Week 7

In the near closing of the film “Latcho Drom” the viewer finds the Roma people at the end of their migration through the Middle East, yet at the very beginning of their migration through Europe. Tracing their movement through the Eastern European countries of Romania and Slovakia, the scenes from this portion of Latcho Drom tell of the suffering and hardship the Roma people have endured throughout their migration from place to place in search of a home.

It is important to note here though that this film in documenting musical and cultural heritages also indirectly homogenizes the Roma people as an uprooted, ethnic race of wanderers and musicians. To some extent having a collective history is important to the developing of a culture, but this can at times ignore the fact that many Roma now have actually found permanent homes dispersed throughout Europe, Western Asia, South America, and also North America. Still, that the Roma people in their history have endured discrimination and persecution cannot be denied.

Against open fields of brush and grasses, a wandering boy finds on a riverbank leaning against a tree two thin Roma men playing fiddle and hammered dulcimer (perhaps the santur). The fiddler accompanies his singing of political revolution in Turkey using inventive techniques such as dragging a single horse hair across one of the fiddle’s strings. From this scene the movie’s focus wanders to a small community of peasant homes, where locals with their fiddles, hammered dulcimers, accordions, string bass, and flute (perhaps the ney) meet outdoors to form a playing circle in some small yard. The music here is lively, fast, and active, with the fiddles playing fluently and in unison virtuosic phrases with the accordion and ney while the santur provides percussive accompaniment and the bass harmonic enforcement. To contrast, the screen is then taken to a moving train car where a group of women and a little girl sing long narratives expressing feelings of hopelessness, rejection, and hurt, describing in particular the ideas of being cursed in the eyes of God and of belonging to a downtrodden social caste. In another scene there is an old woman bearing numbers tattooed to her forearm in front of her cottage by a river singing lyrics telling of the hunger and death swiftly brought by concentration camps at Auschwitz during World War II. Between the years 1941 and 1945, the concentration camps at Auschwitz had murdered between 1.4 and 1.5 million people. In another scene (as far as we got in the film at least) one finds a Romani family living out of a tree house surrounded by plowed fields and a gray sky, again singing lyrics whose themes express the condemnation and misfortune that has befallen the Roma people.

Strictly examining the music of the Roma, since these scenes travel from as far as Poland to Romania it is difficult to trace a development of musical styles and techniques. Even crossing language barriers with Slovak, Polish, and Romanian, there is little more to point to musically other than trends in instrumentation, that singing usually takes on a personal narrative form, and that melodies are narrow in range and are heavily ornamented with tonal inflections.

Week 6

The film “Latcho Drom” traces the musical heritages of the nomadic Rom people, following a small group of Romani as they travel the Asian continent from northern India through the Middle East and into Eastern Europe. During this journey the viewer witnesses an evolution of Romani music, one that corresponds to migrations typical to the Roma people as they adapt to new places and cultures. The movie’s first scene is of the nomads as they celebrate beneath a full moon. Accompanying themselves while singing are a group of females with their finger cymbals, also known as sajat or zills, who later swing bells on strings back and forth to the rhythm of the music. Providing instrumental accompaniment to the celebration and singing are also several males. One male sits with his legs crossed playing a large chordophone with features characteristic of a settar; another male decorates the music’s meter playing a clay pot type idiophone, perhaps the Indian ghatan; and playing in heterophony with the other melodic instruments is a man bowing a fiddle, one that resembles a cretan-lyra, or perhaps even a classical Turkish kemence. In another scene one witnesses the dancing of a couple in Egypt. During all this activity one hears: a chorus of fiddlers, all playing something similar to an Egyptian rababah; several drummers playing distinctly middle-eastern sounding percussion on the darabukka; and in addition the sound of a large tambourine, one that might be a bendir or perhaps a riqq. In the final scene (the final scene we saw in class at least) we are brought to a teahouse in Istanbul, Turkey. Providing accompaniment suitable to the occasion is a traditional tahkt ensemble, featuring distinctly Arab in addition to other more traditionally western sounding instruments, both of which include: the clarinet, the santur (a Persian hammered dulcimer), a couple of violins, again the riqq, and finally the ud (a Turkish plucked lute).

As one can see, all of the instruments here cannot be found within a single geographic region. The director develops the movie’s soundtrack by subtly altering its instrumentation, rhythmic style, and melodic characteristics to show both the versatility of Rom musicians and the intense diversity within their repertoire. As the viewer follows the Romani musicians through their long migration one can hear Arabic, Indian, Persian, Turkish, Egyptian, and even Baltic influences and their adaptation to Rom culture. Throughout this journey the Roma are always shown on the street, pulling carts, or grouping amongst the rural poor in crowded shelters. While the background changes from desert roads to small settlements and urban cities one can detect changes in the characters’ clothing. Shawls, tunic, and robes change to dresses, pants, and shirts; bright, vibrant colors turn to more muted and lighter hues. During this transition bare feet begin to have shoes and ox pulled carts take on metal-spoked wheels more suitable for the journey. Wandering from place to place without home, the viewer is reminded of the Roma’s rude history as a bunch of gypsies. Even if these people seem poor in wealth and power to me, they are rich in their liveliness and cultural heritage.

Week 5

When looking at the history of Japanese of Kabuki Theater, one can see the many ways in which society and artistic culture influence one another. Again, in the era of Kabuki Theater’s inception, Japanese society was strictly governed by rules created by the office of the Shogunate, which were enforced by the warrior Samurai class. Following what seemed to generate public interest and favor, the themes popularized by Kabuki Theater reflected a culture obsessed with the forbidden. Popular stories included upper-class men falling in love with prostitutes, forbidden lovers enticed by the choice of double suicide, and other plots dominated by elements of sex and violence.

No art is made in a vacuum, and in this sense modern film continues the influential exchange made between society and artistic culture. In the 1995 film “The American President”, one sees a divorced United States president lose public approval when his personal relationship with a lobbyist turns into romance. Reflecting the controversy surrounding actual President Bill Clinton and his connection to Monica Lewinsky, “The American President” depicts American values behind marriage and their influence on daily life. In the TV miniseries adapted from the novel “Roots”, author Alex Haley traces his family’s lineage back to his Gambian ancestors, who were captured and taken from their home by early American slave traders. “Roots” reflects the rise of racial minorities against political and social discriminations during the 1960’s and the mark left by slavery on American society. Fascination with violence is also an element seldom forgotten by modern film and in “Saving Private Ryan” is shown to great detail with the depiction of America’s infamous Normandy invasion during World War II. In “We Were Soldiers” and also “Windtalkers” the element of violence is again heavily emphasized while recounting the history behind America’s involvement in both World War II and the Vietnam War. In one way these examples show how politics and society influence American cultural, while in another way the values probed by these examples reflect the interests of the individual. More importantly, it is through the art of cinema that the values of American society and culture can be represented.

Week Four

When discussing the music performed for tourists by the native Naxi of Lijiang County in the northern region of China’s Yunnan province, Professor Helen Reese suggests that the Naxi traditional music is not as “ancient” as it is marketed to its foreign audience. Investigating the history behind this popular “authentic” Naxi musical tradition, Professor Reese points out that the Naxi, like many other ethnic minorities throughout China, inherited many of their cultural traditions from the Han Chinese, which included the musical-religious organization known as the Dongjinghui or Dongjing associations. At first these musical imports included poetic and sacred scripture, garb, melodies, tune titles, notation systems, and a heterophonic texture, although over time secular and informal practicing of these traditions evolved them to their truncated modern forms. Even though the Naxi musical ambassador and performer Xuan Ke presents his ensemble to tourists as being all Naxi, two of his players are in fact Han Chinese. And though the Lijiang ensemble points to their plucked lutes, double reed pipes, and heavy vibrato as being entirely Naxi developments, these differences are relatively superficial when compared to the structurally Han background over which they are superimposed.

In regards to an entirely different situation, when students from China’s Central Conservatory of Music led by Fang Kun performed their orchestrated “national music” at Durham England at the Second Oriental Music Festival in 1979, an American scholar criticized their choice of repertoire as reflecting more the traditions of Western classical music than the styles found in Eastern traditional music. In terms of authenticity, the argument raised here was that the Chinese orchestra in perfecting, redefining, and reinterpreting its own traditions, was in fact adopting practices not only foreign to its own culture but also destructive to its maintenance and growth. The argument in response to this went to suggest that this conservative view aims to arrest the development of Chinese music and that Asian music, following Taoist thought and tradition, is best preserved by recreating the moods found in older styles and genres. Although supporters and opponents for both of these arguments can be found on either side of the East-West divide, more accurately this debate boils down to a matter of individual preference. For even though conservative English patrons praise the Naxi for their “authentic” sounding music, the self-conscious musical fodder used at these foreign tourist oriented attractions is by no means authentic when compared to the musical styles played by the informal secular groups of neighboring villages for their own private entertainment.

This authenticity debate though can be interpreted in many different ways that fundamentally point to vagueness of the entire matter. Following the words of the Russian writer Peter Goullart, authentic in this context can mean “credible” or “convincing”, both of which correspond to the responses of the English tourists to the traditional Naxi performances. A different interpretation of authentic could also suggest that it mean “duly authorized, certified, or legally valid”, which has been adopted by the professional Chinese Central Conservatory of Music and the Communist government behind China’s cultural revolutions. Then again, authentic can also be thought of as exactly copying the form of previously inherited traditions, such as those of the Han Chinese. If such is the case confusion then surrounds the nature of what is being copied, from what historical era the original is taken, and whether the judge of this authenticity is a tourist, a Chinese minority, or a Han Chinese. Again, heavily imbued within this topic is the element of individual preference, which through subjectivity corrodes all attempts toward substantially identifying what constitutes being authentic.