Systems built on different assumptions about pitch and rhythm.
10 topics · 6 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
In Gamelan You Have to Become One "Feeling": Sensory Embodiment and Transfer of Musical Knowledge
Rachel Brashier · 2013
Argues from fieldwork with a Balinese gamelan teacher that mastering gamelan is transmitted through combined visual, tactile and kinesthetic channels…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Making a Case for Balkan Music Studies
Ivana Medic · 2020
Argues that Balkan music has been studied piecemeal within separate national musicologies and makes the case for treating it as a coherent regional…
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan
Francis Taylor Piggott · 1893
Documents Japanese instruments and notation systems and argues that Japanese court and theatre music follow their own coherent aesthetic logic rather…
+3 more at this level
6 works
Rachel Brashier
Argues from fieldwork with a Balinese gamelan teacher that mastering gamelan is transmitted through combined visual, tactile and kinesthetic channels that cannot be reduced to verbal instruction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ivana Medic
Argues that Balkan music has been studied piecemeal within separate national musicologies and makes the case for treating it as a coherent regional field defined by shared historical entanglement rather than by any single national canon.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Taylor Piggott
Documents Japanese instruments and notation systems and argues that Japanese court and theatre music follow their own coherent aesthetic logic rather than lacking Western harmonic sophistication.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Arthur Henry Fox Strangways
Argues that Indian raga and tala are complete, internally consistent systems of pitch and rhythm organisation, not an exotic variant of Western scale and metre.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry George Farmer
Traces the theoretical writings of early Arabic music scholars to argue that Arabic musical science absorbed and substantially advanced on Greek theory rather than merely preserving it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Rainer Polak
Analyses recordings of Malian jembe and Ghanaian Ewe drumming to argue that West African dance drumming pushes metric subdivision close to the perceptual limit of what listeners can still feel as a pulse, rather than staying safely within it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026