Letting the Instrument Speak Through You: Composing on Foreign Instruments in Their Own Styles

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with music as a whole. For much of my life, I wanted to become an English teacher overseas and travel the world, and I never really took music quite seriously until I returned to college after a car accident. When I truly started getting involved in music it was through the lens of global performance studies under professor Mark Stone of Oakland University. He showed me this massive world I was unaware even existed, and started me on my journey of music discovery that led me on the path I’m on now, pursuing a PhD in Ethnomusicology. 

The Gyil found me in 2019, and I quickly took to it, with it eventually becoming my most frequently played and primary instrument. I took a music of world cultures course during my undergrad, and participated in an activity involving composing music between three random instruments in a foreign style. Me, being primarily a gyil player, composed a gyil part for a trio involving a clarinet, vocalist, and gyil, in a similar feel as traditional Dagara gyil music. At the time, I wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing musically, I was simply allowing ideas to generate from my instrument and contemplating melodies to pair with it. 

I revisited that piece infrequently over the next few years until I went to Ghana in 2024 for a research trip with my professor and a colleague. One of my goals during the trip was to discover how one improvises on a gyil; under which contexts is it appropriate or not, how much can one improvise, can improvisations be separate from words, and many others. After getting a better picture of what gyil improvisation consists of, after I returned home I revisited that piece once more and discovered what I had done before. I had taken the harmonic progression of a gyil tune and used it as the basis for my original melody. I then began to use this composition as a training ground for discovering improvisation, altering the melody with my right hand and embellishing lines, matching octaves and intervals, and allowing the left hand to improvise over the harmonic structure. 

I have since finished composing that piece for solo gyil, titled “Trying To Remember”, dedicated to my time spent trying to remember so much about this instrument and the music. It consists of a couple established lenu, or “bassline” or “harmonic outline” to use western terms, paired with a yielu (“song”) and yangfu (“solo”) structure, with an improvised section in the middle, an ode to a solo section in a jazz standard. It should be on my youtube page by mid-may.

I have since taken this pattern and moved it to other instruments, such as the Ugandan Akogo, an African lamellaphone with 14 tines tuned pentatonically in a non-linear fashion. This non-linear tuning standard on the instrument tends to frustrate people very familiar with Western music theory conventions, as they want a convenient layout to express their harmonic and melodic vocabulary. The akogo does not provide this, and it was never meant to. The layout of the akogo works great for the people who play it and it is optimal for expressing their traditional musical ideas. This is a similar case for the invader layout of the steel pan versus the circle-of-fifths layout, with many people complaining about its layout never considering its advantages or historical development. Many composers also do not give the instrument the opportunity to give you its own ideas, and impose their own musical vocabulary onto it. 

After learning and performing a few Ugandan traditional and contemporary tunes on the Akogo, I began to experiment with improvising melodies using octaves and traditional intervals, and mixing those with interlocking patterns between the thumbs, eventually creating a 12-unit cycle commonly interpreted as 12/8. I got the idea for the form from a couple Akogo pieces I have played, as well as many Embaire Xylophone pieces from Busoga. I whistled a few different melodies until I found one I liked, and then added an improvised section. 

I just played this song as the encore for my senior recital. It is titled “A Vessel”. I have never explained why the piece is called a vessel till now. We are a vessel for the music. The music, much like consciousness, exists all around us. We exist as fractal spirals of this universal consciousness and music, and can focus and output it into something artistic and beautiful. Therefore, we exist as vessels for the music. We do not generate these things on our own; we receive them from elsewhere. I allowed the instrument to give me ideas and express itself through me as its vessel. This is my belief, and this tune is evidence of this belief. It is available to watch on my youtube page at this point, I hope you enjoy!

There’s a lot more I could say about this, but maybe I’ll write a part 2 soon!