"Women's Music and the Life Cycle,"
by Jane Bowers
as printed in the ILWC Journal, October 1993, pp. 14-20.
"Funerals are springtime for women." Thus a Druze villager in
Lebanon around 1970 explained women's alacrity in rushing to the funeral
site soon after a death was announced. Among the Lebanese Druzes, the tradition
of funeral singing survived over many centuries as a secular practice alongside
sacred rituals.1 Due to the conservative and mystical nature of their society,
the Druzes, particularly the women, abstained from music, song, and dance
except for singing at weddings and funerals, where women's talents were
able to flourish. Funeral singing became a cultivated art with certain women
specializing in it in every generation.
When Jihad Racy studied funeral singing in some twenty-one villages close
to Beirut in 1970, he found that soon after a death was announced villagers
would gather at the funeral site in sex-segregated groups. Women typically
sat inside the house around the body of the deceased to sing, while men
sang outdoors whenever the weather permitted. Generally speaking, men performed
only if the deceased were a male, whereas women might perform at funerals
of both sexes.
In the women's ceremonies, which went on intermittently for more than a
day, the singing was usually led by a number of skilled soloists who were
assisted by a chorus. Because women's funeral singing was usually much more
emotionally involved than men's, it often displeased the religious initiate
group, who believed that mourners should keep their voices quiet and refrain
from crying, shouting, or wailing. Wearing large white scarves that functioned
partly as veils, Druze women were allowed to expose their mouths only so
long as they could not be seen by men. Women who went beyond certain limits
were liable to punitive action. In one area, a number of female singers
had been excommunicated by means of a type of religious probation which
deprived them of the freedom to perform at funerals. Druze funeral singing
was threatened by westernization as well, and thus by 1970 female funeral
singing was dwindling in popularity in Lebanese villages.
Nevertheless, this example from Druze culture illustrates an important point:
that women have been extremely active in controlling and performing certain
verbal/musical genres connected to important transitional stages of the
life cycle. Women, especially in relatively traditional, nonindustrial,
and nonliterate or marginally literate societies, perform laments after
the death of close kin, and, at the opposite end of the life cycle of close
family members, lullabies after the birth of a child.2 In societies that
elaborate the onset of girls' puberty, women often perform songs and dances
as part of initiation rites. In connection with weddings, they frequently
perform wedding songs and dances. As the American anthropologist Judith
K. Brown recently observed:
The female life cycle, demarcated by a series of physiologic events and
divisible into discrete periods, readily lends itself to cultural elaboration.
Such elaborations, whether in the form of a celebration or the imposition
of a taboo, appear exotic to us, since no analogous practices are observed
in our own society. For us, no celebration marks the attainment of puberty;
no particular restrictions are imposed on menstruating women; and marriage
need not be legitimized by the elaborate exchange of property. A body of
research has attempted to explain the cross-cultural variation in such customs.
Curiously, this work has received little impetus from recent interest in
the anthropology of women, possibly because the anthropological studies
of women have been at pains to prove that biology is not destiny. Yet the
variety of customs which pertain to the female life cycle offers strong
support for this very position by demonstrating that culture shapes the
physiologic aspects of womanhood.3
Fortunately, women's music-making in conjunction with the cultural elaboration
of discrete periods of the life cycle has received some attention in recent
feminist scholarship; together with earlier research, the amount of literature
on the subject has become fairly large. Because it has appeared in widely
disparate sources and in a variety of languages, however, it is not well
known. In order to present information about these culturally and geographically
widespread practices so that it can be more easily incorporated into teaching
and research about women in music, I shall attempt here to (1) sketch the
chief outlines of the subject, (2) discuss several specific examples of
such music-making, and (3) elucidate some of the social, psychological,
and biological reasons why women perform these genres more frequently than
men. Further, I shall compare women's and men's music-making practices where
both perform the same kind of music. Finally, I shall suggest some ways
in which women turn culturally prescribed genres into individually expressive
aesthetic forms.
Why do girls and women predominate in the performance of verbal/musical
genres at these four stages of the life cycle: birth, girls' puberty, marriage,
and death? Their performance of lullabies at and shortly after the birth
of a child must certainly arise from their role as mothers, since in most
cultures mothers have the primary responsibility for caring for children.
Their performance of girls' puberty songs is also in part-although by no
means exclusively-connected to their role as mothers, since through puberty
songs pubescent girls are educated to assume adult status. As for wedding
songs and funeral laments, the picture is complex. I want to take up each
of the four life-cycle stages individually, beginning with women's lamenting
practices.
Lamenting for the Dead
Laments can be found in almost all parts of the world; the tradition of
lamenting has been traced back to the rites of prehistoric religions and
was prevalent in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, and Rome.4
Moslems, Jews, Christians, and other religious groups preserved the lament
tradition, although official prohibitions emanating from both church and
state contributed to the disappearance of the tradition in many areas. Normally,
the lament is not a fixed poetic genre; rather, its contents are adapted
to the occasion of performance and to the vision of the performer. Freedom
of expression, however, has its limits: the lament closely follows certain
stylistic norms and makes plentiful use of traditional imagery and terminology.5
In lamenting traditions documented in recent times, relatives or paid performers
recount the life of the deceased and the loss that the death represents.
Women may also use the occasion of lamenting for the dead to lament their
own situation. Joel Sherzer points out that the lament for the dead provides
a link to two other types of women's laments which focus directly on the
problems of women's own situations, their grievances, and protests. One
of these, the wedding lament, is characteristic of patrilocal societies
and occurs at the moment of a bride's separation from her parental home
and her move to the home of her husband and in-laws. The other type of lament
complains about and protests her unfortunate situation, again typically
in a new home, surrounded by unfriendly in-laws.6
Considering these various kinds of laments as a class, Sherzer suggests
why it is frequently women who perform laments. For one, where social organization
is extremely disadvantageous to women, lamenting provides for a verbal letting-off
of steam and societal expression of conflict, as well as an individually
expressive aesthetic form. For another, song or chant is the appropriate
channel for women to express their complaints, because it furnishes both
role distance and an overtly marked frame for messages that would otherwise
be considered highly inappropriate for women.7
Several studies of rural Greece have explored possible reasons for women's
domination with regard to lamenting. Anna Caraveli has suggested that women's
capacity for reproduction makes them more vulnerable to pain and loss than
men, and is thus recognized as giving them firsthand access to the realm
of the dead.8 Susan Auerbach has pointed out that in some cultures women's
option to sing songs or to lament may be prescribed by their mourning status.
In rural northwest Greece, whereas men sing, dance, and play instruments
throughout their lives, women must respond to changing family circumstances
with shifts in vocal expression. Due to extensive migration of the young
to the cities, elderly residents predominate and funerals tend to outnumber
festivities. Thus, older women rarely sing; rather, they convert songs to
laments in order to express their sorrow. While women ostensibly attend
wakes and commemoration ceremonies to honor the deceased, participation
in death rituals is also the main social and expressive outlet available
to women mourners.9
Janice Jarrett has argued that in ancient times women in Greece became predominant
in lamenting for the dead as their participation in officially sanctioned
religious life, and hence religious music, declined. In this context, the
lament was a dramatic example of the separate traditions women maintained
when excluded from official acceptance, as well as the strength of their
traditions when relatively uninfluenced by those of men.10 In the Finnish-Karelian
lamenting tradition, the lament exhibited evidence of a female-centered
religious system that co-existed or antedated the male system, according
to Elizabeth Tolbert. The most prominent role of the lamenter-always an
older woman-was as a mediator between the world of the living and the world
of the dead. The pervasive elements of Finno-Ugric shamanism inherent in
the Karelian lament tradition show that the female lamenter and the male
seer together shared magico-religious power by dividing the role of the
shaman between them. While confirming the dominant value system by allowing
only sexually ambiguous women recourse to magico-religious power, the lament
represented a system of values and access to power that was independent
of male systems.11
Anna Caraveli has identified a number of different themes in women's lament
texts from a village on the island of Crete,12 including the intention to
commemorate someone's sufferings, praise or invocation of the deceased,
the history of the deceased, the mourner's plight, invitation to share the
mourning, guiding the deceased through the transition from life to death,
and the plight of the deceased. Often the theme of the mourner's plight
was employed as a means of airing grievances against relatives or society,
a common category of grievances being the afflictions particular to women
in male-dominated social structures, including widowhood and the ensuing
loss of social status, desertion by the emigration or death of male relatives
who had acted as protectors, and the sufferings wrought by childbirth or
child raising.13
In another study,14 Caraveli reported on lamenting she observed past the
five-year period usually prescribed for mourning, in contexts as diverse
as visiting the cemetery, doing housework, working in the fields, and walking.
Such extension of performance contexts suggests an expanded use of laments
as instruments for airing grievances on an everyday basis.
Successful lament couplets or entire songs composed by various village women
were remembered and circulated orally. Skilled lamenters were highly respected
by their peers for their creative skills. Their composition of lament poetry
so powerful that it could "crack the hardest rock," as the women
said, raised them to a high, near-magical status. In such poetry, the death
of a specific person was utilized to affirm kinship ties, to cement bonding
among women, to heighten the meaning of female roles, and to reinforce survival
strategies. The symbolic associations of the subject matter of "female
suffering" transformed the lament into a communicative event.
Musically, each area Caraveli researched, and each culture group within
an area, had a set melodic pattern to which laments were sung. The lament
melody characteristic of the Zagori province, for example, used microtones,
stylized interjections of wailing sounds, and leaps at the end of each half
line to induce a state of pathos. A lamenter from a different cultural group
living within the same village, however, would use a completely different
melody and sing in such a different style that each woman's performance
would leave the other indifferent.
Recorded examples of laments are not easy to find, but brief excerpts from
two funeral laments sung by Albanian women living in Calabria in 1954 are
relatively accessible on the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music. In the first lament, a young woman mourns the death of her protector
and recalls certain events in his life:
(Translation:) O son . . . , what road have you taken? O so long, so long
that I won't see you. You were a hard worker, O son, son, how loving you
were . . . .
In this lament, a basic four-note melodic pattern is repeated for each line
of text. Such a pattern would allow for the unrestricted improvising of
new lines of text as they occurred to the singer. The second lament, sung
by a group of women, begins with well-known formulas; then the group bursts
into hysterical lamentation:
(Translation:) Let us sing for the dead. Victoria, our daughter, what have
you done now? What a storm have we endured? Four doctors have we called
for you, but there was no cure, neither doctor nor medicine. Victoria, our
daughter, our queen, we have cleared away the table, we have put aside the
chair, we have cleared the hearth . . . .15
Wedding Music
In connection with weddings women's music has been prominent although not
necessarily predominant. Particularly in those societies where ceremonies
marking marriage are very colorful, women's music-making has often played
an important role. In some places where female musical activities are otherwise
highly restricted, weddings form the chief ceremonial occasions on which
women make music. In such societies, indeed, women seem to make the most
of their few occasions to indulge legitimately in music and dance and to
stretch the ground rules of their ascribed musical role by maximizing their
opportunities in socially acceptable ways.
In the city of Herat, Afghanistan, Veronica Doubleday has reported that
in the mid-1970s women typically remained in strict purdah and spent most
of their time within the confines of their homes.16 The traditional values
of Islam pronounced it sinful for a mature woman's voice to be heard singing.
Though while young a little girl might develop a passion for music and dancing
and spend hours at this pastime, as she approached puberty, she was forced
more into the house until she eventually became completely secluded with
the rest of the women. As she developed into a woman, music could no more
have a suitable place in her everyday life but must be reserved for occasions
of celebration and merry-making.
When there were occasions for celebration, however, then singing, dancing,
and playing the daire, a frame drum like a tambourine, were valid and correct
for women. Most of the occasions for celebration were associated with marriage.
After a bride's family had accepted a marriage proposal, a party of women
from the groom's family processed to the bride's house, playing the rhythms
of traditional wedding songs or dances on the daire and joining women from
the bride's family to celebrate and make music with them. Following this,
there were many opportunities for informal celebratory gatherings with music-making
among the women, as well as engagement and wedding parties, which involved
separate parties in the evening for men and women. In the women's parties,
music and dancing continued nearly non-stop until the following evening,
while the men's parties ended around midnight.
In the absence of a professional band, the musical entertainment was provided
by the women of the groom's family or by guests. The groom's mother, sisters,
and sisters-in-law were expected to do much dancing, since they were acquiring
a new family member and must show their gladness. If the families were well
off, they employed professional hereditary female musicians (sazande) to
play at engagement and wedding parties. These women came from an ethnic
group (Gharibzade) which occupied a low position in society, and they were
heavily censured because they did not observe the strict rules of purdah-men
from outside their family could see them singing and sometimes even dancing.
Nevertheless, as entertainers, female sazande were very popular, providing
fashionable and exciting music and sometimes singing vulgar songs and cracking
coarse jokes. Leading processions with the bride and groom at wedding parties,
drumming loudly on their daires, playing the harmonium and tabla (an Indian
drum pair), and singing traditional wedding songs, they tried to create
an atmosphere of excitement. Each band was made up of a family group, and
babies and young girls were usually taken along with their mothers; the
young girls provided an occasional song-and-dance act to entertain the guests.
Unlike their male counterparts, female sazande underwent no formal training
in music; rather, they picked up everything they knew through repeated contact
with music from a very early age. Their harmonium playing was relatively
simple and repetitive, and they knew nothing of musical terminology nor
of the elaborate Indian system of hand strokes that men used to play the
tabla. Indeed, their drums were in poor condition, and they did not know
how to tune them. The musicians were aware of their own technical deficiencies,
and marriage alliances might be proposed with the express purpose of attracting
a talented performer into a band.
Hindu women have also played important roles in the performance of wedding
music. The American musicologist Bonnie Wade has reported that, in four
communities in the vicinity of Delhi, music for the various ceremonies in
the Hindu cycle of wedding rituals was always provided by women, especially
members of the families of the bride and groom. Perhaps one clue to the
extensive activity of Hindu women in singing for marriages lies in its uniqueness
as a religious rite in which women can participate. According to Wade:
Marriage in India is a sacrament and is one of the most important, if not
the most important, of all Indian socio-cultural institutions. It is a social
obligation to the family and the community, with little idea of individual
interest .... For a woman marriage is absolutely necessary, because since
post-Vedic times it has been the only religious rite that can be performed
for her.17
Certainly, women's music-making in connection with marriage ceremonies has
been widespread among women of many religions and regions.18 However, in
some places where both women and men perform wedding music, ordinary women
may sing ritual wedding songs while professional male musicians are hired
to perform instrumental music. In the southwestern Turkish villages described
by Susanne Ziegler, both men and women professional musicians (usually Gypsies,
who are outsiders in the society) are hired.19 However, while the male musicians
are engaged according to their ability, price and availability, the women
musicians, usually close relatives of the men musicians, are just included
in the bargain. The women sing and accompany their songs in the women's
tent for women only. There is a marked difference between the women's and
men's musical styles, as well as their special ways of musical performance.
The women's music is strictly vocal, accompanied only by the frame drum.
The songs are sung in a strict and monotonous way. The women who are listening
seem to feel that this kind of music is not beautiful or nice to listen
to, but is necessary for the wedding. The men's music, on the other hand,
is not sung but is played purely instrumentally on the davul, a big double-headed
drum, and the zurna, a double-reed shawm. Since the texts are not cited,
the musicians are free to follow or to vary the sung version, even to the
point of obscuring the essential melody. The men's style is more individualistic,
developed, varied, and brilliant than the women's style.
Formerly, women also sang laments in connection with weddings, and this
on a wide geographical scale, from Finland and Russia in the north, through
Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and into the Far East as well as parts
of Africa. As mentioned earlier, in those places where patrilocal customs
prevailed (that is, where the bride was to move from her parental home to
the home of her new husband and in-laws), if her new status was to be less
fortunate than her former one and she would have to learn to face difficulties
and criticism in her new environment, wedding laments functioned as rites
of transition.20
From a body of texts collected in a village in the Sai Kung market area
of the Hong Kong New Territories in the early 1970s, Fred Blake was able
to reconstruct the following marriage customs.21 During the three days and
nights prior to the bride's departure for her new home, other unmarried
young girls of the village with whom the bride had formed strong emotional
attachments sat by her. Her separation from them in marriage seemed like
dying; while she sang of her "sisters" remaining in the East,
symbolic of the rising sun, dawn, spring, youth, and life, she saw herself
as situated in the West, the direction of the setting sun, autumn, demise,
and death. Towards her mother, the bride recalled tender loving memories
but also accused her of having "sold" her into marriage, in such
lines as "How can you be so hard-hearted to sell me at such a tender
age?" and "Even your cabbage and livestock are fully matured before
you sell them." Many laments included apologies for having been born
female, but sometimes the bride called attention to all the work she had
done for her parents and, reviewing her father's household budget, pointed
out that the family could easily afford to keep her several more years.
While most of the feelings the bride expressed were tender and sad, in almost
every lament she included curses. Most ubiquitous were her denunciations
of the groom, his mother, and after that the marriage broker. She imagined
the groom as a little runt or rascal, like a street urchin, and described
her mother-in-law as simply "the bitch," as in this example:
But as I am dying in Hell, / I become ever more sordid; / As my dress is
soiled, / There is no place to wash. / When I ask the bitch where to wash,
/ The bitch bids me to wash in the fields; / When the wash water is finished,
/ I must walk through the pig's piss. / When I ask the bitch where to dry
it, / The bitch summons me to where three roads part; / As I dry it up high,
/ The bitch calls out not so high; / But as I dry it down low, / I fear
the little rascal's dirty affections.
Some of Blake's informants dismissed these laments as pure form having little
substance, and some argued that the bride secretly yearned to marry but
that she dared not lose face by admitting as much. But Blake believes that
the laments had much deeper symbolic significance. In spite of the fact
that the bride gained face by lamenting her sadness at departure, Blake
sees the lamenting process as part of the bride's journey through the three
stages of the ritual process described by Van Gennep and Victor Turner.
In the first stage the bride took leave of her old status as a daughter
and a sister. In the second stage, which Turner calls "liminality,"
she was secluded from the mundane world as she was carried, in a red sedan
chair, from her father's house to her father-in-law's house. In the third
stage she was reintegrated as she assumed her new identity as a wife and
daughter-in-law.
In the period of liminality, the bride was neither a daughter nor a daughter-in-law,
neither a sister nor a wife, and this accounts for her anxiety expressed
in idioms of dirt, cold, disorder, and so forth. But another property of
liminality is license and "freedom." As the bride was being bound
into a new life she was first removed from the normal strictures of her
childhood. In the process of removal she was permitted to say things with
little regard for normal social proprieties; she was licensed to vent her
feelings.
Girls' Puberty Ceremonies
Although descriptions of girls' puberty ceremonies or rites of passage reflect
a wide geographical spread-indeed, the initiation of girls has been reported
for societies on every continent except Europe22 -the majority which record
significant musical activity are concentrated on Africa. In considering
women's music-making in connection with girls' puberty ceremonies, let me
begin with a few general points:
1. Songs were often introduced into puberty ceremonies to impart information
and to reinforce lessons that were being taught pubescent girls about taking
on adult social and sexual roles.
2. While the main purpose of the music was educational, or to impart cultural
authority to lessons already learned, music was sometimes introduced for
enjoyment and entertainment as well.
3. There is cross-cultural variation in the degree to which women and men
are or were the principal music makers in girls' puberty ceremonies.
In some societies females were predominant, in some both females and males
made important contributions, and in others men were the chief musicians.
However, the majority of the literature suggests that girls and women most
frequently perform or performed the bulk of the music in girls' puberty
ceremonies.
While girls' puberty ceremonies have dwindled or become obsolete in many
places, sometimes the music that formed part of those ceremonies has been
absorbed into other kinds of music-making when the ceremonies became obsolete,
and the music has taken on new meanings for women. One study that looks
at this kind of change is Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger's Rituelle Frauengesange
der Tshokwe: Untersuchungen zu einem Säkularisierungsprozess in Angola
und Zaïre ("Ritual Songs of the Chokwe Women: Investigations of
a Process of Secularization in Angola and Zaire").23 At one time, girls'
puberty rites among the Chokwe involved a three- to six-week period of seclusion
for the menstruating girl. At the onset of her first menstruation, the girl
left the house where she was growing up and hid herself in the nearby bush.
Her mother, sisters, and friends then went out to search for her and brought
her to a small hut. At this point, an older woman who was a family member
or friend of the family took over the task of attending to and teaching
the initiate during her time of seclusion, remaining near her day and night.
The older woman gave the girl instruction in four main areas: (1) "correct"
sexual conduct (this was the most important from the point of view of the
time spent on it); (2) necessary magical and medical knowledge regarding
pregnancy, birth, pregnancy prevention, and abortion; (3) correct conduct
during menstruation, including which taboos were valid; and (4) the social
roles of the adult woman, especially her relationships with her husband
and the group.
Special value was placed on the sexual abilities of the Chokwe girl, which
were taught through the jerking pelvis and hip movements of the ukule dance,
which the initiate practiced for several hours a day. At night the women
of the village would gather nearby and dance the ukule with the girl. She
was also taught countless songs by the women of her own clan and neighboring
places. The songs were sung antiphonally, the soloists (who alternated with
the chorus) being chosen because they knew the texts perfectly, a practice
that demonstrates that the main purpose of the songs was pedagogical. Through
daily practice in singing and dancing, within only a few weeks the initiate
learned the songs and dance well. (And throughout the course of her later
life, she would acquire further familiarity with them through her participation
in the puberty rites of other girls.)
Schmidt-Wrenger believes that learning the ukule songs and dance had an
extremely positive personal effect on the initiate: it linked the development
of her personality to what was "right," and she was able to prove
herself by showing her zeal and perseverance. Performing the ukule songs
and dance also benefitted the other women who took part. All the restraints
and limits that were normally imposed on married women fell away for a time,
and the experience of this freedom was extremely important both for the
individual and for the solidarity of the group. Themes that could not be
spoken about could be discussed in detail in song, and songs were thus used
to express aggression, grief, anger, and repressed wishes.
All of this changed in response to threats to traditional society. Patrilinearly
erected laws of European provenance collided with the matrilinear structure
of Chokwe society. New values transmitted in the schooling that was made
available to both girls and boys led to a total collision with women's traditional
concept of themselves. Because early and frequent births came to be regarded
as unimportant, fertility rites were rejected as meaningless. Girls' initiation
rites had for long been opposed by the church, and they were finally forced
into the background. However, in rural areas, the rites were secularized
rather than being abandoned altogether.
Schmidt-Wrenger outlines three phases in the secularization of the secularization
of the Chokwe rites; during the third phase the ukule songs were taken over
by men as solo songs. For women, the secularization of ukule suddenly opened
up new possibilities that brought music to the foreground at the expense
of the meaning of the songs. A new, freely swinging, soloistic song style
developed, and song texts were no longer the most important element but
took a back seat to melody. A new freedom in the presentation of both text
and melody developed, and instead of strict antiphony, voices joined together
in variable ways. Aesthetic criteria came to play a role in the choice of
soloists. Thus, as a result of ukule leaving the province of ritual song,
it developed into a living song form in which the artistic capabilities
of its interpreters were able to develop more freely than in ritual song.
Nevertheless, the original meaning of the songs was lost, and perhaps, as
Schmidt-Wrenger believes, their contribution to the social and psychological
development of women diminished.24
Lullaby Singing
Finally, women's music-making around the birth of children, or in connection
with the early stages of children's lives, has also been prevalent in many
societies. In Herat, for example, women engaged in lullaby singing, singing
and playing the daire for a mother after the birth of a baby in order to
frighten away evil spirits, and singing and dancing for the circumcision
of a boy.25 Across many cultures, lullabies are used not only to put a child
to sleep, enumerate a child's personal beauties and charms, and prophesy
a child's glorious future, but also to complain about the mother's weariness
and hard lot, or of the father's absence, neglect, or drunkenness. Lullabies
are used to teach young children social customs such as family duties, social
position, gender roles and relationships, and family and ethnic heritage.
They are used to pass the time of day and night as women sit together with
their children. In American lullabies, many of which do not mention sleep
at all, Bess Lomax Hawes found that mothers sing as much to themselves as
to their babies, trying to separate themselves from their babies by making
them independent, while at the same time remaining in physical proximity
to them.26
In a study pertaining to the Hazaras, a Shi'a Muslim ethnic group living
principally in the high mountains of Central Afghanistan,27 Lorraine Sakata
found that the lullabies of those women also sometimes performed a double
function: besides putting the baby to sleep, some sent a message to the
singer's (mother's) lover to pay a visit:
Baby's father went hunting / He went to the Marghozar Mts./ The door latch
is straw / The rooster stands at the door / Come by the tobacco field path
/ Come to the bed on the platform / Lalui lalui mother's father.
Lullaby singing among the Hazaras is especially interesting from another
point of view as well: Hazaras performed two kinds of lullabies-"functional
lullabies," called lala or lalu, and "stylized lullabies."
Functional lullabies formed a significant body of women's songs and were
sung unaccompanied with the primary purpose of helping soothe babies and
put them to sleep. Stylized lullabies, on the other hand, were sung by men
as social entertainment, often to the accompaniment of a dambura, a two-string,
fretless plucked lute.28 While both stylized and functional lullabies displayed
many of the same musical characteristics, functional lullabies were not
considered "real music." Even though they exhibited the intervallic
content and other stylistic features characteristic of the Hazara "prototype
melody," a melody type which formed the basis for all songs inextricably
associated with Hazaras, it was only men's stylized, accompanied lullabies
that were considered legitimate music. Sakata therefore concludes that the
Hazara situation seems to have followed a common tendency in many societies
to allow the contributions of women to go unrecognized, because so often
the cultural definitions of music and musician focus solely on male traditions.
Nevertheless, the essential features of the prototype melody as well as
other Hazara melodies owed much to Hazara female repertories and style,
to which lullabies were central.
Conclusion
To sum up, women across a great variety of cultures have developed linguistic
and musical skills especially to mark important transitions from one stage
of the life cycle to another. Through their use of these skills, they have
taught others as well as themselves new social and psychological roles.
They have provided entertainment for themselves and built networks with
each other. They have aired their grievances, vented their feelings, and
found support from each other for their difficult, often subordinate, roles
in society. Without special training and with their musical roles and activities
limited by many societies, women have utilized the freedom accorded them
to celebrate important life cycle transitions to develop their verbal and
musical abilities.
Ethnomusicologist John Blacking has asked, "How musical is man?"29
I agree with his premise that the presence of so much music in the world
makes it reasonable to suppose that music, like language and possibly religion,
is a species-specific trait of "man," and therefore present in
almost every human being. But I would choose to emphasize that woman is
musical. We haven't as yet collected as much evidence about women's musical
abilities as we have about men's, both because of cultural restrictions
imposed upon women's music-making and because of cultural blindness as to
what women have done. Nevertheless, women's music-making around important
transitions in the life cycle demonstrates that women frequently turn culturally
sanctioned and prescribed genres into individually expressive aesthetic
forms. Their work in such traditions hints at their capacity for musical
creativity in cultures where few women have a professional identity.
NOTES:
1. This discussion is based on two sources by Ali Jihad Racy: "Funeral
Songs of the Druzes of Lebanon" (M.M. thesis, University of Illinois,
1971), and "Lebanese Laments: Grief, Music, and Cultural Values,"
World of Music 28, no. 2 (1986), 27-37.
2. Joel Sherzer, "A Diversity of Voices: Men's and Women's Speech in
Ethnographic Perspective," in Language, Gender, and Sex in Ethnographic
Perspective, ed. Susan U. Philips, Susan Steele, and Christine Tanz (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 112.
3. Judith K. Brown, "Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Female Life
Cycle," in Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development, ed. Ruth H.
Munroe, Robert L. Munroe, and Beatrice B. Whiting (New York: Garland STPM
Press, 1981), 581.
4. See especially Ernesto de Martino, Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico:
Dal lamento pagano al pianto de Maria (Turin: Edizioni Scientifiche Einaudi,
1958).
5. Lauri Honko, "Balto-Finnic Lament Poetry," Studia Fennica 17
(1974), 10.
6. Sherzer, "Diversity of Voices," 113.
7. Ibid., 112-114.
8. Anna Caraveli-Chaves, "Bridge Between Worlds: The Greek Women's
Lament as Communicative Event," Journal of American Folklore 93 (1980),
146.
9. Susan Auerbach, "From Singing to Lamenting: Women's Musical Role
in a Greek Village," in Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective,
ed. Ellen Koskoff (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 25-26.
10. Janice Carole Jarrett, "The Song of Lament: An Artistic Women's
Heritage (A Study of the Modern Greek Lamenting Tradition and its Ancient
West Asian and Mediterranean Prototypes)" (Ph.D. diss., Wesleyan University,
1977), viii. In both Jarrett and Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in
Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), there is
detailed information on women's lamenting traditions in the ancient and
post-ancient world. Alexiou also discusses state legislation restricting
funeral lamentation in ancient Greece, as well as the antagonism of the
early Christian church towards ritual lamentation. Through comparison of
ancient practices and texts with modern ones, her work clearly demonstrates
that the Greek lamenting tradition has retained a cultural continuity through
the centuries.
11. Elizabeth Tolbert, "Magico-Religious Power and Gender in the Karelian
Lament" in Music, Gender, and Culture, ed. Marcia Herndon and Susanne
Ziegler (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag, 1990), 41-56.
12. Caraveli-Chaves, "Bridge Between Worlds," 129-57.
13. A somewhat similar study of Irish women's lamenting, which appeared
after the present article was completed, is Angela Bourke, "More in
Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women's Lament Poetry," in Feminist Messages:
Coding in Women's Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1993), 160-82. Bourke focuses on the woman lamenter as
protester of men's violence and miserliness and on the ways in which she
disguises her subversive messages so as to protect the protesting victims.
14. Anna Caraveli, "The Bitter Wounding: The Lament as Social Protest
in Rural Greece," in Gender and Power in Rural Greece, ed. Jill Dubisch
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 169-94.
15. The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. XV: Northern
and Central Italy and the Albanians of Calabria, collected and edited by
Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella (Columbia 91A-02023), nos. 34 and 35. Several
other laments are found on Laments of Lebanon, recorded by Ali Jihan Racy
(Ethnic Folkways FE 4046), and on the cassettes accompanying Jeff Todd Titon
et al., Worlds of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), nos. 25 and 26
(Rumanian).
16. The following information is taken principally from Veronica Doubleday,
"Women and Music in Herat," Afghanistan Journal 9, no. 1 (1982),
3-12. Some of it also derives from information based on the research of
Doubleday reported in John Baily, Music of Afghanistan: Professional Musicians
in the City of Herat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
17. Bonnie C. Wade, "Songs of Traditional Wedding Ceremonies in North
India," Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 4 (1972),
57.
18. Several beautifully sung ritual wedding songs by Jewish women of Tetuan,
Morocco, can be heard on Ballads, Wedding Songs, and Piyyutim of the Sephardic
Jews of Tetuan and Tangier, Morocco, recorded and annotated by Henrietta
Yurchenco (Folkways Records FE 4208, 1983). The recording accompanying Titon's
Worlds of Music (see n. 14) includes a wedding song from the White Sea region
of Russia (no. 23).
19. Suzanne Ziegler, "Gender-Specific Traditional Wedding Music in
Southwestern Turkey," in Music, Gender, and Culture, ed. Herndon and
Ziegler, 85-100.
20. On the latter point, see especially Honko, "Balto-Finnic Lament
Poetry," 51-52.
21. C. Fred Blake, "Death and Abuse in Marriage Laments: The Curse
of Chinese Brides," Asian Folklore Studies 37 (1978), 13-33; and idem,
"The Feelings of Chinese Daughters Towards their Mothers as Revealed
in Marriage Laments," Folklore 90 (1979), 91-97.
22. Brown, "Cross-Cultural Perspectives," 582.
23. 3 vols., Annales 98-100 (Tervuren: Musée royal de l'Afrique Centrale,
1979).
24. Some Chokwe women's music appears on Music and Musicians of the Angolan
Border: The Tschokwe, recorded by Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger (Lyrichord LL
ST 7313).
25. Doubleday, "Women and Music in Herat."
26. Bess Lomax Hawes, "Folksong and Function: Some Thoughts on the
American Lullaby," in J. H. Brunvand, ed., Readings in American Folklore
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), 202-14.
27. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, "Hazara Women in Afghanistan: Innovators
and Preservers of a Musical Tradition," in Women and Music in Cross-Cultural
Perspective, ed. Koskoff, 85-95.
28. Afghani women generally do not play any musical instruments except for
those thought not to be "real" instruments, such as the daira
(tambourine) and chang (jew's harp).
29. John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1973).
Jane Bowers, professor of music history and musicology at the University
of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was co-editor of the landmark anthology Women
Making Music (University of Illinois Press, 1986) and has written extensively
on the subject of women's history and feminist musicology. In the College
Music Symposium 29, 30 (1989, 1990), she surveyed music periodicals' coverage
of women musicians. In the present essay, which is excerpted from a much
larger study still in process, she surveys and analyzes the literature about
women's music in some of the world's oral traditions. Dr. Bowers is now
completing a book about the blues singer Mama Yancey.
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"Women's Music and the Life Cycle," by Jane Bowers
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