Music Report
Bicong He
Music 105
2015/12/9
Performance Event Report
Activity:Music and Dance from the Afro-Peruvian Tradition
Location:School of Music in University of Washington
Date:Dec.8.2015
It’s a free activity and there is no ticket.
The performers were the visiting artist Lalo Lzquierdo from Peru in Africa with Members of the De Cajon project UW students in Music and Dance.There were fourteen instrumental performers include Lalo and there were about twenty dance performers.The instrumental performers played same type of instruments but the instruments looks a little different.The whole performance consists of singers,instruments player and dancer,but some of them played multiple roles at same time,such as the main artist Lalo,he did dancing,sing and play the instrument at different programs.
The instrument players all wore white the shirts and black plants.Only Lalo wore the formal western-style clothes.It was obvious that Lalo is the leading role of this concert.But the dancer wear various of traditional clothes in different songs.I will describe the type of different clothes later accro.Every type of clothes just represent different culture and background beyond different songs.Most of them are African traditional clothes.The stage is just normal stage with normal equipment to improve the quality of the show,such as the sound equipment and the shelf of music score.
There were different kinds of audience in the auditorium.The audience who sat in the central part of auditorium were elder and they looks like the expert in the field of music.The audience sat in the lift and right side of auditorium are the normal people.This group of people looks like all enjoy this music and I noticed that a part of them are black people.Maybe because the artist Lalo is from Africa.There was a warmly interaction between performers and audience.They were not simply just observing.I remembered that the compere in the performers talked and there were some audience in front of auditorium replied loudly about this joke and made all the audience laugh for a moment.I perceived that most of audience have same ethnic background because they have the same reflection on many things.
The instruments they used are consists of percussion,sax,guitar,and bass.In the percussion,there are various kinds of drums with different shapes.I had no idea about their name at first.There are two regular and cylindrical drums,others are square percussion.The height of cylindrical drums is about 50cm and the diameter is about 20cm.The height of square percussion is about 40cm.It’s obvious that they all made by timber.It’s weird that there is a rounded hole in the center of square percussion.I also noticed that there is a image on some of them and the images looks like sun and hawk.I asked one of the performers after the performance about the name of square percussion and he told me it called “cajon.”It’s nominally a six sided,box-shaped percussion instrument originally from Peru,played by slapping the front or rear faces with the hands,fingers,or sticks.The funny thing is every performer on the stage use their hand to play the percussion instruments and maybe because this way looks more original.Besides,all the drums and cajon are belong to membranophones and the subtype is hand friction drums. The other instruments like guitar are just regular instruments and I think everyone know a lot about them.Guitar is belong to chordphones and sax is belong to aerophone.
The dance performance involved in many programs.All the dancer are UW students of dance and music.In some programs which need dance performance,all the dancers already stood in a row waiting for admission when the compere introduced the program.The dancers usually started to dance with the rhythm of drums.Take the most impressive dance performance for me as an example,the dancers lined up in a formation with the tum.Then they started to stamp their feet and stretch out their hands with the melody.A group of dancers were divided into small groups which only have two dancers each group.They cooperated with each other by clapping and jumping around the circle and sang a ethnic and characteristic song together.In another program,The dancer twisted the waist and span,then they arranged into a semicircle.Two people just went into the center of semicircle and dance towards each other,then switched to next group and they all danced with different movements.It’s obvious that these dance movements are traditional dance in Africa.The dancers even went into the auditorium and invited the audience to dance together.The atmosphere was very active and people were clapping and screaming.