Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia (Music Culture) [Hardcover]

Allan Marett (Author)

Book Description

Series: Music Culture | Publication Date: October 27, 2005

Aboriginal musicians receive songs both from an eternal realm known as The Dreaming and from the ghosts of deceased ancestors. Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts is the first book-length study of wangga, a musical and ceremonial genre of Aboriginal people of the Daly Region of Northern Australia. This work is a labor of love, the culmination of nearly 20 years of field work and research by renowned ethnomusicologist Allan Marett, and represents the only comprehensive documentation of a single major genre of Aboriginal music. With first-hand, in-depth knowledge of Northwest Australia's Aboriginal cultures, Marett provides the reader with a penetrating description and analysis of this compelling musical practice. This book makes a significant contribution to knowledge of Aboriginal studies, and provides a rare glimpse into relatively unknown traditions and cultures. It includes illustrations, musical examples, and a CD loaded with samples of this fascinating music, closely linked to the text.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The culmination of nearly twenty years of ethnomusicological research among the Aboriginal peoples of the Daly region of northwest Australia (Marri-tjevin and Marri-ammu), this exemplary work extends and deepens our understanding of Aboriginal traditional song, while going a long way toward closing the gap between our scant knowledge of Aboriginal musical arts and our abundant knowledge of Aboriginal painting...Allan Marett is to be congratulated for his painstaking work in doing justice to the Aboriginal songmen whose work it is to keep their ancestral world alive."--Michael Jackson, Journal of Folklore Research

"This book...deserves the widest possible attention, not just because Marett is the doyen of Australian ethnomusicologists, and this is his masterwork, but because the art form he seeks to anatomise is dying."--Nicolas Rothwell, The Australian

"Marett provides a model for how to successfully integrate social and musical analysis, not just in the Australian context, but within ethnomusicology more generally... This book is admirably concise and efficient in its distillation of an enormous amount of information into 325 pages...Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts is one of the finest books on Australian music published to date."--Steven Knopoff, The World of Music

"an intelligent and detailed look at and attitude towards music and performance outside Western traditions that really does a magnificent job of making the subject clear...a scholarly book, but...fascinating." --Robert M. Tilendis, The Green Man Review

Review

"In this brilliant and passionate book, Allan Marett reaches profound insights on Australian Aboriginal music through detailed analysis of the musical and linguistic features of many wangga songs, some of their accompanying dances, and the social and cosmological processes enacted through their performance." (Anthony Seeger, Professor of Ethnomusicology, UCLA )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; Audio CD. edition (October 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819566179
• ISBN-13: 978-0819566171
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,496,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars authoritative anthropological study of Australian aboriginal music, December 3, 2005

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Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia (Music Culture) (Hardcover)

With nearly 20 years of research on aboriginal tribes of northwestern Australia combined with this many years of research, Marett has an exceptional knowledge of their culture. He's also a professor of musicology and director of the Centre for Music Research at the U. of Sydney. Recognizing that the music of the aborigines--known as "wangga"--rests "on cosmologies and ways of being that are radically different from those shared" by the majority of Australians and others from Western, modernized cultures, Marett nevertheless applies academic and critical methodologies, analyses, documentation, and perspectives to understand the music's enduring role in the ancient cultures as much as this is possible for outsiders. Thus one finds aborigine music put into musical scores, words of songs and chants translated into English, rhythms described, and explanations of changes in the music reflecting the tribes' contacts with modern Australian society. Part of Marett's work is recording a good part of the music before it changes completely or is lost from the inroads of modernity into the native societies. In the native ceremonies and rituals, wangga is not optional (as in some Catholic masses, for instance); and needless to say, it is a far cry from entertainment. In the Australian aboriginal cultures of the northwest region, wangga is believed to issue from the ghosts of deceased ancestors in a timeless realm. In the ceremonies and rituals, wangga is the "means whereby human singers and dancers metamorphose into...nonhuman forms" to connect with their ancestors.