Lesson 19: Music from Around the World
- Play three folk melodies in contrasting modal and rhythmic styles.
- Hear how the same five-note scale produces different music in different traditions.
- Lessons 11–18 — expanded diatonic range.
- Folk melodies from multiple traditions.
- Modal vs major/minor tunes.
Every culture that has a duct flute has a body of music for it.
The duct flute family — recorders, tin whistles, ocarinas, quenas, shakuhachis — appears in nearly every musical culture on earth. The melodies developed for them share a fingerprint: stepwise motion, pentatonic or modal scales, ornamentation that lives in the breath. This lesson presents three short tunes from three traditions, each fully playable on what you have learned.
Japan — pentatonic mode
The Japanese in scale uses five notes from our scale: D, E, F, A, Bb (or in transposition, the recorder-friendly D, E, G, A, B). The melody below is the opening of Sakura, the cherry-blossom song.
Ireland — G major with ornament
An Irish slip jig, in 9/8 time but written here in straight rhythms for now. Notice the lift on each downbeat — this is the rhythmic signature of the style.
Eastern Europe — D natural minor
A Russian-style folk melody using D, E, F, G, A. Plaintive, modal, the falling fourths characteristic of Slavic folk.
Now play these
- Sakura
- The complete Japanese cherry-blossom song. Played without vibrato.
- Sakura Sakura
- A longer, more ornamented arrangement.
- Kalinka
- Russian folk song. Modal, ornamented, increasingly fast through the verses.
- Hotaru Koi
- Japanese firefly song. Almost entirely pentatonic.
When three of the songs above play end-to-end at performance tempo without restarting and without missed notes in the upper register, move on to Lesson 20.