Central Australian Women's Ritual Music: Knowing through Analysis versus Knowing through Performance

Abstract

What can one about any sort of music by means of musical analysis?' What relationship can that bear to the knowledge of performers? These questions, pertinent perhaps to all musicologists, arise particularly strongly for me because for the past three years my work on Central Australian music has involved analysing documents of fieldwork carried out by other researchers (mainly Catherine Ellis) during the 1960s and early 70s, despite the fact that I have neither field experience in Central Australia nor extensive performance experience with performers of Central Australian traditional music.2 What follows is not intended as an apologia for armchair ethnomusicology, but rather as an attempt to open up, through discussion of the problematics of historical ethnomusicology, philosophical questions I believe to be central to the ethnomusicological enterprise. Before presenting a sample of my analysis of Antikirinya and Yankunytjatjara3 women's music, I want to explore some of the ways in which my understanding has shaped and been shaped by the musical analysis I have undertaken. I propose that analysis is a process of understanding rather than a methodology for producing truth. What I know about this music is not a measurable quantity, but a constantly changing way of relating to the music. Each time I listen to or analyse a performance, I experience the music differently. Although I presume that the ways in which I experience it are very different from the ways in which performers do, it is nevertheless the case that the manifested form of the music, which they perform and I analyse, is a shared component of our experience. Through performing my analysis of this sound pattern, I am asking and sometimes answering questions that are relevant to my understanding of the world; just as I understand that sound pattern to be one manifestation of performers' understanding of the world. Therefore, the results of my analysis do not claim to be a definitive statement of the essence of Central Australian women's music, but rather represent one stage in the continually evolving process of my understanding. Different analysts working on the same documents would presumably ask different questions, and arrive at different ways of expressing their results, just as different performers produce more or less different expressions of the same piece. For reasons outlined in more detail below, there are some aspects of these performances that my current lack of field experience precludes me from analysing. These include performers' explanations of texts and the context of the music. Although the focus of my analysis can only be the sound recordings themselves, this does not mean that my understanding of the music is confined to aural elements. Via various indirect means including studying the language, conversations with the recordists, reading