Page 206 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Say It in Singing! 181

important feedback on their social awareness and empowerment. In
a group discussion (Pune, 5 October 1999) Kusum Sonavne and Tara
Ubhe declared: ‘Indeed, we started our movement with these songs
because they were our only knowledge, but now we think about it and
discover that these songs have multiple meanings.’ This process of re-
appropriation and adaptation to new contexts of social communication
is central to the animation work of the Village Community Develop-
ment Association (VCDA), a body coordinating several action groups
in rural Maharashtra. 2
The classification of song texts revealed a remarkable stability of
these texts with respect to the place and time of performance. It is
not uncommon to find the same ovī (with slight syntactic variants) in
villages at more than 200 km distance, and a few texts have been traced
for intact transmission over several generations. The stability of this
repertoire is striking in two aspects: (a) its exclusively oral transmission;
and (b) the distance between ‘spoken text’ (as transcribed) and ‘sung
text’ (as performed).
When women stop singing and recite the text to facilitate its trans-
cription, it is clear that they own an autonomous knowledge of text
even though they may feel reluctant to detach it from the sung per-
formance. They are aware of reciting ‘songs’, not ‘verse’. In other
words, what we would call the ‘musical component’, notably the tonal
structure, is obliterated in this process. This is should not be disregarded
and taken to be lack of expertise in music, for the ontological question
remains: What is ‘music’? Notably when there is no ‘audience’ and no
awareness of its ‘performance’….

The Analysis of Recorded Material
In 1996 we started recording entire performances of grindmill songs,
taking advantage of digital audio technology for accurate indexing.
The database of grindmill songs has been enhanced with information,
giving quick access to the original soundtrack. This entire corpus has
been transferred to an open-access sound archive. 3
As far as tonal classification is concerned, earlier work on the melodic
transcription and analysis of north Indian classical music served little
purpose. Mapping melodies to ragas for the sake of retrieving similar
ones would not make more sense than using a foreign scale system.