I have been music on the topic of the intersection between music and language lately, and something I read recently - I think it was in the anthropology of Walter Roth concerning the Aborigines of Northern Australia - that the words to some of the elaborate, at times humorous and at times excruciating ceremonies maintained by the people he documented were lost; when asked by Roth, a speaker of their languages, what the words meant, the bama (people) said they did not know. It was the music which survived, which orientated them in the soundscape of time and space, which connected and sustained and reminded them to Life. The ceremonies were a key without which they would be lost.
I have been music on the topic of the intersection between music and language lately, and something I read recently - I think it was in the anthropology of Walter Roth concerning the Aborigines of Northern Australia - that the words to some of the elaborate, at times humorous and at times excruciating ceremonies maintained by the people he documented were lost; when asked by Roth, a speaker of their languages, what the words meant, the bama (people) said they did not know. It was the music which survived, which orientated them in the soundscape of time and space, which connected and sustained and reminded them to Life. The ceremonies were a key without which they would be lost.