musicologists

"In all human undertakings the period of growth is followed by one of decay unless a new spirit pours fresh life into the old forms."

"Of ancient stringed instruments there are, we may roughly say, two broad types; in one the strings are stretched across a sound-box and lie parallel to it—this we may call the ‘’ type, though including, for our present purpose, the various forms of and ; in the other the strings are attached to the upper board of the sound-box and rise vertically from it—this is the ‘harp’ type."

"When completely dry the plant should be mounted on stiff white paper. The size depends on the purpose of the collection; paper 17 in. by 10 in. will be found useful and workable, and can be obtained from most printers. It is a bad system to fasten the specimens on with glue or gum, as it renders it impossible to shift the mount, and finer parts of the flowers are destroyed. The writer has found that very thin strips of parchment, cut with wider ends, laid across the stoutest parts of the plant and fastened to the paper with strong cement, form a most easy and effectual way of mounting with the least possible unsightliness."

"Sir (Ur Excavations, vol. , 1934) records that in the grave of the (c. 2700 ) he notices close to the coffin a quantity of small "" of thin cope sheeting, laid over wooden cores; with them there were plentiful traces of wood and also of some substance which looked like leather or skin; he suggests that they formed the remains of a drum."

"That the was the predecessor and counterpart of the of the present day is a matter of common knowledge, but, when we come to unravel the origin of the name, we are landed at once into the region of wild conjecture. Some writers have wisely passed the subject over in silence; others have propounded solutions more plausible than probable."

"When I was hired as Lecturer II by the University of Lagos in April, 1975, I applied to Radio Nigeria for a transfer to Unilag, but was denied a transfer. My then boss vowed that the only way I could leave was to resign."

"I started taking a closer look, on their work on African instruments, and discovered that all African instruments were classified as idiophones. I disagreed deeply with this lumping together of instruments from the so-called developing world. But I could not attack Sachs & Hornbostel, giants in world music. So I decided to research how my culture, the Igbo culture, classifies music instruments and it was an eye opening experience. The Lord gave me everything I wrote in that book, it could not have come from me. The findings were such a bombshell that I had to change the Head of my doctoral committee, before I could go on with my dissertation."

"When Professor Ibidapo Obe, the new VC finally awarded me my retirement, they decided to go by the one year leave that I was originally awarded, and not by the three years that I was entitled. I wrote and presented all the documentation to show that I followed the regulation and did not default even by one day after my leave, papers showing that I returned, that I notified the VC of my return, and had no reply whatsoever from him. In other words, I was asking them to start my retirement from November, 1999, and not from November 1997. We are now at an impasse, me waiting for their reply, and they waiting perhaps for my death. I have already instructed my kids that if I die before this is resolved, they should continue to pursue it even at court level. After all the nasty treatment I received, they have to also rub me of my entitlement? My story is beginning to sound like a soap opera, but that is my story. I lived and survived it only because God was on my side."

"Laz kicked the door to my office open a day after his choral sang at an embassy without me, and warned me that I was swimming in dangerous water if I missed another of his concerts. There and then I resolved to leave his choral for good. He developed the habit of not knocking at my office door, but kicking it open anytime he wanted to talk to me about his choir."

"Recently, one of my past students, who now lives in the US, came all the way from Philadelphia to be at my birthday celebration. Her first question to me was, “Ma, why did you leave? We all needed you and you left.” I gave her a simple answer that time, telling her that I left because there was nothing else left for me to do. My department was scrapped and we were rendered redundant. My colleagues, some younger than me were dead, if I had stayed, I don’t know what would have become of me."

"I want you to see this.” I told him handing him the letter. While he read it I watched his face for reactions. He put the letter down quietly on his table, stood up and offered me his hand and said, “Congratulations colleague."

"I came to know about this because, the Ambassador himself, who knew me quite well because I was a regular performer at the Embassy, sent his driver to Unilag to pick me up and take me to the embassy. There he told me about this man who came to him with a lady, and tried to talk him into signing his translation of my credentials and assessment as correct."

"I left the embassy in shock and determined to follow the Ambassador’s advice. Luck was on my side. It was 1977, and FESTAC was just winding down, when the US embassy in Lagos offered a number of exchange visitor scholarships to some Nigeria artistes, and I was one of them. I took the opportunity of my visit to the US to apply and audition for schools."

"When I returned from Michigan in 1982, I looked forward to a peaceful tenure at my job. My credential wahala had been put to rest. I was also hoping that advancement in my job will be a done deal. I still performed with the Laz Ekwueme choral, but I took time off to set up my band and do my own thing. My work with the choral diminished as my work with my own band increased. I set up a children‘s choir also, and that kept me even more busy, so busy that I stopped singing with the choral."

"On my Dissertation Book Cover, there is something I think you should mention in the book. It is about my dissertation. Before I went to Michigan, I did an extensive research on Igbo folktales, with the intention of writing my dissertation on the importance of folktales and folk song in music education. When I arrived Michigan, in my excitement, I mentioned my plan to a fellow student, a Ghanaian, who was there before me, and had been struggling to get his proposal approved. He quickly stole the idea from me. So I had to go looking for another topic. I wanted my studies to have relevance with my culture, so I started praying, asking God to give me a topic. As I was praying, the Lord was pointing me to the huge book by Sachs & Hornbostel on “Instruments of of World. I was then taking courses in Ethnomusicology and so was familiar with the works of these two men."

"As soon as I returned to Nigeria, I lifted the whole classification section of my dissertation and published it with Nigeria Magazine. I wanted my colleagues to see what I discovered. Of course, it did not go down too well with Laz. He quickly told me that Nigeria Magazine was not a scholarly magazine. The same year, African Music Magazine discovered my article, and requested and published it."

"Anyway, I distanced myself from him even further, minded my own business, and worked hard to write and get published. When I thought I was ready to present myself for promotion, I sent in my application, and copies of my work. He laughed at me and responded with a very denigrating memo in which he trivialized all my work, then he personally brought me a copy of his memo, and told me as he left that unless I did as he said, I should forget to ever be promoted."

"One time, he told me that I should know that the right hand should wash the left hand for peace to reign. I reminded him that when I returned from Michigan to Nigeria to do my field work, I almost jeopardized my field work because he insisted that I must travel with his choir to Ghana and to different state of Nigeria. I pleaded with him to allow me some time to develop my own credits so that I can be promoted. He told me that he decided who got promoted or not, and that it did not depend on how much credit I can accumulate, but on how well I serve him. My God! I could not reason with the man."

"Arunachal Pradesh consists of a chain of isolated languages, which have been on the southern edge of the core Tibeto-Burman area. A plethora of different contact situations have allowed both lexical borrowing and sometimes striking grammatical and phonological restructuring. But perhaps it would be useful to begin considering this region as more similar to the Amazon or NE Asia than Tibet."

"Arunachal Pradesh should be treated as a major priority on a global scale. Languages such as Basque and Burushaski have attracted high levels of scholarly interest over many decades precisely because of their status as language isolates. Those in Arunachal Pradesh have been completely bypassed. Moreover, although these languages are presently still spoken, their populations are small and pressure to switch to Hindi, promoted in both the media and via the school system, is growing. Probably by no coincidence, Arunachal Pradesh is also a major centre for biodiversity, something which attracts worldwide attention and resources. It is suggested that the little-known languages of Arunachal Pradesh should be given similar priority due to their uniqueness and endangered status."

"What seems to have happened is that the seminar room has taken on a life of its own; that topics are established and debated, regardless of any empirical reality. And that hypotheses evolve through a type of arms race; each one has to be more bizarre than the last to attract attention. The larger the constituency, and English literature is the largest of all, the more like an ants’ nest the competition. Only the weirdest survive. Similarly with linguistics; perhaps less than a twentieth of all linguists do anything that could really be described as empirical investigation and tiny fraction of that pays attention to little-known languages."

"The disappearance or decrease in prayer formulas of classical terms indicating the supernatural and the meaning of Christian revelation, first of all that of grace, has favored both the secularization of the rite and of Catholic mentality. Hence few today believe that the liturgical texts serve the priest to talk to God; they evoke a script of which the priest is the director or leading actor, the vogue word of "modern" liturgists."

"Mahler is perhaps the musician with whom I have the most in common, an exaggerated sensibility, Schmalz and at the same time a deep desire for purity, but an almost libidinal purity — a harmony of Judeo-Christian opposites, in balance—and moreover a horror of origins, in fact all the inherent complexes of a Jew and a Christian."

"As I told you on the phone, I'm not going to leave Paris, I'm staying home (I even made my first spaghetti sauce), I listen to the radio a lot (right now to marvelous Iranian vocal music), I compose, go to the cinema, to gay bars, and sleep."

"As in the story where the master asks the pupil what he has learned and the pupil repeats shyly by heart what the master said, upon which the master responds by giving him a slap and asks the pupil to come back when he understands, I don't want to get a slap and I certainly don't want to write Balinese music![...] How can one not speak of love when a friend, by way of farewell, dances for me, when an old woman offers me a piece of fruit for my journey to Java because for her the furthest you can go from Bali is Java!"

"For the first time in my life I feel good in Paris!"

"[It is] a work for Javanese and Balinese gongs and other types of metal that I brought back with me from my journey, here the vision will be fundamentally a religious one."

"What is very strange musically is that the only music that can really inspire me now is my own music — and I think that’s perfectly normal.I’ve found what I wanted: solitude and the space to think. [...] Soon my piano will arrive, because for composing I really need my instrument."

"I love Germany as much as I hate France."

"It will be rather sad music. It will also probably be one of my most beautiful and deepest works. I've been thinking a lot about music, and life, but particularly about music because it's only in thinking about music, and about sound, that I can be happy. [...] This piece I'm doing is an important bridge to cross before beginning the opera, technical work, obviously, a rediscovery (A) of counterpoint (B) of more dramatic musical time, closer to speech, with atomic elements of different kinds."

"Already in October at the same time as my course with Stockhausen I will have to learn 2 African languages. Probably around January I will go to South Africa to study African music. This project is terribly important for me because for me to spend one year at the sources of music and to understand the fundamental reasons for music is terribly important, essential to the formation of a composer."

"I've always been passionate, crazy about music, and believe me it's wonderful."

"It would be hard to find a stranger instance of the irony of fate in all the history of the world. After being the idol of musical Europe when a mere child, Mozart had fulfilled in maturity all the promise of his early years. But as his powers rose to nobler heights his worldly prosperity seemed to decrease. As years went on poverty pressed harder and harder on him."

"Methods of art are the product of the patient labour of generations."

"Art seems to differ from other manifestations of human energy in welcolming so frankly the evidences of personality. Culture and progress alike deprecate aggressive individual prominence. The cherished ideal of the religious-minded is the effacement of self. The philosophical ideal is the entire and perfect accomodation of impulses and actions to the general well-being. But art not only welcomes the evidence of personal initiative; it demands as one of its first necessities copious and consistent proofs of individuality."

"[And here is what Sachs has to say about Bharata's ancient text the Natya-Shastra, which he agrees could be as early as the 4th century BCE and about which he tells us that it] "testifies to a well-established system of music in ancient India, with an elaborate theory of intervals, consonances, modes, melodic and rhythmic patterns". ... "Bharata's text was probably rehandled as early as antiquity, and it may confirm the idea that Bharata himself wrote his treatise much earlier" ... [He also tells us that this text establishes that it represents a stage where the] "slow transition from folk-song to art-song, from hundreds of tribal styles to one all-embracing music of India […] had long ago come to an end"."

"[In respect of the Slendro or "male" scale in Indonesian music,] "It seems that the modes or, better, the melodies ascribed to the modes, matter today only from the standpoint of choosing the adequate time for performance: pieces in nem are to be played between seven and midnight; sanga is the right mode for the early morning between midnight and three and for the afternoon between noon and seven; manjura belongs to the hours between 3:00 A.M. and noon. This time table is unmistakably Indian. The name salendro points also to India. It probably stemmed from the Sumatran Salendra Dynasty, which ruled Java almost to the end of the first thousand years A.D. and had come from the Coromandel Coast in South India. Thus it might be wiser to connect slendro with ragas like madhyamāvati, mohana, or hamsadhvanī than with the Chinese scale""

"China also passed on to Japan the ceremonial dances of India with their music, which were Japanized as the solemn and colorful Bugaku."

"So vital in East Asiatic music is the delicate vacillation that dissolves the rigidity of pentatonic scales that all possible artifices have carefully been classified, named, and, by the syllabic symbols of their names, embodied in notation: ka (to quote the terms of Japanese koto players); that is, sharpening a note by pressing down the string beyond the bridge; niju oshi, sharpening by a whole tone; é, the subsequent sharpening of a note already plucked and heard; ké, sharpening it for just a moment and releasing the string into its initial vibration; yū, the same, but making the relapse very short before the following note is played; kaki, plucking two adjoining strings in rapid succession with the same finger; uchi, striking the strings beyond the bridges during long pauses; nagashi, a slide with the forefinger over the strings; and many others [….] Recent investigation has made clear that this tablature is a Chinese transcription of Sanskrit symbols used in India. Indeed, the graces of long zithers, unparalleled in East Asiatic music, are nothing else than the gamakas of India, imported with the sway of Buddhism during the Han Dynasty and given to the technique of Chinese zithers, which became the favorite instruments of meditative Buddhist priests and monks."

"The strange, never-ceasing drones used in the choral singing of Tibet belong in the Indian, not the Chinese sphere of Tibetan civilization."

"In the retinue of Buddhism, it had a decisive part in forming the musical style of the East, of China, Korea and Japan, and with Hindu settlers it penetrated what today is called Indo-China and the Malay Archipelago. There was a westbound exportation too. The fact, of little importance in itself, that an Indian was credited with having beaten the drum in Mohammed's military expeditions might at least be taken for a symbol of Indian influence on Islamic music. Although complete ignorance of ancient Iranian music forces us into conservation we are allowed to say that the system of melodic and rhythmic patterns characteristic of the Persian, Turkish and Arabian world, had existed in India as the rāgas and tālas more than a thousand years before it appeared in the sources of the Mohammedan Orient."

"[In Siamese (Thai) music,] "the comparatively large share of drums, however, indicates the neighborhood of India""

"The roots of music are more exposed in India than anywhere else. The Vedda in Ceylon possess the earliest stage of singing that we know, and the subsequent strata of primitive music are represented by the numberless tribes that in valleys and jungles took shelter from the raids of northern invaders. So far as this primitive music is concerned, the records are complete or at least could easily be completed if special attention were paid to the music of the ‘tribes’…[There are] hundreds of tribal styles…"

"The first iconographic record of the hand bell or ghaṇṭā is not conclusive. As late as the seventh century it is depicted in one of the caves at Aurangabad; yet five hundred years earlier, the greco-Syrian philosopher, Bardesanes, had related that while the Hindu priest prayed, he sounded the bell. It was small and tulip-shaped, with a thick clapper. As it was exclusively used by priests in the worship of Hindu divinities, the handle was finely decorated with religious symbols, such as Siva's trident, Vishnu's eagle or Hanuman, the king of the apes."

"[And here is what Sachs has to say about the 7-tone-22-shruti system of notes described in Bharata's text:] We know that two basic principles have shaped scales all over the world: the cyclic principle with its equal whole tones of 204 and semitones of 90 Cents, and the divisive principle with major whole tones of 204, minor whole tones of 182, and large semitones of 112 Cents. Bharata’s system derives from the divisive principle, and this, in turn, stems from stopped strings. But the earlier part of Indian antiquity had no stringed instrument except the open-stringed harp; no lute, no zither provided a fingerboard. India must have had the up-and-down principle, and it cannot but be hiding somewhere."

"The oldest preserved style, the classical Sino-Japanese Bugaku dances […are…] of Indian origin, and Chinese and Japanese music on the whole were under Indian influence in the second half of the first millennium A.D. And yet the most typical trait of Indian music, its sophisticated rhythmical patterns or tālas, had no chance in the East. In 860 A.D., someone wrote a treatise on drumming in China, with over one hundred ‘symphonies’ which doubtless were Indian tālas; but nothing came of this, and not one of the Far Eastern styles has preserved the slightest trace of such patterns. The three rhythms used in Tibetan orchestras, and kept up in percussion even when the other parts are silent, are obviously not Far Eastern, but deteriorated Indian patterns. The elaborate polyrhythm of Balinese cymbal players that Mr. Colin MePhee has recently described is not Far Eastern either."

"When we read in Bharata's classical book of the twenty-two microtones in ancient Indian octaves, of innumerable scales and modes, and of seventeen melodic patterns and their pentatonic and hexatonic alterations, we realize that music at, or even before, the beginning of the first century AD was by no means archaic. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that India's ancient music differed substantially from her modern music."

"[In Burmese music,] "These penetrant oboes, which lead the melody instead of the tinkling gongs of Java and Bali, are definitely Indian. But still more Indian is the unparalleled drum chime of, normally, twenty-four carefully tuned drums, suspended inside the walls of a circular pen, which the player, squatting in the center, strikes with his bare hands in swift, toccata like melodies with stupendous technique and delicacy""

"Една страна, в която достойни българи са спасявали евреи, не е имунизирана от антисемитизъм."

"Смятам, че ролята и на журналиста, и на писателя е критичният анализ. Разбира се и писателят, и журналистът плащат съответната цена."