Blog ini bertujuan memperolehi pelbagai aspek tentang muzik tidak kira kecil atau besar ruang pengetahuaannya.Pendidik muzik pasti akan mendapat banyak faedah dari Blog ini.Walaupun nampak formal kepada orang muzik sahaja namun bagi saya orang yang selalu dengar muzik juga dianggap oleh saya sebagai pencinta muzik seperti kami.
This blog seeks to acquire various aspects of music no matter small or large space of knowledge. Music educators will find much of interest by access this blog.Although seen it quite formal to the music people only but those who always listen to the music are also considered as music lovers like us.
Nyanyo Addo is a young master percussionist from Ghana, combining the old traditions with new rhythms and songs.
Nyanyo Addo
It was in the small Ga community of Labadi in Ghana, West Africa, that Nyanyo Addo was born into a family where music and dance was naturally integrated into daily life. Traditionally the drum plays an important role in the healing ceremonies of the Ga - people: The calling of the drum is the main reason why people fall into trance.
Raised by his grandfather, a well respected won or priest, Addo learned to play the drum at an early age. In Ghanaian culture the won is involved with his people in a very direct fashion: He is not only a spiritual and religious leader, but often acts as a doctor, lawyer and community leader, prescribing herbal medicines and settling land disputes. This involves great responsibility, which was given to Nyanyo Addo by his grandfather.
But drumming is also part of the daily life in Ghana, messages were transmitted over long distances with the help of big drums and they still accompany weddings and funerals. Festivals are unimaginable without drumming and dancing. The art of drumming and drum-making has been developed to a high level. The position of the drummer corresponds to the importance and variety of drums: The drummer is a well respected person who knows about history and culture. He gives inspiration to the people as well as to chiefs and kings.
From early childhood, Addo learned to play the traditional drums of the Ga people — for example the big standing drum oblente, but also the atumpani, the gome-drum and the small talking drum odono (with one arm the pressure is varied to change the pitch of the drum, while the other hand uses a stick to beat it.) The slightly bigger blekete is a bass drum with one membrane at each side. The ballafon, a West African type of xylophone, is another instrument which Addo has learned to play with great skill.
Accompanying Fela Kuti, Mutabaruka and Mustapha Tettey Addy on their tours throughout West Africa, Addo has become an accomplished drummer. — Courtesy Calabash Music
Andalusian Music is the traditional urban music of the Maghreb – spanning Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.
In 711, a Berber general named Tariq bin Ziyad crossed the narrow strait that divides northern Morocco from southern Spain, named it Gibraltar, and established the first Muslim claim on European land. Over the next eight centuries, a succession of Arab, Berber and other Muslim leaders would control portions of what is now Southern Spain. The lands that Moors controlled included northern cities like Toledo, but the core Muslim areas were Cordoba, Seville and Granada. This area became known as Al-Andalus. The remarkable cultural blendings and innovations, especially in architecture, music, poetry and literature, that developed in Al-Andalus until 1492 when the last Moors were expelled from Granada, resonates in present day traditions in many parts of the world. Al-Andalus is often celebrated as a time and place of tolerance when Muslims, Jews, and Christians thrived together. But periods of war and sieges from the 8th century on caused many Andalusians - among them poets, musicians, Sufi mystics, political figures and Sepharadi Jews - to flee the violence in Europe and to carry Andalusian culture to North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Musiqa Andalusia is the general term for the traditional urban music of the Maghreb - spanning Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, and also of Syria - where communities preserved and developed Andalusian music since medieval times. This music was imported to North Africa and Syria by Muslims and Jews, who were fleeing persecution and the Christian re-conquest of Spain between the 10th and the 15th centuries, after centuries of Arab Muslim control. Early in the 10th century, the first wave of refugees came from Sevilla and concentrated in Tunisia. Waves of migration that followed came from other areas of Spain and concentrated in Algeria and Morocco. The difference in patterns of migrations resulted in differences between contemporary traditions, and in the development of five distinct national traditions. Each tradition has its own repertory, and the variations between them include differences in modal and rhythmic patterns, large-scale structures, instruments and terminology. Andalusian music is known as a'la (instrumental music) in Morocco, san'a (work of art) in Algiers, Gharnati (from Granada) in Western Algeria, ma'luf (customary, standard) in Tunisia and Lybia. Despite the regional and national differences, Andalusian music is united by some formal characteristics, norms of performance practice, a historical identity and philosophical heritage which as a whole, distinguishes the tradition from the music of the Arab East, known as mashreq.
Origins of distinctive Arab-Andalusian music tradition date back to the early 9th century, when the musician, singer and composer Ziryab (Blackbird), a freed Persian slave, was ousted from the court of Baghdad. Ziryab ended up in the court of Al-Andalus in Cordoba, Spain. There he founded a music school in which he developed a new compositional system based in a system of 24 melodic modes, whose cosmological properties were represented in a symbolic tree of temperaments. Each of the modes was associated with a specific hour of the day, natural elements, colors in the spectrum, and aspects of human emotional and physical conditions. Many of those associations are still respected by Andalusian musicians, even if they are not followed in detail in their musical practice. Ziryab also defined the rules for sequencing different song types, putting in place the template for the large-scale form of Andalusian art music in North Africa - the nouba - a cycle of vocal and instrumental music, the performance of which can last many hours. The nouba consists of one or two instrumental introductions and then a series of different vocal movements that move from the slowest and stately to movements that are faster and have shorter rhythmic cycles, at the end of which the feel is driving and danceable. While there used to be 24 noubas, each linked to a different hour of the day, the way in which certain noubas exist in each of the present-day national traditions defines some of the differences between each tradition.
Across the Andalusian diaspora, Andalusian music was cultivated in the palaces of the aristocracy but was especially embraced by Sufi brotherhoods and performed in both religious contexts as well as in coffee houses and in communal celebrations. Andalusian traditions are monodic and based on a subtle system of melodic modes called maqamat, all of which include intervals that are beyond the scope of the diatonic scale, and with rhythmic structures and range from free to metric cycles with distinct patterns of accentuation. The poetic texts, most of which belong to a literary classical Arabic verse form called muwashasha and some to the vernacular zajal were recorded in special collections, but until recently melodic content relied on oral transmission. Love, nature's beauty and the effect of wine are typical topics. Typical instrumentation of Andalusian music includes the oud (lute) rabab (one or 2 stringed fiddle) darbukka (goblet drum), def or tarija (tambourine) qanun (zither), nay (flute) and kamenjah (violin). In recent lineups, other instruments have been added to the ensemble, including piano, contrabass, cello, and sometimes mandolins and even saxophones or clarinets.
While the earliest Andalusian community established itself in Tunisia, Morocco retained the most long-standing ties with the actual territory of Al-Andalus, and in some Northern Moroccan cities whole communities identify themselves as Andalusian. In both Morocco and Tunisia, French colonial authorities saw value in preserving Andalusian music, and after independence, the music was officially sanctioned by the state. This resulted in sponsorship of Andalusian classical music by the state and the media, which helped to keep the music alive, but deterred innovation and experimentation. In Algeria, the reverse was true. French administrators tried to crush Andalusian music traditions and the religious conservatives in Algeria today oppose the poetic celebrations of wine and carnal love. This has given the music a kind of underground appeal that attracts young musicians to the tradition. In Syria the music lives in cities such as Damascus and Aleppo, though the tradition has been greatly influenced by Persian and Ottoman music. But from Libya to Syria, what has kept Andalusian music alive is its use in religious contexts, especially the Sufi lodges.
In Syria, the most famous singers of Andalusian music are Sabri Moudallal, who began his career as a muezzin, and the hugely popular singer Sabah Fakri; singer Abed Azrie experiments with Arabo-Andalusian crossovers with flamenco. Morocco has a tremendously active scene of Andalusian music, with prominent local orchestras such as the Orchestra of Fez and the Orchestra of Tangier; traditional singer Amina Alaoui has also received fame in the West. Tunisia has a variety of ensembles, ranging from that of the Rashidya Institute, which has been prominent in the preservation of Andalusian music of the 20th century, to the experimental all women's band Firqat El Azifat - which mixes a traditional Andalusian lineup with Western strings and piano. Nassima of Algeria is noted for her renditions of the san'a tradition, which in Algeria has been associated with males, while Habib Guerroumi has tackled the Andalu-Algerian repertoire with solo voice and oud accompaniment.-Nili Belkind
Known for his lavish Bollywood film scores, hitmaker A.R. Rahman is a household name in India and it's diaspora.
A.R. Rahman
A.R. Rahman is an Indian composer best known in the West for his collaboration with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber on the 2002 musical Bombay Dreams. But in India and the Indian diaspora, Rahman is a household name thanks to the hundreds of Bollywood film scores and hit songs that he's penned.
Born A.S. Dileep Kumar in 1966 in Madras (now Chennai), the future megastar grew up in a musical household. He began his music instruction early, beginning piano at the age of 4. After his father's death, young Dileep began to support his family as a professional keyboard player at the age of 11; dropping out of school for a life on the road. He would accompany the great tabla master Zakir Hussain on world tours, and eventually convert to Islam, taking the name Allah Rakha Rahman. And, despite Rahman's failure to complete his formal studies, his raw talent won him a scholarship at the Trinity College of Music at Oxford University, where took a degree in music and studied Western Classical forms. He returned to India in 1987 where he began a career in advertising, honing his pop skills by writing jingles.
Rahman opened his own studio in 1989—Panchathan Record Inn—and soon after moved from advertising to scoring the soundtracks to mainly Tamil-language films. His first great success came in 1992, with the film Roja. By 1995 he had moved on to the even bigger Hindi film market, making a big splash with the smash hit Rangeela. He followed this with string of chart-toppers throughout the '90s, including 1998's Dil Se and culminating in his 2001 masterpiece Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India , which was nominated for best foreign-language film at the 2002 Academy Awards.
Rahman's music is as day-glo and technicolor as the Bollywood films he scores; vivid and unafraid to employ synthesizers and big pop sounds. A big fan of '80s pop, Rahman's music often puts a sly, Indian spin on pop cliches—something that served him well in his collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber. In Bombay Dreams, Rahman adapted the melodies of original hits such as "Chaiyya Chayyia" to new, English language lyrics. The lavish musical was a smash hit in it's original 2002 production in London's West End, but later fizzled when transplanted to Broadway.—Tom Pryor
