From Rahile Dawut and Aynur Kadir, Music of the Ordam shrine festival.

Shawm bands, accompanied by percussion, are an essential—and seriously loud—feature in the soundscapes of life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies in many parts of the world, appearing often on this blog. So in lieu of an unwieldy tag, here’s a roundup of some of the main posts.

Shawms (with a wooden body and a flared bell, small unlipped double reed enclosed in the mouth, and a pirouette, overblowing at the octave) are more common than oboes (like Chinese guanzi and Armenian duduk), although the distinction is complex, also involving cylindrical or conical bores (zzzzz)—see here.

Names for shawms are often variants of zurna, but there’s a wealth of local terms. The musicians are low in social status.

For China, large shawms are particularly imposing in the north, as shown in my two books Ritual and music of north China. The starter post is

• Walking shrill.

I analyse the complex melodies of the Hua family band in

• Dissolving boundaries.

See also

• Blind shawm players of Yanggao
• A secret language in north Shanxi

and, observing a certain scholarly reluctance to countenance such orally-transmitted cultures,

• Sacred and secular.

The Shaanbei bands feature in my post on the great

• Guo Yuhua;

and, adding nearby Gansu, cf.

• China: commemorating trauma
• Maoist worship in Gansu.

See also

• Ritual groups of Liaoning

and for trouble in Shandong,

• Officials without culture.

Shawm bands are common in south China too, such as in Fujian and Hunan.

Some of these styles also appear on the Playlist in the sidebar (##5, 6, 11, and 15, with commentary here).

For Xinjiang, see

• Uyghur drum-and-shawm

and for Tibet, as well as the monastic shawms and long trumpets (still only featured at the end of this post), the courtly gar features in

• How *not* to describe 1950s’ Tibet.

Elsewhere, most traditions have spread with Islam from the Middle East. See

• The Janissary band
• Köçek in Kuzguncuk!
• Musicking of the yayla
• Bartók in Anatolia
• Lorestan
• South Asia
• Gujarat
• and for north Indian shehnai, Raga for winds.

Among a wealth of audio-video tracks on the playlist of

• Bernard Lortat-Jacob at 80

is a fine taksim on the Turkish zurna.

Additive shawm metres from Turkey and east Europe feature in

• Taco taco burrito.

For Azerbaijan, see under

• Mata Hari,

and for Morocco, under

• Paul Bowles.

In Europe, Spain features in

• Festive soundscapes of the Rioja
• Songs of Valencia

And for Italian shawms (not least the 1963–64 recordings from the USA!):

• Italy: folk musicking.

See also

• Frozen brass
• Trumpets, wind and brass bands
• Wind, ethnicity, gender

And cf. the extensive trumpet tag.