Value in Yolngu ceremonial song performance: continuity and change

Abstract

Introduction The Yolngu are an Aboriginal society of a few thousand people who reside on their traditional land in Northeast Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory (see Figure 8.1). My interest as an ethnomusicologist has focused on the public ceremonial songs of the Yolngu community in and around Yirrkala, one of four large Yolngu settlements and currently the home or supply base to about 1,200 Yolngu people. As someone raised in a society where the most prevalent way of regarding music is as mere entertainment or spectacle (or in the case of classical music, as something transcendental, a distinction that nonetheless separates the idea of music from the main business of society), I have been pleasantly shocked to encounter a culture in which most forms of knowledge, including cosmology, law, history, science, and kinship, are fully integrated and embodied within song, and where ceremonial and musical leaders are also the de facto political leaders of the society. Because of the centrality of songs in traditional Aboriginal societies, the notion of cultural value takes on a particular significance when applied to Aboriginal song performance. The value of song and dance performance to Yolngu people is of critical importance, both because of value ascribed to particular content within performance, and because of the general value that performance has as an important site for the creation and maintenance of sacred knowledge and group relations.