Mystic chord. Mystic chord on C. Play . It consists of the pitch classes: C, F♯, B♭, E, A, D. This is often interpreted as a quartal hexachord consisting of an augmented fourth, diminished fourth, augmented fourth, and two perfect fourths. However, the chord may be spelled in a variety of ways, and it is related to other pitch collections, such as being a hexatonic subset of the Overtone scale, lacking the perfect fifth. Nomenclature[edit] The term "mystic chord", appears to derive from Scriabin's intense interest in Theosophy, and the chord is imagined to reflect this mysticism.
It is also known as the "Prometheus chord", after its extensive use in his work Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op.60. Scriabin himself called it the "chord of the pleroma" (aккорд плеромы - akkord pleromy),[1] which "was designed to afford instant apprehension of -that is, to reveal- what was in essence beyond the mind of man to conceptualize. Qualities[edit] Synthetic chord's dominant quality[3] Use by Scriabin[edit] Play . Video: A drumming masterclass with Afrobeat legend Tony Allen. Archive - A glossary of African music styles - May 21, 2003. Tony Allen: The veteran Afrobeat drummer is shaking his sticks as hard and as brilliantly as ever - Features - Music.
Listen to Allen's extraordinary cross-rhythms on all those great Fela Kuti records and you realise he's not exaggerating. "Most composers write a drum part with a regular beat that anybody in the whole world could play," he says. "I always like to extract the beat that's there and then try lots of different beats and different ways of drumming around it. That's the only way not to get bored. " Brian Eno and Damon Albarn have described Allen as the greatest drummer on the planet – and it's hard to disagree. Few percussionists, after all, can claim to have invented a rhythm – but that's what Allen did when he added his propulsive rhythms to the music of Kuti and together they created the sound the world came to know as Afrobeat.
Drumming is a highly physical discipline, but at 67 Allen shows no sign of letting up. He has his own explanation for his indefatigability. Small and wiry with a beanie pulled down over his ears, he meets me in Paris, where he has lived for the past 20 years. Afrobeat. Jazz. The 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures, and in the mid-1950s, hard bop, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation.
Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other jazz styles include Afro-Cuban jazz, West Coast jazz, ska jazz, Indo jazz, avant-garde jazz, soul jazz, chamber jazz, Latin jazz, jazz funk, loft jazz, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, M-Base, spiritual jazz and nu jazz.
Definitions[edit] Importance of improvisation[edit] Race[edit] Yoruba music. The music of the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin are perhaps best known for an extremely advanced drumming tradition, especially using the dundun[1] hourglass tension drums. Yoruba folk music became perhaps the most prominent kind of West African music in Afro-Latin and Caribbean musical styles. Yorùbá music left an especially important influence on the music used in Lukumi[2] practice and the music of Cuba[3] Folk music[edit] Ensembles using the dundun play a type of music that is also called dundun.[4] These ensembles consist of various sizes of tension drums along with special band drums (ogido). Rhythmic structure[edit] Standard pattern in duple-pulse (4/4) and triple-pulse (12/8) form. The strokes of the standard pattern coincide with: 1, 1a, 2& 2a, 3&, 4, 4a. 1 & a 2 & a 3 & a 4 & a || X . 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a || X . .
Yoruba dundun ensemble. Popular music[edit] Yorùbá music is regarded as one of the more important components of the modern Nigerian popular music scene. 'He was in a godlike state' You would be forgiven for driving right past the white three-storey building in a shabby Lagos back-street. But this nondescript house, with its balconies and roof terrace, was once at the heart of one of the biggest musical movements Africa has ever seen. The Kalakuta Republic, as it's known, is the commune that once belonged to the Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti. Here, unlike elsewhere in Africa's most populous country, young men give the single-fisted black power salute as you drive past, rather than a wave of the hand.
As we pull up outside Kalakuta, a rat scurries down an open sewer and a bare-chested security guard opens a large iron gate into the compound. Fela Kuti was the mouthpiece of Nigerian counterculture in the 1970s. He developed a style of music known as Afrobeat - an amalgamation of Yoruba rhythms, Ghanaian Highlife, jazz, American funk and pidgin English.
Kalakuta is now home to two of Fela's children, Seun and Kunle. Den steal all the money And killed my mama. Fela Kuti. Fela Kuti (born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti;[1] 15 October 1938 – 2 August 1997) also known as Fela Anikulapo Kuti or simply Fela ([feˈlæ]), was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, human rights activist, and political maverick.[2] Biography[edit] Early life and career[edit] Fela was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria[3] into an upper-middle-class family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement; his father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, a Protestant minister and school principal, was the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers.[4] His brothers, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, both medical doctors, are well known in Nigeria.
Fela was sent to London in 1958 to study medicine but decided to study music instead at the Trinity College of Music. 1970s[edit] 1980s and beyond[edit] Death[edit] Afrobeat. Afrobeat is a combination of traditional Yoruba music, jazz, highlife, funk, and chanted vocals,[1] fused with percussion and vocal styles, popularised in Africa in the 1970s. Its main creator was the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Fela Kuti, who gave it its name,[1] who used it to revolutionize musical structure as well as the political context in his native Nigeria. It was Kuti who coined the term "afrobeat" upon his return from a U.S. tour with his group Nigeria '70 (formerly Koola Lobitos).
Afrobeat features chants, call-and-response vocals, and complex, interacting rhythms.[1] The new sound hailed from a club that he established called the Afro-Shrine. Origins[edit] Afrobeat originated from Ghana's highlife and heavy african drumbeats and was later exported to the southern part of Nigeria in the 1970s where Kuti, on his return from Ghana where he learnt the genre, experimented with many different forms of contemporary music of the time. Instrumentation[edit] Funk. Etymology[edit] The word funk as applied in the music world initially referred to a strong odor. The anthropologist/art historian Robert Farris Thompson, in his work Flash Of The Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, postulates that funky has its semantic roots in the Kikongo word "lu-fuki", which means "bad body odor".
He says: "Both jazzmen and Bakongo use funky and lu-fuki to praise persons for the integrity of their art, for having 'worked out' to achieve their aims" supposedly meant to signify "the irradiation of positive energy of a person. Hence 'funk' in American jazz parlance can mean earthiness, a return to fundamentals".[3] African-American jazz musicians originally applied the term to music with a slow, mellow groove.
Then it evolved to a rather hard-driving, insistent rhythm, implying a more carnal quality. This early form of the music set the pattern for later musicians.[4] The music was identified as slow, "sexy", loose, riff-oriented and danceable. Tony Allen (musician) Tony Oladipo Allen (born 12 August 1940 in Lagos, Nigeria) is a Nigerian drummer, composer and songwriter who currently lives and works in Paris. His career and life story have been documented in his 2013 autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat, co-written with author/musician Michael E. Veal who previously wrote a comprehensive biography of Fela Kuti.[1] As drummer and musical director of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's band Africa 70 from 1968 to 1979, Allen was one of the primary co-founders of the genre of Afrobeat music. Fela once stated that, "without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat A self-taught musician, Allen began to play drum-kit at the age of eighteen, while working as an engineer for a Nigerian radio station.
Allen was hired by 'Sir' Victor Olaiya to play claves with his highlife band, "the Cool Cats". In 1964, Fela Ransome Kuti invited Allen to audition for a jazz-highlife band he was forming. Two Tony Allen radio shows on Red Bull Music Academy Radio (RBMA Radio) Horn section. Symphonic horn section[edit] The horn section is the group of symphonic musicians who play the horn.
These musicians are typically seated to the back of the ensemble and may be on either side at the director's discretion. Placing them to the left with their bells toward the audience increases the prominence of the section, whereas on the right, the sound reflects off the back of the stage. The order from the principal horn (1st horn) to the 4th horn is right to left from the director's view.
The section is ordered in this way so the principal horn may be heard by all players as the principal sets the timbre and intonation of the section. Popular music horn section[edit] In non-classical music groups such as blues, funk, or rock bands, the horn section refers to a group of wind instrumentalists — usually saxophone, trumpet and trombone players; sometime singularly, and sometimes in pairs or more of each instrument. Notable horn sections[edit]
Fela Kuti - Fogo Fogo. Fela Kuti "Gentleman" (1973)