Parallelism in Arandic Song-Poetry

The ceremonial song-poetry performed by Arandic people of central Australia is characterized by parallelism of sound, form and meaning in both auditory and visual modalities. Parallelism, in all its manifestations, operates at multiple levels of the hierarchically structured poetic form. In the period Arandic people call the Altyerre, "Dreaming," ancestral spirit-beings created the land and laid the lore through actions and song. This included the creation of women's song-poetry called awelye. Awelye is sung in group unison as a series of many short verses that relate to each group's inherited estate lands, their ancestors, and to the ceremonial performance itself. Actions that mirror the meaning of the verses accompany the singing, such as painting designs on the body, placing a ritual object in the ground, and dancing. This paper considers the role of parallelism in the poetic function of language (Jakobson 1987), and facilitates the merging of the everyday realm with that of the performer's ancestors, which Stanner so aptly translates as the "everywhen."Abstract from website.Myfany Turpin is a linguist and ethnomusicologist at the University of Sydney. She has published extensively on Aboriginal song-poetry, including a number of multi-media publications. She has conducted research on Kaytetye, a language spoken in central Australia, and has written an encyclopedic dictionary and Learner's Guide of the language, as well as scholarly articles in lexical semantics and ethnobiology. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and is investigating the relationship between words and music in Aboriginal song-poetry

Tools for Analyzing Verbal Art in the Field

Song is a universal human phenomenon that can shed much light on the nature of language. Despite this, field linguists are not always equipped with the knowledge and skills to analyze song texts and draw out their significances to other areas of language. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a language community to ask linguists working in the field to record and document their songs. Barwick (2012) identifies a number of reasons why linguists should work on songs and identifies iTunes as a local repository for recordings of songs. This paper expands on these reasons and describes how iTunes software can be used for comparing, retrieving and managing recordings of songs. This not only assists analysis of song structure and text, but is also a useful means of providing the community with recordings, even in the absence of a local repository. The paper draws on our use of iTunes during fieldwork on central Australian Aboriginal songs. Our aim is to share the methodology and workflow we use and to encourage linguists to work on this universal, yet often neglected, aspect of language that is often highly valued within the language community.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Central Australian women’s traditional songs: keeping yawulyu/awelye strong

Yawulyu (in Warlpiri and Warumungu) and awelye (in Arandic XE “Arandic” languages) are cognate names for Australian Aboriginal women’s country-based ceremonies in central Australia. Ceremonial performances constitute a collective expression of knowledge surrounding the particular country, lifestyles, and Dreaming stories to which the ceremonies relate. This knowledge is presented in different modalities including song text, rhythm, melody, movement (gesture, dance), ritual designs, ritual objects, and spatial organization and orientation. This chapter discusses various issues and ideas concerning the sustainability of the tradition. It draws on extensive published literature, the authors’ fieldwork in the area over many years, and a series of interviews conducted as part of the Sustainable Futures project.Australian Research Council LP098924

Rapikwenty: ‘A loner in the ashes’ and other songs for sleeping

Rapikwenty is a traditional Australian Indigenous set of stories-and-songs from the Utopia region of Central Australia performed by Anmatyerr speaking adults to lull children to sleep. The main protagonist is a boy who is left to play alone in the ashes. Like many lullabies, Rapikwenty is characterised by scary themes, soft dynamics, a limited pitch range and repetition. The story-and-song form is not common in the Australian literature on lullabies, yet such combinations of prose and verse are found in other forms of verbal art of the region (Green 2014). This verbal art style is also well-attested in other oral traditions of the world (Harris & Reichl, 1997). Rapikwenty resembles other Anmatyerr genres in its song structure; yet differs in its performance style. Echoing Trainor et al. (1999: 532), we find it is the “soothing, smooth, and airy” delivery, rather than any formal properties of the genre, that achieves the lulling effect. In addition, Rapikwenty uses the recitative style known as arnwerirrem ‘humming’. The voice thus moves seamlessly between spoken story and sung verse, creating a smooth delivery throughout. We suggest that the combination of prose and verse reflects an Anmatyerr concept of song as prototypically punctuating events in a story rather than a medium for story-telling itself. This article suggests a more nuanced approach to the relationship between genre and performance styles. NOTE. The pdf version of this paper contains sound files, which may not work if you open the pdf in the browser. If this is the case, please download the pdf and open it from your computer

Text-setting in Kaytetye

Singing is a universal human activity. Across the vast range of song traditions throughout the world, native speakers have consistent intuitions about how the syllables in a given line of song text should be set to the tunes and/or rhythms within their various song traditions. This paper presents an Optimality Theoretic analysis of text-setting in a set of ceremonial songs traditionally sung and passed on orally by groups of Kaytetye-speaking women in Central Australia. Australian Aboriginal songs are renowned for the degree to which they diverge from speech. For our analysis, we use a computational method to exhaustively generate all permitted ways sung forms may diverge from their spoken equivalents along with all possible ways each form may be set to rhythm. We show that the seemingly idiosyncratic nature of text-setting strategies in this song set can be accounted for through a relatively generic set of constraints (even when thousands of competing candidates are considered), reflecting many of the fundamental processes that govern the interaction of language, meter, and music

Brilliance as cognitive complexity in Aboriginal Australia

Writers on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and contemporary commercial art have identified properties that can be described as producing ‘brilliance’, the term used by Howard Morphy (1989) for Yolngu visual art. Brilliance involves the emotionally charged knowledge that Ancestral power is manifest. We suggest that, in Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and art, two kinds of brilliance are at work, both of which we exemplify using evidence from songs and languages of the Arandic and Warlpiri region of Central Australia. One kind of brilliance is manifest as visual brightness and whiteness, the other relates to a variety of cognitive complexities that involve diverse combinations of parts both within and across modalities of expression. In extending the notion of brilliance from the visuality of brightness to include cognitive complexity, we follow other work on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices. Seeking to understand why these properties should produce particular emotional and epistemic effects in participants, we draw on psychological accounts of the sublime and awe (Keltner and Haidt 2003, Miall and Kuiken 1994), which we treat as part of the same broad family of experiences as the experience of brilliance. We suggest both visual brightness and cognitive complexity represent an 'extremity' that as such places considerable cognitive demands on the participants. These extraordinary cognitive demands stimulate emotion and produce the experience of Ancestral power and surprising moments of insight

Central Australian Women’s Traditional Music: Yawulyu/Awelye. Indigenous Music Case Study Report for the Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures Project. Revised Version.

This report concerns yawulyu/awelye, an important ceremonial genre of traditional songs performed by women in Central Australia. Drawing on extensive published literature, our fieldwork in the area over many years, and a series of interviews we conducted as part of the Sustainable Futures Project, we discuss various issues and ideas concerning the sustainability of the tradition.Australian Research Council, Linkage Project LP098924