For my king, etiquette.
This time I’ll focus on an individual musical domain which I love and connected to since ever. I’m talking about this ‘royal’ element that you can’t necessarily relate to a particular musical genre. The most related thing to a musical genre that I can think of was in the late 1960s – Baroque pop, and as you could listen soon this royal element is leaking between many genres outside of pop, and that’s good. I mentioned in some previous post about Modal character which is essential to this musical domain. The composers of the above field embraced some common musical principles from the Baroque era which its roots are mainly from Italy, but also from the British folklore that includes the whole area – Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and even parts of France and other places in western Europe. It is interesting to mention, maybe naturally, the Modal influences and harmonies that are suitable for them, came to other areas through the Christianity and the church, to the eastern Europe and the Balkan folklore music.
The Modal musical materials alone, are familiar with cultures around the globe. But with our ‘royal’ case we can distinguish a typical vocal presentation that includes some particular phrasing or word cutting that became familiar in other countries far from the British Isles. As you can listen in the next nugget, one of the most common instruments is the Harpsichord which I really love. (One of my dreams is to own a harpsichord when I reserve enough room for it… beside some other fantasies…)
The Harpsichord was a predecessor to the piano that we know today. Its way of producing the notes is entirely opposite to the piano. When we hit a key on the piano, we’re triggering an internal hammer to hit the strings. With a Harpsichord, hitting a key causing to pluck a string as you can see in the following video: (I suggest to forward it to the 1:15 min)
I think that the choice of using the Harpsichord helping to emphasize the majesty that characterizes the music and the performance in this domain. More common musical ingredients that we can find here are the massive vocal harmonies, and Counterpoint in particular, and of course the use of acoustic instruments like flutes and plucked instruments. On the first ‘nugget’ that I posted here in this blog, we have some great example for the folkloric use of Modal motives of the young Israeli state. In this nugget, I chose to pick some tracks that contain the ‘royal’ domain but have some additional values that keep them out from the classic folklore music. I think that at least half of the tracks that presented here, come from the Progressive Rock music genre which is one of my musical foundations, and also as an important musical form it will get a tasty nugget series in the future.