Medievalism and Exoticism in the Music of Dead Can Dance

Abstract

In 1991, the alternative rock band Dead Can Dance released an album that caught the attention of music reviewers by constructing an aural allegiance to the Middle Ages. Suitably called A Passage in Time, the album was described as imitating medieval chant, troubadour and trouvere music, Latin hymns, and courtly songs and included Dead Can Dance's hybrid medieval songs as well as performances of actual medieval repertoire. 1 Released and widely distributed by Warner, the album was in fact a compilation of material from their earlier The Serpent's Egg (1988) and Aion (1990), both carried by the independent label 4AD. Both Dead Can Dance's newly composed renditions as well as their performances of medieval music were modeled after historically informed performances and thus drew on the sounds of medieval music as it was constructed in the early music revival of the 1960s and 1970s. In modeling their songs and sounds after historical recordings of medieval music, Dead Can Dance also adopted some of the ideological parameters of these perfor­ mances and historical reconstructions. Examining the output of Dead Can Dance against these performance practices reveals similar preoccupations with the Middle Ages as simultaneously "naive," "pure;' and "uncorrupted" by modern conventions (Haines 2004a), or "distant,""exotic;' and strangely unfamiliar or "archaic" (Leech-Wilkinson 2002).2 For listeners in the UK, and for those familiar with the medieval-inspired progressive rock music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a rock band's foray into the sound world of the Middle Ages may appear to be nothing new. 3 Indeed, in some ways, Dead Can Dance's interest in medieval sounds and technical features parallels what Susan Fast identified in the 1960s bands Gentle Giant, Gryphon, and Pentangle as a "longing for the Other, in particu1ar as a source of power alternative to that possessed by the dominant culture" (2000:35). Yet the musical parameters adopted by Dead Can Dance differ significantly from those Fast describes, insofar as Dead Can Dance combine sacred medieval musical traditions with contemporary Bulgarian, North African, and Arab practices, collapsing the different times and places into one. Dead Can Dance's vision and use of the Middle Ages is thus caught up in complex signifying discourses of the Other, constructing an arena where the exotic, alluring, natural, and spiritual are mapped onto the medieval and non-Western musical practices from which the band borrows.