musifying

Having received a call for submissions for essays on Arab avantgarde, I thought this one was just down my alley..

Thinking about the subject, the questions that seem the most urgent to answer are not about the Arab avantgarde music movement itself just yet, but rather questions about how to have a discussion about Arab avantgarde music. In fact, the questions touch on some of the vague aspects of the term not necessarily in relation to Arab avantgarde.

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Fusion music, whether improvised or composed should sound different enough from the original idioms that go into making it to the point where it can not be considered to be within any of the idioms. At the same time, it has to have discernible characteristics of all of the original idioms that it can be heard as fusion of those idioms. Read the rest…

In part 2 we saw how preconceptions about the music of the other triggered a series of decisions that eventually affected the sonic result of the fusion. Some of those decisions were sound. Others could have been better. In this post, I will try examine prior knowledge a little further and start the discussion of other decisions that need to precede a successful collaboration. Read the rest…

In part 1 we defined fusion as the creation of new music by combining elements from different idioms. In this post we discuss some of the decisions a musician makes before a “jam” with a musician from a different idiom and how that affects the sonic result of the jam. Read the rest…