The Old Songs are Always New

Singing Traditions of the Tiwi Islands

Genevieve Campbell

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English

Sydney University Press
31 July 2023

World music; History

Series: Indigenous Music, Language and Performing Arts

Approximately 1300 ethnographic field recordings of Tiwi songs, made between 1912 and 1981, are archived at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra.

In November 2009, Genevieve Campbell and eleven Tiwi colleagues travelled to Canberra to reclaim these archived songs and song texts. The Old Songs are Always New explores their return home to the Tiwi Islands and reveals that the fundamentally contemporary, topical and current nature of the Tiwi song culture has resulted in the preservation of a rich social, cultural and historical oral record.

Campbell describes the melody, rhythm, vocal technique, language, performance context and function of the twelve Tiwi song types, and gives an overview of the language and poetic devices used in song composition.

By: Genevieve Campbell
Imprint: Sydney University Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm, Spine: 12mm
Weight: 420g
ISBN: 9781743328750
ISBN 10: 1743328753
Series: Indigenous Music, Language and Performing Arts
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 31 July 2023
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Music Transcriptions List of Photographs List of Maps List of Appendices Preface Chapter 1: A very brief introduction to the islands Chapter 2: The archived recordings Chapter 3: Singing identity Chapter 4: Kulama Chapter 5: The Tiwi Language Chapter 6: The Classical Tiwi Music Chapter 7: Emerging musical genres References Appendices

Genevieve Campbell has worked for 30 years as a professional French Horn player and since 2007 has been involved with senior Tiwi singers in musical collaboration which has resulted in numerous performances, recordings and study centred around the repatriation to the Tiwi community of ethnographic field recordings of Tiwi ceremony and song. Her recent Sydney University Fellowship at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Sydney Environment Institute focused on the role of Tiwi song and embodied knowledge in cultural maintenance, artistic creativity and community health. She is currently a Research Affiliate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Reviews for The Old Songs are Always New: Singing Traditions of the Tiwi Islands

“For everything that has happened on the country of Indigenous people, there is always the version told or sung that is told by Indigenous people themselves – full of humour and pathos, sadness and grief – that never makes it into the ‘objective’ accounts of Western history. ... Enables non-Indigenous readers to come to know how any one event can have another story, another way of it being interpreted.” -- John J. Bradley