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ItemResounding relations: Habits of improvisation in Yolŋu song and contemporary Australian jazz(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024)Habit has primarily been considered along seemingly divergent trajectories, either as a mechanism that limits creativity or as a transition of imagination into embodied activity (Grosz 2013). An interplay of these two aspects is clearly seen in music improvisation, in which performances unfold through well-honed patterns of technique and processes of listening and learning. Yet while the development of good habits is considered essential to performance within distinct cultural traditions or stylistic genres, little attention has been devoted to identifying the types of habits needed for engagement in cross-cultural performance settings. This paper broadens the scope of habits typically explored within jazz studies and music pedagogy, conceptualising habit in a way that resonates across contemporary Australian jazz and Yolŋu manikay (public ceremonial song) from Australia’s Northern Territory. In this, we emphasize the relational dimensions of habit as they form a foundation for community formation through performance, involving processes of imitation and evocation, and learning through participation. Through this heuristic braiding of habits in jazz and manikay, we argue that habits of musical performance both locate performers within distinct traditions while allowing freedom to innovate. This dynamic allows for the elevation of these traditions within new contexts and relationships.
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ItemDislocation, Resilience and Change: Three Openings on Togetherness within Australian Music-making(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024)Realities of human dislocation present significant challenges to understandings of social togetherness. As such, a contemporary focus on inherited inequalities, discrimination and exclusion seems at odds with an enthusiasm for what might be held in common. In this article, we seek to reframe experiences of dislocation through three perspectives drawn from Australian music-making. While identifying challenges of inclusion and engagement within Australian history and society, we affirm the possibility for resilient and respectful relationships to be built across diverse experiences. Observations build from research on disability culture (Skinner), Indigenous engagement with western instruments (Case) and cross-cultural collaboration (Curkpatrick). Where Charles Taylor has defined social imaginaries as ‘common understanding which makes possible common practices’ (2007: 172), these perspectives show how human creativity is enabled by shared experiences and our basic materiality as proximate, relational individuals. Unique scenes of music performance are described as they shape new ways of relating and being within diverse communities, as a generative force for social change.
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ItemThe Wind is Always Blowing: Generative Crosscurrents of Ethnographic Dialogue in Australia(Wiley, 2024)Live conversations and writing play an important role in ethnographic research that seeks to develop understanding across cultural differences. Both forms of communication need not remain distinct: written dialogue can develop critical thought while foregrounding the shared contexts and relational impetuses of communication across cultures. Set against the background of recent styles in ethnographic writing about and with Yolŋu people, this article extends from conversations about wata (wind), exploring collaborative practices (music performance and teaching) and approaches to writing ethnography that respond to a core quality of wind as a medium that connects. Wata is a significant theme within manikay (public ceremonial song) that connects Wägilak with their ancestral lands, even as it blows through the country of other groups, allowing new relationships and understandings to be formed. Giving rise to concerns of connection, difference, and movement, wata is a significant theme for considering the ways narrative traditions can shape relationality and give impetus to intellectual inquiry.
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ItemWho is Country? A Hermeneutic Strategy Toward Philosophical Responsiveness in Australia(Open Humanities Press, 2023)Within Australian society, the term ‘Country’ is used to acknowledge prior and ongoing Indigenous Australian connections to specific lands, waters, and skies, challenging any supposed neutrality of public, cultural, or institutional spaces. However, use of the term ‘Country’ might also slide into unreflective abstraction when disconnected from the nourishing interactions of particular people and places that the term in its fullness can embody. In this paper, we seek to dispel conjectural mists that can surround the notion of ‘Country’ in popular societal use by attending to various relational dynamics which configure and substantiate its meaning. Engaging with Warlpiri (Aboriginal Australian) epistemology and the pedagogic strategies of Warlpiri scholar and co-author, Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu, we propose the seemingly odd question, who is country? as a hermeneutic strategy—an approach which embraces a grounded ontology that ‘lowercases’ meaning as essentially relational and figured within shared identities. We indicate similar tonalities in the contextual hermeneutics of prominent Indigenous Australian theologians, who challenge latent abstractions of theism lurking within pronouncements of meaning as disembodied from real contexts of people and place.