iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

Hello,
A friend of mine, who is a specialist of prehistoric period and actually organizing something about prehistoric music, just asked me a question which plunged me back into my first appreciations of Aboriginal music :
He asked me "Do Aboriginal musics' rhythms have to do with heart-beat rhythms?".
In the 90's, when I first heard Aboriginal music's CDs, I had this impression too : the beat seemed to get faster then slow down, maybe to fit to the pace of the emotions in the story.
Then, I realized and learnt that Aboriginal music was really complex and wasn't played as an improvisation at all.
Then again... one isn't the opposite of the other : the music does express emotions (that can be related to heartbeat) and can also be organized in a complex manner, closely interlinked with the story it is telling.
I'd like to have your views on this question if you find it either relevant or not.
Thanks

Hi Francis,

I don't think they are related or at least I've not heard Aboriginal people talking about heart beat and musical rhythms being connected. What Aboriginal music in particular is your friend focussing on? Top End? Central? Didgeridoo music?

Guan

He was asking me about trad' TopEnd music as he knows I'm fond of it.
He asked me this as a kind of "compared ethnologistic" question, but what he's working on doesn't have anything to do with Aboriginals, rather with Occidental's ancestors as I now live in what is called the "Mankind's Valley", a craddle of (Occidental) Mankind. (Lascaux and many other ornamented caves and troglodytic housings).

Ok Francis, the other thing to keep in mind is that it isn't possible or not easy to extrapolate between contemporary Aboriginal music and music of times gone by. Perhaps all primitive musics might have had some relation to heart-beat rhythms although the big question is how old/primitive is Aboriginal music today? Although it is often claimed that the Aboriginal culture is the oldest surviving culture on Earth, we cannot say with confidence that the culture of today is the same as the culture of 40,000 years ago, in fact, it is almost certainly true that cultural dynamism is the norm rather than stasis.

Guan

Hi Francis,
I had the good fortune to spend sometime with a player from N. Queensland back in 2002. Moyle never recorded any didj accompanied songs from this region way back in '66 when she was collecting this stuff, but other observers (e.g. Roth) noted use of the instrument known locally as Yiki-Yiki or Yigi-yigi as far back as 1902. In short, our information on historic use here is confused and scant. What I learned first hand, you may be interested to know, is that an important playing style called ‘wawu’ denotes the heart beat – ‘wawu’ meaning the physical heart, emotional heart, heart-beat, heart of ‘country’ etc - according to context. Wawu is played softly in a steady rhythm with a double-beat motif that resembles a pumping heart. Trouble is we have no way of knowing how old this style is!

Thanks a lot for your answers Guan & Dave, I've passed them on to my friend for him to read
Cheers guys !

Hey that's a nice piece of ethnomusicology Dave, thanks for sharing that here!

Guan

Thanks Guan - if I could choose my uni course again it would be ethnomusicology for sure! I've a bit more I can throw in the pot since I've maintained links with the player over the years and have dug up a few juicy bits myself - will post up when I can, but for now I'm stuck back trying to get my studio up and running in order to earn some dollars!

Yeah, go ahead