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- Convenor:
-
Thomas McKean
(University of Aberdeen)
- Location:
- Tower B, Piso 2, Room T5
- Start time:
- 20 April, 2011 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how songs are used to create community out of environment, how expressive cultures function as a 'way of feeling the world' and interpreting our surroundings. We also examine how songs help to shape our ecosystems ('people make places') by influencing human behaviour.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores how songs create community out of environment and how expressive cultures function as a 'way of feeling the world' and interpreting our surroundings. We also examine the converse phenomenon of how songs help to shape our ecosystems ('people make places') by influencing human behaviour.
Songs, as repositories of cultural memory, are anchored in local experience and practice. By mediating the world around us—the elements, natural features, supernatural obstacles, etc—they define our environment as one suitable for human life, giving us the metaphorical tools with which to negotiate its challenges.
At the same time, songs can alter attitudes to the environment and encourage people to rediscover 'traditional' relationships with the landscape. Additionally, apart from direct environmental activism, songs and music from outside a culture can be positively seditious, becoming agents of change, or at least reflecting changing political landscapes.
The panel will bring together international scholars from a range of disciplines to demonstrate the vitality and necessity of 'singing the land' and the vital role this plays in negotiating a relationship with our surroundings. Topics covered will include how songs encapsulate our knowledge of and relationship to the environment, how they shape our concepts of landscape and our place in it, how songs are used to make sense of natural disaster, how songs help us to control our fears in relation to the world around us, and how songs can be used both as agents of and discouragement to political change.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jerneja Vrabič (ZRC SAZU)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will explore Slovenian landscapes as they are portrayed in humorous, funny or satiric songs.
Paper long abstract:
In my wider research I am exploring songs classified as humorous, funny or satiric in Štrekelj's Slovenian National Songs (Slovenske narodne pesmi 4, 1908-1923). The group starts with 'Pictures of Places' ('Krajevne slike') and I will compare recent songs with those found in the book.
I will present data showing where such songs are found in Slovenia and review their prevalence in different areas, showing which places and their inhabitants are represented. Finally, I will explore impressions about landscape or people derived from named villages, towns and regions in the songs. Are there any attributes which are typical for certain places or their inhabitants? Are they enough to shape, impact, or influence someone's perception of the landscape or its populace?
Hans Kuhn (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
The late nineteenth-century composer, Joseph Glæser, produced about 120 piano-accompanied songs for amateur musicians, for which he chose texts projecting landscapes both romantic/symbolic and specifically Danish, so as to appeal to his main public: middle-class girls waiting to be married.
Paper long abstract:
Over a twenty-five year period, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Danish composer Joseph Glæser produced a series of approximately 120 romances for a middle-class public where family and/or guests had to be entertained at home. The performers were primarily girls waiting to be courted and married off, and for whom some proficiency in singing and piano-playing was considered an essential part of their education and a preparation for their future social and cultural roles as household managers. The subject matter had to relate to their own needs and aspirations and to those of the young men to be snared. "Romances" were traditionally narrative songs, but came to be identified with "romantic" relationships, in joyous and tragic varieties. While during the first half of the nineteenth century they were mainly used as musical insets in spoken plays, the rise of an educated middle class as the culturally dominant sector of society made amateur musicians the main market.
The music of such songs had to be simple enough for lay musicians to master, but I will be concerned with the scenes and landscapes the words project. Although both the producers and the buyers were, in their vast majority, city people, the setting created is rural and idyllic, the season spring to autumn, the typically Danish elements being the sea or lakeside, the beech tree, the lark. There are, however, often symbolic rather than real landscapes, with evocative elements of nature used to express hope, love, longing, sadness, despair.
Máire Ní Bhaoill (St Patrick's College, Dublin City University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how children's traditional songs in Ireland are an eternal backdrop to a changing world, sustained by a force that is stronger than science, progress, or time itself. It will investigate how children can interpret, create and shape their worlds through traditional songs.
Paper long abstract:
It must be acknowledged that the songs we learn in childhood nestle deep in the subconscious and often catch us unawares later in life. Children's songs and singing are genres of Irish oral tradition that have been studied to some extent (Mac an Iomaire, 2007, Ó Laoire, 2002, Ní Uallacháin, 2005, Uí Ógáin, 1988, Brady, 1975), but investigative studies which focus on children's perceptions of traditional songs and singing are rare.
Using ethnographic fieldwork, I will investigate Irish children's songs - playground songs ("Fair Rosa"), Irish language songs ("An Gréasaí Bróg"), macaronic songs ("One Day For Recreation"), love songs ("My True Love He Dwells on the Mountain", "An Goirtín Eorna"), humorous songs ("An Poc ar Buile"), tragic songs ("Weelia Weelia Wallia"), nonsense songs ("Fan-a Winnow"), songs connected to places ("The Skibereen") and protest songs ("Henry Joy") - and examine how connections and interactions with indigenous songs can help children understand, interpret, create and shape the world in which they live. Finally, I will examine the extent to which children identify with many of the sentiments expressed in these songs and evaluate their understanding of performing the song.
Anna Kapusta (Jagiellonian University) Agnieszka Marzęcka (City Specialist Hospital named after G. Narutowicz in Krakow)
Paper short abstract:
Our presentation concerns the recent literary phenomenon of the Polish "eco-fairytale" as exemplified by Agnieszka Marzęcka's "The Victory of the King of Cleanliness", a fabulous tale about ecological lifestyles and the metaphorical ecology of human lives.
Paper long abstract:
Agnieszka Marzęcka's "The Victory of the King of Cleanliness" is a fabulous tale about ecological lifestyles and the metaphorical ecology of human lives. Didactic literature's role in pro-ecological education requires some thought from the author about the young recipient of the text. I will describe (a) the main ecological subplots in this work which shape and promote the literary (symbolic) theme of a healthy lifestyle, (b) the mytho-biographies of the two key heroes, the King of Cleanliness and the Slovenly King, (c) the moral pattern of the latter's final admission of the superiority of the Cleanliness King's lifestyle's, as well as (d) the magical function of a drop of clean water. The second dimension of the eco-fairytale's performative function is the innovatory model of mythical eco-culture proposed by the authoress: that it operates upon the recipient's consciousness through its active reproduction on stage by school children.
The eco-fairytale, through the process of preparation and performance, strengthens the status of the ecological lifestyle in a listener's mind, not only as a universal value but also an ecological module of reading and creative dramatization.
The most important aim of this presentation is to draw attention to the literary factors which activate the ecological imagination of the listener, which in turn takes us from mythical literature to deepening the ecology of an individual biography.
Valentina Bold (University of Glasgow)
Paper short abstract:
In nineteenth-century Scotland, collectors and the collected—particularly women—worked to different agendas. While collectors often sought to define places, women sought to transmit family repertoires, making active decisions about how to represent their family, region and nation through song.
Paper long abstract:
In nineteenth-century Scotland, collectors and the collected—with a particular focus on women—worked from different agendas. While collectors, on the whole, sought to define places, women sought to transmit family repertoires. Critics have often assumed that women played a relatively passive—although rich—role in collection processes and that representing place was the decisive factor for them. In fact, women made active decisions about how to represent family, region and nation through song. I will explore this notion through consideration of four repertoires associated with specific women: Kitty Hartley (1728-1799), Margaret Laidlaw (1730-1813), Carolina Oliphant (1766-1845), and Amelia and Jane Harris (1815-1891 and 1823-1897). The collections were made for different reasons: personal use, publication, as part of a patriot's 'bounden duty', and as a calling card to senior ballad scholars. Through an analysis of contents, and an exploration of correspondence, I consider whether women made conscious choices of songs for transmission and, if so, whether they aimed to gain esteem for their family traditions or were following local and national agendas. I suggest that their decisions were often overlooked by collectors, particularly in the nineteenth-century preference for composite published texts. Choices were mitigated, too, by the agendas of the male collectors with whom women engaged, arguably a process that has continued in the Scottish context into the present day. In conclusion, I will demonstrate that women sources and collectors played vital roles in creating images of Scotland in, and through, song, as well as contributing to broader cultural landscaping.
Rhiannon Ifans (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
Paper short abstract:
Welsh ballads are used to create a new appreciation of old surroundings. Increased tourism caused ballad writers to sing in praise of a particular locality, offering excitement and value, some offering Wales as a health spa.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how Welsh ballads are used to create a new appreciation of old surroundings. Increased tourism was a particularly attractive motive for ballad writers to sing in praise of a particular locality, offering prospective visitors to Wales excitement and value on many levels, but, principally, it was sold as a health spa for those in search of a cure.
The Wye Valley along the Anglo-Welsh border became the first locality in Britain to be recognized as a tourist area, following the publication of Observations on the River Wye by the Reverend William Gilpin in 1782, an illustrated guide to a picturesque area of Wales. Later, with the publication of George Borrow's Wild Wales in 1862, tourists were provided with a handbook to the rugged scenery of the mountainous areas of Wales.
Many blossoming tourist venues were concerned with health matters, places such as the spa towns of mid Wales, and various important seaside towns encouraged sunbathing as a way to promote health and to cure illnesses. Aggravating health conditions made it a pleasant prospect to go to the wonderfully rejuvenating Llansteffan beach spa in search of a cure for various ills. Ballads to Llansteffan establish the beach as a centre for general well-being, but the ballads also list specific conditions and individual diseases which can be identified, and give an account of the way in which total health was regained.
Nuria Benach (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will analyze songs from the urban margins (areas in a process of transformation) with the aim of finding some clues as to how urban proposals could benefit from a better understanding of inhabitants' emotions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will analyze songs from the urban margins, that is areas in the process of transformation, with the aim of showing how planning proposals could benefit from a better understanding of inhabitants' emotions. Such emotions are hardly ever included in debates about urban spatial transformation, as they are considered subjective, irrational and non-negotiable.
Urban margins are defined here as those areas that, no matter their geographical location inside the city, are at the margins of urban economic success. Their present situation and the stressful futures ahead engender a variety of intense emotions, both positive and negative, among people who live there. Such emotions, however, are rarely on the urban experts' agenda as they are seen as subjective, irrational and not debatable to the point that they are only socially permitted outside formal negotiation in the realms, for example, of artistic expression.
As a way of approaching these feelings, I will analyze popular songs created in those margins. Such songs can more freely express sometimes contradictory emotions about places through their musical and poetic language, giving us clues as to how life at the margins is experienced and felt. New proposals for urban transformation could benefit from making human emotion a part of the debate. This analysis of songs from the margins aims to contribute to this dialog.