make an reaction paper through an essay about the comparison and contrast of two different sets of music the tradditional East Asian music versus the western music.the essay should convey the essence of appreciating creativity and uniqueness of the music pieces composed.
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Music
General characteristics
Society and music
Rural and urban music
A general musical division exists between the urban and rural areas of Southeast Asia. Urban centres comprise the islands of Java and Bali and places in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, where big ensembles of gong families play for court and state ceremonies. Rural areas include other islands and remote places, where smaller ensembles and solo instruments play a simpler music for village feasts, curing ceremonies, and daily activities. In cities and towns influenced by Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, shadow and masked plays and dances utilizing music play important communal roles, while in less urbanized areas, in lieu of musical plays, chants and songs in spirit worship and rituals are sung in exclusive surroundings—a ritual procession on the headwaters of Borneo, a drinking ceremony in the jungles of Palawan, a feast in the uplands of Luzon.
In both regions the physical setting is usually the open air—in temple yards and courtyards, under the shade of big trees, in house and public yards, fields and clearings. Many musical instruments are made of natural products of a tropical environment, and their sounds are products of this milieu. The music of buzzers, zithers, and harps is thus akin to sounds heard in the tropical vegetation of Southeast Asia. In Bali, for example, special ways of chanting and sounds of the jew’s harp ensemble (genggong) imitate the croaking of frogs and the noise of animals.
Relation to social institutions
Music in Southeast Asia is frequently related to ceremonies connected with religion, the state, community festivals, and family affairs. In Java, important Islamic feasts, such as the birthday of Muhammad or the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, as well as animistic ceremonies marking the harvest and cycles of human life, are celebrated with shadow plays (wayang [wajang]). In Bali, the gamelan gong orchestra opens ceremonies and provides most of the music for temple feasts. The gamelan selunding, an ensemble with iron-keyed metallophones (like xylophones but with metal keys), plays ritual music, and the gamelan angklung, so called because it formerly included tube rattles, or angklung, is used to accompany long processions to symbolic baths near the river.
In what is now Peninsular Malaysia the court orchestra, or nobat, was held almost as sacred as the powers of the sultan himself. Among the Bidayuh and Iban in Borneo, ceremonial chants are sung in feasts related to rice planting, harvesting, and honouring the omen bird kenyalang (rhinoceros hornbill) and other spirits.
The relation of music to dance and theatre
In the Thai masked play, or khon, dancers, chorus, soloists, and orchestra are all coordinated. The musicians know the movements of classical dance and coordinate musical phrases with dance patterns, turns, and movements. In the shadow play, or nang sbek, the dancer, who manipulates a leather puppet, must keep his foot movements in time with vocal recitations. During pauses in which the gong ensemble plays an interlude, the dancer must change steps accordingly. In general, when there is solo singing, the instrumental ensemble remains silent or plays only a few instruments in contrast to interludes of acrobatic shows or scenes of fighting, when the full orchestra clangs on all the instruments. In Balinese dancing, body movements, paces, and directions are dependent on drum strokes and signals from a wood block (keprak) and cymbals (cengceng). The dancers generally rehearse with the musicians to know exactly when choreographic changes take place.
As theatre, the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata have different musical supports, depending on the country. In Bali, Mahabharata shadow plays are presented to the accompaniment of a quartet of metallophones known as gender wayang. In Cambodia, where the preference is for stories of the Ramayana (which is called Ramker in Cambodia), the music is a full gong ensemble similar to the Thai pi phat ensemble, while in Myanmar, a percussion orchestra of drums and gongs in circular frames accompanies singing, dancing, and dialogues in all types of plays.
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East Asian music vis-à-vis that of other major cultures
East Asia can be viewed as one of the big four among the generally urban, literate cultural areas of the world. The other three are South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Around each of these major regional cultures one can find many satellite musical systems known as national forms. In most cases, the fundamental musical concepts of such national forms reflect the basic ideals of the cultural core. For example, the musics of Iran and Egypt are of one family, as are those of France and Sweden or of China and Japan. A possible fifth addition to the “big four” concept is the Southeast Asian musical culture characterized by the use of knobbed gongs. Its documents on music theory from the 18th to the 20th century combine South and East Asian concepts with indigenous insights. Its most distinctive aspects are its instrument types and resulting ensembles and forms.Using instrument type alone as a measure, it is sometimes possible to note cultural influences and mixtures of the major traditions in smaller units. For example, the physical structure and playing positions of various bowed instruments in mainland Southeast Asia can often mark clearly Chinese influence, as in Vietnam, or Muslim and Chinese forms in confluence, as in the various bowed lutes of courtly ensembles in Cambodia and Thailand. By the same token, the appearance of flat gongs in mainland Southeast Asia shows Chinese connections, while the knobbed gongs clearly stem from Southeast Asian culture proper.Concepts of music
If one turns to distinctions in musical style, one of the first questions to arise is “What is music?” Two basic definitions will suffice for the present discussion. The first definition is cultural: a sonic event can be called music if the people who use it call it music, regardless of one’s own reaction to it. Similarly, certain events that sound musical to foreign ears are not music culturally if they are not accepted as such by native culture carriers. A good example of such a situation is found in the Middle East, where singing is never allowed in the mosque, though one may hear performances and even buy records of “readings” from the Qurʾān. Such cultural and functional problems of definition seldom arise in East Asian music, and a more neutral definition is appropriate. A sound event may be considered and studied as music if it combines the elements of pitch, rhythm, and loudness in such a way that they communicate emotionally, aesthetically, or functionally on the levels that either transcend or are unrelated to speech communication. Those who have been moved by a love song or a lament can well appreciate some of the implications of such a view of music. When listening to “exotic” music—i.e., that of a tradition outside one’s own background—it is important to remember that such transcendental values are at work for the alien listener as well as for listeners familiar with the particular musical language in use.
There are many kinds of music in the world, the three most common terms being folk, popular, and art music. Folk and popular music have their special indigenous and mixed forms in Asia (as in all the world today), but it is in the literate art traditions of Asia that historical and musical distinctions can be made most clearly. In the context of this discussion, art music is defined as a tradition having, to some degree, a conscious theoretical basis and a sense of repertoire that is played against the highest standards held by informed native listeners. The performer is often a professional, and there may be a known historical depth to the traditions. Thus, there may be art music in many nonliterate cultures such as that of the Australian Aborigines and that of the tribal courts of Africa. Here, however, the major concern is with one of the large urban, literate cultures and its three national variants. Before looking at these musical systems in detail, it is useful to compare the entire culture with those of the other major “big” three, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
Theoretical systems
All four major literate cultures, in their ancient forms, laid a strong emphasis on the extramusical qualities of music. For example, the study of such concepts as the power of vibrations (in ancient Indian music theory) and the relationships between music and other elements in the universe (in Assyrian records as well as in the writings of medieval European scholars) can be matched in East Asia by the joint efforts of Chinese musicologists and astrologers to bring the music of the empire in tune with the universe.