AcDec 2015-16 Music

Material about the 2015-16 USAD AcDec topic - India - for use by the Ridge Point High School Academic Decathlon team.

This Wiki is divided into pages in the following categories:
 * Art
 * Economics
 * Literature/Language
 * Math
 * Music
 * Science
 * Social Science
 * Objective Categories (Essay, Interview and Speech)
 * RPHS_AcDec_Wikia

Music Selections - link
Elements of Music:

http://musiced.about.com/od/beginnerstheory/a/musicelements.htm

Music Instruments:

String family - chordophones: One or more strings that can be plucked with a pick or plectrum (eg harp), bowed (eg violin), or struck (eg piano). May have two parts- body and neck, e.g. guitar May have frets, strings/bars on the neck to indicate different pitches. Use vibrating strings or chords to create sound. e.g. violins, guitars, harps; sarangi, kamaicha, sitar, sarod,vina, tambura, ektar

Aerophones-Brass family: Metal instruments, Column of vibrating air create sounds e.g. trumpets, horns

Woodwind family:Column of vibrating air creates sound, possibly using single/ double reeds e.g Flutes, clarinets, shehnai

Percussion family- Membranophone Membrane vibrates to create sound e.g. barrel drums,dholak, dhol,mridangam, tabla,kanjira

Idiophone Instrument vibrates to reduce sound e.g. bells, xylophone, wood blocks, cymbals, triangle,kartal, ghatam,

Keyboard: Wooden body of a gourd and neck with metal frets Metal sympathetic strings plucked with metal plectrum.

Hinduism and Music: http://hinduism.iskcon.org/lifestyle/804.htm
 * Songs of Village Life
 * 72% of Indians live in rural areas. Rural music varies depending on the performer. Men and women perform different types of songs. Training also differentiates specialist from non-specialist music. Musicians can also be divided into professional and non-professional. Professional musicians are paid. Everyone participates equally in women’s non-specialist music
 * They use little instrumentation, with at most a dholak or a kartal. Indians consider these songs a part of life, not performances. Listeners do not judge performers’ quality or ability.
 * Men’s rural music centers on devotional Hindu songs or Muslim poetry. Performers use drums, cymbals, and the harmonium.They perform loudly and energetically to express their fervor.
 * Specialist and professional musicians usually come from a family of musicians. Women perform at women’s gatherings, or in public with male relatives. Certain families have carried rural music for centuries. Radio, TV, and film have brought some women to the profession.
 * Chathi Mata- hymns for the fest
 * The song is not a performance; people move and speak in the background. One woman acts as the leader, with a group around her repeating the last phrase. As the song continues, more singers join. It has a seven-beat rhythm, with internal rhythms coming from short and long syllables. This sample comes from the Chhathi sixth-day celebration. A four-day period of ritual fasting in North India honors the Sun and the Mother Goddess. It begins on the sixth day of the Hindu month of Kartik, somewhere in October or November

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOUI2Db-gs0
 * This interactive clip describes the different types of instruments:
 * Pitch,  is the highness or lowness of the sound. The greater the frequency of a sound wave, the higher its pitch.

The link below describes the classifications of different types of instruments. http://aniko.pertucafe.hu/classification-of-instruments.html

The distance between any two adjacent keys on the keyboard is called a half step, or semitone. A whole step is the distance between every other key (regardless of color, black or white). Half steps and whole steps are the basic intervals of any scale (a sequence of pitches in ascending or descending order). The white keys are usually called the natural keys.

Pitches smaller than half steps may be called microtones or quartertones

In Indian classical music, the notes or pitches are named “Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni.” The twelve different pitches in ascending order are called the chromatic scale. A melody is a series of successive pitches perceived by the ear to form a coherent whole. When two pitches occur together, you have harmony. The “home” or “fundamental” pitch on which a scale is based is called the tonic.

Rhythm is the way music is organized in time.

Beat is the steady pulse that underlies most music. The speed or pace of the beat is called the tempo.

The first beat of a grouping is often the strongest, so it is called the downbeat or strong beat.

Rhythm is syncopated when accented or emphasized notes fall on weak beats, or in between beats.

This Quizlet link is a set of Basic Music Terms:

https://quizlet.com/675432/basic-music-terminology-music-101-flash-cards/

The YouTube clip explains Music Components and Terms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXnvtIAtdvE

The Wikipedia and Tarang Links describe Traditional Indian Instruments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_musical_instruments

http://www.tarang-classical-indian-music.com/instruments_eng.htm
 * Music might be shared across South Asia and the diaspora. These types of music can be called pan-regional. Typically, music developed by professionals in the court centers, temples, and cities came to be shared from center to center across wide regions. Later, styles of popular music were disseminated across the nation by radio, TV, and films.

The dholak is the most common rural drum of North India, and it is used pan-regionally.

Further information about the dholak:

The dholak is mainly a folk instrument, lacking the exact tuning and playing techniques of the tabla or the pakhawaj. The drum is pitched, depending on size, with an interval of perhaps a perfect fourth or perfect fifth between the two heads. The smaller surface of the dholak is made of goat skin for sharp notes and the bigger surface is made of buffalo skin for low pitches, which allows a combination of bass and treble with rhythmic high and low pitches. It is widely used in qawwali, kirtan, lavani and bhangra. It was formerly used in classical dance. Indian children sing and dance to it during pre-wedding festivities. It is often used in Filmi Sangeet (Indian film music), in chutney music, baithak gana, tan singing, and the local Indian music. The dholak is mainly used in India.

Wooden clappers with cymbals attached or rod-shaped metal clappers called kartal are common in both North and South India.

The harmonium, a small hand pump organ, is played throughout South Asia in rural as well as urban settings.

The Harmonium was invented in Europe in Paris in 1842 by Alexandre Debain, though there was concurrent development of similar instruments elsewhere.

the harmonium remains an important musical instrument in many types of Indian music, as well as being commonly found in Indian homes

http://www.tarang-classical-indian-music.com/indian_musical_instruments/soundsamples/harmonium.mp3

The Harmonium can be compared in its functioning to the accordeon. Air is pumped into an enclosed space by means of bellows. With a keyboard it is possible to open specially defined holes, through which the pumped air is then pressed. The reeds attached to the openings (double, triple or quadruple reeds) are set vibrating and so produce the desired note.

There are also many different forms of harmoniums: foldable harmoniums, standard harmoniums, harmonium with couplers, scale-changer harmonium, and compact travel harmonium.

Tarang is known as the main distributor of lines for harmoniums to simplify the process because there are so many different options available.

http://www.tarang-classical-indian-music.com/indian_musical_instruments/images_gross/harmonium_standard.htm

String instruments, plucked or bowed, are generally played by specialists.

Reed and brass wind instruments are also generally played by specialists. They are often associated with out- door playing, especially processions, at wedding or temple events. Double-reed instruments, like oboes, and flutes made of bamboo or wood, are found in various contexts, and may be played by specialists and non-specialists.

Some 72 percent of India’s population is classified as rural. Men and women in Indian villages typically do separate kinds of daily work and gather separately for music. Thus, village music is usefully characterized as women’s or men’s music. Musicians may be non-specialists or specialists, according to whether they have special training, and non-professional or professional, according to whether they perform for pay.
 * Hindustani and Carnatic (or Karnatak) are the terms for the classical music of North and South India, respectively, which developed distinctive systems by about the fifteenth century.

Ragas are the melodies or, more precisely, the melodic structures of Indian classical music. Every raga is a set of melodic motifs used for playing both composed and improvised material. The concept of raga has excited musicians from all over the world for hundreds of years.

Ragas: A raga uses a series of five to nine musical notes upon which a melody is constructed.However, the way the notes are approached and rendered in musical phrases and the mood they convey are more important in defining a raga than the notes themselves. In the Indian musical tradition, rāgas are associated with different times of the day, or with seasons. Indian classical music is always set in a rāga. Non-classical music such as popular Indian film songs and ghazals sometimes use rāgas in their compositions.

As rāgas were transmitted orally from teacher to student, some rāgas can vary greatly across regions, traditions and styles. Many ragas have also been evolving over the centuries. There have been efforts to codify and standardize rāga performance in theory from their first mention in Matanga's Brihaddeshi (c. tenth century). Some ragas are reputed to have health benefits, however their effectiveness depends on the receiver's demeanor.

A raga is performed by a main vocalist or instrumentalist, or sometimes two, accompanied by a small ensemble. The main musician sits in the center. A drum accompanist sits to the musician’s right.

The Indian term for pitch or musical tone is svara, a Sanskrit term for sound. Seven svaras make up the scale, and their names are found in the very earliest texts.

The twelve steps in an octave correspond roughly to the twelve steps of the Western octave, but tuning is done by ear. The Indian system does not use the Western equally tempered scale. The Indian theory of intervals involves the idea of shruti, or microtone.

All raga scales now begin with Sa. Since the medieval period, the idea of twenty-two shrutis and of a certain number of shrutis for each svara has become purely theoretical.

Today the shruti theory is taught in the abstract but is not used in practice.

Musicians and listeners alike often use the term shruti to mean a delicate shading of pitch.

The link below describes ragas: outside the area in which they are spoken
 * http://www.britannica.com/art/raga
 * The region and languages
 * India has 22 official languages and 27 more recognized languages.
 * English and Hindi form the official government languages. Some Indians in the east and south oppose the use of Hindi English comes from the colonial period. Large cities use it for government, business, media, and conversation. Most people communicate with regional languages, with many being bi- or trilingual. The northern Indo-Aryan family forms India’s largest language family. It forms part of the Indo-European family, which includes languages of Europe and Iran Hindi is spoken by the highest number of Indians
 * Sanskrit forms the language of Hindu sacred texts, literature, folklore, ritual and scholarship. It has a function akin to Latin and Greek and is not used in conversation. The language once remained limited to male priests of the Brahmin caste. Today, it can be heard in Hindu homes and temples.
 * Other Indo-Aryan languages include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi,Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, and Urdu, Bengal, Gujarat, and Punjab are names of states, which reflect the majority language. Many Bengali speakers live in both India and Bangladesh. Punjabi was partitioned between Pakistan and India in 1947.
 * The Dravidian family forms the second-largest language family and dominates the south of India. It probably pre-dates the Indo-Aryan family. It has four main languages: Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu.
 * Tamil-language speakers also live in Sri Lanka. “Pan-regional” refers to a language or practice that is used outside its primary geographical area. Especially in music and poetry, pan-regional languages can often be understood
 * South Asia, the term geographically includes bangladesh, bhutan, india, the maldives, nepal, pakistan, sri lanka.
 * The national boundaries were drawn When the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan partitioned in 1947.
 * This split caused Linguistic, ethnic and religious groupings. The punjabi language became partitioned between pakistan and india,
 * Sri lankas tamil population shares strong cultural links with the tamil language speakers, but share differences when it comes to nations policies and economics.
 * North India
 * The central Government, in New Delhi is based on the parliamentary system and that is why india ia knows as the worlds largest democracy.
 * The topography and natural barriers hold a deeper meaning to the regional identity. The high peaks of the Himalayas allows the Ganga River to flow and create the fertile plan that crosses the densely populated states of North India.
 * South India
 * the south consists of elevated plateaus, river basins, and coastal plains, and the cities, villages an temple towns of the five southern states.
 * The kaveri river greatly defines the southern region, and empties into the bay of bengal.
 * Chennai, the center of culture and education hosts a city wide festival every year.
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQHAGluOO4
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3f9mgkNQMA
 * Media in India
 * when it comes to recording, the British Gramophonecompany recorded most of the professional singers in Kolkota.
 * recording made all music- classical, film, patriotic and ater available to the upper class market.
 * https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=media+in+india&FORM=HDRSC3#view=detail&mid=FC68D3009DA92F0E522AFC68D3009DA92F0E522A
 * Radio
 * the radio began to be very popular in the 1930's when it made classical, popular, and regional musics available to the mass public
 * unlike recordings which were mainly reserved to the upper class, the radio became something that people of all casts and classes could enjoy.
 * All India Radio tried to influence a certain type of artistic taste on to the public, and even went so far as to block certain types of music which enranged the public because it was the first time that people were beginning to think and listen to the type of music that they decided to listen to and not what was defined to them.
 * http://www.onlineradios.in/
 * below is a link to the online radio broadcasting service in india
 * Television
 * the national television service has been broadcasting since the 1970's.
 * at first only government channels were available until the 1990's
 * since then, new technology and private tv channels have made hundreds of channels available to all sorts of genres including drama, talk shows, sitcoms'
 * this is important to note because since then, the government had such a strong control over what the government dictated for the public to think.
 * studies show that even to this day and age only about one third of the rural households actually own a tv.
 * https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=television+in+india%27&FORM=HDRSC3#view=detail&mid=38FF936A26F771C5DA6438FF936A26F771C5DA64