Talk:Percussion ensemble

Bias

Article lead currently [1] reads in part Although the term can be used to describe any such group, it commonly refers to groups of classically-trained percussionists performing primarily classical music.

I'm afraid my immediate reaction to this was what complete and utter rubbish. Percussion ensembles have existed since long before classical training even existed, and the many percussion ensembles that visit Sydney annually, and are billed as Percussion Ensembles, include Taiko, African drum and South Pacific groups. But Googling the term leads some credence to the usage described in the article too, http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/ensembles/Small-Percussion-Ensemble/122?ge=139 for example.

Watch this space. Andrewa (talk) 07:07, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

The same thing struck me, after having written so much on the subject at Noise in music#World traditions. However, your example of Taiko ensembles does not support the thesis of percussion ensembles predating "classical training", unless percussionists managed historically to avoid classical training until well after the Second World War.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:33, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Not sure I understand the objection... are you saying that Taiko drummers are classically trained, or that Taiko groups are not percussion ensembles? If they aren't classically trained, and if they are percussion ensembles, then isn't that a relevant counter example? Andrewa (talk) 02:09, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Taiko ensembles are an invention of the 1950s. I believe that classical training of percussionists has been in place since before that time. It is for this reason that I did not mention Taiko in the "Noise in music" article, at the point mentioned, since that section is about unpitched music prior to the 20th century.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:13, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

OHO! OK, I didn't know that but I now see it documented at Taiko#Japan. Point taken. Andrewa (talk) 20:31, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Globalise

I've tagged the section After the Second World War with a globalize tag, it seems to be purely about the USA, while percussion ensembles have flourished in many other areas as well. Andrewa (talk) 02:09, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it possible that you are being too cautious. Right from the opening there is this bias. For example, I don't believe that Pungmul was ever fostered in conservatories—at least not for the first several centuries of its existence.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:38, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Agree that the bias is to some extent in the rest of the article too, but not nearly so strongly.

Surely the article at this title should be about such ensembles generally? The alternatives seem to be to have no article about the general topic, or to split or move the US-specific content to a more specific title. The globalise option is the least work.

Perhaps the drummers of Pungmul (the performance as described in the article), perhaps might be considered a percussion ensemble, but Samul nori might be a better example, unless, as with Taiko ensembles, it turns out to be relatively modern in that form. It's in Category:Korean traditional music. And I see that the samul nori article says The traditional Korean instruments are called pungmul (my emphasis, and I note the small p, unsure whether that is significant).

Lots going on. Andrewa (talk) 21:28, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree wholeheartedly that this article ought to include percussion ensembles of all types, not just American-university ones (or even American/Canadian/European/Australian-university ones). The article I mentioned in the other section, Noise in music, has got a lot of material ready for plundering, and I only mentioned pungmul as one example from among many in that article (fagu hui, thayambaka, yangge, etc., not forgetting taiko, which deserves inclusion despite its comparatively recent vintage). As far as capitalization is concerned, Korean doesn't have the caps/lc distinction of the Latin alphabet, so the choice to capitalize or not is a matter of taste in transliteration.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:58, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

OK... so pungmul (whether capitalised or not) can be either the performance or the instruments? Not sure that the lack of capitalisation in Korean is significant; Capitalisation is an English marking, and Korean may have a different marking system but a translation seeks to represent the meaning, not the marking system used to convey it. Andrewa (talk) 03:29, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm no expert on Korean music or culture in general, but to judge from the Wikipedia article and New Grove, pungmul is the whole performance tradition. I cannot find a specific collective term for the instruments involved. As to the spelling of the name in Korean, it is 풍물놀이, transliterated as pungmul-nori, which translates something like "a play in a pleasant landscape" (pungmul is the "pleasant landscape" part). In any case, there is no capital/lowercase distinction for "풍", or any other character in Korean. As I said, this only has meaning in Western alphabets (not just English), and even then only in comparatively recent times (about the past six hundred years—a mere blip in the history books).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:15, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

The relevance of the usage of capitalisation in languages other than English is zilch. As to other meanings of pungmul, is the article I quoted above wrong? Andrewa (talk) 06:58, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely, capitalisation of words transliterated from koRean, japansE, ChInEsE, and such languages are irrelevant. The quotation you give from the article "Samul nori" includes a link to the article "Pungmul", which begins with a contradiction of the claim in the "Samul nori" article: "Pungmul ([ˈpʰuːŋmul] poong-muul) is a Korean folk music tradition that includes drumming, dancing, and singing." I don't know which is correct.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:44, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Now you've provoked my curiosity, I have had a look around New Grove and have discovered another contradiction. The article Samul nori strongly suggests the name is a genre or type of ensemble, but Robert C. Provine's article of that title in New Grove (second edition) states flatly that it is the title of a particular performing group, founded in 1978 (also mentioned in the Wikipedia article as "The most famous samul nori ensemble"). Their music "is largely derived from parts of traditional Korean farmers' band music (nongak or p'ungmul kut), it is played only on two drums and two gongs (rather than by a large band), is played seated on an indoor stage (instead of dancing outdoors), and has a much more developed, professionalized and virtuoso style".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:29, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

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