I think (er... hope?) that the recurring theme in this blog will be the question, "what is music?" It's amazing how varied the answers can be, depending on cultures, customs, and even physical attributes (We'll get to that last one in another post. If you're deaf, what IS music? Can you listen to music without your ears?).
While we've become accustomed to sitting down and listening to music "as is", a lot of what we consider music isn't seen that way by the people who produced them... such as this work song from Ghana.
A field recording by James Koetting in 1975, this piece was created by postal workers canceling stamps at the University of Ghana post office (In Accra!). That's right! It's just 4 dudes with scissors, stamps, and a table.... making music as they work, completely improvised. I think it's utterly mesmerizing to listen to, as the polyrhythms overlap and the whistled harmonies come in. Not to mention how cool it is that all these office supplies become instruments.
If you want to know more about this piece, go here.
i fell in love with it the first time i heard it...its so amazing! i tried to find more like it, but cant...have you come across any others?
ReplyDeleteThere are others indeed, but one's that are like this (field recordings) are harder to come by.
ReplyDeletegoogle/search "field recordings", "works songs", and whatever country you want to focus on ("Africa" tends to return mostly African-American things).
Here's a youtube video you might like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iB0B8J-yxE&feature=related
Also, the website of James Koetting at Brown University (of which this recording is part of) has the whole collection up for streaming. You should check that out too:
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/koetting/recordings.html