“Without music, the prehistoric past is just too quiet to be believed.”
While I can’t marshal much evidence one way or the other, my intuition leads me to believe that song preceded speech. Until now, I had never juxtaposed that supposition with my interest in toponomy, or “the place names of a region or language.”
Why do toponyms matter? Here’s one explanation from Toponyms as a Gateway to Society, An Abui Case Study:
Toponyms have been termed as “living fossils” of the study of language, history, and culture, and are particularly useful in describing the history of ethnic groups and changes in rural settlements…
- By Shaun Lim Tyan Gin and Francesco Perona Cacciafoco, in Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia, October 7, 2021.
We act as though the place names we take for granted have always been here and will always be here. After all, we see them on road signs and maps, and retrieve them from neatly catalogued gazetteers and databases. Around here, most of today’s place names came about within the past couple of centuries. Some originated during the colonial era, and a few others might be attributed to Cherokee or Muskogean nomenclature from a century or two earlier than that.
Before that, words from languages long lost were used to denote different places in these mountains, though we'll probably never know what those words might have been. Looking ahead, it is more likely than not that at some future date, the names familiar to us will be swept off the map and replaced by other names.
But human beings have inhabited these mountain for millennia. Those past occupants had a need to make reference to specific locations, a need much greater than our own, given their subsistence lifestyle. And so, go back in time, way back in time, when singing was more common than speaking. Is it possible that different melodies represented different places? Could it be that a particular pattern of pitch and rhythm pointed to the mountain where, let’s say, the grapes were sweet and abundant?
But human beings have inhabited these mountain for millennia. Those past occupants had a need to make reference to specific locations, a need much greater than our own, given their subsistence lifestyle. And so, go back in time, way back in time, when singing was more common than speaking. Is it possible that different melodies represented different places? Could it be that a particular pattern of pitch and rhythm pointed to the mountain where, let’s say, the grapes were sweet and abundant?
Perhaps.
What did it sound like when every place on the landscape was a tune to be hummed or a song to be sung? And how closely would we need to listen to hear the echoes of those melodies still reverberating across these hillsides?
I would like to know.
I would like to know.
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing… It seemed to come from all directions at once … Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard.
- C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
Singing is an essential element in most Mardudjara ritual performances because the songline follows in most cases the direction of travel of the beings concerned and highlights cryptically their notable as well as mundane activities. Most songs, then, have a geographical as well as mythical referent, so by learning the songline men become familiar with literally thousands of sites even though they have never visited them; all become part of their cognitive map of the desert world.
Singing is an essential element in most Mardudjara ritual performances because the songline follows in most cases the direction of travel of the beings concerned and highlights cryptically their notable as well as mundane activities. Most songs, then, have a geographical as well as mythical referent, so by learning the songline men become familiar with literally thousands of sites even though they have never visited them; all become part of their cognitive map of the desert world.
-Anthropologist Robert Tonkinson describing Mardu songlines in his 1978 monograph The Mardudjara Aborigines - Living The Dream In Australia's Desert.
Songspirals bring Country into existence. In Aboriginal English usage, Country has a particular meaning. Country encompasses the seas, waters, rocks, animals, winds, and all the beings that exist in and make up a place, including people. For Yolŋu people from North East Arnhem Land in northern Australia, songspirals, often called songlines or song cycles, are rich and multilayered articulations passed down through the generations and sung and cried by Aboriginal people to make Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place…
- Country, B., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., Lloyd, K., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., & Daley, L. (2022). Songspirals Bring Country Into Existence: Singing More-Than-Human and Relational Creativity. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 435–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211068192
Songspirals bring Country into existence. In Aboriginal English usage, Country has a particular meaning. Country encompasses the seas, waters, rocks, animals, winds, and all the beings that exist in and make up a place, including people. For Yolŋu people from North East Arnhem Land in northern Australia, songspirals, often called songlines or song cycles, are rich and multilayered articulations passed down through the generations and sung and cried by Aboriginal people to make Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place…
- Country, B., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., Lloyd, K., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., & Daley, L. (2022). Songspirals Bring Country Into Existence: Singing More-Than-Human and Relational Creativity. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 435–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211068192
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