Interactive: Ethiopian Music Scales | Hacker News Reader

Interactive: Ethiopian Music Scales

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I'll throw in a couple more good pieces of music by Ethiopians:

This is from an album of older pop music. From the little I've read this is something like live bar music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSUuqP7RFj0 https://open.spotify.com/track/1yInD7kgqru084JKE3Bqyz?si=b31...

A dutch ~punk band called the Ex recorded some music with a famous saxophonist named Getatchew Mekurya. The whole album is great, this is my favorite song:

https://theex.bandcamp.com/track/che-belew-shellela

And this piano piece by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, a lady who led a seriously interesting life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKU7iz9RYV0

Tezeta by Mulatu Astatke [1] in solidly in my top 10 songs of all time. The whole "éthiopiques" series is great.

praise be the algorithmic DJs that brought us Ethiopian Jazz in the 2010s. While there's certainly valid criticism of the payment model of music streaming platforms, I love how many "under-loved in their time" artists are now in the spotlight and appreciated as a result such as Astatke.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy-v-FgiUD8

I'm reminded a bit of Mdou Moctar, a Tuareg guitarist who plays some pretty cool psychedelic rock. His stuff definitely has a much different flavor than a lot of western guitarists but still crosses over into rock territory in a way that is pretty pleasing to the ear.

His KEXP performance is a fun listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52CZVfiiMpY

hell yeah -- just crate dug a vinyl of Afrique Victime last weekend

Yes! I found it in a soundtrack for a movie that’s also awesome, this indie with Bill Murray: Broken Flowers.

exactly! wow, I forgot, thanks!

Late 2010s? Those CDs came out in the 90s and took the world music scene by storm. Get off my lawn!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89thiopiques

1998 to 2017 :)

(1998) Éthiopiques Volume 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969–1974, Mulatu Astatke

Btw, I've just read this sad one https://fleurmach.com/2013/04/06/getatchew-mekurya-antchi-ho...

About Éthiopiques and copyright of Francis Falceto (Buda Musique record company), in an interview with Getatchew Mekurya published by Ethiopian Reporter in January 2012 he says: ''I think that is one of the reasons why Mulatu Astatke despises Frances Falceto. He does not want to see his face. Even if he was able to contribute to the recognition of our music worldwide, on the other hands he used us. He is making tons of money. I do not work with him; I work with other musicians and promoters and I think he is not happy with that fact.''

Yes, the whole "éthiopiques" series is super great!

and Mulatu Astatke is super alive and fine :) a lovely character, not "just" a great musician

Although this is cool and educational and I hope it helps people make music, I have to admit I've seen that this scale obsession in students learning Music Theory may not be the most productive. I've seen people falling into these traps studying scales.

First, fundamental building blocks of pitched music is always intervals, never scales. Scales matter in so far as they relate to a tonic through intervals. Scales give us a "summary" or "snapshot" of the intervallic content of the music. Learning about scales is never a substitute for learning about intervals. Only thinking about scales can be a baggage because sometimes you can miss operations that make sense in terms of intervals but go outside the scope of the scale. (This limitation of scales is well known and well studied as starting mid-20th century composers (especially atonalists) and musicologists started thinking in terms of Set Classes instead of scales).

The other trouble is, I've seen that people study this kind of material too much in abstract. E.g. one can go and study Messiaen's scales ("modes of limited transposition" as he calls them) as if it's mathematical material. Although this is a-ok, music theory is best used to make or analyze music. It's best to learn these scales then sit down on your piano/notation software and actually make music. Music you like to listen. Not only will this help you understand the scale (i.e. the harmonic content of the scale) better but also motivate you to learn more.

Ethiopian culture is as ancient as the bible and rich with ancient wisdom, western music has a limited number of standard modes and oriental music offers a lot of variety there. We go just by greek heritage coupled with african aggregations. You would say a student of raga should be "obsessed" sbout particular ragas to full immerse in them? Also just exploring and hearing non-western music is a marvellous experience if you find the good parts. I'm doing something not so oriental, as I'm learning Chinese rock songs to help language acquisition, and been posting about that[0].

0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/who-led-me-here--xie-tian...

I'm very familiar with non-Western music and I studied music theory in abstract, not tainted with Western bias. There are models of music that are universal and found in all cultures, these directly come from the acoustic/physical properties of music. When I said the most fundamental building block in pitch based music is intervals, I didn't mean to say that for Western music, I really did mean "music". "Music" is a universal concept, found in all cultures, anthropologically we don't know of a culture that doesn't have "music". Although "music" is wildly different in each culture, it can still be studied in a generic way. Not all cultures necessarily have pitch based music, but if we do find pitch in music, intervals are the most fundamental tool to understand it. In Western music intervals are 12TET (an octave divided into 12 equal parts) but this doesn't have to be the case, this is merely an arbitrary convention. However, in other cultures we still do see intervallic treatment. These intervals may not be the same (e.g. Balinese Gamelan uses various tuning system, some similar to 9TET and 5TET (i.e. divide octave into 9 or 5 equal intervals).

In short, my comment above applies to Ethiopian music as well, so does it to any music.

On a second read of your comment, I must say, I slightly misunderstood you and replied with this misunderstanding. I think if the music itself is "obsessed" with a certain structure there is nothing wrong or bad or misguided about being "obsessed" with that structure. In this case, if these modes are truly ubiquitous in Ethiopian music, nothing wrong with teaching, studying or using them. My original post was intended for people who are learning from scratch. I think it's better to understand the intervallic structure of a given music or musical repertory, instead of just the scales. But there is nothing wrong with scales themselves, as they're truly very useful models of music.

If you’re into this maybe check out this guy (from Mali) https://youtu.be/glHXDhFnQy8

Really enjoying this, thanks.

While more "pop" oriented, I was introduced the music of Salif Kieta in the late 80's and have loved him ever since. Also Mali.

omg, I love him!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wBeUcaAtGI&list=PL7Ninasdu8... (Salif Keita - debagnouma)

Ethiopian scales can also be found in certain "Western" tracks, in which they give this distinct/unique Ethio vibe. For example, check out The Magic Eye by The Zenmenn and Connassais de Face by Khruangbin - both favorite tracks of mine.

For anyone interested in more like this, I would suggest Wede Harer Guzo - this album is just amazing. Also, there is this great documentary from BBC about traditional Ethiopian music: https://youtu.be/6boJCbIr53w (skip to 5:30 for an awesome track).

Very cool. I've always loved music related software stuff like this.

I've been really interested in alternate tunings, or more accurately temperaments, since I this video about a just intoned cigar box guitar. I'm burning to build one of these for myself after hearing how cool that major third sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fkw_xtPU-0

In the meantime, I'll have to give these scales a whirl on my boring old equal temperament guitar ;)

There's a dedicated Ethiopian music channel through the Trace network

https://trace.tv/traceprime/

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