Hugo Zemp: Les Voix du Monde

Aaresi and Il'aresi, ink on paper, 11x14 inches, 2021

The is the second painting within a brief period featuring the singers Aaresi and Il'aresi. The duo appears several times in the 1994 ethnographic documentary film 'Are'are Music by Hugo Zemp. Footage from the film was recorded mostly in  1974 and 1975 at Malaita, the largest of the Solomon Islands, the performers in the film belong the the 'Are'are ethnic group. The song illustrated here is an example of the Nuuha iisisu genre (love songs/complaints). The song illustrated less than a month ago is from the Aamamata genre of funerary songs. The two singers are also seen in the film as part of a trio performing bamboo stamping tubes as well as part of a larger group of women performing several kiro ni karusi songs, which are water games. The splashing of water provides the rhythm. Aaresi and Il'aresi are in the top 20 of individual performers in the Top 100 2020, a count that I tabulate each year. This is the first year individual performers recorded in an ethnographic context have made this particular list. I have never tabulated a list of recorders but would I have done this Hugo Zemp would, without a doubt, have topped this list in 2020. Not only was Zemp responsible for all six recordings made within the Solomon Islands in the Top 100 this year, he is also the main curator of the 3cd-set Les voix du monde: une anthologie des expressions vocales that was released in 1996 and is with great distance the winner of the albums contest that year. Directly after Aaresi and Il'aresi at number 74 comes a recording of a type of pan flute that is called au waa that features in the same 'Are'Are Music film. Au waa consists of seven bundled (bamboo) pan flutes. The performer now is Noni'ikeni. He sings a melody that is the same melody he produces on the flutes, much in the same manner as jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk is known to have played.

Noni'ikeni, 14x11 inches, 2021

The sources for both ink paintings on paper were screen shots that I took while re-watching the film 'Are're Music. A synopsis of the film, with outtakes of all the major highlights can be seen here on YouTube. I have been painting simultaneously on the top 100s from 2020 and 2021 working on one of each of the series at the same time. The painting for the Top 100 2021 I worked on while drawing the 'Are'are illustrates the song, a lullaby, Hejde Lilibe, recorded by Zoltan Kallos in 1965. The same song was also featured in the Top 100 2020 and, just two months ago, I illustrated the same song. So for the version for this year (all paintings are now on canvas) I decided I would use the very same images as I had used in March. (It's really the only image of the singer Anna Balint that is available on line.) The track is listed as Hungarian Lullaby (cancion de cuna hungara) on the collection La voz humana en la musica by Carlos Reynoso (2021.) Upon my further reading up on the work of Kallos, I realized the recording was not made in Hungary, as I had assumed, but rather by ethnic Hungarians in Romania. (Not that it makes any difference but I had to, again, update my archive to reflect this error in the data I maintain.)

Zoltan Kollas and Anna Balint, oil on canvas, 2021