Music of the Tesazo

[Solarius]

Hi y'all!

I've been trying to learn about music theory and composition, which is a bit of a silly thing for me to be doing as I have exactly zero knowledge base. As part of learning about these, I've been trying to think about what the music of one of my concultures, the Tesazo, would sound like, including writing a little bit of music intended to approximate what their music might sound like.

I'm trying to approach it with a bit of a conlanger's mindset--i.e. I'm trying to avoid being too Eurocentric in terms of developing the musical system, and I'm trying to learn by doing--so all sorts of errors, etc. are certain. I'm also just not a musician (though I have been trying to teach myself to play the keyboard.)

With requisite disclaimers out of the way, here are some notes on Tesazo instruments.

The most common and musically important instrument is the lazar, a small, portable harp similar to the ennanga. Lazars traditionally have five strings and are played with the right hand; the shortest string is the root tone. Traditionally, there’s a string to each finger–so the thumb plays the root tone, the index finger plays one above it, etc. Fingers consequently are used as shorthand for notes – a musician might tell another musician to play certain notes, using their fingers. Traditionally the Tesazo don’t use musical notation, but this is the closest thing.

Lazars are usually designed to be in one specific scale and key, and as a result most musicians will have more than one [1]. The most common scale is the "beer-drinking scale," which is a pentatonic scale, which from C is C-D#-F-G-A. Traditionally, the Tesazo conflate key and scale, referring to them both as õnezun, which literally translates as rut. Other common õnezuns include the western barbarian scale, which is just the beer-drinking scale in F (F-G#-A#-C-D), the waking up scale (C-D-E-G#-A#), and the green tree Scale (C-D-F-G-A).

Professional musicians also frequently use the lazarlu, a much larger lazar with 9 strings. These lazarlus combine two common õnezuns, albeit ones with common root tones, creating a nonatonic scale. However, in practice musicians often avoid playing one (or more often two) notes, as it's slightly easier and sounds a bit less muddy for a musical culture which is accustomed to pentatonic scales.The subject of which note should be left out is a point of much discussion, debate, and discourse among musicians.

Lazars are almost always complemented by drums, known in Tesazo as nõr. These drums are often made of metal or wood, with a piece of animal skin over the top, and they tend to be small, squat cylinders. The Tesazo love polyrhythms and frequently deploy complex ones.

Tesazo music is also frequently complemented by the lökriyan, a deep, resonant string instrument played with a bow. These are almost always in a octatonic scale, usually in a combination of the beer-drinking scale and the waking up scale but without A or A#. The lökriyan isn't usually used for melodies, though it sometimes is, but most commonly for a drone or as an opener and a closer for songs.

Tesazo music finally uses the tanka lazar (tankahö lazar), a smaller string instrument played with a bow which has four strings rather than five. It resembles a talharpa. Unlike Lazars proper, which are made to play many different õnezun, tanka lazars play only one tetratonic scale, which from C goes C-D-E-G. They’re frequently used to play drones, known as tkärri in Tesazo. But they're also often used to play the melody in folk music. Elite music traditionally looks down on the tanka lazar, due its origin in the stigmatized Tanka minority, but it's extreme popularity among the people has led to it infiltrating even elite music.

[1] It's worth noting that this is professional musicians. As the Tesazo are a pre-industrial society, they don't have recorded music, so most people sing and play music for fun. Most of these people will only have one lazar, usually in the beer-drinking scale.

[Torco]

Neato! I've long been thinking about getting into conmusic, but I've yet to come around to it. It's nice to see some popping up.

this is, in a few ways, rather realistic in the sense of attested: I don't know that conflating form which note you start and the intervalic structure of a scale is very common in world music (mostly because it requires musicians to either have an absolute tuning reference, and that's somewhat difficult, or, alternatively, having absolute ear: but it's not *that* difficult to either have a bunch of different local references (like "this town uses A=440, this other town uses A=445, this other uses A=429, etc) or have some mechanism for communicating absolute tuning, such as a class of tuners, maybe certified by some body). but the pentatonic is very common, and it's also very common for the pentatonic to not be absolute, as in some pitches outside it to be used from time to time.

This may be western bias, but as I played around with your pentatonic scales I thought it would be interesting for them to have like a sixth note that's not exactly part of the scale, but that can be used for some purposes: for example, in the beer drinking scale, as you riff on it, sometimes you feel like a b-flat would be a nice sort of "chromatic" tone.

So you have melodic frameworks in place: a few things that'd be interesting to explore could be.

intonation: the 12TET system we use is not the only possible way to divide the octave: indeed it's very unlikely it would arise on its own without first a relatively complicated tradition of mathematics and precise measurement and standarization of pitch. are your fifths (the interval, for example, betwen the tonic and the G in the beer drinking scale) western piano fifths? (700 cents) or pythagorean fifths (more like 701.955 cents), or maybe some other kind of fifth, like 696 cents? this is kind of a byzantine area of music theory, but it's fun!

melodic habits... or cliches, to call them something. for example, in western classical music it's very common for melodic phrases to have very clear beggining and endings, interspersed with rests, and to start and end on the tonic while passing at least once, but often many many times, through the fifth (G if your tonic is C), but this isn't necessary, and other musical traditions don't do it nearly as much.

rhythms: especially for this sort of musical tradition, revolving around a string instrument soling over a drum, it's very important for the soloist (in this case, the dude with the lazar) to have a pretty good idea of what the drummer is going to play: this can be accomplished either by having the drummer just start with a rhythm and not deviate from it, or by having a relatively complex taxonomy of rhythms that the performers can use to refer to rhythms: like "yo, i'm going to start with a (name of rhythm) and then, every 32 bars, switch to (name of a different rhythm), just so you know. a pretty cool example of how many different rhythmic cycles you can have within a tradition is offered by this webpage. https://www.maqamworld.com/en/iqaa.php.

singing: all humans sing, and all music traditions in the world, as far as I know, feature singing: if I pick up my drum and you pick up your lazar and we start jamming, it's very likely the rest of the people in the tavern <especially if they're drunk or getting there> will start singing... so how will they sing? will they sing the line you're playing in the lazar? it'll have to be repetitive and predictive, otherwise they won't be able to, and they'll perhaps throw bread at us!. will you play a riff and then stop for a moment, so that the rest of the people reply to your phrase, like it happens with, I don't know, football songs, or the theme song for squarepants spongebob? (you know, you play the melody to "who lives in a pineapple under the sea" and the tavern replies with "sponge! bob! square! pants! or whatever). maybe they don't sing your line, but they sing mine ? like I'm doing a dum-dum-dada-dum [quarternote-quarternote-eighth-eight-quarternote] and what they're singing is the same dum-dum-dada-dum pattern to sort of ground or complement your line on the lazar?

improvisation vs. composition. what's the role of improv in Tesazo popular music? for example, in western classical there's almost no improv, but in baroque music there was a lot of it! if we play music, again you on lazar and me on drum, do I just give you a beat and you riff and raff over it, or do we agree that we're going to play X piece which we both know? maybe there's a mixture, like popular songs have composed parts everyone knows and then some improvisational parts, kind of like rock solos? or, possibly, the main melodic line is composes, i.e. fixed, but, like in ancient and medieval music, you the melodic performer add ornamets, deviate some from the traditional melody, put in trills, skip notes and sort of make the composed melody yours, but keep to the original melody enough that the song is still recognizable, as is the american tradition with their anthem? what's its name? you know the one, rocket's red glare and so on.

[Salmoneus]

I feel I should say that I do actually intend to reply to this, it's just that my time has been limited in the last week. Soon! Sorry!

[Solarius]

Thanks for the very thorough reply!

Neato! I've long been thinking about getting into conmusic, but I've yet to come around to it. It's nice to see some popping up.

this is, in a few ways, rather realistic in the sense of attested: I don't know that conflating form which note you start and the intervalic structure of a scale is very common in world music (mostly because it requires musicians to either have an absolute tuning reference, and that's somewhat difficult, or, alternatively, having absolute ear: but it's not *that* difficult to either have a bunch of different local references (like "this town uses A=440, this other town uses A=445, this other uses A=429, etc) or have some mechanism for communicating absolute tuning, such as a class of tuners, maybe certified by some body). but the pentatonic is very common, and it's also very common for the pentatonic to not be absolute, as in some pitches outside it to be used from time to time.

This may be western bias, but as I played around with your pentatonic scales I thought it would be interesting for them to have like a sixth note that's not exactly part of the scale, but that can be used for some purposes: for example, in the beer drinking scale, as you riff on it, sometimes you feel like a b-flat would be a nice sort of "chromatic" tone.

My thinking on the lazar is that it isn't usually tuned actually. It's made of pretty accessible and cheap materials--animal skins, wood, or gourds for the body, catgut or plant fibers for the strings. Most people make their own in whichever scale they like the best (usually the beer-drinking scale) and then if they want to play something else they'll borrow their buddies' or make another one (or just play a song out of tune). Professional musicians or dedicated usually have quite a few. Either way, the local references are extremely diverse as you would expect.

It is definitely possible to get in notes outside of the usual scales. In informal contexts the method is usually just singing; it's pretty common for people to sing along while playing lazar. The popularity of the tanka lazar comes also from this. In more professional contexts, the solution is just using a lazarlu.

intonation: the 12TET system we use is not the only possible way to divide the octave: indeed it's very unlikely it would arise on its own without first a relatively complicated tradition of mathematics and precise measurement and standarization of pitch. are your fifths (the interval, for example, betwen the tonic and the G in the beer drinking scale) western piano fifths? (700 cents) or pythagorean fifths (more like 701.955 cents), or maybe some other kind of fifth, like 696 cents? this is kind of a byzantine area of music theory, but it's fun!

Haha this is one area where my dearth of musical knowledge raises its ugly head; I'm aware this is a thing but because I don't really play an instrument I've been using platforms like Noteflight and Musescore to sketch out pieces and haven't known how to shift the tuning system (though I see now that Musescore supports some other tunings, so I'll try that). The Tesazo do have a fairly robust tradition of math though.

melodic habits... or cliches, to call them something. for example, in western classical music it's very common for melodic phrases to have very clear beggining and endings, interspersed with rests, and to start and end on the tonic while passing at least once, but often many many times, through the fifth (G if your tonic is C), but this isn't necessary, and other musical traditions don't do it nearly as much.

I've been playing with this a little bit in the pieces I've made, and a pattern which seems to work well, especially with the context of a lot of Tesazo performances, is a short melody which itself kind of has two sub-components, originating from music used as dialogue during plays (i.e. one character sings one component and then another character replies). Then the melody would repeat, with increasing variation. These usually start on the tonic but not always.

Another similar pattern, which comes from the interaction between the different scales of the tanka lazar and lazar, is the use of "bitter notes," i.e. notes outside of a scale being used to "pause" or "clear" a melody. It's common for musicians to first play a short melody on the tetratonic tanka lazar and then attempt to transpose it onto a regular lazar, which means leaving out a note--that note can be brought in to end a phrase. This has also become a habit in music which uses the lazarlu, where it's especially surprising and dissonant sounding to the Tesazo ear.

rhythms: especially for this sort of musical tradition, revolving around a string instrument soling over a drum, it's very important for the soloist (in this case, the dude with the lazar) to have a pretty good idea of what the drummer is going to play: this can be accomplished either by having the drummer just start with a rhythm and not deviate from it, or by having a relatively complex taxonomy of rhythms that the performers can use to refer to rhythms: like "yo, i'm going to start with a (name of rhythm) and then, every 32 bars, switch to (name of a different rhythm), just so you know. a pretty cool example of how many different rhythmic cycles you can have within a tradition is offered by this webpage. https://www.maqamworld.com/en/iqaa.php.

Ooh, very cool link! I think in practice drummers usually do the latter, but I haven't thought that too much out. Something I've wanted to draw in are some Balkan-style aksak rhythms, but I've had trouble making them work.

singing: all humans sing, and all music traditions in the world, as far as I know, feature singing: if I pick up my drum and you pick up your lazar and we start jamming, it's very likely the rest of the people in the tavern <especially if they're drunk or getting there> will start singing... so how will they sing? will they sing the line you're playing in the lazar? it'll have to be repetitive and predictive, otherwise they won't be able to, and they'll perhaps throw bread at us!. will you play a riff and then stop for a moment, so that the rest of the people reply to your phrase, like it happens with, I don't know, football songs, or the theme song for squarepants spongebob? (you know, you play the melody to "who lives in a pineapple under the sea" and the tavern replies with "sponge! bob! square! pants! or whatever). maybe they don't sing your line, but they sing mine ? like I'm doing a dum-dum-dada-dum [quarternote-quarternote-eighth-eight-quarternote] and what they're singing is the same dum-dum-dada-dum pattern to sort of ground or complement your line on the lazar?

improvisation vs. composition. what's the role of improv in Tesazo popular music? for example, in western classical there's almost no improv, but in baroque music there was a lot of it! if we play music, again you on lazar and me on drum, do I just give you a beat and you riff and raff over it, or do we agree that we're going to play X piece which we both know? maybe there's a mixture, like popular songs have composed parts everyone knows and then some improvisational parts, kind of like rock solos? or, possibly, the main melodic line is composes, i.e. fixed, but, like in ancient and medieval music, you the melodic performer add ornamets, deviate some from the traditional melody, put in trills, skip notes and sort of make the composed melody yours, but keep to the original melody enough that the song is still recognizable, as is the american tradition with their anthem? what's its name? you know the one, rocket's red glare and so on.

I was kind of alluding to this earlier, but a lot of songs in Tesazo music use kind of a pretty simple repetitive melody designed to be sung along to. In most contexts the melody will be agreed on by performers beforehand (i.e. "we're going to use the green tree scale, do your thumb, ring finger and pinky, it sounds like this song but you make this part shorter" etc.) but there's no formal musical notation. Instead, the performers play the melody, at first simply and then with increasing variation, ornamentation, etc. Basically heterophony, if I understand that term right. These flourishes are pretty much all improvised. There are some tendencies though--usually lazar players are the first to deviate from the initial melody, and then drummers and singers/flautists will switch things up, though in the scenario you outline of people getting drunk in a tavern singers probably won't deviate from that initial melody.

Also, in my initial post, I forgot to mention the pan flute, which is used frequently alongside lazars. Since the pan flute is pretty loud, it often deviates less than the lazar, which creates what the Tesazo call a "mallam" or whispering texture, which is thought by them (and me) to be a cool sound. The pan flute generally is used in a similar way to singing; musicians will usually leave it out if there are singers.

[Torco]

You're most welcome: I'm all about conmusic being more of a thing.

What I meant by tuning is like this thing about exactly how high or low your notes are: succinctly, we have all the 12 notes spaced evenly across the octave: like, the interval betwen C and Db is *exactly* the interval between A and Bb, but historically this wasn't the case and it's one way in which music sounds different from other music.

I love the 'bitter' notes metaphor: in western music that's called chromatic as opposed to diatonic, meaning not from the scale and yes from the scale, respectively.

Yup, that's what heterophony means. I'm not sure what mallam/whispering means in this context: like, in heterophonously playing a given melody together, the panflutist will stick to the basic melody and the lazarist will ornamet it more? if so, why is that whispery ?

[Salmoneus]

Hi y'all!

I've been trying to learn about music theory and composition, which is a bit of a silly thing for me to be doing as I have exactly zero knowledge base.

Obligatory apology for still not having written that 'how music works' post that I keep saying I'll write...
In the meantime, though, have you seen the threads here on chinese and arabic music? Unfortunately they both stopped suddenly, but they'e still interesting!

As part of learning about these, I've been trying to think about what the music of one of my concultures, the Tesazo, would sound like, including writing a little bit of music intended to approximate what their music might sound like.

Great to see someone thinking about this!

I'm trying to approach it with a bit of a conlanger's mindset--i.e. I'm trying to avoid being too Eurocentric in terms of developing the musical system, and I'm trying to learn by doing--so all sorts of errors, etc. are certain. I'm also just not a musician (though I have been trying to teach myself to play the keyboard.)

Don't worry, musicianship is unnecessary for this. Though it is helpful to be able to pick out a tune on the piano, just so you can hear it. For more complicated things, free composition software is available.

With requisite disclaimers out of the way, here are some notes on Tesazo instruments.

As a general note: it would be good to be able to relate this to some idea of the technological, economic and geopolitical situation of the Tesazo, as these will be significant in shaping musical culture.

The most common and musically important instrument is the lazar, a small, portable harp similar to the ennanga. Lazars traditionally have five strings and are played with the right hand; the shortest string is the root tone. Traditionally, there’s a string to each finger–so the thumb plays the root tone, the index finger plays one above it, etc. Fingers consequently are used as shorthand for notes – a musician might tell another musician to play certain notes, using their fingers. Traditionally the Tesazo don’t use musical notation, but this is the closest thing.

FWIW, the ennanga is designed to be played the other way around. I think you're thinking of a European harp, where the strings are vertical, the box rests at an angle on the knees, and the neck projects out vertically from around the shoulders, with the angle (and hence shortest strings) near the body.

An ennanga, however, is played with the neck opposite the player, and the box projects outward along the knees. The longest strings are nearer the player. If you think about it, this is strongly encouraged by the shape of the harp: with a long, heavy neck, a gentle curve, and a relatively short (and round-bottomed) soundbox, holding it like a European harp will tend to make the neck fall forward, or the box slip down. What's more, it'll probably break the instrument: because the ennanga's neck is only lightly attached to the box, it essentially wants to 'fall back' to horizontal under gravity, with only the strings keeping it in place (which helps make sure the strings stay taut); but if you turn it upside down, gravity and the strings will act in the same direction, and the neck will tend to collapse in to the box. As a result, spoon-and-cup harps are always held [I mean, in general, not saying nobody has ever held one 'wrongly'] with mostly-vertical necks with the boxes pointing away from the player. You can use the flipped (rather than rotated) alignment, with the neck held against the body vertically and the soundbox essentially held up by the strings, which in theory gives you the shorter strings closer to the body (eg the ardin)... but because of the angle of the strings in this arrangement, I think these are usually played with the hands vertical rather than horizontal, so the thumb (at the top) is still playing the longest strings, if that makes sense (look at wikipedia's picture of someon playing an ardin, for instance).

Also, harps are almost always played with both hands, because there's no advantage to not doing so - if you have a choice between trying to delicately pluck a string with the fourth finger of your right hand, or with the forefinger of your left, you're going to use your left. Unless your left hand is doing something else. Ennangas, fwiw, are played with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, with alternation between hands, although this perfectly regular alternation is unusual for harp-playing.

Lazars are usually designed to be in one specific scale and key, and as a result most musicians will have more than one [1].

I'm not sure this follows. It's generally cheaper to take a few minutes to retune your instrument than to build an entirely different instrument!

The most common scale is the "beer-drinking scale," which is a pentatonic scale, which from C is C-D#-F-G-A. Traditionally, the Tesazo conflate key and scale, referring to them both as õnezun, which literally translates as rut. Other common õnezuns include the western barbarian scale, which is just the beer-drinking scale in F (F-G#-A#-C-D), the waking up scale (C-D-E-G#-A#), and the green tree Scale (C-D-F-G-A).

I'm a big confused here. You talk about 'conflating' key and scale, and yet then you talk about two onezuns being the same scales in different keys (one being 'in F'). What gives?

When you say the barbarian scale is the beer scale but 'in F', do you mean it's just all transposed up a fourth? I guess you must, since there are no shared notes other than the F and the C. [if there were shared notes, an alternative interpretation would be that it used the same pitch for those notes in both scales, which would make one scale audibly different from the other as the relationships between the notes would be different, assuming this isn't an ET scale].

I'm not sure this is realistic, although I'm not entirely sure it isn't.

The problem with one scale being a transposition of another is that pre-modern societies don't have fixed pitches for their notes (pitch was only fixed in the West via an international treaty in 1939, and it's still controversial with LaRouchites, QAnon, etc). So one person's C is another person's F. Are you aware of 'transposing instruments'? They exist because historically people couldn't even reach agreement between players of different instruments what pitch A should be. Pitch in religious music was typically different from pitch in secular music, and pitch was different in different places, and changed over time. At one point, travelling from a church in Calais to a church in Dover would mean having to play an entire major third lower just to sound the same! And that's in a society that had an international system of music notation and a great deal of written music, centralised musical education and so forth.

Three things that discourage absolute pitch are a) that most humans don't have it (we can't tell what pitch a note is, only how it relates to other notes around it; only a minority have 'perfect pitch', and it usualyl requires training), b) that a standardised pitch requires enough trade and travel to spread that standard and prevent localised standards developing (bear in mind that even what time it is wasn't standardised in England until the 19th century, with each village previously having its own timezone (or multiple ones!)), and c) that a lot of music involves singers, all of whom have different voices. When there is a large ensemble, as in an opera, we can simply tell them they have to do what they can with the music because the orchestra isn't going to retune - particularly when audio recording and comparison isn't an issue (and even then, retuning to match a singer wasn't unknown historically). If you just have, say, a singer and a guitar, the singer will generally sing at a pitch that's comfortable for them, and the guitarist will retune (or more likely, in an ET system, 'transpose') to match. Bear in mind here that, for instance, a tenor is going to instinctively sing a fifth or so above a baritone. So it seems odd that tenors will automatically be described as singing in a different, 'barbarian' scale from a baritone, when they're singing the same song!

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More generally: I'm afraid I don't really see the logic behind the choice of pentatonic scales. Most pentatonic systems I'm familiar with (European, Chinese) are just generated from the circle of fifths, with multiple modes being produced as permutations from the selection of a new tonic; but your scales aren't permutations of one another, and only one is generated by fifths. Other pentatonic scales - as in Indonesia or parts of Africa, are equal-tempered, but yours don't seem to be. Scales could also be generated by the selection of trichords, filling in the perfect fourths, so to speak; but in your system, some scales don't even have the fourth and fifth, and the scales use different top and bottom trichords - which is certainly possible, but it seems strange to me that a system with so few scales wouldn't include the simplest ones as options?

I'm not saying this isn't possible (I assume all these scales are attested somewhere in the world), I'm just saying I don't understand what the logic is behind having these specific scales - why these ones have been chosen, and how they are used, etc.

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There's also another small issue here. You give the note names in terms of European/Chinese/etc notes - that is, prima facie assuming dodecaphonic music generated in fifths. If your notes are not generated in this way, it becomes more misleading to use these note names, since it's less likely that your notes will fall near the European/Chinese notes. It's obviously a convenient shorthand, but worth talking about what your notes actually are, if there's no reason for them to be the European notes.


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I suppose I should backtrack: are you familiar with the idea of tuning in perfect intervals, and the consequences for the division of the octave?

Professional musicians also frequently use the lazarlu, a much larger lazar with 9 strings. These lazarlus combine two common õnezuns, albeit ones with common root tones, creating a nonatonic scale.

I'm a bit confused!
Why are these instruments larger, if they still only cover the same octave? Are they an octave lower, or something?
Size of instrument isn't normally connected to the number of strings - a cello has the same number of strings as a violin. Instruments are larger if they play lower notes (a cello plays lower than a violin).

Having said that, I guess that if it's a spoon-cup harp like an ennanga, increasing the number of strings without reducing their tension would presumably require adding additional dead weight to the neck as a counterbalance?

However, in practice musicians often avoid playing one (or more often two) notes, as it's slightly easier and sounds a bit less muddy for a musical culture which is accustomed to pentatonic scales.The subject of which note should be left out is a point of much discussion, debate, and discourse among musicians.

This seems strange to me. It's certainly understandable that a professional musician might have an instrument that can play outside the mode of a song, so that they can play different songs without having to retune in between them. But doesn't make the instrument suddenly have a mode with more notes in it! It only gives the musician the ability to more easily play outside the mode if they want (to play chromatically (perhaps in ornamentation), or to modulate). Generally music is conservative, sometimes exceptionally so - it follows rules, which may be gradually altered. People don't just suddenly start playing new notes that didn't exist before willy-nilly. To give a real example: European harpists had access to fully-chromatic harps (double and triple harps) from before the common practice period, and yet made little real use of outright chromaticism for the next 200-300 years. Indeed, a violin has always been able to play all 12 notes, and remains able to play 24 or 48 or however many notes to the octave!

The transition in Europe is, I suppose, not obligatory :
- music is performed in a single mode or key
- pieces in different keys are performed in succession on the same instrument
- a single piece has sections in different keys
- the 'sections' in different keys become shorter and less structurally defined - free-form modulation
- shorter, and even momentary modulations become possible, allowing 'borrowing' of chords (i.e. modulating for the span of a single chord)
- chords are 'borrowed' from fictional sources - chords that can't be explained as real borrowings
- such chords become so widespread that they are no longer the exception but the rule

The other sources of chromaticism that spring to mind are through direct transposition and through affective ornamentation.

But the point is that in all these routes, musicians are arguing over whether and when it is acceptable to add notes. The idea of people sitting around arguing over which notes to not play isnt' one that really seems to make sense to me.


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More generally: do people like the music the musicians play? If not, why do they play it? But if they do, why don't ordinary people add a couple of strings to their own instruments and play it themselves? Is there some religious taboo?

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FWIW, ancient egypt had similar problems with additional strings - the arched harp was threatened by the angled harp, which permits many more notes, allowing, in theory, modulation and chromaticism.

The Egyptians reponded by simply banning the angled harp. They argued that they had seen the consequences of permitting harps with more than ten strings - the heresy of Akhenaten (today we concentrate on the whole 'monotheism' aspect and the new city in the desert, but he also radically encouraged the construction of harps with angled joints, for which he was damned for all time) - and they wouldn't let it happen again. Just to be sure, the authorities posted up signs at temples and other public places listing all of the permitted tunes and every permitted variation in how they might be played. These tunes would continue to be played in those precise ways for the subsequent thousand years. The Egyptians were so legendary for the strict views on proper and improper music that they were even mocked by Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle - and Plato and Aristotle themselves wanted to ban the harp entirely, for its dangerous number of strings...

This is irrelevant, but fun to know.

Lazars are almost always complemented by drums, known in Tesazo as nõr. These drums are often made of metal or wood, with a piece of animal skin over the top, and they tend to be small, squat cylinders. The Tesazo love polyrhythms and frequently deploy complex ones.

FWIW, metal drums aren't that common, both because metal is very expensive and because metal drums can easily turn into gongs if you're not careful...

Tesazo music is also frequently complemented by the lökriyan, a deep, resonant string instrument played with a bow. These are almost always in a octatonic scale, usually in a combination of the beer-drinking scale and the waking up scale but without A or A#. The lökriyan isn't usually used for melodies, though it sometimes is, but most commonly for a drone or as an opener and a closer for songs.

Some things here puzzle me.

Why do all the instruments play music with different scales? That's not usual.

What do you mean when you say the lokriyan is 'in' this scale? Do you mean it has a string for each note? Or are the strings in some way just tuned to be able to play that scale well?

Why does it need eight strings, or however many strings but tuned for eight notes, if it's mostly just used for drones?

When you say "string instrument"... well, what sort? Is it a harp? A lute? A lyre?

I wonder why this instrument exists. Bowing is a very rare invention, and since you don't mention the lokriyan being closely related to the lazar I assume the tesazo didn't invent bowing themselves, and also didn't just borrow the idea of bowing, since then they would just bow the lazar. The lokriyan itself must be a borrowed instrument, which make me wonder about when it arrived and whether it brought any connotations with it.

Tesazo music finally uses the tanka lazar (tankahö lazar), a smaller string instrument played with a bow which has four strings rather than five. It resembles a talharpa. Unlike Lazars proper, which are made to play many different õnezun, tanka lazars play only one tetratonic scale, which from C goes C-D-E-G. They’re frequently used to play drones, known as tkärri in Tesazo. But they're also often used to play the melody in folk music. Elite music traditionally looks down on the tanka lazar, due its origin in the stigmatized Tanka minority, but it's extreme popularity among the people has led to it infiltrating even elite music.

It's interesting that this is a bowed lyre, but you don't have a plucked lyre, and you have a plucked harp but not a bowed one.

Again, I'm a little confused why every instrument has a different scale, and thus must play different melodies. Has no player of the tanka lazar thought "it would be nice to play this popular tune, why don't I just add another string?"

[Salmoneus]

My thinking on the lazar is that it isn't usually tuned actually. It's made of pretty accessible and cheap materials--animal skins, wood, or gourds for the body, catgut or plant fibers for the strings. Most people make their own in whichever scale they like the best (usually the beer-drinking scale) and then if they want to play something else they'll borrow their buddies' or make another one (or just play a song out of tune). Professional musicians or dedicated usually have quite a few. Either way, the local references are extremely diverse as you would expect.

They must be tuned, or else they won't be able to play notes! They could all be tuned diffeently, but to some extent there must be a common tuning if you can talk about thee being more popular scales. And if you play your lazar with your lokriyan, you need them to be tuned to the same notes (even if a different selection of them), othewise the noise will be unbearable to listen to.

I think I have to go into a point in more depth here: in reality people will just retune their instruments. Remember, the tuning of the lazar isn't set when you make it: the player will have to retune it every time they play it. Well, not exactly, but any time they've played extensively, or any time they're left unplayed for any length of time. Strings that are kept under tension will stretch; the joint of the harp will bend under the tension; strings will stretch or contract with humidity and temperature. It may be easier and safer to keep the isntrument unstrung, but then it will hve to be tuned when it is restrung.

So given that they're constantly being retuned, it's no effort at all to retune them for another song. Whereas building a new one would take a great deal of time, effort, skill and materials.

Haha this is one area where my dearth of musical knowledge raises its ugly head; I'm aware this is a thing but because I don't really play an instrument I've been using platforms like Noteflight and Musescore to sketch out pieces and haven't known how to shift the tuning system (though I see now that Musescore supports some other tunings, so I'll try that). The Tesazo do have a fairly robust tradition of math though.

In real life, maths is historically probably an outgrowth of trying to understand tuning!

I've been playing with this a little bit in the pieces I've made, and a pattern which seems to work well, especially with the context of a lot of Tesazo performances, is a short melody which itself kind of has two sub-components, originating from music used as dialogue during plays (i.e. one character sings one component and then another character replies). Then the melody would repeat, with increasing variation. These usually start on the tonic but not always.

Theme and variation is indeed a very common compositional method.

I was kind of alluding to this earlier, but a lot of songs in Tesazo music use kind of a pretty simple repetitive melody designed to be sung along to.

A small note: generally, people will interpret this the other way around: the melody is sung, and the instrument accompanies (possibly by playing the same melody). The instrument plays along to the voice, as it were, rather than the voice singing along to the instrument.

In most contexts the melody will be agreed on by performers beforehand (i.e. "we're going to use the green tree scale, do your thumb, ring finger and pinky, it sounds like this song but you make this part shorter" etc.) but there's no formal musical notation.

What usually happens is that people are simply taught tunes by example, and tunes get handed down through generations. There's no need to talk about them at all.

Instead, the performers play the melody, at first simply and then with increasing variation, ornamentation, etc. Basically heterophony, if I understand that term right.

Sort of, depending on what you mean.

Heterophony is not a melodic structure - it's not nothing to do with repeating the melody with ornamentations per se.

Instead, heterophony is a texture. In a heterophonic performance, the lead melody is divided into important and unimportant notes (generally defined rhythmically - every second or third or fourth beat might be important - and structurally (beginning and ending notes, and beginnings and endings of sections, are likely to be even more important than regular stressed beats)), although some additional notes may be considered important as well (i.e. those that are particularly distinctive in the melody). The other voices (mostly - allowing for drones and the like) share all the important notes, but do NOT share all the UNimportant notes (other than directly doubled voices). In a sense, therefore, every voice has its own melody, but each melody is derived from the lead melody - every voice is, as it were, playing a different variation of the melody, all at the same time (some voices may not play anything int he unimportant bits, of course, or may only play every second important note or the like).

The aural effect of this is that there is a wave-like alternation of consonant and dissonant notes: the important, on-beat notes sound 'nice' and consonant, but dissonant chaos breaks out on the unimportant off-beats. [it doesn't literally have to be every on-beat that's important, but it's usually at least partly rhythmic]. It's like an image rhythmically going in and out of focus. A common technique is to have at least one voice that plays at a considerably faster tempo than the main melody. But this isn't necessary.

The lines of the other voices may be improvised, or pre-written, and may be independent (other than requiring the fixed important notes), or may be highly formulaic, or may be generated entirely mechanically from the main melody.

[Torco]

But the point is that in all these routes, musicians are arguing over whether and when it is acceptable to add notes. The idea of people sitting around arguing over which notes to not play isnt' one that really seems to make sense to me.

It does to me. as an illustration, if you and me get together to jam (i.e. improvise or compose), what do you think will happen if you go "let's play in D" and I go "okay, but why don't we try never playing C#"? what'll happen is that our respective improvisational habits, the riffs we will naturally gravitate towards, and the resulting music will be very different than if we'd have said A was outlawed. (not having a fifth reall gives a scale a flavour of its own). For example, the very common -in western music- movement of seventh to tonic (in spanish we even call the seventh 'la sensible' because it so strongly *leads to the tonic* it is said) becomes impossible and, thus, other resources must be employed in its stead. I don't think it's attested, musicologically, but it's the kind of thing that, I think, is likely to naturally arise if musicians play at seeking new sounds, which I would suspect is a musicological universal.

I think your'e quite right about the unusualness of the pentatonicity here, as well as the diversity of scales: It feels to me more like a culture that already, say, used the ionian heptatonic mode as a 'standard' scale and decided to depart from that standard. A possibility of why different instruments might have different scales and notes is, of course, that they come from different traditions, possibly even use different tunings, and thus there's both social and sonoral reason *not* to play them together.

[Salmoneus]

But the point is that in all these routes, musicians are arguing over whether and when it is acceptable to add notes. The idea of people sitting around arguing over which notes to not play isnt' one that really seems to make sense to me.

It does to me. as an illustration, if you and me get together to jam (i.e. improvise or compose), what do you think will happen if you go "let's play in D" and I go "okay, but why don't we try never playing C#"?

Yeah, but, my point is, I can't easily imagine anybody ever saying that. That seems like something you only say if you want to be intentionally weird! [and indeed it is something some 20th century composers intentionally said, in order to be weird]

And if you do say that, I'm going to reply: "er... but... the tune we're playing has a C# in it, doesn't it? So... that's not going to work!?"

Of course, you could instead have said "we don't we try never playing D#", and, if we're playing in D major, I might say "errr... sure? OK?"... but that's because I wasn't planning on ever playing D# in that song anyway. So you'd be unlikely to ever say "let's not play the note we wouldn't be playing anyway".

If nothing else, this whole idea just seems too abstract to me. Even modern musicians generally, as I understand it, don't usually communicate in such abstract ways: when I've read about jam sessions, it's always along the lines of "A said 'hey, listen to this', and B listened for a bit and then joined in". Maybe after they've been jamming a bit one of them goes "hey, I liked it when you dropped out for a bit there, let's do that again" or "can we pick up the tempo a bit at the end there?" or something. But I'm not sure anyone says "wow, I liked it when you never played C# today", an then the other player goes "yeah, actually, could you never play C# either, I've invented a new key called 'not playing C#' that I'm hoping to popularise!" At least, I don't think it's something that would ordinarily happen.

[if nothing else, if the Tesazo only name the notes by the fingers corresponding to the string, and they have nine strings to play on five fingers, I'm not sure how they even CAN say "let's not play C# today"...]

if musicians play at seeking new sounds, which I would suspect is a musicological universal.

I think it's closer to a musicological anti-universal. Music is generally incredibly conservative - while there are sometimes revolutionary moments, it typically take generations for 'new sounds' to very slowly develop, amid violent controversy. If you sing most pop songs and accompany yourself on a guitar, you'll be performing music that is exceptionally close to music that would have been familiar to anyone in the last 400 years - similar melodies (a bit simple and boring but not bizarre), similar instrument (just a bit bigger and louder), same scales, same chords for the same purposes... the only big change will be that we now use a wider range of rhythms. Take out some of your guitar chords and maybe improvise a second melody on your guitar (but if not then just going with a drone will do fine) and it'll be recognisable to people for another 400 years or so before that (in fact the melody will probably become more familiar to them than to people of recent centuries!). And modern pop music is the result of the most radical centuy of technological and social change imaginable.
Similarly, the tanbur has continued with little modification for probably 5,000 years. Egypt, as i mentioned, was famous for retaining its musical tradition almost unaltered for over a thousand years.

There are also good reasons for this. Most musicians historically have not been middle-class teenagers trying to annoy their parents. Many of them have been people looking to be paid money for pleasing groups of listeners - and, almost invariably (outside a few intellectual dinner parties), "play songs that people know and love" is a better strategy for being able to buy food than "play weird new music that people are confused by". But perhaps even more common than professionals have been celebrants: music is often very strongly connected to religious rituals, and performing a ritual 'correctly' is usually more importantly than performing it 'innovatively'. More generally, music is emblematic of social order, and musical innovation - the kids these days with their hair and their music - is generally seen as a sign, symptom and cause of social disruption, which in almost all societies will be suppressed by the relevant authorities.

So while obviously music, like other languages, does evolve over time, under most conditions it, like other languages, evolves very slowly, and largely unintentionally. [the developments in European musical history have generally taken hundreds of years at a time - and Europe was an unusually large, multicultural, and novelty-seeking society with both weak authorities and extensive documentation of both music and history (many of the biggest changes being attempts to return to a poorly-documented history)].

I think your'e quite right about the unusualness of the pentatonicity here, as well as the diversity of scales: It feels to me more like a culture that already, say, used the ionian heptatonic mode as a 'standard' scale and decided to depart from that standard. A possibility of why different instruments might have different scales and notes is, of course, that they come from different traditions, possibly even use different tunings, and thus there's both social and sonoral reason *not* to play them together.

Indeed.

[Solarius]

Just wanted to say that I've been quite busy but intend to respond soon!

[Salmoneus]

No problem. Not sure what my internet connection and/or free time will be next week (could be great, could be zero), so if you do reply, I may not reply to your reply and that's probably why!

[hope my comments weren't too critical or disheartening. It's just great to see someone actually thinking about this topic]

[Solarius]

No problem. Not sure what my internet connection and/or free time will be next week (could be great, could be zero), so if you do reply, I may not reply to your reply and that's probably why!

[hope my comments weren't too critical or disheartening. It's just great to see someone actually thinking about this topic]

Oh no not at all!

[Solarius]

The most common and musically important instrument is the lazar, a small, portable harp similar to the ennanga. Lazars traditionally have five strings and are played with the right hand; the shortest string is the root tone. Traditionally, there’s a string to each finger–so the thumb plays the root tone, the index finger plays one above it, etc. Fingers consequently are used as shorthand for notes – a musician might tell another musician to play certain notes, using their fingers. Traditionally the Tesazo don’t use musical notation, but this is the closest thing.

FWIW, the ennanga is designed to be played the other way around. I think you're thinking of a European harp, where the strings are vertical, the box rests at an angle on the knees, and the neck projects out vertically from around the shoulders, with the angle (and hence shortest strings) near the body.

An ennanga, however, is played with the neck opposite the player, and the box projects outward along the knees. The longest strings are nearer the player. If you think about it, this is strongly encouraged by the shape of the harp: with a long, heavy neck, a gentle curve, and a relatively short (and round-bottomed) soundbox, holding it like a European harp will tend to make the neck fall forward, or the box slip down. What's more, it'll probably break the instrument: because the ennanga's neck is only lightly attached to the box, it essentially wants to 'fall back' to horizontal under gravity, with only the strings keeping it in place (which helps make sure the strings stay taut); but if you turn it upside down, gravity and the strings will act in the same direction, and the neck will tend to collapse in to the box. As a result, spoon-and-cup harps are always held [I mean, in general, not saying nobody has ever held one 'wrongly'] with mostly-vertical necks with the boxes pointing away from the player. You can use the flipped (rather than rotated) alignment, with the neck held against the body vertically and the soundbox essentially held up by the strings, which in theory gives you the shorter strings closer to the body (eg the ardin)... but because of the angle of the strings in this arrangement, I think these are usually played with the hands vertical rather than horizontal, so the thumb (at the top) is still playing the longest strings, if that makes sense (look at wikipedia's picture of someon playing an ardin, for instance).

Also, harps are almost always played with both hands, because there's no advantage to not doing so - if you have a choice between trying to delicately pluck a string with the fourth finger of your right hand, or with the forefinger of your left, you're going to use your left. Unless your left hand is doing something else. Ennangas, fwiw, are played with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, with alternation between hands, although this perfectly regular alternation is unusual for harp-playing.

This is a good point. Frankly my mental conception of a lazar has been a bit variable; I had thought that the ennanga was played more like a European harp. It's probably something a bit like this, with the big important element being that it's not super large and it's open. Musical context is a bit important here; my thinking was was that lazars are often played by shepherds when they're out in far-flung pastures, or by farmers during breaks in the fields, so they need to be pretty portable.

The problem with one scale being a transposition of another is that pre-modern societies don't have fixed pitches for their notes (pitch was only fixed in the West via an international treaty in 1939, and it's still controversial with LaRouchites, QAnon, etc). So one person's C is another person's F. Are you aware of 'transposing instruments'? They exist because historically people couldn't even reach agreement between players of different instruments what pitch A should be. Pitch in religious music was typically different from pitch in secular music, and pitch was different in different places, and changed over time. At one point, travelling from a church in Calais to a church in Dover would mean having to play an entire major third lower just to sound the same! And that's in a society that had an international system of music notation and a great deal of written music, centralised musical education and so forth.

Three things that discourage absolute pitch are a) that most humans don't have it (we can't tell what pitch a note is, only how it relates to other notes around it; only a minority have 'perfect pitch', and it usualyl requires training), b) that a standardised pitch requires enough trade and travel to spread that standard and prevent localised standards developing (bear in mind that even what time it is wasn't standardised in England until the 19th century, with each village previously having its own timezone (or multiple ones!)), and c) that a lot of music involves singers, all of whom have different voices. When there is a large ensemble, as in an opera, we can simply tell them they have to do what they can with the music because the orchestra isn't going to retune - particularly when audio recording and comparison isn't an issue (and even then, retuning to match a singer wasn't unknown historically). If you just have, say, a singer and a guitar, the singer will generally sing at a pitch that's comfortable for them, and the guitarist will retune (or more likely, in an ET system, 'transpose') to match. Bear in mind here that, for instance, a tenor is going to instinctively sing a fifth or so above a baritone. So it seems odd that tenors will automatically be described as singing in a different, 'barbarian' scale from a baritone, when they're singing the same song!

Good points. By no means I was presuming that these notes would be the same from place to place -- but good point about musicians. I think this falls under the bracket of "I need to be thinking a lot more about how exactly these people are doing tuning/dividing octaves."

More generally: I'm afraid I don't really see the logic behind the choice of pentatonic scales. Most pentatonic systems I'm familiar with (European, Chinese) are just generated from the circle of fifths, with multiple modes being produced as permutations from the selection of a new tonic; but your scales aren't permutations of one another, and only one is generated by fifths. Other pentatonic scales - as in Indonesia or parts of Africa, are equal-tempered, but yours don't seem to be. Scales could also be generated by the selection of trichords, filling in the perfect fourths, so to speak; but in your system, some scales don't even have the fourth and fifth, and the scales use different top and bottom trichords - which is certainly possible, but it seems strange to me that a system with so few scales wouldn't include the simplest ones as options?

I'm not saying this isn't possible (I assume all these scales are attested somewhere in the world), I'm just saying I don't understand what the logic is behind having these specific scales - why these ones have been chosen, and how they are used, etc.

The choice of pentatonic scales was because I wanted to make the musical system relatively constrained, to make it easier on me with my own relative lack of musical skills and composition experience, and since it seemed relatively common. That's the reason for the lack of tuning, fewer strings, etc. Is heptatonic the most cross-culturally common minimal system of divvying up notes?

More generally, I think it's clear that I need to do more thinking about how exactly tuning works. I really like the idea of using different scales with different moods, etc., like Indian ragas. Are there particularly cross culturally common forms of just intonation?

Wrt: the lazarlu and lokriyan, the concept of these instruments came from feedback from a friend who had pointed out similar issues with the relatively few notes being able to be played by lazars, with the idea being that these instruments would introduce more diversity in notes, scales, etc. The Lokriyan in particular is not super thought out; it was because I liked the way that using a cello for drone notes sounded in certain compositions. I was not aware that bowing was so uncommon.

Hopefully that speaks to a lot of the issues! I'm working on a post which outlines some of the cultural contexts for these.

[Salmoneus]

This is a good point. Frankly my mental conception of a lazar has been a bit variable[; I had thought that the ennanga was played more like a European harp. It's probably something a bit like this, with the big important element being that it's not super large and it's open. Musical context is a bit important here; my thinking was was that lazars are often played by shepherds when they're out in far-flung pastures, or by farmers during breaks in the fields, so they need to be pretty portable.

It's understandable that you've not nailed down the details yet. However, I should point out that the really big difference between the cengi here and the ennanga is that the latter is arched, whereas the former is angled. [also note that unlike either the ennanga or the European harp family, the cengi is played with the soundbox at the top, not at the bottom]

Why does being 'angled' matter? Well, arched harps have a neck that bends away from the soundbox, whereas angled ones have a neck that's fixed at a sharp angle away from the soundbox. Arched harps are inherently more fragile: partly because they can be made lightly and so the resonator-neck connection can break (the ennanga's neck isn't even firmly attached to the soundbox, it just rests on the lip of it, apparently), but more importantly the arch in the neck can distort with pressure. This means firstly that it's hard to increase tension because the neck just bends to relieve it, but also that if you do increase tension the neck can snap. To solve this problem, angled necks were invented, wit two stiff, straight arms joined firmly by some sort of carpentry. [admittedly some 'angled' harps actually have curves in their necks too, but usually much more robust necks than in arched (or 'bowed') harps].

The result of this is that as soon as angled harps were invented harps went from having, say, 7 strings to having, say, 24 (because the body could resist the string tension of having more strings). This enables both more interesting music and a wider range. And because individual strings can have higher tensions too, you can also have higher notes. [having said that, the cengi is an example of an instrument that's presumably lost most of its strings again, so the fact it's an angled harp kind of isn't that significant, except for its history and genealogy!]. On the other hand, angled harps are usually heavier and take more work to make.

Arched harps may have been invented repeatedly, or at least spread widely. Angled harps were only invented once, in Mesopotamia, and quickly radiated out from there, but not reaching all parts of the globe. African harps, in particular, are all arched, possibly because angled harps were illegal in Egypt for about a thousand years, blocking transmission...

You're correct to note the openness as significant. Frame harps have been invented at least twice, but perhaps no more than that - once in the Greece before the bronze age collapse, and again in Europe thousands of years later.

Harps aren't great instruments for shepherds, because they're delicate, annoying to tune and retune, and quite large and heavy and awkward to hold and play. However, if they're the only instrument they have, they'll have to make do! [or if they're just very culturally engrained]

The choice of pentatonic scales was because I wanted to make the musical system relatively constrained, to make it easier on me with my own relative lack of musical skills and composition experience, and since it seemed relatively common. That's the reason for the lack of tuning, fewer strings, etc. Is heptatonic the most cross-culturally common minimal system of divvying up notes?

Oh, sorry, I phrased that badly. What I was unsure about was the use of those specific pentatonic scales. You're absolutely right that pentatonic scales in general are very common. I believe they're the most common scales cross-culturally. Having said that, the line between pentatonic and heptatonic isn't as clear-cut as might be thought...

More generally, I think it's clear that I need to do more thinking about how exactly tuning works. I really like the idea of using different scales with different moods, etc., like Indian ragas. Are there particularly cross culturally common forms of just intonation?

I'm actually (inspired by this thread) currently writing up an explanation of how exactly tuning works (at least, in outline). Won't be too long, hopefully!
[i mean, not too long before I finish it. It's going to be pointlessly long, I'm afraid (while still being uselessly simplified and unspecific)]

I'll just point out here, though, in case you're not aware, that ragas are a lot more complicated than just scales! They equate better to the idea of a 'key', but even more so...

Wrt: the lazarlu and lokriyan, the concept of these instruments came from feedback from a friend who had pointed out similar issues with the relatively few notes being able to be played by lazars, with the idea being that these instruments would introduce more diversity in notes, scales, etc.

It's actually OK to not have many notes, though. Pentatonic scales are commonplace, and there are even cultures who make do with fewer notes than that!

I was not aware that bowing was so uncommon.

Most people aren't! I think it's partly because it's so unintuitive (wait, you want me to scrape the strings of two different bows together!?) and partly because it sounds so horrible. I mean, pretty much any tense string, no matter how you play it, will sound nice when you pluck it or hit it. But when you scrape it with another string, you have to be really, really good to make it not sound like a creature from hell. And even with the ideal circumstances with an expert player and an instrument specifically designed for it, many people still hate the sound!