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Ethnic Music

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ETHNIC MUSIC

The Systems of
Order in Music

Tonality

Differences
in Understanding as Reflected by Language

The Beginnings of
Musical History

New Sound Composer
of the 20th Century and the
Range of Intervals

Advancing
to the Transcendental
Play of Music

Musical Insight into the Culture of Peoples

Musical Relationships

The Musical Path
to Self-Knowlegde

Homophony

Polyphony

The Counterpoint

The Threefold Perfect
Form of the Harmony

Relations in Music

 

Peter Hübner
Founder of the
Micro Music Laboratories

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  The Systems of Order in Music
       
 
Differences in Understanding as Reflected by Language


   
 
Peo­ples do not know the cus­toms and ex­peri­ences of other peo­ples, and there­fore will natu­rally convey only their own habits and ex­peri­ences – in their own lan­guage, their own ex­pres­sions.

 
Life Habits and Experiences of the Peoples
 
 
An abori­gine of the Aus­tra­lian bush may not know the lights of a city, but he is fa­mil­iar with the sounds of the night in the bush, and just as a city-dweller, in his lan­guage, spon­ta­ne­ously ex­pres­ses the day-to-day life of the city, a man liv­ing in the bush natu­rally ex­pres­ses the mani­fold world of the jungle.

 
Different Worlds of Different Peoples
 
 
In our own cul­tural area in Ger­many, for ex­ample, we know the phe­nome­non called “Ge­muet­lich­keit”: a phe­nome­non of finer lev­els, of a more re­fined field of life. Take, for ex­ample, a cozy gath­er­ing of friends at the fire­place. Si­lence pre­vails, in­ter­rupted only by the quiet crackle of the fire, giv­ing rise to a men­tal-emo­tional fa­mil­iarity be­tween the par­tici­pants.

 
The Different use of Inner-Human Forces
 
 
The ex­peri­ence of such group-con­scious­ness char­ac­ter­ized by si­lence can be ver­bally com­mu­ni­cated in the lan­guage of our cul­ture, and our peo­ple will have a natu­ral un­der­stand­ing and an in­ner sen­si­tiv­ity for this situa­tion in which feel­ing domi­nates. Natu­rally, it is not the physi­cal en­vi­ron­ment of the fire­place which gen­er­ates the im­pres­sion of “Gemuetlichkeit” so fa­mil­iar to us, but the cen­tury-old cul­ti­va­tion of a sense of to­getherness.

 
Cultural Area and Language
 
 
We know that an Ameri­can, for in­stance, may hardly un­der­stand our con­cept of “Ge­muet­lich­keit,” much in the same way his con­cept of a spruce cocktail party will appear strange to us.

   
 
On a su­per­fi­cial level, we rec­og­nize these gaps in ex­peri­ence be­tween dif­fer­ent cul­tural ar­eas from those words which ex­press a par­ticu­lar feel­ing of life in one lan­guage and are used un­changed in an­other lan­guage. Thus, an Ameri­can uses our word “Ge­muet­lich­keit” with as lit­tle suc­cess at home, as we use his term “cocktail party” in our coun­try.

 
Gaps in Experience between Different Cultural Areas
 
 
The task of the to­nal­ity is to de­scribe the vari­ous at­mos­pheres of life.

 
The Task of the Tonality
 
 
Tonalities dif­fer from each other just as the vari­ous en­vi­ron­ments of men dif­fer from each other quite sub­stan­tially.

   
 
And just as man, in dif­fer­ent en­vi­ron­ments, natu­rally adopts quite dif­fer­ent ways of life, like­wise, the motif un­folds dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent tonalities and de­scribes these dif­fer­ent ways of un­fold­ment in quite dif­fer­ent melo­dies.

 
Describing the Diverse Atmospheres of Life
 
     
     
                                 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                     
                                     
  With kind permission of AAR EDITION INTERNATIONAL
© 1998 –  MICRO MUSIC LABORATORIES



 
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