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Jon Silpayamanant โจนาทาน ศิลปยามานันท์ | Mae Mai Profile picture
Jon Silpayamanant โจนาทาน ศิลปยามานันท์ | Mae Mai
@Silpayamanant
Intercultural & Southeast Asian Music Researcher, Composer, Educator. Founder @SawPeep Intercultural Orchestra. Host BBC "World of Classical." he/him 🖤 🩶🤍💜
Feb 15, 2023 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
While working on the database of Popular Music Schools, I came across a piece with a bio of the child prodigy Cecil Cowles (1893-1968) which stated that:

"In recent years [1920s-1940] Miss Cowles has been active in the field of composition, particularly in Oriental music." A San Francisco Chronicle piece about Cecil Cowles from 17 June 1923 says: "The other occasion was a recital of her own in which she played her Song Without Words, In a Rickshaw , Chinese Dance and Valse Caprice..."

"Fifty Local Prodigies: 1906-1940"
archive.org/details/fiftyl…
Jan 18, 2023 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
Normalize not centering Western Chord labels in Music Theory. In quintal harmony, it'd be a C2; In a quartal one it's a D5/2; not sus chords at all. Parallel seconds (and ninths) are way common in Eastern Orthodox traditions.

reddit.com/r/musictheory/… "The notations of znamenny polyphony require a special approach to their transcription; but when correctly read the music of the ‘scores’ abounds in harsh sonorities in the form of extended parallel seconds & fifths.”

Brazhnikov, qtd in Swan "Russian Music & its Sources..." p45
Jan 13, 2023 • 32 tweets • 15 min read
Apparently there were organs on planes.

"An organ was installed on a Northwest Stratocruiser in the 1950s through an arrangement with local musician Swanee Swanson. The organists received free flights to New York and other East Coast destinations."

content.govdelivery.com/accounts/MNORG…
Image Page 43 of "Northwest Airlines: The First Eighty Years"

arcadiapublishing.com/Products/97807…
Image
Aug 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Welsh Harp tablature from the *Robert ap Huw manuscript* (1613). The manuscript is the oldest extant source of primarily Late Medieval eisteddfod repertory that dates to 1340-1500 and was compiled by Robert ap Huw (c.1580-1665).

pbm.com/~lindahl/ap_hu… Short segment on the *Robert ap Huw manuscript* in Rhodri McDonagh's wonderful "Welsh Trad Music | A Beginner's Guide" video (cued up to that segment below). The whole vid is worth a watch and is only 24 minutes.

Aug 3, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
One of the things I love about Georgian Harmony is that it's based on what's essentially close to a functionally 7TET/EDO collection of pitches. Many global harmonic systems are built on different tuning systems than those in what's typically referred to as Western harmony. The above image from Malkhaz Erkvanidze's "On Georgian Scale System" pg. 181

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…
Aug 3, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Just looking the bi/polymusical course offerings at Thai Universities (sample below) in a Dissertation from 1998.

"Undergraduate Piano Pedagogy Course Offerings in Thai Universities" Chindarat Charoenwongse. University of Oklahoma.
shareok.org/handle/11244/5… Image Bi/polymusical education ecosystems are far more common outside of Europe and North America.

Aug 2, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Latest update to the <Solo Keyboard Repertoire - Southeast Asian Composers> resource. Added about another 50 or so pieces by (primarily) Vietnamese/Vietnamese diasporan composers.

I'm barely scratching the surface of solo keyboard rep here, folks.
doi.org/10.6084/m9.fig… I think it's easy to underestimate the size and diversity of SE Asia (hence why I added a new second paragraph to the doc). For example, Indonesia alone has a population of nearly 275 million: the 4th most populous country in the World. About 231 million Indonesians are Muslim. Image
May 12, 2022 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Finally getting a chance to read this and the intro piece "American Music and Racial Fantasy, Past and Present" is so excellent & lays out the backdrop for what I call the <Perpetually Foreign Music> idea & how Raceface Minstrelsy shapes current Anglo/American popular musics. This, especially: "Dismantling the Black-white binary requires us to locate our discussion of music and race in the period prior to 1900" (pg. 573) though I'd argue we should extend this into discussion of race/music today & how the Black-white binaries create other...
Dec 19, 2021 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Classical Music ≠ Notated Music or Composed Music

This follows up on the "Classical Music ≠ Concert Music" thread since we now have mature concert music traditions globally that use notation regularly in their Indigenous or hybridized composition traditions. What counts as notation is also highly variable and different notations have different universal AND a context-dependent aspects per Bhagwati's <Notational Perspective>.

Dec 18, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Classical Music ≠ Concert Music

Here's a thread of 120+ orchestras in global concert music traditions, many of which wouldn't be considered "classical music." These also have similar ensembles (chamber, choral) & genres (opera, ballet) found in CM.

It was something I mentioned in another thread, but felt like it needed to be reiterated. Seems like so many of the alternative names/phrases for classical music still creates an exceptionalism standard for what we'd otherwise call classical music.

Dec 5, 2021 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Adventures in compiling bibliographies: Arabic #MusicTheory edition. PART X - Ottoman Empire and the Turkic World.

I don't know why I didn't use the tweet below to start a thread about Music Theory in the Ottoman/Turkic world for the AMTBib project.

It's not as if I haven't created a number of other related threads.

Dec 4, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Bless their hearts. I guess this is a natural consequence of colonial harmony.

"Three systems of harmony"
reddit.com/r/musictheory/… Colonial harmony is basically the result of treating a small sample of global harmonic traditions as Universal and Neutral.

Dec 3, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Yellowface is well and alive. 🤮 Ugh
Dec 3, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Oof! I do love long titles for presentations! 😂

"When Heterophony Becomes Polyphony: Two Ways of Looking at Multipart Music on a Continuum and how that Influences Composition and Performance Practice." But I'm really looking forward to this as I'll be framing it from the standpoint of creating inclusive pedagogies by highlighting Heterophony/Polyphony as types of musical practices embodied as variations across cultures. Similar to what I describe here:
Dec 3, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
If I have to read another essentialist description of West African music being drumming music, it will be too soon. Probably a good place to put this.

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/islam-blues-aa…
Dec 2, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
🍿 Pretty much my view.
Dec 2, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
When you're researching 16th c. music prebends of Olivença and the Diocese of Ceuta and get distracted by mention of Japanese slaves in Portugal and start going down that rabbit hole... 😬

brill.com/view/title/379… This helps give a lot of context to the Mardijkers of Batavia, many of whom were descended from Portuguese slaves and went on to form slave orchestras in Batavia.

Nov 29, 2021 • 31 tweets • 9 min read
"How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed American Music"
smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-in… "String Band Revival: Sovereign Strings is breathing new life into nineteenth-century Hawaiian popular music"
hanahou.com/22.3/string-ba…
Nov 28, 2021 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Yeah, can we stop acting as if *key signatures* unambiguously designate a scale/mode (or even a *key*, for that matter); or that they haven't been used outside of diatonic musics for, like, centuries in some cases? Image Key signatures only unambiguously designate the collection of pitches used in a piece or a section of a piece. How they are used or arranged determines what scale/mode/maqam/rag/qenet/thang/etc. is being used.
Jun 30, 2021 • 57 tweets • 16 min read
Did you know?

Music Theory exists outside of the West?

Follow for more music theory tips! Did you know?

Harmony/Polyphony exists outside of the West?

Follow for more music theory tips!

Jun 26, 2021 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
Even more underrated is what your frame or theory says is there and how your choice of theory shapes what you assume to be there. One of my favorite examples is gravity. We have three main theories that describe what it is, and what the universe is like, very differently:

1) classical mechanics
2) Relativity
3) quantum gravity