
(I have to confess to a personal connection with the
Tapestry Festival. It was at the Tapestry
in 2011 that I gave one of my last ever solo organ recitals in Singapore. It can’t have been any good, for nobody seems
to have remembered it and they never asked me again, but I remember having had a
wonderful time myself!)
Running since 2009, the Tapestry Festival celebrates
sacred music in all its guises. It tends
to be more an ethnic arts festival than anything else, the sacred music it
presents coming mostly from non-Christian and culturally remote faiths, but it affords
us all a wonderful insight into cultures and religions which, even in
multi-cultural and multi-faith Singapore, are alien.
This year’s festival comprised, by my reckoning,
around 50 events all of which, miraculously, were free. There was Korean Shamanistic music, Thai
Buddhist chant, Sikh Singers, Devotional Songs of Shiva, Shima Singing bowls, 10th century
chants, and 19th century French choral music, along with Islamic
Devotional Poetry, Hula dancers, Arabic calligraphy and a talk on pre-Islamic
carpets. Nobody could have any excuse
for not being aware of the multiplicity of faiths in our world.
A magical moment for me came on Saturday evening. Taking a break after the lovely medieval
chanting of the three ladies who comprise La Voix Médiévale and before the
Megwhal Singers of Rajasthan, I sat with my wine in the outside bar of Harry’s
watching the sun go down as the flaming torches shimmered by the harbour. At the next table sat the Esplanade’s
director, while at another sat a group of dancers who had performed earlier. Around us a crowd moved slowly around,
lapping up the sights and sounds, talking about what they had seen and what
they were going to see. Children played
around noisily, a party of disabled people, bedecked in bright green tee
shirts, was gently shepherded by ever-patient and
attentive carers (the sacred in practice, you might say) and the whole thing
just felt utterly festive; compensation for the absence of true Festival club
where we could all have mixed and discussed across cultures and arts
disciplines – hopefully that will come one day.
However, there is a niggling ethical issue I have with
this, which is probably the product either of an over-sensitive mind or an
indicator of a suppressed conscience.
Twice in my professional life I have been actively
engaged with ethnic music. The first time
came as I had completed my Masters degree at Cardiff and been accepted to do a doctorate. In need of funding, I approached the Welsh
Arts Council. They had no funding
available but, to my surprise, the Director offered me a job identifying,
researching and setting up a musical instrument collection for the Welsh Folk
Museum which would portray the wealth of music making in South Wales. For a year I travelled around, locating weird
and wonderful instruments, learning how they were played and what their
function was in the long-dead societies of which few then could remember, and
then present their history and sound to interested students before putting them
on permanent museum display. At the end
of the year I was offered the job full-time, but I turned it down, partly because
this was not what I wanted to do, but largely because it seemed so alien to
me. It was not part of my culture, nor
my tradition, and while I for a very short time probably knew more about it
than anyone else, I felt always as if I was a stranger, an outsider, to a culture
of which I could, by virtue of my birth, never be a part.
The second time came around 20 years later when, in a
project supported by the Sarawak Government, I was asked to identify and record
the music of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak.
A mad-cap scheme thought up in Kuala Lumpur to build a massive and
utterly unrealistic hydro-electric plant in the middle of Borneo would have resulted
in the flooding of native lands of some 26 different indigenous tribes. In a sop to environmentalists (the disappearance
of one of these, the Swiss Bruno Manser, had drawn in unwelcome international scrutiny
on Malaysia’s treatment of its non-Muslim indigenous peoples) it was decided to
record their arts for posterity. Once again
I spent a year travelling, listening and learning in the company of an ethnomusicological
expert from Canada, and was intrigued and fascinated by the sounds I heard and
the music I experienced. But when one
man from a particularly remote tribe refused to sing for a recording, stating
that for his song to be heard out of context would bring bad luck on him and
his people, I realised that I really had no idea what was at the heart of what
I simply regarded as interesting sounds.
I could recognise the sounds the music made and enjoy it on my own terms.
I could even look with the academic eye of a musicologist at its rhythmic complexities
and remarkable tuning systems. But I
could never appreciate the music as it was intended – I could only re-interpret
it through my western eyes. The music
lost its legitimacy once I was involved in either its delivery or reception.
How much more dangerous it is for us to treat so
carelessly music which belongs to faiths of which we have no understanding, and
can never have because we are not of the culture, the land or the ancestry of
those who create the music. To put on public display the sacred music of
others is, as I see it, paralleled by the medical student who dissects
and regards the most intimate details of a cadaver but can never begin to appreciate the
person who once inhabited the very cadaver being so clinically inspected.
It hit me very much at the Tapestry Festival this year
during a display of Shona music from Zimbabwe.
The hypnotically attractive sound of the Mbira was charmingly introduced
by Fradreck Mujuru, and he was joined by two locally based musicians with a
skilled interest in ethnomusicology.
They could certainly make the right noises and the sound of the music
was enchanting. But when Mujuru endearingly
described the Mbira as a “telephone” by which the Shona people could contact
their ancestors, I suddenly felt the dread hand of ethical doubt. What is the point of having a telephone if
there is nobody to contact? Our two
local musicians may have known how to operate the keypads and dials, but neither
of them had the ancestors at the other end of the line nor, I presume, the inner
conviction that they were there to be contacted at all?
My worry is that while Christians have for so long
taken their great musical legacy for granted to the extent that it is now
almost wholly lost (how often do you hear in Christian worship today the great
music which has sustained Christian beliefs for so many centuries? - it certainly is extinct in Singapore) are we not
in danger of allowing the same thing to happen to the music of other
faiths. We even lump it all together as
if it were a single entity under the generic label “World Music”. My fear is that, by taking possession of selected
parts of other faiths for non-faith purposes, we will end up doing with that
what we have done to our own heritage – take it so much for granted we let it
die.
May the Tapestry Festival continue and thrive not as a means of
preservation but as a simple reflection of the world in which we live yet which
we largely fail to understand.
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