Music: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

In this room

Follow the subject sideways.

Cards are connected by subject and by mood. Move through the complete sequence below, or cross into a neighbouring part of the archive.

21Drive

23Stillness

36Wonder

Q1806

WonderMusic

Umm Kulthum became one of the Arab world's defining twentieth-century voices, transforming classical Arabic poetry, radio concerts and improvisation into shared cultural memory.

Umm Kulthum's art depended on control and surrender at once. She could stretch a phrase, return to it, let the audience's response shape the performance and make poetry feel communal rather than private. Radio carried her first-Thursday concerts far beyond the hall, turning listening into a monthly ritual. Her voice became not only a sound, but a room that millions recognized.

Umm KulthumRead card

Q1807

StillnessMusic

Fado is Portugal's urban song tradition, usually joining solo voice, poetry, guitar and Portuguese guitarra in performances shaped by longing, memory and city life.

Fado is often translated through saudade, but it is richer than one word. It grew in Lisbon as an urban practice where voice, poem and stringed instruments turn longing into form. The singer does not explain the feeling away; the performance holds it, phrases it and lets listeners inhabit it together. Some music comforts by lifting sadness. Fado comforts by giving sadness a beautiful chair.

FadoRead card

Q1808

DriveMusic

Delta blues grew from African American experience in the Mississippi Delta, drawing on field hollers, work songs, guitar styles and storytelling that later shaped blues, rock and popular music.

Delta blues is not just a style; it is a record of pressure turned into voice. Field hollers, work songs, church feeling, railroads, juke joints and guitar invention met in a landscape shaped by racial violence and labour exploitation. When musicians carried the sound north, it changed again in cities. The blues kept moving because pain, humour and survival kept needing new rooms.

Delta bluesRead card

Q1842

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.

Humpback song is structured in repeated units, phrases and themes, yet it does not stand still. Males gradually modify a shared version; occasionally a radically different song sweeps through, replacing the old one as whales meet along migration routes. Culture here requires no archive—only memory, contact and a sound powerful enough to travel.

Whale vocalizationRead card

Q1911

WonderMusic

On the mbira, staggered metal keys fixed above a wooden soundboard let the thumbs and forefinger weave repeating lines that listeners hear as melodies within melodies.

An mbira often begins as a board, a row of tuned metal keys and, sometimes, a gourd resonator that gives the notes greater depth. The hands set several short patterns in motion at once; singers, clappers and dancers may enter the spaces between them. In Zimbabwe and neighbouring communities, repertoire carries history, counsel and social memory, while the craft itself travels through families, apprenticeships and schools. Complexity here is not crowded sound, but relationships held in rhythm.

MbiraRead card

Q1912

StillnessMusic

The Armenian duduk pairs a short apricot-wood body with a broad double reed, producing a warm, close-grained tone that can seem poised between breath and voice.

Duduk music is often built by two players. One sustains a continuous drone, using circular breathing to make the floor of the music seem unbroken; the other shapes the melody above it with small inflections and improvisation. The instrument accompanies weddings as well as funerals, so its timbre is not assigned to a single emotion. A narrow wooden tube becomes a place where celebration and grief can recognise one another.

DudukRead card

Q1913

WonderMusic

In Tuvan throat singing, a performer sustains a low fundamental while reshaping the mouth and throat to amplify selected overtones into a high, whistle-like line.

Every voiced note already contains a ladder of overtones, usually fused into what we hear as timbre. Khöömei makes that hidden structure audible: minute changes of tongue, lips and vocal tract select one overtone after another while the low tone continues. Tuvan traditions connect these sounds with rivers, wind, animals and the acoustic attention of herding life. The marvel is not that a throat makes the impossible, but that trained listening exposes what sound was carrying all along.

Tuvan throat singingRead card

Q1914

WonderMusic

Each shaken bamboo angklung usually supplies only one pitch or chord, so a complete melody emerges when many players enter at precisely the right moments.

An angklung holds tuned bamboo tubes in a light frame; shaking it makes the tubes strike and resonate. Because a player is responsible for only a fragment of the scale, rehearsal turns musical timing into social awareness: watch, listen, enter, release. Indonesian ensembles expanded the instrument from traditional tuning systems into diatonic repertoire during the twentieth century without erasing its communal logic. The music arrives only when individual restraint becomes collective fluency.

AngklungRead card

Q1915

StillnessMusic

Across Korea and its diaspora, Arirang survives through a simple refrain and thousands of local variations whose new lyrics can hold separation, labour, love or homecoming.

Arirang is recognisable enough to gather strangers and open enough to belong to a village, a region or a person far from home. Its short structure invites singers to alter the verses around a returning refrain, so memory is carried by variation rather than fixed text. The song has crossed borders, political division and migration without becoming a museum specimen. Continuity, here, means keeping a door in the music through which another life may enter.

ArirangRead card

Q1916

DriveMusic

A pansori singer moves between song, stylised speech and gesture while a single drummer answers with rhythm and calls, sustaining an epic narrative that may last for hours.

The stage can be almost bare: a singer with a fan, and a drummer beside a barrel-shaped buk. From that economy comes abundance—narration, dialogue, laughter, sorrow, sudden characters and whole landscapes summoned by phrasing. Some complete works demand many hours and years of vocal training, including the cultivation of a rough, expressive tone. Pansori shows that spectacle does not require more objects; it requires a performer capable of making attention change scale.

PansoriRead card

Q1917

StillnessMusic

In qawwali, lead singing, answering voices, handclaps, percussion and repeated poetic lines gather momentum until devotion becomes a shared physical experience.

Qawwali is rooted in South Asian Sufi gatherings, including performances at shrines and devotional assemblies. A lead singer may unfold a line of Urdu, Persian or Punjabi poetry; the chorus returns it, claps mark the pulse, and harmonium and drums tighten the frame. Repetition does not leave the words where it found them: emphasis, improvisation and audience response alter their emotional weight. The ensemble turns listening from private reception into collective participation.

QawwaliRead card

Q1918

StillnessMusic

The end-blown shakuhachi can bend pitch through tiny changes of breath and head angle, making air noise, unstable tone and silence part of its expressive vocabulary.

The shakuhachi is a vertical bamboo flute whose open blowing edge exposes every adjustment of the player's breath. During the Edo period, komusō practitioners of the Fuke tradition used solo pieces as a discipline of attention; later, the flute entered chamber, stage and contemporary music. Its sound is compelling partly because it refuses polish as the only measure of beauty. A gust, a cracked edge and the pause after a note can all remain inside the composition.

ShakuhachiRead card

Q1919

DriveMusic

Japanese American ensembles formed from the late 1960s helped develop North American taiko, building drums from available materials and making group performance a language of community.

Taiko names a broad family of Japanese drums, but the large choreographed ensemble known as kumi-daiko is largely a postwar form. In California, Japanese American groups from the late 1960s adapted that energy to temples, festivals and community life, sometimes turning wine barrels into affordable drum bodies. The practice was neither a sealed inheritance nor a clean invention. Migration made tradition audible as a verb: remember, improvise, build, gather.

TaikoRead card

Q1920

WonderMusic

Azerbaijani mugham gives performers a modal framework rather than a fixed script, asking the singer and instrumentalists to shape an unfolding architecture through improvisation.

In a classical mugham trio, a singer commonly performs with tar and kamancha, while holding a frame drum. Modes, melodic routes and inherited poems provide the grammar, but no notation can prescribe the weight of every pause or ascent. Each interpretation therefore carries disciplined memory and present-tense judgement at once. The tradition has absorbed centuries of exchange across Persian, Turkic and Caucasian worlds without losing its demand that a musician find the road anew.

MughamRead card

Q1921

StillnessMusic

Cabo Verdean morna joins poetry, voice and string instruments to hold departure, distance and longing—experiences shaped by island life and generations of migration.

Morna is sung in Cabo Verdean Creole, commonly with guitars, violin, cavaquinho and other strings giving the voice a gently turning ground. Its poems often return to sodade: not a decorative sadness, but the ache of people, islands and futures separated by the sea. The form has travelled wherever Cabo Verdeans have made homes abroad. A small archipelago turned distance into a shared musical grammar without pretending that distance hurts everyone in the same way.

MornaRead card

Q1922

DriveBiography

Violeta Parra travelled through Chile recording songs from local performers, then carried that fieldwork into broadcasts, albums, original compositions and visual art.

Parra sought out singers and instrumentalists whose repertoire rarely entered official culture, preserving voices while learning how each song worked from within. She did not stop at documentation: her own writing renewed the tradition, and her arpilleras, paintings and ceramics let the same intelligence cross into colour and thread. The archive and the artwork were not opposing tasks. She showed that careful listening can be an original act when it returns inherited material to public life with new force.

Violeta ParraRead card

Q1923

DriveBiography

After South Africa cancelled her passport in 1960, Miriam Makeba spent three decades in exile, using performance and United Nations testimony to confront apartheid abroad.

Makeba's records carried South African languages, rhythms and everyday stories to listeners who often knew the country only through headlines. When she tried to return for her mother's funeral, the state refused her entry; in 1963 she addressed the United Nations about apartheid, and her music was banned at home. Exile gave her reach, but at the price of ordinary belonging. Her career refuses the comforting idea that an international platform cancels the wound of being denied one's own door.

Miriam MakebaRead card

Q1924

StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş inherited the Abdal and bozlak tradition from his father Muharrem Ertaş, then renewed it through an extensive body of his own songs and performances.

Ertaş grew up inside a working musical lineage, accompanying his father and learning not only melodies but the social world that gave them weight. His singing let the bozlak's high, unguarded cry hold separation, poverty, love, pride and the road; his bağlama answered without ornament for ornament's sake. He became nationally known without sanding away the Abdal tradition that formed him. The achievement was not escape from inheritance, but a voice distinct enough to keep inheritance alive.

Neşet ErtaşRead card

Q1925

WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac commanded an exceptionally broad range, moving between cavernous lows, brilliant high notes and vocal colours that resisted a single category.

Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Peru, Sumac entered international popular culture through recordings that placed orchestral spectacle around her astonishing instrument. Publicity often wrapped her in fantasies of an exotic Inca princess, a story easier to market than a modern artist directing her own sound. The mythology should not be mistaken for the achievement. Her voice could move from subterranean resonance to airborne precision and make the distance feel architectural.

Yma SumacRead card

Q1926

StillnessBiography

Queen Liliʻuokalani composed more than ceremonial music: songs such as Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani turned intimate melody into memory during political dispossession and confinement.

Liliʻuokalani was Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch and a prolific composer whose songs joined poetic language to a keen sense of place. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, she was confined in ʻIolani Palace; music written around that period carried loyalty, loss and attention to those outside the room. Aloha ʻOe became globally familiar, but familiarity can blur the political life behind the melody. Her songbook is also an archive of a sovereign mind refusing to be reduced to defeat.

LiliʻuokalaniRead card