@silpayamanant.bsky.social
Intercultural & Southeast Asian Music Researcher, Composer, Educator. Founder Saw Peep Intercultural Orchestra. Host of BBC "World of Classical." he/him 🖤 🩶🤍💜
Raqs Maqom: Dances & Music of Central & West Asia
Sun-Oct 19-2PM
World Affairs Council Lobby
223 S 5th St, Louisville
Free-limited seating; RSVP: worldaffairscouncilofkentucky-bloom.kindful.com/e/see-paw-ra...
Raqs Maqom: collaboration between Crescent Moon Dance Co. & Saw Peep Pan-Asian Ensemble
Always makes me chuckle when r/musictheory mods just refer folks to r/GlobalMusicTheory. 😅
www.reddit.com/r/musictheor...
Image text: 'This is what cellist and researcher Jon Silpayamanant (2020) describes as “how Imperialism and the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific slave trade enriched European countries to the point that they could afford to create a music ecosystem with large scale and expensive orchestras, operas, and ballet companies which might not have emerged absent those conditions”'
Some of my more scholarly work is contributing to the expansion of string pedagogy in surprising ways. Esteban Hernández Parra's recent dissertation "Resuena Abya Yala: Otherwise Practices in Bowed Strings Learning and Performance" cites 1 of my pieces abt slave orchestras!
hdl.handle.net/2022/33684
“[T]he evolution of the orchestra was brought to a standstill”
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2025/08/28/t...
Next Friday, Aug 29, we'll be at the World Affairs Council's inaugural WorldFest Kick-Off Reception. We hear it's already sold out, but you can come see us at WorldFest mainstage on Saturday at 3-4pm!
www.sawpeep.com/events/ @silpayamanant.bsky.social @divyakrthk.bsky.social
Examples of bird songs from Simeon Pease Cheney's 1892 "Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music" (Cheney died in 1890, so this was published posthumously).
Images are from pages 39, 94, and 101. Cheney's book is downloadable here: archive.org/details/wood...
200+ more entries added to the Timeline of Music Notation since the last update. 1700+ entries total now!
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/timeline-of-...
A number of Korean notations; systems for animal songs (esp. for birds/whales); accordion/free reed tabs; & some dutar/fiddle/folk instr. tabs.
The original poster gave an example of adding a Pipa to an opera that he's writing.
29.07.2025 18:06 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Love how the implication here is that there are "non-ethnic" instruments. It's the classic way to normalize supraethnic/macro-ethnic (e.g. Western/European instruments) phenomena as neutral and/or universal.
www.reddit.com/r/composer/c...
Open Access here: escholarship.org/uc/item/64k2...
"Historical evidence suggests that the fiddle may be one of the oldest uninterrupted instrumental traditions in African American culture, yet most people in the United States, including African Americans, do not identify it with Black music"
I guess we'll be hearing more from Timothy Jackson and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies going forward...
22.07.2025 14:37 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
"Score-type notation of Maibataraki made by an amateur musician, Tazaki Enjirō. Ōtsuzumi in blue, kotsuzumi in red, taiko in green and red, and the chanting text and nohkan’s shōga in black from right to left in a column." https://noh.stanford.edu/music/notation/
"Score-type notation of Maibataraki made by an amateur musician, Tazaki Enjirō. Ōtsuzumi in blue, kotsuzumi in red, taiko in green and red, and the chanting text and nohkan’s shōga in black from right to left in a column."
noh.stanford.edu/music/notati...
Just added another 50+ entries to the Timeline of Music Notation the past couple of days which brings the total to over 1300 entries.
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/timeline-of-...
@kcommons.bsky.social
How do we login into our hcommons profile if the only login method was via twitter?
Listening to some Raag Malkauns to calm after the earlier barrage of sound...
www.chandraveena.com/blog/r25-mal...
"Erasure is implicit in the unsung melodies of a hundred micromusics, missing from the classrooms of Euro-America. Like the lack of one's language, the absence of familiar music sends a clear supercultural signal to children. Stereotypes blossom everywhere, often as a part of officially sponsored cultural pluralism. American school music books, have tended to include songs from a variety of "homelands," each item brand-naming whatever subculture is depicted." Mark Slobin "Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West" (1993; page 30) https://archive.org/details/subculturalsound00slob https://www.weslpress.org/9780819562616/subcultural-sounds/
From Mark Slobin's 1993 "Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West" (page 30)
archive.org/details/subc...
www.weslpress.org/978081956261...
Saw Peep Pan-Asian Ensemble is so pleased to announce that we have been selected to be the COLLIDER Artist-in-Residence for December 2025!
Learn more about the COLLIDER Artist-in-Residence program:
www.lfpl.org/lifelong-lea...
Learn more about past COLLIDER artists: www.lfpl.org/past-collide...
"Pu‘uwai Haokila: The Story of How Hawai‘i Shaped Modern Music"
www.pbshawaii.org/puuwai-haokila
"Narrated by Raiatea Helm, this PBS Hawai‘i documentary uncovers Hawaiʻi’s deep, global impact on modern music despite the political struggles they faced at home."
Image of me as the Klingon Cellist/Xenomusicologist from an outdoor gig in 2012. A microphone is in front of my face and a cello neck and scroll can be seen in my left hand.
Ok, I watched the "Klingon Music Theory is Weird" video and it was "meh" but I did laugh when an image of me from a 2012 performance with Il Troubadore Klingon Music Project showed up in the vid (at the 25:27 mark)! 😂
29.04.2025 20:47 — 👍 11 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Whatever happened to Shadia Mansour? This is still one of my favorite collabs she's done--"Sonos Sur" with Ana Tijoux!
youtu.be/EKGUJXzxNqc
It was great finally performing this after it was initially cancelled in April, 2020!
I opened the event with the Global Cello project performing works composers from Southeast Asia or of Southeast Asian descent!
www.silpayamanant.com/projects/glo...
This is a companion piece for her "The New “Yellow Peril” in “Western” European Symphony Orchestras"
doi.org/10.1093/oso/...
Found a couple of my works cited in Maiko Kawabata's "Racism and Diversity in Orchestral Practice" which is the first chapter of the edited volume "East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music" (edited by Ken Ueno and Maiko Kawabata)!
ethicspress.com/products/eas...
What Islam Gave the Blues by Sylviane Diouf
www.youtube.com/watch?v=19jk...
renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what...
Been needing to overhaul this page, but had to update w/ Athita Kuankachorn's diss. "The Application of Thai Classical Fiddle Techniques for Cello" & Nichagarn Chiracharasporn's beautiful cello work "Homage to Mor-lam" which I've been enjoying working on!
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/sea-string-p...
This book has been a few years in the making and we are so excited to share the cover! Kristina R. Gaddy and I have brought together 19 pieces of Black music created between 1687 and 1867, spanning from the Caribbean to North America, with my banjo tab, plus the story behind each piece.
01.04.2025 15:47 — 👍 366 🔁 79 💬 13 📌 9
I had a delightful time presenting as part of TU Dublin Conservatoire's "Contemporary Composition Perspectives" series yesterday!
28.03.2025 10:35 — 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Just got my copy of Nancy Yunhwa Rao's "Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond" in the mail today!
www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p0...
The only commercial recording of it, as far as I know, is by Eduardo del Río Robles!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOt...
Everyone seems to love the last ("Flamenco") movement of Rogelio Huguet y Tagell's (1882-1956) first Unaccompanied Spanish Cello Suite but I'm kinda partial to the prelude to the second!!
Love playing this and looking forward to performing on some upcoming Global Cello recitals!!
