Haunting songs of life and death reveal a fading world (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

 HAUNTING SONGS OF LIFE AND DEATH REVEAL A FADING WORLD
 Nicolas Rothwell
18feb06
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18146439%255E5001986,00.html

 SONGS, DREAMINGS AND GHOSTS: THE WANGGA OF NORTH AUSTRALIA
_ By Allan Marett, Wesleyan University Press, 292pp, $27.50_

A GENERATION ago, when musicologist Allan Marett was beginning his fieldwork on
the Aboriginal song-cycles of northern Australia, he was asked an intriguing
question by a young indigenous man.

   Why was traditional Aboriginal music - music of endless subtlety and beauty
- not as highly valued as the Aboriginal paintings that Australians have come
to view as potent emblems of national identity? 

  This book is Marett's attempt to provide an answer and to redress that
imbalance. The most profound and detailed study of an indigenous musical genre
yet attempted, it has been two decades in the making, and even before
publication acquired a kind of legendary status among the small circle of
experts addicted to the sounds of indigenous song. It is a specialist volume,
yet it is written with a clear, cool passion. 

  It sets out the overwhelming evidence for the finesse and compositional craft
of the Top End's song cycles and brings the master-singers of the region and
their beliefs and experiences to vivid life. It deserves the widest possible
attention, not just because Marett is the doyen of Australian
ethnomusicologists, and this is his masterwork, but because the art form he
seeks to anatomise is dying. 

  Aboriginal song is, of course, elusive: in its traditional form, it is sung
in language, it is brief, coded, meshed with dance. It tends to be ceremonial
in nature, and this has kept outsiders from disseminating its splendours to the
wider world. For what do everyday Australians know, in truth, about indigenous
music, other than the noise of the didge and the guitar chords of Treaty? 

  Marett turns his attention on the Aboriginal songmen of the Daly region, who
live today gathered in the remote community of Wadeye, close to the Bonaparte
Gulf, and at Belyuen, on the Cox peninsula opposite Darwin. Their key song
cycles, the Wangga, take the form of sharp, jewel-like chants, accompanied by
clap-stick and didgeridoo. Poetic in the extreme, filled with rhythms that
summon up, like Western leitmotifs, whole worlds of association, these are
musical slivers that make up a dictionary of the singer's world. Their core is
religious: the Wangga are sung at times when the living and the dead draw
together. They are often learned in dreams; and they plunge deep into the
entwined fabric of the traditional domain. Marett picks apart several songs and
unfurls the aspects of life they express: "The essential interconnectedness of
the living and the dead through ceremony; the mutual responsibilities of the
living to look after each other in everyday affairs; the exigencies of everyday
life; and the intimate relationship that the living and the dead maintain with a
sentient landscape". 

  The world revealed is one of infinitely varied songs and rhythms, swift,
succinct, full of conviction. 

  Marett gives his readers a glimpse of the urgency with which these themes are
perfected and performed: there are vignettes where he is scolded for using the
wrong words in a practice singing session; at one point he turns in amazement
from his chapter-length analysis of a single, minute-long snatch of music,
staggered by the amount of submerged information it contains. 

  In his field years Marett became very close to several great song-masters
from Belyuen, and he was planning to devote himself to the study of one of
these figures, Bobby Lambudju Lane, a man at once gentle and voluble,
Western-trained, literate, a fluent speaker of English and of his own
traditional languages. Lane "had the rare capacity to speak the texts of songs
and give their translations the moment he had finished singing". 

  He was, in short, the Homer of Wangga song, the man at the end of the
tradition who could fix and read the music's mobile shards. But Lane died at
52, and, as Marett says bluntly, even though other singers have taken up his
duties, "the tradition will probably never recover from this blow". 

  Much of Marett's book is devoted to examinations of Lane's work, above all a
haunting, evanescent song from Badjalarr, a low-lying sandy islet that has
become, in the imagination of the Belyuen people, a far-off, generalised land
of the dead, although on our maps it is merely North Peron Island, a favourite
weekend sports-fishing haunt for Darwin's boat-going class. 

  Lane's death has been duplicated many times across the north: the old songmen
are dying in the Kimberley and in Arnhem Land, a curtain of silence and
mass-consumption music is coming down. Hence the vital importance of this book
as a guide to the power and fluidity of a traditional form. 

  Marett covers much ground: he shows how singers shift their songs to explain
their relationship to country; how melodies relate to certain ancestor figures;
how songs and dances set out social themes. 

  An astonishing idea lurks glinting in the closing pages of his work as he
considers the depth and scale of the musical system being uncovered. Like many
music scholars, he is intrigued by the ultimate questions: where did the music
come from and what connections may exist between Aboriginal and Southeast Asian
traditions? 

   The role of the Macassan traders who visited north Australia in contact
times may well have been critical in spreading musical models. But, more
broadly, Marett speculates that deeper study could well reveal "something
startling" about north Australian music, namely that it forms a continuum, in
its rhythmic organisation, with the music of the Middle East, Southeast Asia,
India and Indonesia. 

  Such elusive, attractive ideas: but how can they be tested when the material
is dying out? Marett is centrally involved in a new recording project, which is
strongly supported by the surviving traditional songmen of the north. "My own
experience," he says briskly, "is that most Aboriginal communities, at least in
the north of Australia, want their music to be more widely disseminated and
better understood." 

  At the recent Garma culture conference in northeast Arnhem Land, a clarion
call was sent out in headline words: "Indigenous songs should be a deeply
valued part of the Australian cultural heritage. They represent the great
classical music of this land. These ancient traditions were once everywhere in
Australia, and now survive as living traditions only in several regions. Many
of these are now in danger of being lost forever. Indigenous performances are
one of the most rich and beautiful forms of artistic expression, and yet they
remain unheard and invisible." 

  It is this trend of eclipse and cultural extinction, tragically immediate and
fast-advancing, that Marett's meticulous, pioneering work - at once tribute and
testament - has been written to resist.

	    © The Australian		

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