ABSTRACT
Scholarship on Australian composition regularly draws attention to practices of unethical borrowing from Indigenous musical cultures, especially the incorporation of musical elements or themes from Australian Aboriginal traditions within orchestral compositions. By contrast, recent collaborative endeavours by improvising musicians renew approaches towards co-creation across cultural differences, foregrounding the generative interactions of Indigenous performance and ceremonial narratives. Exploring features of integration and juxtaposition in Nyilipidgi, by celebrated Australian pianist-composer Paul Grabowsky, this paper shows how jazz composition might be utilised to structure collaborations characterised by responsive listening and improvisation. We argue that Grabowsky’s compositional processes extend from narrative themes within the Yolŋu manikay tradition and performance practice of Wägilak ceremonial leaders, and that his approach sustains relationships between different people and cultures through musical integration and juxtaposition. Further, by outlining the development of Grabowsky’s collaborations with Wägilak singers, we argue that engagements between Indigenous and non-indigenous musicians are best enabled through long-term relationships of trust and the celebration of those relationships in performance.
Processes of collaboration are important. In a world of rapid change, interdependence fosters new ways of thinking and knowing. Co-construction is underpinned by learning as a social process, in which existing concepts are challenged and reinvented when different lives and cultures rub against one another. Creative partnerships in the arts in particular, offer examples of modes of engagement in which the pursuit of learning has created vast new understandings in music and art. The prevailing use of composition over improvisation as a starting point for co-creation within Australian collaborations with Indigenous musicians, poses certain challenges for defining each individuals’ contribution and enabling agency for all parties. Because it is textual in nature, composition begins schematically, in mapping performed interactions on paper, rather than responding to the present and unique event of musical gathering. Of course, improvisation is also limited in significant ways; what is needed is the deft utilisation of both composed and improvised approaches. It is just such an innovative interplay of composition and improvisation that Nyilipidgi (Grabowsky, Young Wägilak Group) offers to intercultural musical engagements, which has emerged not by schematic design but through Grabowsky’s long-term relationships with musicians from diverse backgrounds.
Recent research into collaborative models in music education suggest that we teach what we know (John-Steiner, 2006), challenging us to examine and share more of ourselves if we are to develop new ways of being and doing together in a multicultural world. The significance of this observation is only redoubled for improvising musicians, whose performance extends from the influences and relationships that have shaped their practice. There is an ever-growing demand for research on collaborative dynamics in small to larger groups in interdisciplinary studies to understand the pyscho-social dynamics of creative partnerships and long-term collaborations.Footnote1
Underlying political and ethical issues surrounding intellectual property and cross-cultural borrowings have increasingly become a part of collaborative musicological conversations. The histories and politics of appropriation embedded within designative labels like Western Art Music and Jazz, generate internal dynamism within communities that locate their practices within such traditions. Yet such discussions can also constrain creativity across cultural and historical differences. Indeed, cultural politics in jazz and free improvisation is a potent issue. Many artists are uncomfortable with these labels precisely because they continue to abet elisions of proper attribution and an indebtedness to art forms and cultural practices that are inseparable from the African American experience. Acknowledging ambivalence towards the colonial powers inherent in the construction of jazz and improvised music history must be considered.Footnote2 While this further complicates the discussion around notions of appropriation in a context far removed from the music’s origins, Australia, Wägilak manikay shows us that creativity need not be circumscribed by an essentialist view of culture and history: in acknowledging with Indigenous people elders long since passed, whose voices resonate within the songs of a new generation, improvising musicians might also confirm the significance of those who have gone before, from other times and places, whose voices give impetus to present creativity.Footnote3 Rather than arguing, explicitly, against an academic preoccupation with musical appropriation, this paper seeks to affirm the relational dynamics that underpin creativity in difference, within a uniquely Australian composition.
Discussions on musical borrowing of Australian Indigenous culture have revealed a lack of regard for the religious and social significance of musical materials.Footnote4 Indigenous performers have also been denied the right to represent their own musical traditions.Footnote5 In Australia, there has been a movement towards a readjustment of the power imbalance inherent in earlier white Australian attempts to engage Indigenous music. Agendas include both championing Indigenous music as a form of advocacy for Indigenous culture, whilst others consider all Indigenous references by non-indigenous composers should be off limits.Footnote6 Alternative approaches toward engagement with Indigenous culture have sought frameworks that prioritise open-ended dialogue rather than representations of Indigenous culture. Such collaborations are exemplified by an exchange of ideas between Indigenous and non-Indigenous performers, where the event of performance reflects an ongoing learning process.
Building on over fifteen years of collaboration between musicians from Melbourne and Ngukurr, Norther Territory, the composition Nyilipidgi is unique in framing jazz improvisation with orchestrated sections that invoke various styles and histories within Western art music. Performed by the Monash Art Ensemble (MAE), Nyilipidgi is arranged for a jazz orchestra of four woodwinds, two trumpets, two trombones and rhythm section of guitar, double bass, guitar and drum kit. The ensemble is augmented from a traditional big band with the addition of electric piano (as well as acoustic piano), electronics (also doubling on trumpet), a second drum kit, percussion (which includes vibraphone, bass drum, whip, rachet, various gongs, glockenspiel and xylophone) violin and the Wägilak performers on yidaki (didjeridu), bilma (clapsticks) and vocals. The score utilises both standard notation and descriptive instructions. Significantly, while Grabowsky’s composed material begins with the forms and narratives of Yolŋu manikay (public ceremonial songs), the score incorporates space for Wägilak ceremonial leader Daniel Wilfred to respond to Grabowsky’s interpretation of manikay, generating musical dialogue between musicians and traditions. Uniquely, by foregrounding improvisatory process, Nyilipidgi allows diverse musical traditions to be integrated and juxtaposed, enhancing rather than overwriting the nuance found in these distinct practices of manikay, jazz and western art music.
In this paper, we focus especially on Grabowsky’s approach toward, and ethos of, co-creation, considering how the integration of composition and improvisation within the same performance might develop from prevailing approaches to collaboration with Indigenous Australian musicians. It is important to locate Nyilipijgi within the collaborative processes inherent to these distinct traditions, jazz and manikay. Grabowsky has led a prolific career as a pianist, conductor, arranger and composer working across film, jazz and classical music contexts. As director of the Australian Art Orchestra from 1994 to 2013 he developed numerous intercultural collaborations with artists from Indonesia, India and Korea, performed with critical acclaim at major festivals and venues across Australia. In a similar way, Wägilak singers from Ngukurr have sought to strengthen traditional performance practices through new engagements and contexts;Footnote7 bands such as Yothu Yindi and artists such as Gurrumul Yunupingu demonstrate cultural autonomy within contemporary Australia, through globally acclaimed creative works that extend from the manikay tradition. Ŋilipidji (also Nyilipidgi), the ancestral homeland of the Wägilak, is itself a place of trade and the formation of new relationships between language groups, famous as the site of an ancient quarry of ŋambi (stone spear heads) traded across Northern Australia.
Nyilipidgi might also be located within a series of performances by Grabowsky, Wägilak singers and the Australian Art Orchestra. This relationship began in 2005 with Crossing Roper Bar (2005–2015), in which a manikay series used for smoking ceremonies was approached as a framework for collective improvisation. Having developed an awareness for the intricate patterns and narratives of this manikay series, Nyilipidgi (2015) features a more formalised set of compositions by Grabowsky for jazz orchestra, performed and recorded by the Monash Art Ensemble with Wägilak singer Daniel Wilfred and his uncle, Ritharrŋu man David Wilfred.Footnote8 Composed sections are interspersed with improvisations from ensemble members, and offer a musical and poetic response to the narrative scenes of Djuwalpada, the ancestral mokuy (ghost) for the Wägliak, who travels through the land and establishes the homeland of Ŋilipidji. Another work, Bambula (2018) features Grabowsky alone on the piano with Daniel and David Wilfred, improvising with a different manikay narrative that tells of the blossoming of the gadayka (stringybark tree).Footnote9
While Grabowsky’s work on Crossing Roper Bar (CRB) has been well documented, Nyilipidgi, deserves closer examination as it marks a shift in his collaborative approach, by adopting compositional frameworks in addition to sections of open improvisation.Footnote10 While Nyilipidgi reflects Grabowsky’s sensitivity to the nuanced musical structures of manikay, it does not seek to definitively represent manikay but rather explores possibilities for integration and juxtaposition that extend from manikay performance, while utilising improvisation as a catalyst for creativity and innovation.
Moving Toward Composition as Collaboration
Discussions around the misappropriation of Aboriginal music have grown over recent years. McKenry (2013) and Paget (2013) provide background on Australian non-Indigenous composers’ uneasy relationship with Indigenous cultures, asking, “When is it OK for a white composer to borrow from indigenous musical cultures?”Footnote11 Whilst ultimately positioning himself as an apologist for appropriation, Paget’s limited critique looks at arguments both for and against these questions from composers such as Anne Boyd, who argued that “nothing should be off limits to creativity, for this is what helps us grow our human imagination,”Footnote12 and Liza Lim, who argued that whilst “appropriation, borrowing (and) influences … are part of everyday life, there needs to be a better model for correct cultural exchange that includes payment for time and information, permission and share equivalent financial and intellectual property rights.”Footnote13 In both these comments, there seems a priority for the composition as the definitive object of a composer’s creativity, over the potential for performance to enrich relationships and understanding.
The process of composition may be perceived as a solitary endeavour. For collaboration to occur, adaptation, compromise and a willingness to relinquish creative control and artistic vision must occur. The decentralisation of creative process moves the emphasis from product to process. Viewing Nyilipidgi within this perspective sheds light on the works’ point of differences against a long history of compositional practice in Western Art music. In his compositional approach, Grabowsky demonstrates an ease of working across musical forms and styles that cannot be easily categorised; he draws on different modalities in order to respond flexibly to the manikay tradition, rather than trying to represent manikay within a fixed orchestral composition.
There have been a variety of approaches to the representation of Aboriginal traditions within composed music, allowing Nyilipidgi to be situated within a trajectory of increasing collaboration. In the later post-colonial period (1940 and 50s), composers of the Jindyworobak movement – a label retrospectively assigned to them by scholars such as David Symons (2021) – sought to find a national Australian identity through the borrowing of Aboriginal titles for their works, superimposing Aboriginal myths, and the use of Aboriginal musical material. The results, as argued by Gregg Howard (1978), was that the music attempts to capture the sounds and “programmes” borrowed from Aboriginality, whereby the derived material is adapted to western forms, resulting in a contrived and caricatured outcome.Footnote14 In some cases, the sonic references are framed so as to not lose their identity.
Within such orchestral compositions, there has been a progression from music that has been influenced by a composer’s imitations of “Aboriginality,” sometimes quite remotely, to a greater inclusion and incorporation of Aboriginal performers. Yet while numerous compositions like Peter Sculthorpe’s Kakadu Songlines (1988) and Matthew Hindson’s Kalkadungu (2007) involve Aboriginal performers such as virtuoso didjeridu artist William Barton, the language surrounding these works and their promotion may inadvertently perpetuate romanticised representations of Aboriginal traditions. This can be seen in program notes that emphasise the “timelessness” of these traditions, or a vague, immanent spirituality abstracted from any particular, localised content. For example, if the didjeridu is a highly complex instrument that has developed an intriguing cosmopolitan profile in contemporary Australia, for Hindson it conveys something more “primal” in its duet with the bass drum; it is left to the electric guitar to create a “link with the present day.”Footnote15 That such romanticised sentiments are widespread suggests the need to continue developing greater public understanding of Indigenous performance traditions in Australia, something which these composers have, despite recourse to such language, made great efforts toward.
A slightly different approach can be discerned in the music of Liza Lim, whose Invisibility (2009) and Pearl, Ochre, Hair String (2010) gain inspiration from the “aesthetics of shimmer”Footnote16 in the art and ritual of some aspects of Aboriginal cultures from the Kimberley region in Northern Australia. Lim’s compositional process developed after having spent time in this region and later reflected on these experiences. Structural patterns from specific cultural practices also informed her compositional ideas. Notions of “timelessness” still persist, however in an abstract form, as Lim explains, “qualities of ‘shimmer’ ‘brightness’ and ‘iridescence’ are factors which both veil and point to the presence of a timeless spiritual reality.”Footnote17 This approach shapes Lim’s broader musical themes, aesthetics and philosophical attitude toward composition. Other examples include Lim’s orchestral work The Compass (2005–2006), and Iain Graindage’s Mirramirratjara (2006). While both works make no direct Indigenous music quotations, Indigenous narratives and aesthetics inspire the composers into new sonic worlds. The musical objective of these works is to allow Indigenous performers and their traditions to lead the orchestra, which seeks to complement their performance rather than integrate them tokenistically. While Lim and Graindage have sought to develop new approaches to working with Indigenous communities and musicians, demonstrating a commitment to equitable partnership and personal formation, their musical scoring tends to fall within traditional modes of “on-stage presentation,” emphasising the creation of musical “works” rather than musical gatherings. By contrast, Grabowsky utilises the score – like the concert hall stage – as a provisional framework to generate interactions that both consolidate and develop musical cultures through the sequential iterations of performance. Such an approach, which relies on the formation of long-term relationships between musicians, priorities relational growth and the maturation of understanding between musicians and is evident in the many iterations that constitute the Crossing Roper Bar collaboration.
Perhaps the most direct transposition of Aboriginal song structures into notated music for western instruments can be seen in Erkki Veltheim’s arrangement of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s Djarimirri (2018). Having worked on the original Crossing Roper Bar collaboration with the Australian Art Orchestra, Veltheim recognises the rhythmic significance of the yidaki (didjeridu), which is often treated as a harmonic drone within composed music. He transcribes complex yidaki rhythms directly into the cello part of an arrangement that draws on the minimalist tradition, particularly the compositions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.Footnote18
By contrast to this composed tradition within Australian music, jazz and improvised traditions do not display the same length of history in collaborating with Indigenous musicians. Notable exemptions include Ngarukuruwala by Genevieve Campbell and singers from the Tiwi Islands, typified by conventional folk-jazz harmonic material provided as a backing to the Tiwi singers. Another album, Ngiya Awungarra – I Am Here Now,Footnote19 is the result of a repatriation of archival recordings of highly endangered songs also from this area. Improvised interludes by Tiwi performers are juxtaposed against archival recordings, providing an interesting contrast of sonic worlds. Both these projects are driven by a collaborative agenda that promotes cultural sustainability and repatriation through performance.
Other notable examples include jazz pianist Kevin Hunt, who has created compositions based on ancient Aboriginal chants from the Sydney region and facilitated the annual OUR MUSIC Indigenous music program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Trumpeter James Morrison has performed with didjeridu player William Barton at numerous events. During the 2019 International Jazz Day global concert, Barton and Morrison improvised a welcome to country, with a call and response dialogue that echoed bebop rhythmic figurations; the virtuosity of both musicians featured, with Barton’s complex, skipping rhythms and Morrison’s signature high notes, smears and bluesy embellishments. Despite a few significant examples like this, jazz musicians in Australia have generally turned for inspiration toward forms of Oz Rock and Asian musics instead of their Indigenous counterparts (Rose 2016). Indeed, there is a call for more meaningful engagement of Indigenous culture within Australian jazz music performance and composition.
Collaborative Approaches in Nyilipidgi
What does Nyilipidgi offer within this variegated history of engagement with Aboriginal musicians and traditions in Australia? This question is explored by approaching Nyilipidgi as a performance congruent with the manikay tradition, as much as it is a novel musical response to manikay. We focus on two compositional processes within Grabowsky’s composition, integration and juxtaposition, which are themselves consonant with the performance of manikay in traditional contexts. These processes also allow Nyilipidgi to bridge both improvised and composed approaches to performing with Indigenous musicians.
Forming New Connections Through Song
The manikay (public song) tradition has been performed by Yolŋu people throughout Northeast Arnhem Land for countless generations. More than sixty different Yolŋu clan groups are custodians of their own unique repertoires of song and narrative, which concern the identity of that clan, express ownership of hereditary estates, and structure responsibilities between different families and country. These distinct manikay repertoires can be identified by unique melodic/harmonic configurations and rhythmic modes that structure performances and sustain relational connections between different families and country.Footnote20
Manikay are sung when different families gather on the bambula (ceremonial ground) for public ceremonies such as circumcisions or funerals. Those who gather hold different responsibilities within performance, based on their relationship to the lead singer and the purpose of the event. For example, a funeral will be led by singers who are the classificatory fathers and brothers of the deceased, while their in-laws will manage the ceremony as djungayi (managers), providing the yidaki (didjeridu) player and dancers from their own family for the occasion. Daniel Wilfred understands his performance with Grabowsky to be an extension of this principle of bambula, a gathering place where diverse individuals come together to explore their relationships and responsibilities to one another in song. “You bring your songs and I will bring mine – we will listen to each other. Then we can play together. Your story – my story. This is ceremony.”Footnote21 This direction is significant for composed engagement with Indigenous musicians because in manikay, the relational connections of ceremony are inseparable from the performed event – something which is easily overlooked in the performance of notated music.
Different sequences of songs are selected based on the context of the performance. The part of a smoking ceremony in which the house of the recently deceased is cleansed with smoke will draw on the narratives related to the wind, which carries the birrimbirr (spirit) of the deceased home to a clan’s ancestral country. For Wägilak, the songs wata (wind) and birrkpirrk (plover) – songs which feature in Nyilipidgi – are used for this purpose. Other closely related clans perform songs which precede or follow this narrative sequence concerning the wata (wind), such as the wukun (cloud) songs or waltjan (rain) songs. Ceremonial performance relies on different groups making appropriate contributions to the gathering, strengthening social and familial relationships, and also sustaining interconnected repertoires of narrative and song.
Connections between different family groups are not only shaped by sequential or intersecting manikay narratives, but encoded in the rhythmic patterns that structure song. Closely related families share common bilma modes, enabling them to groove together when they gather for ceremony. For Daniel Wilfred, “everything comes out of the bilma (clapsticks),” including the relationships between different families sustained by song. Progressions of rhythmic modes carry the narrative action of the song but they also give impetus to dance, which recreates the travels of the ancestral ghost Djuwalpada walking, running and dancing through the land. As we will see, Grabowsky recognises the importance of the bilma leading songs by structuring narrative progression, and generating momentum and groove. Rhythmic cadences which signal key points of transition between sections of manikay, are deployed in Nyilipidgi to shift into sections of open improvisation. “When the bilma stop, those other musicians are going to take over and keep carrying that song forward,” explains Daniel Wilfred.
Another significant feature of manikay that will be explored within Nyilipidgi is the melodic/harmonic patterning of song known as dämbu. This is a configuration of intervals unique to every repertoire of manikay and all the songs belonging to one clan will conform to this pattern. In performance, singers improvise their own realisation of this pattern which is always “the same but different” from the singers around them. With perhaps a dozen men singing together, this produces a richly textured, dense heterophony.
As different individuals weave their voices into this mix, the märr (power; vitality) of manikay is sustained. That is, by enlivening inherited structure with a complex interplay of vocal lines, ancestral narratives are brought to life through a community of sound.Footnote22 This provides an opportunity for jazz musicians to weave their own voices into this performed expression of community. As Daniel Wilfred explains, the efficacy of manikay as an event that shapes community requires active participation: “You can’t just sit there, you have to go for it! Use your instrument; make something!”
To be welcomed onto the bambula (ceremonial ground) entails the responsibility to attend to the stories and identities of those who gather. This is indeed how Grabowsky’s invitation to hear and participate in manikay began, following an invitation from Wägilak elder Sambo Barabara in 2005. Yet as all performing musicians know, and as Daniel Wilfred encourages, “If you don’t press into that song, it won’t know you.” Manikay requires a commitment to personal formation within a dynamic community and the development of relationships through active participation. While melodic, rhythmic and narrative elements remain integral to composition as a framework structuring performance, it is this ethos through which Grabowsky understands the event of Nyilipidgi, in its conception, composition and performance:
If you had been brought into that manikay, if you are effectively part of the manikay, if you have been given the permission and you are embraced by it, then whatever you do within that context is a part of the manikay, it’s not an add on. It is not a kind of a suffix, or something which has been imposed on it. It embraces what you are doing so for them, when they are performing with us doing Crossing Roper Bar or Nyilipidgi, whatever we bring to that conversation is a manikay. And manikay is a very dynamic, a very holistic, utterly flexible kind of artistic notion.Footnote23
Nyilipidgi as Integration
Because improvised performance integrates different musical voices, influences and traditions, improvisation can form a bridge between cultures. As John-Steiner suggests, improvised collaboration can build relations across different people and cultures: while “we live in a period of ‘necessary interdependence,’ it is through joint activities and partnerships that we confront our shifting realities and search for new solutions” (John-Steiner 2006, 3). By giving space to individuals to create with their own voices, improvisation begins with inherited cultural backgrounds and stylistic influences yet allows these to be drawn forward in new ways. While improvisers readily borrow ideas, stylistic traits and musical concepts from others, this tends to be more conversational than composed forms of musical integration – such as quotation or pastiche – allow, foregrounding the ways different traditions and musicians interact eventfully. This focus gives improvisation a flexibility that empowers individuals within collaborative engagements, suggesting a broader mode of engagement for collective creativity.
In Nyilipidgi, Grabowsky draws on melodic and rhythmic components from Wägilak manikay to structure shared spaces for improvisational engagement. His composed sections follow closely the narrative sequences of the manikay and progression of bilma modes. Melodic lines in the score also follow the manikay voices, building from the unique intervals of the Wägilak dämbu (head; melodic/harmonic structure) and extending the characteristic heterophonic texture of manikay to include jazz improvisation. Here, Grabowsky encouraged members of the MAE to add their own inflections to any composed melodic lines, in the way that manikay singers freely extemporise around inherited melodic forms.
Indeed, rather than seeking to integrate manikay into his score, Grabowsky provides a flexible framework that can be integrated into the performance of manikay. This is evident in the different composed sections he juxtaposes between manikay items, using the rhythmic patterns of manikay and bilma cadences to hold the two ensembles together (). Sections of the score also include open repetitions, allowing Grabowsky to direct the ensemble to proceed once an appropriate point within the manikay series has been reached. Similarly, Grabowsky demonstrated flexibility during rehearsals in rearranging sections of the score to accommodate changes suggested by Daniel and David Wilfred. For example, sections within the final movement, “Safe Journey,” were rearranged several times at the direction of Daniel Wilfred, allowing him to adjust Grabowsky’s compositional framework to fit the manikay. Grabowsky remarks:
Yes, getting the band to sync up with them for the last chorus of the “Birrkpirrk” [Plover], or “Goodbye Song,” proved to be quite difficult. For Daniel to say, ‘Ok, I hear the ensemble section, I get what you are trying to do, but it ain’t necessarily going to go like that.’ Again, trying to impose a composed structure onto the manikay and say, you have to sing that bit there, that runs completely against the grain. And so, that was more of a process of negotiation to get to the point where we could figure out how to bring it to a close like that.
I’d have to admit that the philosophical framework within which the collaboration is taking place is very much in their domain because they are the people whose culture sets that framework. They are the people who define the kind of aesthetics, philosophical and spiritual context within which the collaboration is taking place, and the kinds of protocols which surround that.Footnote24
Figure 1. Excerpt from movement 9, In the Bag. The dominant rhythmic and melodic content is drawn directly from manikay, allowing Daniel and David Wilfred to improvise over the top.
Nyilpidgi as Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is another important feature of Nyilipidgi that shapes engagement between different musicians and cultures. Grabowsky’s score also includes the juxtaposition of various compositional approaches and styles, such as sections of notated “big band” arrangements, aleatoric techniques, electronic soundscapes and free improvisation, interspersed between manikay items. These multiple modalities, often working incongruently with the manikay, creating a degree of unpredictability but also playfulness. Holding together multiple notated and improvised lines are the driving rhythms of the bilma, which carry this celebratory cacophony of sonic gathering – an aesthetic that resembles the energy of heterophonic vocal improvisation in manikay and the cathartic release of ceremony.Footnote25 While this can leave some listeners scratching their heads – one review commented that Grabowsky’s composition seems “as out of place as an abstract expressionist image would in the stained glass window of a medieval cathedral” – the result is colour and movement that is far from a bland synthesis.Footnote26 Rather than any pretension to be composing manikay, Grabowsky confidently allows such contrasts between traditions and styles to play out.
I get why he would say that [referring to stained glass windows] … It might well sound like that … But that’s ok because I know that what I am doing is completely cool as far as [the Wägilak singers] are concerned, and as far as the whole nature of the project is concerned. It then becomes a matter of the decisions that you make and what you want to bring to it. So there’s far more responsibility, in a sense, on me as an improviser, or in the case of Nyilipidgi, me as a composer, to be very clear about what I am introducing into that conversation and why.Footnote27
Within his orchestrations, Grabowsky seeks to compliment manikay as a “powerful and direct form of expression,” in the sense that creative ancestral beings emerge into presence through the performance of manikay. This can be seen in his extensive use of Mingus-like orchestrations, including parallel movements, cluster chords and accentuated dynamic contrasts, creating high points of intensity. Grabowsky explains how these techniques, more than an impression of manikay, reflect an attempt to decolonialise the composition through the rejection of European preoccupations with subtle colour changes and the refined use of harmony: “There’s no point being nice about it: manikay is a very direct form of expression” (Grabowsky 2018). For Grabowsky, the experience of performing manikay has always been accompanied by intense, emotional responses, His orchestration in Nyilipidgi reflects the intensity of these experiences and seeks to offer something that matches the power of manikay performance.
Narrative Action in Nyilipidgi
In what follows, we offer some notes on a recording of Nyilipidgi by the Monash Art Ensemble, indicating how compositional techniques of integration and juxtaposition contribute to the narrative movement of manikay, as it is structured by the bilma (clapsticks). In this, we demonstrate the ways Grabowsky’s compositional framing, as well as approaches to improvisation, both complement and enliven the story of Wägilak manikay. We focus on the movements “First Dawn,” “On the Wing,” and “Safe Journey.” It is recommended that these notes be read in conjunction with listening, as they identify features within the recording that illustrate the above discussion of integration and juxtaposition.
The structure of the first movement, “First Dawn” (), serves as a microcosm of collaborative processes in Nyilipidgi as a whole. It opens with a soundscape played by members of the MAE, orchestrated using aleatoric figures in the score, ambient textures and electronics. Daniel Wilfred begins by humming, as in traditional contexts, as he “searches” for his voice. As this emerges into full expression, the yidaki (didjeridu) begins with the “walking” bilma (clapstick) mode from the Djuwalpada narrative. The full ensemble joins, performing the dämbu (melodic/harmonic “head”) together with Daniel Wilfred. A tutti section performed by the ensemble () imitates the rhythmic patterns of the singers and bilma cadence concluding the manikay item. The interposition of electronic elements in the open sections utilise looping techniques from electronic artist and trumpeter Peter Knight, was an attempt to “freeze” a moment, and evoke the notion of a “worm-hole.” This idea was also influenced by the use of sampling and layering in the music Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015).
Figure 2. Excerpt from Movement 1. First Dawn. Music sample can be downloaded (https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkgp5hv9o6fnncd/01FirstDawn.mp3?dl=0).
The structure here, in many ways representative of the architecture of the entire work, such that different components of manikay, composition and integration remain distinct, even as they interact with one another. These sections alternate between responsive musical dialogue between ensembles, and more unified sections which hold diverse voices together. Importantly, these rhythmic modes of the bilma hold everything together, carrying the narrative of Djuwalpada’s journey through the land. In other words, as the score of Nyilipidgi unfolds, Djuwalpada travels through a variety of musical scenes and contours, even as core rhythmic and melodic elements persist ().
Figure 3. Excerpt from Movement 11. On the Wing. Djuwalpada continues his journey in the form of the birrkpirrk (plover).
The final movements of Nyilipidgi, On the Wing and Safe Journey (11 and 12), integrate composed elements, improvisation and manikay more seamlessly. The manikay items in these sections, “Wata” (Wind) and “Birrkpirrk” (Plover), form the climax of Wägilak smoking ceremonies and often incorporate sections of unison chorus. This creates a unifying effect as grief is transformed into celebration, and any lingering animosity between families is set aside. The unruly mokuy (ghost) of the deceased is blown away, the birrimbirr (soul) is carried in the form of the birrkpikrrk (plover), back to the ancestral realm. Throughout these songs, the intensity and pace of the bilma builds with the wind, which slowly picks up to become a ferocious hurricane. Grabowsky’s composition and improvisations contribute toward this growing intensity and eventual cathartic release, as the ensemble grooves together in one last “Goodbye,” a song performed by Wägilak at most funerals ().
Table 1. Movement 11. On the Wing / 12. Safe Journey. Music sample can be downloaded (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hdgk8nn86p9bnp/11OntheWing.mp3?dl=0) and (https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mv55frttes80dz/12SafeJourney.mp3?dl=0).
A Future for Collaboration
Nyilipidgi is not just about the creation of a new work but the sharing of traditions, cultures and musical practices, and the mutual learning this entails. The score both celebrates the intricate narrative and structural components of manikay, while heralding ways that non-Indigenous musicians might be enfolded into manikay performance. Utilising techniques of integration and juxtaposition to facilitate new relationships through performance, Nyilipidgi might be considered a unique event of intercultural dialogue and exchange, animated on multiple levels.
While this paper has focused on Grabowsky’s compositional process, Nyilipidgi is also a performance of traditional manikay, one which Daniel Wilfred considers as “no different to what our elders used to do.”Footnote28 Indeed, Daniel and David Wilfred arguably retain the greater share of creative influence on the composition through their long-term influence on Grabowsky’s practice and understanding of collaboration. In consolidating ancestral identities through the integration and juxtaposition of many different voices, and the formation of new relationships through performance,Footnote29 Daniel and David Wilfred assert the autonomy and contemporary efficacy of Yolŋu culture. Grabowsky’s reflections on the project recognise this seeming inversion of creative autonomy: “I discovered, with time, that far from appropriating Indigenous culture, or imposing some kind of neo-colonialist paradigm on it, we were being let into their culture. So in a way it was an inversion of some of the normative processes of Australian history.”Footnote30 This possibility has been enhanced by Grabowsky’s capacity to hold together diverse modalities of composition and improvisation, and most importantly, his desire to develop long term relationships of mutual respect and trust, through the unfolding creativity of musical conversation.
The manikay tradition and Nyilipidgi invite us to look beyond reified descriptions of style and form – descriptions which shape our engagement with jazz history as an historical progression of styles like blues, swing, bebop, cool, soul, funk, and free. Overlooked by this privileging of identity labels is the underlying impetus that holds diverse expressions together, the real-time bilma groove that draws together yet is expansive, the movement of Djuwalpada through the land, to observe the world around him and search for his home – an expression of that insatiable human desire to find one’s place and purpose amid the contingencies and contradictions of life.
Inklings to understand Nyilipidgi as a form of jazz, as a hybrid expression, constrain the complex, generative dynamics that are implicit within any human interaction, limiting discourse to categorical observations of genre and subsequent concerns over ownership and appropriation. So long as Wägilak singers are given the space and priority to affirm that their collaborative performances are generated within the manikay tradition, the diversity of musical forms that coalesce in this event need not be problematised: manikay is, first and foremost, a gathering in which differences of culture and history are explored through performance, allowing those differences to generate new forms of understanding and shared experience.
Casting his ears back through history, Grabowsky similarly understands jazz as a “music of process … a child of many parents born out of wedlock.”Footnote31 Jazz, which “spins on the pinhead of real time, the result of untold billions of spontaneous decisions,” lives in the present (Ibid.). Yet this present is not separated from the many voices within which it is carried: we might hear Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman blowing through the yidaki, just as the Wägilak wata (wind) is heard picking up through Grabowsky’s synthesiser. Diverse traditions of improvisation – including jazz and manikay – perpetuate an attentiveness to life within coordinates of substantiating history; through the voices of the past, we discover our own place and purpose. As Gadamer (2006) has comprehensively argued, a view of tradition as a living, constitutive force in the present is essential to freedom, whereas a historicist view of the past can only deal in symbolic representations. Likewise, to approach Nyilipidgi as an eventful gathering is to recognise how “old and new ways are always combining into something of living value.” Just as manikay itself is an invitation to come together in our differences, Nyilipidgi is a dynamic meeting, through which the brilliance and power of Djuwalpada’s ancestral voice might be heard anew.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jeremy Rose
Jeremy Rose (PhD, University of Sydney) is an academic at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. His research investigates issues of identity, creativity, and social processes in jazz and improvised music. Jeremy runs an active career as an award-winning saxophonist, composer, bandleader and record label director of Earshift Music.
Samuel Curkpatrick
Samuel Curkpatrick’s (PhD, Australian National University) research spans issues of music, culture and theology, with focus given to Indigenous Australian song and philosophical issues of language and identity. Since 2010 Sam has worked closely with Wägilak singers from Ngukurr and taught collaboratively with ceremonial leader Daniel Wilfred at the Australian Art Orchestra’s Creative Music Intensive. Sam is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Sir Zelman Cowan School of Music, Monash University.
Notes
1 see R. Keith Sawyer. “Group Creativity: Musical Performance and Collaboration,” Psychology of Music 34, no. 2 (2006): 148–65; Sam Hayden and Luke Windsor, “Collaboration and the Composer: Case Studies from the End of the 20th Century,” Tempo 61, no. 240 (2007): 28–39; Paul Roe, “A Phenomenology of Collaboration in Contemporary Composition and Performance” (PhD diss., University of York, 2007); Lukas Foss, “The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship: A Monologue and a Dialogue,” Perspectives of New Music (1963): 45–53; Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde. “‘Recercar’ – The Collaborative Process as Invention,” Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 1 (2007): 71–95); Barrie Webb, “Partners in Creation,” Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 2 (2007): 255–81.
2 See George E. Lewis, “Gittin’to Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism and the Racial Imagination,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 1, no. 1 (2004).
3 Samuel Curkpatrick, Singing Bones: Ancestral Creativity and Collaboration (Sydney University Press, 2020).
4 Christopher Sainsbury, Ngarra-Burria: New Music and the Search for an Australian Sound. (Currency House, 2019), Jonathan Paget, “Has Sculthorpe Misappropriated Indigenous Melodies?” Musicology Australia 35, no. 1 (2013): 86–111; Timothy McKenry, “A Forgiveness Song: The Emergence of an Ethical Framework Informing Australian Composers’ Interactions with the Music of Indigenous Peoples,” Forgiveness: Philosophy, Psychology and the Arts (Brill, 2013), 153–63.
5 Amanda Harris, “Representing Australia to the Commonwealth in 1965: Aborigiana and Indigenous Performance,” Twentieth-Century Music 17, no. 1 (2020): 3–22.
6 McKenry, “A Forgiveness Song”.
7 see Curkpatrick, Singing Bones.
8 Nyilipidgi was released by ABC Jazz, 2016.
9 In tracing the development of Grabowsky’s collaborations over time, Bambula is significant in paring down the thick, even hectic textures of CRB and allowing more intimate connections to emerge. See Curkpatrick, Singing Bones, 184.
10 Within CRB, improvisation allowed musicians to explore manikay through participation; each performance generated new musical conversations between musicians. In this way, CRB sought to avoid cultural misappropriation while embracing an ethos of innovation and experimentation. Following the first rehearsal and performance of CRB, Grabowsky reflected: “What I’m hoping is that we’ll together be able to create a work over time in which we are equals, which is a reflection and a record of the specific situation of engagement and encounter” (2005).
11 Paget, “Has Sculthorpe Misappropriated Indigenous Melodies?” 86–111.
12 Boyd Anne, “Writing the Wrongs? A Composer Reflects,” Sounds Australian 67 (2006): 18–23: 22.
13 L. Lim, “Crossing Cultural Boundaries and Ecstatic Transformation,” Sounds Australian 67 (2006): 10–17. Later Version, “A ‘Hidden Centre’: Crossing Cultural Boundaries and Ecstatic Transformation,” in Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 2005, ed. Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall, Vol. 1. (Perth: Edith Cowan University, 2006), 9–19.
14 Howard Gregg (1978), 38, quoted in Symons David, “The Jindyworobak Connection in Australian Music, c. 1940–1960,” Context: Journal of Music Research 23 (2002): 33–47, 45.
15 William Barton and Matthew Hindson (2013). Kalkadungu (2007): programme notes for Kalkadungu. https://hindson.com.au/info/kalkadungu-2007/.
16 Tim Rutherford-Johnson, “Patterns of Shimmer: Liza Lim’s Compositional Ethnography,” Tempo 65, no. 258 (2011): 2–9.
17 https://lizalimcomposer.com/pearl-ochre-hair-string/. For further reading on Lim’s work, see L. Lim, “Patterns of Ecstasy,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik 21 (2012): 27–43. L. Lim, “Staging an Aesthetics of Presence,” SEARCH Journal for New Music and Culture Issue 6 (2009). T. Rutherford-Johnson, “Patterns of Shimmer,” Tempo 65, no. 259 (2011): 2–9.
18 M. Hohnen, “Gurrumul’s Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow) – Behind the Songs of the Chart-Topping Album,” Guardian, April 30, 2018.
19 Ngiya Awungarra – I Am Here Now (Rouseabout, 2016).
20 For a detailed exploration of structural forms in Wägilak manikay, see Curkpatrick, Singing Bones.
21 Curkpatrick and Wilfred regularly teach together as part of the Australian Art Orchestra’s Creative Music Intensive. Wilfred has offered these and subsequent comments in reflection on this shared practice and his various collaborative engagements.
22 Samuel Curkpatrick, “Shimmering Brilliance: A Yolŋu aesthetic of creativity and collaboration,” in Australasian Music at Home and Abroad, ed. John Gabriel and Sarah Kirby (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2023).
23 P. Grabowsky, Paul Grabowsky interview with Jeremy Rose, August 22, 2018. Interview took place in accordance with University of Sydney ethics committee approval, application 2018/787.
24 Grabowsky, Paul Grabowsky interview with Jeremy Rose.
25 Curkpatrick, “Shimmering Brilliance”.
26 John Shand, “Bambula Review – Elemental Forces Uncover Confluences and Gulfs,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 26, 2018.
27 Grabowsky, Paul Grabowsky interview with Jeremy Rose.
28 Curkpatrick, Singing Bones.
29 Curkpatrick, “Shimmering Brilliance”.
30 Grabowsky, Paul Grabowsky interview with Jeremy Rose.
31 Paul Grabowsky, Paul Grabowsky, The Complete Musician, at ANU, https://youtu.be/bTTQpCxukBw (accessed September 20, 2022).