Traditional Music
Non-lexical vocables are used in Blackfoot music and other American Indian music, Pygmy music, the music of the Maldives and Highland Scots music. Vocables frequently act as formal markers, indicating the beginning and end of phrases, sections or songs themselves, and also as onomatopoeic references, cueing devices, and other purposes.
The Blackfoot, like other Plains Indians, use the consonants h, y, w, and vowels. They avoid n, c (ts) and other consonants. i and e tend slightly to be higher pitches, a, o, and u lower ones.
The AIM Song has its origins in the Plains; as such, it holds similar characteristics to Blackfoot song. It is intended as an intertribal song, so the use of non-lexical vocables prevents bias to one particular language.
Other traditional musical forms employing non-lexical vocables include:
- Canntaireachd (ancient Scottish practice of noting music with a combination of definite syllables for ease of recollection and transmission)
- Eefing (Appalachian vocal technique similar to beatboxing)
- Puirt à beul (traditional Scottish and Irish song form that sometimes employs nonsense syllables)
- Nigun in Jewish religious music
Read more about this topic: Non-lexical Vocables In Music
Famous quotes containing the words traditional and/or music:
“The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind.”
—Augustus Y. Napier (20th century)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
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