Pygmy Pop Music
By Alexandro Venegas & Cinthia Prado
Summary
Pygmies & Pygmy music
Steven Feld
Pygmy music is:
- African style music from Africa (especially Congo)
- Incorporation of music and culture.
- Emotional impact & movement.
- They preserve their culture and changes.
- "Song is used to communicate with the forest".- Colin Turnbull
- Known for their rich, complex music.
- Starting at a young age.
- Copyright conventions
Mimesis, copyright & inspiration
Pygmy music
"This is a different thing, you see, brothers, we're all making African music, that's what I'm talking about" .- Hancock 1985
*He was a Professor of:
- Anthropology and Music @ UNM
- World Music @ the Institute of Music, University of Oslo, Norway
*Founder of New Mexico Jazz Workshop
*Bosavi rainforest region in Papua New Guinea
*Greek Macedonia
Men play struck beau.
Women & children sing behind them.
- AfricanAmerican citation practices
- Stylizations, references to Afro-Islamic humanism and African American nationalism.
Videos and Sounds
In a global space of circulating commodities
- Pygmy Music
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/recordings-of-pygmy-music-from-the-1946-ogooue-congo-mission/
- DEEP FOREST – Hunting
- Madonna – Sanctuary
- Head Hunters | Herbie Hancock | 1973 | Full Album
- Mbuti Peoples Music, Indigenous Africa, Hindewhu
Arguments
Subtlety spanning oppositional ideology and lyrical romanticism
“Pygmy-inspired mimetic practices in the jazz arena might allow us to scrutinize more closely how appropriations are neither musically nor politically singular” (Page 7).
- “Recordings were made by scholars and were realized specifically as anthropological and ethnomusicological documents, they have reached an unusually large and diverse audience” (page 9).
- Small portion of a much larger pattern
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
- No moral high ground
- Global schizophonic condition
- cultural invention in its own right.
- Egyptians, of African villagers, of colonials and missionaries, of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists.
- “Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them” (Kelly 1995, Page 19).
No rule specified at the time of writing.
Future Issues
- Gilbert Rouget. Congo in 1946
- Different tools
- Madonna in "Sanctuary".
musical influences worldwide
Questions
- Jazz musicians expressions in the 60s & 70s
- Improvisation and composition
- "theft"
- Revitalizing one's own tradition.
- Have you ever heard this Pygmy music in other artist?
-Do you think if Pygmy music was more popular, today could we have a Pygmy artist?
- Do you think if Pygmy society could have fancy instruments, music could be better than personal instrument?
- Innocence for
- tribal, ethnic, folk, or traditional music
- "world beat."
- Noise & silence
- Notions of reflection and revelation
Classical music is music without Africa
Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them
- In what year was the first discovery by Pygmy society?
- What is the mean kind of music by this community: monophony, polyphony, homophony or monody?
- In which country primordially is this society?