THE GENRE PROJECT - January 8 - Bamar Muisc
Genre of the Day - Bamar (Burmese) Music
Album of the Day - စိန်ချစ်တီ (Sein Chit Ti) - New Arrangements for Hsaing Ensemble (1987)
Today’s genre is our first regional one, hailing from the nation of Myanmar. While Bamar music is the overarching genre to describe music of the Bamar ethnic group, the major ethnic group in Myanmar, today’s album is technically Burmese classical music (i.e., versus folk music). That semi-irrelevant side note aside, Burmese traditional music has unique and distinctive forms of harmony, distinct instruments, with a seven note scale attached to animistic beliefs with specific animals being associated with each note. The most common instruments include a variety of gongs, stringed harps and zitherns, wind instruments, and many drums.
Today’s album was my first to only be available on YouTube, meaning—I shudder as I write this—manual Last.fm scrobbles. How tragic. And I can’t even add this album to my Spotify playlist! How can I feel that I’ve done something without proof of it stored on some sort of data collector! Anyway, thank god for YouTube for housing so many albums that wouldn’t otherwise be registered on other DSPs—one has to wonder what the actual numerical differential is between the number of songs uniquely available on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. versus YouTube.
As an internationally-minded person and someone itching to learn more about how different cultures came to view what sounds just sound right—what makes up a scale? What melodies are most common?—this was a fascinating first listen. Regional music makes up by far the largest category of subgenres on RYM, so this is likely the first of many in this series. Different forms of traditional music both reflect a common human understanding of sound and the fact that most cultures invented some sort of wind instrument, some sort of stringed instrument, and some sort of drum speaks to the shared exploration of our ability to make intriguing, evocative sound that all cultures share.
Today’s album was စိန်ချစ်တီ (Sein Chit Ti) - New Arrangements for Hsaing Ensemble from 1987. Hsaing ensemble refers to essentially an orchestra of traditional Burmese music, and actually uses the hemitonic scale typically (I’m not good enough with music theory to tell on this album, so you tell me). What a dynamic first listen, though! This is fast-paced, frenetic, at times crowded and jittery music, thumping gongs, searing winds, and clanging cymbals in conjunction and leaping into action, catching the listener off guard just as a more peaceful melody seemed to take hold. This is more of a characteristic of Hsaing ensembles which aim for dynamic, abrupt changes in melody and tempo rather than Burmese music as a whole, showing the wide variety of traditions within a single culture’s music. I’m glad that I was exposed to the sound of the Hsaing ensemble versus another, perhaps more restrained style, as this is truly a sound one just doesn’t hear in Western classical music, the cymbals being so much more at the forefront and the sound of the wind instruments so distinctive. This was a fascinating and fruitful listen, and dare I say it—I don’t know how many times I’ll end up saying this in this column—good work music!