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Non-Western musical performance traditions vary significantly across regions, with South Asian music emphasizing improvisation and personal mentorship under a guru, while Southeast Asian gamelan music features a range of instruments and vocal styles tied to poetry. In China and Japan, musical performance is closely linked to theatrical traditions, with Chinese opera showcasing a blend of singing, acrobatics, and instrumentation, and Japanese music focusing on the visual grace of performance. Each tradition reflects distinct cultural values and aesthetics, contrasting with Western musical practices.

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9 views

21

Non-Western musical performance traditions vary significantly across regions, with South Asian music emphasizing improvisation and personal mentorship under a guru, while Southeast Asian gamelan music features a range of instruments and vocal styles tied to poetry. In China and Japan, musical performance is closely linked to theatrical traditions, with Chinese opera showcasing a blend of singing, acrobatics, and instrumentation, and Japanese music focusing on the visual grace of performance. Each tradition reflects distinct cultural values and aesthetics, contrasting with Western musical practices.

Uploaded by

Pragya Mishra
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Non-Western musical performance

traditions
South Asia
Although classical South Asian or Indian musicians usually
perform in a concert situation quite analogous to that of
Western artists, their audiences respond to them quite
differently: they are judged not on how faithfully they
reproduce the music the composer imagined but on how well
they create their own music within certain wide bounds set by
the composer and by the general practice of Indian music.
Since Indian musical performance is based on improvisation,
Indian musical pedagogy is therefore a more personal
procedure, in which aspiring musicians will “apprentice”
themselves to a guru, with whom they are thereafter
identified; in the West this kind of organization is reflected in
the rise of the group-virtuoso discussed above. Similarly,
Western development away from large performing groups such
as the full orchestra reflects—or at least parallels—the
more intimate character of Indian music, the basic texture of
which usually involves a quite small group of performers: one
player to provide rhythm on a drum such as the double-
headed, pitched tabla; one to provide a basic drone, often on
the lute-like tambura; and a central performer on the sitar
(technically also a plucked lute but one with melodic
capability, unlike the tambura). The players often engage in a
kind of competition not unlike that of Western jazz groups. If
there is singing, the style of performance is low and soft, in
contrast to that of Indonesian classical vocalism.
Southeast Asia
The gamelan is at the centre of the art-music tradition of
Indonesia. It may range in size from a few to more than 75
instruments. The basic melodic instrument is the saron (bronze
xylophone), accompanied by various gongs, a kind of bowed
lute, a recorder-flute and/or a zither; the group is led by a
drummer. As in medieval Western music, there are two kinds
of gamelan playing, one emphasizing the bronze instruments
(comparable to medieval haut, or loud, consorts) and the other
the wind and stringed instruments (bas, or soft, groups). A
similar differentiation exists in Indochinese music in the
contrast between the percussion-dominated pi phat band of
Thailand and the string-dominated mahori bands of Thailand
and Cambodia. Gamelan playing, particularly of the softer
type, often accompanies solo and unison choral singing of
classical poetry (music is connected with most of Indonesian
literature). Southeast Asian vocal performance—like that of a
great deal of non-Western art music—is characterized by
tense, high, often nasal voice production; this is one of
many alternatives explored by the more experimental 20th-
century Western composers and performers.
China and Japan
The most extensively developed and most
important Chinese and Japanese traditions of musical
performance are closely tied to theatrical styles and traditions.
Perhaps the most spectacular of non-Western performance
traditions is Chinese opera, in which singers, acrobats,
costumes, scenery, and instruments are combined in the
creation of a highly varied work of art. Jingxi (Peking opera)
uses two basic kinds of instrumentation: wuchang, for military
scenes a battery of drums, gongs, and cymbals with a kind of
oboe (suona) playing the melody; wenchang, for the more
frequent domestic scenes a wider variety based on a drum
(bangu) with a peculiarly sharp, cracking sound for keeping
time, and a number of two-stringed bowed lutes (huqin,
notably the jinghu) played with the bow passing between the
strings. Plucked lutes (notably, the yueqin) and flutes
(typically, the di) also appear at times. All of the melody
instruments play heterophonically with the singers, whose
vocal style, as in the West, is highly artificial. Heroines are
usually portrayed (sometimes by female impersonators) in a
high, thin voice; heroes use a raucous rasping tone quite
foreign to traditionally oriented Western ears—but, again, not
unlike some of the vocal techniques required by 20th-century
Western avant-garde composers. A performance tradition
peculiarly Japanese is the emphasis on the visual aspects of
making music: custom directs that gagaku (court orchestra)
instruments must be played as gracefully as possible.

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