gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (09/25/85)
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.
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