Music, politics and the importance of understanding the text

So this evening Elaine and Byron are going to jointly talk about Music, politics and the importance of understanding the text. They're going to present their research, which collectively is into religious music from Scotland, England and Cameroon. They will explore historical arguments around the understandability of the words in this music, as well as the consequences of these arguments of how music was subsequently composed.

So now we'll move on to Bryon. Let me say a little bit about Byron's career so far. So he joined us in 2012, previously he’d been Lecturer in Music at the Royal Northern College of Music and before that held posts as University Fellow in Music here at The Open University and Co-ordinator of Musicology at Columbia College, Chicago. He studied ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, where his doctoral research focused on public performances of First Nations and Metis music and dance in the western Canadian city of Winnipeg, which I think is his hometown. So his early musical studies in piano performance were undertaken at the University of Minnesota and Wilfred Laurier University. So now it gives me great pleasure to invite Byron to the podium.

Bryon: Thanks very much Kevin and I'm delighted to be able to share some of my research with you today. Here right at the beginning I'd like to acknowledge the collaborations that enable this work. Everything I discuss in this lecture results from the fieldwork and discussion undertaken with Dr Kizito Essele Essele, ethnomusicologist at the Catholic University of Central Africa, pictured here on the right. Two other researchers have joined our team recently, Dr Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso, who is a linguist at the International Centre for the Research and Documentation of African Traditions and Languages, and Dr Maxime Yves Julien Manifi Abouh, linguist at the École normale supérieure in Yaoundé.

Linking my and Professor Moohan's lectures today is the theme of the comprehensibility of the text in sacred music and there are at least 2 issues in play here. The first involves whether or not the text is in a language that listeners can understand. The second involves music that is in a language that listeners can understand but is nevertheless unintelligible because of the way it's been composed or the way it's performed, and that's the key concern in my own talk. It's worth acknowledging here at the beginning some of the anxieties around these issues. There are worries about loss, of disappearance of beloved languages, tunes, words, musical styles, instruments, and songs. There's also a doctrinal anxiety regarding the meanings of sacred texts and the clarity of those meanings. There are finally anxieties about the music that involve its supposedly worrisome associations. In the context of European Christian nationalisation these have often involved music’s association with the dancing body and with competing belief systems. So there are anxieties regarding both the word and the flesh and both of these come up in what follows.

Across the centre region of Cameroon songs performed in local languages and styles and accompanied by xylophone ensembles can be heard in community celebrations, funerary rites, in nightclubs, and in Catholic liturgical music. This neotraditional music flourishes in part thanks to a burst of creative activity that began among Cameroonian Catholic musicians in the late-1950s, a few years before Cameroonian independence, resulting in the creation of many new compositions in indigenous languages and in neotraditional musical styles. These newly composed sacred songs were soon much more widely sung than their European antecedents, which for the most part were songs set to European melodies and musicians have been composing this new style of songs ever since. It might be possible to ascribe this turn to Cameroonian tradition to official church pronouncements from on high. For example the 1955 Encyclical by Pope Pius XII proclaimed that people in lands where missionary work was conducted should be able to hear sacred music “in a language and in melodies familiar to them”. Similarly in 1963 the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which was one of the documents to come out of the Second Vatican Council, decreed that, “a suitable place is to be given to the musical traditions of people from so called mission lands, not only informing their attitude toward religion, but also in adapting worship to their native genius”. It also recommended that missionaries “become competent in promoting the traditional music of these peoples, both in schools and in sacred services”. Despite the condescending tone of these statements mostly in the parts that I'm not reading out loud, there's clearly an initiative underway to incorporate indigenous musical traditions in worship. Yet when Cameroonian experts narrate the emergence of a generation of indigenous Catholic composers beginning in the 1950s, they focus not on growing approval from above, but rather on how this new generation of composers addressed a problem involving textual comprehensibility, the ability to hear and understand what was being sung. When European missionaries created liturgical music for use in Cameroon they translated hymn texts into local languages, such as Ewondo, then set those texts to existing European melodies. In doing so however they neglected an important aspect of these languages. They are tonal languages, meaning that the pitch of syllables relative to one another helps to establish their meaning.

For example, Ewondo, Eton and Bassaá, the most widely spoken languages in central Cameroon, employ high, low, rising and falling tones, which you can see here in the diacritics laid out in this slide. This complicates the process of setting words to music. During the late 1950s indigenous Cameroonians studying at the Catholic seminary in Otélé, a small town in Cameroon, began to argue that it doesn't work simply to slap a text in Ewondo onto a pre-existing European melody. The contour of the melody will not match the contour of the spoken words. So here's Monseigneur François Xavier Amara speaking to a largely Cameroonian audience in 2017 about missionary settings of Christian hymns. You may not understand the languages he's speaking and singing in but notice the growing sarcasm in his voice as he describes how the use of a European melody obscures or even twists the meaning of a text and notice too the laughter from the people in the room.

[sound recording]

François Xavier Amara: I have a collection of hymns, Bia bi Nda-Zamba, that was dictated by Monseigneur Vogt [former vicar apostolic of Cameroon] in 1936. In this hymn they took the melody of a western hymn – French or German – and they set words to it. I will give you an example [sings].

When you say that to an Ewondo [claps hands] he won’t understand. There are no tones, there are no- and also there are contrary senses [sings].Ŋ

‘Ònè mbéŊ which says that there’s a cudgel, when you want to say ‘Who listens to goodness’. (Amara 2017b)

Byron: In narrations of Catholic music history, such as Amara’s it’s the poor match between melody and text in missionary songs that required indigenous musicians to begin to compose sacred music themselves and compose they did. Moreover, they composed what they knew, introducing not only melodies that matched the text, but also elements of indigenous musical styles, and eventually traditional and neotraditional instruments, including the xylophone ensemble mendzang that you saw in some of the pictures earlier.

To give you a sense of how this music sounded here's an extract from a setting of Psalm 40 that Amara, who you've just heard speaking, composed himself in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The song is called ‘A Ŋkode Wam’. As I play the extract listen for one of the most characteristic aspects of this music, which is that the melody changes when the words change, whereas a lot of European strophic music reuses the same melody to set different words. New words here require new melodies. Thus in what follows you will hear first of all Amara singing solo, a series of couplets each of which is pretty distinct from the last and this is an alternation with a mixed chorus that sings a repeated refrain in which the music and the words are the same each time. So you can see that divided up on the score here. The top line is what Amara sings. The bottom line in each set of 2 lines is what the chorus sings and as you hear the chorus you should be able to hear that the chorus is singing the same thing each time. But also that Amara’s melody varies substantially and it varies because the words are changing, the words have different tones.

[singing]

Byron: Okay, and then we get to the most memorable part of the song, the part that everyone remembers and can sing along with when it's sung in a service. But it's worth noting that this particular piece has 23 couplets. So there's a lot that the singer needs to memorise. In fact they would have to memorise the melody and they'd have to memorise the melody by ear because this transcription here does not exist in Cameroon, except so far as people have copies of it that I've given to them, because it's a transcription that we made ourselves. The music circulates orally and so if you wanted to sing this piece, you'd have to memorise all 23 couplets, each with its own separate melody and perform it that way, quite a feat.

In the remainder of this talk I'll aim to show that the argument about textual comprehensibility was ultimately successful in the first place because correspondence between tone and tune, that is melody and text, really does matter to Cameroonian musicians and second possibly because it was the only argument that could work.

Starting with the first, does tone-tune correspondence really matter to native speakers of central Cameroonian languages? After all there are examples of music and tonal languages from other parts of the world where disjunctions between melodic contour and textual contour seem not to inhibit comprehension. To find out we compared music composed by European missionaries with music composed by indigenous musicians, which made it apparent that correspondence really does matter.

This slide contains an extract from Menë Kristen, the first piece in a Catholic songbook from 1936, whose production was co-ordinated by a French missionary, the vicar apostolic of Cameroon. The song takes its melody and the basis for its Ewondo text from the well-known French hymn ‘Je suis chrétien’. So you can see the Ewondo on the left and the French on the right, and they're very much the same piece. We evaluated the missionary song first by notating a transcription that included the tonal components of the text. You should be able to see the diacritics above the vowels of the words here in the slide and then we studied the music transition by transition.

A transition typically comprises two notes and two syllables. So there are two transitions on this slide one on the left and one on the right. In the one on the left there is an exact correspondence between the melody and the text. The melody ascends, and the text moves from a low tone to a high tone. So you would sing ‘Zam-bá’ and you would say ‘Zam-bá’. On the right, you have an exact contradiction between the melody and the text. The melody still ascends ‘Bár-ki’, but you would say the word ‘Bár-ki’, you descend.

These images represent just two of the relationships that can exist between the text and the melody at any transition. I've highlighted the two of them here in this slide in orange, but there are 12 in total. Moreover, they range from exact correspondence through various forms of ambiguity to exact contradiction. But I'm getting into the weeds. For the purposes of this lecture all we need to consider for any given song is how much exact correspondence there is, and how much exact contradiction and of the 327 transitions in Menë Kristen, we found that the rate of exact correspondence is 37%, and the rate of exact contradiction is 14%, and that's pretty much where it would be by chance. So if you took any melody and set these words to that melody, you'd have 33% exact correspondence and you'd have 17% exact contradiction. So basically Amara’s critique was absolutely correct. This music was composed without any kind of concern or respect for the tonal contours of the text.

When we look at music composed by people who are fluent in the languages of the area though there's a far higher correspondence between tone and tune. Here for example is an analysis of the piece that you heard earlier by François Xavier Amara, and in the first 475 transitions of that piece 77% exact correspondence, and almost no instances of exact contradiction, 3%. Moreover, this close correspondence between tone and tune is evident not only in liturgical music where a committee often reviews the words and music of new compositions before they can be sung in the mass, but also in music composed and sung by Cameroonians more generally. So we transcribed the music and words of 12 examples of music in indigenous languages, and this included lullabies, funerary songs and even some pop songs, and for each song or extract, the rate of exact correspondence was far higher, and the rate of exact contradiction far lower than it would be by chance.

I won't present each individual example but this table gives the overall rate of exact correspondence again in green, and of exact contradiction in orange. So tone-tune correspondence really seems to matter. But I said earlier that the argument around tone-tune correspondence was perhaps the only one that had a real chance of success. Why was that? Certainly Pius XII’s 1955 Encyclical had demonstrated an openness to indigenous languages and musical styles.

Moreover, European missionaries working in Cameroon were aware of this openness including those training the new generation of composers at the major seminary in Otélé in the 1950s. But European clergy who were ambivalent about or hostile to black musics could easily find arguments to exclude those musics from worship services. So the same Encyclical that I quoted earlier also states “the church must insist that music remain within its proper limits, and must prevent anything profane and foreign to divine worship from entering into sacred music along with genuine progress and perverting it”. It also characterises the intention of the church as being “to protect sacred music against anything that might lessen its dignity”. So in short, the same Encyclical that encouraged the use of indigenous musical idioms also gave Europeans with European prejudices, excuses to dismiss black music, which they did. For example, in 1958 Marcel le Feb, at the time Archbishop of Dakar, visited the major seminary at Otélé where he heard some of the new music being created and afterwards he is said to have turned to the Archbishop of Yaoundé to say, “I hope such filth would never be sung as part of the holy liturgy”. The Archbishop of Yaoundé himself seems not to have appreciated the music initially and had to be persuaded by the Benedictines at the major seminary to tolerate it. In short, new Cameroonian liturgical music was susceptible to European objections that it was either profane or undignified and in this context arguments around the intelligibility of the text were perhaps more effective especially when Cameroonians showed how poor settings of texts could be confusing or even hilarious.

To sum up then, arguments around tone-tune coherence and textual comprehensibility open space in one of Cameron's most powerful institutions for people to sing in local languages, compose in local idioms, and eventually perform on local instruments as part of the mass. This in turn helped embed such music far beyond the doors of the church, in nightclubs and on the radio. Notably though, European clergy seemed to have been hesitant to implement the meaningful kinds of musical inclusion they themselves had proposed, and only the urgent matter of unambiguously communicating liturgical texts circumvented their prejudices. In short, conservative arguments about the clarity of the text succeeded where fine words about aesthetic inclusivity failed. I'll leave it at that. Thanks for your attention.

Kevin: Thanks very much for an excellent presentation. We're just going to go down to the end and take some questions.

Speaker: You give statistics for composers who are fluent in the language of correspondence and contradiction and the contradictions come out as very low, 3%. But why are there any percentages of contradiction at all? Why isn't it zero? Could it be because there's a sort of musical logic that is sometimes allowed to override the sense of the text?

Bryon: I think that's it in part, but in part it's because this is our preliminary analysis and we're getting a couple of linguists on board to help us check exactly our figures. So there could also be problems with our analysis that's resulting in a degree of error. So for instance, there's a process of simplification that goes on where you have rising and falling tones and that simplification exists in spoken language, but also in some language. So that process could be turning up kind of false positives in our transcription of the music from recorded sources because we're not taking into account the way things would actually be spoken and actually sung in a way that would sound idiomatic to Cameroonians themselves. So in short, there could be aspects of the way we're analysing that are turning up some of those results.

Kevin: Elaine, you mentioned you've got a book coming out about Robert Johnson. Could you tell us a little bit more about that. I know you are hoping that will lead to more people playing or singing his music.

Elaine: Yes. So my edition of The Complete Works of Robert Johnson was published a couple of years ago. One of the things that we did when we were all locked up. We managed to get it through publication. There is some sacred music there. There's also some instrumental music and some songs, and some incomplete works that one of my now deceased colleagues reconstructed for four parts. So there is a great range there of really difficult music like the ‘Ave dei Patris Filia’ that I played to you at the start that really requires a highly trained choir to be able to sing it and others like ‘I give you a new commandment’, I have experience of conducting a non-reading choir and that's the type of work that you could give to a non-reading choir and teach them and they would be able to sing it. So the works themselves are fairly different in the demands made on the singers.

Kevin: How has the popularity of that music waxed and waned over the centuries? Has there been particular periods where it's been popular?

Elaine: Most composers writing in the 16^th century would not have expected their music to last more than a couple of decades. The music theorist Tinctoris says that music of any more than the generation we are currently in is not worth listening to. So the people writing the music did not expect it to last and that's a concept that comes in more in 19th century music where we expect music to go on. What we find about Johnson is that there are so many existing sources and that the Paston family particularly seem to have been copying a lot of his music into a lot of their books which means it must have been known in circulation for it to be copied into a book that you want. So that gives us some idea of how popular his work was at the time he was writing.

Speaker: This might be a bit of a half-formed question, but I'm hoping you can sort of run with it. There's an element in what you're both doing of advocacy as well. So in Elaine’s case it's about promoting the music of Robert Johnson and in Byron's case, partly what you're doing is writing this down for start which is quite interesting given that it's an oral tradition. What do you think your roles are as academics in relation to this music and this concept of advocacy, and especially as it pertains to what you've been talking about. Intelligibility, for example, is it the job of the academic to make it intelligible or make it de-intelligible? Something like that. This is a discussion question.

Elaine: It is a tricky question Alex, isn't it and it's what we all do when we're creating a modern edition of music. We have to think about the people who are going to be using it. So are we creating an academic book that is going to sit on a library shelf and someone will look at it once every 10 years or are we trying to produce what we often refer to as a ‘performing edition’, something that opens up a new repertoire and new pieces of music to an audience which could be the performers, as well as a listening audience. So what I have attempted to do in my edition of Robert Johnson is to make the scores accessible to modern performers. So if you look at it, it's the type of score that performers would expect to be using. There's no fancy musicological stuff in there. Then the scholarly stuff is the critical apparatus at the back, which is what the musicologists want to look at. It's a very difficult line to tread to think about who it is that you're working for. The book is published by Musica Scotica and one of the aims of Musica Scotica is to make the music editions available to performers, not to academics, not for scholars to sit on their shelves. So I hope that goes a bit towards answering your question so Bryon can do the rest.

Bryon: I was in Cameroon in January and February and as part of that trip we took the transcriptions that we'd already made around to musicians. We played them what we transcribed. We showed them what we transcribed and musicians were genuinely really curious about what was written down. Still you can't do an undergraduate degree in Music in the country of Cameroon to my knowledge. So you can imagine that if you study music typically you would be studying it actually probably within some sort of liturgical context. What is absent is transcriptions, notated versions of Cameroonian music. Most of the music, and in part because the music does not require transcription to circulate because people learn it by ear, and they reproduce it very well by ear, but what's missing from contexts of teaching and learning is the ability to have something notated that people can study that comes from there. So it's possible to study Palestrina and Mozart, and all of these composers. Everyone there can get to IMSLP and download a score and there's lots of Western music. There's even a fair amount of music from other countries in Africa that exists in notated form to study if you're interested in academic music studies. But there isn't a possibility of looking at transcriptions of the music from there. So one of the things that we've been working on is ensuring that we can circulate the music to musicians who are interested in it so that they can have music that is really of interest to them, for those who want to study music in notated form.

Speaker: Hello, a question for Byron. I relate to what you were talking about. I was asked to do a piece on the piano for a Nigerian choir about six months ago, and I asked for the music and there was no music. So I had to write down what I thought they were singing. I thought I'd got the hang of it, and I hadn't got the hang of it. I tried number one to put it into bars of a sensible measure and you had 68 there. Secondly, it was in a language called igbo spelt IGBO. Is it the same thing in Nigeria as it is in Cameroon?

Bryon: Well I mean they are neighbouring countries but there's just an immense diversity of music. I think one thing that a lot of scholars of music have been paying attention to is that it's important to observe the rhythmic cycle in most kinds of sub-Saharan African musics, which is often longer than bars are in Western music. So you will often find transcriptions that don't have any bar lines whatsoever. In my case what I tried to do is to show where the cycle began and ended, which is a pretty remarkable one in this particular piece of music, because it's a cycle that epitomises a kind of meeting of the kinds of traditional music that you hear in Cameroon, with a kind of Catholic tradition, because 60 divided by 6 gives you 10. You will find cycles of 6,12, 24 in traditional folk musics in Cameroon, but not divisible by 10s. That very clearly emerges because this is a psalm text and there's been a process of metricilisation of the text and it's produced something that is at once cyclical in the manner of Cameroonian traditional music, and also it's cyclical in a new way that emerges from the meeting between sung psalmody and traditional approaches to cyclicity.

Speaker: Hi, thanks very much for wonderful presentations and very much aligned. A question for you both. First for Byron. Byron, you've already alluded to the additional layer of complexity when we talk about rhythm but in my experience certainly in indigenous Australia, there's yet another layer which is all to do with biblical translation. I was wondering whether that’s had any impact on the ways in which the music was set. For example, in Australia, in Aboriginal languages at least they don't have concepts of heaven and hell. In fact, the earthly realm is very much worshipped in traditional relationships and has an impact in terms of how the biblical text is translated, and indeed, also musically conveyed. So was there something similar going on in your neck of the woods? I guess for the both of you also the question, I think Elaine you already alluded to it in some way, is that of course nowadays in the academy we think ourselves as being quite secular, but of course, it wasn't ever thus. Of course, SIL, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, does a lot of translation of music and interpretation and musical settings. So would you be able both of you to say something about the relationship between universities, church, scholarship and musical practice settings and translations of this sort of thing. Thank you.

Bryon: I don't know where to start off. I think yes inevitably there are really interesting questions about translation. Because part of the work I’m involved in is Catholic liturgical music, I'm often in contact with priests in that tradition who as part of the conversations will talk about the ways that particular aspects of the liturgy have been indigenised and made appropriate. One common remark, that doesn't have to do with music but points to the complexities of these translations, is when you would kiss the altar as part of the mass this was understood as really, really confusing to people who are attending the mass because why would you sniff the altar, doing this was something that you did to see if meat was still good. The idea of kissing something as a sign of respect was just bizarre, at least in early years. So the entire process, especially post-Vatican II, has been one of increasingly moving towards translations that work locally, I think would be one way of putting it and that also has to do with the ways that music works.

Kevin: The final word to you Elaine.

Elaine: Gosh, it's such a big question isn't it, and especially thinking about the medieval mind and Renaissance period of the 15th/16th century. So much of their daily life was taken up with the rhythm of the church and the holidays were the rhythm of the church. The fairs come with religious feast days. So it's within everyone's essential being that rhythm of the liturgical calendar. That continues through into the Reformation period as well. Particularly the Scottish Reformation was very different from what happened in England. It becomes very, very strict in Scotland and Presbyterian Scotland where the new religion even would dictate the clothes and the colours that people were allowed to wear as well. Even though it was an illiterate society everyone was expected to have a book of the New Translation, and everyone was expected to learn to read. One of the famous myths that's always brought out about the Scottish Reformation was it's brought education to the masses because in August 1560 after that point every parish was expected to have a school. Everyone was expected to learn how to read, but you were expected to learn how to read so that you could read the scriptures.

Kevin: Great, thank you. Well we're up on time. So thanks very much for answering the questions. Thank you very much to our questioners. In a second I'll ask you to join me in thanking once again Elaine and Bryon for really fascinating talks. If you've attended today you're going to receive a request for some feedback that we always ask for after an inaugural. So please do let us know your thoughts. I’m particularly liking I have to say the double inaugural. I think the interplay between the 2 talks is really interesting. So I think we may look to do more of this. So we have another inaugural coming up which is Anne Adams who's in the Institute for Educational Technology, whose title is ‘Why learners, politicians, practitioners and users are not the enemy and how to listen to them’. That sounds very interesting. So on that I will bring this to a close and ask you just to thank them once again for an excellent joint inaugural. Thank you.

[clapping]