Visual and Performing Arts for the CSET

Feb
19

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Excerpt from the CSET study guide

Teacher candidates studying for the CSET subtest III, Visual and Performing Arts section should have a multi-cultural respect for music from different cultures.

Question: What is the style Jamaican music employs?

Answer: It follows an up tempo three-chord progression with a boogie bass line played by the piano. One critic relates it to either an African or African American call and response style, suggesting that: “the drums played off the other instruments and the signers: voices, trailing just a bit and almost playing call and answer.” This provides a syncopated layer on top of the straight beats of the R&B background. The net effect of this syncopated call and response drum technique was to make the tune uniquely danceable by Jamaican audiences.

Instead of the accent coming in at the beginning of each beat, the emphasis was moved to the second half of the beat, syncopating the rhythm.

Question: What are some similarities between Chinese and Japanese music?

Answer: Japanese music theory was wholly derived from Chinese musical theory which dated back at least to the fifth century BC. In Chinese music theory, the five tones of the musical scale (called a pentatonic scale) were intimately related to all the other “fives” based on the five material agents: the directions, the seasons, organs, animals, etc.

In addition, the five material agents were collapsed in a larger notion of yang and yin, the male (creation) and female (completion) principles of change in the universe. Likewise, the pentatonic scale was divided into a male scale and a female scale, or ryo and ritsu in Japanese.

The most important note in the pentatonic scale is the third note of the scale, called the “cornerstone”-in the correspondences with the five material agents, the “cornerstone” corresponds to the agent wood (and so to Spring and the East, or beginnings, and jen , or “benevolence, humaneness,” the most important of the virtues). While in the West we define tonal scales based on the first note of the scale (called the tonic), in Chinese and Japanese music, the scale is defined by the cornerstone, or third note. If the relationship between the first note (kung, which corresponds to the earth agent and the center) of the scale and the cornerstone form a perfect third (if you play middle C and E on a piano, you’re playing a perfect third), the scale is male; if these two notes form a perfect fourth (like middle C and F on a piano), the scale is female.

Go to a piano and play only the black keys-that’s a pentatonic scale. If you play a scale

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