A Loading Dose: Musical Sustainability in Defined Territories. Comparative Study: New Technologies (Argentina) and Sonic Orders (South East Asia)
Joe Peters
Abstract
This paper presents two fundamentally different approaches to a similar issue: the survival of traditional and indigenous musical systems. In part 1 we deal with Professor Alejandro Iglesias Rossi’s interdisciplinary work at UNTREF (Universidad Nacional De Tres De Febrero) in Argentina where The Orchestra of Indigenous Musical Instruments resides. I refer to it in this paper (with his permission) as the Argentine Indigenous Orchestra (AIO). His multi-disciplinary work has become a model for those pursuing decolonization in music. He has uniquely included archeology in South American pre-Spanish timelines in his multi-disciplinary work prompting me to make a pointed comparison between his research into 10,000 years in South American music and comparing some observations in my tracking of 2000 years of European musical development – done via two graphical representations. In Part 2, I write about my on-going applied-music project called Sonic Environment Studies (SES) as a comparative development that is moving very slowly, but surely, evolving (as I write) into a digital laboratory called Timeline Music Annotation Lab/Library – Pedagogy (TMAL-P). It is crafted to train skilled music listeners for the super-majority in any music-chain (composers, performers, service providers and music-listeners). We are taking different routes but having to arrive at the same destination – with no pressure on the arrival timeline.
PART 1 | The Argentine Indigenous Orchestra
My first contact with Alejandro at UNTREF (Universidad Nacional De Tres De Febrero) began in 2006 with a personal invitation to the Argentinian Indigenous Orchestra (AIO) to visit and perform in Singapore. A brief news report about their impending visit to Asia triggered this invitation. It was a successful connection we made in Singapore and we have kept in touch in what has been a continuous study (from afar) of the great developments in new musicology in Argentina and Central America. I saw some important parallels with my work in Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics (Peters, 2003) – a musicological study I crafted and led in ASEAN (Association of SouthEast Asia Nations) that aimed at creating a musicological method, bridging with engineering, to see if we could find a way to track and measure the vast variance in pitch intervals in a large number of pristine musical systems in the ASEAN group of nations.
I have summarized our interaction in this paper as A Loading Dose – a term borrowed from the medical fraternity, meaning an application of a musical vaccine to protect ourselves against the relentless emissions from media chains that are driven by market-share based industries, much of which are based on the Western tempered system. It is also about pitch-migration as traditional musicians are translating the sound from their pristine intervals to the equidistant ones. The music chain (composers, performers, service providers and listeners) is where the music transactions take place. Currently, music chains work around products that have monetary value and disregard the music profession as we know it. In academia the issues are enormous if we are looking at solutions. Multiple musical systems and a complicated set of issues are needed to raise an adequate teaching and learning system to address change in listener skills. This is the issue we are faced with here in ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations). It is the central issue I pursued in my PhD thesis (Peters, 1991) and Masters Thesis (Peters, 1981) where, stating it briefly, I saw, by moving text and other instructional issues, directly to the sound timeline, and support that with a strong digital configuration, my guess is that, if this was fitted into a circular music curriculum, as the teaching and learning platform over the students school-lifetime, we many see positive changes. Thus, until music is taught to all as a skill, there is very little hope for the survival of traditional and indigenous musical systems in the digital world that is unfolding now.
While I communicated with Alejandro, I also began to assemble books to study South America. I knew a little about this land mass through my earlier research of the Galleon Trade in relation to the Filipino rondalla that I imported into Singapore, and which today has evolved into tremolo strings. The latter is another research and development area for me but I will not expand on it here. AIO was (and still is) a totally new musicological phenomenon but with many similarities with Southeast Asian musical diversity. I crafted a timeline history of South America which led me to deeply appreciate and understand the two great civilizations (Mayan and the Andean) in South America.
Figure 1: South American instrumental timeline history based on AIO
The AIO musical instruments and artifacts were recreated through an inter-disciplinary method that Alejandro instituted at UNTREF. I learnt it was an engaging educational configuration and I knew then, it was already a growing success. I was lucky I had a comparative reference in the life and works of my musicology teacher, the legendary musicologist, Dr. Jose Maceda (Maceda, 1981) who scaled the island masses of the Philippines to do fundamental ethnomusicology field work in the most detailed and strictest way. His work mooted a series of musical research and development projects under ASEAN (Association of SouthEast Asian Nations) which his students spear-headed. I was part of these developments in ASEAN. Thus, I had to see and hear AIO for myself: especially the re-created musical instruments; the method and mode of performances; their pan regional nationalism – all working together, through intricate sets of disciplined methods, talents and technologies.
AIO is an important end-product. It is a new educational format: over one hundred musical instruments, from organology and archeology research and development, all mixed with relevant other instruments, and the whole group of 16 members, moving around the stage silently, performing complex musical scores that merge sound, light, multimedia projections, all orchestrated in a staged-choreography. It is a new form of embedded organology within a bold new musicology that brings to the audience new music in a fundamentally different manner. Something disciplined, very difficult to do but would be a path to a good future.
The UNTREF method is squarely based on a deep dialogue among the sub-disciplines of archeology, organology, musicology, pedagogy, technology (audio-visual and music) and, to top it all, original musical compositions, all happening in one place, at one time, and for one major purpose – to create a new music propulsion by working backwards from the Spanish colonial era, and by doing this, they create a more powerful forward propulsion in artistic expression. UNTREF has actually provided a clear description for this illusive term called de-colonization that has been talked about loudly as a new way of thinking in ethnomusicology – and yet there are no clear examples except for this project at UNTREF. Thus, I classify it as a loading dose – for cures and resurrection in an ailing academic music discipline!
If we compare The Progress of Western Music (Refer to Figure 2) which spans 2000 years, perhaps the great possibilities in the UNTREF method may also achieve great turning-point achievements into the future. European musical development traveled a long, laborious, slow, but deeply steeped in the growth of allied life-supports like science, musicology, new technology and politico-economic/cultural developments. Western music, working within their music/media chains, created major turning points that resulted in fundamental changes to a single musical system that dominates the world today, through great advantages through colonization. If UNTREF tracks their progress and impact, in real statistics and technical monographs, with intent to publish updates for into the future, then a significant map will emerge. But of course, by then what is left for traditional and indigenous music elsewhere would have phased out!
Figure 2: 2000 Years of The Progress of Western Music
Briefly, we can track the impetus of growth in Western music from the 5th century when Pope Gregory ordered the Catholic church to have one chant for worship services, against all the territorial ones that wanted their independence and hegemony. The idea was to maintain unity (religious or otherwise) all over Europe. It took a very long time for that to happen till finally, in the 9th century the Gregorian Chant came to fruition and was installed as a prime musical form for the church. The next three centuries were a rough and tumble journey to develop early harmony through layering the melodic lines of the chant. There was a hurdle to cross, what musicologists then called the missing-comma – and we know it now as that elusive 7th tone by-pass to modern tertian harmony.
The historical European music trek took four more centuries, till a lone monk in the Pyrenees discovered that missing-link. A roller-coaster musical ride began once JS Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier, which explained the basic theory of the musical cycle in Western music, and which became the ballpark for music as an art, and as an industry too – the cue we must not forget to maintain as we try to de-colonize!. This chart plots the development of Western music as a solid system of slow but sure musical development. The forward lines become active and curvy as Western music crosses into the 20th Century. What does that reflect? That is for another paper.
What is relevant to Asia in the timeline history of Western music is the fair share of deep research and development that the Europeans did. With a huge number of supporters, it was propelled over 2000 years into a wholesome musical system and a fertile bed for tremendous creativity. It spread worldwide through colonization and audio technology, and it seems to be here to stay! But this situation is not any fault of the West. It has to do with under-education (or miss-education) in the East.
UNTREF and AIO are on a similar path into the future with a difference – going backward before moving forward immediately, always in a constant musicological dance that draws away from the Spanish Colonial period, backwards, so re-creation into the immediate future is possible. UNTREF is spending much time, effort and assets, in galvanizing information and artifacts from the past, and propelling them in a new and dynamic way forward. I witnessed this first hand in 2007 listening and watching AIO on stage in Singapore. I always wonder if Alejandro imagines how the future timeline graphic will look for Argentina and South America:
Composers in the peripheral countries are at the crossroads between finding their own personal identity as creators and their cultural identity as members of a community that encompasses them. The challenge relates to getting to be oneself, discovering one’s uniqueness in all its potency. This process not only affects the creator but also influences and transforms the very geo-culture he/she was born into. The trans-culturalization of elements (as in the case of avant-garde techniques and composing in the classical style of European origin) must be digested, internalized, in order to reappear with a special potency, in a unique color that will broaden the fringes of knowledge, as one explores the unknown lands of creation. This challenge is not only individual and cultural but also instrumental and operative, that is to say, it entails the election of the techniques and fundamentally the means (the tools) the creators will choose, free from any a priori, any prejudice that may restrain his/her visionary capacity (Iglesias Rossi, 2001).
There are many views on the history and impact of Western music. The graphic in Figure 2 is based on D.J. Grout’s view6. He was brilliant but I take issue with him for classifying everything before this timeline as primitive – it set in motion a form of thinking that the pristine musics of Asia fell into this categorization called primitive, and by default of world political history, there was a barrier in perception of traditional and indigenous musical systems as primitive. This is a subject that needs to be deeply and fully researched and spoken/written at length.
Atalli7 sees the history of Western music as a set of noises! A Hegelian dialecticism that explains why one type of system or philosophy gives way to another. Breaking codes equals cleavages leading to changes. Codes change, so it is not the making of Western classical (or pop) music as the dominant systems in the world, or is it? But he maintains that all nations must be recognized for their sound – without the details! There are more views on this subject of Western music history, but I will keep that for another article, because I don’t find Western music really relevant when we have to literally re-tune our ears to a level where it becomes necessary to either be extremely ambidextrous or choose one side to sustain as a priority. The Grout labeling of music history served division in the academic music understanding in Asia, where Asian music has been peripheral and thus the immense work that went on in ASEAN on Asian musics came abruptly to a stop in 2003.
Murray Schafer was perhaps the biggest writer on this concept of acoustic soundscape and linked it to another concept – clairaudience (the ability to extract information from sound). This I found greatly relevant to my sonic environment studies. However, my pedagogy was aimed at circular curriculum development training for listening skills, like normal school subjects do. Barry Traux, (Schafer, 1969) who did follow-up on Schafer’s work, expanded the concept as the macro acoustic soundscape with the addition of the electroacoustic soundscape to the concept of the sonic environment. I thought that is a very good suggestion mainly because he foresaw the impact of not just electrostatic sounds in music but also the penetrating permanence of a highly interactive internet. Both views led to their World Soundscape Project. This comes close to my work in Sonic Environment Studies, which is also on a worldview trajectory – tracking and measuring emissions worldwide with SOLMI (Sonic Orders Listening Mode Index). Yet, I am convinced that Alejandro’s work is ready for the world now! And I hope the world responds without prejudice!
PART 2
Figure 3: Musics of Asia is what I have summarized from major publications done by musicologists in ASEAN (Association of SouthEast Asian Nations). MUch have been published (unitedly) under the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information (COCI). Unfortunately, limited copies were made but (as far as I am briefed) all countries under the United Nations have received a set. If you have not, I have made enough for you! They are part of the Maceda musicological lineage because it was first mooted, organized and executed by many students of Maceda in 1988 as the ASEAN Composers Forum on Traditional Music – by the Philippines. At periodic intervals it was further developed by other ASEAN countries (Thailand and Singapore specifically) for the purpose of expanding the interface between composers and the regional musical systems directly in close working formulae . All projects were published under ASEAN COCI The legacy of Professor Jose Maceda’s work with his generation of musicologists from both sides of the Pacific, is captured in The Musics of Asia (Maceda, 1966). This project by his students began in 1988 as the 1st ASEAN Composers Forum on Traditional Music staged at Banaue in Northern Philippines. It centered on Ifugao Igorot music and life-culture, using the field formulae of Maceda with the added advantage of having composers and performers from the ASEAN region in the project – the age of immediacy and cooperation was dawning on ethnomusicology. The purpose was solely for exposure and first attempts at composition with the Ifugao musical concepts and sounds. All projects that followed were bent this way with full awareness that the depth and breadth of its effect would only be reached if more such projects were added in a progressive manner.
Figure 3: The Musics of Asia
Prof. Maceda used this plural musics many times in his lectures and articles. I was glad to see it in a published form – stated boldly on the front title page. He had been advising this region that the musical systems are fundamentally different and they have to be documented first before they are used in all music sectors (pedagogy, musicology and technology). Examples of his composition scores, using new scoring formats and built upon the material from his field research are available for music pedagogy. There is a very large and well equipped Maceda-Library at the College of Music, University of the Philippines that can facilitate deeper study of his methodology and artifacts. He believed that the music of the Philippines lay with the people who were spread through-out the vast Filipino archipelago. He spent his life documenting the musics of the Philippines, always maintaining that musicology has to be from field to paper initially (in his case) and then to pedagogy. The raw data collection was diligently edited, processed, categorized and stored for access in an efficiently planned way. According to him many lifetimes are needed for Asia to accomplish any of the objectives that we may aspire to. He did show by example that field work could also be a composer’s domain. He applied many of the fundamentals from Filipino indigenous music in such a parallel activity in his many compositions. Here-in lies the touch-point between Alejandro at UNTREF and Maceda and the University of the Philippines in a parallel mode of thought and action.
An article written by Aki Onda (2018) tells much about the early years of Maceda’s career, giving tremendous insight into his group of colleagues on both sides of the Pacific and their commitment for comparative musicology that led to the conference and book Musics of Asia. More about Maceda can also be gleaned from an interview he did with Charlotte Lim at Radio Singapore (1980) where he gave deep insights into musical systems/instruments in this Asian archipelago region around Singapore. Maceda has always said that it would take a long time for South East Asia to evolve before any expression through innate musical idioms can be done – because they are fundamentally different musics.
Tran Van Kee (Peters, 2023) was another pillar in Asian musicology, and who had extensive knowledge and experience in Vietnamese music, particularly, the complicated and varied Hac tonal system which forms the central vein of traditional music there. He was also often quoted in the huge Vietnamese chapter in Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics where a team of musicologists did painstaking work to list the interval and tonal bases where using approximations in pitch and scala relationships becomes very complex music education.
In the Thai music chapter in Forum Papers (1993) Phra Chen Duriyang and Visnutep Silapabanleng talks about the illusive 7 tone equidistant scale that the Thai Ranad and its repertoire. These instant quotes are many. What is missing is the link between text and real music work. I have lived and taught in Thailand for some years and I would say the young academics are actively engaged in Thai music priorities.
Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics was a huge regional “field-to-lab-to-book” project that culminates this trajectory from the 1966 Maceda publication – directly and indirectly. All chapters were detailed and written by teams of professionals looking at all musical systems in each ASEAN country. Only Cambodia was not there because they were not within ASEAN then. Two volumes and 10 CDs were the final products. Indonesia reported that at least 126 musical systems were still surviving. Most other countries had something positive for the future too. It is Chapter 1 that I want to highlight where a technical report of the laboratory study on pitch-interval measurement by Dr. Chew Chye Heng (2003) and his team, was published. This fundamental scientific step, which I always cautioned is the first step before many more, did have something positive to report. His team supervised the field and laboratory recording operations and selected samples for analysis. His summation that this lab method could work but many more samples were needed.
I expected it to carry on till we obtained some substantial laboratory-based knowledge before going to the next stage, to get agreement from the ASEAN countries to engage in upgrading the MIDI (Musical Instruments Digital Interface) standard. The MIDI technology will not go away. However, it has stayed in version 1 since it was released in 1984. Asian music has to pitch migrate if MIDI (and all else that develops on its side, carries us int the future. However, if SE Asia wises up, positive adaptation of MIDI would be good for music and business. It could be another loading dose!
History has shown us too that broadcasting media, which is vital for music’s survival, did have a sense of worthiness in the early years for evaluating classical versus popular music. Blandas (1965) wrote about the fight for airtime on radio between (cultivated) and vernacular (popular) music in the early days of radio broadcasting in the United States. The Federal Music Project was created in 1935 to ensure that classical music was maintained in the USA. Thus, classical music had the benefit of support from the government and managed to maintain a sizable air presence through concerted pressure often labeled as unfair. In 1927 classical was aired much more than popular music. By 1930 this was reversed and radio featured twice as much as classical music. The blame was leveled at the radio and their profit motive.
The discipline of ethnomusicology was self-created after a heated academic discussion/dispute between the German scientific school and the academic Euro-American school. In my view there should have been a dual track that is anti-antagonistic, but built on compromises and a willingness to also have a journal for real work on sustainability programs. That way real products from teaching and learning as well as professional performing groups would have a measure like most disciplines have for their hinterland. UNESCO music organizations have to change from, as a place to multiply organizations like ISME, ICTM, ICM, IASA, ISAME and many others elsewhere, to supporting papers that track applied and quantified studies. The discipline of music must have discipline! Otherwise, I see any aspiration for a loading dose would change into a lethal dose!
The literature shows that the impasse in musicology was serious enough for a permanent split in methodology and content. The rift came because the German school wanted to apply a scientific measure to the differing musical intervals that much of the rest of the world had, and in particular Asia. It was/and still is a difficult subject – one that we have to confront sooner than later. Until we have a generation of young persons who can think and act in a multipolar manner, only then will we see some progress. I see that happening in Alejandro’s work. He has developed a crop of talented young professors on this trajectory. However, I still see a fact, that they will also struggle for air-time unless there is a total expansion of technology application, research and development and put this decolonization energy into a further propulsion that would grab much more airtime.
The need to understand the fundamentally differing pitch intervals of 95% of world musical cultures became mostly fictional writing in journals that made headway for professions but not musicology as it should be. There are still no cross regional benchmarks that can inter-relate on this position. And even if there are, it is the listeners that are the final arbiters on accepting tonality and content. So that trajectory to musical plurality as sustainable systems with real listeners is yet to happen.
The initial 1966 publication that triggered a series of ASEAN field musicological projects was an important conference in 1964 of ethnomusicologists from both sides of the Atlantic. It was led by the late great Professor Jose Maceda from the Philippines. He was my teacher! The papers were published in 1966 as the Musics of Asia – an ingenious set of articles were presented which had graphical references to pitch intervals of musical systems in Asia. It was clear that this first generation of musicologists in Asia wanted to follow-up on what they said in strong language – that there was a plural called musics.
The Musics of Asia was published in 1966 and it contained detailed thoughts from eminent musicologists on the salient issues for the region to contend with. I will just report on the way pitch intervals were discussed and presented by a string of eminent musicologists. I compiled them into a chart (Refer to Figure 5) with some other relevant musicologists that I added when it became my responsibility to explain this topic to ASEAN COCI (Committee on Culture and Information) who managed the ASEAN regional projects that came later. My position was that these estimated pitch intervals had to be measured and it would be the responsibility of my generation of musicologists, working on an inheritance of such basic knowledge from those who were behind the 1966 publication.
In 1989 the ASEAN COCI began a series of rotating musicology projects tabled through the Philippines. These projects tried to expand on the topics and issues made in the 1966 publication. The series were costly and they ended in 2003 producing a wealth of information for even further research and development that had to be done. Most of these publications had musicologists and traditional/indigenous musicians participating. The field projects were designed as three week on-site live-in ones and had musicologists and performers from the ASEAN region working together. Most of us became life-long friends and colleagues. Refer to Figure 4 for a front face of these publications.
Figure 5: Estimated Pitch Interval Differences in Asian Musics
I was personally involved in the Forum Papers in 1993 (a first-hand over-view of the region that had much news coverage) and Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics (1999-2003) that ran as a field-to-laboratory-to-book project. It followed a sonic orders approach based on sampling recorded music by in-project traditional musicians, using a state-of-the-art acoustic laboratory and supervised by a top acoustic scientist in Singapore. The objective was to see if there is an acceptable Engineering method that would be adequate to take this project into a higher level of research and development – one that would fit into upgrading MIDI (Music Instruments Digital Interface) and an applied laboratory-style, circular curriculum music education program that would have young persons doing hands-on activity that they enjoy now with their powerful handphones. My hope, like all the past and present collegiate want this discipline of music lifted to be on par with Law, Medicine, Engineering and more, and not fence makers and worse, fence-sitters as we go into an age where we see the loss of the subject-reality in traditional and indigenous musics. The real fear I had (and still have) is that, if the MIDI standard is not expanded to include the known remaining musical systems in Asia, then we could see the current pattern of pitch migration towards the Western tonal system as a given.
MIDI is still in Version 1 and will remain so because it thrives on popular music and other musical configurations. For academic musicology usage two things need to be done: a. the 127 editing protocols have to be doubled so the pitch wheel could be more accurate for live performance of Asian-musics; b. The pitch-intervals have to under-go a detailed analysis and measures in a long-term and all-inclusive manner using engineering equipment. These suggestions are important because MIDI operates within the music chains of the world and that is where the listener becomes the benchmark for change and reversal listening (to facilitate more accurate delivery of Asian musics). What this means is that eventually the Music Chain will take over the duties of all musical enterprises and succeed in preventing ASEAN musics from a chance to be part of a proper business in the music chain. I see this poised to happen now! Not later!
Sonic Environment Studies (SES)
Sonic Orders was my PhD research which had a measuring formula called Sonic Orders Listening Mode Index (SOLMI). I used this index in teaching, course projects, and tracking the emission from sonic emitters (radio, television, recordings, performances and now, in an updated version, tracking the internet). The tests I did for the sonic environment of Singapore showed huge discrepancies between positive Western emissions and very low negative emissions of traditional musics. There are many ways to get around this issue of emissions.
SOLMI is my main research and development work now. It began in the bachelor degree where I created the idea of creativity-based school curricula that is easier to measure like the Associated Board of the Royal Schools and Western music. In my Masters, where I mooted a spiral-curricula based on creativity that would be measured every few years along the school life-cycle of any student, so that music education becomes part of life-skills according to their defined territories. The skills to listen across sonic orders is vital. But the free-choice principle still remains. My doctorate was a search for that measuring entity which I termed sonic orders. One can say the ASEAN Sonic Orders Project was one of my tests for a number of measurable variables.
Currently, I am in the final stages of my digital set up called Timeline Music Annotation Library/Lab–Pedagogy (TMAL-P) which helps make the application of timeline annotation as part of the music educational process, just like writing and reading is a life-skill for all. The tools to achieve this are in TMAL-P. Before this idea of a digital-platform, I did have a brick-and-mortar laboratory for a course entitled Music East-West at the Singapore Management University (2000-2008) where elective students did this course totally on the music timeline: Refer to Fig 6 (TMAL-P/SMU LAB)
FIGURE 6: Top: TMAL-P (Timeline Music Annotation Lab/Library – Pedagogy).
Bottom: SMU Laboratory (Brick&Mortar)
I believe now is the time to move integration of music disciplines on to what is becoming a very powerful digitalization of the music profession. Music colleges will be asked eventually to move much like other great movements going-on in all aspects of human life. There is time for paced development in music. This new TMAL-P technology will allow the following:
A. TIMELINE MUSIC EDUCATION using large resources from the Sonic Asia Digital Library and the first Singapore-based musicology collection – IPML (Ivan Polunin Multimedia Laboratory) by the Unknown Musicologists Dr. Ivan Polunin from Singapore (Peters, 2018). More collections will be added as it progresses for teaching and learning. Timeline annotated products for listening-based music education – projects that could be used for individuals, tutorial groups and full classes, is the target so a new generation of trained music listeners are on the scene to evaluate the music chains in a proper manner. Private groups too, who want to have annotated sound in any genre (Classical, Asian Traditional, Indigenous and more) could have a piece of this new recipe.
B. TRACKING AND MEASURING SONIC ENVIRONMENTS (radio, online performance, television and recordings) and collecting samples for sonic environment emissions studies and posting statistics using SOLMI (measuring tool called Sonic Order Listening Mode Index).
C. CIRCULAR CURRICULUMS in SCHOOL MUSIC EDUCATION: crafting and implementing circular curriculums to develop advanced music listening skills across systems and genres using the timeline annotation facilities for individualized learning.
The Audio Timeliner app is at the center of TMAL-P. It is a free app available for all platforms and done on open-source technology. It has had a long history that goes back to an attempt by the US Library of Congress to try and provide the listeners of their super huge music collection, with some kind of timeline engagement via text annotation. They failed to get it done because it was beyond the understanding of the academic music profession and university and public education leaders. Today, this simplified app is serving music educators in classroom-laboratories. SES is expanding its scope to serve defined territories in bridging TMAL-P with teaching, sonic environment monitoring and cross-environmental collaborations in monitoring and measuring sonic environment – with a view of making this a normal word-wide activity. .
CONCLUSION
Both ASEAN and South America have the same goals – to try and be themselves musically without alienating the thrust of Western musical impact and opportunities. I gathered this from the literature and listening material that was sent to me by Alejandro before they performed in Singapore. I knew this project was (and is still) doing something unspoken about in the literature of musicology, orchestration and pedagogy then and even now. Alejandro’s initially terminology had a long Spanish title, which I summarized as integrated musicology – one that brought together the disciplines of archeology, organology, technology, ancient-history, orchestration and performance with an absolute difference because of technology integration: the vision of an orchestra of 16 performers (AIO) performing over 100 instruments, with no seats in any orchestral formation, but only performers moving silently through a complex stage-management formula (lights, audio, graphics, dance/body movements and expert sound management) is the cue for change. AIO explains de-colonisation for the current academics who are struggling with words and no action.
REFERENCES (all the references listed here, are available as file:. Send an email to me at: sonicasia@singnet.com.sg).
Publications/Papers (Selected)
1. Peters, Joe. (2003). (Chief Ed.). Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics. 2 Vols, 10Cds. ASEAN COCI, Singapore. (it is available on request)
2. Peters, J E. E. (1999). Sonic Environment as a Macro Measure of Relevance in General Music Education. PhD Thesis, University of Western Australia
3. Peters, Joseph. (1981). “A Conceptual Framework for a Creativity-based General Music Education Program for Singapore Schools”. M.M. Thesis, University of the Philippines
4. Maceda, Jose. (1981). A Manual of Field Music Research with Special Reference to South East Asia. University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines.
5. Iglesias Rossi, A. (2001). “Cultural Identity and Contemporary Creation Techniques”. UNESCO Musical Magazine « Resonances» Nº 115, pp 16-17.
6. Grout, D.J. (2005), A History of Western Music, 7th. Ed. Original, New York, 1960)
7. Attali, Jacques. ( 1985 ). Noise: The Political Economy of Music . Trans. by Brian Massumi.
[ Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 16 ]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
8. Schafer, R. Murray. ( 1969 ). The New Soundscape. London: Universal Edition.
9. Traux, Barry. ( 1992 ). “ Electroacoustic Music and the Soundscape: The Inner and Outer World ”. In Paynter, John; Howell, Tim; Orton, Richard; Seymor, Peter. ( eds ). Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 374 – 398.
10. Maceda, Jose. (1966). The Musics of Asia. University of the Philippines, Quezon City.
11. Aki Onda (2018) www.aaa-a.org/programs/on-jose-maceda-a-talk-by-aki-onda
12. Charlotte Lim (1980). Radio Singapore programme with Dr. Jose Maceda
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-I5sh2d6K
13. Peters, Joe. (2003). “Tran Van Kee curriculum”. Sonic Environment. http://thesonicenvironment.blogspot.com
14. Phra Chen Duriyang and Visnutep Silapabanleng. (1993). In Peters, J. (ed.). Forum Papers: Presentations at the Second ASEAN Composers Forum on Traditional Music. Singapore: National Arts Council, pp. 42 – 52.
15. Chew Chye Heng , “Pitch Interval Studies in ASEAN Musics: A Proposed Methodology”. In Peters, J. (2003). Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics, ASEAN COCI, pp. 46 – 85.
16. Blandas, Kenneth H. (1965). All of the Music Belongs to the Nation: the WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.
17. Peters, Joe. (2018).“Dr. Ivan Polunin The Unknown Musicologist in Singapore”. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaeCyDC13vg&t=548s
