Hugo Zemp (cont.)

Aamamata, funerary chant
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2014

I left the previous post on Hugo Zemp with a question that I now have the answer to: Indeed panpipes are in the repertoire of traditional Solomon Islanders music. However...this is not because Hugo Zemp imported the flutes from South America but the islanders themselves invented their own pan flute and they make it out of bamboo. And I learned that the Koleo (funerary chant) that I so treasure and is at #3 in the Top 100, is a rather recent development, a synthesis of the previous weaping tradition at a funeral and the vocal imitation of bamboo panpipes. The photograph that was the source for the above painting features in a lengthy paper on bamboo flutes by Hugo Zemp. He probably took the picture. Depicted are two women performing the funerary chant Aamamata, a different recording than the Koleo that is featured on Iles Salomon: Musique de Guadalcanal (Ocora/Radio France, 1970.) Hugo Zemp now is becoming the most important ethnomusicologist in this year's top 100 as he is the producer of Les voix du monde, une anthologie des expressions vocale, a three cd-set compiling all these recordings I have been collecting (and mimicking in my own compilation The Origins of Music.) All the stuff I've been gathering over many years I suddenly find in one instant compiled on these three cds. The collection is all I have been listening to.

Charles Duvelle

Charles Duvelle and his instrument
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Earlier paintings of Charles Duvelle featured him as an old man, here he is in his prime in the 1970s working on field recordings that became his legacy. He considered himself a "westerner with a microphone" and this painting shows just that. The track he recorded that is in the top 100 is, like last year, is Wama Igini Kamu recorded in Papua New Guinea. The track comes in at #2 and appears on The Photographs of Charles Duvelle (Sublime Frequencies, 2017.) Charles Duvelle (1937-2017) was a French ethnomusicologist and composer. For a time he was associated with the record label Disques Ocora, founded by the founder of Musique Concrète Pierre Schaeffer. It is to Duvelle to whom Ocora owns its sterling reputation. [Sublime Frequencies] For Ocora Duvelle recorded the music found on the cd-set mentioned above, including Wama Igini Kamu. Duvelle rejected neocolonialism and while at Ocora put forward an effort to decolonialize the recording industry and setting up—mainly in Africa—local systems for the production and distribution of music.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

Rekutkar performers
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Jean-Jacques Nattiez
14 x 11 inches, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2019

For the obvious reason of similarity in style I assumed that the three vocal throat singing traditions, the Inuit katajjait, the Ainu rekutkar, and the Chukchi pič eynen, found within the arctic circle must be related and/or have a common ancestor. I recently signed up for JSTOR, an online database of scholarly research papers and lo and behold the relationships have of course been studied at length. I am now the proud owner of a wealth of information about this subject. The paper I am referencing here is Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. I've also downloaded the liner notes to the cd Canada: Inuit Games and Songs produced by Nattiez. In these notes I am now able to identify all singers of katajjait in the Top 100 (there are many) that were previously anonymous. The two paintings presented here are to illustrate Imitation of the Cries of Geese and Assalalaa, the recordings were made by at Baffin Land  by Nicole Beaudry and Claude Charon in the mid seventies. The painting for Assalalaa I was working on from a photograph found by an image search of the terms katajjait combined with Jean-Jacques Nattiez represents not Inuit but Ainu singers. I intuited this was the case since I had not seen katajjait performed sitting down while the pose was the same as in my painting of rekutkar. The image I used was originally taken by I. Kurosawa (used by William P. Malm in 1963) and reproduced in Nattiez' paper. There's a hint of the Scottish flag in the bottom third of the painting that appeared when the thought of painting the flag arose. I never reject a thought but I obscured it later on as both the flag in form and meaning had really nothing to do with what I was painting. What I am most interested in is the history of these three vocal styles and its (ancient) origins. Nattiez hints in his paper at a possible shamanic origin of said vocal styles but it is hard to establish sound evidence for this hypothesis. Scientific papers do not, per definition, use incidental inferences.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez was born in Amiens, France, 30 December 1945. He is a musical semiologist and professor at the Université Montréal. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1990.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. "Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach." Ethnomusicology 43, no. 3 (1999): 399-418. doi:10.2307/852555.

Charles Brooks, Madagascar

Vonarino
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

So far my attention to ethnomusicologists on these pages here have been far from diverse. The three discussed so far (Duvelle, Lecomte, and Kemp) are all French speaking white males born within two years from one another. The next painting that's in the works is of Jean-Jacques Nattiez who (though a little younger) fits also in that category. As it is in many fields in the arts (and in general) the last few decades have brought many changes and the field is much more diverse now. Charles Brooks, who recorded Vonarino (above), is, like Nattiez from Montréal and speaks French, but represents a whole new generation. He is a field-recording artist (as his bio states) and also a musician and unlike the others mentioned, not associated with an institute of higher education. One change in the field of ethnomusicology over the last few decades has been to provide much more contextual information with recordings than was the case earlier. All musicians on Brook's Fanafody album are portrayed and also photographed. A photo of Vonarino (Vonarino Avaradova Amboaniotelo Tulear) made it to the cover of the album and the song in my Top 100 Mozika Mandrehita is the opener on side A. Vonarino plays a home-made three string fiddle (lokanga). Recorded in Madagascar in 2006/7.

Henri Lecomte

Henri Lecomte
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Anna Dimitrievna Neostroeva 
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2018

Henri Lecomte (1938-2018) died last year. I just figured that out while searching for biographical data on him. Darn, last year I painted and wrote about another French ethnomusicologist Charles Duvelle, he had just passed away in 2017 and I didn't even know it then. Henri Lecomte (Google keeps thinking I misspelled his name and I'm searching for the tennis star Henri Leconte) was, beside his work in the field, also a musician and director. He played a host of instruments among them many traditional central Asian ones. The last thirty years of his life were dedicated to research into the music of the Arctic Siberian regions. He wrote a number of papers on the subject and his series of cd releases simply called Siberia consists of eleven volumes, all released on Buda Music (Musique de Monde) between 1991 and 2009. They're hard to get by. I have two (plus some downloads of individual tracks from other discs in the series) both ordered via amazon.fr. In front of me lies Volume 3 dedicated to the Kolyma (Chants de nature et d'animaux) which features musicians with Čukč (Chukchi), Even, and Jukaghir backgrounds. The disc is from 1995. There are seven recordings made by Henri Lecomte in the Top 100 this year, as there were last year. One of these is a throat song by Anna Neostroeva who is Chukchi. I painted her last Fall but never posted it on these pages. The source photo was taken by Lecomte. There are still a handful of older paintings waiting to be uploaded here. I never posted on the painting I did last year (when he was still alive) of Lecomte either. The image can be seen at #43 in the post that shows thumbnails of all 100 paintings from the last year's list. This one is better.

Hugo Zemp

Hugo Zemp playing a pan flute watched by a young woman
14 x 11 inches, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2019

Most recordings (sixty-nine to be precise) in the Top 100 2018/2019 were not recorded in a studio but in the "field" by folklorists, (ethno)musicologists, hobbyists, and institutions. Not always do I, in these pages, dwell on those individuals who travel the world to record music from the most remote places in often challenging even dangerous conditions. From the sixty-nine recordings the majority were made by ethnomusicologists from France and the US. Over the next few weeks I'll single out a few of these individuals whom I will provide with a short bio and of course paint. First up is Hugo Zemp, who is represented twice in the top 10 with recordings made in Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Both tracks come from the LP Iles Salomon: Music del Guadalcanal. Professor Zemp was born in Basle, Switzerland in 1937 and has recorded, written, and filmed on the subject of ethnic music. As a Swiss national (working in France) he is naturally interested in yodeling, a subject he also found in various places beside Switzerland. On the image above Zemp is seen playing a pan flute in the Solomon Islands. He must have transported that thing all the way from South America! The young woman (who may well be the individual heard on Aate: Dance le femmes) looks bewildered. I wonder if Zemp left the pan flute behind and if so, did the flutes end up in the repertoire of Solomon Islands traditional music?

The following is the full list of credits for the field recordings, they're in order of the Top 100. A few names will sound familiar (Bartok) but most are pretty obscure.

Charles Duvelle; Hugo Zemp (2); Jean-Jacquez Nattiez (2); Anne-Maria and Pierre Pétrequin (2); Béla Bartók; Ramon Pelinski (3); OPOS; Enrique Pinilla (2); David Fenshawe (2); Megan Biesele; Jaap Kunst; Dept. of Anthropology, Government of India; Theodore Levin (3); Henry Lecomte (7); Francisco Carreño and Miguel Cardona; W. Coppens; Charles Brooks (2); David Blair Stiffler (3); Leo A. Verwilghen (2); Steven Field (2); Denise Harvey; Frank Proschan; Albert Cort Haddon; Albert Lord; Michel Vuylsteke; Andrei Golovnev; unknown (7); F. Conti; Vietnamese Institute of Musicology (2); Andre Didier; Howard Keva Kaufman; Hugh Tracey; Carol Jenkins; Georges Luneau; A.P. Elkin; Dave Dargie; Anne Chapman; Stephen Jay; Gilbert Rouget and André Didier; Brigitta Hauser-Schaublin; Jenny de Vera; Center for Andean Ethnomusicology.

The Weaves and Tanya Tagaq

Tanya Tagaq
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Jasmyn Burke, The Weaves
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

As in the previous post on the Ainu both paintings here also represent songs that were in last year's Top 100. Twenty-one repeats from the previous list seems about average. All three songs in which the Canadian (Inuit) Tanya Tagaq appears were also listed last year. Twice under her own name and once as a guest in the (also) Canadian band The Weaves. I did not paint Jasmyn Burke last year as I deemed the contribution of Tanya Tagaq to the song Scream by Burke's band The Weaves the reason for its inclusion then. Now this is different as the song comes in at #12 in the Top 100 2018/2019. Punk rock meets throat singing!

Ainu Songs

Kiyo Kurokawa
14 x 9 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Teru Nishizama (?)
14 x 9 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

 

Kiyo Kurokawa and Teru Nishizama perform several duets and a few solos on the cd Chants des Ainu (Ainu Songs) from the Musique & Musiciens du Monde series of the UNESCO collection. Last year songs of theirs were represented by stock images of  traditional Ainu women but now I think that I've found photos that actually depict the two women. The photos were made by Jean-Jacques Nattiez who also recorded the music. These photos are found on Ainu Songs Japan on the Phillips label and was in 1980 the first release of the music recorded in 1978 in Hokkaido. I do not have the original LP and liner notes are not published on the web so I can't be sure the images depict them or who's who. Given the prominence of Kurokawa on the LP and that she's seen clapping on another photo I may assume that the individual on the record sleeve is indeed Kurokawa. Why is this important you may wonder? Well, Kiyo Kurokawa, together with Nishizama is featured twice at #5 and #14 in the Top 100, and individually she comes in at third place of performers for the year, just behind Cat Power and Bongwater. The Ainu, as dwelled upon earlier, are descendants of the indigenous Japanese Jōmon people and share many cultural characteristics with neighboring Siberian and Inuit peoples. A great number used to live (and some still do) in the easternmost Russian territory Sakhalin, an island just north of Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island where most Ainu live today. Sakhalin has been disputed territory between  Japan and Russia but became solidly Russian after the second World War. The two songs in the Top 100 are both associated with the bear festival. Upopo is a sitting song and Horippa a dancing song.

Wanderer Tops the "Albums" list for 2018/2019

Rihanna
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Five songs from Cat Power's newest Wanderer LP made the list of 100. The year 2018-2019 (July 1st until July 1st) is now closed and a new one just began. I'll be painting several more months until all 100 are ready for exhibit for the grand opening of the Top 100 Studio and Archive space. Five songs, four originals (Wanderer, Horizon, In Your Face, and Nothing Really Matters) ans one cover (Stay). Stay is an original from the Bahamian singer Rihanna. Her (original) version is quite beautiful too but didn't make the list of 100 songs. Four of the five are painted as Rihanna's portrait serves as the illustration for Stay. The Cat Power portrait below, painted two months ago, belongs to Horizon. The  final Cat Power portrait for the Top 100 2018/2019 exhibit will have to wait until I go see her live in concert in Tampa in September. It'll be based on sketches done from life.

Cat Power
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Rice Minnowing

Kalinga woman
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The Kalinga rice minnowing song that appears on Music from the Mountain Provinces is illustrated on YouTube with a vintage photograph of a bare chested woman in a field. I may assume the field is a rice field and the (young) woman is from the Philippines. David Blair Stiffler recorded the song in the mid 1980s in the Kalinga province of the mountainous northern Philippines. The photograph, that I used for the painting above, in the video is certainly not his. The photograph is much older from a time that it was deemed alright to fetishize exotic women. The woman in the photo is quite young perhaps not older as fourteen. Stiffler recorded the Kalinga women inside a bamboo stilt house, whre they certainly had their chests (breasts) covered. I doubt it if women would be working bare-chested in the field at the time the recording was made, or long before that.

I have commented before on the colonialist's attitude towards the exotic, and earlier yet I vowed not to paint gratuitous nudity. This was almost exactly ten years ago and I believe I've been respectful to any individual performer (and all human beings) since. As a middle-aged white male I do not shy away from addressing important issues that come with posting content on the internet. I believe that any (questionable) private feelings one may have as it comes to race, sexuality, violence, or status is culturally induced and to alter one's mindset that will disallow biases will also alter one's inner feelings. We can learn to be a good person. The right education. Don't get me wrong, this is not a pamphlet for ignoring or overcoming one's passions or desires, what is intended is to learn respect. Restraint is commendable when it involves affecting other people without their consent. Relations are eskewed when one party does not have a voice.

The woman in the photograph could never consent to this painting. In the context of the photograph the relation between photographer and model is also one of a clear slant in which the photographer is dominant and the model without a voice. I am aware of the erotic appeal of the photograph and painting, and that this appeal is the true object of the work, and that the ethnographic interest is an excuse. The Philippine woman was selected not to represent agricultural practices in her culture but for her (sex) appeal. She was (no doubt) selected by the photographer for her looks and how they would reinforce the (western) audience's sense of the exotic. The photo was selected by me not because it illustrates the particular song in the top 100 but to indulge in exoticism and to use the opportunity to address it too. As a teacher that I am, I won't miss the opportunity to tell my audience all about it.

Shamanism

Shamans performing ritual in Pegtimel
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Becoming a Shaman

The impulse of becoming a shaman was, as it is with the artist of today, the manifestation of idiosyncratic traits. Psychosis, gender ambiguity, poetic sensibility led to an existence as an outsider in society. Unlike today, these differences yielded high respect from other members in society. Today we seek medicine to cure idiosyncrasies but back then these traits were not considered the disease but the cure. For the shaman was the doctor. It was a difficult journey, full of obstacles, crises necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, the ability to traverse various planes of consciousness. Art today assumes a similar function; the budding artist, because of her difference, goes through the ordeal of societal rejection, and through deepening crises she becomes a visionary. She shows her audience the reality beyond the mundane and thus provides her community an important service, that of spiritual equilibrium. Let’s not reject the rejects, rejoice in the manifestations of oddness, queerness, and deviance.

The inevitable crisis that comes with the abandonment of the self into the other marks the onset of the journey of the shaman.

“...a psychosis that is emerging for some reason or other is so strong that the only way out open to the individual attacked by it is to escape from it into shamanistic activity, that is to say essentially by means of artistic productivity, such as dancing or singing, which always involves a state of trance.”[1] “In other words, any person suffering from a psychosis, and who escapes from it through artistic productivity in a trance state is a shaman, or at least a ‘future shaman.’ One who is a specialist in ancient techniques of ecstasy, the shaman normally is a functionary for a non-literate community, serving as its healer, intermediary with the gods, guide of the souls of the dead to their rest, and custodian of traditional tribal lore. The typical shaman comes to this role through either heredity or having manifested idiosyncratic traits (epilepsy, sexual ambiguity, poetic sensitivity, dramatic dreams). Psychologically, shamans depend on an ability to function in two worlds, the ordinary reality of daily life and the extraordinary reality they encounter through their ecstatic journeys. As well, they serve their tribe as a defense of meaning, by incarnating a contact with the powers thought to hold the tribe's destiny.”[2]

“The stereotypical shaman Other, whose practices are perceived as the origins of religion, is singled out as the “artist” of that classic Other archaeological art perceived as the origins of ‘art’—Cave Art.”[3]            – Robert J. Wallis

[1] Lommel, Andreas. Shamanism: The Beginning of Art. Michael Bullock, trans. New York & Toronto: McGraw Hill Book Company. 1967. Reviewed by Dorothy Hammond. Brooklyn College. American Anthropoligist. 1967. Article. Accessed through: American Anthropologist. Vol. 71, issue 3. Article. 2009. Web. 14 Dec. 2014. [Lommel,1967:9-10]
[2] This definition of Shamanism is cited from crsmith, Shamanism (see footnote 1). Crsmith quotes from: Carmody, Denise L. and John Tully Carmody, Ways to the Center: An Introduction to World Religions. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1980.
[3] Mariko Namba Walter and Eva Jane Neumann Fridner, editors. Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture, ABC-CLIO, Inc. 2004.

L'art brut

Jean Dubuffet
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

For a week I visited my old home town which is Columbus, Ohio. Besides visiting family and friends, the Columbus Museum of Art, a trip to Used Kids records was high on the to-do list. I went three times. It's not that you can't buy any record on line these days, there's something about a mortar and brick record store, especially one with a selection like Used Kids. Don't get me wrong, I like Joe's Record exchange, and I like Joe, but the difference between Columbus and Fort Myers is day and night. Which ones of the ten that I selected should I buy? I left behind records that I would've bought in a heartbeat had I seen them at Joe's: One of three Moondogs, one of three John Cages, and a double record of the Art Brut artist Jean Dubuffet who I admire. At $27 I left it behind, the track, that through Ubuweb.com was already in the top 100 (La Fleur de barbe) was not even on this record.