Music
A music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity, and may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region. The world may be divided into three large music areas, each containing a "cultivated" or classical musics "that are obviously its most complex musical forms," with, nearby, folk styles which interact with the cultivated, and, on the perimeter, primitive styles:
- Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa
- based on shared isometric materials, diatonic scales, and polyphony based on parallel thirds, fourths, and fifths.
- North Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, and Indonesia.
- based on shared small intervals in scales, melodies, and polyphony.
- American Indian, East Asia, Northern Siberian, and Finno-Ugric music
- based on shared large steps in pentatonic and tetratonic scales.
However, he then adds that "the world-wide development of music must have been a unified process in which all peoples participated," and that one finds similar tunes and traits in puzzlingly isolated or separated locations throughout the world.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Area
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“See where my Love sits in the beds of spices,
Beset all round with camphor, myrrh, and roses,
And interlaced with curious devices
Which her apart from all the world incloses!
There doth she tune her lute for her delight,
And with sweet music makes the ground to move,
Whilst I, poor I, do sit in heavy plight,
Wailing alone my unrespected love;”
—Bartholomew Griffin (d. 1602)
“It is hard to describe the thrill of creative joy which the artist feels when the conviction seizes her that at last she has caught the very soul of the character she wishes to portray, in the music and action which reveal it.”
—Maria Jeritza (1887–1982)