Indigenous Music, Language and Performing Arts – serie

Music, Dance and the Archive reimagines records of performance cultures from the archive through collaborative and creative research. The contributors explore modes of re-embodying archival records, renewing song practices, countering colonial narratives and re-presenting performance traditions.

It’s really great. It’s like they’re all here. I hear all of these voices and I sing with them, you know? — Yikliya Eustace Tipiloura, senior songman and ElderPerhaps the most defining feature of Tiwi song is the importance placed on the creative innovation of the individual singer/composer. Tiwi songs are fundamentally new, unique and occasion specific, and yet sit within a continuum of an oral artistic tradition. Performed in ceremony, at public events, for art and for fun, songs form the core of the Tiwi knowledge system and historical archive. Held by song custodians and taught through sung and danced ritual, generations of embodied practice are still being created and accumulated as people continue to sing.In 2009 Genevieve Campbell and eleven Tiwi colleagues travelled to Canberra to reclaim over 1300 recordings of Tiwi songs, made between 1912 and 1981, that are held in the archives at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). The Old Songs are Always New explores the return home of these recordings to the Tiwi Islands and describes the musical and vocal characteristics, performance context and cultural function of the twelve Tiwi song types, giving an overview of the linguistic and poetic devices used by Tiwi composers.For the past 16 years Campbell has been working closely with Tiwi song custodians, studying contemporary Tiwi song culture in the context of the maintenance of traditions and the development of new music forms. Their musical collaboration has resulted in public performances, community projects and recordings featuring current senior singers and the voices of the repatriated recordings. For this publication, Elders have enabled the transcription of many song texts and melodies for the first time, shedding light on how generations of Tiwi singers have connected the past with the present in a continuum of knowledge transmission and arts practice.There are 27 Tiwi recordings available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/old-songs.html

Warlpiri songs hold together the ceremonies that structure and bind social relationships, and encode detailed information about Warlpiri country, cosmology and kinship. Today, only a small group of the oldest generations has full knowledge of ceremonial songs and their associated meanings, and there is widespread concern about the transmission of these songs to future generations.While musical and cultural change is normal, threats to attrition driven by large-scale external forces including sedentarisation and modernisation put strain on the systems of social relationships that have sustained Warlpiri cultures for millennia. Despite these concerns, songs remain key to Warlpiri identity and cultural heritage.Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs draws together insights from senior Warlpiri singers and custodians of these song traditions, profiling a number of senior singers and their views of the changes that they have witnessed over their lifetimes. The chapters in this book are written by Warlpiri custodians in collaboration with researchers who have worked in Warlpiri communities over the last five decades.Spanning interdisciplinary perspectives including musicology, linguistics, anthropology, cultural studies, dance ethnography and gender studies, chapters range from documentation of well-known and large-scale Warlpiri ceremonies, to detailed analysis of smaller-scale public rituals and the motivations behind newer innovative forms of ceremonial expression.Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs ultimately uncovers the complexity entailed in maintaining the vital components of classical Warlpiri singing practices and the deep desires that Warlpiri people have to maintain this important element of their cultural identity into the future.

Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle documents a ceremonial song cycle situated within the traditional kurdiji “shield” ceremony, as sung by Warlpiri Elder Henry Cooke Anderson Jakamarra at Lajamanu, Northern Territory, in 2013.The song cycle relates to a women’s Jukurrpa Dreaming narrative, and tells the story of a group of ancestral women on a journey across the country. Jakamarra performed the songs (recorded by Carmel O’Shannessy) to make them available to the Warlpiri community and the wider public.Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle includes:the words of the songs in Warlpiriinterpretation in English as given by the singer, Jakamarra, and Warlpiri Elders Jerry Patrick Jangala OAM, Wanta Steven Patrick Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu Jampijinpa and Steven Dixon Japanangkamusical notation by musicologist Myfany Turpinphotographs and illustrations for each songa foreword by two senior custodians, Jerry Patrick Jangala OAM and Wanta Jampijinpa.There are 38 recordings available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/yuupurnju.html

Keeping Time: Dialogues on music and archives in Honour of Linda Barwick explores current issues in ethnomusicology and the archiving and repatriation of ethnographic field recordings.The 19 chapters by 36 authors consider archiving practices as a site of interaction between researchers and cultural heritage communities; cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding song; and the role of musical transcription in non-Western music.This volume is international in scope with case studies with Indigenous and minority peoples from Papua New Guinea, China, India, the Torres Strait and mainland Aboriginal Australia; the latter being the focus of the majority of chapters.Topics include the revival of songs from early written sources, creation of new songs based in old genres, the concept of “sing” in other languages, spirits as the origin of song knowledge, and how to manage ethnographic records over time. Keeping Time approaches Indigenous practices from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history and performing arts, as well as Indigenous Studies, cultural revitalisation (including reclamation of Indigenous languages), Indigenous knowledge and application to climate change.Offered in honour of Emeritus Professor Linda Barwick, the founder of the Indigenous Music, Language and Performing Arts series, Keeping Time offers a diverse range of opinions on ethnographic research practices and their value to society.There are 3 audio examples available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/keeping_time.html