Albania and Ashaninka, numbers 7 of 2021 and 66 in 2020.

Albanian mourners, Spiro Shetuni

The song illustrated in the above painting is one of several for which I could find not a whole lot of information about. The song title is Lamento de Albania which I found on the collection La voz humana en la musica parte 1. It's a Spanish language website and was compiled by the Argentinian Carlos Reynoso, professor of Anthropology at the the University of Buenos Aires. His liner notes to the Albanian recording are short; A funeral song by a group of about 12 women. The song is syllabic, it does not have words. "A collective clamor organized according to a strophic structure" is how Reynoso described it. The source is the Institute of Popular Culture of Tirana. No date. So I looked up the Institute of Popular Culture of Tirana. The Institute does not exist anymore, not using that name anyways but it lead me to the name Spiro Shetuni, "the West's foremost authority on the subject of Albanian music." Shetuni is an Albanian American whose nationality is Arumanian (I had to look that one up too, the term designates Eastern Romance people, and their language). He moved to the United States in 1992 and was for a period employed at the Ohio State University. Between 1993 and 2000 he taught a course called An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples. This at exactly the same time I was at OSU. I was a grad student there between 1994-1997. I stayed on as a lecturer and Gallery assistant until 2011.  I wish I knew then what I know now and I certainly would have taken this course. In 2005 I organized an exhibition of record sleeve collections and did come in contact with Margarita Mazo, a professor in the cognitive music department. Mazo had recorded Old Believers: Music of the Nekrasov Cossacks, a cd on Smithsonian Folkways that I owned a copy of and that was in the Top 100 at the time. I had never heard of Shetuni then let alone met him (he had already moved to South Carolina anyways.)

Back then I was in middle of compiling a cd with examples of cry singing, mostly funeral laments. Throughout the world existed (still exists but disappearing) this practice of mourning through song and I had gathered examples from Ireland (where it's called keening to Papua New Guinea, and everywhere in between. Albania was not included in that collection but had I known the existance of this recording I would have certainly included it on the cd, and would have contacted Shetuni in the process.

 

The image of the wailing Albanian women I found in Death Rituals in Albania: An Anthropological Review by Gentian Vyshka and Bardhyl Cipi, published on Antrocom an online journal of Anthropology in 2010. Vyshka and Cipi used the 1985 photo courtesy of the Albanian Film Archive, Tirana.The caption reads: "The wailing ritual and laments in Southern Albania are led from a professional mourner, a woman that might be not a relative of the dead, and hired for that function." The caption also reaffirmed me that I was painting Albanian women. I had started this painting already without some of the context and I was not sure if all 8 individuals were women. I've painted half the photo, the four people on the left in the picture.

Ashaninka Indian, Josefat Roel Pineda

The Ashaninka songs, at #66 in the Top 100 2020 was also part of the Top 100 2019. In 2019, while painting the illustration, I did do some contextual research as to what I was listening to. The track Ashaninka songs are actually two short songs that appear on a project initiated by Mickey Hart (of the Grateful Dead) for the Library of Congress called Endangered Music Project. The first cd of which is called The Spirit Cries: Music from the Rainforests of South America and the Caribbean (Rykodisc 1993). The sections on the cd involving the Peruvian Indians Shipobo and Ashaninka were recorded in 1963 and 1964 by Enrique Pinella and Josefat Roel Pineda. I may assume that Pinella, a Peruvian avant-garde composer, was responsible for the Shipobo recordings and Pinella for the Ashaninka but I can't be sure. The otherwise well documented CD does not distinguish. While writing about bot sets of recordings last years I spoke about Pinella and omitted Pineda. Now, while focusing on the Ashaninka only, I'm reversing this and chose a portrait of Pineda to include in the drawing of an Ashaninka woman. The woman I depicted is anonymous, as are the performers of the Ashaninka songs. The photo source I used comes from the Goteborg Ethnographic Museum and I found it on a Brazilian website documenting Amazonian tribes. I could not find photographs made by either Pinella or Pineda during their field recording sessions in the Amazon region of Eastern Peru. I commented in the text on the Ashaninca last year on the tattos seen in older, vintage, photographs of many Ashaninka women. Beautiful face tattoos that have now been replaced by face painting. Talking about tattoos: I can't get this image out of my head of the tattoos on the back of Grimes, the partner of Elon Musk. She covered her back in abstract, very expressive white marks resembling doodles or scribbling, or the style of Antonin Artaud's drawings or Alberto Giacometti's. I saw it on the Daily Mail this morning. They probably put it up to feed the disgust people have for the ultra-rich extravagant escapades. To shock their viewers. I found the tattoos rather impressive. Easily one of the best non-tribal or ceremony related tattoos I've ever seen.