Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The wangga of north Australia.
Rice, Timothy
Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The wangga of north Australia
Allan Marett 2005
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut (music/culture
series), xxiii+292pp bound, with CD audio recording, ISBN 0 8195 6617 9
Since 1986, Allan Marett has journeyed off and on to the towns of
Wadeye (Port Keats) and Belyuen in the Daly River region of northwestern
Australia to learn to sing, dance to, love, and understand the deep
cultural significance of an Aboriginal song genre called wangga. Wangga
do many things for the Marri-tjevin, Marri-ammu, and Wadjiginy peoples
who sing them. They bring together the world of the living and dead in
two contexts: the giving of songs by the ancestors in the dreams of
songmen, and mortuary and circumcision ceremonies. For the first two
groups, they are exchanged in ceremonies with two other groups, the
owners of the song genres lirrga and dhanba, in a reciprocal social
arrangement, invented in the 1950s, that keeps peace among these three
groups. They connect the singers to the land and to the Dreamings that
gave birth to the land. They create a sense of social solidarity among
the Marri-tjevin when sung and danced in vigorous unison during
ceremonies. Finally, they are a source of aesthetic enjoyment and
creativity in the moment of their performance.
In this book, probably the first scholarly book on Australian
Aboriginal music published in the United States, Marett tries to occupy
a middle ground between older traditions of musical scholarship in
Australia and New Zealand that focus almost exclusively on detailed
descriptions of musical structures, and newer trends in the US that
focus almost exclusively on understanding the meaning of music and
musical performance with precious little or even no attention to musical
features and details. (There are, of course, important exceptions to
these stereotypes.) In that academic middle-earth, a place where I
believe ethnomusicologists should live in order to do their most
compelling work, he provides what, by the standards of American
ethnomusicology, are extraordinarily detailed musicological and textual
analyses of a selection of specific songs (28 are on the accompanying
audio CD) that illustrate general trends within four repertories of
wangga, analyses that should contribute significantly to previous
scholarship on Aboriginal song. At the same time he extends that
scholarship by using his analyses to read the social and cultural
significance of the structural details he uncovers. Given the
specialised nature of music-analytic language and notation,
Marett's detailed approach to musical structure puts a somewhat
unenviable narrative burden on him compared to, I would imagine, an
analysis of meaning in the figurative details of Aboriginal paintings.
For anyone seeking simply to appreciate the structural principles
of wangga song, there is plenty of detail. The overall formal structure
in the alternation of instrumental and sung sections; melodic rhythms,
sectioning, modality, and the descending shape of melodic lines; and the
rhythmic modes created by the combination of tempo with clapstick, song,
and didjeridu rhythms are all elucidated clearly and in all of their
many variants. Although these descriptions and analyses make up the bulk
of the narrative, the author's goal is to link these structures to
the social and cultural meanings they express.
Marett manages to find meaning in a remarkable number of musical
structures at least partly because he was able to observe their
performance in such a wide range of places and contexts: not only in
Wadeye close to the Dreaming sites of the spirits who gave the songs but
in Belyuen far from those sites; not only in the Daly River region but
in Barunga and the Kimberley, where the meanings had been lost for the
most part; not only by groups of singers performing ceremonies but by
individuals who no longer sang for ceremonies.
We learn, for example, that songs received in dreams are fixed in
form when they are sung often in ceremonies, whereas when they are sung
mainly by the individual who dreamed them, those individuals experiment
with the formal structure of the song at every performance. In Belyuen,
where the songs are given by the ghosts of deceased ancestors, singers
like the highly respected Tommy Barrtjap are expected to imitate the
vocal quality of their teachers (p.69).
By singing the words of the dead, in the voice of the dead, the
songman brought into ritual space not only his own voice but the
voices of his ancestors. The dancers, dancing as ghosts, assisted
in closing the gap between the worlds of the living and the dead
and allowed the dead woman's spirit to depart in peace.
Through the process of association, 'melody has enormous power
to signify relationships between people, their Dreamings, and their
country' (p.80). Through iconicity, 'clapstick beating often
signifies the footsteps or the gait of an ancestor' (p.80). Unison
dance and unison singing signify group solidarity, especially when large
groups from different language families get together. Music and dance
elements have 'clear intrinsic associations [that] form the
semiotic bedrock on which signification rests' (p.110).
Meanings can also arise in specific performances, not just from
these structural pillars. For example, in one repertoire, two pentatonic modes (C Eb F G Bb and C D F G A) are associated with the coast and an
inland site, respectively. When performers from these two places come
together, the social and musical tension is resolved in the interest of
solidarity by performing the heptatonic combination of these two local
modes (C D Eb F G A Bb). Among the Marri-tjevin, the variety that could
once be heard in clapstick patterns has been eliminated so that a few
can 'function as key markers of a group identity' (p.133).
In one case, he 'unpack[s]' (p.152) the social meanings
contained in a performance by the songman Ngulkur from the Marri-ammu
group for the three leading Marri-tjevin songmen. For his song he
appropriates a Marri-tjevin text and combines it with the most famous
Marriammu melody. This expresses the close reciprocal ties between these
groups. He intensifies these links by performing the song first in the
rhythmic mode of the Marri-ammu and then in one of used by the
Marri-tjevin. When the text and melody don't fit, he alters the
melody, expressing his respect for Marri-tjevin traditions. The
Marri-tjevin singers didn't object to his appropriation of their
text, another sign of their close reciprocal relationships.
Marett demonstrates a remarkable engagement with and sympathy for
this culture and the ceremonial singing that enacts and sustains it.
Flying over a landscape he can now interpret in line with Aboriginal
ways of thinking, he writes (p.233):
What I see now is a living entity, country that is alive and which
throws into life many different phenomena--birds, rain, and fire
--as well as the many different orders of being: humans, ancestral
spirits, mermaids, ghosts, little people, not to mention language
and song ... I have learned about this country through the medium
of songs.
'I count myself extremely fortunate' (p.235). Of a text
that brings the country to life, he writes, 'The surprise and
delight felt by the ancestral dead at the return of their living
descendants ... is almost palpable' (p.138). Given the elliptical and descriptive nature of these texts, this could only have been written
by someone deeply steeped in this tradition.
Although the richness of the analysis, the detail of the musical
description, the interpretation of meaning in music, and the depth of
involvement and commitment to this culture are exemplary, American
readers of this work will probably miss some basic ethnography, some of
which would presumably be familiar to an Australian readership. What
does the landscape look like apart from rivers and beaches? What grows
there and how hilly or flat is it? What does 'the small
Marrit-jevin outstation' look like (p.235)? How many people live
there and in Wadeye and Belyuen, and what do they do for living? Is
there a difference between towns and outstations in the conduct of
ordinary and ceremonial life? What sort of social problems and economic
issues do they deal with when not engaged in ceremonies and dreaming
about songs? What kinds of lives do the songmen, whom Marett admirably
names and credits for their creativity, lead? How does a mortuary
ceremony unfold in time? Without this kind of ethnographic detail, the
copious analyses and ingenious readings of meaning float oddly
disconnected from what one can only imagine are the social, economic,
and political realities that, in addition to a rich cosmology, also
produce these wonderful songs.
Reviewed by Timothy Rice Professor of Ethnomusicology, University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) <trice@arts.ucla.edu>