Keeping the Song Alive
For those of you who know me, you will know that I wear many hats in our musical circle. But my interests are wider than music and, for example, I love to travel. Though I usually plan my trips around ancient ruins, craft markets, art museums, hiking, diving sites or mountain views, once there inevitably, I gravitate toward the music. Any music. Local music. National Music. Music on the radio in languages I don’t know. Moms singing folk songs to their babies in the back of the bus. Musicians in funny hats playing weird instruments for the dinner crowd. I am not thinking of music when I choose to go somewhere, but music is the medium that I seek, unconsciously, once I am there.
The order of priorities shifts in my life, but the basics stay the same. There is music. Dinner at a local restaurant in a backwater in China brings questions about my life, and so suddenly I find myself singing “O mio babbino caro” for the curious residents of Dali. (And a young lady stands up and says in perfect English with a Chinese accent: “I sing that one too!” And she does!) On an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca we are singing Billy Joel songs at a dance party populated by the natives, me, my daughter, and a bunch of vacationing Finns… Or, like this past summer, I went hiking with my daughter in a remote part of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and was asked to sing “Summer time” for the astonished (and I suspect alarmed) Berber family who were hosting us for lunch. (Or later, at a deserted bar in Marrakech, belting out American 1950’s rock tunes with the bartender and piano player.) How in the world did these people in these places know these songs?
My brother, someone from a totally different walk of life, the world of science and medicine, recently introduced me to a place where our worlds overlap. He had been to Australia for a while, and there he had heard of the Aboriginal Songlines*. For those of you who love singing, you’ll be interested to know about the Songlines. It is an epic story of a people who lived and died by a song that existed for eons, stretched out over immeasurable time and space, and was the way of communication for countless generations of people. Imagine all the loves of your life, defined by and guided by… a song. Imagine an entire culture of people who live this life, this song. (And now, just imagine how much prestige and money we’d all have if it were America, and the song was classical music? But I digress.)
Long before the British ever set foot on Australia, there were the indigenous people, the Aboriginals. They had a myth about seven sisters who came from afar, and began the “dreaming”, which became the song. Australia is largely an inhospitable land full of wide deserts and plains with little water. People needing to navigate the land needed to know songs in order to be introduced to the next resting place. Rather than trying to explain this concept, I will just quote what Wikipedia has written:
A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the song, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. In some cases, the path of the creator-beings are said to be evident from their marks, or petrosomatoglyphs, on the land, such as large depressions in the land, which are said to be their footprints.
By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, Indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interior. The continent of Australia contains an extensive system of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometres, whilst others traverse hundreds of kilometres through lands of many different Indigenous peoples — peoples who may speak markedly different languages and champion significantly different cultural traditions.
Since a songline can span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Thus the whole song can only be fully understood by a person speaking all the relevant languages.
In some cases, a songline has a particular direction, and walking the wrong way along a songline may be sacrilegious act (e.g. climbing up where the correct direction is down). Traditional Aboriginal people regard all land as sacred, and the songs must be continually sung to keep the land "alive".
With a tradition and a tale like that I would be inspired to travel far to hear this song! People, for whom songs and singing was not just a living, but a way of life. All things depended on the song. Wow. It sounded so fascinating that I was already planning my trip to Australia…
But alas, the British came to Australia, colonized it, and over time (mostly this past century) the songlines have been cut, severed, had roads built over them, fences built, buildings erected, sacred places bulldozed. The songlines, like a map of dreams, have become fragmented, overlooked, ignored, and ultimately, mostly destroyed. Those portions of them that still exist are so small and remote that only the people who dreamed them can still find them. It is sad for me to see their song wither… But I have hope that it will not die.
I know I’ve written in the past about our own little dwindling song, classical music. Our song is a little like the Aboriginals song… Other songs have come in and usurped it’s direction and it’s power. But it lives on, and I have found it in odd places in the world, where one would never expect to find it.
Occasionally I feel I live a smallish life. I do the things I do, love the things I love, sing the songs I live and I try to love the songs I sing. Everywhere I go I am reminded of the similarities between my life and people who seem to have nothing really in common with me. Songs are here and there. Songs come and go. My song is part of all of our songs—It is part of the song of the little Chinese girl in Dali, it is part of the Quechua people on Amantani in Peru, it is part of the Berbers in Morocco--- the song of the ancient Aboriginals in Australia, whose song is waning, dying out, but not quite dead yet. We must all try to keep a tiny bit of our song alive, each one of us, in everything we do.
* If you want to find out more about the Songlines, the book “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin is fascinating. Possibly out of print now, but you can get it on Amazon.
For those of you who know me, you will know that I wear many hats in our musical circle. But my interests are wider than music and, for example, I love to travel. Though I usually plan my trips around ancient ruins, craft markets, art museums, hiking, diving sites or mountain views, once there inevitably, I gravitate toward the music. Any music. Local music. National Music. Music on the radio in languages I don’t know. Moms singing folk songs to their babies in the back of the bus. Musicians in funny hats playing weird instruments for the dinner crowd. I am not thinking of music when I choose to go somewhere, but music is the medium that I seek, unconsciously, once I am there.
The order of priorities shifts in my life, but the basics stay the same. There is music. Dinner at a local restaurant in a backwater in China brings questions about my life, and so suddenly I find myself singing “O mio babbino caro” for the curious residents of Dali. (And a young lady stands up and says in perfect English with a Chinese accent: “I sing that one too!” And she does!) On an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca we are singing Billy Joel songs at a dance party populated by the natives, me, my daughter, and a bunch of vacationing Finns… Or, like this past summer, I went hiking with my daughter in a remote part of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and was asked to sing “Summer time” for the astonished (and I suspect alarmed) Berber family who were hosting us for lunch. (Or later, at a deserted bar in Marrakech, belting out American 1950’s rock tunes with the bartender and piano player.) How in the world did these people in these places know these songs?
My brother, someone from a totally different walk of life, the world of science and medicine, recently introduced me to a place where our worlds overlap. He had been to Australia for a while, and there he had heard of the Aboriginal Songlines*. For those of you who love singing, you’ll be interested to know about the Songlines. It is an epic story of a people who lived and died by a song that existed for eons, stretched out over immeasurable time and space, and was the way of communication for countless generations of people. Imagine all the loves of your life, defined by and guided by… a song. Imagine an entire culture of people who live this life, this song. (And now, just imagine how much prestige and money we’d all have if it were America, and the song was classical music? But I digress.)
Long before the British ever set foot on Australia, there were the indigenous people, the Aboriginals. They had a myth about seven sisters who came from afar, and began the “dreaming”, which became the song. Australia is largely an inhospitable land full of wide deserts and plains with little water. People needing to navigate the land needed to know songs in order to be introduced to the next resting place. Rather than trying to explain this concept, I will just quote what Wikipedia has written:
A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the song, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. In some cases, the path of the creator-beings are said to be evident from their marks, or petrosomatoglyphs, on the land, such as large depressions in the land, which are said to be their footprints.
By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, Indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interior. The continent of Australia contains an extensive system of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometres, whilst others traverse hundreds of kilometres through lands of many different Indigenous peoples — peoples who may speak markedly different languages and champion significantly different cultural traditions.
Since a songline can span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Thus the whole song can only be fully understood by a person speaking all the relevant languages.
In some cases, a songline has a particular direction, and walking the wrong way along a songline may be sacrilegious act (e.g. climbing up where the correct direction is down). Traditional Aboriginal people regard all land as sacred, and the songs must be continually sung to keep the land "alive".
With a tradition and a tale like that I would be inspired to travel far to hear this song! People, for whom songs and singing was not just a living, but a way of life. All things depended on the song. Wow. It sounded so fascinating that I was already planning my trip to Australia…
But alas, the British came to Australia, colonized it, and over time (mostly this past century) the songlines have been cut, severed, had roads built over them, fences built, buildings erected, sacred places bulldozed. The songlines, like a map of dreams, have become fragmented, overlooked, ignored, and ultimately, mostly destroyed. Those portions of them that still exist are so small and remote that only the people who dreamed them can still find them. It is sad for me to see their song wither… But I have hope that it will not die.
I know I’ve written in the past about our own little dwindling song, classical music. Our song is a little like the Aboriginals song… Other songs have come in and usurped it’s direction and it’s power. But it lives on, and I have found it in odd places in the world, where one would never expect to find it.
Occasionally I feel I live a smallish life. I do the things I do, love the things I love, sing the songs I live and I try to love the songs I sing. Everywhere I go I am reminded of the similarities between my life and people who seem to have nothing really in common with me. Songs are here and there. Songs come and go. My song is part of all of our songs—It is part of the song of the little Chinese girl in Dali, it is part of the Quechua people on Amantani in Peru, it is part of the Berbers in Morocco--- the song of the ancient Aboriginals in Australia, whose song is waning, dying out, but not quite dead yet. We must all try to keep a tiny bit of our song alive, each one of us, in everything we do.
* If you want to find out more about the Songlines, the book “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin is fascinating. Possibly out of print now, but you can get it on Amazon.