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Reviews
Les Bardes du Khorassan Iranien: Le Bakhshi et son Repertoire

Travaux et Memoires de lInstitut dE
tudes Iraniennes, 6.
AMENEH YOUSSEFZADEH
Leuwen and Paris, Peeters, 2002
xii / 316 pp., photographs, maps, figures, musical exx., bibliography, discography,
index
ISBN: 90-429-1116-6 (Peeters Leuwen), 2-87723-628-5 (Peeters France). CD (64:21)
Ameneh Youssefzadehs monograph on the bards called bakhshi in north-eastern Iran
is a welcome addition to the small body of writings in European languages on Iranian
regional musics. It is also an important contribution to the far more substantial
literature on singers of tales in various regions of Eurasia, notably those in which
Turkic languages are spoken. The title refers appropriately to Iranian Khorasan in
order to distinguish the largest province of Iran from the geographic region known
for centuries as Khorasan, which extended further north and east from Persia to the
Amu Darya basin and thus included parts of what are now Turkmenistan and
Afghanistan.
For more than a millennium Khorasan, like Azerbaijan and Transoxiana, has been
a site of cultural interaction among speakers of Iranian and Turkic languages; the
bakhshis social role and repertory are important results of this interaction. Many
bakhshis are trilingual / in Persian, Kurmanji Kurdish and Khorasani Turkish, the
latter being the dominant language of their repertoire. It was first identified as a
distinct group of dialects within the Oghuz Turkic languages by Gerhard Doerfer,
who has published a collection of folkloric texts (Doerfer and Hesche 1998) as well as
lexicons and grammars of 23 dialects (Doerfer and Hesche 1993). The Khorasani
Kurds, whose forced migrations to the region began in the 16th century CE, speak a
variety of Kurmanji which has also been the subject of a monograph (Tsukerman
1986).
The compact disc accompanying Youssefzadehs book offers examples of sung
poetry in all three of these languages and in Turkmen as well. The idiom of the
Turkmen bags y clearly served as an important model for the bakhshis of Iranian
Khorasan, in a number of respects. For example, Youssefzadeh notes (pp. 143/6) that
the 19th-century Kurmanji poet Jafar Qoli is esteemed by Khorasani Kurds in much
the same way as the 18th-century Turkmen poet Magtymguly is esteemed by their
Turkmen neighbours (close to a million of whom live in north-eastern Iran). Detailed
comparative studies have yet to be carried out on the poetic vocabularies in which
similar topics are treated in Turkmen, Khorasani Turkish and Kurmanji Kurdish, and
Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 13, No. 2, November 2004, pp. 287/317
ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online) # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1741191042000286202
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on the polyphonic idioms developed on the long-necked lutes of the Turkmen bagsy
and the Khorasani bakhshi. While the Khorasani dutar (two strings in Persian) has a
deeper sound chest and a longer neck than the Turkmen dutar, on both instruments
the higher-pitched string carries the melody and the second string (tuned a fourth or
fifth lower in Khorasan) enriches the sonority at certain points.
In her first chapter, Youssefzadeh reviews the distribution of ethnic groups
and languages in the northern portion of Iranian Khorasan and the adjacent
Turkmen Plain. She also briefly describes the musicians known as asheq (literally,
lover) and compares their performance roles and repertory with those of the
bakhshi. The second chapter outlines the historical context of the bakhshis
contemporary roles, with attention both to changes in the meaning of the term
itself and to other terms for bards in Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus
(beginning with the Parthian gosan, the Armenian gusan and the Georgian mgosani ).
The bakhshis mentioned in Persian sources of the Mongol period (1251/1335)
were shamans, Buddhist priests or some combination of both roles. As the birth-
place of poetry in the New Persian language and an early centre of Sufism,
Khorasan offered fertile ground for development of the quatrain, which quickly
became (and remains) the dominant form of popular poetry in Persian and in
Oghuz Turkic languages. As a bard, the bakhshi retained traces of a shamanic past
modified by the poetry and ideals of Sufism. Much the same can be said of other
Turkic singers of tales / such as the as q of Azerbaijan and eastern Turkey, the
Turkmen bagsy, the Karakalpak zhiraw and the Uzbek bakhshi (all of whom
accompany their singing on a plucked or, in the zhiraws case, a bowed lute). Until
quite recently, the heart of the bakhshis repertory consisted of narratives (called
dastan) performed in a combination of sung poetry and spoken prose; the verses are
quatrains addressed to one another by lovers when their emotions can best be
expressed in song. Other Turkic singers of tales perform many of the same stories in
their own musical idioms. The second major component of the bakhshis repertory /
lyrical and didactic verses, such as those attributed to Jafar Qoli / is unique to
Khorasan and has been increasingly favoured in recent decades.
Most of Youssefzadehs second chapter is devoted to the contemporary circum-
stances of the Khorasani bakhshi / his apprenticeship, listeners and social status /
and to the construction and playing technique of the dutar. The third chapter
examines the narrative and lyrical portions of the bakhshi repertory against the rich
background of Iranian literary history, and the fourth chapter is largely devoted to
prosody and metrics. Youssefzadeh makes a strong case for the filiation between the
forms of Persian literature and the repertory of the bards (pp. 104/16).
Some of the verses sung by bakhshis make use of the quantitative meters of classical
Persian poetry, certain of which were adopted by Turkic poets and also occur in
Khorasani Turkish. Other verses in Khorasani Turkish, and all poetry in the Kurmanji
of Khorasan, use syllabic rather than quantitative meters. Youssefzadeh gives good
examples of Khorasani Turkish quatrains with eight-syllable and eleven-syllable lines
(pp. 171/3), but she errs in treating lines with 15 syllables as likewise syllabic rather
288 Reviews
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than quantitative. The underlying model for all the 15-syllable lines quoted in the
book (on pp. 174, 175, 184, 185/6, 203/5) is the quantitative meter consisting of
long, short, long, long/long, short, long, long/long, short, long, long/long, short,
long. This error also affects the subsequent discussion of the melody types called Shah
Khatai and Navai which are commonly used for singing verses in this meter and
have been shaped accordingly; rhythms of 2/1/2/2 occur frequently in the dutar
patterns associated with both melody types, for example.
While Kurmanji verses are commonly structured as tristichs, singers can turn them
into quatrains by adding refrains, as Youssefzadeh notes (pp. 160/1). Unfortunately,
one of her Kurmanji examples is wrongly described as containing four tristichs, each
with an added refrain line, when in fact it contains two tristichs within a more
elaborate refrain scheme: 1r2r3rrr (x2) rather than 123r (x4).
The longest chapter is devoted to the bakhshis musical resources, concentrating on
the tone system and on the melody types that are commonly called ahang or maqam.
All the bakhshis maqam-s, unlike the gushe-s and dastgah-s of Persian classical
music, must be structured to accommodate the singing of quatrains. The functions of
notes in gushe-s and dastgah-s are often described with a set of five terms: witness
note, starting note, variable note, internal stop and final.
1
Youssefzadeh modifies this
vocabulary in her analysis of functions in the maqam-s of Khorasan, replacing
witness note with note polarisee and distinguishing between note fondamentale
and note conclusive. Her discussion of melodic functions is not well integrated
with her outline of the tone system, which she describes as based on three conjunct
tetrachords, one available on the lower-pitched string and the others on the higher
(p. 218). The analysis of functions concentrates exclusively on the higher two
tetrachords, ignoring the notes in the lower tetrachord or pentachord that are
sounded simultaneously with the higher pitches, and the notes played on the lower
string that are not heard in the vocal melody. In my view this is a serious flaw in the
outlines of nine maqams (pp. 233/41), five of which are illustrated on the
accompanying compact disc. Otherwise the chapter succeeds in giving equal weight
to vocal and instrumental resources.
The final chapter describes the situation of musicians in Iran since the 1979
Revolution, a topic that Youssefzadeh has also discussed in these pages (see BJE 9 (2):
35/61). Bakhshis now face radically altered conditions of patronage created by the
cultural policies of state institutions. By giving priority to the lyrical and didactic
portions of their repertory rather than to the dastan, Khorasani bakhshis assumed an
extremely prominent position in national festivals of regional music.
Youssefzadehs monograph offers a much-needed introduction to one of Irans
richest and most engrossing performing arts. It nicely complements earlier studies of
the arts of the bakhshis closest relatives / the Azerbaijani asq and the Turkmen
bagsy (e.g. Eldarova 1996; Z
eran ska-Kominek 1997, reviewed in BJE 10 (2)). All three

of these works furnish a solid basis for future research, not least for comparative
studies of the repertories and performance idioms of Turkic singers of tales.
Ethnomusicology Forum 289
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Note
[1] Laurence Picken has compared the functional names of notes in modern Persian with the
ancient Sanskrit terms for similar functions, remarking that it seems likely that discrimination
of note-functions existed at an early date in Persia/Iran (2000, 205, 222/4). However, we have
no evidence that any such discrimination was articulated in the modern terms (or in words
from which the modern terms were derived).
References
Doerfer, Gerhard and Wolfram Hesche. 1993. Chorasanturkish: Worterlisten, Kurzgrammatiken,
Indices. Turcologica, 16. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
_______
. 1998. Turkische Folklore-Texte aus Chorasan. Turcologica, 38. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Eldarova, 3min3 (1996) Az3rbaycan as q s3n3ti (The art of the Azerbaijani asq). Baku: Elm.
Picken, Laurence. 2000. Modal note-sets and related matters in Ancient China; in Ancient and
Modern India and Persia; in Ancient Greece. In Music of the Tang court . Vol. 7, Some ancient
connections explored. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185/251.
Tsukerman, I. I. 1986. Xorasanskii Kurmanzi: issledovanie i tekst (Khorasani Kurmanji: research and
texts). Moscow: Izdatelstvo Nauka.
Youssefzadeh, Ameneh, comp. 1998. Iran: bardes du Khorassan. Compact disc, Paris: OCORA C
560136.
Z
eran ska-Kominek, Sl awomira with Arnold Lebeuf. 1997. The tale of Crazy Harman: The musician
and the concept of music in the Turkmen epic tale, Harman Dali . Warsaw: Academic Publications
DIALOG.
STEPHEN BLUM
Music Program, CUNY Graduate Center
City University of New York, USA
SBlum@gc.cuny.edu
Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe
MARTIN STOKES and PHILIP V. BOHLMAN (eds)
Lanham, MD, and Oxford, The Scarecrow Press, 2003
Growing up in Belfast in the 1960s and 1970s, I was well aware of the power of the
word Celtic as a marker of identity and space. But Celtic was generally pronounced
with a soft C rather than a hard one, and signified the Glasgow football team rather
than the supposed shared ethnic and cultural characteristics of peoples from the
western fringes of Europe. If you were a Protestant you would have been likely to have
supported Rangers, and if a Catholic, Celtic. A scarf or other favour for the relevant
Scottish football team was then (as now) as potent a signifier of ones religious,
political (and, for some, ethnic) affiliations as any imaginable. The term Gaelic
tended to be more heavily loaded than Celtic for kids on the Oldpark Road at that
time. Rather than language, it usually implied the sports of Gaelic football and
hurling: in particular, if you carried a cricket bat, you marked yourself out as a
Protestant and if hurling stick, a Catholic.
290 Reviews
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In the earlier years of the 20th century traditional music was perhaps less
politicized than it has since become. In front of me as I write lies a newspaper cutting
from 1935 which identifies James Perry from Bridgend, near Ballymena, as the first-
prize winner in the competition for Country Fiddlers (Senior Class) at Larne Musical
Festival of that year. James was my uncles father-in-law, and was a fiddler whose
repertoire included many of the same dance tunes and airs played by contemporary
traditional Irish performers. And yet he was a Protestant, who happily played such
music in Orange Halls as well as the more usual venues / and taught the fifers in the
Orange band. For many present-day Ulster Protestants, however, much of the music
he played is no longer seen as their music but representative of a Catholic,
nationalist Gaelic identity.
Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlmans Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe is
particularly welcome in that it offers a critical interrogation of the role of music in the
construction of contemporary Celticism. Stokes and Bohlmans excellent and densely
argued introduction eloquently sets up the problematic, explaining their choice of
Celtic rather than Gaelic both in terms of the breadth of perspective this offers
and in a more abstract sense, through the notion of continuity, which results from
what Malcolm Chapman describes as a particular kind of culture-meeting / a
meeting between a self-consciously civilising, powerful, centralising culture, which
produces written records, and a much less powerful culture which leaves no or few
written records. The continuity in the characteristics of this culture-meeting gives us
continuity in the Celts (Chapman 1992, 3). As the editors note, this approach
has the distinct advantage of situating us firmly in a world of structured and
structuring relativities, in which centers and peripheries are not separate social
and cultural facts, whose violent coming together is to be understood not simply as
a collision of abstracted political and cultural entities driven together by
colonialism, or nation-states formation, but interwoven and mutually constituting
processes. Celtic meanings can thus never be reduced to matters of ethnic
property and aboriginal meaning, or to the simple functionalism of domination or
subversion, hegemony, or counterhegemony. (p. 3)
The rift between Celtic and Gaelic imaginaries, the former framed by a secular,
modernist internationalism, the latter by a localized and religiously phrased
nationalism, was at least partly driven by notions of realism. Whereas the collectors
Petrie and Bunting, both Protestants, have sometimes been rejected by nationalist
ideologues for their inability to come to terms with the real, the expatriate Captain
Francis ONeill, Chief of Police of Chicago, who left Ireland as a teenager, has been
enshrined as a guardian of the true tradition. This view is well illustrated by Ciaran
Carsons (2002) review of my own edition of The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music
of Ireland where he is able, without irony it seems, to note that ONeill was wholly
within the tradition, Petrie came from without (Carson 2002, 49). Despite the fact
that ONeill himself regarded Petries collection with great enthusiasm, describing it
as singularly interesting and invaluable. . .the great majority of which but for his
instinctive care would have been buried in oblivion (ONeill 1973, 144), Carson
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remarks that very few of Petries melodies sound like traditional melodies (Carson
2002, 48).
Stokes and Bohlman pursue three main tacks in the rest of their introduction.
In a section subtitled Praising the worlds edges they move from festivals as sites of
pan-Celtic exchange and ceremonial, to the trope of pilgrimage, in the context of
New Age spirituality, post-Cold War revivalism, and a mass-mediated postmodern
syncretic multiculturalism. The second tack, Looking West, begins by exploring the
interactions, both implicit and explicit, between Celtic musicians and, in particular,
African-American expressive forms. Although African-American music has had an
undoubted influence on traditional Irish music, anyone who has sat in a rural bar or
cafe in any part of Ireland, North or South, nationalist or unionist, will have noted
that the pervasive musical form, along with contemporary rock and pop, is country
and western. Thus, as the authors note, it is white, rather than black, America that
has provided the most consequential point of connection between Celtic and new
worlds (p. 14). In the final section, the issue of Celticism and commerce is
addressed. Starting with the merchandising of Celtic-inspired arts and crafts at the
end of the 19th century, Stokes and Bohlman move to the contemporary marketing
phenomenon of groups such as The Chieftains and Altan. While noting the
complexity of the marketplace, they also observe both the absence of a unitary
Celtic musical vision and the enormous diversity of musical artefacts that flourish
under the moniker of Celticism. This takes us back by a commodius vicus of
recirculation to Captain Francis ONeill, whose Music of Ireland was, as the authors
assert, a mass publishing phenomenon. ONeills collection can be seen, they suggest,
not simply as a scholarly response to what has been perceived as the crypto-colonial
efforts of the Victorian collectors, but also as a work coming under the direct
influence of the New Worlds rationalism, zoning, monumentalism, and modernist
appeal to scientific disinterest, starkly embodied in the urban design of ONeills
adopted city, Chicago (p. 18).
The editors identify three primary strands in the ten subsequent chapters: the
circulation of the Celtic imaginary across Europe, the location of the Celtic within
global cultural flows and national and regional responses on the part of
administrators, educationalists, and political activists. . .to a transnational phenom-
enon (p. 2).
The Circulation of the Celtic Imaginary across Europe
Caroline Bithells Shared imaginations: Celtic and Corsican encounters in the
soundscape of the soul is by far the longest chapter in the book at 46 pages. It begins
by setting into context resonances and relationships between Corsica and the Celtic
regions. Corsicans, like Celts, have long been stereotyped as heavy-drinking and wild
barbarians. The megaliths on their island, once attributed to Celtic builders, have
more recently been assumed to have been constructed by settlers from Asia Minor.
Nevertheless, as Bithell notes, there remain strong imagined connections with the
292 Reviews
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Celtic world, whether through the cult of the dead, Scottish writers (especially James
Boswell) who visited and wrote about the island, or in terms of the shared cultural
experiences of a minority within a state which is regarded as oppressive.
In the second half of her chapter, Bithell moves to the specifics of musical practice
in Corsica, and in particular the dichotomy between urban and rural song, and the
attempt to revitalize earlier practices. She remarks on a current interest in Oriental
musics that is part of the process of discovering the deep roots of the Corsican vocal
tradition (p. 50), a musical tradition that (like western Irish sean nos and Scottish
Gaelic psalmody from the Island of Lewis, I would suggest) involves a rhythmically
free melismatic approach and a degree of modal flexibility.
Bithell addresses the performance of identity towards the end of her chapter and
notes that the traditional music of the Corsican villages was still practiced in direct
continuity with the past (p. 61) rather than being a reinvention or revival of an
earlier moribund style. Outside the urban folk groups there has been no generalized
attempt to create or employ national costume or a specifically Corsican image, and,
although there is contact with Celtic style music, there is a desire to retain the
traditional culture of the island.
Graeme Smiths Celtic Australia: bush bands, Irish music, folk music and the new
nationalism turns the focus to Australia with a consideration of the phenomenon of
the folk-rock bush band style and the employment of the didjeridu in Irish traditional
dance music. Smith notes that:
in both these cases, Irish music has been a potent symbolic resource within the
contemporary discourses of a settler nationalism. In the first, it contributed to the
imagination of a distinctive Australian national character and type. In the second,
in a political climate full of doubts about the unitary basis of settler national
identity, Irish music, along with its national and historical references, moved
towards a protean Celticity, that allowed settler Australians to place themselves
both in relation to the experiences of postwar non-British migration and to
indigenous political claims. (pp. 73/4)
It would have been interesting here to have had a little more information about the
construction of Irishness in Australia, especially with regard to the extent to which
Ulster Protestant immigrants and their descendants regarded themselves as Irish and
actively contributed to this national character and type (OFarrell 1986, 101).
According to Patrick OFarrell, the Ulster Protestant immigrant community in
Australia fluctuated between 10 and 20% of the Irish total. I note that the 19th-
century Australian poet Victor Daley offered an idealistic vision of unity between
Catholic and Protestant expatriate Irish in his poem The Glorious Twelfth at
Jindabye. But the extent to which this was achieved and Protestants have been
absorbed into a more homogeneous Irishness is not clear to me.
This theme is to some extent considered by Johanne Devlin Trew in Diasporic
legacies: place, politics, and music among the Ottawa Valley Irish. Largely
ethnographic in nature, the chapter considers issues of Irish emigration to Canada
(according to Trew, there was a two-to-one ratio of Protestant to Catholic
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immigrants), homeland and diaspora, the role of the Orange Order in Canada, and
performance of traditional Irish music, with a brief survey of Ottawa Valley style. She
describes the good valley fiddlers as musical chameleons / appropriate, perhaps,
for a region which is marked by compound identities.
The Location of the Celtic within Global Cultural Flows
In Jerry Caddens Policing tradition: Scottish pipe band composition and the role of
the composer we move to the fine detail of the competitive world of pipe music.
Although the Celtic element is not particularly prominent, and in some ways this
chapter stands apart from the rest of the book, there is much useful information
about this rather arcane world (analogous to the field of brass band competitions),
which by and large crosses religious and political boundaries in Scotland, Ireland and
among the diasporic communities.
Scott Reisss Tradition and imaginary: Irish traditional music and the Celtic
phenomenon offers a sensitive contextualization of Irish music, and a theorization
of Celtic music that draws on Arjun Appadurais familiar model of scapes.
According to Reiss, playing traditional music in Ireland defines a certain
construction of Irishness. It enacts a culture of orality, an awareness of heritage
and lineage, and an aesthetic of spontaneous creativity (p. 148). Reisss examination
of the debate between tradition and innovation leads to a consideration of the
infamous 1996 Crosbhealach an Cheoil (The Crossroads Conference) which was the
locus of an intense discussion between the composer and educationalist M chea l O
Su illeabha in (a supporter of innovation) and the television producer Tony

MacMahon (who spoke in favour of tradition).
Whereas Irish music for Reiss exists as part of a social community (and at times I
feel he perhaps adopts a rather too idealistic view of the place of traditional music in
Irish life), Celtic music has no existence outside its commodity form and the
community in which [it] resides is the virtual community (p. 158). Appadurais five
scapes, Reiss suggests, offer a matrix through which Celtic music can be located. At
the end of his chapter, he optimistically offers the inclusive view that perhaps
musicians can participate in both traditional and virtual communities.
Dai Griffiths Home is living like a man on the run: John Cales Welsh Atlantic
provides a buffer zone between Reisss and Fintan Vallelys takes on the tradition/
innovation debate in Irish music, and offers a detailed and persuasive study of the
ways that Cale, the viola playing rocker from South Wales, reflects his Welsh origins
and, more importantly, challenges any too-settled formation of what it is to be
Welsh in the late twentieth century (p. 173).
The Apollos of shamrockery: traditional music in the modern age by Fintan
Vallely, a highly entertaining and at times splenetic piece, takes up where Reiss left off,
and with a vengeance. Vallely diagnoses Irish traditional musics popularity as one of
its major problems: if so-called world music, as mediated by bands such as the Afro-
Celt Sound System (whose stage show he describes as a visual reconstruction of the
294 Reviews
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Victorian pyramid, the power balance of colonialism (p. 206)), begins to dictate the
content. . .then there may be serious concern for all Traditional [sic] musics that their
integrity is threatened, their meanings suppressed (p. 211).
National and Regional Responses on the Part of Administrators, Educationalists,
and Political Activists. . .to a Transnational Phenomenon
Desi Wilkinson, like Fintan Vallely, is a well-known traditional flute player from the
North of Ireland. I write the North of Ireland, but I could equally have written
Northern Ireland, Ulster and the Six Counties among others. Each has a different
resonance well understood by those who come from the area, but often opaque to
those from elsewhere in the world. To understand any culture and its intra-cultural
semantics more than superficially demands close involvement with it, and
Wilkinsons Celtitude, professionalism, and the Fest Noz in traditional music in
Brittany is clearly the result of an intimate interaction with the music and society of
the region by the author. Of particular interest in this chapter is the very detailed and
systematic discussion of the effective state subsidy of performers through the syste`me
dintermittent du spectacle or unemployment benefit scheme for irregulars of the
entertainment industry as Wilkinson gives its translation.
The penultimate chapter, You cannae take your music stand into a pub: a
conversation with Stan Reeves about traditional music education in Scotland by
Peter Symon demonstrates the complexity of the interactions between music,
cultural heritage and national identity in Edinburgh (p. 258). Stan Reeves is the
supervisor of the Adult Learning Project Association, a self-governing association of
students, of which the Scots Music Group has had an extraordinary success in
developing an interest in the traditional music of Scotland. As well as allowing
people to feel connected to a tradition, it is about fun and enjoyment, and this aspect
of amateurism and community involvement would seem to offer a means by
which the commodification of Celtic, or Scottish, or Irish music may by
circumvented.
With Timothy Taylors excellent, short but well-focused final chapter, Afterword:
Gaelicer than thou we return to issues of identity, from the perspective of an Irish-
American whose Irishness was challenged while he was an exchange student at
Queens University Belfast, because his ancestry was Protestant rather than Catholic.
In the recent memoir Protestant Boy by the eminent academic psychologist Geoffrey
Beattie (who came from the working-class Protestant enclave of Ligoniel in North
Belfast), he notes how, as a student in Cambridge, his ethnicity was equally challenged
by a student from Dublin he shared a room with in the psychology department. It
seems the Dublin man remarked that youre not even Irish. . .youre just a wee
Protestant from the North (Beattie 2004, 11). And from my own observations, albeit
anecdotal, for many Protestants from Northern Ireland, filling in ones nationality
in a visitors book can be a traumatic issue / British, Northern Irish, Ulster and,
more recently, Ulster-Scots are all possible, but few would unambiguously put
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Irish. Recent census returns suggest that the island of Ireland has a population of
some 5.6 million people, of which around 1.5 million class themselves as non-
Catholic. This implies that more than a quarter of the population of the island would
fail the test of nationality put to Taylor / a curious situation, and one which should
encourage us to question precisely what we mean when we use terms such as
Irishness.
In Taylors analysis of the relationship between identity, commodification and
consumption he notes that race and ethnicity have become something that
Americans can now consume (p. 278), albeit a thoroughgoing, theoretically
sophisticated treatment of music as a commodity has yet to be written (p. 279).
Music, Celtic or otherwise, need not, Taylor asserts, become a commodity, and can, in
fact, become removed from the arena of exchange. At the end of the day, what
matters to Taylor is not whether commodification per se is good or bad, but the uses
to which people put the commodified musics. They can, he suggests, permit
consumers to find a moment of stability in the otherwise fragmenting nature
of todays hustle bustle world, to find an identity, however temporarily, that offers a
sense of self rooted in both place and community marked by ethnicity or race
(p. 282).
Overall, this is an impressive and thought-provoking collection of essays which is
able to accommodate a constructive, if at times critical, dialogue between its authors.
It is to be strongly recommended for its intelligence and breadth of coverage.
Adapting Dai Griffiths remarks about John Cale, I hope it helps to challenge any too-
settled formation of what Celtic music is in the early 21st century.
References
Beattie, Geoffrey. 2004. Protestant boy. London: Granta.
Carson, Ciaran. 2002. In the ear of the beholder. The Dublin Review 44: 38/51.
Chapman, Malcolm. 1992. The Celts: The construction of a myth. New York: St Martins Press.
Cooper, David, ed. 2002. The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland. Cork: Cork University
Press.
OFarrell, Patrick. 1986. The Irish in Australia. Kensington: New South Wales University Press.
ONeill, Francis. 1973. Irish music and musicians with numerous dissertations on related subjects .
Repr. Darby: Norwood.
DAVID COOPER
School of Music, University of Leeds, UK
d.g.cooper@leeds.ac.uk
Ilmatars Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization and the Changing Soundscapes
of Finnish Folk Music
TINA K. RAMNARINE
Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2003
xxii / 262 pp. ISBN 0-226-70402-5 (cloth), 0-226-70403-3 (paper).
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I have, no doubt, a romantic view of Finland. I have never visited the country and
know only a little about it. What I have are impressions. These are formed from a
little familiarity with the Finnish school of folklorists with their diffusionist
methods, an image of the kantele, a sort of zither-harp that is the national
instrument, a familiarity with some of the works of Sibelius and images of northern
forests. I sometimes entertain people by stating (and probably overstating) that the
national dance of Finland is the tango. I have read the Kalevala, the Finnish national
epic constructed (I almost wrote fabricated) in the 19th century by Elias Lonnrot.
There is, what I believe to be, a very good translation by Keith Bosley, and I thank the
BBC World Service for introducing me to it.
All of these elements of my ideas of Finnishness are mentioned in Ramnarines
thoughtful and interesting book that broadened and deepened my knowledge of the
land and its changing culture. The Kalevala features strongly in Finnish conscious-
ness and it has been widely claimed that it is the basis of Finnish nationalism. The
Kalevala is a typically episodic epic: creation stories, quests, impossible tasks, magic
and music (the last two often linked) all feature as its stories unfold. Ramnarines
book starts and ends with quotations about music from the Kalevala.
I have another piece of personal debris to mention before I consider the book more
closely. I am writing this review in July 2004. In a couple of months I shall move to a
new job at the University of Newcastle to work on Englands only large-scale
undergraduate course on folk and traditional music. The Finns were there before us
and aspects of folk music are taught at all levels of the Finnish education system. In
1983, The Sibelius Academy set up a Department of Folk Music, which grew out of
teaching in the area that had been conducted at the academy previously. Thus what
the book had to say about the teaching of folk music in a formal academic setting
was of great personal interest to me as well as being of more general concern. Clearly,
the transmission of folk music in different contexts, and the way those different forms
of transmissions alter the music itself, is of great interest.
Ramnarines book is an ethnographic study based on fieldwork conducted mostly
in the early 1990s. It joins and contributes to a growing body of ethnomusicological
work on the phenomenon of revivalism. It starts by exploring theoretical and
historical issues and it is here that the Kalevala features strongly. In a sense, the
importance of the Kalevala in Finland, constructed as it was from the texts of
traditional songs, created a favourable cultural space for institutional support for the
folk music revival. This it did in spite of the seemingly obligatory response from the
guardians of the high arts who articulated the view that light music had no place
within an institution that bore the name of Sibelius (p. 69).
The effects of institutionalizing the teaching of musics that were once part of a
vernacular milieu with informal methods of learning are interesting to contemplate.
Ramnarine gives some very interesting ethnographic material on teaching sessions.
She found that, in spite of some emphasis on aural learning, the teaching and
transmission of folk music through notation was common (p. 72). The use of
recording, although dependent on modern technology, is like the use of notation in
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that it tends to diminish variation and improvisation and encourage standardization
in performance. This finding, I am sure, would hold true for folk music revivalism in
a number of countries and contexts but it is interesting that there is such a use of
notation and recording in this educational context, as one can imagine other
pedagogical approaches.
Folk music in the modern world is recontextualized music. However hard one
might try for an authentic performance (either pastiche or in a prescribed idiom),
the contexts of performance are different and therefore the music and its range of
meanings are different before any other of the numerous variables are considered.
The Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy actively encourages innovation
and such a view seems to be generally supported by revivalists. The music that
revivalists produce is significantly called new folk music. Exotic elements are
incorporated into the performance of traditional material and Ramnarine stresses
that musicians make creative choices.
The element of change is vital, for this is what makes folk music a living tradition
even if these kinds of departures compromise a folk musics authenticity. Folk
music finds new methods of transmission (organized educational programmes and
projects, notated sources, and commercial recordings), new performance contexts
(festivals, streets, concert halls, schools and music academies) and new interpreta-
tions, in order to remain relevant to people. (p. 214)
One thing that does not come through clearly in the book is the extent to which
the degree of innovation is approved or disapproved of by different factions within
the revival, or the extent to which there is factionalism within a dynamic revival
movement. One gets the impression from Ramnarines writing that there is a fair
degree of consensus within the Finnish folk music revival. Speaking from my UK
experience, there are decided camps within the folk music revival and these are
often ill at ease with each other and hold rather different values. Of recent years in the
UK, there seems to have been a reticence about engaging in too much open debate,
but the British revival is an odd and deeply fractured coalition. I would be surprised if
such cultural politics was not at play within the Finnish revival although I can
understand the ethnographers difficulty in discovering and exposing such tensions /
something that has not been adequately done by recent writers on the UK revival. As I
write this, I realize I am writing from personal experience and this is an area that is
not easily unearthed by even the best ethnographers.
Ramnarine is very interested in the ways performers of new folk music actively
seek out and learn about exotic musics, sometimes incorporating elements from
these musics within their own performances. At the same time, they are able to
maintain that their music is Finnish and serves as a marker of national identity. This
balancing act is achieved by a view that accommodates both continuity and change as
important, a sort of development through negotiation of somewhat conflicting
pressures and tensions.
As well as negotiating the tensions of past, present and future, Finnish new folk
musicians also deal with issues relating to the local and the global. In terms of locality,
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it is almost as if certain places are hallowed sites for Finnish music; for example, the
village of Kaustinen, which has an important traditional music history reinforced by
its ongoing festival, and the region of Karelia where much of the material that formed
the Kalevala was collected. Yet, alongside this heightened sense of place, Finnish
musicians perform on a world stage and participate in a global musical economy in a
particular niche within that bizarre marketing phenomenon, world music. They
also play alongside musicians whose musical inheritance comes from other
continents. They incorporate exotic musical elements within their performances
and, in the wonderful case of the tango, take over a whole idiom from another part of
the world and make it their own. (It must be said, the growth in popularity of the
tango in Finland pre-dates the folk revival, but revivalists seem happy to perform
tangos as part of Finnish tradition.)
There are parts of the book where I felt I would like to know more than Ramnarine
gives. Other than a rather non-specific nationalism there is little about politics in
the book. All the folk revivals I have learned about have had overt political aspects,
even if the politics are internally contested. Being based solidly on fieldwork and a
particular time, and in spite of the changing soundscapes of the title, the study
tends towards the synchronic (although it does give a good historical background to
the period of study). I would have liked to know something about the development of
the revival in the decade or so since the fieldwork was completed. Because of the
synchronic nature of the work, the study contributes little to an understanding of the
temporal nature of revivals and their dynamics over time. Although there is
recognition of the world music scene, there is much less about folk revivalism in
many other developed countries as a contemporaneous cultural phenomenon.
Finally, I get little sense of how folk music fits within the wider world of musical
life in Finland; is it more central or as marginal as it is in the UK?
Maybe these points are the results of personal curiosities and are in any case minor
when judged against the interest and value of the book as a whole. Ramnarine has
made a significant contribution to the literature on folk music in the modern world
and I commend it to readers.
VIC GAMMON
School of Arts and Cultures, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Vic.Gammon@newcastle.ac.uk
The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction
MARTIN CLAYTON, TREVOR HERBERT and RICHARD MIDDLETON (eds)
New York and London, Routledge, 2003
384pp., ISBN 0-415-93844-9 (hbk), ISBN 0-415-93845-7 (pbk)
I hope the reader will permit a short preamble before I turn my attention to the above
book. I was brought up and trained in the former USSR where one assumes that the
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State system is in general synonymous with a culture system. As a newcomer to
the UK, it was difficult for me to accept that industry and capitalism were contingent
in the production of culture. While adapting to a completely different life in the
West, I often asked myself the question: what could Westerners learn about our
music, living as they do in completely different states and circumstances? From my
own experiences of culture shock and fieldwork in the UK I can sympathise.
How could they possibly perceive the true meaning of music performed in an
environment very different from the one familiar to them? How could they possibly
encounter, without getting lost, for example, the bundle of definitions such as
traditional, classical, folk, epic that marked out convergent and divergent
trends within related Central Asian music cultures, those which I had come to know
extremely well?
For instance, in the USSR we never had a definition of Music per se, but rather of
the concept of Musical Culture. So we never used the terms Uzbek Music or
Kazakh music, but rather Uzbek or Kazakh musical culture. At the same time
so called culture was dictated by the State Communist Party slogan as national in
form and socialistic in essence. Representing that part of the world, where the
amalgam of musical culture/State reigned, was a strong belief that the incidence of
such a union applied to any other place in the world. I remember many situations in
which the strong policy of state censorship in music played the dominant role. For
example, I recall the times when for three days and nights the State TV and radio
broadcast the widest ever range of classical music heard via the media. The meaning
we could take from the music was overshadowed and limited by one thing: the
Empires leader had died! That storm of Western/Russian music was the means by
which the State ushered in the winds of political change for a new leader. Any official
celebrations, regardless of whether they were devoted to the Great Revolution
anniversary, Workers Day, or the Second World War victory celebrations, were
scrupulously pre-arranged. A certain amount of musical performance broadcasting
time was allocated to specific Soviet republics, according to their significance and
weight in the countrys political life. In these rankings, Uzbekistan, for instance,
occupied fourth place amongst the fifteen republics. In other words the hidden and
illusive context of performance was much more important than its text, which could
be relatively easily understood even by outsiders. More importantly, the system for
understanding music was inextricably related to a Soviet worldview. I spent seven
years in a musical school, four further years in a musical college, five years in a State
Conservatoire and finally four more years for postgraduate studies, receiving an
education that I believed was solid and robust. This was an education where / like
the six volumes of the Musical Encyclopaedia (our main reference book) / every
notion had a certain and definite place in the mind of my educators. In this very local
music education system, ideas about music that were not in accordance with State
ideas about music were assigned to the section called bourgeois concepts of music
and were subject to fierce and vehement criticism.
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However, the book which I am reviewing here is different though no less polemical.
For me, having read this book, it is as if an unknown cataclysm had shaken the
Encyclopaedia and the bits and pieces of the collective knowledge of that work had
fallen apart. Perhaps that encyclopaedia was now turned into a newspaper, where
Classic FM and Bjork, the Spice Girls and Adorno, African rituals and the global
musical market found themselves on the same surface. My first impression of The
Cultural Study of Music is that, though the authors of the articles are certain in their
knowledge of the separate themes, the overall thread which unites them is not
immediately clear. The book is more about the search for a new paradigm and is
very much a part and in tune with the times we live in. After all, The times are out of
joint as Hamlet said!
In the last two decades the world has been experiencing a turbulent transforma-
tion. This has been marked, in particular, by the collapse of the Soviet Union,
German unification, enlargement of the European Union, mass migrations of people
from the east and south to the west and north, a series of wars and so on. It is not
surprising that people are finding themselves not only face to face with the challenge
of daily survival living life on a ledge but also of holding on to or finding a new sense
of cultural identity in a world increasingly affected by global cultural flows. Cultural
life in many places has reflected global or inter-regional changes yet these changes
have precipitated and inspired the emergence of new trends in art and music. Often,
these trends show a local response where fresh and often challenging notions are
worked into a well-established sense of an ethnic and musical identity.
In the previous bi-polar communist-capitalist world, while living in the ex-Soviet
Union and absorbing the binaries of the world through the Russian/non-Russian,
Soviet/ethnic, official/underground, I used to think that the world consisted of black
and white alternatives. The same I believed was very much the case in the UK and
North America. But what is presented within The Cultural Study of Music is, in a way,
a new multi-coloured cultural space. To study this new and emerging world in depth
you need a guide and the book provides an introduction to the new ways forward,
preparing the grounds for further research.
The aim of the book is clearly defined in the introduction by Richard Middleton as
the search for a new paradigm in cultural musicology. Indeed, there are many
aspects that need to be taken into consideration in contemporary cultural study.
While the definition of ethnicity is changing (see, for example, Hutchinson and
Smith 1996) and the relationship between society, the individual and art is switching
from one extreme to another, the point of study of music in society needs to be
captured and encapsulated in a 21st-century paradigm. Though the authors define
the aim modestly, stating that the book is about the changing world of music and the
emergence of new trends, which are not to be taken to justify the announcement of
any new paradigm, but to testify to the process of reconfiguration(pp. 1/2).
To my mind, taking its lead from the work of John Blacking, in particular, the
exploration and concept of the role of music in society is the primary concern in
ethnomusicology. So it is here. But what do we mean by society today? According
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to the Dictionary of Anthropology (Barfield 1997, 436), society refers to the totality
of social relations among men and women in their various statuses and roles within a
given geographical area or among humankind at large. As the winds of change have
brought to life a large variety of social, cultural, ethnic and also musical
metamorphoses, we need to take another critical look at these points and the book
does just that.
In his article Globalisation and the politics of world music, Martin Stokes notes
that A world in which ideas, cultures and senses of identity were woven snugly and
securely into place by the nation-state was unravelling. Previously unimaginable
connections were possible, thanks to the increasingly uninhibited circulation of
people, ideas, and things (p. 297). Furthermore, Stokes notes that The emergence
of hyphenated identities (Turkish-German, British-Asian, and so forth) has been
hailed as a force undermining the oppressive identity-producing apparatus of the
nation-state, and putting into play new, inclusive, and open-ended notions of
belonging (p. 305). He goes on to note that [a]s globalisation progresses the
capacity of the nation-state to organize political, economic, and cultural experience is
held to diminish (ibid).
The meaning of Diaspora has also changed, according to Mark Slobin in his
article The destiny of Diaspora in ethnomusicology. In the 1970s, Slobin notes,
the word Diaspora spilled over its traditional boundaries as designator of the far-
flung fate of the small number of groups / principally the Jews / outside their
homeland(p. 284). But today Diaspora does not just mean a people away from its
homeland. The meaning of it goes beyond demographics revealing a consciousness
of separation, a gap, disjuncture(p. 288). Taking Klezmer music as an example, Mark
Slobin claims that music itself becomes a kind of homeland to the musicians
compounded sense of Diaspora (p. 290).
Martin Claytons article Comparing music, comparing musicology tackles the
problem of analytical methodology. Pop singer Bjorks performance at the Royal
Opera House in London made the author realize that what he considers important
in the event could not be adequately expressed in words (p. 58). Bringing another
example from his long-term work on North Indian music, Clayton demonstrates
how, from the very beginning, he was experiencing difficulty trying to stick together
two sets of terms and concepts in British and Indian music. Comparing the Indian
and Western rhythmic organizations / the study in which he unexpectedly became
involved / Clayton found out that comparison is inevitable in musicology(p. 66).
However, he concludes, in future research what we might look for is a kind of
metatheor y that is able to take into account the contingency of the very idea of the
musical structure (p. 66).
I can sympathize with Martin Claytons dilemma. I remember myself how once,
when I witnessed the process of recording in an Uzbek radio station studio, a visiting
Western ethnomusicologist interfered, pushing musicians to sing a masterpiece
from the score. He was not aware that the musicians considered such an act a
corruption of the oral nature of the Uzbek music. This made me think that
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sometimes you have to look at the familiar things with outsiders eyes, then in the
situation of distancing yourself from the daily, familiar reality, you can all of a sudden
see what was obvious and, in effect, hidden.
Studying a new culture, a culture of others, one must take into account that it
puts the scholar in a highly responsible position. In this respect, [n]o scholar has
had more impact on ethnomusicological representations of people making music
during the last quarter century than the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (p. 171),
argues Jeff Todd Titon in his Textual analysis or thick description? Drawing the line
between musicologists and ethnomusicologists, Jeff Todd Titon specifies: whereas
traditional musicologists regard culture in the Arnoldian sense of getting to
know. . .the best which has been thought and said, we regard culture in the
anthropological sense as the learned inheritance that makes one peoples way of
thinking and doing different from anothers (p. 172). Titon points out that Geertzs
thick description entirely reconfigured the project of cultural anthropology. The
cultural study of music requires one to become far more active as a participant-
observer. It encourages the student of music to be not simply a spectator looking over
an ethnographic shoulder but also an ethnomusicologist drawing interpretive
conclusions(p. 180).
John Shepherd reveals in his Music and social categories that, like many of us, he
studied music in a very conventional way, focusing on the music itself as if it lay
beyond the influence of social and cultural forces. Popular music at that time was
seen as inferior to classical music and should not therefore be included in the
curriculum (p. 70). Yet Shepherd reminds us that [Elvis] Presley was able to
identify intuitively with many of the cultural contradictions evident in the United
States. . .and give them musical expression (p. 78). Following Berger and Luckmann
in stating that reality is a social construct, Shepherd adds that music of any kind is
not something given that we receive and perceive neutrally, but something that is
constructed by people acting together (p. 72). He follows with the question: to
what extend do musical structures and practises reflect, model or resonate with the
identities, experiences or structural positions of social classes, and gendered and
ethnic groups?(p. 69). Shepherd predicts a new emergent paradigm for the cultural
study of music (p. 71).
Philip Bohlman notes that the essence of a universal culture was born by music
(p. 47) and that music has been a resource that fired the engines of modernity. The
author wonders why, therefore, the historiography of Western Art music that includes
historical musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology and popular music studies
clings to the counterintuitive assumption that music and culture are separate?
Bohlmans idea of the music and culture relationship is expounded further under
four headings: Colonial Encounter, Racism, Nationalism, and Eschatology. He
argues that historically music represented culture in two ways, as a form of
expression common to humanity, and as one of the most extreme manifestations of
difference (p. 47). He concludes that music and culture relate to each other, even
that one is inseparable from the other (p. 55).
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Musical instruments should be a feature of the cultural study of music in society,
argues Kevin Dawe, because as sound producing devices. . .they are firmly embedded
in local music cultures worldwide (p. 274). He notes that the forces that move
musical instruments around the globe are tied to multifarious systems for social,
cultural, economic and political exchange, their value and meaning negotiated and
contested in a variety of cultural arenas (ibid.). He goes on to say that What I call
world music instruments are those instruments caught up in the transitional
movement of consumer goods, the international trade in ethnic crafts, global
tourism, and a multimillion dollar music business and musical instrument
manufacturing industry. From my own experience, I know that the dutar (long-
necked plucked lute) probably goes back to the beginning of the millennium. Yet
today this instrument from Central Asia bears an up-to date image. For example,
Turkmen musicians play an amplified dutar, putting a pick-up inside the instrument
to make it sound louder, modelling their customized dutar on the electric guitar.
Kevin Dawe notes too that musical instruments are culture-specific objects and,
along with study of physics, wood science and biological systematics (p. 275), we
need to widen our understanding of their cultural and social origins, and thus
their meaning. He insists that musical instruments can provide unique insights into
the body-machine interface in their development, construction, and the ways in
which they are played (p. 275). Taking the lyra (a three-stringed upright bowed lute)
from the island of Crete as an example, he provides a rich insight into the
instruments role and meaning in Greek culture where even today there is an
extensive folklore that grounds the instrument in a world of pastoralists and
mountain villages up where the air is pure and where Zeus was born (p. 279).
Regarding its origin he notes that The pear shaped, fiddle like features of the lyra
suggest both Western and Eastern influences / it could be Turkish or Venitian (p.
279). In terms of gender features he notes that the lyra is still regarded as
quintessentially a mans instrument with its body, neck, eyes, heart and soul having
special symbolic resonance and technical significance (ibid). He concludes that
[t]he lyra is not only emblematic of cultural difference in Crete, setting it apart from
the outside world, it is also engendered, empowered, and is the body politic finely
tuned (p. 280).
Trevor Herbert in his Social history and music history offers a brilliant account
of the history of the creation of Valve bands in Victorian Britain where social
and economic factors initiated one of the most momentous changes in the life of
brass instruments in the West. Herbert asks us to consider the question: Should
this narrative be read as music history or as a social history? Live performance
on musical instruments used to be, and still is for many cultures, the only form
of musical experience. Today the situation has changed with the appearance of a
large variety of recorded music. Love is not listening to loud music suggest
London undergrounds educational posters, resonating in tune with Simon Friths
chapter in which he notes that recorded music is played everywhere today and is
the focus of our attention. Indeed, he notes that according to medical research,
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recorded music (piped or canned) raises the blood pressure and depresses
the immune system. Frith points out that the issue of prohibiting the broadcast
of recorded music in certain public places was the subject of discussion in the
House of Commons on 15 March 2000. On the subject of musical pollution
Simon Frith thinks of different forms of assaulting by music that one can meet
everywhere. In the past music was used in games and for dancing; to organize work
and war; in ceremonies and rituals; to mark the moments of birth, marriage, and
death; to celebrate harvest and coronation; and to articulate religious believes and
traditional practices. People might have enjoyed music individually, but its purpose
was not to make them feel good (p. 980). Frith believes that music is now used to
mark private territory that it can also invade; it is because music has become so
deeply implicated in peoples personas that it can be misused; and it is because music
is now so widely employed as an emotional tool that its misuse is genuinely
upsetting (p. 100).
With these profound insights and questions ringing in my ears I conclude that
The Cultural Study of Music is an extremely thought-provoking book featuring some
of the most respected names in Western ethnomusicology today. The book, like a
kaleidoscope, gives an amazingly rich overview of the current state of music studies
and the study of culture and music. I have only touched the surface of a broad-
ranging and challenging book. It has become apparent that music serves entirely
different purposes in different times for different societies. The gradual shift in the
meanings in and of ethnomusicology alternate with time. One of books advantages is
in its provision of a compilation of views from scholars in various fields, including
performing musicians. The contributors originate from a variety of different
countries and cultures (UK, USA, France, Canada, Africa), thus presenting a
multifaceted approach to the subject of music and its study. Apart from the names
already mentioned above there are other leading specialists in their own fields, such as
Nicholas Cook, Ian Cross, Eric Clarke, Ruth Finnegan, Kofi Agawu, Lucy Green,
Antoine Hennion, along with others who bring to debate their personal views
and valuable perspectives. The size of the book (twenty-six contributors) may
be a disadvantage. At the same time there is no duplication in the articles. The
diversity of the themes makes the book indispensable to students of ethnomusicology
and anthropology not only as a work of reference, but also as a good, thought-
provoking read.
This book reminds me of another famous book, which is called Vehi or
Landmarks. Several Russian philosophers contributed in 1909 to a compilation
of unconventional articles, which were simply about Russia. The world was shifting
at that time and the authors were rushing to come up with a paradigm to understand
it. After severe Bolshevik criticism the book was buried under the rubble of the
Great October revolution, but, like a genie in a bottle waiting to be set free, its
ideas gradually escaped and grew in strength. Now Landmarks is one of the must-
reads in Russian philosophy. The same / though without burial / I expect from The
Cultural Study of Music, which will surely help to plant the seeds of a new musicology.
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References
Barfield, Thomas. 1997. The dictionary of anthropology. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.
Blacking, John. How musical is man. 1973. Seattle, WA: Washington University Press.
Hutchinson, John, and Anthony D. Smith. 1996. Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Keldysh, Uryi, ed. 1973/82. Musicalnaya encyclopaedia (The Encyclopaedia of Music), 6 vols.
Moscow: Sovetskyi kompositor, Sovetskaya Enziklopedia.
Vehi (Landmark). 1909. Moscow.
RAZIA SULTANOVA
Department of Music, School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London, UK
razia.sultanova@soas.ac.uk
False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground
STEVEN TAYLOR
Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2004
345 pp., ISBN: 0-8195-6667-5 (hbk $70), 0-8195-6668-3 (pbk $24.95), including CD:
False Prophets, Invisible People.
If the seismic rumbles of punk were most noticeably felt between 1975 and 1977, the
years in which virtually all of the key recordings of this musical moment were
released, the earthquake that struck London and Manhattan, in particular, had been
building for almost a decade before that. Furthermore, the tremors that rippled from
the central eruption have really never settled. For a quarter of a century after that
furious burst of creative energy, the effects, the impact, of a brief revolution, have not
been shaken off.
Put shortly, the punk chronology stretches some way beyond the London club
called the Roxy and New Yorks famed Bowery bar CBGBs, both of which became key
geiger-counters of a sometimes chaotic experiment. In fact, we need to go back as far
as the garage music of the Standells or the Seeds from Americas mid-1960s, to the
Velvet Underground, Stooges and MC5 of the later 1960s to trace the antecedents of
what eventually burst forth. If we trace the line of history forward, the aftershock
embraces the no wave of New York, the new wave of Manchester, Liverpool and
California, the hardcore and straightedge scenes of Washington, through bands like
Joy Division, Wire, XTC and the Gang of Four in Britain, to Bad Brains, Black Flag,
NOFX and Green Day on the other side of the Atlantic, and considerably more
besides.
I think this is a useful preamble to a review of Steven Taylors readable and
idiosyncratic account of what it was to be an active American punk in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. For his book False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground
frames a drama that unfolds at a time when many of us may have assumed punk had
gone to the same genre cemetery that is now home to skiffle, beat groups and glam
rock. In fact, punk lives on in the hearts and minds of at least two generations since.
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If it is marginalized, returned to the underground whence it came, only occasionally
to re-surface on day-time radio or in the Top 40, the spirit of an uncompromising
time in rock n roll history survives in various outposts. That is, in Detroit or Leeds,
Berlin or Rome, in illegal squats and social ghettos, in independent record labels and
a network of back-street venues, where amplified noise and nostalgie de la boue tend
to go hand in hand.
Nor do I say that from first-hand experience. It is Taylor, a versatile guitarist who
was also the musical accompanist to the poet Allen Ginsberg for two decades, a Fugs
member since 1984 and now professor of writing at the renowned Naropa Institute in
Boulder, Colorado, who casts his astute eye over these frayed places, over these
spirited refugees who breathe punk with a commitment that is both enduring and
extraordinary. For five years Taylor was a member of a critically noted though
persistently uneconomic outfit called False Prophets. A lower Manhattan act, the
band had been going for some while before he was recruited as a stand-in guitarist
only to stay for several tours in North America and Europe. Taylor endured many
fights and disagreements, artistic and some pugilistic, stayed on through a small
number of highs and some emotionally draining lows, before the sheer exhausting
stress of running a life on creative dedication and political integrity but barely making
a dollar proved too much and the project crumbled.
What happened to punk after the filth and fury of Johnny Rottens Sex Pistols and
Joe Strummers garage band the Clash, the art and artistry of Television and Talking
Heads and the comic book capers of the Ramones, Blondie and the Damned, was that
the music became assimilated and diluted. The youthful spurt of pent-up aggression
was tamed by the industry. If you were too difficult to pigeon-hole / the Pistols,
Television / you split up. If you had commercial possibilities you signed long-term
deals with major labels, released double and triple LPs in the case of the Clash,
worked with Phil Spector in the Ramones case, or enjoyed number one singles that
grafted disco, reggae and rap onto the power pop sounds that exemplified Blondie.
But there was a determined rump that stuck fervently to the values of the punk
ethic / independence, no sell-out, adherence to a loosely drawn notion of individual
freedom laced with a febrile suspicion of establishment structures / and that never
went away. In Britain, Crass and the Anti-Nowhere League typified the cult; in the
US, the Dead Kennedys and Fugazi were examples. A little later, False Prophets were
part of that latter tradition and Taylors overview of what went on / a piece of
snapshot analysis at the rock face and mostly on the run / is valuable for that. His
story is part cultural studies, part autobiography and part journal. If it is fragmented
as a result, the fracture of theory and practice, bound by the writers own experiences
/ composing, playing, arguing, falling in love, facing up to contemporary terrors like
heroin and Aids, if at a slight distance / is far from ineffective. It is a metaphor for
the difficulties of bringing subcultural analysis, for instance, into the bear garden of
manic moshing and the graffiti-splattered cubicle of the venues toilet stall. And into
an arena where collectives committed to a version of anarcho-syndicalism come face
to face with the terrifying gutter fascism of Nazi thugs at the local rock keller. In this
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engaging and picaresque adventure there is the ongoing struggle to secure a record
deal and retain artistic control, the enervating rows about issues of political
correctness within the band and without, the parallels with earlier art radicals like
the Beats, the free jazz fraternity and the cinematic underground.
I hugely enjoyed Taylors personal and professional punk odyssey. All too few
books have so dispassionately attempted to outline, explain, divulge the realities of
living, breathing rocknroll musicianship: the blood, the toil, the sweat, the despair.
Punk has been characterized either, romantically, as a post-Situationist gesture, a slice
of minimalist agit-prop cranked up loud or as a mindless, moronic assault on the
craft and art of music-making. Taylor proves that it cannot be characterized so
simply: it can be both those things, political and petulant, but also inventive and
irreverent, ideological and infantile, creative and crude, prosaic and poetic.
Thankfully an articulate player/singer/poet/writer has had the energy and foresight
not only to face the white heat of the circuit but also to record its sometimes thrilling,
often grimy, but also mundane details, carefully and honestly.
Summarizing the de facto realities of this labour of love, Taylor explains:
False Prophets lived to tour. None of us ever received payment for gigs other than
in a touring context (and then only, and minimally, in Europe). All of the band
members had to work regular jobs. . . . On tour, the dream of becoming full-time
musicians is, for a period of weeks, realised. There isnt much money (only a
modest per diem of about 10 dollars a day, because gig fees are low, drives between
shows are long, and gasoline is expensive), but theres the life of a professional / all
one does is travel and perform. The tour is also important in what I call the bands
cycle of production because it is the link between records, where one sells the latest
record at gigs (a crucial source of cash) while selecting and perfecting the songs for
the next. (pp. 104/5)
From the itineraries to the budgets, from the detail of instrumental inventories to the
rider requests for quite basic vegetarian foods (all too regularly ignored), the account
is a revealing survey of the underbelly of rock practice.
Is this volume a work of ethnomusicology? Has the author visited a subculture now
sufficiently subterranean that he becomes the witness to a lost, or at least declining,
civilization? Can ethnomusicologists ever effectively work their own patch or have
they to experience the Other, an unfamiliar culture, to truly do their job well? Are
these revelations ethnography entangled with memoir, autobiography on the frontline
and, if so, what value do they have for the music scholar? False Prophet does raise
some of these issues: the author wrestles, to a degree, with them, too, and the reader
inevitably contemplates them. But, however we define this book, it does provide a
useful and serious addition to that slim literature on the world of the working rock
musician and adds an extra layer to earlier accounts by Sara Cohen, Barry Shank and
Jason Toynbee. The book comes with the additional bonus of a band CD, Invisible
People, and a number of haunting drawings by Eric Drooker, reminiscent of the
graphics associated with the great avant-garde comic Raw.
Punk is a slippery fish, sometimes a shark, and Taylor, frequently just avoiding the
teeth of the storm, reels in some lively and incisive insights.
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References
Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock culture in Liverpool: Popular music in the making. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant identities: The rock n roll scene in Austin, Texas . London: Wesleyan
University Press.
Toynbee, Jason. 2001. Making popular music: Musicians, creativity and institutions . London: Arnold.
SIMON WARNER
School of Music, University of Leeds, UK
s.r.warner@leeds.ac.uk
Maroc: The Art of Sama in Fez
Recorded by Ted Levin, accompanying notes by Azzeddine Kharchafi
Disques VDE-Gallo, http://www.vdegallo.ch, CD-1104
The Orchestra Ahl-Fahs, under their director, Muhammad Bennis, performs all
the music featured on this contemporary recording. It illustrates the exclusively
male tradition of religious song and chant collectively known as sama (literally
meaning audition), most associated in Fez, Marocco, with Sufi fraternities. Because
of their origins in ritual (or, at least, ritualistic) performance, three of the four
pieces presented here have fairly basic instrumental accompaniment, as the choirs
vocal role takes priority. Two broad forms of music are included in this record:
first, those that are based upon religious poetry, which have much in common
with the more secular Andalus art music tradition; second, those which are
essentially in the form of a chant, presumably drawn more from the dhikr
ceremonies of Sufi brotherhoods. These include the repetition of sacred
formulas, such as the shahada: the first part of the Islamic profession of faith
(La ilaha illa Allah / there is no god but God), sometimes delivered with
the exaggerated exhalations associated with these ritual contexts. In common
with the Andalus vocal style, the sung poetry is effectively heterophonic; here the
lead singer accompanies the chorus with a melismatic embellishment of core
melodies.
Although the voice takes centre stage on this CD, instrumental introductions and
accompaniments play an important role in the structure of sama concerts, and here
the performances are polished and expert. The ensemble, ud (lute) derrbuka (goblet
drum), tar (frame drum), ney (flute), rebab (two string fiddle), and violin
accompanies a choir of five male voices. This arrangement is more in keeping with
the traditional size of such groups rather than the large orchestras that have
developed more recently elsewhere in North Africa. Although such massed choirs and
large ensembles can convey a grandeur of their own, this size of group has more of a
chamber ensemble feel about it, which in my opinion allows the listener to
appreciate the more subtle qualities of these instruments. The recordings themselves,
made in 1997 (presumably in situ, though the notes do not tell us), are clear and very
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listenable to. The chosen pieces display a range of styles, which, despite the familiar
discourse linking North African art musics to 12th century Andalucia, is perhaps as
much a testimony to the diverse cultural influences that Fez itself has absorbed since
then.
The illustrated sleeve notes, in French and English, do a very good job of
explaining the basic structures of Arabic music. However, they might have been better
linked to the recordings themselves and it would have been useful to have had more
information that placed the repertoire in its contemporary context. For example,
though extensive quotations from Chottin (1939) and Guettat (1980) are employed
to describe Muwashshah and zajal (two forms of classical Andalusian poetry which
have influenced the structure of Moroccan art musics), the reader is not told which of
the recordings exhibit these characteristics. The musical information is accurate but
so general that the pieces on the CD are not explained. Similarly, though we are
provided with a brief history of the ensemble it is not entirely clear what their
associations with Sufi practices are. Both sama and dhikr (remembrance of God
through musical repetition) are well-documented aspects of rituals intended
to bring about wajd, or spiritual trance (see Rouget 1985). Mention is made
of the performance of sama during the mussem (festival) of Moulay Idriss,
and the condition of khamra (state of spiritual drunkenness) that singers attain
therein, but the reader is not told whether the ensemble is actually a part of such
fraternities or are professional musicians who came together with the explicit
purpose of preserving these traditions. While this information would not change the
quality of the performance or recording, it would nevertheless be useful for academic
purposes.
Regardless of some shortcomings in the notes, this CD provides a good record
of a musical tradition that has probably existed in Fez in something like this
form for centuries. Its links to medieval Andalusian musics will doubtless appeal
to historical musicologists as much as its continued importance in Moroccan
culture will to ethnomusicologists. In addition, the recording offers an opportunity
to compare this local manifestation with similar genres to be found in other
cities throughout the Maghreb. Today, much of the Andalus tradition has been
secularized, partly through its appropriation by North African states as a vehicle
of national heritage and its subsequent esteemed role in cultural policies. This
current use of Andalus tends to play down the significant associations it once
had with both the Jewish communities of North Africa and with Sufi practices. As
well as being a very enjoyable recording to listen to, this CD provides welcome
evidence of the aesthetic overlap that once existed between religious and art music
in Morocco.
References
Chottin, A. 1939. Tableau de la musique Marocaine. Paris: Paul Geuthner.
Guettat, M. 1980. La Musique classique du Maghreb. Paris: Sindbad.
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Rouget, G. 1985. Music and trance: A theory of the relations between music and possession. Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press.
TONY LANGLOIS
School of Media and Performing Arts, University of Ulster
A.Langlois@ulster.ac.uk
Niger, Musiques des Tuaregs, Vols 1&2 (Azawagh and In Gall)
Recorded by Francois Borel 1971/97
Disques VDE-Gallo, http://www.vdegallo.ch, CD-1105 and CD 1106
This excellent pair of CDs is largely compiled from recordings made by Francois Borel
between 1971 and the late 1990s. Each takes a specific regional community as its focus
and provides a comprehensive cross-section of its musical culture, representing, we
assume, an indigenous typology. The illustrated notes (in French as well as English)
that accompany the discs provide brief but adequate explanations of the social
contexts in which the recordings were made. Biographical details of some individual
musicians are also included, which not only informs a listeners understanding of
their role in society but can also illustrate their performative intentions. We are told,
for example, that the song Amellokoy (vol. 2, track 6) is performed by a man in his
sixties who has lost some of his vocal capabilities but has retained the distinctive
traits of the A r style, which are subsequently described. For listeners unfamiliar
with Tuareg musics these notes are invaluable, as they draw attention to aspects
of the recordings that would otherwise be missed. Being personally more familiar
with northern Berber musics, I could certainly identify strong family resemblances
with the rhythmic and melodic structures found here, particularly in the use
of the anzad (one-string bowed lute), though associations might just as easily be
made with genres found in Mali or even Mauritania. As traditionally transhumant
societies, whose neighbours refer to them as Tegareygaret (in between people),
Tuareg groups have clearly played a significant role in the transmission of musical
styles across the Sahel, through trade, migration or seasonal interaction with settled
communities.
Perhaps a little surprisingly, these various groups seem to have maintained a
rigid hierarchical social system, until more recently coming under increasing
pressure to become sedentary. The social apex consists of a warrior class that
in the past has specialized in raiding trans-Saharan trade routes and settlements.
Below these are artisans, ritual specialists, herdsmen and vassals, the descendants
of slaves captured during these acts of warfare. Most speak Tamachek, a Berber
language that distinguishes Tuaregs from their neighbours, though vassal tribes
may use forms of Arabic. Such distinctions are reflected in the musical
cultures of these groups, and these CDs do a good job of illustrating and
explaining these differences. Shepherds provide flute music played on recycled
copper piping, certain dances are mostly associated with smiths and servants
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(though we hear that young nobles sneak out at night to join in), and specialist
bards (ammessewey) recount tales of past valour in song. However, the biggest
socio-musical distinction illustrated in these CDs is between male and female
repertoires. Men from warrior classes, it appears, do not play instruments, but in
Arzawagh (Vol. 1) they sing Asak poetry to the accompaniment of the anzad
fiddle, which is played exclusively by noble women, many of them clearly
virtuosos. The style of singing in In Gall is quite different, reflecting closer
associations with the Tuareg communities of A r, yet this gendered principle
remains the same. Vol. 2 includes the dhikr chanting of the Qadiri Sufi
brotherhood, another aspect of local musical practices, which is also exclusive of
women.
The instruments which most distinguish Tuareg groups from their neighbours,
the anzad and the tendey drum, are largely the province of women, and they
are used not only to accompany mens song and solo performance but also
in various curative rites. The tendey, typically associated with lower-status
women, is effectively a small bowl covered with hide, usually played along
with the assakhalaboo water drum, another bowl played up-turned in a
bucket of water. It is no doubt significant that these most iconic instru-
ments, including the anzad, are put together temporarily from household
objects, as befitting a thoroughly nomadic lifestyle. Over the period in which
these recordings were made these communities have adapted to considerable
social changes, and the In Gall tribes appear to have become effectively
sedentarized during this time. Recently guitars have been introduced, as
exemplified in Vol. 1, as other instruments from adjacent Hausa communities
have become incorporated into local tradition. So the significance of these
more traditional musics has also presumably changed, as the Tuareg strive to
maintain social hierarchies and intertribal alliances as matters of identity
preservation rather than everyday practice. These collections encompass the musics
made during a period of transition and as such may be considered somewhat
historical, as surely not all of these traditions will survive this fundamental change
of lifestyle in the same form, or with the same significance.
Both these CDs contain a wide range of material, and, though clearly drawing
upon broad common traditions, each is quite distinct and designed to be typical of a
particular area. As what are effectively archive field recordings they are comprehen-
sive and scholarly, but not likely to have a wide non-specialist appeal. However, as an
introduction to a complex and fascinating musical world they serve their purpose
extremely well.
TONY LANGLOIS
School of Media and Performing Arts
University of Ulster
A.Langlois@ulster.ac.uk
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Chave Mini (You Are My Eyes): Songs from Turkish Kurdistan
Cultural Cornerstones (no catalogue number), 2002.
Recording and booklet.
The recording comprises tracks recorded by Jordan Bell and Gregory Scarborough in
the summer of 2001, and a number of tracks donated by Turkish-based Kurdish
recording companies, KOM Muzik and Ciwan Muzik. Some of these are studio
recordings that date back to the late 1960s (Mec de Sileman and Zad na Shakir on
track 4, for example). Others are archival recordings of some of the best-known
musicians in living memory in todays Turkish Kurdistan, such as Arif Ciz r , Ayse
S an and I
sa Berwari on tracks 17, 18 and 19, respectively. Many of the recordings are
from the central Kurmanj dialect areas of Hakkari, Van, Urfa, Mardin, Batman and
the city of Diyarbakr (where many sought refuge from the Turkish armys
devastating military operations in the area throughout the 1990s). A few, though,
are from elsewhere: Track 2 records S evabe Egit and Eg de Cimo, recorded in Yerevan,
in formerly Soviet Armenia. Most, though, are musical snapshots of the vibrant
musical life of this corner of Turkish Kurdistan, recorded by Bell and Scarborough,
and narrated by them in breathless terms in the accompanying booklet. Of track 7,
entitled Field workers politik, they have this to say, for example:
In the fields just beyond the walls of Amed along the banks for the Tigris, we
searched for traditional field songs. Young women in their teens and 20s, with dark
eyes peering out from behind their scarves, agreed to sing for us. As they relayed
verses back and forth with strength and defiance, it was clear that these were not
traditional field songs but highly charged political chants. These songs, which give
reference to war, hope, and freedom, speak a truth for much of the youth who have
grown up and lived in Kurdistan.
The accompanying booklet will, unfortunately, have ethnomusicologists tearing out
their hair. Singers and instrumentalists are often unidentified, musical instruments
are never described, some tracks are translated into English and others are not, the
provenance of the older recordings is not specified, and so on and on. The first few
pages of the booklet are wasted making the elementary point that Kurds in Turkey
have had basic political and cultural rights denied for decades. Most people picking
up this CD will not necessarily be specialists in Middle Eastern history, but are likely
to be newspaper readers and otherwise educated people; they do not need to be told
this. What all of us (Kurds and non-Kurds alike) probably do need to know more
about, however, are the details, facts, contexts and animating circumstances of a
remarkably rich, diverse and generally undocumented musical culture. It is a pity that
the producers of this CD underestimate the interest in, dare I say it, scholarly
information on the part of the world music buying public and the work that
recordings such as this could do in the academic and teaching world if only they were
documented in a cliche-free and informative manner.
Because the recordings on this CD, in all their jumbled diversity, are remarkably
beautiful and ethnographically extremely valuable. It is a little unclear as to whether
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this is a recording primarily of the dengbej , the (unaccompanied) Kurdish bards, or
whether it seeks to represent Kurdish vocal art more generally (including the stranbej
and chirokbej ), and to what extent the recording seeks to embrace all of Turkish
Kurdistan (Dersim, Tunceli and the Zaza dialect areas, musically very rich, are
ignored, for example; the diaspora in Germany, Scandinavia and Istanbul is not
touched on). The sound quality of the recordings is mostly low; many of those
donated by the Turkish-Kurdish recording companies, for example, appear to be
recordings made in situ on cheap cassette-recorders by local collectors and
enthusiasts. There is little here to seduce a first-time listener with the beauty of
this music / one needs a certain amount of patience, cultural commitment and
affection for the ethnographic artefact to be able to listen to the whole recording in
one go. What the recording does succeed in doing, and doing well, is presenting the
living art of the dengbej in a historical and political context. An art designed for
relating the heroic deeds of the warriors, the adventures of wanderers, battles
between the Kurdish tribes, tragedies and delights of lovers won and lost, and the
struggle against disasters of nature and man (notes to tracks 20/2) has adapted itself
to address the flight from villages, prison conditions in Diyarbakr, the lampooning of
the Turkish village gendarmerie and other such topics. The CD also captures well the
everyday instrumental soundscapes of Turkish Kurdistan. Track 6, for example,
labelled Amplified Dilan is a valuable recording of a ubiquitous instrument, known
across Turkish Anatolia as the elektrosaz, an amplified long-necked lute and an
essential component of any rural wedding celebration / one not represented on any
other ethnographic recording from the region to the best of my knowledge. The CD
may be a little thin on examples of other traditional instruments (duduk and
kamanche, for example, though the tenbur, the non-electrified Anatolian saz is
included), but the inclusion of the amplified dilan more than compensates.
MARTIN STOKES
University of Chicago, USA
mhstokes@midway.uchicago.edu
Wayang Golek: The Sound and Celebration of Sundanese Puppet Theater
Recorded, edited and annotated by Andrew N. Weintraub
Multicultural Media, MCM3019/24, 2001. Music of the Earth Series.
Six compact discs. Booklet, 44 pp.
This six-CD set is notable as the first commercially available recording of a full-length
performance of wayang golek / the rod puppet theatre of the Sundanese people of
West Java, Indonesia. Given that most wayang begin sometime between 7.30/8.00pm
(after the evening prayer) and do not finish until around 3.30/4.30am the following
morning, it is not so surprising that a complete performance has not found its way
onto a CD recording before. Andrew Weintraubs high-quality live recording, a
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product of doctoral fieldwork conducted in 1994, is just under seven hours long.
Comprising a combination of instrumental pieces, songs, action sequences and
passages of narration and dialogue (the puppeteer assuming a different voice for each
of the puppet characters as well as verbally interacting with musicians on stage), the
entire performance is conveniently broken down into 155 separate audio tracks. Each
track is listed with explanatory comments in a performance flow chart in the
accompanying booklet.
The liner notes, which include a map and photographs, are superb. A succinct but
incisive introduction to the history, function and practice of Sundanese wayang golek
paves the way for more detailed textual and contextual information about the specific
production presented. What is more, Weintraub has meticulously transcribed the
entire spoken dialogue and song texts in the original Sundanese, supplying
Indonesian and English translations (these files are saved in Adobes Portable
Document Format (PDF) on enhanced CD 6).
Wayang golek is typically staged in celebration of a significant personal life-cycle
event or auspicious public occasion. The performance on this recording was
sponsored by the national telecommunications company (PTT Telkom) to mark
the opening of a new facility and training school. It features West Javas best-known
dalang (puppeteer) Asep Sunandar and his Giri Harja III gamelan group who toured
the UK in July 2001. As the most successful member of the influential Sunarya family
of wayang specialists, Asep is particularly famed for his skilful manipulation of the
puppets and use of innovative musical arrangements. In the absence of any video
footage / the addition of which would further enhance future wayang recordings
incorporating CD-ROM (or VCD/DVD) technology / the dalangs ability to animate
individual puppets is not in evidence. However, this set does clearly communicate the
creative energy and resourcefulness of Asep Sunandar and Giri Harja III.
On the occasion of this performance the troupe eschewed the regular gamelan
salendro orchestra tuned to the salendro scale (a pentatonic tuning with roughly
equidistant intervals) and conventionally employed in wayang golek theatre in favour
of a gamelan selap. This is a type of oversized multi-scale ensemble in which
additional pitches / formerly only singable or playable on non-fixed-pitch
instruments such as the rebab (two-string spiked fiddle) / are wedged in (nyelap,
hence the term selap) between the fixed tones of the salendro instruments using
specially elongated frames. The gamelan Ki Barong heard on this recording has a
ten-tone rather than the standard five-tone octave. These tones are arranged so that
the musicians can play in seven distinct pentatonic laras (tunings or modes);
however, only six are utilized in this performance. The group exploits this facility
early on in the proceedings as they set out to show off their musical versatility and
technical prowess: the tatalu opening suite of instrumental pieces begins in the more
unusual mataram mode but shifts to salendro three-quarters of the way through (CD
1, track 1). Gamelan selaps capacity to cover a wider musical terrain than its
salendro-confined counterpart is also illustrated by the inclusion of repertoire
appropriated from other genres. The borrowing of pop songs from the smaller
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Sundanese gamelan degung is a case in point. Contemporary degung pieces / such as
the sorog-tuned Dua Saati (CD 2, track 10) and the pelog degung-tuned Pras Pris
(CD 3, track 23) / by the leading composer Nano Suratno (alias Nano S.) are
characterized by highly arranged instrumental accompaniments that do not always
satisfactorily transpose into salendro. Another example of cross-genre fertilization is
the intermittent use of the suling bamboo flute, an instrument that is generally
associated with gamelan degung rather than wayang golek.
While this recording is not necessarily musically representative of mainstream
Sundanese puppet theatre, it still offers ample opportunities to sample more standard
wayang repertoire. For example, the song Sinyur (CD 4, track 3), which serves as a
vehicle to showcase the pasinden female singer, exemplifies the way in which gamelan
salendro traditionally accommodates melodic material in other tunings and modes
(in this instance sorog). Elsewhere, the puppets wage war to the crashing
accompaniment of explosive battle sequences and dance jaipongan (a popular
Sundanese music/dance form) to dynamic grooves on the drums (kendang) and
raucous vocal cries (senggak). In contrast, more subdued sections of kakawen (sung
poetry) provide an opportunity to appreciate the dalangs sonorous singing voice as
well as softer instruments such as the gambang (xylophone) and rebab.
Even so, this remains first and foremost an audio recording of a theatrical
performance. Extensive passages of spoken and sung dialogue mean that the CDs
(with the exception of CD 1) do not lend themselves to passive listening. The most
rewarding way to explore the set is to follow the track-by-track summary outlined in
the booklet while simultaneously cross-referencing the transcript found on CD 6. I
originally intended to scan through the 94-page English version of the text but
quickly found myself engrossed in Weintraubs skilful translation; the dramatic
breadth and depth of the genre is artfully conveyed.
The performance is based on the fantastical adventure story of the birth of
Gatotkaca. At the climax of the story the slain hero and central character Jabang
Tutuka undergoes an alchemic transformation that sees him boiled up in a cauldron
with iron, steel, silver, gold and other metals and brought back to life as the bionic
warrior Gatotkaca. However, the relating of this epic tale is only one aspect of the
narrative. The unfolding plot is interspersed with light-entertainment songs, comic
skits, commercials for fee-paying sponsors and more sombre monologues in which
the dalang expounds religious ideology and addresses topical political issues of the
day. Moments of poetic lyricism and philosophical reflection are juxtaposed with
government service broadcasts (listen to the rousing family planning choral refrain,
CD 2, track 10), adverts for local shops (such as the Yamaha promotion, CD 2, track
12), and bawdy stand-up routines. A highlight of any wayang for the Sundanese
crowd is the entrance of the clown servants at around midnight. The translation of
this segment of the performance is particularly welcome as it enables a wider
audience to share the jokes. Another advantage of a live recording is that it captures
the lively banter and laughter of the spectators responses. It is hard not to smile on
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hearing the musicians and singers chuckle as the clown Semar makes a crude remark
about one of the long nose foreigners on stage (CD 4, track 18).
While writing this review I was intrigued to discover that Indonesian wayang
puppet theatre was proclaimed a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of
humanity by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization) in November 2003. The organization put forward an action plan
which, among other things, calls for the creation of audio-visual documentation
designed to stimulate research. No doubt this type of (albeit pre-existing) resource is
just what UNESCO have in mind. This CD set provides an excellent introduction to
both Sundanese wayang golek and gamelan selap (which is increasingly the ensemble
of choice for those puppeteers sufficiently affluent to afford one). At the same time it
makes accessible first-rate primary material suitable for more in depth analysis and
advanced study.
RACHEL SWINDELLS
City University, London, UK
rachelswindells@yahoo.co.uk
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