Page 242 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Grindmill Songs 217

She was ready to tell songs to Kokate, but did not welcome the idea of
being seen in the ‘cinema’.

Musical Documentation

The oral tradition of the grindmill songs also carries a tradition of folk
music. Women do not only open their heart and communicate through
poetic compositions, they transmit the songs to one another as musical
compositions. Word and tune are not to be dissociated. The tunes
and rhythms play a pivotal and no less significant role in giving that
tradition the status of a means and milieu of communication. We have
already stressed the importance of this with regard to a study of the
structures of effective communication.
Moreover, the tunes should not be considered as mere musical
performances any more than the text of the song can be considered
a literary achievement. Neither of them was for the women singers.
Both literature and music jointly serve a triple purpose of spontaneous
expression, symbolic creation and free communication.
Third, the variety of tunes is astonishing. Tunes may be related to the
mood of singers, the meanings of the songs, the musical environment
of a group of singers in a particular area, their family status, the ritual
context, local musical influences, the more or less hard cereal that is
ground, etc. The tunes greatly vary in the same area and from area to
area in the same way as do the words of the distichs. A study of that
musical spontaneity and creativity cannot be omitted. Morphologically,
the musical variety analogically parallels the lexical variety character-
istic of the poetic compositions, whether we consider the glossary or
the imagery. A process of communication is powerful not as transfer,
but as innovation and creativity through its variety. We ought to take
measure of this by studying the flexibility of musical forms.
In short, the remarkable linguistic and musical wealth of the trad-
ition of grindmill songs shows that communication calls for reciprocity,
exchange and therefore invention instead of being just informative or
didactic. The tradition of grindmill songs is a remarkable milieu of
communication to the extent it tends to be performative of a personal
relationship within the context of domestic duties incumbent to peas-
ant housewives.