An Aboriginal Women’s Song from Arrwek, Central Australia

Abstract

Songs are a fundamental part of Indigenous Australian cultures. They are vehicles for transmitting experiences about a region, including the stories and ancestral entities from the creation. Yet relatively little is known about the musical characteristics of songs from many parts of Australia. In this article we present the first musical analysis of traditional songs of the Anmatyerr people of central Australia. We analyse a selection of songs from recordings of a women’s song set owned and performed by the landholders of Arrwek, an estate that straddles the Anmatyerr-speaking and Warlpiri-speaking regions. We analyse three basic acoustic elements of a central Australian Aboriginal song: rhythmic text, pitch, and the relationship between them. Our analysis finds that these have much in common with Warlpiri songs, despite their Anmatyerr geographic affiliation.

Notes

1 We use the word ‘song’ to refer generally to Aboriginal singing, and reserve the phrase ‘song item’ when referring to this particular organizational unit.

2 Many of these verses can be heard on Campbell et al. 2009.

3 The recordings listed here have been deposited in the Endangered Languages Archive and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

4 Only song items from the impromptu solo performance vary from this structure (song items 8 and 11). In the 2013 recording, these same verses have an AABB structure.

5 Parraparra is an onomatopoeic word for the burrowing frog (N. nichollsi), while -rla corresponds to the ergative suffix.

6 Percussive accompaniment, whether with clapsticks or hand-body slapping, is the norm in awely performances across central Australia (Barwick, Birch, and Evans 2007; Moyle 1977; Treloyn 2003; Turpin and Laughren 2013).

7 Barwick (1989, 18–19) found that the Ngintaka song series (Western Desert language) similarly fall into two broad tempo bands, fast and slow.

8 This finding has been widely observed in other central Australian song genres (Barwick 2002; Turpin 2011).

9 The ligative -p-, plus a partial reduplication of the verb stem -ante-, shows continuous action, while -me shows that this is a non-past-tense ending.

10 In her study of Pitjantjara kangaroo songs from Karlga, Ellis (1967, 244) found that the tonal centre of a song plays an integral role in determining the scalic range of a melody.

11 The one song with a pitch range of a major third (song item 11) can be regarded as a flattened fourth.

12 For ease of comparison, the pitch contours of song items 7, 8, and 9 have been transposed down to D as the tonal centre.

13 Song item 9 only has two iterations of the pitch contour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Calista Yeoh

Calista Yeoh is an honours graduate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Her research area involves musical analysis of central Australian Aboriginal music.E-mail: [email protected]

Myfany Turpin

Myfany Turpin is a linguist and ethnomusicologist at the University of Sydney. She specializes in languages and music of central Australia and has published in the areas of song, ethnobiology, and lexicography. She currently holds an ARC Future Fellowship to investigate the relationship between words and music in Aboriginal song-poetry.E-mail: [email protected]