Non-Western Traditions
The label does not hold up, and that is the first thing to say. It groups most of the music on earth by what it is not, which tells you nothing. What follows are four traditions that are genuinely built on different principles, each named for itself.
- 4 traditions
- different principles
- not a category
In which styles
- Indian classical
- West African
- Arabic
- Indonesian
In short
A raga is not a scale. It carries a set of pitches, and also characteristic phrases, an ascending and a descending shape, notes to rest on and notes to pass through, a time of day and an emotional world. Playing the pitches without the rest is like naming the letters of a word and calling it a language.
Each of these traditions treats time and pitch as things that can be organised differently, and hearing that is the point of the page.
How the style works
West African music organises interlocking parts around a timeline: a repeating pattern, often played on a bell, that everything else is positioned against. The Arabic maqam system is about the journey through a set of pitches rather than the set itself. Gamelan is an ensemble tuned to itself, so the tuning is a property of the orchestra rather than of the system.
Where you run into this
- A melodic tradition where the phrases matter as much as the pitches
- An ensemble tuned to itself rather than to a standard
- A groove organised around a bell pattern instead of a downbeat
What you leave out
Treating any of these as exotic decoration. Lifting a scale out of its tradition and calling the result authentic is the most common mistake, and the least interesting thing you can do with any of it.