Week 11: Australia and Aboriginal Music

1
Week 11 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.