Zora Neale Huston sings Florida shack-a-lacka-lacka, # 4. And more.
Some of the elementary-school singers in #15 are in their 60s today. Their parents, heard applauding from the audience, and some of them, are likely gone.
Haitian Rastafarians, working in the fields, #9.
Inimitable Soul, #21.
Via Neil Gaiman
Pandora. Try it out with a favorite song or performer.
Just try it.
Via Creative Generalist
We called out (no we're not edgy) Iris Dement, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and The Incredible String Band.
Jeff Hull quotes I Ride an Old Paint in comments above. Here, answering our own question, is some music. Cowboy poetry and music, growing out of the prairie like indian paintbrush or bluebonnets. Even before Lady Bird's gift to the world.
Also in the Eastern vein, it is time for a Lenten plug for Ancient Faith Radio, 24/7 webcast [just click listen] of the incandescent Eastern Orthodox repertoire. Laced with meditation morsels. If your taste inclines to chant that resembles Gregorian and more, as well as simple pure harmony, don't miss sampling this spectacular steadying resource for peace and presence. A world away from the caricatured AM-band religiosity of O Brother.
February 8, 2005
A major music conservatory announces "scratching" in its curriculum, right there with solfege, modal harmony, and analysis of the sonata form.
What does it sound like? Can you hum a few bars? Heeeerrrrrre's 20-year needle-thrasher DJ QBert (Screen Savers video), whose current entrepreneurial project is a portable turntable-mixer set-up he can carry to a beach near you. And sell to others to carry to etc.
An example of Remix as prevailing cultural theme, via Creating Passionate Users. QBert is also the auteur of a graffiti animation movie. Wave Twisters tackles the government conspiracy to suppress hidden hip hop art forms.
January 29, 2004
Thai Elephant Conservation 10-12 member orchestra, 
interview with composer and examples of music, including Pong's solo improvisational chimes and Ganesha Symphony #1, C-sharp minor Thai scale plus Western diatonic scale. Elephants respond to conductor, assisted sometimes by mahouts.
Musical geography somewhere between Stockhausen and schön. Bamboo Dreams with cello schön-er than most.
January 5, 2005
From the BBC, The Telegraph, and CNN. Schoolchildren are being taught their ancient whistled language, to save it from extinction.
The language is called Silbo Gomero, and is only heard on the Canary Island of La Gomera, off the coast of Morocco.
Pouring from a classroom window of the primary school in San Sebástian came a sound similar to the chirping of caged song birds.
A glance inside the room, however, revealed not an aviary but a room full of eight-year-olds, each with a knuckle in their mouth, whistling the islanders' ancient language of silbo.
The language evolved as a means of communicating across the island's jagged terrain thousands of years ago. La Gomera, a lump of volcanic rock west of Tenerife, is riven by barrancos (ravines) that make communication of any kind arduous. Silbo is thought to have arrived with settlers from the Atlas mountains of North Africa 2,500 years ago and it is far more complex than a few simple signals.
Whistled Silbo Gomero, with spoken-language-like intonation, can be heard here and here.
Via Mirabilis.ca
Update:
Studies how the brain of Spanish speakers and Silbo speakers processes the language.
December 14, 2004
As contrast to yet another accustomed and often vanilla-flavored muzak-drenched run-up to to Christmas, today we're trying something different. The visual approximation of a multicolored Lego nativity scene; juxtaposed to sonorous chords or Slavic-accented instruction in virtue from Ancient Faith Radio. It is music that can offer to those of us unfamiliar with its riches a way to attend to the season refreshed. This tradition tracks back chronologically and doctrinally about as close to the First Christmas and the Story it launched, as moderns can reach.
Strong stuff. Satisfyingly unsuitable to preferences for EZ-listenin' or improvised-spirituality-style observance.
Via J-Walk and Mere Comments [12.13.04], respectively. Mysteriously, also courtesy of the Memorare, concurrent with a report that the world's favorite color is blue.
