Music and Solidarity

Questions of Universality, Consciousness, and Connection

Felicity Laurence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351504218
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

The philosopher Christopher Small suggests that musical meanings are concerned with relationships, both with other human beings and with the world, and that music functions as a means of exploration, affirmation, and celebration of those relationships. If members of different social groups have different values, or different concepts of ideal relationships, then the kinds of performances that enact those relationships will differ from one another.

Using music to express benevolent intentions is not, in general, one of its most obvious functions. In fact, military music has been used throughout history to destroy cross-cultural communion. Music is also a powerful and ubiquitous tool in propaganda, and in facilitating various political projects in all kinds of inventive ways that have nothing much to do with the pursuit of peaceful and cooperative intercultural understanding, or with helping people address issues of injustice.

This text moves far beyond the knowledge of music's power upon humans, however this may be conceived and explained. It addresses a field of inquiry that is still a tiny endeavor, at least in comparison with all other academic efforts in the world. The sparseness of serious theoretical engagement with the topic of music's potential role in the area of peace and policy is echoed by how little music is directly used in the "real world" for building a more humane consciousness. Finding ways to that goal is the purpose of this work.

Voices from the Living Heart: Healing Australia’s Dark Past

Elizabeth Bowen

Somewhere in the last century¹ white Australia developed the phrase and notion of “The Dead Heart.” It was used to describe the arid interior of the country, which is anything but dead. At the centre stands Uluru, the great giver of life in the midst of that vast red interior. Whitefellas were scared of the emptiness, the loneliness, the silence. The blackfellas knew and loved every inch of their country intimately. This was a living heart not a dead one. They were deeply “within” their carefully-evolved Law, lore and “Dreaming” and the whitefellas were “outside,” looking in, unable to see the hidden mysteries and the beauty of this ancient, tough but fragile ecology and cosmology. It was mainstream Australia which has carried a “dead heart.”²

Introduction

Music is a powerful storyteller; it accompanies newsreels and films of war, glorifying it, and our own life-events, creating associations in the depth of our subconscious. Some music stands out because it both captures a time in history and spotlights the marginalized, heightening awareness of injustice. In Australia, such music exists in the form of many songs that relate the dark chapters in our history of the struggle for the very survival, as well as acknowledgment of the cultural identity, of the Indigenous³ population. Since white settlement, a consistent backdrop to their existence and central to their story has been a discriminatory policy that has disastrously failed this population. In hopeful contrast, the current developing prominence of Indigenous music in mainstream rock, and recent collaborations with jazz music, are telling us about the resilience of hope in the face of a history of systemic violence and denial of human rights.

Despite an Indigenous history dating back some 40,000 years, white settlement in Australia nevertheless centered on the doctrine of Terra Nullius or “Land that belongs to No-one.” This was finally overturned with the Mabo⁴ decision of 1992, and Indigenous lands rights and the way in which cultural identity was tied with custodianship of the land finally had a legal foundation. However, the rich cultural legacy of the traditional owners of the land has been slow to be acknowledged as enhancing cultural life not only for Indigenous but for all Australians. That this cultural spirit is still thriving and now being shared, in the face of the ravages wrought by deprivation and poverty, is a testament to its strength of spirit. Musical interchanges occurring between Indigenous and jazz musical traditions can be seen as a potential healing ground, further opening up a dialogue, and creating possibilities for a new vision of solidarity. Jazz, with its own traditional roots in raising awareness of black identity in the United States, has demonstrated its openness and has in its global diaspora absorbed the beauty of different cultural expressions.

This chapter offers a narrative that highlights musical collaboration as a potential force for healing and reconciliation in Australia’s political and cultural landscape. In a case study of two innovative projects involving cultural exchanges and collaborations between white musicians and Indigenous musicians, I will describe how these have been significant in opening up a path of mutual commitment to cross cultural exchange, and instrumental in a healing process that is moving Australia closer towards reconciliation. These two projects have provided voice to the voiceless; they are The Australian Art Orchestra and Ngukkar musicians’ Crossing Roper Bar, and The Black Arm Band’s The Hidden Republic and Murandak.

I begin this discussion with an account of the historical background, which I hope will help establish and explain the context from which these projects have arisen.

Two Countries and “The Intervention”

Australia is two countries on the same continent. A broad sweep of one country’s history is that of free white settlement with waves of multicultural immigration. This has driven dynamic, cultural, social and economic development for Australian citizens and a pride in the harmonious co-existence of various ethnicities. However, challenging experiences of resettlement for new immigrants, a poor record on treatment of some refugees and a widening gap between rich and poor as the middle class began to shrink in the 1980s cannot be denied. Australia, however, has fared very well during the recent global economic crisis. This Australia, albeit ironically, has been coined The Lucky Country, which is shackled only by the lack of imagination of a political bureaucracy “mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past.”⁵ This past is confined to a romantic connection to the “mother country” or its European heritage, and a rejection of its “black heart.”⁶

The other country’s history, lived in and experienced by Indigenous people, is a story of disenfranchisement, desolation and painful disintegration, with citizenship denied to these first Australians until a referendum in 1967. Populations have been all but wiped out by rifles and disease; families ravaged as children were taken away to live in white families in attempts at “assimilation,” these children now recognized as the “stolen generation,” and communities continue to be shattered by poverty, “sit down money,”⁷ alcohol and child sexual abuse.⁸ Radically lower than average life expectancy, poor literacy and educational attainment, squalid housing and health issues associated with the third world characterize the living conditions of these long-standing custodians of the land, and yet only very recent Australian citizens. Within the context of Australia’s global reputation as an advanced economy, these indicators of basic well-being fall abysmally short and any kind of economic and social equality remain stubbornly out of reach.

The most recent response to these seemingly intractable conditions is referred to as “The intervention” or more officially, the “Northern Territory Emergency Response,” which was implemented in 2007. This was a controversial response to the report, The Little Children Are Sacred (2007)⁹ which documented child sexual abuse within the Indigenous population; but the resultant policy has been criticized for further stigmatizing and discriminating against Indigenous Australians for reasons cited below.¹⁰ It is considered a paternalistic, top-down policy that contravenes Australia’s international human rights commitment; and indeed its radical nature was epitomized in the need for Australia to revoke its Anti-Discrimination Act in order to implement this policy program. Jon Altman describes the outcome of this in his report in 2007:

In the 183 days [to November 2007] since the intervention was declared—with its mobilisation of the armed forces, unprecedented powers for civilians and police, and recruitment of volunteer aid workers—there has been a frenzied level of media attention in indigenous affairs… And frenetic bursts of policy-making on the run. Blind faith defence of the intervention by politicians and their agents has usually been based on a seeming unassailable call to “save the children,” a moral imperative that hides unstated, untested, but very evident ideological motivations far removed from concerns of child welfare.¹¹

The policy can be seen as the most recent contribution to Australia’s shameful track record on human rights, to which Irene Kahn, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, has recently drawn attention. She relates a story about Elsie:

squatting in the raw dirt of an open field, surrounded by all her belongings, which bore the dents and scratches I have seen inflicted on scant possessions when people have to flee, for example from flood, war or forced evictions… I walked down the desert track, past the filthy and worn mattresses… past the wooden crate perched on a rough-hewn bench that is their kitchen, and stepped over the tangled extension cord that brought electricity to their single lamp.¹²

Khan then asks, “Did I meet Elsie in Sudan, Sri Lanka or Afghanistan? No. The political leaders responsible for Elsie’s situation are not to be found in Khartoum, Colombo or Kabul. They are in Canberra and Darwin.”¹³ Khan relates her dismay at witnessing this abject poverty in one of the world’s richest countries, citing its ranking in the top ten when measures such as health, longevity, community life, political stability and political freedom are added to GDP measures.¹⁴ Elsie, through an interpreter, conveys the lived experience of poverty not captured by defining it only in relation to income: “Lady, I pay rent to the government for sleeping on a mattress in the desert. I have no home, I don’t have a voice, no one is listening to me or my family.”¹⁵ For Khan poverty is “the stuff of real human insecurity; the stuff of marginalization, of voicelessness, of degradation, of inequality and injustice.”¹⁶

Galtung defines cultural violence as those “aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence—exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)—that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.”¹⁷ When examining his typology of violence, Indigenous Australians could be said to have had everything thrown at them. In Galtung’s terms, cultural violence makes reality opaque, turning the moral color of actions from wrong to right or at least acceptable.

Rhetoric aside, too much has been accepted in Australia’s history in terms of the poor living conditions for Indigenous Australians. One of the publicly stated motivations for maintaining the policies of the intervention was to close the gap in health and life expectancy for Indigenous Australians in comparison with the rest of Australia’s citizens. For example, life expectancy is approximately twenty years lower and the prevalence of kidney disease is nine times higher, skyrocketing to thirty times higher in some regions of the Northern Territory.¹⁸ Suicide, depression, incarceration and substance abuse are also at chronically higher levels than for the rest of the population.

Indigenous musicians are a public face to the stark reality of these health and social well-being indicators that are associated with chronic poverty, despair and disenfranchisement. Mandaway Yunupingui, front-man for Yothu Yindu, a band of Indigenous and Western musicians who combine Western with traditional Indigenous instrumentation, has a public battle with renal failure; and the singer Ruby Hunter (see below) passed away prematurely at the age of 54 in February of 2010. Paul Grabowsky, in tribute, describes her voice and unique cultural contribution:

Her sound nursed somewhere at its heart a moan, a lament, which came from a deep place, a place outside of particularities of space and time, but a singularity, nonethele...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Misunderstanding and Reunderstanding
• Introduction
• Inspiring Musical Movements and Global Solidarity: Playing for Change, Min-On and El Sistema
• On Music, Interconnection, and Consciousness
• Universals in Music: Music as a Communicational Space
• Examples of Tunisian Intermusicality: Particularism and Universalism
• Compositional Process and Intercultural Dialogue: The Role of Music in a Collective Harmonious Consciousness
• Orchestrating Multiple Eastern-Western Identities through Music: A Turkish Story
• Voices from the Living Heart: Healing Australia’s Dark Past
• Music and Human Rights: Towards a Paradoxical Approach
• Music Therapy: Connecting through Music
• Music Therapy and Strategies for Dialogue
• The Case of the Ahwâsh Dance of Morocco: A Contribution of the Specific to the Universal
• Musicking and Empathic Connections
• Making Musical Space for Peace
• Contributors