Two women and their quests to trace people s music back to the source.
Video may have killed the radio star, but both media surely had a hand in the demise of folk music. You can buy traditional tunes from Kenya through to Kazakhstan on CD and as MP3s, but such recording technologies have helped to change the way we incorporate music into our lives.What was once a communal, performance-based experience is now largely a private and passive pastime. Music is something outside of our experience a soundtrack to our dinner parties or a social isolator (courtesy of portable players and headphones). It is either wallpaper or a wall.
But it hasn t always been this way. Music was once something that people made together. Folk music was a means of sharing beliefs and celebrating existence.
It bound communities together and bound the generations too. Traditions were handed down from mother to daughter, father to son. Many of these arts are now lost, but some passionate souls at the ANU School of Music are digging back through the records to rediscover some of the threads of our musical heritage.
In Australia, the term folk music conjures up memories of school bush dances where enthusiastic band leaders would explain how to strip the willow before launching into a rollicking version of Clip Go the Shears or Wild Colonial Boy. Yet some of the earliest folk music written and performed in Australia by Europeans would have been unintelligible to most school children and their parents alike. These were the songs of Australia s Scottish Gaelic community, which kept alive pockets of the Gaelic language in this country for over 100 years.
Dr Ruth Lee Martin is uncovering the history of Gaelic music in Australia, as well as keeping some of the songs alive in performances with staff and students from the School of Music. She said that a great migration of Gaelic-speaking Scots occurred during the 19th century due to abject poverty and land dispossession.
The Gaelic speakers crofters, who lived off small parcels of land in the highlands were basically kicked out by landlords who wanted to develop their holdings.
They wanted the land to run sheep as the wool industry was really taking off. Consequently hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly shipped around the world to countries such as the US, Canada and Australia.
Conditions on these voyages were frightful.
Children in particular were vulnerable to shipboard diseases and many died. The journey took around six months and was spent in the most appalling cramped and unsanitary conditions. Once in Australia, the Scots were confronted with a land that was truly foreign to their experience.
Dr Martin says this dislocation led to a kind of cultural shock, which is evident in the songs written by the early Gaelic speakers. Part of a verse written by a bard who settled in Victoria in the 1850s poignantly says in translation:
There were many grieving when we sailed from the harbour,
There was little to miss since the ground refused to produce crops.
Officers came to serve notice that we should abandon our homes.
Like herds being conveyed on the ship we could scarcely be counted,
Death removing a tenth of our number.
In a way, these are the songs of some of Australia s earliest refugees, Dr Martin says. They talk about the harshness of life in Australia, how dry and parched the land is.
What you get from the songs is a sense of the total alien nature of the landscape.
Much of the music consisted of laments, as a homesick people remembered their highland origins. Dr Martin says she is constantly struck by the abiding sadness in the music, but that this was also balanced with more celebratory fare as the mind conjured up a utopian vision of the lost homeland.
The grief of thinking of home is almost too heavy a burden this theme runs through many of the songs. My mind again turns to thinking about home, and there s a great burden that can t be lifted. They re really very sad songs.
The only joyful songs are as part of the genre called a praise song. Some of them are purely about praising the land of mist . They ll have an idealised vision of how beautiful Scotland is, how it s teeming with salmon jumping in the burns [streams] and deer leaping about the mountains.
The music of the Highlanders is absolutely incredible. It s such a rich tradition. They have what they call the Ce l Mor (big music), which consists of laments.
They also have the Ce l Beag (small music) for dancing and working. Every aspect of life was accompanied by song, whether it was milking a cow, spinning yarn, attending a dance or lamenting a death.
These lost laments were received with enthusiasm by contemporary Gaelic speakers in Scotland when they were performed there recently by the band Eilean Mor.
This ensemble consists of Dr Martin on vocals, Bill Williams on Double Bass, Chris Stone on violin and Bill Grose on guitar. They really felt that we were bringing some of their songs back home and they were very touched by this.
Jazz student Williams says the chance to take these Australian Gaelic songs back to Scotland was something he ll never forget.
Travelling to Scotland and being immersed in the tradition has strengthened my connection to the music, more to the heart than to the ear. Performing with these musicians in Scotland was a life-changing experience. It makes you realise how small you really are back at home.
The music is everything to them over there. It s what they do. It s almost a spiritual thing.
It s a feeling that you get when you re there, playing music with them and talking to them about the history of their songs.
Where Australia s Gaelic folk music history survives in mostly written scraps, other parts of our musical heritage have been recorded on tape for posterity. In the 1950s, Australia experienced a folk music revival like that of similar movements in the UK and US.
Committed collectors like Mary Jean Officer, Norm and Pat O Connor, and John Meredith travelled around the country making recordings of different folk performers before their traditions were lost. Jennifer Gall came across some of these field recordings while working at the National Library of Australia. She was struck by how many of the songs differed from the rambunctious, diversionary songs like Click Go the Shears.
The songs popular with bush bands are up tempo, Gall says. They are mostly about entertaining a large group of people who have come to dance. But these other songs were very introspective.
They were sung, usually unaccompanied, in a domestic setting to maintain a connection with previous generations and for consolation.
Gall, now a PhD student at the School of Music, is using these introspective songs to trace the role that women played in recording and transmitting folk music in Australia. One of her subjects is the Scot Georgiana McCrae, who came to live on the Mornington Peninsula with her husband around 1840.
McCrae, the illegitimate daughter of the fifth Duke of Gordon, had access to her family s rich music collection at her ancestral home. Gall believes that when McCrae knew she would be leaving Scotland forever, her handwritten albums of piano music took on particular significance as a musical legacy.
Her musical notation of the folk material was often quite deliberately skeletal, to leave room for extemporising and to accommodate other participating musicians.
For McCrae and women of all classes in Australia who dragged their pianos to remote locations, the piano was very much a bush instrument.
McCrae wanted to notate the authentic Scottish music of the highlanders who lived around Gordon castle, perhaps to reinforce her connection to the homeland she knew she had to leave. There are records of some music that she collected from the singing of an old Highland woman.
She also brought a lot of Scots genteel music with her. It s probable that she played an important role in disseminating this music, as she was happy to entertain people from the working class to Governor La Trobe.
Gall is also investigating another woman who was one of the last in a chain of folk singers from an oral tradition.
Born in 1894, Sally Sloane learned many songs from her mother and grandmother. Her amazing memory meant that she was a walking treasure trove for music archivists in the middle of the 20th century. Gall says that Sloane s memory was triggered by particular activities, like washing the dishes.
There s not much detail recorded about Sloane s life, despite the fact that she s known as the Queen of Australian Folk. The resource I had was the field recordings, so I listened to those again and again to hear any slight background noise that might give a hint about how and where she sang the songs. You can hear many details she moves about the room, there will be kids coming in and out.
You get a real sense that the music is part of the domestic way of life. You can hear how she focuses down to singing the song. At the start you can tell that she is kind of distracted, as she s searching for a connection, then she focuses into the mood of the song and there is a clear point where she leaves the everyday world.
Sloane died in the 1980s, but her voice is preserved thanks to recordings in the National Library of Australia. Such records were made by people like Mary Jean Officer, another subject in Gall s study. Officer worked during the 1950s in rural Victoria with Norm and Pat O Connor to preserve folk songs on tape.
Her family was relatively well-to-do, meaning that her folklore collecting included the landowners as well as the workers. Gall says that Officer s field notes are distinctively meticulous.
By looking at the work of Officer, McCrae and Sloane, Gall is teasing out some of the overlooked aspects of Australia s folk music heritage.
The creation of folk music was often a partnership between men and women. That needs to be acknowledged it wasn t just a case of the woman being a secretary, Gall says. In the field recordings, women are often heard prompting the men being recorded with the right words.
Women also created some of the classic items in the Australian folk song repertoire like The Stockman s Last Bed - a song often attributed to male musicians, but in fact penned as a parody by the Grey sisters in 1846.
For a lot of women, you couldn t talk about the things that were going on in your private world a thwarted love, or an unhappy marriage. It s fair enough to say that women s music was often a document of the unsayable.
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