Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site astroatc.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!qantel!dual!lll-crg!seismo!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor From: gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP Newsgroups: net.music Subject: The Music of Ethiopia Message-ID: <185@astroatc.UUCP> Date: Wed, 25-Sep-85 00:02:02 EDT Article-I.D.: astroatc.185 Posted: Wed Sep 25 00:02:02 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 29-Sep-85 05:42:58 EDT Distribution: net Organization: Astronautics ATC, Madison, WI Lines: 224 It's article time for OPtion writers, and this is the last issue of the magazine that will be using the alphabet format. Scot Becker asked me to knock out a quickie to introduce the complete novice to the music of Ethiopia. SInce I finished the thing, I thought I'd pass it on to the lot of you here. Sorry if it's too general (there is no mention of Kate Bush anywhere...not even Bushmen), etc. You're probably a touch more intelligent than an OPtion reader maybe. Anyway, here goes: From time to time, attempts to probe the music of remote parts of the world ensnares you in the net of confusing places, impressions and facts that make up the fabric of "information" in the Postmodern world. What often begins as a simple curious interest in "other" or "exotic" musics may bring you face to face with the notion that things are not what they appear. It's an unnerving experience, and most people either get creeped out and give up, or you go back again and again. Ethiopia is a good paradigm case of both the source of our images of a country, and the complex musi- cal traditions that the amateur ethnomusicologist can stum- ble onto. Ethiopia is a mystery wrapped up in a set of very different (and often sharply conflicting) images: Anyone with a pass- ing knowledge of Rasta theology knows Ethiopia as the home of Haile Selassie-Ras Tafari (literally "the Lion of Judah" in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia) the incarnation of Jah himself. The modern image of Ethiopia comes straight out of the Live Aid tapes: acres of drought-ridden land, starving masses, A Marxist regime that ended a cholera epidemic by reclassifying all cholera cases as influenza. The pipes that end Peter Gabriel's "San Jacinto" are digital samples of an Ethiopian instrument played by someone who is be dead due to starvation or political involvement. Most of the recordings available (you'll be able to find four record- ings: they're all listed below) are the field work of a group of researchers who have set out to create a musical image of a complex, mysterious culture. The pattern that comes out of all that confusion is a picture of some of the oldest musical practice in the world: stuff straight out of the time capsule. Forget the "primitive" label as well: Ethiopian music is not just the surviving remnant of a great empire, but the stuff of even everyday music is celebrated for a highly complex, multilayered, punned, aphoristic net of verbal meanings and double meanings that is unique in all the world. The bards of Ethiopia are so respected that not even Mussolini would risk throwing them in prison when they turned their acid wit upon the Italian conquerors. And the musicians did it all for money for drinks. What is this stuff, anyway? The history of the place does much to suggest where the com- plexity begins: The country of Ethiopia is an invention of a bunch of 19th century Europeans, but within the boundaries of the created country lies the ancient kingdom of Axum- reputed to be the home of the "real" Queen of Sheba. By the 1st century AD, the Axumite cities were on the trade routes throughout the Middle East, and Axum a powerful, distinctive culture. In the middle of the 4th century, the king of Axum converted to Christianity, and the country followed suit, embracing the Monophysite doctrines of the Alexandrian church (who were alone in the world in believing that Christ has a single nature rather than a human/divine mix). The inevitable quarrels with the Orthodox Christian world ensued, and as a result the Ethiopian Coptic church was cut off from the musical and doctrinal traditions of the rest of the world very early on. With the Moslem conquest of Arabia and Africa in the 7th century, Ethiopian culture became all but completely isolated from the rest of the world. It was not until the 19th century that the Ethiopian kingdoms turned expansionist and snapped up a lot of territory (and cultural raw material) that was both distinctly African and Arabic in nature. The music that comes out of this history is very, very old. The isolating of the Ethiopian kingdoms sealed off a whole musical tradition, and the fact that it was much of that music was religious in nature meant that the tradition was preserved almost intact-so well preserved that the liturgi- cal music of the Copitc church is one of the first places that scholars who are interested in the music of the dim past look. The music of Ethiopia contains much of the influences inher- ited from both Africa and the Near East throughout its more recent history as well. You'll find flutes (the end-blown washint, which is usually played in rhythmically hocketed groups of two players), harps (both the beganna, or "the Harp of King David"-played only by men for religious pur- poses and the 5-stringed kr'aal which is played by both men and women), drums and thumb pianos from Africa, and the masenqa, which is a distant cousin of the one-stringed fid- dle found all over the Arab world. But much of the stress in Ethiopian music is on vocal music, and the words the singers sing. The Ethiopian way of referring to the rela- tionship between words and meaning in music is "Gold from Wax:" It's a reference to the way that a wax model (the lyr- ics themselves) is made into an object of cast gold (the "gold" is the hidden meaning, often buried under layers of puns, acrostics, and subtle jokes) by the skillful artist. The singing itself is can be monophonic (most of the reli- gious music is a kind of call and response plainsong), or polyphonic (the choral singing of the Dorze singers may rem- ind you a lot of the very old kind of polyphonic singing found in Soviet Georgia). In short, this is a very complex bunch of musics. So where do you go to find Ethiopian music? There are basi- cally only four albums that you can find with any ease, and most are on small labels that specialize in ethnomusicologi- cal stuff: The four albums listed below are still out there, and I've taken some pains to make sure that you can still get them. They also pretty easily break down according to subject matter, so you can chase down any specific type of music mentioned above that interests you. _E_t_h_i_o_p_i_e _1&_2 _L_i_t_u_r_g_i_e _d_e _l'_E_g_l_i_s_e _C_h_r_e_t_i_e_n_n_e _O_r_t_h_o_d_o_x_e _E_t_h_i_o_p_i_e_n_n_e (_O_c_o_r_a _5_5_8 _5_5_8/_5_9): Of the albums listed, this is the closest to a real high-production tour de force you'll find: A beautifully recorded boxed set of an entire Coptic liturgy, complete with a booklet of notes in French and English. If you're at all familiar with the Ocora records series of world musics, you already know that they're the best recorded (and the most expensive) stuff on the market. It's also the only fairly complete recording of an entire liturgy available. It's my favorite of all the records here, and may occasionally remind you of everything from Arabic street singers to Sacred Harp recordings. It is also a very peculiar recording: The priests insisted that one of the deacons actually hold the microphone on a pole during the service. Since the priests and the people are physically separated and the deacon evidently assumed that the mike should be pointed at whoever was singing or responding at the time, the acoustic space and placement of the recording changes unpredictably. Voices mysteriously slide in and out of nowhere, singers fly back and forth between the speakers, and the apparent size of the room expands and contracts wildly. Still, it is one of those recordings of real passion and complete otherness. That's why we listen to this stuff in the first place, right? _E_t_h_i_o_p_i_a: _T_h_e _F_a_l_a_s_h_a _a_n_d _t_h_e _A_d_j_u_r_a_n _T_r_i_b_e (_F_o_l_k_w_a_y_s _F_E_4_3_5_5): If you've read the papers at all, you know that the Israelis were secretly airlifting the Falashas out of Ethiopia and settling them in Israel last year. The Falashim are Jews who migrated to Ethiopia from as early as the 6th century, and have lived in virtual isolation from the resot of the world, Jewish or otherwise. In adddition to the initial migration, more Jews emigrated from Palestine during the 17th and 18th centuries as well. Like the Ethiopian Christian church, they have been outside of the cultural development of their faith almost entirely: their religious language isn't even Hebrew, exactly-it's the same old ritual language the Coptic church uses, since the invad- ing Turks burned all their books in Hebrew centuries before. The first side of this recording is a Sabbath service taped in a remote corner of the country. It will probably remind you of the Ethiopian Christian rite with its call and response format and monophonic singing. The second side documents the folk music of an equally remote tribe of the nomads who inhabit the western part of Ethiopia. The music here is danced while it is sung, and almost totally vocal. The singers providing percussive mouth noises, hoots, yodels, and clicks. It's noisy, exuberant stuff-sort of like the nomadic version of "the human beatbox". This is also definitely a field recording, so don't expect the fidelity and range of the Ocora recording. The first side is a must for anybody interested in Jewish music. _M_i_n_d_a_n_o_o _M_i_s_t_i_r_u (_L_y_r_i_c_h_o_r_d _L_L_S_T-_7_2_4_3) _a_n_d _G_o_l_d _f_r_o_m _W_a_x (_L_y_r_i_c_h_o_r_d _L_L_S_T-_7_2_4_3): This is actually a two volume set of urban, folk, and religious music of Ethiopia. It attempts to provide a little bit of everything, and you can come away from either album with a good idea of the diverse types of music that Ethiopian culture produces. These are both real smorgasbord recordings: each album features one performance of each type of common Ethiopian instrument (the flute, the thumb piano, the spike fiddle, the harp and the drum), type of music (instrumental music, popular love songs and bal- lads recorded in the bars of Addis Ababa, and Coptic hymns played on the "harp of King David") and regional style are represented here. Frustratingly, there's little information in the liner notes about what the music is about here, and that's particularly crucial when you're dealing with the subtle inflections of language that the Amharic singers are renowned for. Instead, you'll have to settle for cryptic non-translations ("This song is about a sexual encounter...."), or actual translations that give you very little idea whatever clever wordplay there may be (The result of this is a very strange bunch of lyrics, since you have to make up your own allusions for stuff like "I am always for you/You are always for others/May St. George of the marketplace/put out your eyes, my love."). Since this is the only compilation available that give you any kind of overview of the culture and its musics, it is a bit frus- trating. Still, if you've got no strong interests, it's the best place to start. So there you are: enough mysterious background to (I hope) pique your interest, and some recordings to chase down. Of course, it's possible that all this will really do is just add another layer of strange images of Ethiopia to your already peculiar collection. Ah, life in the modern world. 9 9 Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com