Singing Death

Reflections on Music and Mortality

Helen Dell, Helen M. Hickey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315302096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Death is an unanswerable question for humanity, the question that always remains unanswered because it lies beyond human experience. Music represents one of the most profound ways in which humanity struggles, nevertheless, to accommodate death within the scope of the living by giving a voice to death and the dead and a voice that responds. This book engages with the question of how music expresses and responds to the profound existential disturbance that death and loss present to the living. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a way of speaking or responding to human mortality. Each chapter, in its own way, addresses these questions: How are death and the dead made present to us through music? How does music, as composed, performed and heard, respond to the brute fact of death for the living, the dying and the bereaved? These questions are addressed from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. Singing Death also covers a wide range of musical genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters.

Part I
Going home

1 Into the profound deep

Pulled by a song

Samuel Curkpatrick

Manikay (song) performed by Yolŋu people in Australia’s remote Arnhem Land conveys many interesting and intricate perspectives on death. Passed down the generations for centuries, ideas of death are interwoven in complex narratives and the layering of images in song. Performances of manikay shape life through particular foci of ontological thought and religious beliefs, becoming tangible and relevant in performances concerned with birth, initiation, celebration and education.

But most prominently, manikay accompanies death. In the small Aboriginal community of Ngukurr on the mighty Roper River, the Wägilak clan sustain this living tradition of song, engaging with the persistent reality of death through sound, narrative and community.¹ Highly visible amid the close relationships and small population of the Ngukurr community, death is surrounded with manikay and is even considered incomplete without it.

Death severs and strains families through grief and upheaval, and singing might seem a strange, impractical response to such traumatic and incomprehensible experience. Yet through manikay, families and individuals are pulled together in a community that is ongoing and not limited by the separations of death. As this chapter explores, manikay also structures various mortuary rituals and brings families together around this ultimate event of life, allowing them to engage with the personal and emotional challenges of death communally, in grief but also in celebration.

Importantly, manikay offers more than poetic, cultural reflections on death or distanced ontological observation. The extensive sequences of song and narrative that constitute each clan’s unique repertoire of manikay hold vital relevance for all aspects of life. Wägilak life is saturated by song, which bestows upon the present generation a blueprint for ŋalabuluŋu rom (correct living) through patterns of kinship, relationship, land ownership, governance, law, religious practices, liturgical programme, education and history.

Manikay is public and open, communal and present. The click-click-click of the bilma (clapsticks) is always heard alongside death, these hardwood ŋaraka (bones) of song ringing in the evening air, echoing around the community. The bilma also carry a horizon of death into all public ceremonial performances, as songs progress through narratives that pull rhythmically toward death: creative and living song orients life toward this profound, mysterious deep.

Raki (string)

It is only by engaging with the things of life that we can think about death. We know death in the midst of life and contextually through experience and therefore through story and song. Thoughts of death occur amid the exuberance of ongoing life that is creative, relational and dynamic—life that is like a song.

Wägilak manikay suggests that an individual’s life is just one thread woven into a greater, ongoing raki (string), a string that was established long ago in a creative ancestral past. The song ‘Raki’ imagines the way this string continues to extend today, as new, individual strands of fibre are rolled into its length. For Yolŋu, present life is interwoven with ongoing ancestral reality. An individual’s life—given definition by their death—is absorbed into the ongoing stringline of established ancestral life.

When someone in Ngukurr dies, those who were living with the deceased vacate the house and a string is erected around its perimeter. Sometimes this is a rope wrapped from pole to tree to veranda post; sometimes thick fishing line is tensioned between star pickets driven deep into the rocky ground. This string is adorned with cloth tassels attached along its length at intervals of approximately a metre. Many complex significations extend out of this raki (string).

Ceremony performed by Wägilak conveys narratives that are densely layered with multiple meanings. For Wägilak, the raki (string) is associated with the harpoon rope garram or balku (rope). The ancestral shark Bul’manydji is connected by this rope to Nambatj’ŋu or Rinydjalŋu, the deep and profound waters of Lutunba (Buku-Larrnggay Mulka 29, 90). These waters are in Blue Mud Bay on the east coast of Arnhem Land, a sacred place adjacent to many important ceremonial sites for a number of clans. In these dangerous, turbid waters, Bul’manydji is pulled by the harpoon rope down into her subterranean world. Drawn by the sacred names of Lutunba intoned in song, the birrimbirr (souls) of the dead are also pulled into profound waters, transgressing the barrier between the world of humans and the metaphysical world of the waŋarr (ancestral beings) (Keen 36). Death is a deep mystery: pulled by a harpoon rope, our lives are always drawn toward this hidden reality.

The raki (string) is also associated with yarrata (string line), which represents an individual’s lineage through agnatic descent (father’s line) as well as their purposeful orientation along the stringline of life shaped by madayin (ancestral law and ceremony). Through the ongoing performance of manikay, individuals are joined to their ancestors through yarrata (Hamby 211), which is continued in the lives of their descendents. The fluttering tassels of the raki surrounding a house can also signify the different generations who have lived within the particular yarrata of that individual: generations past continue to surround the deceased.

Just like the raki (string) that weaves together various narrative strands, manikay as a form is interwoven with complementary expressions of dance and painting. Similarly, this chapter entwines multiple images and expressions in a dense, layered exploration of manikay narrative and structure. This begins with an outline of the basic events of Wägilak mortuary ceremonies and the ways in which death is surrounded by song.

Drawn together

Death is always present in Ngukurr: mothers and fathers cry for their children; children cry for their parents; brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, cousins—everyone is torn by grief or is regularly confronted with those who mourn. Sometimes grievances surface and arguments erupt with blame and accusation. But ceremonial performance reconciles, bringing people together in a communal celebration of life through song, dance, ritual purification and burial.

Manikay is an open and public song tradition which has been performed by Yolŋu for countless generations. Manikay narratives and forms focus on relationship and community, structuring society, polity and identity. Manikay also conveys history and tradition, connecting generations past, present and future; it draws people into madayin (ancestral law) and models for living as ŋalabuluŋu rom (following law); it engages individuals with complex philosophical and religious thought. Manikay surrounds Yolŋu life, working its way into the actions and thoughts of living individuals.

Dozens of different Yolŋu clans and family groups are custodians of distinct manikay repertoires. These express the foundation of a particular group’s homeland, familial and political relationships with other groups. Although each clan’s manikay repertoire can be identified by its unique melodic and harmonic forms, the manikay repertoires of closely related clans weave together interconnected narratives and symbols, expressing important social connections, legal responsibilities and other corporate identities.

As a public form, manikay is performed in most open ceremonial contexts, such as circumcisions, funerals, purifications and events of general entertainment. Its performance is nearly always accompanied by buŋgul (dance), which articulates sung narrative through mimetic movement. Singers and dancers are also supported by the rhythmically complex, syncopated patterns of the yidaki (didjeridu). Although singers perform the songs of their paternal lineage or bäpurru (father’s group), the yidaki player must be related through the singer’s maternal lineage or ŋändipulu (mother’s group).

Ngukurr is a small town of around 1000 people, originally founded as the Roper River Mission in 1903. Families from seven different language groups, mostly non-Yolŋu linguistic and cultural groups, settled here. Because of various attitudes and policies of missionaries and governments, many traditional ceremonial practices similar to manikay fell out of use over half a century (Corn, “Ngukurr Crying” 10; Harris 92–112, 311–25). In Ngukurr today, members of the Wägilak clan are some of the only remaining practitioners of traditional mortuary ceremonies.

In the 1970s, a greater number of Wägilak people began to settle in Ngukurr from life ‘out bush’ and ‘on country’. Until this time, many Wägilak families had been living on or close to their hereditary estates around Ŋilipidji, which lies about 150 km northeast of Ngukurr. In the mid-1900s, Wägilak men spent many months of the year travelling on foot between work on cattle stations, visits to smaller towns like Numbulwar and time spent ‘on country’ (Andy Peters, 12 July 20). Importantly, Wägilak people retained much of their ceremonial knowledge despite the stresses and unprecedented challenges of colonisation. Elders such as Sambo Barabara and Andy Peters brought this knowledge with them when they settled in Ngukurr, increasingly bound to the town and its people by developing relationships and family ties.

Today, the Wägilak perform their own traditional songs and dances for all of the non-Yolŋu clans in Ngukurr. It is a great responsibility and one that strains the energies of young singers and ceremonial leaders such as Daniel and Benjamin Wilfred. Daniel explains, ‘I’m really tired of singing. All the time there are funerals in Ngukurr. But I have to keep going, for my kids. Stay strong, keep on passing the knowledge on to my kids’ (D. Wilfred, 29 May 2014). Benjamin also asserts: ‘You have to keep rolling it, the string. All these people in Ngukurr, they have forgotten their ceremony. Only the Young Wägilak Group is helping them now; we have to hold strong’ (B. Wilfred, 20 Aug. 2010).

Although these sentiments are genuine, they are somewhat exaggerated: Yolŋu clans such as the Djambarrpuyŋu, Dhalwaŋu and Madarrpa also live in Ngukurr and occasionally perform manikay: Wägilak singers are also supported in performance by family who travel to Ngukurr from communities such as Gapuwiyak, Numbulwar or Bulman. Nevertheless, the Wägilak take primary responsibility in leading mortuary ceremonies for the non-Yolŋu majority of residents in Ngukurr.

Despite realities of cultural change and ‘coherence within change’ (Morphy and Morphy 51) in contemporary mortuary practices, the Wägilak keenly sense a degree of impoverishment in their cultural surrounds: undoubtedly, the resources of classical ceremonial knowledge once belonging to the region are diminished. Wägilak singers have become ceremonial specialists, taking on the responsibility of performing on behalf of other clans and families who lack ongoing traditions of song and dance. Performing at more than a dozen funerals a year, Wägilak singers even travel to smaller communities around Ngukurr—such as Urapunga and Minyerri—to perform a ceremony.

As I was planning to write this chapter, a middle-aged man in the ‘top-camp’ area of Ngukurr died. Although I did not know him personally, his identity was immediately conveyed to me through relationship, ‘You call him ŋathi [mother’s father]. He is my ŋapipi [mother’s brother]’. In Ngukurr, everyone is related to everyone else, either by direct relationship or by skin name. Skin names are a scheme of eight sections that are designated by lineage—a mix of classical Yolŋu gurrutu (kinship) and the non-Yolŋu kinship systems belonging to the area. In this cultural and linguistic melting pot, these systems are flexible and changing.

The morning after the death was announced, I spent many hours walking around town with my bäpa (father) David Wilfred. It was stinking hot in the midday sun and David had to find the right family members to make arrangements for the coming days of ceremony. A number of questions shaped our enquiries: When should the singing start? Who do the performers need to wait for? Is a family from Numbulwar going to travel to Ngukurr to join in? When is the burial going to be? ‘We have to walk Melbourne speed’, said David, meaning we needed to make arrangements as quickly as possible.

Fiona Magowan has documented some of the specific roles different relations of the deceased play in Yolŋu mortuary ceremonies at Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island), just off the north coast of Arnhem Land (78–84): ‘Once the positions of clan relations to the deceased have been identified, clans negotiate how they will take the body through song to particular clan lands’ (79). Over the days of manikay performance, different clans with close same-moiety relationships to the deceased contribute to the unfolding narratives realised in song. The songs move—in sound, language, dance and imagery—through different tracts of country and sacred sites related to the deceased, recalling the journeys and activities of particular ancestral beings at those places. Sequences from different manikay repertoires are brought together in a unique performance, appropriately selected to correspond to the identity of the deceased.

Under Yolŋu madayin (ancestral law), decisions relating to funeral arrangements are made by the deceased’s märipulu (mother’s mother’s group), that is, individuals related directly to the deceased’s märi (mother’s mother). The djungayi (ceremonial managers) from the deceased’s ŋändipulu (mother’s group) oversee arrangements, especially protocols relating to manikay performance. As decisions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: music for the dead and the living
• PART I Going home
• PART II ‘Lest we forget’: music, history and myth
• PART III Approaching by turning away: metaphorical death
• PART IV The restless dead
• Index