Jason Torello Final Project Central Asian Music 297 12/09/20 Narrative Instrumental Küi Performance: Action through Music My final project was conceptualized out of the lecture and readings from week 6 Narrative and Instrumental Performance: Kazakh küi. I will be presenting a piece of original program music which is constructed around a quasi-epic narrative and crafted loosely into a Kui style. My project will include a piece of program music that I will write and perform on my bass guitar. Since the highest strings of the bass are tuned to a perfect forth, I thought there was a connection between those registers and the two stringed dombrya. I also have been developing a strumming and finger-picking style which hopefully will capture the gestures of the music I have been hearing this semester. I will only use the two strings to keep close as I can to the spirit of the dombrya sound. The performance will be put together as a 5-minute audiovisual program. The listeners can follow the portion of my essay explaining my reasoning and processes. I will use the technique on the dombrya of dividing the neck into four sections: bas bun (lowest register) negizgi bun, orta bun, and sagha (the highest register). I will use these divisions as compositional elements which I will arrange to go with an original story that reinforces some of the themes in the song. While the outline of the piece is laid out by the arrangement, the actual phrases will all be spontaneously composed on the spot in an attempt to convey the images I am seeing in my mind. What is most important to me is that this performance in no way attempts to mimic an actual Kazakh küi or for that matter any particular Central Asian Music style. The project would be a failure if it was perceived as a form of culture-miming. What I am trying to achieve is simply to build a bridge between my own musical philosophy and this ancient form of communication. What I identify with is the idea of music being the oldest and most pure form of communication spiritually. The particular style I am playing is, I hope, more the result of inspiration than appropriation. Pure Sound I have always been fascinated with the concept of communicating purely through music. As children we seemed to do this more naturally, often exploring the world around us in terms of music/sound. Simple objects became musical instruments. Pots and pans became cymbals and gongs. Tubs, boxes, spoons and sticks could be used as percussion. My first stringed instrument was actually a thick rubber band which I found, if stretched tight enough, could play different notes by adjusting my fingers. I also thought of the world around me in terms of sound. I remember spending hours in the woods, hearing the music of trickling streams. The rhythm and Jason Torello Final Project Central Asian Music 297 12/09/20 echoes of the trees I struck with sticks. On trips to the beach, I can still remember how my voice would make strange leaps off the water at the end of the jetty. I recollect listening to the ocean in the conch shells on the beach. This was made even more magical when I discovered the sound still survived even when I brought the shell home. These were the purest notions of music I can remember. In these terms sound and music were something I used as a vehicle to explore the world around me. It is important to stay in touch with these kinds of early conceptions of exploring sound. It is an ideal centered on both the interpretation and documentation of the world around us. The material of this work are instruments, culture, and the modes of music which express their meaning. This semester we saw great examples of this. Tuvan throat singer Ayan- ool Sam gave us beautiful and powerful examples of throat signing. Mohammadgeldi Genldinejad played his dutar sharing stories of his training as a youth. And Raushan Orazbaeva composed a hauntingly beautiful performance on the gobyz. There was a common thread which ran through all of their performances. Each musician found their own way to extract the mood of a narrative and use it to color their respective pieces. What I took away most from these performances was the state of mind that all of the musicians seemed to be in while performing. This is key to the philosophy of Central Asian Music. The Instruments Central Asian musician’s instruments are also central to the development of their musical traditions. They believe the instruments they use are imbued with magic qualities, sometimes representing the morphology of a living being (Daukeyeva ,2020). This is particularly true of stringed instruments such as the dutar and dombrya. There are actually competing narratives about the creation stories of the stringed instrument which is proof of their importance to the competing cultures within Central Asia. In Turkman culture, the creator of the first dutar is recognized as Baba Gambar, while Kambar is known to be the creator of the komuz, the three stringed lute (Levin et al. 2016: 26). The story of Kambar tells of a hunter named Kambar who found a monkey that had be impaled in a tree which its intestines stretched between the branches. As they dried a great wind came which vibrated the intestines creating a beautiful and magical sound. This gave Kambar the inspiration to carve the first komuz using dried animal intestines for Jason Torello Final Project Central Asian Music 297 12/09/20 strings(ibid). No matter their origin, the construction of musical instruments was certainly inspired by local traditions and used local materials constituting the development of regional repertoires. The regional raw materials used to construct these exceptional instruments help to capture the sounds of the environment from which they are crafted. The dombrya was no exception. One of the primary instruments in a Kazakh Kui, the dombrya is an instrument with a diverse sound capable of the extended range needed to capture a variety of images. The design of the instrument takes full advantage of the tonal range of the instrument, dividing the fingerboard into sections meant to represent the thematic progression of the piece (ibid: 285). Figure 1. A dombrya-neck divided by range(ibid:285) In the following diagram 2. we can see how the division of the fingerboard can be expressed visually highlighting different iterations of phrases within the küi. We saw an example of this Jason Torello Final Project Central Asian Music 297 12/09/20 kind of progression in visual diagram form in the lecture on narrative program music. Figure2. (Daukeyeva, powerpoint,2020) The division of the fingerboard helps musicians to orient themselves within the structure of the küi: Many tokpe küi are structured as a succession of thematically related sections in progressively higher pitch areas or registers (buyn) on the fingerboard of the dombrya: the initial section, serving as a refrain, produced in the lower pitch aera close to the pegboard of the dombrya (bas buyn);the middle section produced in the middle pitch area of the fingerboard (orta buyn); the culminating section of the küi marked by attainment of the high pitch area close to the body of the instrument (sagha)(ibid:285). Within these structures the musician is free to improvise the moods within the phrases. In other words, this diagram could be used to play the same piece in a variety of different ways. Jason Torello Final Project Central Asian Music 297 12/09/20 Inspired by this concept, I divided the neck of my bass into different sections in order to represent different characters in my narrative Figure 3. My divisions are based on the idea that the registers of the instrument define the major themes of the respective characters' moods and actions. This is a simpler interpretation of the system used in the Kazakh Kui. The Horse and Wind sections of the fret-board are clear enough to understand. The Steppe section represents a field on which the two characters can explore a common register. I see this as a metaphorical realm where both the spiritual and the physical/ the upper and lower realms intersect. Jason Torello Final Project Central Asian Music 297 12/09/20 Composing the piece When I was conceiving the project, it was important to me to find interesting ways in which to use the divisions of the neck as a guide to guide connecting me to the material without the traditional kind of arranging process usually employed in Western composition. One of the considerations was the actual mode or harmonic quality I would approach the piece from. To get a sound or mood that felt exotic I used a G Harmonic minor scale figure 4. The harmonic minor is often associated with Eastern music and is often referred to as the Mohammedan scale. One reason for this is the large jump in scale-degree, in this case the jump from the Eb to the F#. This is not a common sound in Western compositions so it denotes images of “the other”. I also devised a unique way for me to set the general arrangement of the piece. Rather than relying on conventional organizing units such as measures to fit the phrases into, I relied instead, on the action of the story to guide the changes in phrasing from buyn to bas buyn or orta buyn. This was an interesting arranging exercise because it required that I first not only memorize the story but also to internalize the moods of the characters in the story.