Re: Mandolin world vs fiddle world
Originally Posted by
catmandu2
Not only those you mention above Ranald, but roughly half or more the world goes without notation. So what do we say about that? That they are "incomplete" players and musicians? That they can be "improved" by using notational systems? Of course such is not the case at all (if we are to assume that non-western cultures and traditions are "legitimate," that heterogeneity exists, and that the goal of every arts culture is not "Westernization"). This is often challenging for folks culture-bound and accustomed to operating with ethnocentric bias, as most of us have been taught to do.
This is also true of many folk subcultures within the West. Many outsiders have such ingrained ideas of how music should sound that if they go to a community in which everyone plays the "A" a bit sharp sometimes, they assume that everyone except themselves is off pitch. The so-called standards of Western music -- e.g., near-perfect pitch and clear intonation -- don't even apply to a large part of western traditional music, e.g, blues, Cape Breton and many fiddling styles, Cajun music. Sadly, there is a feedback mechanism where as you say would say, folk music here too is becoming "Westernized," in that it's absorbing the standards of Western elite music. Many of us initially turned to these folk genres because they sounded different from the popular and elite music of our cultures.
Robert Johnson's mother, describing blues musicians:
"I never did have no trouble with him until he got big enough to be round with bigger boys and off from home. Then he used to follow all these harp blowers, mandoleen (sic) and guitar players."
Lomax, Alan, The Land where The Blues Began, NY: Pantheon, 1993, p.14.
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