Week 9: Australia and Aboriginal Music

1. Week 9: Australia and Aboriginal Music • 1. Australian Aborigines arrived 40,000 years ago and developed a stable society with complex cultural traditions. • 2. Aspects of culture have survived colonization but few still live in the traditional way. • 3. Aboriginal culture has been greatly affected and has in many cases changed to conform to existence with whites.

2. Generalities • Many small tribes with specific languages and cultural identities. Many of these differences have been water down by contact with whites. • Communities may be hunter gather and thus on the move or (now) settled in semi-agricultural communities. • No written culture. • Music songs and dance are linked inextricably and central to identity, enculturation, religion and language. Music (song) is the repository for tribal history. Without maintaining repertoire ancestor links will be lost and with it tribal identity.

3. Dreaming • Cosmic order includes social order. Division of labour by sex. Men hunters, women gatherers. Men aristocrats, women menials. Men could take time to make music, rituals and fighting. • Nature had to be stimulated by ritual . Elaborate plan of life formed by ritual centred on concept of Dreaming. • Events in Dream time are recorded in myth. At Dream time the earth was featureless. Life in structureless flux until creative powers moved around creating the landscape, all iving things, and structured society. Then the powers sank into the earth. • Powers can have human or animal forms. Dualism of then and now. Communication between powers and men takes place by signs. E.g.Rainbow serpent, and in paranormal experiences of trance in which new songs may emerge. • Creativity comes from the powers and men `follow up the Dreaming’ by receiving and reproducing songs. • Elaborate system of kinship, to animals, places, insects, through clans. Fixed location of everything in a total order. • Rites and life (initiatory and fertility) and death (often brought about by singing a person). Rites to help reluctant spirits to leave a body and settle spirit or dispatch it to its spirit home.

4. Aboriginal Music • Exchange of music has been a feature of groups that live in different environments. Songs and dances of one area are adopted by neighbors. Absorginal music has significant regional variation but is more closely related to each other than any other kind of music. • Dissemination of didjeridu – originally a northern instrument but now pan-Australian. • Country rock and pop mixed with elements of aboriginal music is also now popular. Fusion genres.

5. Ritual and Religion All music (dance, singing, designs and representations) are associated with religious rituals. • Time of Dreaming - ancestral beings created the world, then deposited their creative power at certain sites. This power accessed by correctly reproducing in ceremony the songs and dances the ancestors used to create the world. • Some rituals are dangerous and restricted to the few. • Public songs also abound which may be given by ghosts or ancestors in dreams. Performed at circumcision and death, or for entertainment. • Song exchange.

6. Regions • Northern Region has a number of specific forms and dances that include the: • junba a dance performed with long bark caps and leaves at elbows and knees. Songs sung by groups of males and females, musical organisation (isorhythmic texts set to a flexible melodic contour); accompanied by sticks or boomerangs and body percussion. Composed by individuals with aid of spirits who appear in dreams and take them on spirit journeys. • Wangga – didjeridu-accompanied in public part of ceremonies that are not restricted,

7. Daly Region • Wangga and lirrga – forms performed by one two or three singers who accompany themselves with wooden clapsticks. Spectacular male dancing and female dancing that emphasizes the upper body. • Received in dreams by individuals from spirit agents or ghosts of dead songmen. Translated from ghost language into human language by the singer. • Many occasional ceremonies to turn boys into men through circumcision. Also `rag-burning’ – to assist spirit of dead to leave the world.

8. Arnhem Land • Song ownership is group-based. Ceremonies focus on the activities of ancestral Dreaming figures. • Clan songs grouped into series – and owned by more than one clan. Sung in public rituals – mortuary, circumcision and ritual diplomacy. • In mortuary ritual three stages. Preparation and exposure; cleaning and painting of bones after a few months, crushing bones and placing in log coffins which is then placed upright and abandoned.

9. Central Areas • Dessert regions – over 40 tribes. • Songs based around the travels of the ancestors through the region in the beginning time. Songs have been passed down since the time of the ancestors. • Functions – education, history, law, preservation of land, and healing. • Primarily syllabic vocal music based on cycles. Instruments are percussive (boomerangs, paired sticks, foot stomping and thigh slapping). • Songs for ages and stages – lullabies, infants, young boys etc. • Songlines – conserving ancestral history. Lots of smaller units each representing one piece of information in relation to ancestor being celebrated.

10. South-Eastern Aboriginal Music • Long and harsh contact with whites. Colonisation starting in 1788. • Corroboree and related genres. Corroboree is a mode of dancing. Open performance or song and dance in which men, women and children perform together. • Songs of social control. `Sing-you-down’ – stores relate to unacceptable behavior such as drinking and gambling.

11. Didjeridu • Construction is basic and can be made out anything. • Both blown and sung into. • Blowing low-pitchen basic tone (fundamental) by loosely buzzing the lips, higher overtones with tighter lips. • Circular breathing. • Vocalised tones also included – blurts and squeaks. • Great variety of rhythms and timbres while maintaining basic tone.

12. Revivals of Indigenous Culture • Terrible repression of past has turned round to some extent and there are programmes of cultural revival, including that of language and music/dance. • Fusion groups on country and pop scene. Songs dealing with alcohol, law and Aboriginal identity.