“When it comes to borrowing from other cultures, is music fair game?” write Hannah Edgar and Elias Gross in last Thursday’s (8/8) Newsounds.org. “The question isn’t simple…. Last week, that question hit the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, sparking a cross-generational, multinational conversation between composers, performers, and festival faculty. The piece at the center of the dialogue was Thousand Year Dreaming by Annea Lockwood during the festival’s inaugural LOUD Weekend [and] inspired by trance traditions… Thousand Year Dreaming … [grew] out of a close musical collaboration: The year before, Lockwood created Nautilus, an improvisation for didgeridoo, conch shell, and percussion…. The didgeridoo is an Australian Aboriginal instrument with roots in the ceremonial practices of the Yolngu people in northern Australia [in which] the instrument is played exclusively by men….. In 2007, the Australian Government and the Australia Council for the Arts issued recommendations about the use of the didgeridoo—namely that women avoid publicly playing the instrument and that non-Indigenous musicians seek consent from ‘the original custodians’ of the instrument before playing it. Last month, Christopher Sainsbury, an Indigenous composer, published an essay … urging non-Indigenous composers wishing to use Indigenous source material or instruments to collaborate with Indigenous musicians.”
Posted August 15, 2019
