 |
For the tribal person, music is an essential part of life, a force without which their known world crumbles. Learning music is a means of entering the highest reaches of his culture's intellectual and spiritual development. Whether or not an individual is capable of progressing through the entire process of learning, their awareness of the fact that some of their own people can do this is a security to them in a world which is otherwise frequently bewildering and sometimes outright hostile to them. Without this security their sense of identity collapses. With it they have before them a means of education which will develop their individual capabilities to the full (provided they make the necessary effort) and will at the same time develop their whole personality.
Learning Aboriginal music under the direction of tribal teachers would be valuable for any thinking person in today's multicultural world. There is a need not only for the uninterrupted traditional teaching, but also for adapted teaching using similar methods, aiming at the same goals of personality development but reaching Aboriginal students whose life style is an acculturated Aboriginal/white one. Such adapted teaching may be essential for the survival of the whole tribal education system.
The negative aspect of the lessons at CASM centred mainly on the absence of appropriate environments. The learning would have been greatly improved if some of it had occurred within tribal territory. For various reasons, however, our frequent attempts to organize student trips to Indulkana always floundered, until late 1982. Either the elders were free when the students were not, or permission to stay at the reserve could not be granted when both were available at the same time. This was significant because the actual physical environment related to the songs is often unknown to students who have never visited the desert regions which the Indulkana people come from. It is then impossible for these students to visualize or to have any feeling for the countryside depicted in the songs. Similarily, the absence of social impact is a serious limitation. Meeting the elders in the city, seated around tables drawing designs on paper, important though it is, is very different from carrying out the correct social procedures for meeting them in their own homeland.
Another negative we found was the use of literacy-based teaching methods, disadvantageous for learning about a process which traditionally was entirely oral. In the first year of teaching at CASM the elders taught in their traditional way. They soon learned, however, that we were unable to absorb aural stimuli as quickly as visual, and so they began insisting that we write down the texts of their songs. This led to a series of false assumptions on the part of our teachers. They thought that if we could reproduce the song texts from our written notes this meant that we knew them. This was far from accurate. We may have known them in the sense that we could repeat them, but we did not have them, along with their rhythm and melody, indelibly committed to memory. Those of us who had the privilege of being involved in the first year's lessons found that we never forgot the few small songs that were taught to us forcefully, and without any reference to literacy whatsoever.
This change from oral to visual teaching is a good example of the problem of incorporation to the point of disintegration mentioned earlier. Here the change to the visual approach, seemingly a simple incorporation of a different technique, in fact erodes the essential elements of the teaching which are all aural. To avoid such a damaging shift requires a change in western student's attitudes towards amounts learned in a given span of time. For western students, quantity is much reduced as soon as the visual component is removed from the teaching. This is frustrating also for their tribal teachers. On the other hand, incorporation of the visual component reduces the quality of the learning by ignoring the whole area of aural memory on which the traditional system rests.
Another problem of the lessons in the city is the absence of spontaneity. In a tribal situation a performance will take place at sundown provided that the weather is suitable, the firewood available, and the people are present. This alows a flexibility which is totaly absent in a more rigorously-timetabled schedule that has to enable students to meet other university demands. There can be no choice of the right moment, the right group of people, the right atmosphere. The performing has to occur at the allotted time, irrespective of who is present and whether or not they feel like performing. Confusion also arises because there are mixed sex groups at all lessons. (This is unaviodable, because, as it happens, there is usually only one male student at a time, who is often unwilling to have an individual lesson.) This creates difficulties with teaching since the men traditionaly taught the boys, and the women the girls. For purely economic reasons it is only possible to bring four tribal performers to Adelaide at any given time and sometimes these are all men. Then, the female students have extreme difficulty "catching" the melody since they cannot sing in unison but have to sing in octaves. This difficulty disappears when women teachers come, but then the songs are usually not intended for men to sing at all.
As I have had lessons both in the field and at CASM I am more able to compare these different experiences than are most CASM students. I found that it was much easier to learn the structural elements of the songs away from the other pressing difficulties of field work within an alien culture. In the field other things disturbed my concentration too much for me to be able to devote full attention to learning songs effectively and efficiently. (not the least of these was the need to produce taped evidence of my field work in order to maintain research funds.) These disturbances are unknown to city students.
On the other hand, the true performance on location has tremendous impact; no matter how short-lived the performance, its deep significance is always apparent. This the city students miss. The involvment of the performers, and their unfailing assumption that once I had witnessed a "correct" version of a ceremony I would be forever committed to its preservation, provided a background to my learning. This is unknown to the student with no field experience. In November 1982, a group of students and the ethnomusicology tutor from CASM spent nine days at Indulkana. This visit stimulated many performances of Inma, an infrequent event these days. The tribal teachers were excited that this happened and requested many more visits of tribally trained white people coming to Indulkana to study with them. It further increased their motivation for coming to Adelaide to perform and teach white students. For the students, the experience proved to be profoundly thought provoking and exciting, and expanded their experience of learning to cope with culture shock.
The fact that Aboriginal teaching techniques cater for every individual - allowing each student to develop to their full potential at their own rate of growth - is a revelation to every person who has close contact with the work and this alone is justification for the city experience, despite its limitations. It almost seems that the cross-cultural aspects of the work are secondary to this important discovery that students make about themselves as whole people, and about the divisiveness of our Western education system. And despite the difficulties which may arise through the adaption of traditional teaching techniques to a contemporary situation, the fact that this can occur at all seems encouraging for the survival of traditional tribal teaching within the domains of an alien culture.
The Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) works not only with tribal people, but also with people who have come from areas where there is no longer any tribal music. These non-tribal people still choose to identify as Aboriginals and their music making also has a significance in its own right. (Some of them are choosing to become students of the tribal elders, alongside white people.)
Although my discussion of Aboriginal music has been drawn exclusively from South Australian material, the general concepts are similar throughout Australia. Only the detail changes from one area to another, not the process itself. The loss of this traditional education system, using music as its central form of comunication, has been a severe blow to non-tribal Aboriginal people who now find themselves caught between two worlds, each of which claims a sophisticated system of learning and each of which, by means of many exclusions, denies them the right to be part of its system. It is toward this destructive educatoinal problem that CASM has been directed.
Taken From:
Ellis, Catherine J. (1964) "Aboriginal Music Making", Libraries Board Of S.A. Adelaide, Australia
|
