Vanishing Songs: How Musical Extinctions Threaten the Planet Allan Marett This lecture focuses on musical extinctions and the negative implications and consequences they have not just for those who own the traditions but also for the future of all humans on the planet. The 2002 Garma Statement on Indigenous Music and Performance (which is the founding document of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia, of which I am currently Director) enumerates some of the ways that the extinction of music and dance traditions impacts catastrophically on indigenous societies. With the loss of songs and dances comes the loss not only of unique and beautiful forms of aesthetic expression, but also of the very mechanisms by which indigenous people maintain and adapt their sense of themselves and their place in the world—with attendant implications for both individual and cultural survival. But the damage may extend well beyond those who lose their traditions. Drawing on arguments in Nicholas Evans’s 2009 book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What they Have to Tell Us, I contend that such extinctions have significant implications for humanity as a whole. The most threatened of human musical cultures, like the most threatened languages, tend to be those of small marginalised societies that are struggling, in the face of modernity, to maintain unique and particular ways of being in the world. Just as endangered languages encapsulate radically alternative ontologies, unique and intimate relationships with the natural environment and complex forms of social organization, so too do music and dance performances. With the extinction of languages and performance traditions comes a loss of cultural diversity. And because—as has been demonstrated repeatedly in countless domains—loss of diversity threatens adaptation, musical extinction may have serious implications for our future as a species on this planet. In order to illustrate my argument, I will critically examine my own shifting position in relation to just such an endangered tradition—wangga—a form of song and dance that is performed by a number of Aboriginal language groups in the Daly region of North West Australia. And it is not only the song and dance traditions of each wangga-owning group that are highly endangered, but also their languages. While I have previously described the ceremonial efficacy of wangga from the position of a musicological researcher (Marett 2005), since taking up the role of ceremonial performer in 2008, I have found myself struggling to talk (even to myself) about what it feels like to be part of, and in to some degree, driving ceremonies that re-shape the world. On the one hand I want to avoid assimilating my experiences to a broadly western view of reality, thus denying the very factors that make ceremonies work. On the other, I don’t want to alienate my audience (or myself) by giving voice to experiences that seem so alien as to appear irrational. Up until now my response has been to remain silent on these matters. Recent re-readings, however, of music historian Gary Tomlinson’s writing about the transformative role of music in domains as radically remote from present day realities as European renaissance magic (Tomlinson 1993) and Mesoamerican world-creating singing at the time of first European contact (Tomlinson 2007) has prompted me to attempt, in this paper, to shine a light, however dimly, on precisely those aspects of my performance experience that are most resistant to discussion. In doing so I am encouraged and emboldened by Tomlinson’s efforts to reverse the erasures of the unfamiliar and incomprehensible that are part and parcel of conventional music histories and by his cultivation of a productive tension between that which is known and understood and that which lies outside our normal field of comprehension. My struggles with these issues are of course germane to my central theme, namely that if we lose musical traditions simply because the worlds and experiences they embody are too difficult for us to talk about or relate easily to, then we not only fail in our duty of care to the cultures of the marginalised and oppressed, but, as humans, we also lose for all time access to the radically different ways of being in the world enacted in these traditions. Just as biological extinctions deny future generations access to possible remedies for as yet unimagined future ills, so to does the loss of the languages and other expressive media that might deny our children or grandchildren access to traditions that may contain the very wisdom that they will need to navigate their as yet unforeseeable futures. Evans, Nicholas 2009 Dying Voices:Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Marett, Allan 2005 Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts. The Wangga of North Australia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Tomlinson, Gary 1993 Music in Renaissance Magic: Towards a Historiography of Others. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press —— 2007 The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press |