Origins of Music (4): Shamanism

 

 

The image on top is a photograph from an installation of my paintings at Tempus Projects earlier this year. In the exhibition over 300 paintings were shown organized into blocks of 10, top 10s. The detail here is the top 10 dedicated to shamanic music. Number 9, a Tuva shaman, is a fairly new painting and I still owe a better picture and more info on that one. The Top 10:



1. Chukchi Shaman
2. Shamanic costume
3. Veteran Minnasie Chief and Daughter-in-law
4. Maria Sabina
5. Bernard Tobal
6. Chukchi Shaman
7. Gran Chaco Indians
8. Kubu People
9. Tuvan Shaman
10. Siberian Shamanism

1. Top 100 2011, #23: Chuckchi Shamanic Ritual

I'm quite pleased with this tiny little painting of a Chukchi shaman playing his drum sitting by some palm trees at Billie's Creek that runs behind my house. It got a spot on my wall directly next to my last Siberian shaman painting that I did precisely ten years ago. Certain genetic theories have it that about 15,000 years ago a group of less than twenty Chukchi crossed what is now the Bering Street into America. They are the ancestors of the native Americans who spread as far south as South America. So this Chukchi shaman of Arctic Siberia may well have a similar genetic code as Billie Bowlegs, the Seminole after whom the creek was named and who might have very well been sitting once at the very spot as where I placed the shaman in the painting. On YouTube there exists a beautiful film of a shamanic Chukchi musical performance. If you decide to watch it please watch it until the end because the last thirty seconds features a very intriguing type of breathing-singing that made the recording propel into Top 100 land.

2. Top 100 2001, #49: D. Kosterdine – Morceau de Khe I Kheri (Musique Nganassane)

From the CD: “Voyage en URRS, Vol. 6: Caucase du Nord, Volga/Oural, Siberie, Extreme Orient/Extreme Nord”, Le Chant du Monde. Recorded in Siberia. Khe is a ceremonial (shaman) costume worn on important occasions, and upon which sixty to seventy rattles were sewn which made a noise with each gesture. On the  recording, the music of this dress is supported by the droning of the khieri, made of wood or bone, or even of the tusks of fossilized mammoths.

3. Top 100 2010, #14: Torres Strait Death Wail (Rec. by A.C. Haddon, 1898, Australia)

Recently the BBC made their complete sound archive library available for anyone to listen to.  It would take years to listen through everything so I figured I’d just start at the beginning, I have time. The beginning, of course, is the most exciting part anyway: a collection of wax cylinders from before 1900.  This one is from the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition led by Prof. A.C. Haddon of 1898, just 21 years after Edison managed to record sound.  Because it’s a wail, I assumed it was a woman (or women) singing but this assumption may be false.

4. Top 100 2017: Maria Sabina – Sacred Mushroom Chant

More ethnopoetics from Ubuweb: María Sabina is a Mexican Mazatec healer, a shaman, who became a notoriety because of a visit by American ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson who published his experiences in Life magazine in 1956. In the 1960s scores of Westerners flocked to the little village where Sabina was practicing a healing ritual that included the use of magic mushrooms. Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Keith Richards are believed among those seeking audition. Wasson recorded Sabina during one of those nightlong ceremonies in 1956 in the Oaxaca province. Recordings appeared on the Folkways label the following year. The 8:06 minute Mushroom Chant that appears on Ubuweb was made during these sessions.

5. Top 100 2007, #55: Bernardo Tobal - Warao male Wisiratu shaman’s cure

6. Top 100 2011, #23: Chuckchi Shamanic Ritual

Certain genetic theories have it that about 13,000 years ago a group of less than twenty Chukchi crossed what is now the Bering Street into America. They are the ancestors of the native Americans who spread as far south as South America. So this Chukchi shaman of Arctic Siberia may well have a similar genetic code as Billie Bowlegs, the Seminole after whom the creek behind my house was named and who might have very well been sitting once at the very spot as where I placed the shaman in the painting. On YouTube there exists a beautiful film of a shamanic Chukchi musical performance. The last thirty seconds of the shaman recording features a very intriguing type of breathing-singing that made the recording propel into Top 100 land.

7. Top 100 2002, #90: The Musical Experience of Shamans, Gran Choco Indians

From a cassette on Lyrichord Argentina: The Indians of the Gran Chaco) with wonderful titles such as The musical therapy of the Shamans, Control of atmospheric phenomena and such. In the musical expression of the Chorote shaman the world is conceptualized. By way of ecstasy shamans communicate with powers beyond.

8. Top 100 2017: Kubu shamanic healing ceremony (Kubu People, Palembang, Sumatra)

A track from the album (3CD set) Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1905-2007. The 1905 in the CD title refers to recordings the German anthropologist Bernard Hagen made in 1905 near Palembang in Sumatra. Two CD features three recordings by Hagen. Two of those are of healing ceremonies by Kubu shamans.

9. Top 100 2017: Oleg Kuular – Collection of Höömeï Styles (Tuvan Shaman)

From notes to the CD Deep In the Heart of Tuva: Cowboy Music From the Wild East

    German Explorer Otto Mănchen-Helfen observed the practices of Tuvan Shamanism in 1929. "The shaman is not a priest," he wrote, "He does not belong to a separate caste, and enjoys no separate priveleges. He is a herdsman, just like his relatives and neighbors. There are no 'professional' shamans: each shaman merely feels himself called upon to mediate between humans and spirits–and each is a very personal mediator."

10. Top 100 2000, #73: D. Kosterdine - Musique Nganassane: Morceau pour l’arc qui chante (corde pincee), Morceau pour l’arc qui chante (lancer de fleches)

Shamanism

The presumed origin of music, situated at the onset of the evolution of our species, is closely linked to that of language. Communication seemed to have played an important role in music's beginning. Be it as the communication of a mother to her child—singing to the child when she had to put the it aside because she needed to use her hands for daily chores—between members of a group, as mating calls, to accompany work, or as communion with the spirits, music was essential to the characteristics that make a human a human. The part I like to elaborate further on is that of communion with the spirits. As we've seen in art too, the impetus, the acknowledgement of death, birth, and rebirth–eternal life in essence–is the communion with that what is eternal, the spiritual realm. To commune with the spirit, to become the spirit, solves the mystery of temporal life. To become the spirit one has to overcome the ego, to emancipate ones eternality from ones temporality. Trance is vehicle to do so. Whether achieved through narcotics, dancing, chanting, or (en)acting the spirit, a trance will let you explore the realms not available to everyday chores and existence. The shaman traditionally had the function to deliver the group members to the sacred.

The shaman has a deposition towards the sacred. He (or she) was different from the others, an outsider in the community. Psychotic tendencies, sexual ambiguity, whatever differing traits were exposed as a child, the future shaman was predestined and celebrated for the role of priest, healer, and artist for the sake of the wellbeing of the community. The shaman could, or is expected to, transgress the norms and taboos of society.

Before the iron age the shaman's drum and clothing would not have metal rattles attached to them. Music is incorporated into the shamanic ritual. So are theatre and art. The shamanic ceremony is a gesamtkunstwerk. As time moves forward the field of academic research is closing in on the original condition. The term ethnopoetics, the field that is approaching the original condition, was coined in 1968. Crucial for this field of study is the communication with anthropology and ethnography. At the center of ethnopoetic investigation is the shaman and the relation to the sacred.

The shamanic ritual: speaking in tongues, at times rhythmic with the aid of the drum and rattles; breathing, increasingly deeper and faster. As the ceremony intensifies the shaman's pitch rises, the movements become increasingly erratic. The shaman transgresses the empirical world and becomes spirit, becomes eternal. His empirical state is (near) dead. There's no heartbeat, no pulse, no breathing. Audience participation: As by infection the audience is moved, they participate in music and dance. The shaman has aides, they make sure he has the tools available to make the journey into the spirit world, the catch him when he collapses, and they animate him back to life.