Gamelan Music Overview- The gamelan is a traditional musical ensemble from Java and Bali, islands in the Indonesian chain. In the Javanese language, the word meaning bronze instrument. The word gamelan includes several different types of instruments, and has come to mean more of a traditional style and use of instrumentation, including at times vocals. The traditional gamelan orchestra includes instruments like xylophones, kendang drums, gongs, metallophones, bamboo flutes, and bowed

Music Culture: Congado The purpose of this work is to review the article written by Lucas Glaura about the music rituals of the Afro-Brazilian Group who has the "Ceremony of Congado." Each year religious musical festivals take place in Minas Gerais, Brazil in which musical worship is the focus. These festivals and ceremonies hail from a past when the whites were actively making slaves of the blacks and these ceremonies were

Popular Music It can be difficult to create a meaningful distinction between global and local music today. While some music is clearly created for local consumption -- usually because of language barriers, cultural references and distribution limitations -- music itself is easy to transmit around the world using modern communications technologies. Furthermore, musicians draw their influences from other musicians as much as from cultures, and these influences are often multicultural in

However, this was when the musical elements that were so deeply rooted into my belief system, into my very soul started to appear and I began to clearly recognize that it was possible to pursue the existence of something even stronger and deeper in the world of art, more specifically in the world created by sounds. Possessing both a keen ability to observe and a very strong aptitude to recall

I especially appreciate the opportunity to place musical compositions and composers within a historical context. Placing music within a historical context illuminates some of the variables that characterize a piece like "Rite of Spring." Understanding the cultural, political, and military events taking place during the composer's lifetime is essential to understanding the music. Although analyzing classical pieces can prove difficult because of shifting time signatures, counterpoint, and layering of

Music Compare "The Rite of Spring" by Stravinsky, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" by Debussy and "Mondestruken" by Schoenberg as to compositional techniques. Why do they sound so different from each other and still from the same time period? Nostalgia for an idealized version of a mythic past was an obsession with many 20th century composers, including Stravinsky, Debussy, and Schoenberg. All three of these artist's most works deal in