tea and music

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Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:21 am

more a field recording than music, but Steven Feld's Suikinkutsu might be of interest to people here:

SUIKINKUTSU, literally "water-zither-cave," is a unique instrument associated with washing for the Japanese tea ceremony. Water drips from a chozubachi stone basin into a partly-filled underground ceramic bowl.The dripping sound, resembling a kotozither, projects up through bamboo tubes into a garden, where water may symbolize spirit, purification, solace, and reflection.

Dating to the mid 17th century Edo period, the name suikinkutsuis often credited to the famous tea ceremony teacher Kobori Enshu. After a decline, the instrument re-emerged in the Meiji Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with renewed recent popularity.

This soundscape of Kyoto’s Enko-ji Temple suikinkutsu is a multitrack composition created from field recordings. At low volume one experiences the ever-changing water rhythms flowing randomly into the pulsing surround of summer cicadas.


http://earthear.com/suikinkutsu.html

I love and very much miss the sound of cicadas here so finding this made me pretty happy.
Octagon
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Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:53 am

Youzi wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:23 am
Guqin music will make you transcend from your room into the mountains of China, in any time of the day. :D
I've been trying to learn more about the guqin. Do you have any recommenddations for good players/recordings?
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Youzi
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Tue Mar 30, 2021 12:04 pm

Octagon wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:53 am
Youzi wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:23 am
Guqin music will make you transcend from your room into the mountains of China, in any time of the day. :D
I've been trying to learn more about the guqin. Do you have any recommenddations for good players/recordings?
Any playlist on Spotify or apple music should be sufficient. Just make sure it's guqin and not guzheng. You can tell it easily, if you hear the same note repeatedly, quickly, then it's a guzheng.

Guqin always "feels slow" even when it's played fast.
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Wed Mar 31, 2021 9:51 am

Youzi wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 12:04 pm
Octagon wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:53 am
Youzi wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:23 am
Guqin music will make you transcend from your room into the mountains of China, in any time of the day. :D
I've been trying to learn more about the guqin. Do you have any recommenddations for good players/recordings?
Any playlist on Spotify or apple music should be sufficient. Just make sure it's guqin and not guzheng. You can tell it easily, if you hear the same note repeatedly, quickly, then it's a guzheng.

Guqin always "feels slow" even when it's played fast.
Guangling san is a pretty amazing guqin piece. Although today's version is probably reconstructed from the original in the Ming/Qing period, as far as I know it's one of the oldest if not the oldest partly surviving guqin composition. Although I'm not sure it's something you normally want to listen while drinking tea, since it's about an assassin who assassinates the Han state's king and then commits suicide, later having his body displayed in the public square while is mournful sister looks on. The way the strings are struck are particularly violent in comparison to most guqin pieces.

The piece was written by Ji Kang who was a neodaoist in the 3rd century AD, who was put to death by the Sima Clan, I suppose due to partly his loyalty to the Cao clan, since he had married Cao Cao granddaughter. I believe the legend is that it's the last piece he played when he requested a guqin before being put to death.
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mbanu
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Sat Apr 03, 2021 9:41 pm

mbanu wrote:
Tue Feb 16, 2021 9:19 am
It is fun to listen to music that was popular when a particular tea was made or invented.
A fun 1980 documentary on the British 2-Tone Records:



1980 was an interesting time for tea in the UK, as it was slowly becoming Americanized. After decades of resistance, the teabag was on the rise, and the Indian blends of the previous generation were being replaced with the East African blends of modern British tea.

(Also a nice cameo for fans of 70s British teaware, what looks like it could be an English TAMS tea-mug, from the lone band-member not drinking lager during an interview. :D It seems like for a time all the mugs TAMS made had that distinct handle-shape.)
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mbanu
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Tue Apr 06, 2021 9:45 pm

Going along with music that was popular when a tea was popular, I noticed that there are old episodes of the Lipton-sponsored Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts radio show up on Youtube:




So far it seems like a nice thing to have on for a cup of American-style Ceylon tea with clove-studded lemon or Constant Comment. :)
Pan
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Wed Apr 07, 2021 11:03 pm

do particularly when I use tea with meditation particularly aged pu-erhs or dan chongs, and gyokuro basically any tea which is high grade or special and where it is used to help focus and enhance energy.

I usually listen to Doom metal particularly from bands such as Sleep, Om or Progresssive ones such as Tool, basically any of the genre that helps promote a meditative state oh and Hildur Guntofur. These combined with the above teas and either agarwood or mysore sandalwood is an unforgettable experience










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mbanu
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Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:04 am

An old concert by Charles Aznavour, a fun match with a Mariage Frères tea, as Mariage Frères was a new company doing new things masquerading as an old company doing old things. :) Although they play up the "since 1854" and try to make their shops look the part, they are really the product of new ideas of the 1980s about what tea could be, taking the flavored blends of the 70s to more complex places, experimenting with things like tetsubins enameled to be teapots, taking advantage of the opening of Chinese trade to contract custom Yixing, and introducing Francophiles to white tea who had never heard of it before, all while acting as though everything they were doing was very old and very French. :D

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mbanu
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Fri May 07, 2021 9:28 am

Maybe an unexpected connection, but I was reading an article on how Yixing potters develop their personal styles, and there was an off-hand mention that even master potters will make the same design again and again, each time slightly different. This helped me realize that they were really a lot like an old-fashioned type of musician, the "standard-bearer", who primarily sang cover songs, but whose versions were some of the most famous ones of their era (like Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald's songs).

This was helpful for me because whenever I saw Yixing potters described as practicing "clay art", I assumed that meant they were Clay Artists, which has a very different meaning (I think) to many Americans. Often when someone is called an Artist it means they produce (or hope to produce) Masterpieces, which are unique and coveted originals that are only made once (with outtakes, rough drafts, etc. either destroyed or carefully guarded), then exhibited for display or industrially copied for appreciation.

I remember earlier reading a commentary on a Yixing pot that mentioned off-hand that it was unlikely to be by the potter marked on it because it was not "known", and at the time I wasn't quite sure what they were getting at. Reframing potters as clay musicians rather than clay artists makes this a bit easier to understand for me, since a musician, especially a live-musician, will sing the same song again and again if it is a good match for them and popular with the audience, so when presented with a recording of a song supposedly by that musician, an easy way to guess whether it is really sung by them is to ask if they're known to have ever sung it before. So what the person commenting on the pot was trying to say was that since that potter was not known to have ever made any other pots of that design, that extra skepticism was needed.
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psboston7
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Tue Jun 01, 2021 6:47 pm

Hi there I am a newbie to the forum, however not new to the enjoyment of tea and music. ;)

I LOVE music at all times I will generally have my cuppa in the morning and the afternoon. I play Chillhop throughout the day while I am WFH and musical scores for my indoor and outdoor plants.

Chill and Lounge music compliments tea time on any day.
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Photo is not mine but I have it on my Pinterest Board... I love sipping tea on trains.
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psboston7
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Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:37 pm

mbanu wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:04 am
An old concert by Charles Aznavour, a fun match with a Mariage Frères tea, as Mariage Frères was a new company doing new things masquerading as an old company doing old things. :) Although they play up the "since 1854" and try to make their shops look the part, they are really the product of new ideas of the 1980s about what tea could be, taking the flavored blends of the 70s to more complex places, experimenting with things like tetsubins enameled to be teapots, taking advantage of the opening of Chinese trade to contract custom Yixing, and introducing Francophiles to white tea who had never heard of it before, all while acting as though everything they were doing was very old and very French. :D

Wow! I had no idea... :o color me schooled. Thanks for that I like Mariage Frères so this is good to know.
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mbanu
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Wed Jun 02, 2021 7:41 pm

psboston7 wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:37 pm
mbanu wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:04 am
An old concert by Charles Aznavour, a fun match with a Mariage Frères tea, as Mariage Frères was a new company doing new things masquerading as an old company doing old things. :) Although they play up the "since 1854" and try to make their shops look the part, they are really the product of new ideas of the 1980s about what tea could be, taking the flavored blends of the 70s to more complex places, experimenting with things like tetsubins enameled to be teapots, taking advantage of the opening of Chinese trade to contract custom Yixing, and introducing Francophiles to white tea who had never heard of it before, all while acting as though everything they were doing was very old and very French. :D

Wow! I had no idea... :o color me schooled. Thanks for that I like Mariage Frères so this is good to know.
I wish they received more credit -- they pioneered many things that are popular today but no longer associated with them, like the cast-iron teapot made in the shape of a Japanese water kettle.
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Bok
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Wed Jun 02, 2021 8:14 pm

mbanu wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 7:41 pm
I wish they received more credit -- they pioneered many things that are popular today but no longer associated with them, like the cast-iron teapot made in the shape of a Japanese water kettle.
Next step is to dissect their blatant copy cat Singaporean TWG :lol: I think it was founded by someone working at MF before or something, but I might remember that wrong...

I used to love to browse MF shops when I was still very ignorant in terms of tea, but interested enough to depart from Asia Shop Gunpowder, hahaha

They had/have quite decent Darjeeling I remember, not sure if I would still like them if I tried now.
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Thu Jun 03, 2021 4:42 am

mbanu wrote:
Fri May 07, 2021 9:28 am
Maybe an unexpected connection, but I was reading an article on how Yixing potters develop their personal styles, and there was an off-hand mention that even master potters will make the same design again and again, each time slightly different. This helped me realize that they were really a lot like an old-fashioned type of musician, the "standard-bearer", who primarily sang cover songs, but whose versions were some of the most famous ones of their era (like Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald's songs).
Its an interesting idea/comparison. I guess for me what comes to mind is more jazz. Say something like Meng Chen pots being the equivalent of the fake book/standards- they are there and get copied, there is the main tune almost everyone wants to hear but you can still find room to improvise and make it your own. I suppose some of this depends on who enjoys what or what the maker's goal was, but in that way too that say a technically flawless/virtuosic performance doesn't necessarily have any real soul or depth - some of this maybe applies more to ideas central for say Japanese ceramics. Similarly even if you want to go way off in to left field it doesn't mean you won't find references to classic forms/tunes or that it doesn't still follow a structure no matter how loose it may seem.
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Bok
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Thu Jun 03, 2021 6:16 am

One thing also worth mentioning: the limitations of our human being. We all have four limbs and the approximate same senses and capacities. So there is a limit to the variations we can create inside these boundaries. 8-)

I hear that statement from my martial arts teacher when I remark similarities to other styles: “we all only got two arms and two legs, only so much movements we can do with these”
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