In the period from 1984 to the present, numerous collections of essays dedicated entirely or partly to Aboriginal song and dance have appeared. (1) Each of these represented a response to particular stimuli. Three publications, Songs of Aboriginal Australia, The Politics of Dance and Landscapes

of Indigenous Performance grew out of conferences; two, Problems and Solutions and The Essence of Singing and the Substance of Song, were Festschriften (for Alice Moyle and Catherine Ellis respectively); and two more, Power-Laden Aboriginal Song and The Politics of Dance, were, like the present volume, special issues of a journal.

Much of the work presented in the present volume, Studies in Aboriginal Song: A Special Issue of Australian Aboriginal Studies, resulted from research projects that focus on endangered language and music and involved either collaborative work between linguists and musicologist, or work by scholars with training in both disciplines.

The first essay in the volume, 'Iwaidja Jurtbirrk Songs: Bringing language and music together', for example, is the result of collaboration between musicologist Linda Barwick and linguists Nick Evans and Bruce Birch, and was carried out as part of the project 'Yiwarruj, yinyman, radbihi lda mali: Iwaidja and other endangered languages of the Cobourg Peninsula (Australia) in their cultural context', funded by the Volkswagen Foundation's Documentation of Endangered Languages (DoBeS) program. The papers by Allan Marett ('Simplifying musical practice in order to enhance local identity: The case of rhythmic modes in the Walakandha wangga (Wadeye, Northern Territory)') and by Lysbeth Ford ('"Too long, that wangga": Analysing wangga texts over time') also represent the fruits of a longstanding collaboration between a musicologist (Marett) and a linguist (Ford). Ford's and Marett's contributions, as well as Michael Walsh's 'Australian Aboriginal song language: So many questions, so little to work with', arose from the Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project 'Preserving Australia's Endangered Heritages: Murrinhpatha song at Wadeye'. Two other papers have come from another endangered language project, 'Classical song traditions of contemporary western Arnhem Land in their multilingual context', funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, Major Project Grant, and led by Linda Barwick; these are Murray Garde's 'Morrdjdjanjno ngan-marnbom story nakka "Songs that turn me into a story teller": The morrdjdjanjno of western Arnhem Land' and Isabel O'Keeffe's 'Sung and spoken: An analysis of two different versions of a Kun-barlang love song'. Aaron Corn and Neparrna Gumbula's research reported in 'Budutthun ratja wiyinymirri: Formal flexibility in the Yolnu manikay tradition and the challenge of recording a complete repertoire' was conducted both as part of the work of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia, and as an ARC-funded Discovery Project 'When the waters will be one'. Myfany Turpin, whose paper, 'The poetics of Central Australian Song' represents the work of a scholar with both linguistic and musicological expertise, is currently a postdoctoral fellow funded by another Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, Major Project Grant, the 'Arandic songs project'. The only paper not formally associated with an endangered language or music program is Sally Treloyn's 'Flesh with Country: Juxtaposition and minimal contrast in the construction and melodic treatment of jadmi song texts', but even in this case, that language of the songs belongs to a critically endangered Australian language, Ngarinyin. (2)

How is it that issues of cultural endangerment have taken centre stage in the work of so many scholars, and why have collaborations between musicologists and linguists become so pervasive? After all, as Michael Walsh points out in this volume, Clunies Ross (1987), in her introduction to Songs of Aboriginal Australia, implied a certain lack of attention to Aboriginal song on the part of linguists: 'Only within the last decade have linguists begun to pay much attention to the subject [of Aboriginal song]'. Twenty years later, as Barwick, Birch and Evans point out in their paper in this volume, there has been significant collaboration between linguists and musicologists, and more recently, young scholars trained in both disciplines are beginning to emerge. The value of such an approach and its associated collaborations becomes clear when we consider each of the contributions to this volume in a little more detail.

Focusing on a single corpus of songs (from the previously undocumented Jurtbirrk genre of public didjeridu-accompanied love-songs, in the Iwaidja language of northwestern Arnhem Land), the paper by Barwick, Birch and Evans is able to bear multiple analytical perspectives: rhetorical, musicological, phonological and grammatical. The musicological analysis highlights the ways in which musical structures support the textual poetics, and correlates certain musicological features (rhythmic and melodic modes) with particular composers and performers. Phonological analysis considers the alignment of stick beating with syllable onset, and also specifies the nature of changes in vowel quality and intonation in sung versus spoken forms of Iwaidja, while the grammatical and semantic analysis shows how the use of language in love-songs can add significantly to an understanding of the expressive possibilities of Iwaidja.

Murray Garde's paper deals with a highly significant and highly endangered genre of songs from western Arnhem Land. This previously undocumented song genre, morrdjdjanjno, is of great interest not only for the ways in which it reveals the close relationship between local environment, history and cosmology in western Arnhem Land, but also for its links with other genres of song, both within its own cultural domain (for example, public kun-borrk dance-songs and the restricted songs of the now defunct Ubarr ceremony), and outside it (for example, 'increase' songs of Central Australia). Through detailed engagement with a range of song-texts and their commentaries, Garde is able to show the ways in which specialist vocabulary participates within an ecology of knowledge associated with the people and landscape of western Arnhem Land. In his examination of morrdjdjanjno song texts, Garde makes important observations on the use of special song language and everyday forms, and the ways in which songs in specialist registers can be translated into everyday language by knowledgeable informants. The issue of esoteric song language and its relationship to everyday forms has long fascinated scholars of Aboriginal song, and this issue is addressed in other papers in this volume.

The contribution of Isabel O'Keeffe (nee Bickerdike) also addresses themes that have been a long-time preoccupation of scholars of Aboriginal song, and that emerge in other papers in this collection. The first of these concerns the way that we make sense of the archival record in the light of current performance practice, and the second concerns the relationship between sung and spoken versions of a song. O'Keefe, who has been trained in both musical and linguistic analysis, analyses in detail one didjeridu-accompanied love-song in Kun-barlang language recorded in sung and spoken versions by Bilinyarra (brother of the original composer, Balir-balir) for Alice Moyle in Oenpelli (Kunbarlanja) in 1962. O'Keeffe's analysis reveals interpolations of vocable text at structurally significant points in the spoken text, and remarkable consistency in content and form in contemporary versions of the song performed by Bruce and Barndanj Nabegeyo, sons of Bilinyarra, recorded at Kunbarlanja in 2005 and 2006.

Allan Marett's article addresses the contemporary relevance of another didjeridu-accompanied repertory recorded by Alice Moyle in the 1960s, the wangga songs of Mendheyangal composer Jimmy Muluk. Through a mixture of detailed musical analysis and oral history, Marett shows how the complex system of rhythmic modes employed by Muluk was adopted and then transformed by Marri Tjevin composers and singers in the creation and elaboration of the Walakandha wangga repertory at Wadeye. A major focus of this paper is the way in which musicians respond to social pressures--in this case, the need of a somewhat disparate group to project a strong unified identity--and the ways in which this affected the evolution of the song style over several decades.

Muluk's wangga songs, are also the subject of Lys Ford's paper. Here Muluk's repertory is examined from the perspective of the song texts and how their condensed and elliptical form and content relate to more discursive spoken explanations and stories associated with the songs. As comparative material she considers a Marri Tjevin wangga song recently composed by Philip Mullumbuk, suggesting that its expansive through-composed form is stylistically outside the conventions of other wangga texts, and thus less likely to be adopted for ceremonial use.

Sally Treloyn's article engages with the repertory of contemporary Ngarinyin/Miwa junba composer, Nyalgodi Scotty Martin. Through analysis of particular examples of textual construction, dance practice and melodic setting, Treloyn shows how an aesthetic of juxtaposition functions in this repertory to assert and articulate relationships between humans and country. Like Marett, she is concerned to show how specific musical processes relate to and reflect broader social and cosmological aspects of culture, and like a number of the younger, broadly trained scholars in this volume, Treloyn deploys a range of disciplinary perspectives (linguistic and anthropological as well as musicological) in her work.

Drawing on her training in both linguistic and musicological concepts and techniques, Turpin's fine-grained analysis of one Central Australian repertory, Kaytetye women's awelye akwelye, succeeds in spelling out the metrical processes and guiding principles underlying the transformation of Kaytetye text words into rhythmic text, which is in turn set to melody. The paper is underpinned by the author's longstanding relationships with Kaytetye women, their language and their musical practices as well as her tools of the trade as a highly skilled musicologist and linguist.

An example of collaborative work between a non-Indigenous and an Indigenous scholar, Corn and Gumbula's paper describes the process of recording a Gupapuyngu manikay series under the direction of the owners and performers of the tradition for the explicit purpose of preserving it for future generations. They outline the reasons behind their decision to

   ...record the luku (footprint, step, root): the full sequence of
   songs, subject by subject across its five named bilma modes,
   without any dance accompaniment or predetermined ceremonial
   functions

then go on to identify gaps in the resultant record. They also discuss the difficulties of transcribing the complex heterophonic textures produced by three or four voices, and to outline and critique the solution proposed by Gumbula, namely 'not to translate the lyrics as they had been recorded' but to have Gumbula recite the text from memory word-by-word, then to translate them, noting that this resulted in a faithful translation of the complete series as it was remembered by a seasoned singer. By reflecting on how best to record cultural heritage for future generations, this paper represents current struggles to refine our methods in order to respond appropriately to Indigenous concerns about the future of their traditions.

Michael Walsh's concluding essay arises from a longstanding linguistic interest in the typologies of song language in Australia. In his own words, it seeks to

   ... recall the state of the art twenty years ago, then review what
   has been learnt about Australian Aboriginal song language over the
   last twenty years and to suggest some ideas for best practice in
   the documentation and analysis of Australian Aboriginal song
   language.

Largely written prior to the assembly of the various papers in this collection, it raises questions about themes that have already emerged throughout the volume: the use of esoteric and nonstandard lexical items in songs, and the complex relationship that both standard and non-standard lexical items have to exegeses of song texts; language loss and its effects on song traditions; phonological and morphosyntactic differences between song language and everyday language; the revelation of 'hidden' or particularly semantically rich language in song; the acquisition and transmission of songs and how these are affected by broader sociocultural factors; the relationship of the archival record to the living tradition; the problem of stability and variability in song text. But in addition he raises matters not dealt with here, which remain issues for future research: 'Are there examples of non-Aboriginal languages other than English appearing in song traditions ?'; 'How do women's songs differ from men's and to what extent do they express women's knowledge?'; 'How widespread are children's songs and how do they interact with adults' songs?'; 'Are songs in settled Australia the same and/or different from those in other parts of Australia?'; 'How can song traditions assist in Native Title and other such cases?'

In addition to the themes of interdisciplinarity and endangerment identified at the beginning of this essay, other themes emerge. In several papers (in particular those of O'Keeffe, Garde and Ford) authors examine the relationship between sung and spoken forms: in the case of O'Keeffe the focus is on spoken and written forms of the same song text; in Garde's case it is on the spoken exegesis of songs given by one of the last remaining singers of a dying tradition; and, in Ford's case, it is on the stories associated with particular songs. Several papers, and in particular those by Barwick, Birch and Evans, and by O'Keeffe and Garde also deal with the question of song texts whose lexicon lies outside that of normal speech.

Several papers draw on the archival record and relate this to present-day practice. O'Keeffe's, Marett's and Ford's papers, for example, use recordings made in the 1960s and 1970s to make a variety of points about the relationship between spoken and sung forms or the evolution of musical style, while the project described in Corn and Gumbula's paper arose as a response to perceived lacunae in the recorded record of Gupapuyngu manikay. Several papers, in particular those by Barwick, Birch and Evans, and by Marett, present evidence of a more complex practice in earlier times, evidence that suggests that, in addition to wholesale loss, traditions may also be being simplified in response to the pressures of modernity. But there is also a vivid sense in many of the papers that Aboriginal song traditions today are a vital part of contemporary life, that these are not living museum pieces as some of our politicians would have us believe, but rather active and potent responses to the exigencies of everyday life--indeed they are one of the primary mechanisms by which Aboriginal Australians respond to and adapt to change.

Faced as we are with the ongoing and escalating loss of so many of Australia's Indigenous languages and performance traditions, there is some evidence that studies of Aboriginal song are increasing. There is a growing number of articles being published in journals, (3) some major survey articles have appeared in recent years, (4) well-documented CDs are appearing at a regular rate, (5) an annual symposium on Aboriginal song has been established, and four new monographs on Aboriginal music have been published in the past three years. (6) And yet too little is being done too late by too few. In musicology in particular, the discipline has failed adequately to respond to the cultural tragedy that is unfolding before our eyes as manifold traditions of Australia's Indigenous heritage are lost to future generations of Aboriginal peoples and to the national heritage. Major initiatives, such as the various endangered language programs mentioned earlier in our essay, and the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia, are attempting to find solutions that will empower Indigenous peoples in their struggle to maintain their threatened languages and traditions in the face of the enormous forces arrayed against them. But so much remains to be done, not least in training young persons, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, with the disciplinary and practical skill to meet this challenge.

REFERENCES

Anonymous 2005 National Indigenous Languages Survey Report 2005, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra.

Barwick, Linda 2006 'Marri Ngarr lirrga songs: A musicological analysis of song pairs in performance', Musicology Australia 28:1-25.

Barwick, Linda, Bruce Birch and Joy Williams 2005 Jurtbirrk Love Songs of Northwestern Arnhem Land, Batchelor Press, Batchelor.

Barwick, Linda, Allan Marett and Guy Tunstill (eds) 1995 The Essence of Singing and the Substance of Song: Recent responses to the Aboriginal performing arts and other essays for Catherine Ellis, University of Sydney (Oceania Monograph 46).

Barwick, Linda and Nyalgodi Scotty Martin 2003 Jadmi Junba: Public dance songs by Nyalgodi Scotty Martin, Undercover Music, Sydney (booklet to accompany audio CD).

Clunies Ross, Margaret 1987 'Research into Aboriginal songs: The state of the art' in M Clunies Ross, T Donaldson and SA Wild (eds) Songs of Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Publications, Sydney, pp.l-13.

Clunies Ross, Margaret, Tamsin Donaldson and Stephen A Wild (eds) 1987 Songs of Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Publications, Sydney.

Ellis, Catherine 1992 'Power-laden Aboriginal songs: Who should control the research?' World of Music [Special issue] 36(1). Ford, Lysbeth 2006 'Marri Ngarr lirrga songs: A linguistic analysis', Musicology Australia 28:26-58.

Garde, Murray 2006 'The language of kun-borrk in western Arnhem Land', Musicology Australia 28:59-89.

--2007 Wurrurrumi kun-borrk: Songs from Western Arnhem Land by Kevin Djimarr, Sydney University Press (booklet to accompany audio CD).

Henry, Rosita, Fiona Magowan and David Murray 2000 'The politics of dance', The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11(3) [Special issue].

Kaeppler, Adrienne and J Wainwright Love (eds) 1998 Encyclopedia of World Music (Oceania volume), Garland Publishing, New York.

Kassler, Jamie C and Jill Stubington (eds) 1984 Problems and Solutions: Occasional essays in musicology presented to Alice M Moyle, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.

Mackinlay, Elizabeth 2007 Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding teaching and learning experiences in Indigenous Australian women's music and dance, Peter Lang Publishers, New York.

Magowan, Fiona 2007 Melodies of Mourning: Music and emotion in northern Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley.

Magowan, Fiona and Karl Neuenfeldt (eds) 2005 Landscapes of Indigenous Performance: Music, song and dance of the Torres Strait and Arnhem Land, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.

Marett, Allan 2005 Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: The Wangga of north Australia, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown.

Neale, Margo and Sylvia Kleinert (eds) 2000 Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

Sadie, Stanley and J Tyrell (eds) 2001 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edn), Macmillan, London.

Scott-Maxwell, Aline and John Whiteoak (eds) 2003 Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, Currency Press, Sydney.

Stubington, Jill 2007 Singing the Land: The power of performance in Aboriginal life, Currency Press, Sydney.

Turpin, Myfany and Alison Ross 2004 Awelye Akwelye: Kaytetye women's songs from Arnerre, Central Australia, Papulu Apparr-kari Language and Culture Centre, Tennant Creek (Audio CD with scholarly notes).

Allan Marett and Linda Barwick

University of Sydney

NOTES

(1.) These collections include those made by Kassler and Stubington (1984), Clunies Ross, Donaldson and Wild (1987), Ellis (1992), Barwick, Marett and Tunstill (1995), Henry, Magowan and Murray (2000), Magowan and Neuenfeldt (2005).

(2.) Based on recent census data, Ngarinyin is classified as 'no longer fully spoken' (Anon. 2007).

(3.) For example Musicology Australia (2005-06 volume), which contained articles on Aboriginal song by Barwick (2006), Ford (2006) and Garde (2006) as well as the present volume and a planned volume on song for the Australian Journal of Linguistics.

(4.) Articles on Australian Aboriginal song in collections edited by Sadie and Tyrell (2001), Kaeppler and Love (1998), Scott-Maxwell and Whiteoak (2003) and Neale and Kleinert (2000).

(5.) Well-documented CDs of traditional music that have appeared in the last five years include those produced by Barwick and Martin (2003), Turpin and Ross (2004), Barwick, Birch and Williams (2005), and Garde (2007).

(6.) Marett (2005), Magowan (2007), Mackinlay (2007) and Stubington (2007), some of which are reviewed in this volume.