Ethnographic Methods
Musical Instruments Pt. 1
Organology
African Music Theory
Rituals, Ceremonies, Possession, and Religion
100
This term, coined by Christopher Small in 1998, shifts music from a static occurrence to a social event, and includes performers, dancers, composers, audience, and so on.
Musicking
100
Western classical stringed instrument found in the middle east and south Asia today.
Violin
100
Category of the Sachs-Hornbostel classification system that deals with instruments like the marimba.
Idiophone
100
This style of "playing two rhythms at once" is found throughout the music of sub-Saharan Africa
Polyrhythm
100
African Shona possession ceremony that sounds almost like the instrument it features.
Bira
200
Term for the power dynamics that exist between cultures or individuals.
Positionality
200
The long tubular drum, called the mridangam, is found in this country.
India; South India
200
The three categories of traditional European instrument classification
Wind, percussion, string
200
Is there an echo?
Call and Response
200
The fundamental sacred sound of Hinduism.
Om; Aum
300
Three different types of "culture" encounters one might engage with. Linked to ethics.
Cultural exchange, cultural appropriation, and cultural appreciation
300
This instrument was played by the Punjabi folk singer, Alam Lohar
Chimta
300
Animate and inanimate, or voice and everything else, belongs to the classification system of early Christians and this other culture.
Ancient Greece
300
West African style of drumming that imitates the spoken voice.
Talking Drum
300
This can be heard five times a day in Muslim areas of the world.
Adhan; Call to Prayer
400
This method involves observing with all of one's senses, and "jotting" down notes to be later categorized and analyzed.
Journaling
400
Ancient 7-string Zither of Chinese music.
Guqin
400
Fifth category added later to the Sachs-Hornbostel system.
Electrophone
400
Repeated rhythmic figure that can be heard first in a west African music performance, before the other "layers" start.
Ostinato
400
Collection of early Hindu texts and chants from which Indian classical music originates.
The Vedas
500
This hyphenated method involves both journaling what an ethnographer witnesses and learning to partake in the culture they are studying.
Participant-observer
500
This "hand piano" of Zimbabwe was brought to the West by ethnomusicologist, Hugh Tracy, in the 1950s.
Mbira; Kalimba
500
The Jiangnan Sizhu ensemble is named after these two materials of the 8-fold Chinese classification system.
Silk and Bamboo
500
This rhythm is played on the gankoqui, and can be felt in either duple or triple meter.
Bell pattern; bembe
500
Term coined by Emile Durkheim to describe a musical phenomenon wherein all listeners feel the same thing at the same time, facilitating possession.
Collective Effervescence