KU on Music Theory Print

Kuda Lumping

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origin#

The is originated in Java island, Indonesian. Two main hypotheses have been proposed. The first suggests that may have arisen out of Diponegoro’s war against the Dutch colonial forces, as a ritual reenactment of battles. While the second theory suggests that it is based on Mataram-era troops riding against the Dutch. However, is known under different names in different areas of Indonesia. is the most common name in West Java, in Central Java it is known as or in East Java, while in Bali, it is known as . In Balinese Sanghyang dance refer to the type of dance involving trance by spirit identified as .

Kuduro

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origins#

The roots of kuduro can be traced to the late 1980s when producers in Luanda started mixing African percussion samples with zouk béton (“hard” zouk) and soca to create a style of music then known as Batida (“Beat”). European and American electronic music had begun appearing in the market, which attracted Angolan musicians and inspired them to incorporate their own musical styles. Young producers began adding heavy African percussion to both European and American beats. In Europe, western house and techno producers mixed it with house and techno. Kuduro is primarily an electronic music genre. In addition to the aforementioned influences, Kuduro also incorporates regional styles that are based on global and local influences that highlight sonic expressions of personal and collective identities. These collective and personal identities were formed due to Angola’s turbulent history. The history of kuduro has come about in a time of Angolan civil unrest, and it provided a means of coping with hardship and positivity for the younger generation. Scholar Inês Cordeiro Dias describes how kuduro “became a popular form of artistic expression for Angolans, especially those living in the slums, to claim their space in the city, and to criticize society.” Angola experienced periods of war, repression, and some instances of political tranquility. The origin of Kuduro came from and due to this political instability. There was significant anti-colonial resistance to Portuguese rule and influence which created a transitional government composed of two political parties. These two parties engaged in power-based struggles and tensions that led to the Angolan Civil War. Such shift in attitude away from optimism was reflected through Kuduro’s increasing distortion in timbre and hardened aesthetics, while lyrics of the genre often reflected experiences of life in the musseques (Luanda’s informal, unpaved and marginal neighborhoods). After Angolan independence in 1975, the ruling party, the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) adopted the musical genre for use in political campaigns, recognizing its popularity. As Vivian Host points out in her article, despite the common assumption that “world music” from non-Western countries holds no commonalities with Western modern music, Angolan kuduro does contain “elements in common with punk, deep tribal house, and even Daft Punk.” And although Angolan kuduro reflects an understanding and an interpretation of Western musical forms, the world music category that it fits under, tends to reject the idea of Western musical imperialism. Kuduro also was birthed out of the political climate that was taking place at the time of its origins. When looking at certain dance moves within the Kuduro genre, one can notice that the moves emulate that of a disabled person and their stature or movements. Given that there was a civil war taking place during the birthing of Kuduro and there were actual mine fields that blew off people’s limbs, it is discernible to see why Kuduro dance moves mimic an amputee’s movement. Kuduro as a dance genre is different than most in the fact that expands it inclusivity to disabled bodies and rewrites notions and narratives of Black disabled sexuality, given the erotic heteronormative nature of the dance moves. Kuduristas use body movements that often emanate movement/stillness, incoordination, falling, pop & lock, and breakdancing. This style of dance seems to “break down” body parts into isolations and staccato movements, serving as a reflection of debility and the mixture of abled/disabled bodies in performance. Kuduro is usually performed in the streets, where groups gather in circles and one by one come into the center and perform their movements while impressing the crowd. Usually, participation is open to everyone, and the audience claps and cheers on the dancers. Kuduristas contort their bodies in direct response to their spatial environments: “Kuduristas, acutely aware of the six to twenty million landmines still waiting to be detonated, as well as the fact that one out of every 334 Angolans has lost a limb as a result of landmine detonation, emulate to various degrees the movements of the land mine victims around them, and are themselves victims.” Young also argues that kuduristas use their dancing “to signify on the normative landscape of the black body,” and by extension, their spatial order. Acts of oppression (colonialism) and violence have composed their environments as sites of subjugation, but these dancers influence the essence of their settings by taking up space and recasting it through their bodies and movement.

Kui (music)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kui in Kazakh culture performed with dombyra#

In Kazakh culture kuis were learned by heart and passed from generation to generation without written fixation. For example, Kazakh folk Kui “aqsaq qulan” (lame onager) is dated to the 13th century. Authors of many Kazakh kuis lived in the Middle Ages. But the pick of the culture is from the 19th and 20th centuries. Kui tradition included also verbal part that explained in detail the story for its compositions, personalities, reasons and legends. Before performing the kui, the performer used to give a story about the composition to play, so the auditory could get proper feelings. But by the time the verbal tradition for kuis was finally separated from instrumental performances and only few kuishi (performer of kui) still keep this part of the tradition.

Kujawiak

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

The name “kujawiak”, as a reference to the dance, first appeared in 1827, in T.F. Jaskólski’s composition Pasterze na Bachorzy. Sielanki Kujawskie. It is argued that the dance was developed from the mazur between 1750 and 1830. In 1841, Leon Zienkowicz described the kujawiak as a “regional variety of the mazurka relying on the domination of the minor key”. The majority of the composers in the years following, including Ignacy Dobrzyński, Edward Łodwigowski, Kazimierz Łada, Ignacy Komorowski, Wojciech Osmański, and Henryk Wieniawski, agreed with this interpretation, and treated the musical features like the rhythms and tempos of the kujawiak and the oberek as a “single entity”. The kujawiak involved much collaboration between dancers and musicians in olden times. The dancer would request a specific tune by singing it to the band, often filling lyrical lines with “dana, dana” as an imitation of the sound of an instrument. The first fiddler would then guess how to play the tune from the gestures and movements of the dancer, and the dancer would give the musicians some money. Throughout the dance, the first fiddler would need to watch the dancer’s movements closely in order to follow their desired changes in music and tempo – if the musicians were able to follow the dancers well, they were considered a good band, and were paid well and invited back for more dances. Through this back-and-forth of the nobility learning and improvising upon the traditional steps and the peasants adopting the improvisations, the kujawiak was thus incorporated into the elegant parties and fancy balls of the upper class towards the end of the 1860s. In 1990, Czesław Sroka published Polskie tańce narodowe – systematyka (Polish National Dances: A Typology). This publication included a standardized set of kujawiak components, in which the Council of Experts of Folklore determined the precise number of ten positions for pairs, fifteen types of steps, eleven ornaments, and eleven figures for the kujawiak.

Kulintang

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology#

Technically, kulintang is the Maguindanaon, Lumad Ternate, Moluccas, and Timor term for the idiophone of metal gong kettles which are laid horizontally upon a rack to create an entire kulintang set. It is played by striking the bosses of the gongs with two wooden beaters. Due to its use across a wide variety groups and languages, the kulintang is also called kolintang by the people of Maranao and Sulawesi, kulintango by Mongondow, totobuang by those in central Maluku, kulintangan and gulintangan by those in Brunei, Sabah, North Kalimantan and the Sulu Archipelago. Gulintangan or gulingtangan literally means rolling hands in Brunei, Sabah and Sulu. By the twentieth century, the term kulintang had a come to denote an entire Maguindanao ensemble of five or six instruments. Traditionally the Maguindanao term for the entire ensemble is basalen or palabunibunyan, the latter term meaning “an ensemble of loud instruments” or “music-making” or in this case “music-making using a kulintang.”

Kulning

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Acoustic characteristics#

The song has a high-pitched vocal technique, i.e. a loud call using head tones, so that it can be heard or be used to communicate over long distances. It has a fascinating and haunting tone, often conveying a feeling of sadness, in large part because the kulokks often include typical half-tones and quarter-tones (also known as “blue tones”) found in the music of the region. Linguist and phonetician Robert Eklund, speech therapist Anita McAllister and kulning singer and speech therapist Fanny Pehrson studied the difference between kulning voice production and head voice (sometimes also somewhat erroneously referred to as falsetto voice) production in both indoors (normal and anechoic rooms) and in an ecologically valid outdoor setting near Dalarna, Sweden. The song analyzed was the same in all cases, and was performed by the same kulning singer (Pehrson). Comparing kulning to head voice, they found that partials were visible in far higher registers in kulning than in head voice (easily observed up to 16 kHz) and that they were also less affected by an increased distance from the source than head voice, with more or less unaffected partial patterns when comparing a distance of 11 meters from the source, compared to 1 meter from the source. In the outdoor setting, they also found that head voice production exhibited a 25.2 dB decrease at 11 meters from the source, compared to 1 meter from the source, while the corresponding amplitude decrease in kulning was only 9.4 dB, which is a clear indication that kulning is well-suited to carry over long distances in an outdoor setting. Or, as the authors summarize the findings: It was shown that kulning fell off less with distance from an intensity point of view, and also that partials in kulning—but not in head voice—remained more or less unperturbed 11 meters from the singer, as compared to 1 meter from the singer. Both results help explain why kulning as a singing mode was developed for calling cattle that might be at considerable distance from the singer.

Kumina

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Definition#

Kumina is also known as Pukkumina or Pocomania, although the latter term is largely pejorative. It is a form of Jamaican Revivalism. It has also been described as a “dance tradition”. It is mostly associated with the parish of St. Thomas in the east of the island. However, the practice spread to the parishes of Portland, St. Mary and St. Catherine, and the city of Kingston.

History#

Kumina emerged through the practices of indentured labourers who were brought to Jamaica from the Kongo region of central Africa after the abolition of slavery. In the second half of the 19th century it syncretised with Myalism. Kumina differed from Zion Revivalism in rejecting the belief that the Bible should be the central authority behind worship.

Kundiman

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology#

Several theories have been proposed regarding the etymology of the word kundiman. One theory traces the term to the Tagalog phrase “kung hindi man”, meaning “if not”, “if not meant to be”, or “if it were not so”, from which kundiman is believed to have evolved through linguistic contraction. Another theory suggests that the word originated from a traditional folk verse in which it first appeared and repeatedly. Supporters of this theory cite a line from a folk song popular in Cavite in 1873: “Mula nang mauso / damit ng kundiman” (“Since kundiman clothing came into fashion”).

Kunqu

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Kunqu refers to Kunshan tune (昆山腔, Kūnshān qiāng), a repertory of songs and performances from Kunshan in Suzhou. The Kunshan tune is generally believed to have been developed during the Ming dynasty by (魏良輔), who was from the port of Taicang. A more recent discovery, however, suggests that Kunshan tune was introduced in the late Yuan dynasty by Gu Jian (顾坚), who developed an early form of Kunqu with a group of musicians in Kunshan. Nevertheless, Wei is believed to have modified Kunshan tune with songs of Haiyan (海鹽) near Hangzhou and Yiyang (弋陽) of Jiangxi; he also combined nanxi rhythms, which often used flute, with the northern zaju style, where plucked string instruments were preferred. The resultant elegant Kunshan tunes are often called “water mill” tunes (水磨調, shuimo diao). Kunqu operas are chuanqi-style operas but incorporating Kunshan tune throughout. An opera, Washing Silken Gauze (浣紗記, Huan Sha Ji) written by a Kunshan native Liang Chenyu (梁辰魚), has been described as the first Kunqu opera. The story of Washing Silken Gauze was based on Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue, and the use of elegant “water mill” tunes in the opera earned it wide praise from scholars. Kunqu operas then became popular throughout China, and the emergence of Kunqu is said to have ushered in a “second Golden Era of Chinese drama”. The most famous Kunqu opera is The Peony Pavilion written by Tang Xianzu in the Ming dynasty. Other important works include The Palace of Eternal Life written by Hong Sheng, and The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren written in the early Qing period. The operas were not necessarily performed in full, but may be performed as excerpts or highlights called zhézixì (折子戲), which became the norm by 1760s and over 400 pieces of these were known. Kunqu performance influenced the performance of many other styles of Chinese musical theater, including Peking opera, which contains much of the Kunqu repertoire. Kunqu was referred to as Yabu (雅部, “elegant drama”), and it came under competition from a variety of operas (e.g. Shaanxi opera, Clapper opera, Yiyang tunes, Peking opera, etc.) termed Huabu (花部, “flowery drama”), and as a result, Kunqu troupes experienced a commercial decline in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, the cultural elite tried to re-establish Kunqu, and the Academy was founded in 1921 to train performers. In 1919 Mei Lanfang and Han Shichang, renowned performers of Kunqu, traveled to Japan to give performances. In the 1930s, Mei performed Kunqu in the United States and the Soviet Union and was well received. It was later subsidized by the Communist state, but like most traditional forms of Chinese opera, Kunqu was banned during the Cultural Revolution. Kunqu began to revive by the mid-1990s, and it was then declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001, and received generous support by the government, and experienced a great increase in popularity by 2004. Today, Kunqu is professionally performed in seven major mainland Chinese cities: Beijing (Northern Kunqu Theater), Shanghai (Shanghai Kunqu Theater), Suzhou (Suzhou Kunqu Theater), Nanjing (Jiangsu Province Kun Opera), Chenzhou (Hunan Kunqu Theater), Yongjia County/Wenzhou (Yongjia Kunqu Theater) and Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province Kunqu Theater), as well as in Taipei. Non-professional opera societies are active in many other cities in China and abroad, and opera companies occasionally tour. In 2006, Zhou Bing acted as a producer and art director for Kunqu sexcentenary. It won Outstanding Documentary Award of 24th China TV Golden Eagle Awards; it won Award of TV Art Features of 21st Starlight Award for 2006.

Kurdish classical music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

The Kurdish classical music formed itself within the general cultural and musical traditions of the Middle East, which creates a continuity of musical practices that have historically and regionally influenced the area. Some scholars describe it as a synthesis of broader cultural elements known as “great traditions,” with local practices among communities, or which they call “little traditions,” through the conceptual lens offered by anthropologist Robert Redfield. Kurdish music has roots in the pre-Islamic era, marked by the emergence of modal melodic structures. It later developed further under various Islamic empires, incorporating diverse external influences.

Kurdish folk music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History and background#

Kurdish folk music has a long history that is closely connected with the cultural and political experiences of the Kurdish people. Traditionally transmitted through oral tradition, these songs often carry themes ranging from historical narratives to epic poetry and legends. The introduction of phonograph technology in the late 1920s marked an important phase in the documentation of Kurdish music. Recording studios in Baghdad began to capture the performances of Kurdish artists, contributing to the preservation and wider dissemination of their musical heritage. Historically, Dengbêjs, traditional Kurdish bards, have played a central role in conveying oral history and ancestral tales through song and spoken word. Their performances are key to the narrative tradition within Kurdish music, often recounting events, genealogies, and heroic sagas. The development of Kurdish folk music has been deeply affected by socio-political conditions. At various points in history, expressions of Kurdish identity, including music, have faced bans, censorship, and cultural suppression, particularly in countries where Kurds form a minority population. The political experiences of the Kurdish people have profoundly shaped the content and purpose of their folk music. Songs frequently explore themes of resistance, self-determination, and the struggle for cultural and political rights. This politicized dimension became especially pronounced during the 1990s in Turkey, where Kurdish folk music emerged as a form of cultural expression and solidarity amid state-imposed restrictions.

Kurdish music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Definition#

Traditional Kurdish music is culturally distinct from Arabic, Armenian and Turkish music, and mostly composed by people who remained anonymous. Thematically, the music were of melancholic and elegiac character, but has since then incorporated more upbeat and joyous melodies. Kurdish folklore consists of three genres: the storytellers (çîrokbêj), bards (dengbêj) and popular singers (stranbêj). Moreover, there are religious-themed songs (lawje) seasonal musical topics, for example “payizok” that are songs about the return to the summer pastures performed in autumn. Kurdish improvisations are called teqsîm.

Kushtdepdi

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Characteristics#

The Küştdepdi ritual involves improvised poetry focusing on positive emotions, happiness, well-being, mutual respect, and solidarity. Küştdepdi is integral to state ceremonies, celebrations, and family events like births and weddings. The improvised singing is accompanied by dances featuring characteristic gestures, hand movements, and steps timed to the melody. The ritual begins with a song by a group of seated, respected women in traditional dress, offering wishes of happiness and moral messages to younger generations. In the main ritual, a pair of singers (traditionally a man and a woman) perform poetry while surrounded by dancers forming partially or completely closed circles. The dancers begin with three steps on the right foot, followed by simultaneous stomping and clapping to symbolize the expulsion of evil and misfortune. Audience clapping and the lead singer’s vocalizations (typically male, expressing “ha-uhha-ha” or “oyha-oy”) set the dance rhythm. The event concludes with a prayer to nature for fertility, solidarity, and peace. Master practitioners (both women and men) pass their theoretical and practical knowledge to students informally. Formal education takes place in specialized music schools and cultural centers. Community members sustain the tradition’s vitality by participating in these celebrations, while residents and government institutions collaborate to create educational materials about the ritual. Küştdepdi is performed by people across different social strata, organized into folklore groups totaling roughly 350 members as of 2017 (including one children’s group). Although primarily concentrated in western Turkmenistan (the Balkan Province along the Caspian Sea), the practice is also present to a lesser extent in the Ahal, Mary, Daşoguz, and Lebap provinces.