vidéo

Performer’s Gesture and Compositional Process in Xenakis’ Solo Pieces - Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet

Simultaneous translation: Marie-Louise Diomède

8 octobre 2015 28 min

Vidéo

La place du geste de l’interprète dans le processus compositionnel : le cas des œuvres solistiques de Xenakis - Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet

Dans cette communication, je me propose de croiser deux problématiques, celle des relations compositeur-interprète dans le processus compositionnel, relations dans lesquelles le positionnement de Xenakis s’avère assez particulier par rappor

8 octobre 2015 28 min

Vidéo

Sculpting the Air (2014-15) de Jesper Nordin : l’expérimentation d’une direction d’orchestre techno-augmentée - Baptiste Bacot, François-Xavier Féron

Exformation Trilogy est un cycle de trois pièces mixtes que le compositeur suédois Jesper Nordin projette de composer entre 2014 et 2017 en utilisant Gestrument, une interface de contrôle gestuel qu’il a lui-même développée. Sculpting the A

8 octobre 2015 33 min

Vidéo

Opening address (EN) - Nicolas Donin, Hyacinthe Ravet, Jean-François Trubert

Simultaneous translation: Marie-Louise Diomède

8 octobre 2015 14 min

Vidéo

Sounding Bodies: Embodiment and Gesture in the Collaborative Creation and Realisation of works for Piano and Electronics - Zubin Kanga

This paper examines works for piano and electronics that use technology to expand and subvert the body and pianistic technique of the pianist. It draws upon the fledgling research field of auto-ethnographic examination of composer-performer

8 octobre 2015 28 min

Vidéo

No score, hundreds of sketches: Mario Bertoncini’s Spazio-Tempo - Valentina Bertolani

In the last decades, sketch studies and musical philology have been expanding their object of study to include non-conventional notation and alternative supports for the diffusion of the work of art, such as tapes or pieces of code (e. g. H

8 octobre 2015 25 min

Vidéo

La pratique de la direction d’orchestre au prisme du genre - Claire Gibault, Dominique My, Hyacinthe Ravet

8 octobre 2015 01 h 48 min

Vidéo

'Feeling New Strength': Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 - William Kinderman

One landmark in the reception history of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, in which Mann places his fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn into the role of the Faustian figure. Leverkühn’s culminating work is

8 octobre 2015 29 min

Vidéo

Gender and the Practice of Conducting

On the occasion of the publication of "L’orchestre au travail. Interactions, négociations, coopérations" (Ravet, 2015) which is based on the observation of several conductors and several ensembles in the process of constructing a musical pe

8 octobre 2015 01 h 49 min

Vidéo

What is it to analyse the creative process in music? - Georgina Born

8 octobre 2015 01 h 12 min

Vidéo

Qu’est-ce qu’analyser les processus de création musicale ? - Georgina Born

Traduction simultanée : Marie-Louise Diomède

8 octobre 2015 01 h 12 min

Vidéo

partager


Vous constatez une erreur ?

IRCAM

1, place Igor-Stravinsky
75004 Paris
+33 1 44 78 48 43

heures d'ouverture

Du lundi au vendredi de 9h30 à 19h
Fermé le samedi et le dimanche

accès en transports

Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau, Châtelet, Les Halles

Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique

Copyright © 2022 Ircam. All rights reserved.