Customer Reviews

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

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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.