The significance of archaic survivals in remote refuge areas was brought home to me with unusual force when reading Joseph Jordania’s book, Who Asked the First Question (Jordania 2006). In his very thorough and convincing consideration of European vocal traditions, Jordania demonstrates that societies where polyphonic vocalizing comes more or less naturally, as part of long established oral traditions, tend to be found in “refuge” areas, such as mountainous regions, islands, forests, etc. -- and this appears to be a continent-wide phenomenon, extending to the British Isles as well. Surrounding these isolated pockets, oral traditions of a different kind prevail, characterized by solo singing and/or group vocalizing in unison and octaves. Both types are clearly “old,” but the striking difference in their distribution -- the one continuous and “mainstream,” the other discontinuous and marginal -- could be an important clue, not only to their relative age as distinct musical practices, but to our understanding of European pre-history generally.
Following the lead of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1994), Jordania associates the polyphonic traditions with what she called “Old Europe,” an archaic culture either absorbed or displaced by a migration from western and/or central Asia, dating from roughly 4,000 BC, of a more aggressive, and ultimately far more successful, “proto Indo-European” culture (see below), bringing with it a very different musical style. While certain of Gimbutas’ theories, such as her “civilization of the Goddess” idea, have been regarded with justified skepticism, the considerable body of musical evidence offered by Jordania tends to support her notion of a once ubiquitous but now marginalized “Old European” culture of great antiquity, fragments of which have survived in various refuge areas throughout the continent well into the Twentieth Century.
As illustrated by the many transcriptions in Jordania’s book, “Old European” polyphonic singing is highly varied, ranging from interlocking counterpoints and hockets stylistically close to P/B (see previous chapter), to various types of drone polyphony, parallel harmonies, or combinations of any two or three of the above. In some places, the harmonies are “smooth,” in a manner familiar to modern ears, but in other places, such as the highland regions of Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, etc., harsh dissonances are favored. While many of these traditions do not carry the “African signature” precisely as I’ve defined it, the tightly blended polyphonic choral practices found among so many of these groups have many typically “African” characteristics. Whether they represent derivations from musical styles introduced to Europe via the Out of Africa migration, or are the result of completely independent processes must remain, for now, an open question.
Here are some examples of so-called "Old European" polyphony:
From the mountains of Liguria, in northern Italy: Musical Example 43: Tralallero (from Italian Treasury: Folk Music & Song of Italy, Rounder Records, recorded by Alan Lomax).
From Basque country, in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain: Musical Example 44 : Koadrila Batsen Gara (from The Spanish Recordings: Basque Country, recorded by Alan Lomax, track 6).
From the Pirin mountains of southwest Bulgaria: Musical Example 45 :Vetar Vee (from Bulgarian Village and Folk Music, recorded by Ethel Raim and Martin Koenig)
From the forests of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia): Musical Example 46: Belarus Folksong (from Folk Music of the USSR, Smithsonian Folkways 4535, compiled by Henry Cowell).
Perhaps the most astonishing example of an “Old European” survival is a traditional Basque instrument called the Xalaparta, as demonstrated here, via youtube -- Video Example Two, Ttukunak:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tgBF57eBo&feature=related )
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tgBF57eBo&feature=related )
[Added 3-11-11: As Maju reminded me in a recent comment, the traditional Txalaparta is a wooden instrument, consisting of no more than two pieces. Although the youtube performance is more typical of how younger people are innovating on the basis of the Txalaparta tradition, the aspect that interests me most, i.e. the precise, hocketed interaction of the performers, is demonstrated quite nicely here.]
The Xalaparta is closely related to an instrumental ensemble almost certainly of African origin and widely found among many indigenous groups as part of the "African Signature": stamping tubes. It may also be related to the xylophone, though that connection is more remote. Both traditions were in all likelihood a part of Out-of-Africa migrant culture (HMC), maintained through their epic migrations to Asia, Indonesia, Melanesia and, of course, Europe.
To illustrate, here’s a youtube video of stamping tubes from Ghana: Video Example Three: Traditional Bamboo Orchestra in Mesomagor:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ7KAI4qqf0 )
The Xalaparta is closely related to an instrumental ensemble almost certainly of African origin and widely found among many indigenous groups as part of the "African Signature": stamping tubes. It may also be related to the xylophone, though that connection is more remote. Both traditions were in all likelihood a part of Out-of-Africa migrant culture (HMC), maintained through their epic migrations to Asia, Indonesia, Melanesia and, of course, Europe.
To illustrate, here’s a youtube video of stamping tubes from Ghana: Video Example Three: Traditional Bamboo Orchestra in Mesomagor:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ7KAI4qqf0 )
[Added 3-11-11: The following youtube video, by ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp, illustrates how stamping tubes are prepared and performed among the ‘Are ‘are people of the Solomon Islands, in Melanesia. Video Example Four: 'Are 'are Stamping Tubes:
Different types of group interaction can be seen if you skip to about 6 and a half minutes in.
A Romanian monastic tradition known as toaca, appears stylistically related to both Txalaparta and stamping tube performance, though in this case wooden hammers are used. On this youtube video we see as many as four nuns performing a complexly interactive hocket. Video Example Five: Toaca:
A Romanian monastic tradition known as toaca, appears stylistically related to both Txalaparta and stamping tube performance, though in this case wooden hammers are used. On this youtube video we see as many as four nuns performing a complexly interactive hocket. Video Example Five: Toaca:
The European Mainstream
The most typical vocal styles of “mainstream” European folksong, once commonly heard in lowland farms, villages, and small towns throughout the continent, tend to be monophonic, highly word-oriented lyric songs or ballads, in strophic (i.e., verse) form, often with a refrain. According to the terminology adopted by Alan Lomax, the polyphonic vocal traditions of the remote highland areas are considered “Old European,” while the monophonic, strophic “folk songs” of the lowland villages and towns are “Modern European.”
A few examples of "Modern European" strophic song:
Hungary: Audio Example 48: Come on Girls to the Spinning House (from Folk Music of Hungary, Smithsonian Folkways, collected under the supervision of Bela Bartok).
Lithuania: Audio Example 49: Riding Across a Forest of Green (from Lithuanian Folk Songs in the United States, Smithsonian Folkways).
Italy: Audio Example 50: Stornello Baresi (from Italian Folk Songs and Dances, Smithsonian Folkways).
If Old European polyphonic singing is rooted in archaic traditions either stemming from, or closely related to, the culture of the earliest African colonists, then what could be the source of these much simpler monophonic songs and ballads? For clues, we will need to delve farther into the fascinating theories of Marija Gimbutas.
The “Kurgan” Invasion
According to Gimbutas’ model, Indo-European language and culture developed in the “Dnieper/Volga” region in the “earlier half of the 4th Millennium BC” and spread from there in many directions, both to the east and west, facilitated by Kurgan mastery of horsemanship. The Wikipedia article on the Kurgan Hyphothesis includes the following “Map of Indo European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BC according to the Kurgan model”:
From this map we can get an idea of what Gimbutas is talking about when she associates the Indo-European migration (or, if you prefer, invasion) into Europe with the destruction and ultimate marginalization of “Old European” culture. Note the yellow area in the map, between the Caspian and Black Seas, representing a mountainous area, roughly where Georgia is located, that was left unconquered by the aggressive and warlike Indo-Europeans.
There was evidence of immigration and escape from these violent happenings and a lot of confusion, a lot of shifts of population. People started to flee to places like islands and forests and hilly areas.
Whether there was literally a “cult of the Goddess” or “civilization of the Goddess,” as Gimbutas claimed, is less important, as I see it, than her theories regarding an essentially “matristic,” egalitarian and pacifist “Old European” culture, prior to the transformation of Europe by the Indo-Europeans. The Old Europe she describes seems quite close in many ways to the “Utopian” culture of the African Pygmies and Bushmen, as commonly described in so much of the literature. (See Chapters Three, Four and Six.)
To help us understand how “African” Old Europe may have been, let’s compare two sets of images, the first an example of Paleolithic rock art from southeastern Spain, as presented by Gimbutas in Civilization of the Goddess (p. 187), the second a selection of four unrelated rock art images from Southern Africa, usually associated with the Bushmen culture of anywhere from several hundreds to several thousands of years ago:
Figure 13.2 Paleolithic Rock Art -- from Spain (Gimbutas 1991)
Figure 13.3 Images from rock paintings attributed to Bushmen artists -- southern Africa
Interestingly, there is hardly any difference between female polyphony (scored line) and polyphony generally (solid line), indicating that the differences between “men's songs” and “women's songs” (an issue that has received much attention over the last 25 years or so) may matter less than differences in the way women are treated in the society as a whole.
Figure 13.1 Indo-European Migrations (Wikipedia)
From this map we can get an idea of what Gimbutas is talking about when she associates the Indo-European migration (or, if you prefer, invasion) into Europe with the destruction and ultimate marginalization of “Old European” culture. Note the yellow area in the map, between the Caspian and Black Seas, representing a mountainous area, roughly where Georgia is located, that was left unconquered by the aggressive and warlike Indo-Europeans.
“Matristic” vs. “Patriarchal
In an interview with David Jay Brown & Rebecca McCLen Novick, Gimbutas speaks of her childhood in Lithuania, a country which, at the time, was, as she says, “still fifty percent pagan”:
In some areas, up to the nineteenth and twentieth century, there were still beliefs alive in Goddesses and all kinds of beings. So in my childhood I was exposed to many things which were almost prehistoric, I would say. And when I studied archaeology, it was easier for me to grasp what these sculptures mean than for an archaeologist born in New York, who doesn't know anything about the countryside life in Europe.
Such observations, coupled with many years of archaeological research, led her to develop a fascinating hypothesis associating the destruction of Old European civilization with the migration into Europe of “proto-Indo-European people” from southern Russia. The “Kurgans” were violent horse-mounted conquerors, who introduced their "patriarchal" social structure, with the result that European culture became “hybridized.”
According to Gimbutas, Old European culture, prior to the invasion of the Kurgans was “matristic.”
I call it matristic, not matriarchal, because matriarchal always arouses ideas of dominance and is compared with the patriarchy. But it was a balanced society, it was not that women were really so powerful that they usurped everything that was masculine. Men were in their rightful position, they were doing their own work, they had their duties and they also had their own power. This is reflected in their symbols where you find not only goddesses but also, Gods. . .
While the Old Europeans were nonviolent and had no weapons other than weapons for hunting, the Kurgans had military weapons and also horses, which gave them a powerful military advantage. When they invaded, the indigenous inhabitants retreated high into the hills, “sometimes in places which had very difficult access.”
There was evidence of immigration and escape from these violent happenings and a lot of confusion, a lot of shifts of population. People started to flee to places like islands and forests and hilly areas.
Whether there was literally a “cult of the Goddess” or “civilization of the Goddess,” as Gimbutas claimed, is less important, as I see it, than her theories regarding an essentially “matristic,” egalitarian and pacifist “Old European” culture, prior to the transformation of Europe by the Indo-Europeans. The Old Europe she describes seems quite close in many ways to the “Utopian” culture of the African Pygmies and Bushmen, as commonly described in so much of the literature. (See Chapters Three, Four and Six.)
To help us understand how “African” Old Europe may have been, let’s compare two sets of images, the first an example of Paleolithic rock art from southeastern Spain, as presented by Gimbutas in Civilization of the Goddess (p. 187), the second a selection of four unrelated rock art images from Southern Africa, usually associated with the Bushmen culture of anywhere from several hundreds to several thousands of years ago:
Figure 13.2 Paleolithic Rock Art -- from Spain (Gimbutas 1991)
Figure 13.3 Images from rock paintings attributed to Bushmen artists -- southern Africa
The Ancient Roots of “Modern European” Song
If the exuberant folk polyphony that so deeply impressed both Lomax and Jordania can be associated with “Old Europe,” can we associate the more thoughtful and poetic monophonic folk songs of “Modern Europe” with the culture of Kurgan invaders and their Indo-European languages? In search of an answer, let’s turn to the musical traditions of the Central Asian horse nomads, where highly poetic, monophonic, strophic songs are typical, and polyphonic vocalizing is conspicuous by its absence.
An excellent example of Central Asian strophic song at its most rhapsodic is provided in the soundtrack of yet another youtube video, from Kyrgyzstan, which will also give you an idea of how important horses are in this culture: Video Example Six: Kyrgyz Song:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrETbBI1kOU&feature=related )
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrETbBI1kOU&feature=related )
Equally impressive singing, and playing, is found among the neighboring Kazaks: Audio Example 51: Kanapya. Note how effectively the dombra rhythms evoke the sound of horse’s hoofs.
Compare the above with this northern Albanian ballad: Audio Example 52: Zenel Kadrija.
While there appears to be a clear connection between the Kazak performance and the one from Albania, the connection between Central Asian strophic song and that of the more straightforward, simple, and unaccompanied strophic “folk songs” of mainstream Europe (cf. Audio Examples 47-50) isn’t quite so clear. In both cases, we find a musical syntax based on clearly delineated phrases, tailored to fit carefully contrived poetic lines, with the music repeating almost note for note with each successive verse. But the Central Asian examples are often much longer, more rhapsodic and rhythmically flexible, and also, of course, usually accompanied by plucked string instruments such as the dombra, of a sort that we don’t find in western Europe until the Middle Ages.
In my phylogenetic map of music style (see Appendix B), I labeled both types of strophic song B2a2, as opposed to another important solo style labeled B2a1, the “Elaborate Style” discussed in Chapter Eleven. According to this model, both styles derive from B2, the “Breathless Style” of the Paleosiberians and Saami, rooted in the “bottleneck event” discussed in Chapter Ten. B2a1 and B2a2 differ from Breathless Style in that phrasing has become an important feature, while Breathless Style is characterized by musical “run-on sentences,” interrupted by arbitrary gasps for air. It’s possible that the Central Asiatic strophic song represents an intermediate evolutionary phase between B2a1 and B2a2 rather than a simple branching from B2. It isn’t as highly embellished or as “through-composed” as “elaborate” style, but it does share in some of its rhapsodic freedom, and the relation between the instrument(s) and the voice (unison or heterophony) is similar as well.
Is the European strophic song related to the strophic songs of Central Asian horse nomads via the mutual influence of the “Kurgan” horse nomads postulated by Gimbutas? Or does it have some other source, possibly as an independent outgrowth from Breathless Style? Could it be an amalgam of both? Or a completely new “independent invention”? Can we see it as part of a “modern” tradition that supplanted “Old Europe” after a “Kurgan invasion” and the introduction of Indo-European languages? Or is it a survival of a much older cultural strain, associated with the earliest development of farming and herding in Europe. In any case, this is a style that seems to have pervaded the vocal performances of most farms and villages through the length and breadth of Europe for many thousands of years.
The Role of Women
When Alan Lomax collected folk music in Spain and Italy during the 1950's, he was struck by certain differences in singing style between north and south in both countries that appeared related to the role of women. Specifically, where women played a more important and active role in the society and had a certain amount of sexual freedom, as in the north, voices tended to be more open, relaxed and “well blended,” and there was a tendency to sing in groups, often polyphonically. Where women played a subordinate role, and their sexuality was strictly controlled, as in the south, voices tended to be constricted and tense, solo singing was more common, and group singing usually in harsh unison. Since Lomax was something of a Freudian -- and a disciple of Margaret Mead -- it's not difficult to see how he could have associated sexual tension with vocal tension, male-female harmony with musical harmony.
Since this was one of the principal “epiphanies” that led him to focus on the stylistic aspects of music, the testing of this hypothesis became one of the earliest goals of Cantometrics. Drawing upon the “Ethnographic Atlas,” a database compiled by ethnologist George Murdock, containing, among other things, data pertaining to the role of women in a number of different societies, Lomax found correlations that did, indeed, appear to confirm his initial hypothesis.
Since this was one of the principal “epiphanies” that led him to focus on the stylistic aspects of music, the testing of this hypothesis became one of the earliest goals of Cantometrics. Drawing upon the “Ethnographic Atlas,” a database compiled by ethnologist George Murdock, containing, among other things, data pertaining to the role of women in a number of different societies, Lomax found correlations that did, indeed, appear to confirm his initial hypothesis.
Of particular interest is a graph appearing on p. 167 of Folk Song Style and Culture, with “productive complementarity” as the horizontal axis, and mean percentage of polyphonic singing as the vertical. The graph progressively rises from left to right, indicating a growing tendency, worldwide, for polyphonic vocalizing as the participation of women in food producing activities, according to Murdock's ratings, increases (M and N indicate male domination for such tasks, D and E rough equality of males and females and F and G almost exclusively female participation):
Figure 13.4 "Polyphony and Complementarity" (Lomax et al. 1968:167)
Interestingly, there is hardly any difference between female polyphony (scored line) and polyphony generally (solid line), indicating that the differences between “men's songs” and “women's songs” (an issue that has received much attention over the last 25 years or so) may matter less than differences in the way women are treated in the society as a whole.
While many of the relationships Lomax found between song style and social structure remain either problematic or difficult to assess, his correlations between male-female “complementarity” and aspects of song style such as polyphony, tonal blend and vocal tension have always seemed more convincing. While it's not clear whether such a correlation can be regarded as truly universal, it does seem to hold for large portions of Africa, Europe and Asia.
Lomax's notion of complementarity seems quite close to Gimbutas' idea of the matristic -- a “balanced society” where women and men live and work together on a more or less equal basis. Lomax described this type of society as follows:
[W]here women take a leading recognized part in the central activity of a society, such as supplying the main source of food, they assume, at least in this respect, a complementary, or more or less equal, interactive relationship with men. . . People tend to sing in wide voices in societies where women are most secure in their productive and sexual roles and where, therefore, they are freest to relate fully to the males (pp. 199-200).
While Lomax often writes as though he sees a cause and effect relationship between sexual and vocal tension, complementarity and polyphony, etc., he also associates polyphonic vocalizing and wide, relaxed voices with the same “Old Europe” that Gimbutas associated with the earlier, matristic societies that dominated all of Europe prior to the advent of the Indo-Europeans. Which raises a fascinating question: are we dealing with a patently Freudian situation, where tensions between men and women, both sexual and political, tend to promote behavioral tension, as expressed by tightly constricted throats and harshly blended monophonic group performance? -- or do the differences, both sexual and musical, reflect a contrast between two types of culture, the matristic, complementary, “polyphonic” culture of Africa and Old Europe vs. the patriarchal, repressive, violent, monophonic culture of Indo-European invaders?
Is there some sort of universal cause and effect relation at work between the role of women in society and certain aspects of musical style? More specifically, is there a cause and effect relation, as Lomax claimed, between male-female complementarity and polyphonic vocalizing, relaxed voices, and “good” tonal blend? Or are the correlations he found due to historical processes at work in a specific time and place -- in this case neolithic Europe -- affecting both the treatment of women and many other aspects of culture, as Gimbutas' theories suggest?
Universalist claims of this sort can be tested by determining whether or not the correlations still hold in a completely different socio-historical context. Consider, for example, native North America. Here we have both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, simple tribal cultures and advanced civilizations. We also have patrilineal societies, where women are clearly subordinate, and matrilineal societies, where women have considerable influence and freedom.
Universalist claims of this sort can be tested by determining whether or not the correlations still hold in a completely different socio-historical context. Consider, for example, native North America. Here we have both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, simple tribal cultures and advanced civilizations. We also have patrilineal societies, where women are clearly subordinate, and matrilineal societies, where women have considerable influence and freedom.
Yet throughout the length and breadth of this vast area, we find only the barest trace of polyphonic vocalizing, mostly in very limited areas, such as pockets in the Northwest Coast and, in northern California, among the Hupa, who are patrilineal. The music of just about every other native American tribe north of Mexico, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, aggressive and warlike, or relatively quiet and passive, is dominated by unison singing and moderately tense voices, with little to no trace of polyphony. Evidently, the correlation Lomax found between complementarity and polyphony cannot, therefore, be regarded as universal, as it doesn't seem to apply in North America.
As for the other musical characteristics Lomax associated with complementarity -- relaxed voices and “good” tonal blend -- the picture is not so clear. The Navaho and many Pueblo groups are matrilineal -- and have indeed been characterized as “Apollonian” (as opposed to “Dionysian”) cultures. Their voices do in fact tend to be more relaxed than is typical for native Americans in the north -- and Pueblo singing is noted for its smooth vocal blend. The Apache, however, close relatives of the Navaho, and also matrilineal, tend to have a more strident, tense and harshly blended style of vocalizing. Since it's not clear whether or not the Apache pattern could be a response to relatively recent historical events, additional research would be necessary before a firm conclusion could be reached.
Returning to our consideration of Europe, we are probably safe in concluding that Old European polyphonic vocalizing, associated by Lomax with the role of women, was most likely the product of historically contingent, rather than universally necessary, forces -- as implied by both Gimbutas and Jordania. There would seem to be no hard and fast rule causing humans to sing in harmony wherever women are treated as equals, though this very interesting issue is still open to further investigation.
Nevertheless, as Gimbutas would surely point out, the Old European pattern does suggest that gender-balance, acephalous, egalitarian political systems, group integration, cooperation, and sharing, along with an overall lack of competiveness and aggression, do seem to go hand in hand with musical practices expressing harmoniousness, social integration and simple pleasure. It does seem reasonable, therefore, to associate smoothly blended, relaxed voices, singing spontaneously together in harmony, with the sort of harmonious culture one might expect when both women and men are socially integrated on a free and equal basis, with minimal opportunities for sexual rivalry and tension to arise. In other words, while the correlations Lomax discovered do not necessarily point to cause and effect relationships, they strongly suggest that the various aspects of any culture can best be evaluated as parts of an integrated whole.
As for the other musical characteristics Lomax associated with complementarity -- relaxed voices and “good” tonal blend -- the picture is not so clear. The Navaho and many Pueblo groups are matrilineal -- and have indeed been characterized as “Apollonian” (as opposed to “Dionysian”) cultures. Their voices do in fact tend to be more relaxed than is typical for native Americans in the north -- and Pueblo singing is noted for its smooth vocal blend. The Apache, however, close relatives of the Navaho, and also matrilineal, tend to have a more strident, tense and harshly blended style of vocalizing. Since it's not clear whether or not the Apache pattern could be a response to relatively recent historical events, additional research would be necessary before a firm conclusion could be reached.
Returning to our consideration of Europe, we are probably safe in concluding that Old European polyphonic vocalizing, associated by Lomax with the role of women, was most likely the product of historically contingent, rather than universally necessary, forces -- as implied by both Gimbutas and Jordania. There would seem to be no hard and fast rule causing humans to sing in harmony wherever women are treated as equals, though this very interesting issue is still open to further investigation.
Nevertheless, as Gimbutas would surely point out, the Old European pattern does suggest that gender-balance, acephalous, egalitarian political systems, group integration, cooperation, and sharing, along with an overall lack of competiveness and aggression, do seem to go hand in hand with musical practices expressing harmoniousness, social integration and simple pleasure. It does seem reasonable, therefore, to associate smoothly blended, relaxed voices, singing spontaneously together in harmony, with the sort of harmonious culture one might expect when both women and men are socially integrated on a free and equal basis, with minimal opportunities for sexual rivalry and tension to arise. In other words, while the correlations Lomax discovered do not necessarily point to cause and effect relationships, they strongly suggest that the various aspects of any culture can best be evaluated as parts of an integrated whole.
Just a quick note: you may know or not that the original txalaparta was always of wood and generally had two boards only, not four, five or whatever.
ReplyDeleteThese "xylophone" txalapartas we see nowadays are modern developments of the last few decades, nothing else. These days you can even see them cut out of ice as a band did in Lapland for a musical movie. Nice but not really "ancient".
Maju, I tried to find videos of more traditional types of txalaparta performance, but all I could find on youtube were performances of more or less this kind, by young people experimenting with "modern developments," as you say. That's not a serious problem for me, because it's the precise interaction between the performers, a very interesting form of "hocket," rather than the antiquity, or even the design, of the instruments themselves, that most interests me.
ReplyDeleteEven when these performers are doing their best to be "innovative," they are, as I see it, perpetuating a truly archaic tradition of tightly interlocked performance, as should be evident when comparing the Basque video with the one from Ghana. Note that the Mesomagor performers are using instruments very different from the txalaparta. What's important is not the instrument itself but the tightly interlocked performance style, as well as the manner in which the performers hold their sticks.
Yes the examples are valid, of course, just wanted to make sure you knew. 20 years ago even 4 boards' txalapartak were innovations :)
ReplyDeleteSome of the other places you would look for "Old Europe" or really "Old West Eurasian" influences would be in the traditional folk musics of the Saami, the Estonians, the Mountain Mari, the Alevi, and the people of the Caucusus Mountains. I don't know any of these musics, but those are the places one would generally expect to look for refugia cultural traces in Europe generally. The Ket of Siberia are also believed to be one of the most closely linked to the Native Americans and from a strata older than that of other Siberians.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, Andrew, there is no such thing as the music of "the Estonians," or of any national entity, since just about all nations are agglomerations of populations that were originally divided into different "tribes" with different traditions and histories.
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with the music of the Mari. And I'm wondering why you would single them out for special attention. Same with the Alevi. If you can convince me that there is something special about these particular groups that I've overlooked, I'll try to find some examples of their music.
I discuss the music of the Caucasus above, though I concentrate on Georgia, since that's the most remarkable culture from a musical point of view. Other groups in the Caucasus appear to be related either to Central Asians or sing in some version of "Elaborate" style. It's only in Georgia that we find a culture that appears to have been protected from "Kurgan" incursions and thus more likely to harbor "Old European" musical styles.
I'm not sure why the Ket (Ostiaks?) would represent a population older than other Siberians. That interests me.
As far as the Saami are concerned, they group musically with just about all the other "paleosiberian" groups and I agree that at least some European solo song traditions might be related to a very old cultural strain with roots in southern or central Europe that at some point migrated north with the reindeer. I think European solo singing may well have multiple roots and might possibly predate the Kurgan "invasion." Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the way these songs are distributed (mainstream) and the distribution of Old European polyphony (marginal) and that must be explained.
I think Andrew is thinking in Y-DNA Q being strongly dominant among the Ket and among Native Americans. Their language family (Yenisean) has also been linked to Na-Dene recently.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest of what he says, it looks to me an unjustified fetish of Uralic as being ancient European when in fact is probably a recent arrival from Siberia and NE Asia (Y-DNA N and autosomal evidence of East Asian influx among all Finno-Ugric peoples).
"First of all, Andrew, there is no such thing as the music of "the Estonians,"
ReplyDeleteEstonians, as a Uralic language speaking ethnicity, come from a linguistically older strata in Europe than the Slavs. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are "ancient Europeans" but their cultural links are older and more strongly connected to a hunter-gather-fisher tradition than other Eastern Europeans.
"I'm not familiar with the music of the Mari. And I'm wondering why you would single them out for special attention."
They are a relict population of Russia which is one of the few in Europe to have retained pre-Christian polytheism. Their resistance to outside religious conversion suggests a similar older than average cultural strata.
"Same with the Alevi."
The Alevi are a Turkish people who retain many cultural practices of the Central Asians (e.g. shamanism and gender equality) who brought the Turkish language to Anatolia; they were particularly selective in the extent to which they adopted mainstream Islamic practice into their culture. They have a strong and distinctive musical and dancing tradition that has been retained via the Sufi movement within Islam. Their role musically in the Islamic world might be compared by analogy to the role of the Irish in English speaking culture.
"I discuss the music of the Caucasus above, though I concentrate on Georgia,"
North Caucasians are surely pre-Indo-European in origins linguistically and phonetically. If there is a link to Central Asia, it may be as a source rather than an impact. They may be representative of what pre-Indo-European Anatolian culture was like.
"I'm not sure why the Ket (Ostiaks?) would represent a population older than other Siberians. That interests me."
The Ket are "Paleosiberian" with a linguistic tie to the Na-Dene languages of North America: "The Ket are thought to be the only survivors of an ancient nomadic people believed to have originally lived throughout central southern Siberia. In the 1960s the Yugh people were distinguished as a separate though similar group. Today's Kets are the descendants of the tribes of fishermen and hunters of the Yenisey taiga, who adopted some of the cultural ways of those original Ket-speaking tribes of South Siberia. The earlier tribes engaged in hunting, fishing, and even reindeer breeding in the northern areas." Other Siberians probably have origins in migration from China to the North sometime post-LGM and pre-Neolithic, with East Eurasian influences (pre-Russia) probably becoming predominant only with the Turkish and Mongolian expansions of the last two thousand years Before that, most of Siberia was aligned with West Eurasia and may even have been Indo-European/Kurgan from at least the Bronze Age and likely as far back as 3000 BCE or earlier.
"As far as the Saami are concerned, they group musically with just about all the other "paleosiberian" groups"
I wouldn't consider the Saami to be Paleosiberian (a term of art), and indeed, they probably have an admixture of Uralic Eastern influence and post-LGM Atlantic fishing culture sources.
Andrew: "Estonians, as a Uralic language speaking ethnicity, come from a linguistically older strata in Europe than the Slavs. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are "ancient Europeans" but their cultural links are older and more strongly connected to a hunter-gather-fisher tradition than other Eastern Europeans."
ReplyDeleteYes, I understand. And I appreciate your point. The problem for me is that linguistic evidence, though certainly valuable, is also problematic because the language spoken by a particular group can change radically even in a single generation -- while musical styles, in my experience, tend to be much more resistant to change.
We see this clearly in the assumption that every national group can be characterized by a particular language. Thus the French speak French, the Germans speak German, the Estonians speak Estonian, etc. And wherever conflicts arise on this basis (as for example recently in Belgium) this can turn into a national crisis.
As we know, the boundaries of almost all nations are artificial, and only rarely reflect ancient tribal distinctions, either linguistic or geographical. So I have problems with the tendency among so many population geneticists to sort their data on such a basis.
That said, you certainly do have a valid point, and some very interesting old traditions do certainly seem to have survived in Estonia.
[Continued from previous comment] When you speak of groups like the Mari, the Alevi and the Ket, that makes much more sense to me and what you've written definitely interests me. My problem is that it's not always possible for me to find good examples of the music of such groups. And even when I do, the project of analysing and evaluating such music can be daunting.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why I so much appreciate the work of researchers such as Joseph Jordania, who has already sorted so much of this out -- and presented so many very useful transcriptions as well.
The Ket, aka Ostiak, can, as far as I recall, be classified musically as Paleosiberian, although I don't have any recordings handy at present to double-check. I certainly wish there were more recordings of all these groups available and this is especially a problem for Siberian groups because I suspect that some of their traditions may have been lost.
The Saami can also be grouped with Paleosiberians musically -- at least on the basis of the recordings currently known to me. Since they are reindeer herders living in far northern regions of Europe, I'm not sure why you would have a problem associating them with Paleosiberians, at least on a cultural basis. Genetically, I'm not sure.
Maju: "I think Andrew is thinking in Y-DNA Q being strongly dominant among the Ket and among Native Americans. Their language family (Yenisean) has also been linked to Na-Dene recently."
ReplyDeleteI see. Very interesting. So far, as I just wrote in Chapter Fifteen, I've never found any really strong musical links between any Paleosiberian group and any American group -- with the exception of the very odd presence of Paleosiberian "breathless" style among the Ona of Tierra del Fuego and maybe one instance among the Guahibo of Brazil (?).
There are certainly some very interesting points of similarity, but nothing decisive. Whether there is some element of Ket music that might be exceptional would be very interesting to investigate, so I'm grateful to Andrew and you for raising this possibility.
One way to test your hypothesis that musical similarities of indigenous peoples around the world have a common source, rather than being parallel independent inventions would be to compare the musical traditions of the Pueblo people (or their closest modern ancestors in the vicinity of New Mexico, Southern Colorado and the vicinity) to the musical traditions you identify as possibly being traceable to Old Europe.
ReplyDeleteWe can say with pretty much absolute certainty that Pueblo culture had no pre-Columbian contact with Europe and no culture influences with it. But, Pueblo culture ca. 1000 CE and Old European Neolithic culture were strikingly similar in the structures, tools, lifestyles, nature of their intercommunity conflicts and warfare, and what traces we have of their religions. A non-expert would have a hard time distinguishing old Pueblo ruins from those of early Neolithic Anatolia without looking a clues like vegetation in the background.
If the two musical cultures are similar, this is strongly suggestive of independent origins, and suggests that this could be true in other cases as well.
@Andrew: I am totally perplex about your claims of the Anasazi (I imagine you mean them when you say "Pueblo") having any cultural relationship of any kind with Neolithic Europe. I have no idea where you got that idea but (unless you can provide strong evidence of some sort) it seems so completely wrong.
ReplyDeleteI can think of a handful of elements that might have tentative Eurasian connections in that area (swastika, the linguistic affinity teotl-theos, maybe color codes for the four cardinal points..., which could be explained by some sort of obscure Eurasian steppary connection) but I cannot think of any possible connection specifically with "Old Europe", i.e. Balcan Neolithic (following Gimbutas' terminology).
Example 43 = fully Georgian
ReplyDelete"I am totally perplex about your claims of the Anasazi (I imagine you mean them when you say "Pueblo") having any cultural relationship of any kind with Neolithic Europe. I have no idea where you got that idea but (unless you can provide strong evidence of some sort) it seems so completely wrong."
ReplyDeleteThere isn't any genetic or cultural diffusion relationship at all. We know that they are entirely independent in origins, which is what makes them so interesting. What arises in both is something that we can expect to arise independently; area where they differ, in contrast, are far less likely to be cultural elements that would arise independently.
But, despite their total independence from contact or anything but the most remote common origins, their architecture and spatial organization in communities (and the stages that the culture goes through from one kind of architecture to the next and their construction methods), their patterns of intergroup warlike conflict, their form of social organization, the broad outlines of their religious practices so far as we can discern them from archaeology (including notions of witches and how to treat the bodies of suspected witches), and some of their artifacts bear stunning similarities to very early West Eurasian Neolithic sites from about 8000 years earlier half the world away.
The strong similarites suggest that technological and human nature realities are far more specific in delimiting how culture can develop than is usually assumed by anthropologists. There are only so many good ways to build a Neolithic village. A certain kind of Neolithic lifestyle seems to naturally inspire or require certain levels of astronomy mastery, certain attitudes towards nature that are naturally anthroposized, similar kinds of fears about the unknown and magic, certain sized communities with particular spatial distributions internally and relative to each other, and certain approaches to warfare.
Hugo Zemp's video doesn't play. It would be helpful if you replaced it with something else from the Solomons.
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting me know about this Dave. Unfortunately many of these youtube links are unreliable and could vanish at any moment. It will probably be impossible for me to replace this video with another one from the same region, but I'll look around for an audio file I can present instead.
ReplyDeleteVictor,
ReplyDeleteI'm posting here instead of Savage Minds as my comment was swallowed there. Nevertheless, here are a few small criticisms that occur to me:
The archaeological cultures of pre-Indo-European Europe are extremely diverse, and archaeological cultures are normally less numerous than the language groups that left them. That indicates that Old Europe was not one culture, or even one coherent set of cultures, but much more of a crazily diverse mix. That might raise a few problems when suggesting the pre-Indo-European ancestry of polyphonic singing in Europe.
I'd also suggest that Gimbutas' ideas about Indo-Europeans introducing "patriarchy" into Europe are a little suspect, to say the least. The notion that Indo-European speakers were horse-mounted patriarchal warriors, where the Old Europeans were gentle matristic folk, appears to be quite incorrect. Many finds indicating a measure of human sacrifice have been recovered from pre-Indo-European sites throughout Europe, and that they were friendlier to women doesn't necessarily follow from the worship of goddesses.
There's nothing wrong with using hunting weapons to kill people; the absence of specialised weapons for killing humans indicates the lack of a specific class or generation of individuals responsible for warfare, not warfare's absence. I can also call to mind a few studies where weapons (like stone maceheads) have been found in pre-Indo-European sites in southeastern Europe, but I'll have to do some searching to find them for you.
It's also unlikely that Proto-Indo-European speakers migrated wholesale into Europe, pushing Old Europeans into less fertile land. What happened was likely more akin to recruitment of Old Europeans into an Indo-European society where prospects for social advancement were greater than in the Old European world - hence the clear evidence of a wide spread of language and chariot-technology by the Indo-European pastoralists and much less evidence for the spread of genes from their homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. David Anthony uses an ethnohistorical example, of the expansion of Luo-speaking Acholi in east Africa, to make this point, but there are any number that could be used. This model fits much better with the archaeological data than the conquest model.
It's odd of Gimbutas to claim that Lithuania was "50% pagan". It may be true, but the pagan religion of the Baltic shows startling similarities to Vedic (or Indo-Iranian) religion, not to pre-Indo-European beliefs, whatever they happened to be.
I also doubt that songs from Kyrgyzstan will help unravel problems in Indo-European studies (such as whether narrative songs are Indo-European/"Kurgan" or not), as the Kyrgyz people speak a Turkic language, unrelated to PIE. There is a voluminous literate on Indo-European rhythm and poetics, including two excellent recent works - How to Kill a Dragon by Calvert Watkins and Indo-European Poetry and Myth by Martin Litchfield West. I highly recommend both. Indo-European studies as a whole has generated an incredible literature.
I hope you find this critique helpful.
I'm glad you posted here, Al, as it gives me some room to respond adequately. And, yes, your critique is definitely helpful, since you obviously know a lot more about the archaeology than I do, so your input is valuable.
Delete"Old Europe was not one culture, or even one coherent set of cultures, but much more of a crazily diverse mix. That might raise a few problems when suggesting the pre-Indo-European ancestry of polyphonic singing in Europe."
It was never my intention to formulate a theory of pre-Indo-European ancestry in general, nor of Indo-European origns. Very simply, what struck me was the presence of vocal polyphony in the oral traditions of so many refuge areas and its almost total absence just about everywhere else on the European continent. That is, in fact, consistent with Gimbutas' theories, regardless of anything else one might want to say about them.
You are certainly correct in asserting that "Old Europe" was most likely far more complex than what is apparently assumed in Gimbutas' writings. But if you read carefully you'll see that I don't endorse her theories as a whole, but simply point to aspects of her thinking that appear to be consistent with the musical evidence.
Perhaps I should have made it clear that only some refuge areas are characterized by polyphonic singing, certainly not all. And it would, of course, be premature to assume that certain types of music can be associated with violence and others with non-violence, so forgive me if I gave that impression.
As far as Gimbutas' notion of "matristic" societies is concerned, I happen to find that idea very thought provoking and, within limits, convincing. It's important to recall that her thinking was as much influenced by her knowledge of contemporary "pagan" societies as by her archaeological research. And as we know, conclusions based solely on the latter are all too often based on assumptions and conjecture.
In any case, as I believe I've made clear in my text, it was never my intention to endorse Gimbutas's or anyone else's theories, but simply to explore certain possibilities suggested by them.
As far my Kyrgis example is concerned, my point was simply that their songs, along with just about the entire repertoire of Central Asian song, are almost 100% monophonic, and since the Kurgan culture posited by Gimbutas (and others) apparently stems from horse nomads with a very similar culture to that of Central Asia, it made sense to use a song of this type as an example of what Kurgan music might have been like. It so happens, by the way, that "Kurgan" is itself a word of turkic origin.