Music: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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WonderOcean

Male humpback whales in a population share an evolving song, and novel song types can spread between populations through social learning rather than genes.

Only male humpbacks sing, mostly in the breeding season: a long, repeated sequence of moans, cries and pulses, built from phrases and themes. All the males in one area sing nearly the same song, and it keeps changing as singers add small variations that the others copy. Sometimes the change is sudden. In 1996, researchers off eastern Australia recorded two males singing a song that belonged to the population off western Australia; within two years every singer they recorded had switched to it. Their report in Nature in 2000 called it a cultural revolution, because such a rapid, complete change can only spread by learning. Later studies traced new songs moving eastward, population by population, across the South Pacific.

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WonderMusic

The mbira is a musical instrument of the Shona people of Zimbabwe: a row of metal keys fixed to a wooden board, plucked with the thumbs and a forefinger. Players repeat short interlocking patterns, and listeners hear new melodies emerge from within them.

A typical mbira dzavadzimu, “mbira of the ancestral spirits”, has 22 to 28 keys. For performance it is often placed inside a large hollow gourd called a deze, which makes it louder, and bottle caps or shells fixed to it add a buzzing sound. Among the Shona the mbira is played at all-night gatherings called bira, where families call on the spirits of their ancestors, as well as at celebrations and concerts. In the late 1950s the English music researcher Hugh Tracey began making a simplified version, the kalimba, which carried the sound around the world. In 2020 UNESCO listed the art of making and playing the mbira in Zimbabwe and Malawi as intangible cultural heritage.

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StillnessMusic

The duduk is an Armenian wind instrument made of apricot wood and played through a broad double reed, which gives it a warm, soft, voice-like tone. It is usually played in pairs: one musician carries the melody while the other holds a steady background note.

Its Armenian name, tsiranapogh, means “apricot pipe”. The background note, called the dam, never breaks because its player uses circular breathing: breathing in through the nose while pushing air out from the cheeks. Duduk music is heard at weddings, in folk songs and at funerals alike. Its best-known master, Djivan Gasparyan (1928–2021), took it to audiences around the world, and his playing can be heard in film scores such as Gladiator. UNESCO proclaimed Armenian duduk music a masterpiece of intangible heritage in 2005 and added it to its list in 2008. Related double-reed instruments are played across the region, such as the Turkish mey and the Azerbaijani balaban.

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WonderMusic

In throat singing from Tuva, a Russian republic in southern Siberia, one singer produces two sounds at once: a low, steady hum and, above it, a high whistling melody. The singer makes it by shaping the mouth and throat to bring out overtones hidden in the voice.

Every sung note is really a bundle of tones: the main pitch plus fainter, higher ones called overtones, which give each voice its colour. Throat singers learn to move the tongue and lips so precisely that single overtones ring out as a separate melody. The general term is khöömei; sygyt is a whistling style and kargyraa a very deep, growling one. Tuvans, a Turkic-speaking people, link these sounds with the landscape of herding life, imitating wind, rivers and animals. Groups such as Huun-Huur-Tu took the music to world stages from the 1990s. The physicist Richard Feynman spent years trying to travel to Tuva, a quest told in the book Tuva or Bust!

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StillnessMusic

Arirang is Korea's best-known folk song, sung in the North, in the South and by Koreans abroad. It exists in about 60 versions and some 3,600 variations, all sharing a refrain close to “Arirang, arirang, arariyo”, while the verses change with each singer and region.

Nobody knows exactly what the word “arirang” means. Many versions tell of crossing a mountain pass, and the verses often speak of parting, longing and hard work, though others are playful. The version most people know spread through Na Woon-gyu's 1926 silent film Arirang, made under Japanese rule and regarded as the first Korean nationalist film. Because the song belongs to both Koreas, it has served as a shared anthem: at the opening of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, athletes from North and South marched in together as it played. UNESCO added South Korea's Arirang to its intangible heritage list in 2012 and North Korea's in 2014, so the same song appears on the list twice.

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StillnessMusic

Qawwali is the devotional music of the Sufis of South Asia. A lead singer sings a line of poetry, a chorus answers, and handclaps, harmonium and drums build the repetition up until the whole gathering is swept along together.

Qawwali grew up at Sufi shrines and gatherings in South Asia, where music is meant to draw listeners closer to God. The tradition is usually traced to the poet and musician Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) of Delhi. The words are Sufi poems in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi or Hindi. The lead singer may dwell on a single line for minutes, shifting its emphasis and improvising around it, while the chorus repeats it and the audience responds. In the twentieth century the Sabri Brothers and, above all, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan took qawwali to concert halls around the world; Nusrat's work with Western musicians in the 1990s brought it a global audience.

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StillnessMusic

The shakuhachi is a Japanese bamboo flute blown from the end. Small changes in the player's breath and head angle bend its pitch, so the rush of air, a wavering tone and silence all become part of the music.

The name comes from the flute's standard length, one shaku and eight sun, about 54 centimetres. During the Edo period (1603–1868), wandering monks of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism, known as komusō, played it as a form of meditation called suizen, 'blowing Zen', and travelled with deep straw baskets over their heads to hide their faces. Their solo pieces, called honkyoku, are still played today. After the Meiji government abolished the sect in 1871, the flute moved into secular chamber music, and in the twentieth century it found a place in film scores, jazz and contemporary classical music.

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DriveMusic

Taiko, Japanese ensemble drumming, took root in North America through Japanese American groups formed in California from the late 1960s. They built drums from whatever they could find, including wine barrels, and made playing together a way of building community.

In Japan, taiko simply means drum. The style of large, choreographed drum ensembles, called kumi-daiko, took shape after the Second World War, notably with Daihachi Oguchi's group from 1951. In 1968 Seiichi Tanaka founded the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, and in 1969 members of Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles formed Kinnara Taiko, making affordable drums from wine barrels. For many Japanese Americans whose families had been interned during the war, taiko became a way to claim their heritage in public. North America now has hundreds of taiko groups.

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WonderMusic

Mugham, the classical music of Azerbaijan, is largely improvised. Instead of a fixed score, the singer and players follow a mode, a set of notes with its own melodic paths and mood, and shape each performance anew.

A classic mugham trio has a singer, called a khanende, who often keeps time on a frame drum (the gaval or daf), accompanied by the tar, a long-necked lute, and the kamancha, a bowed fiddle. The performers move through a series of sections within the mode, rising gradually in pitch towards a climax, and the singer usually chooses classical poetry by poets such as Fuzuli. The tradition shares roots with Persian and Turkish makam music. UNESCO proclaimed Azerbaijani mugham a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, and the International Mugham Centre opened in Baku in 2008.

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StillnessMusic

Morna is the slow, melancholy song of Cabo Verde, sung in the islands' Creole to guitar, violin and cavaquinho, a small four-string guitar. Its lyrics keep returning to departure, distance and longing, shaped by island life and generations of emigration.

Cabo Verde is a group of Atlantic islands off West Africa, settled by the Portuguese and by enslaved Africans. Poverty and drought have long driven its people to emigrate, and by many estimates more Cabo Verdeans now live abroad than on the islands. Morna's central feeling is sodade, a Creole word related to the Portuguese saudade: the ache for people and places far away. The poet Eugénio Tavares (1867–1930) and the composer B. Leza shaped its classic form. From the late 1980s the singer Cesária Évora, known as the 'Barefoot Diva', made morna known around the world. UNESCO added morna to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019.

MornaRead card

DriveBiography

Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra travelled through her country in the 1950s, collecting folk songs from rural musicians. She carried what she learned into radio programmes, records, her own songs and her visual art.

Parra (1917–1967) came from a family of artists; her brother Nicanor Parra became one of Chile's best-known poets. She sought out elderly singers whose songs had never been written down, and her own compositions, above all Gracias a la vida (1966), gave that tradition new life. She also made arpilleras, pictures stitched from fabric, and in 1964 became, by most accounts, the first Latin American artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Louvre palace, in its Museum of Decorative Arts. Her work laid the foundations of the Nueva Canción Chilena, the Chilean New Song movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She died in 1967.

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DriveBiography

South African singer Miriam Makeba was barred from returning home in 1960, when the government cancelled her passport. She spent 30 years in exile, using her concerts and her testimony at the United Nations to campaign against apartheid.

Apartheid was the system of legal racial segregation that ruled South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Makeba left in 1959 to attend the Venice premiere of Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film in which she sang, then settled in New York with Harry Belafonte's help. When she tried to return for her mother's funeral in 1960, she was refused entry. In 1963 she spoke against apartheid before a United Nations committee, and her records were banned at home. In 1966 she and Belafonte shared a Grammy for their joint album, and her song Pata Pata became a worldwide hit in 1967. She returned home in 1990, after Nelson Mandela's release, and was widely known as 'Mama Africa'.

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StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş (1938–2012) was one of Turkey's best-loved folk musicians. From his father, Muharrem Ertaş, he learned the bozlak, a long, high-pitched and often mournful song of Central Anatolia, and he renewed it with songs of his own.

Ertaş was born in 1938 in a village in Kırşehir, into an Abdal family. The Abdals are a Central Anatolian community in which music has long been a hereditary trade, played at weddings and gatherings. As a child he travelled from village to village with his father, playing the bağlama, a long-necked lute. In 1976 a stroke left him unable to play; he went to Germany for treatment in 1979, stayed for 24 years and gave concerts for Turkish migrants across Europe. In 2002 he declined the title of State Artist, saying that all artists already served the state and a separate title felt like discrimination. He received an honorary doctorate from Istanbul Technical University in 2011 and died in İzmir in 2012.

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WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac had an exceptionally wide vocal range, reaching from deep low notes to very high ones. In the 1950s her recordings, set in lavish orchestral arrangements, made her an international star.

Sumac was born in Peru in 1922 as Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo. Her first album for Capitol Records, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), made with the composer Les Baxter, set Andean-inspired songs in lush Hollywood orchestration and sold in huge numbers. Publicity presented her as an Inca princess, and a baseless rumour claimed she was really a Brooklyn housewife called Amy Camus, her name spelled backwards. Estimates of her range run from about four and a half to nearly five octaves; the composer and critic Virgil Thomson put it very close to five. In 1960 she began a tour of the Soviet Union that lasted more than six months. She died in Los Angeles in 2008.

Yma SumacRead card

StillnessBiography

Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch of Hawaiʻi, was also a prolific songwriter. Imprisoned in ʻIolani Palace in 1895, she wrote Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani about the flowers a supporter brought her from her garden, wrapped in the newspapers she was forbidden to read.

Liliʻuokalani came to the throne in 1891. In January 1893 a group of American and European businessmen, backed by US troops, overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom. After a failed rising to restore her in 1895, she was arrested, forced to abdicate and held in an upstairs room of ʻIolani Palace for about eight months. Denied political news, she followed events through the newspapers wrapped around the flowers. She wrote more than 150 songs in all, including He Mele Lāhui Hawaiʻi, the kingdom's national anthem from 1866 to 1876, and Aloha ʻOe (1878), still one of Hawaiʻi's best-known songs. The United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898.

LiliʻuokalaniRead card

StillnessMind

Silence between pieces of music can relax the body more than the music itself. In a 2006 study of 24 people, fast music raised heart rate, blood pressure and breathing; during a two-minute pause all three fell, even below the levels measured before the music began.

Physician Luciano Bernardi of the University of Pavia in Italy, with Cesare Porta and Peter Sleight, tested 12 practising musicians and 12 people of the same age without musical training. Each listened to six styles in random order, including rap, techno, Indian raga and classical music, with a two-minute pause inserted at a random point. Tempo mattered more than style: faster music and simpler rhythms were the most stimulating, while slow or meditative music had a calming effect. The musicians' breathing followed the tempo more closely than the others'. The authors suggested that alternating music and pauses might help with stress, but a single small laboratory study is only a starting point.

Bernardi study, 2006Read card

WonderMind

The 'Mozart effect', the popular idea that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, grew from a 1993 study of just 36 college students. After hearing a Mozart sonata, their scores on a spatial-reasoning task rose for only 10 to 15 minutes; later reviews found no lasting boost to intelligence.

Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Catherine Ky published the study in the journal Nature. Students listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, a relaxation recording or silence, then did paper-folding-and-cutting puzzles from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The Mozart group did better, but only briefly, and the study involved no babies, no children and no measure of general intelligence. Publicity turned it into a promise that classical music makes children smarter: in 1998 the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed $105,000 a year to give every newborn in the state a classical recording. Later analyses found at most small, short-lived effects, most likely because lively music lifts mood and alertness.

The Mozart effectRead card

WonderHistory

A hoard buried in Norfolk, England, about 2,000 years ago contained a near-complete carnyx, a tall bronze war trumpet topped with an animal's head. Found in 2025 and announced in January 2026, it also held parts of a second carnyx, a boar-headed standard and five shield bosses.

The carnyx was played across Iron Age Europe, roughly between 200 BC and AD 200. Held upright, its bell, shaped like an animal's open mouth, rose high above a crowd. This is only the third found in Britain: one dredged from the River Witham in Lincolnshire in 1768 was later destroyed while its metal was being analysed, and of the Deskford carnyx, found in Scotland in 1816, only the boar's-head bell survives. A standard is an emblem carried on a pole to mark a group of fighters, and this is the first boar's-head standard found in Britain. A shield boss is the metal dome at a shield's centre that covers the hand grip. The hoard was probably buried in the first century AD, in the lands of the Iceni, the people of Boudica, who rose against Rome in AD 60 or 61.

Norfolk carnyx hoardRead card