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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 🖤 🩶🤍💜
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 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.

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 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Just won a banhu (板胡) on an auction. Might have to learn some bangzi tunes now. I mean, sure I’d love to play Wang Danhong’s “Red Sorghum” (紅高粱) or something, but that ain’t going to happen anytime soon! 🤣

Here’s Shen Cheng (banhu) performing it with the Hsinchu Youth Chinese Orchestra of Taiwan.

Jun 18, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I wonder if my music career would have been different if I'd had opportunities like this or an environment that didn't encourage assimilation and hiding of non-white ethnic heritages!

UCLA Summer World Music Intensive Online for High School students
schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/summer-ethnomu… Image There are more and more diverse music education programs emerging recently that aren’t so WAM and WPM centric, but these music education ecosystems take time and resources to build.

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/diversity-incl…
Jun 16, 2021 • 26 tweets • 10 min read
Reading Dr. Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje's "The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle" again because it's so good and I can't wait for her book on African American Fiddling to come out.

#CiteBlackWomen

cambridge.org/core/journals/… Image And part of that highlighted quote: "rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses." rings so true in light of the Decolonizing DAW discussion.
Jun 7, 2021 • 20 tweets • 7 min read
Polynesian chant. "Talanoa Faka Matala" is in Wallisian (aka ʻUvean or East Uvean) language from the Island of Wallis (ʻUvea).

26/
Tuareg Chant, a form a drone polyphony. This one is from Mali.

27/
Jun 4, 2021 • 6 tweets • 5 min read
Got my khaen (แคน) and sueng (ซึง) today!

#ThaiMusicalInstruments #ThaiMusic #Thailand #ซึง #แคน #khaen #sueng #lute #mouthorgan #bambooinstrument #Isan #Lanna Here's Sombat Simha (สมบัติ สิมหล้า), a khaen master. The khaen is a bamboo mouth organ from the Isan region of Thailand/Laos. Where I'm from.

Jun 3, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Submitted a draft of “Diversity initiatives in classical music as an extension of colonial power” this week and so feeling this (especially regarding the name/label issue in classical music a while back).

instagram.com/p/CPn5hS4geXi/ This one.
May 15, 2021 • 22 tweets • 14 min read
While working on my diverse/inclusive cello method books I’ve been thinking about the cello, not as an instrument, but as a cultural instance of a type of instrumental practice embodied in many variations across cultures.

1/4 ImageImage Western music ecosystems are already familiar with the wide variety of early cello-like instruments (e.g. viol da gamba, baryton, violoncello piccolo) but there have been cello-like instruments outside of the context of classical music and Europe.

2/4 Image
Apr 7, 2021 • 17 tweets • 9 min read
This can't be emphasized enough, but let's put sound to some of these composers, and the types of groups they compose for, to decenter European composers/instruments. 16 composers from the greater Turkic/Western Asian world.

THREAD 1/ Sərdar Fərəcov (b. 1957) Azerbaijani composer

"Rondeletto"
Müjgan Zülfüzadə (left photo)- Tar Soloist
Children and Youth Folk Instruments Orchestra of the Azerbaijan State Children's Philharmonic (right photo)



2/
Apr 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Loved it for what it was, but this take is close to how I feel.

"[O]ne film shouldn’t have to handle the weight of representing an entire geographic region, and I don’t expect Raya and the Last Dragon to do so, though it appears to desperately want to."

slashfilm.com/raya-and-the-l… And this still stings a little.

"It mostly goes into the issue of treating Asians as a monolith, no matter which country they come from. And there is a distinction between East Asian countries and Southeast Asian countries."

npr.org/2021/03/09/975…