When I was in elementary school the idea of teaching music of different cultures consisted of watching slides and videos, making 'coffee can' drums, singing songs in the original language to piano accompaniment, and whacking on toy percussion instruments. I slept through the slides and videos, cut my fingers opening the bottom of the coffee can, hated singing weird unintelligible words, but loved playing the percussion instruments. MUSIC IS NOT A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE Music is interwoven with every other aspect of a culture: language, food, dress, climate, resources, the list goes on. The combined rhythms of an African drum group are heard as one complete rhythm to their dance group. For the average American teenager it sounds like corn popping. A Viennese waltz would make no sense to an Australian Aborigine. Many times the language heavily influences the music: pitch inflection, glottal/fricative/bilabial sounds, rhythm of the spoken phrase. Rhythms can also be derived from ...
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