Classical Music
The classical form is closely related to that of the Siamese. The Lao classical orchestra can be divided into two categories, Sep Nyai and Sep Noi (or Mahori). The Sep Nyai is similar to Thai Piphat, and is ceremonial and formal music and includes: two sets of gongs (kong vong), a xylophone (ranat), an oboe (pei or salai), two large kettle drums and two sets of cymbals (xing, similar to Thai ching). The Sep Noi, capable of playing popular tunes, includes two bowed string instruments, the So U and the So I, also known to the Indians. These instruments are similar to the Thai Saw u and Saw duang, respectively. They have a long neck or fingerboard and a small sound box; this sound box is made of bamboo in the So U and from a coconut in the So I. Both instruments have two strings, and the bow is slid between these two strings, which are tuned at a fifth apart and always played together. Furthermore this mahori or sep noi ensemble (the sep nyai is strictly percussion and oboe) may include several khene. In this respect, it differs markedly from the mahori orchestras of Cambodia and Siam.
Some ethnomusicologists believe that Laos is a country where the ancient art music of the Khmer people has been best preserved -- as well as diverse forms of folk music related to the oldest types of Indian music, music that has largely disappeared in India itself. They claim to find in Laos a scale which the ancient Hindus called the "celestial scale," the Gandhara grama, which is a tempered heptatonic scale, or a division of the octave into seven equal parts.
The Royal Lao Orchestra, consisting of musicians of the former court of the king of Laos, who fled Laos following the communist takeover in 1975, now reside in Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee, United States.
Read more about this topic: Lao Music
Famous quotes related to classical music:
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. ‘Material Differences,’ Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)