Papers by Richard Widdess
Choice Reviews Online, 2016
Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Creative Communication 2015 There is a t... more Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Creative Communication 2015 There is a treasure trove of underappreciated music out there; this book will convince many to explore it. The Economist What is classical music? This book answers the question in a manner never before attempted, by presenting the history of fifteen parallel traditions, of which Western classical music is just one. Each music is analysed in terms of its modes, scales, and theory; its instruments, forms, and aesthetic goals; its historical development, golden age, and condition today; and the conventions governing its performance. The writers are leading ethnomusicologists, and their approach is based on the belief that music is best understood in the context of the culture which gave rise to it. By including Mande and Uzbek-Tajik music - plus North American jazz - in addition to the better-known styles of the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, and South-East Asia, this book offers challenging new perspectives on the word 'classical'. It shows the extent to which most classical traditions are underpinned by improvisation, and reveals the cognate origins of seemingly unrelated musics; it reflects the multifarious ways in which colonialism, migration, and new technology have affected musical development, and continue to do today. With specialist language kept to a minimum, it's designed to help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions which may be unfamiliar to them, and to encounter the reality which lies behind that lazy adjective 'exotic'. MICHAEL CHURCH has spent much of his career in newspapers as a literary and arts editor; since 2010 he has been the music and opera critic of The Independent/I>. From 1992 to 2005 he reported on traditional musics all over the world for the BBC World Service; in 2004, Topic Records released a CD of his Kazakh field recordings and, in 2007, two further CDs of his recordings in Georgia and Chechnya. Contributors: Michael Church, Scott DeVeaux, Ivan Hewett, David W. Hughes, Jonathan Katz, Roderic Knight, Frank Kouwenhoven, Robert Labaree, Scott Marcus, Terry E. Miller, Dwight F. Reynolds, Neil Sorrell, Will Sumits, Richard Widdess, Ameneh Youssefzadeh
Analytical Approaches to World Music, 2020
The editors of Analytical Approaches to World Music are pleased to present the following set of i... more The editors of Analytical Approaches to World Music are pleased to present the following set of invited responses to Andrew Killick's article "Global Notation as a Tool for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Music Analysis." While Andrew Killick has been developing global notation since 2016, the present article stems from his presentation at the Fifth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music in Thessaloniki in 2018. The presentation generated lively discussion at the conference, and when Killick subsequently submitted the paper to the journal, one of the peer reviewers recommended publishing responses alongside the article. In compiling these responses, we have sought to include perspectives from scholars with a range of backgrounds and identities in terms of academic discipline, area of expertise, race, gender, age, and nationality. The set of responses does not fully live up to these goals insofar as the majority of respondents are men, are white...
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Oct 23, 2021
Music transcription is a process of creating a notation of musical sounds. It has been used as a ... more Music transcription is a process of creating a notation of musical sounds. It has been used as a basis for the analysis of music from a wide variety of cultures. Recent decades have seen an increasing amount of engineering research within the field of Music Information Retrieval that aims at automatically obtaining music transcriptions in Western staff notation. However, such approaches are not widely applied in research in ethnomusicology. This article aims to bridge interdisciplinary gaps by identifying aspects of proximity and divergence between the two fields. As part of our study, we collected manual transcriptions of traditional dance tune recordings by eighteen transcribers. Our method employs a combination of expert and computational evaluation of these transcriptions. This enables us to investigate the limitations of automatic music transcription (AMT) methods and computational transcription metrics that have been proposed for their evaluation. Based on these findings, we discuss promising avenues to make AMT more useful for studies in the Humanities. These are, first, assessing the quality of a transcription based on an analytic purpose; secondly, developing AMT approaches that are able to learn conventions concerning the transcription of a specific style; thirdly, a focus on novice transcribers as users of AMT systems; and, finally, considering target notation systems different from Western staff notation.
Analytical Approaches to Music of South Asia, 2023
International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, 2003
In the Newar town of Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, music and dance are still integra... more In the Newar town of Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, music and dance are still integrated with the ritual and agricultural calendar, social organization, urban geography, and Hindu-Buddhist concepts of sacred time and space. Performance also provides opportunities for religious devotion, expressive fulfilment, and entertainment for its participants and onlookers.
Screenworks
For the inhabitants of Bhaktapur, a historic town in Nepal, Gũlā is a sacred month. It is celebra... more For the inhabitants of Bhaktapur, a historic town in Nepal, Gũlā is a sacred month. It is celebrated with processions, music, and other observances in the streets, squares and temples of the town, culminating with a festival in which Buddha statues parade to musical accompaniment. In this short film, a collaboration between an ethnomusicologist, filmmakers, and performers, two musicians - senior and junior, male and female, Hindu and Buddhist respectively - give their complementary perspectives on the importance of traditional ritual and devotional music and the problems of transmitting this intangible cultural heritage to future generations.
Early Music, Aug 1, 1996
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access... more The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact
Oxford Music Online, 2019
Oxford Music Online, 2001
Oxford Music Online, 2001
Ethnomusicology Forum, 2013
Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every... more Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Though observers of Indian classical music have long commented on these gestures, Musicking Bodies is the first extended study of what singers actually do with their hands and voices. Matthew Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to demonstrate the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The gestures that are improvised alongside vocal improvisation embody a special kind of melodic knowledge passed down tacitly through lineages of teachers and students who not only sound similar, but who also engage with music kinesthetically according to similar aesthetic and ethical ideals. Musicking Bodies builds on the insights of phenomenology, Indian and Western music theory, and cultural studies to illuminate not only the performance of gesture, but its implications for the transmission of culture, the conception of melody, and the very nature of the musicking body.
Songs as artefacts and performances Every evening at about six o'clock, a group of men assemble a... more Songs as artefacts and performances Every evening at about six o'clock, a group of men assemble at the temple of Dattātreya in the town of Bhaktapur, Nepal, to sing sacred songs. They are farmers, who live in the nearby streets of the town and go out to work in their fields by day. It is their pleasure, and they also regard it as their duty, to sing for around two hours every evening, throughout the year without exception, accompanying themselves on cymbals, drum and natural trumpet. They sing a minimum of five or seven songs, and by singing every line repeatedly, each song is extended to many times its intrinsic length. Preliminary and concluding rituals, and breaks for conversation between songs, mark the event as both a sacred and a social interaction. The type of singing that the group perform is called dāphā bhajan, or dāphā for short, a style of devotional music that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bhajan is a ubiquitous South Asian term for a devotional song; the origins of the term dāphā are obscure, but it seems to refer to group performance. The repertoire of the group, and of other similar groups at other temples in Bhaktapur, is a repertoire of religious poems set to music. Such songs can be considered both as historical artefacts having at least a degree of permanent existence, and as evanescent events in timethat is, performances. The poems are contained in manuscript songbooks, which the singers read from as they sing. Punctuation marks delineate their division into verses and lines, and
Empirical Musicology Review, 2012
Yearbook for Traditional Music, 2020
Scientific Reports, 2021
How are listeners able to follow and enjoy complex pieces of music? Several theoretical framework... more How are listeners able to follow and enjoy complex pieces of music? Several theoretical frameworks suggest links between the process of listening and the formal structure of music, involving a division of the musical surface into structural units at multiple hierarchical levels. Whether boundaries between structural units are perceivable to listeners unfamiliar with the style, and are identified congruently between naïve listeners and experts, remains unclear. Here, we focused on the case of Indian music, and asked 65 Western listeners (of mixed levels of musical training; most unfamiliar with Indian music) to intuitively segment into phrases a recording of sitar ālāp of two different rāga-modes. Each recording was also segmented by two experts, who identified boundary regions at section and phrase levels. Participant- and region-wise scores were computed on the basis of "clicks" inside or outside boundary regions (hits/false alarms), inserted earlier or later within those...
Cognitive Science, 2016
Musical knowledge is largely implicit. It is acquired without awareness of its complex rules, thr... more Musical knowledge is largely implicit. It is acquired without awareness of its complex rules, through interaction with a large number of samples during musical enculturation. Whereas several studies explored implicit learning of mostly abstract and less ecologically valid features of Western music, very little work has been done with respect to ecologically valid stimuli as well as non-Western music. The present study investigated implicit learning of modal melodic features in North Indian classical music in a realistic and ecologically valid way. It employed a cross-grammar design, using melodic materials from two modes (r agas) that use the same scale. Findings indicated that Western participants unfamiliar with Indian music incidentally learned to identify distinctive features of each mode. Confidence ratings suggest that participants' performance was consistently correlated with confidence, indicating that they became aware of whether they were right in their responses; that is, they possessed explicit judgment knowledge. Altogether our findings show incidental learning in a realistic ecologically valid context during only a very short exposure, they provide evidence that incidental learning constitutes a powerful mechanism that plays a fundamental role in musical acquisition.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021
Music transcription is a process of creating a notation of musical sounds. It has been used as a ... more Music transcription is a process of creating a notation of musical sounds. It has been used as a basis for the analysis of music from a wide variety of cultures. Recent decades have seen an increasing amount of engineering research within the field of Music Information Retrieval that aims at automatically obtaining music transcriptions in Western staff notation. However, such approaches are not widely applied in research in ethnomusicology. This article aims to bridge interdisciplinary gaps by identifying aspects of proximity and divergence between the two fields. As part of our study, we collected manual transcriptions of traditional dance tune recordings by eighteen transcribers. Our method employs a combination of expert and computational evaluation of these transcriptions. This enables us to investigate the limitations of automatic music transcription (AMT) methods and computational transcription metrics that have been proposed for their evaluation. Based on these findings, we d...
Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 166, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, IX, 2011
Laurence Picken contributed to both the sciences and the humanities, and had in particular pionee... more Laurence Picken contributed to both the sciences and the humanities, and had in particular pioneered a radical transformation in musical perspectives. His work in zoology brought national and international recognition with the award of the Sc.D. in 1952, Fellowship of the Institute of Biology, a Walker-Ames Visiting Professorship at the University of Washington in 1959, and the Linnean Society's Trail Medal in 1960. The Organization of Cells and Other Organisms was the crowning achievement of a long and distinguished career in the natural sciences. Alongside the zoological research and teaching, Picken developed a parallel career as a musicologist, issuing a series of studies on Chinese and other musics that were quite as original and, for their time, definitive, as his scientific publications.
Hierarchical models of music allow explanation of highly complex musical structure based on the g... more Hierarchical models of music allow explanation of highly complex musical structure based on the general principle of recursive elaboration and a small set of orthogonal op- erations. Recent approaches to melodic elaboration have converged to a representation based on intervals, which al- lows the elaboration of pairs of notes. However, two prob- lems remain: First, an interval-first representation obscures one-sided operations like neighbor notes. Second, while models of Western melody styles largely agree on step- wise operations such as neighbors and passing notes, larger intervals are either attributed to latent harmonic properties or left unexplained. This paper presents a grammar for melodies in North Indian raga music, showing not only that recursively applied neighbor and passing note oper- ations underlie this style as well, but that larger intervals are generated as generalized neighbors, based on the tonal hierarchy of the underlying scale structure. The notion of a genera...
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