Text and meter in a Lander Warlpiri song series

Abstract

The way that language and music are matched to create a well-formed song differs across singing genres and languages. This article analyses how text and music align in a set of Warlpiri women’s songs of the yawulyu genre from the Lander River region of central Australia. It proceeds by investigating whether a previously identified set of constraints governing how words are put to music in a different corpus of yawulyu songs applies to a further set of yawulyu songs considered here, which we refer to as the Kiirnpa song series. Both sets of songs are from the Lander Warlpiri region. It emerges that one constraint must be revised, and an additional constraint is observed in this corpus, while the preferred weighting of constraints differs in interesting ways.