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Chapter 6 details a power-laden and affective symbol, metaphor, poetic and musical sign in Pamir culture that is central to concepts of health and healing. This is done through poetic and musical analysis that shows the pervasiveness and centrality of this local sign, which is manifest in local belief, the natural and built environment, and the musical and poetic structure of maddâh devotional music. A physiological experiment that was conducted in the context of maddâh ritual performance is presented and statistical data analyzed and interpreted showing a significant downward modulation of systolic blood pressure at p-value of .0003. Further, the culture-transcendent aspects are applied in another research project in the U.S. among a culturally diverse group of people (ages 18-85) where participants learn to create health, healing, or transformation through practices of music, sound, vocalization, and meditation. The GAP — Guided Attention Practice is presented as part of this latter research project.

This introductory chapter explores the historical and aesthetic context of Mozart's seminal contributions to the piano literature, with attention given to the evolution of keyboard instruments and relative assets of the fortepiano and modern piano, questions of stylistic influence, issues of aesthetic autonomy, and Mozart's own devotion to the cultivation of “taste and sensitivity” (“Geschmack und Empfindung”). The desirable balance in Mozart interpretation between freedom and determination, or subjective expression and objective structure, is probed. A goal is outlined whereby analytic description of the music can remain relevant to issues of practical performance.

This chapter presents a review of the essay “Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure,” written by Allen Forte. The essay comments on a graphic analysis presented by Heinrich Schenker and exemplifies his approach towards tonal music. The music theorist in Forte's essay is conspicuously a writer, who seeks to dispose the words of the essay in the allotted time or space, imagines a time outside the span of the essay and an encounter with a diverse world in which incomprehension is possible. Beyond making assertions about musical structure, the essay also mimics procedures of Schenkerian musical structure and musical theory. Forte's language in the essay also creates parallels between music and theoretical discourse apart from more general resemblance between the musical theorist and the composition in the essay. He also refers to the discipline of music theory and evokes a coherent, purposeful area of research at a time when the present institutional structures of music theory didn't exist.

This chapter examines the collective aspects of improvisation, proposing an analytical framework for the examination of widely divergent forms of collectively improvised music. It assesses collectivity from two broad vantage points, musical and interactional, exploring each from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The concept of the “model” for improvisation, introduced in Chapter 1, is nuanced through discussions of model specificity and flexibility, the varying degrees to which models are consciously known, and the musical make-up of the model itself: whether it contains one or multiple strands of music and which musical textures are idiomatic to its realizations. Discussion of these factors for musical analysis is enhanced by consideration of cognitive processes and concepts of group flow, shared histories, and dynamic, shared knowledge bases. Interactional factors of collective improvisation are then considered through an examination of communication codes and modes of interaction as well as diverse interactional roles. The concepts of collaborative emergence and intersubjectivity, central to many discussions of group creativity, are tempered here by considering the varying degrees of influence and interaction at play in different moments of a collective improvisation. The end result is a comprehensive analytical model for examining the multifaceted aspects of collective improvisation across cultures.

The success of the expression “world music,” a commercial label coined during the 1980s to refer to certain types of music, provokes an inquiry into the conditions underlying its invention and success, and to question about how these types are brought together and how this music is made. An analysis of a limited corpus of pieces circulating under the genre “world music” leads to the building of a typology. This music does not correspond to any homogeneous form; it derives completely from a combination of pre-existing elements. This art of making combinations, whereby the imagination spreads its wings in the contemporary world, explores a changing world, arouses a feeling of exercising control over it and provides a means for escaping from it. “World music” thus turns out to be an instrument for construing a new, emergent world. Sociological and musicological approaches must be brought together to understand how this music operates and how imagining this new world works through music.

As an introduction to the book Making It Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond, this chapter proposes “collective improvisation” as a concept with usefulness far beyond New Orleans jazz, free jazz, and experimental rock. An examination of the related concepts of group genius, distributed invention, and collaborative creativity across diverse fields shows the centrality of collective work to most creative processes. The chapter then advocates placing collectivity at the center of musical improvisation discourse across genres, extending and nuancing the definition of collective improvisation to create a more cross-culturally salient concept, and thus encouraging a unified terminology that enables intertextual reference among researchers of diverse improvised practices. In preparation for the book’s longer music-analytic case studies (Ch. 2-3, 5-6), the chapter introduces two collectively improvised practices from traditional Balinese gamelan music, which was long thought of as essentially non-improvisatory: kendang arja and reyong norot. Finally, by showing how ethnographically-informed musical analysis can deepen and nuance our understandings of improvisatory processes and collective creativity in culturally resonant ways, a case is made for the value of analytical ethnomusicology in this and other studies.

The first of two chapters in a music-analytic case study on collective improvisation, this chapter introduces reyong norot, a collectively improvised practice for the Balinese gamelan gong kebyar’s four-person melodic gong chime reyong. The chapter’s goals are two-fold. On the smaller scale, it investigates the consciously-known but unspoken model guiding reyong norot performance: a model derived from the fixed norot playing of the ensemble’s gangsa metallophones then further informed by a knowledge base unique to reyong. Analyses reveal how the gangsa’s complementary polos and sangsih melodic strands, which are played using either specific interlocking figuration (kotekan) or parallel harmonizing notes (kempyung), are differently conceived on the reyong because of its construction and performance practice. More broadly, the chapter outlines a research methodology for uncovering unspoken models for improvisation and analyzing their manifestations in improvised practice. Proposing five basic steps – listening, learning to play, immersion, transcription, and one-on-one interactions – it delineates processes of discovery, ethnographic field methods, and musical analysis techniques from the author’s research on reyong norot as suggested research methods for analytical ethnomusicologists. Discussions throughout the chapter assume an outward bearing, applying concepts to diverse practices worldwide and suggesting rich potential for comparative and cross-cultural research.

This chapter examines the concept of musical improvisation, unraveling the myriad of terms used to describe it and proposing language and frameworks for analyzing diverse improvisatory processes in unified ways. “Improvisation” is characterized as a continuum of creative options, from relatively strict formulaic variation to relatively free improvisation, each drawing in its own way from a pre-existing musical model and informed by a culturally-accepted knowledge base, which together make up the so-called conceptual space of the practice. An examination of creative cognitive processes, such as combinatorial creativity and exploratory creativity, and a musical analysis of two contrasting improvised excerpts (of Hindustani alap and Balinese kendang arja) together elucidate the unique characteristics and functions of diverse models for improvisation and reveal four complementary processes of improvisation: interpretation, embellishment, recombination, and expansion. These processes are then surveyed across varied practices. Finally, the concept of the improvisational “knowledge base” is explored, examining how varying degrees of conscious knowledge about a practice’s underlying guidelines affect their acquisition by both practitioners and analysts, and exploring how such a knowledge base informs both performance and analysis. The aim of the chapter is to provide widely-applicable terminology and concepts for analyzing improvisation across genres and cultures.

The second of two chapters in a case study on the musical analysis of collective improvisation, this chapter examines reyong norot, a collectively improvised practice for the Balinese gamelan gong kebyar’s four-person melodic gong chime reyong. Building on the model and knowledge base proposed in the previous chapter (Ch. 2), this chapter considers the many ways that reyong musicians diverge from their models in improvised performance. Short improvised patterns as well as longer group passages are closely analyzed in the context of the four improvisational processes theorized in Chapter 1: interpretation, embellishment, recombination, and expansion. The analyses borrow concepts from related Balinese techniques, draw upon idioms and idiosyncrasies of individual pieces and performers, and are framed in local oral music theories on stasis and motion (ngubeng and majalan), feeling (rasa), “greatness” (wayah), and other concepts gleaned through field research. Each new analysis suggests ways that the four broad conceptual categories of improvisatory process can be nuanced and expanded to suit the specific conceptual space of reyong norot, revealing the flexibility of the concepts while not shying away from their limits. Throughout, comparisons to diverse practices across the globe point to the widespread applicability of the proposed analytical framework.

This chapter discusses an alternative to the structural listening proposed by Rose Subotnik is presented. This alternative approach rejects Subotnik's notion that one must choose between binary opposites. It considers structural elements as gestures, which do not represent meanings within abstracted two-dimensional spatial graphs, or communicate them through association or reasoning by analogy, but rather constitute part of the meaning of the original work as a performance event. The essay also critiques Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Richard Taruskin, who based on musical analysis, has provided ideological or philosophical critiques of Le Sacre. This chapter particularly questions the way these two authors defined human subjectivity based on immanent musical form, and how they use their conclusions to determine the humane value of Le Sacre. It also questions their structuralist analyses of Le Sacre by offering an alternative reading that recognizes the importance of bodily gesture in danced works of music.

This chapter presents musical transcriptions of the attempts of eight adult subjects to recall part of a folk melody that was repeatedly presented to them. It also discusses the results of some analyses of these transcripts, which seem to point particularly clearly to the involvement of structural knowledge in musical memory. A different reason for the paucity of empirical work on musical recall is the lack of agreed upon and well-motivated methods of describing and analysing the content of a performance in relationship to an original model. The chapter explores methods of musical analysis that provide information at an analogous level of abstraction. It is worth pointing out that most contemporary research on musical memory has used some form of recognition procedure and has used sequences containing much fewer than thirty notes.

This chapter discusses the main topic of this book, which is musical meaning. The question “Does music have meaning?” has been asked ever since music became a subject of discourse. While some think that musical meaning is intrinsic, extrinsic, autonomous, or permanent, the chapters in this book provide an exercise in musical analysis. Several terms that are used in the following chapters are mentioned and defined here, such as semiotic adventures, music as discourse, and discourse.

Some of the ways in which film music has more recently been treated are initially examined. Engagement with the Adorno/Eisler Composing for the Films concentrates on a curious gender implication in their modernist-oriented critique. This is extended into a broader account of hidden critical agendas within the academic practice of musical analysis, particularly with respect to late nineteenth-century music. Rachmaninov is chosen both as a key source of film music's style and as a key composer to suffer both modernist and musicological opprobrium. He is considered with reference to Adorno's essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” An exploration and problematization of the historical roots of that critical discussion leads to an analysis of Brief Encounter (1945) and the question of what it actually “affirms.”

The first of two chapters in a music-analytic case study of collective improvisation, this chapter introduces kendang arja, a collectively improvised practice for two interlocking Balinese drum (kendang) players whose models for improvisation are unconscious. The chapter opens by exploring how diverse methods of learning and teaching can generate different ways of knowing, leading to both explicitly and intuitively known improvisatory models. The central aim of the chapter is an exploration of ethnographic methods for revealing aspects of unconscious (intuitive) models. Musical analysis first uncovers how overtly taught arja drumming patterns from various different performers share certain fundamental features. While acknowledging the dangers of codification, the shared features of these taught patterns are taken as a kind of model: a set of guidelines for idiomatic improvised performance. These guidelines are then framed and nuanced by informally acquired oral music theory that prescribes, among other things, complementary performative roles for the two drums favoring a balance of freedom with constraint and complementary musical roles of beat-keeping (ngematin) and structure-marking (ngegongin). Detailed, ethnographically-informed musical analysis thus illuminates kendang arja’s unconscious model, while broadly comparative discussions throughout the chapter suggest potential for parallel approaches to research and analysis across genres and cultures.

The second of two chapters in a music-analytic case study of collective improvisation, this chapter examines kendang arja, a collectively improvised practice for two interlocking Balinese drum (kendang) players. Building on the model and knowledge base proposed in Chapter 5, this chapter considers the many ways that arja musicians diverge from their models in improvised performance. Short improvised patterns as well as longer passages of paired drumming are closely analyzed in the context of the four improvisational processes theorized in Chapter 1: interpretation, embellishment, recombination, and expansion. Yet the chapter also assumes a wider lens, examining how larger structural elements of the music and the dramatic performance it accompanies, as well as aesthetic preferences discovered through fieldwork, such as a desire for balancing busyness (ramé) with sparseness, might influence an improviser’s moment-to-moment decisions. It likewise considers how regional style, pedagogical lineage, and the personal choices and preferences of individual style can shape collectively improvised practice. The chapter aims to be both specific and broad-reaching: ethnographically-informed musical analysis offers a detailed and comprehensive template for collective improvisation in arja drumming, while comparative observations of diverse practices point to the usefulness of a unified approach for analyzing collectively improvised musics worldwide.