Resounding Relations

Abstract

Habit has primarily been considered along seemingly divergent trajectories, either as a mechanism that limits creativity or as a transition of imagination into embodied activity (Elizabeth Grosz (2013) ‘Habit today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and us’, Body & Society 19(2&3): 217–39). An interplay of these two aspects is clearly seen in music improvisation, in which performances unfold through well-honed patterns of technique and processes of listening and learning. Yet while the development of good habits is considered essential to performance within distinct cultural traditions or stylistic genres, little attention has been devoted to identifying the types of habits needed for engagement in cross-cultural performance settings. This paper broadens the scope of habits typically explored within jazz studies and music pedagogy, conceptualizing habit in a way that resonates across contemporary Australian jazz and Yolŋu manikay (public ceremonial song) from Australia’s Northern Territory. We emphasize the relational dimensions of habit as they form a foundation for community formation through performance, involving processes of imitation and evocation, and learning through participation. Through this heuristic braiding of habits in jazz and manikay, we argue that habits of musical performance both locate performers within distinct traditions while allowing freedom to innovate. This dynamic allows for the elevation of these traditions within new contexts and relationships.

Within Western academic discourse, the concept of habit has largely been considered along two seemingly divergent trajectories (Grosz 2013). On the one hand, habit has been understood as mechanistic repetition constraining creativity to well-worn patterns of behaviour. On the other hand, the capacity to form new habits is taken to be integral to adaption and growth in response to new contexts and the vicissitudes of life. Habituation to new processes or skills enables the embodiment of human imagination within everyday contexts and activities.

But what of habit within traditions of Indigenous Australian thought and performance? Can meaningful correlations be made between these two dominant interpretations? Grosz identifies the latter interpretation, which understands habit as primarily creative, in ‘the philosophy of life that runs through the work of Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and that has Darwin as its attractive centre’, over against a focus on the mechanical dimensions of habit seen in the work of Descartes, Kant and Sartre, whose view of habit downplays the role of human creativity (2013: 219). Grosz’s analysis, which builds primarily from the work of Ravaisson (2008 [1838]), identifies habit as a way of fostering a sense of individual purpose and identity as ‘lived regularity’, ‘cohesion’ and ‘repetition’, in a universe of ‘perpetual change’ in which ‘nothing repeats’ (2013: 219). For Ravaisson, habit signifies a transition from potential to action – a process by which ‘idea becomes being’ (2008: 55).

On face value, this interpretation can seem problematic in relation to Indigenous Australian epistemologies, which typically view ethical and artistic development as an increasing convergence of present life with ancestral precedent. Community well-being and vitality are considered a manifestation of habituation to the established patterns of the old people, and practices of caring for the land, kin and repertoires of song and story that have been passed down countless generations (see Langton and Corn 2023; Pawu et al. 2023).

Yet Indigenous Australian performance traditions offer so much more than the mechanical repetition of the past, in a way that ‘inhibits consciousness, thought and freedom’ (Grosz 2013: 217). While diligent recreation of ancestral song forms is considered essential to marking distinctions of hereditary identity and land ownership, these performance traditions also attend to inherited forms as the very potential for creativity (Corn 2009; Curkpatrick 2020). In contrast to Ravaisson’s perspectives on the emergence of new behaviours and identities through habit-formation, Indigenous Australian traditions are not overtly forward-looking. That is, creativity is not perceived as something that transcends the constraints of mere repetition and instinct. An alternative view of habit emerges, one that reconciles the seemingly divergent trajectories of Western theorizations of habit cited above: rather than attending to the emergence of the new from the old, we might conceive of habit as the interminable creativity of the old, which continually generates new possibilities by enfolding novel relations and contexts into patterns habituated through ancestral tradition.

Before introducing the manikay (public ceremonial song) tradition of Yolŋu people from Australia’s Arnhem Land, we explore the development of new skills in Western music performance. This development also relies on a bifurcated notion of habit as mechanistic patterns and processes acquired through years of disciplined learning, which in turn allow the embodiment of creativity through performance. This is particularly evident in music improvisation, in which the habituation of complex skills enables musicians to perform collaboratively while fostering a sense of musical intentionality and freedom through creative choice.

Studies in music performance and pedagogy have largely focused on habit formation through deliberate repetition and structured, goal-orientated learning (Ravn et al. 2021). This involves a pattern of internalization (practice) and externalization (performance). However, examining real-time decision-making of jazz improvisation provides insight into how a sense of creativity or musical freedom is facilitated. This freedom emanates from developed expertise in instrument-specific techniques, dexterity in working with various improvisational approaches and stylistic knowledge cultivated through analytic listening and historical knowledge (Onsman and Burke 2018).

The term ‘habituation’ in this context serves to reassert a sense of continuity and reliability that might otherwise be lost to ‘open-ended plasticity’ (Grosz 2013: 217). Habituation suggests the ways traditions of style and practice establish a context in which creativity becomes meaningful; habituation implicitly shapes how we improvise and the contexts in which we perform, including the cultural milieu or interpretive horizon within which meaning is constructed (cf. Gadamer, below). All performances are intricately linked to particular ways of hearing, thinking and engaging with music. Even the physical materials that improvising musicians utilize (instruments, sheet music, concert stage) are inextricably connected to histories of design (the piano and equal temperament) or contexts of use and schools of technique or ‘sound’ (the classical and jazz approach to saxophone performance).

Creativity and imagination are therefore meaningful in relation to largely inherited cultural coordinates. These coordinates provide a context for the creative mind to foreground and reconfigure tacit assumptions about what music is and why we perform (fig. 1). In this sense, tradition is akin to language that opens the world to us in a particular way (Eagleton 2013). It directly shapes the ways we understand and engage with the world, while also enabling creativity and the expansion of our horizons (Curkpatrick 2020; Gadamer 2006). Through the habituation of skills and techniques within a specific context, an individual is empowered to respond to that context, affirming, questioning, innovating or reconfiguring what has been inherited through tradition. Understanding habituation in this dual sense of context and capacity emphasizes the necessary coordinates of tradition within which creativity is embedded. This challenges a sense of individual authenticity as narrowly defined within modernity (Taylor 2003).

Figure 1. Still from Peter Knight – Solo for Trumpet, Delays, Tape and Rice (2019). Knight’s performances shift assumptions about the sources of sound and approaches to tone production, and combine as created on the trumpet and laptop with mechanical tape decks, delays and rice. See Australian Art Orchestra (2019b). Video production Leo Dale

JAZZ SENSIBILITIES IN AN AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT

Before exploring habits of improvisation within manikay, one of the many rich and beautiful song traditions indigenous to Australia, we consider improvisation in Australia more broadly, through sensibilities of jazz.¹ By framing improvisation as a conversation that unfolds within habituated techniques and styles, we conceive of habit as both limiting and expansive. Interpreted in this way, the concept of habit closely aligns with the process of meaning-making within human language and culture. Drawing on Grosz, we demonstrate the notion that habit ‘signals the possibility of seeing a new kind of relation between life and its surrounding support systems’ (2013: 218). In our interpretation, this notion is linked to the emergence of new relationships between those habituated within different cultural traditions, in contemporary Australia.

While most practising musicians in Australia work within traditions of performance from Europe and North America, there is an increasing desire to explore, through performance, Australia’s cultural inheritances alongside global neighbours in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and the complex multicultural landscape of a nation in which almost half of Australians have a parent who was born overseas.

Australian jazz is only just beginning to grapple with uncomfortable legacies of settler colonization, the appropriation of Indigenous cultural expressions and continuing ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land on which we work and perform (Kellett et al. 2024). This context raises significant challenges for musicians navigating questions of belonging and purpose through their music, and what we are to make of performance habits inherited from Europe and America. Improvisation with a jazz sensibility (Onsman and Burke 2018) seems a productive approach for exploring these questions, as improvisation can foreground intrinsic aspects of communication and interaction within performance, allowing questions of relationality across cultures to be explored (Benson 2003; Curkpatrick 2020). Indeed, within the long and complex history of jazz and its diverse branchings, creativity has been expressed through musical voices that seek to work within or against inherited approaches to melody, harmony, timbre and narrative: it is a living conversation that constantly challenges expectations and generates creative resposes to them.

Improvisation with a jazz sensibility is generative, in the sense that it unfolds through the interactions of musicians and the choices they make when they improvise. This includes decisions on what notes and rhythms to play, and how these elements are combined to form melodies and harmonies, all in relation to the choices of other musicians. Similar to playing a game, musicians must become responsive in how, what and when they play. The focus of the ‘game’ changes based on the style or context of performance. For example, playing within a bebop idiom requires a saxophonist to draw from well-rehearsed melodic licks to keep up with the breakneck speed of the music and complex harmonic changes. Conversely, when accompanying a blues singer, musicians might utilize different timbres to enhance the idiosyncratic inflections of the voice. The assumed rules of the game, such as idiomatic harmonic progressions, enable virtuosity through one’s command of the rules, as well as innovation, through the expansion or transgression of assumed forms.

Jazz lives and breathes at this nexus between established traditions and pedagogies, and a desire to experiment beyond these setups. While idiosyncratic identities in performance are shaped by who we listen to, who we study, who we interact with and our socialcultural environment (Burke 2022), as a process of internalization and externalization, improvisation is phenomenologically connected to one’s evolving identity (Johansson 2012; Tee and Lee 2011). Consequently, the nature and meaning of improvisation can be ambiguous given its capacity to allow for novel responses to other musicians in real-time, and evolves over time, through exposure to diverse influences and traditions.

The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) provides a stellar example of the potential for new approaches to performance, communication and understanding to emerge through habits of improvisation that enable conversational interaction between diverse performers and traditions. Since its foundation in 1993, ‘one of the primary aims of the AAO has been to create situations allowing for a free and open exchange of musical and dramatic ideas between different cultures and traditions’ (Australian Art Orchestra, cited in Curkpatrick 2020: 167). For the founding artistic director Paul Grabowsky (2010), music ‘has something to do with expressing the continual act of creation … music is a way of changing the mode of one’s relationship to one’s surroundings’.

While each of the AAO’s projects manifests in dramatically different ways, improvisation has at its core collaborations with musicians and performance traditions from southern India, Sri Lanka, Bali, Vietnam, Sichuan, Korea, Japan, Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Indigenous Australia.² While improvisation allows a flexible and adaptive approach to performance, these collaborations have also emerged over many years of habituation into the diverse cultural traditions Australian musicians have engaged. Musicians invest significant time listening, workshopping and learning about these traditions – in some cases, forming relationships that have extended for several decades. To find meaningful correlations across traditions and adjust to diverse performance styles, musicians must become habituated within new techniques and conceptualizations of creativity. Drawing on Grosz’s reading of Ravaisson, habit might here be characterized as a transition, in which ‘voluntary actions function as if they were instinctive. Habit is the movement by which effort and consideration is transformed into action’ (2013: 221).

Through their work with Wägilak musicians from Ngukurr, a small community in Australia’s remote Northern Territory, members of the AAO have developed long-term relationships through many visits, rehearsal, tours and performances. These relationships have developed through various performances with different stylistic influences and ensembles – from free jazz to symphony orchestra – and include Crossing Roper Bar (2005–15), Tract (2010–11), Nyilipidji (2015–17), Bambula (2018), Hand to Earth (2018–) (fig. 2), Bambula: Three voices (2019), Wata: A gathering for songmen, improvising soloists and orchestra (2021–), Fresh Water Salt Water (2022–) and Raki (2023–). The extent and longevity of this collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous performers is unprecedented in Australian music.³

Figure 2. Hand to Earth at Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin, June 2022. Image supplied by the Australian Art Orchestra

Through these collaborations, a focus on musical dialogue has emerged in which individual voices and traditions remain distinct, even as an expansive and interactive conversation between those traditions emerges (Curkpatrick 2020). Within an Australian context, this is significant, as engagement with Indigenous musicians and song traditions has a history that is dominated by cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. Further, while in recent decades Indigenous music and musicians have been celebrated and included within the programming of mainstream festivals and ensembles like symphony orchestras, these musicians largely remain separated from the internal workings or dialogues of those ensembles with which they work. Improvisation can address this situation directly. As George Lewis explains, ‘in performances of improvised music, the possibility of internalising alternative value systems is implicit from the start. The focus of musical discourse suddenly shifts from the individual, autonomous creator to the collective’ (2002: 234). By responding to one another through improvisation – for Grabowsky, ‘in the sense that you are receiving information, and immediately feeding it back into the conversation in order to move it forward’ – performance becomes a continuing dialogue. Grabowsky (2011) continues: ‘this dynamic play of give and take is an ongoing process, a living thing’.

Interpreted in this way, the concept of habit relates closely to meaning making within human language and culture. In relation to philosophical hermeneutics, Hans Georg Gadamer states that ‘the attraction that the game’ – here akin to an improvised performance – ‘exercises on the player lies in this risk’ of decision and investment along a course of action; thus ‘one enjoys a freedom of decision, which at the same time is endangered and irrevocably limited’ (2006: 95). Improvisation foregrounds a tactical decision-making that continually weighs individual decision and creativity within a constantly shifting, collective environment, discerning what and when to play in a way that sustains the ongoing conversation. This happens within a single performance and through the various interactions of collaboration over time.

As with music performance, communication within language depends on established patterns of grammar and behaviour, in the sense that understanding always requires habituation into established modes of communication. However, patterns of grammar and behaviour must also continually adapt to meet the demands of new situations and relations. In many respects, everyday conversation is therefore akin to improvisation: while members of a speech community draw on established rules (or ‘traditions’) of lexicon and grammar, much of the meaning of these forms derive from context (see, for example, Grice 1957 Levinson 2000) and the interpersonal relations within which language is generated and held. While language depends on conventional structures (grammar), it also requires flexibility to adapt to new situations and relations.

Aboriginal languages are no different from the world’s other 7,000+ languages in this regard. However, what is particularly notable in the Australian context is the deep connection between language, land, ceremonial performances and extensive networks of kinship connections between all things – human, animal, plant and even inanimate objects. In this context, individuals hold custodianship over languages and songs because they hold a custodial relationship over a particular tract of land. Thus, while ‘distinctions … amongst language varieties are couched principally in the idiom of local geography’ (Sutton 1991: 49), those languages also express the multiple connections between diverse families and homelands that extend from the topographical and ecological patterns of country. Aboriginal Australian languages are akin to traditional ceremonial songs in signifying distinct ancestral identities of people and place, while also enabling new connections and conversations to develop.

In what follows, we further explore this generative nexus between habituation and creativity within the context of Yolŋu manikay, attending to habits of improvisation that draw us more tangibly into the places we inhabit, and the relations that extend from those places.

ANCESTRAL HABITS IN YOLŅU MANIKAY (SONG)

The concept of habit is not necessarily foreign to Indigenous Australian cultures and may readily correlate with several traditional concepts related to performance and pedagogy. Exploring these concepts within specific Aboriginal song traditions can enhance broader understandings of habit, especially in relation to music improvisation. Manikay exemplifies prevailing understandings of habit as pattern and process, in the acquisition of skill through years of disciplined listening. However, Yolŋu musicians also emphasize the ways performance can generate new relationships across cultural differences, through patterns that affirm distinct ancestries while also generating innovative approaches to collaborative performance.

Australia is home to songs, dances and narratives that are part of the oldest continuing cultures in the world. One such tradition is manikay, the public ceremonial songs of Yolŋu people from Arnhem Land. Manikay carry poetic narratives that have been retold for countless generations and are thick with multiple layers of image and association.⁴ Discrete manikay repertories are held by the sixty-plus clans that constitute the Yolŋu nations. Every bӓpurru (‘father’s group’) who draw their identity from a specific ancestral homeland are custodians of distinct song sets, which may take several hours to perform. These songs convey narratives concerning ancestral law and the formation of Yolŋu people and homelands by creative ancestral beings, as well as intricate ecological knowledge and observations about people and the environment – such as the time of year the dhaŋarra (white Eucalyptus flowers) bloom, enticing bees to make honey. Manikay are used to structure ceremonial events such as the circumcision of boys, burial and smoking (purification) ceremonies.

Manikay are passed through the generations along with associated dances, designs, stories and sacred names, discretely owned by each clan. As Paddy Dhathaŋu comments in relation to Yolŋu painting, performance demonstrates ‘that things are as they have always been: the authority of their forebears is confirmed’ through the ongoing and efficacious ‘performance of that authority’ (cited in Caruana and Lendon 1997: 56). Yet while performances of manikay invoke ancestral luku (footprints, foundations, roots of a tree) related to identity and purpose, like the branches of a tree, songs also extend outwards in new directions, to blossom and produce sweet honey (see Blakeman and Dhambiŋ 2023). Improvisation and the interposition of contemporary narratives within inherited song forms are integral to this sense of growth through the generations, the old – carried in those well-honed habits of performance – always emerging into something of living value (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023a). For Indigenous Australians, the continual re-enactment of ‘the way of the ancestors’ through the performance of ancestral law in song (Langton and Corn 2023) promotes timeless ways of being and knowing that underwrite human flourishing in every time and place.

TOGETHER THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

Various habits of jazz improvisation, described above, can be discerned in manikay, especially in the disciplined acquisition of skills necessary to performance within established traditions. Yolŋu children start their ceremonial education by sitting beside their parents on the ceremonial ground, playing bilma (clapsticks) fashioned from small sticks. Through imitation and participation, they learn to sing by memorizing the yäku (sacred names) that identify ancestral beings, the land through which they journeyed and names that simultaneously describe those places and people who are their custodians. Traditional Yolŋu ceremonial education begins with raypirri’ (respect, discipline), by attentively listening to elders, night after night, year after year. Daniel Wilfred, a leader for the Wägilak clan, comments:

Raypirri’ means when you are sitting, listening and learning, you are going to be responsible to the old people who are standing there teaching and talking to you. And you are learning. That’s raypirri’: be a person who respects, listens and learns. Without respect, you won’t learn anything … You learn those stories and it changes your life. This is the rom way (Yolŋu law and culture), the manikay way … The Yolŋu law, we have to respect and listen to our elders – what they are teaching. That’s how we learn. They’re still carrying the law. The new generation has to start listening and learning things. (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023c: 3)

Raypirri’ can also be defined as ‘congruence with the proper ancestral way of doing things’ (Christie and Campbell 2013: 10) and is closely related to the acquisition of gakal (skill). Gakal, the competency to interpret ancestral narratives and the knowledge conveyed in song, is progressively acquired as one takes on responsibilities to perform ceremony and fulfils leadership roles within a community.

The bilma (clapsticks) (fig. 3), played by the song leader, symbolize important patterns of identity and narrative, which are passed through the generations by song. Handed by father to son, the bilma convey responsibility to lead the ceremony: those same clapsticks that ‘grew up’ a child in the luku (footprints, foundations, roots of a tree) of his elders, continuing to resonate through the lives of a new generation.

Figure 3. Bilma used in Yolŋu manikay, carved from the ironbark tree. Photo Samuel Curkpatrick (2019)

Singers, dancers and a yidaki (didjeridu) players all follow the bilma, which carries the narrative action of a clan’s manikay. The songs evolve through a series of inherited rhythmic patterns depicting the travels of an ancestral figure like Djuwalpada, the Wägilak ancestor, as he walks, hunts and dances through the land. Underneath a densely woven heterophony of voices, the bilma represent the ŋaraka (bones) of a clan’s ancestral identity – the bark and flesh of the tree whittled away to expose a resonant core, the ŋaraka (bones) of song that are carried through the generations and that structures performance in all generations. When listening to recordings of manikay from decades past, the rhythmic patterns of the bilma and their tempo measured in beats per minute, are accurately reproduced. In performance, singers elaborate on these rhythmic ŋaraka through melodic improvisation and the poetic juxtaposition of song texts, enabling the structural forms of the song to branch in new directions, carried by a new generation of voices.

The bilma therefore provide a framework that at once sustains patterns of tradition – habituating a new generation into patterns and procedures of ancestral law – while allowing those traditions to be extended and reinterpreted. Heard resonating through a community and calling people to the ceremony, the steady groove of the bilma draws together multiple generations, family groups, languages and country, to strengthen their relationships with one another through song. Songs dutifully passed through the generations become meaningful when different branchings of people and story interact in performance, connecting and diverging, and enlivening community.

Significantly, the relational habits of manikay represented by the bilma are not limited to ceremonial contexts within Yolŋu communities but incorporate non-Indigenous Australians. For Wilfred, habits of respect and attentive listening inculcated through manikay are about

how you play together, share and listen. How you listen to stories from your family and friends. We are getting more knowledge from other people. Learning to respect and how to get along, to respect what you learn and those who teach you. That is the responsibility you have to take. Balanda [non-Indigenous people] need to do that too. Respect is about how you gather up, paint and come together. (Wilfred 2023)

Ancestral habits are those that have passed through the generations as forms of life and behaviour that sustain life and enable it to flourish in various ways. Yolŋu performance and pedagogy challenge us to a more expansive view of habit. That is, while the habituation of a new generation into ancestral patterns underpins connection to law and important identities of people and place, this does not necessarily constrain creativity and engagement with those from other places and cultures. Habits of manikay dutifully curated through the generations affirm ancestral traditions through the very potential of those forms to generate new ways of performing, thinking and relating.

HABITS OF TOGETHERNESS THROUGH IMPROVISATION

In Yolŋu song and performance a variety of metaphors embody the concept of balaräliyunmirri (dynamic reciprocity), emphasizing a dynamic back-and-forth between interlocutors that fosters capacity to learn from one another and grow together in our differences (Blakeman 2015: 18). Anthropologist Bree Blakeman notes that ‘one fundamental structural and ontological position necessary for balaräliyunmirri and raypirri’ (respect) to work is that people stand with their feet [luku] in their own foundation’ (2023; see also Blakeman 2015: 120). According to this Yolŋu perspective, a capacity to work collaboratively across cultures requires adept footing within inherited traditions. Through disciplined listening and the acquisition of gakal (skill) in interpreting ancestral forms, we develop freedom to innovate, enlivening those traditions within new contexts and relationships.

The rest of this section presents three vignettes that seek to generate dialogue between the perspectives on jazz and manikay as explored throughout this article. These vignettes, centred on themes of imitation and evocation, learning through doing, and resounding relation, highlight the relational dimensions of habit in performance and processes of community formation. Our aim is not to synthesize performance approaches from jazz and manikay but to generate conversation among musicians, performers and researchers, fostering more engaged and responsive ways of working together.

IMITATION AND EVOCATION

When the AAO performed Crossing Roper Bar at the Darwin Entertainment Centre in 2010, Paul Grabowsky placed a laptop on the lid of the piano he was playing, facing out into the audience. It showed images of African American jazz greats, such as Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, who Grabowsky considered to be his elders – voices he has attended to with raypirri’ (attentive listening, respect) throughout his formation as a musician. Similarly, projected behind the Wägilak singers was an image of Djuwalpada, the Wägilak ancestor. This image had been painted by Sambo Barabara, the Wägilak elder who initially granted permission for the collaboration to proceed.

In what musicians play and their motivation to perform, the ideas, approaches and voices of their teachers may be discerned. This was clearly visible on stage in Darwin, where two senses of repetition might be understood: imitation and evocation. First, imitation is an intentional repetition of the habits of another musician (the melodic patterns of Miles Davis), which, to knowing listening, might be heard as such, included into the content of an improvisation. Many musicians learn new skills by imitating others. By contrast, evocation seems more impressionistic than imitation and might be discerned across a range of techniques or creative approaches, by which a performer reminds the listener of the stylistic approaches of another musician. As such, evocation carries a sense of conjuring a sound or sensation of another within one’s own approach to performance. In manikay, the present-day efficacy of ancestral pasts is made explicit by using different vocal timbres to evoke the voice of an elder past, an important teacher who carried those songs through the generations. This is exemplified in Daniel Wilfred’s collaborative performance with Peter Knight, Bambula: Three voices (2019).⁵ In this recording, Wilfred utilizes multi-track recording to overlay three improvised vocal lines, each one evoking the timbre and stylistic inflections used by different generations who come together for ceremony (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023a).

Cultivating a capacity to imitate and evoke the voices of elders can connect performances through the generations; it can also help musicians develop awareness of the ways creativity has been enabled – and is held among – the voices of others. On this view, creativity as the emergence of new identities through moments of regularity and cohesion (Grosz 2013) need not be viewed as an activity that displaces tradition as mere repetition. Evocation suggests more than the repetition of stylistic idioms or technical approaches: where repetition of patterns and processes merely represent what was played in the past, evocation affirms the ongoing efficacy of those voices and traditions as an ‘effective historical consciousness’ (Gadamer 2006) shaping present interactions and imaginations.

LEARNING THROUGH DOING

Through focused repetition, musicians aim to develop practical and analytical skills that become second nature. Competent jazz improvisers – like good communicators – are those with the capacity to draw effortlessly on these skills, to express an idea or intention in sound, without getting caught up in the mechanics of performance. Knowing how to perform within a particular tradition or style entails more than understanding processes of performance in an analytical sense: knowing and doing are inseparable.

A similar concept is conveyed by the Yolŋu verb marŋgi. This might be simultaneously translated as ‘to know’, ‘to be able to’ and ‘to have rights in’ (Pawu et al. 2023). Within Yolŋu epistemology, knowing about ancestral law and how to sing manikay also generates obligations to interpret that knowledge for the well-being of others. Gakal (skill) is seen in the energetic improvisation of seasoned performers. But it is also recognized in the voices of elders who, through many decades, inculcate within a community the wisdom of ancestral traditions.

For Australian musicians seeking greater engagement with Indigenous peoples and cultures, it is not sufficient to simply learn about those songs through recordings or in the practice room. Coming to understand those traditions is necessarily bound up in relational engagements and responsibilities – when something becomes second nature, it is no longer separate in a conceptual or experiential way from our own habituated behaviours or understandings.

While not everyone can spend time learning from manikay singers or building relationships over many years, the concept of marŋgi can nevertheless shape how we engage with others through performance in any setting. Encouraging participation, Wilfred calls out to the non-Indigenous musicians he works with, ‘Go for it! Make something!’ and, ‘If you don’t push in, that song won’t know you.’ This is an invitation for Australian improvisers to move beyond historic ambivalence towards relationally engaged conversations, by pushing into the dynamic game of performance.

RESOUNDING RELATIONS

Throughout this article, we have explored the ways that habits in musical performance enable creativity and cultural inheritance to become embodied within living communities. We have also argued that habituated process and techniques of music performance do not simply lock us into established patterns but open the possibility of forming new relationships through performance.

Taking this view of habit can shift our focus from performance as repetition and interpretation of past traditions or styles, to performance as a relational event, in which we come to understand our own histories and creative potential, in community with others. This holds great significance within multicultural societies: developing ways of performing together requires more than careful, analytic listening, but a focus on the ways that different traditions can enable us to work together. Habits do not simply lock us into established patterns but open the possibility of thinking and relating to one another through performance.

As the discussion of imitation, evocation and learning through doing has shown, differences between cultures do not simply disrupt inherited perspectives or traditions; rather, differences can be celebrated as they enable the present generation to comprehend the unique and complex relationships of history and culture that constitute experience. Likewise, while habitual processes in jazz and manikay position a musician within distinct coordinates of tradition and culture, they also enable creativity, enlivening those traditions within new contexts and relationships. This is significant in contemporary Australia, where an attention to habit in this way might build community cohesion and purpose.

Notes

1 Onsman and Burke use the term ‘sensibility’ to refer to ‘a performative quality that is the product of idiosyncratic experience, expertise and aesthetics, and subconsciously acquired frames of references and perspectives’ (2018: 44).

2 The Australian Art Orchestra website (2024) provides much interesting information on these projects and links to these performances. www.aao.com.au/

3 For a detailed study of these collaborations and the Wägilak manikay (song) structures and narratives on which they build, see Curkpatrick (2017; 2020; 2021) and Curkpatrick and Wilfred (2023a; 2023b; 2023c).

4 For an introduction to manikay, see Corn (2009; 2013), Magowan (2007) and Gay’wu Group of Women (2019). For recordings of Wägilak manikay see Curkpatrick (2023).

5 For a recording of Bambula: Three voices, see Australian Art Orchestra (2019a).