Medicine Songs, etc., Peru

Icaros de Peru: Vencedor, Rio Pisqui and San Francisco, Rio Ucayali

Music from India

Yoik

Recordings from Sápmi.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

I am here

I brought fortune cookies with me, to open upon arriving in Norway, Peru, and Tuva. My first one says:

Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea never regains it’s original dimensions.

Beautiful. Right on. What does the typo - “it’s” - mean?

This project did not seem fully real until I was all alone on the plane, saying goodbye to America and my former existence.  As I collected myself before take-off, I wrote my intentions most boldly and basically in the first pages of my notebook:

… to learn, grow, give, create, inspire, and get deeply in touch with the real – myself and the world in the context of “The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music”… meeting kindred and kind… singing the world… using intuition, humility… of sacred and beautiful, plurality and Truth, sound and music, and glorious compassionate wisdom… building my wings on the way down, and beforehand too.”

I am in Northern Norway to learn about Yoik and how to yoik. Simply put - and so at least partially wrong - it is a song form, with unique aesthetics for vocal timbre, melody, rhythm, lyric, etc. Yoiks are made for people, places, animals, landscapes, and just about anything whose spirit can be captured in song. Originally, it was intimately involved in Shamanistic rituals, enabling trance and deeper experiences of other layers of consciousness involving these people, places, and things. It was a part of daily life, involved in bear hunting, reindeer herding, and generally experiencing nature.

I am wondering what it is, where it comes from and goes, what the experience of it is like, how it is functional in a scientific, social, and personal sense, what the aesthetics are and why, and how it exists today in music and as a symbol of Sami culture.


Having been here for two weeks, I had made friends and contacts, found a place to live, learned enough Norwegian to make people laugh (mostly at my awkward strides into the language), and gotten comfortable walking around this scholarly fishing town of Tromsø. The water is pure and food a delight to the palette. Everything is expensive, but with sharing of food, bills, and tasks this little family of friends does very well for itself. Camping is allowed everywhere without permit, and buskers litter the street without getting picked up.

Silly purchases:

1. I bought a liter carton of prune juice thinking it was berry juice, and thought it was a steal of a deal, though I sure paid the price later.

2. A children’s play tent that almost fits me and is almost waterproof; everything else was hundreds of dollars. I can only sleep in it diagonally with bent legs and trash bags on the floor (for full rainproofing). It was $16 dollars and is very light.

3. Too many calzones, a $10 beer, a $40 book.

I first arrived here in the rain, took a cab to the nearest – and cheapest - hostel and got in a room made for four strangers-turned-friends, trusting in a lock and the goodness of these fellow travelers to keep my things safe while I explored the city and ventured to its different quadrants. At first, I walked and walked, meeting sailors and bikers, tourists galore. Through back roads, forest, and along the coast I wandered alone and with new acquaintances. “A meditator/night-walker/world-traveler showed me back to the hostel, his wide gait and drunken stumble tumbling through flowers and my boyish nymph leaps toppling over these same bushes in his wake. ”

In spite of these wonderful encounters with smiling faces, I was very alone. Watson fellows always talk about the loneliness; one once looked deep into my eyes and told me that it was so devastating he was never the same. I haven’t been away long enough to know what this is like, but I sense that in the way I felt a fish out of water when I first arrived, one can get accustomed to feeling this for prolonged periods… missing the familiar walls of home, language, and general cultural comfortability.

Above all, I crave/d that cocoon of cuddling love I had with my girlfriend, that assured me I was safe, loved, and not alone. This longing subsided when singing it out before bed down by the ocean, in high awe of the landscape – “the tides of time ebb and leave mountains and townships underneath”. Also, when I stumbled upon my first golden opportunities for making contacts and learning about the Sami and yoiking, the excitement of discovery pushing me past my emotional undertow.

I was perhaps so alone because I got here to discover that those few contacts I made over the internet were not coming back from vacation for over a month. So, all this walking was necessary to meet people from who I could learn something.  The man who was my foremost contact worked at the museum, so I went there and learned and talked up the visitors and staff. I got a few books and a tip about a Japanese man who has been in Tromsø for years learning about yoik. One day while trying to find a US to Norwegian adapter, I saw this very well-composed Japanese man plotting his course through the city, and the next thing I knew he was telling me about yoiking. “The first thing you should know is that it’s not singing. It’s living… an energy that comes through you… its spirit you give melody.” At one point he told me about how a person yoik is given to that person, closing his eyes and placing his words very carefully out before him, first in Sami and then in English, “…  one sets the yoik to you and you are yoiking”.

As we walked around trying to get camping material for the upcoming Sami festival Riddu Riddu we spoke of this and the sounds of the gangs of Seagulls that dominate this island with their presence. I of course asked, if he thought they were making music, and he said no but that they were extremely musical, and pointed out how in certain vocalizations – for instance, those pulsating glissandos he thinks they do to compete for a mate - they sing in harmony. Truth is every since he told me this, I have been hearing these seagulls sing in perfect fourths and fifths, making webs of intricate polyrhythms while they are not swooping for food or to intimidate strangers. It turns out that this man spends a lot of time learning about seagulls, and that he composes music based on their communication, which sends a visible rush of energy through his body when he hears them doing their high caws.

Since he was about to have coffee with an ethnomusicologist studying Sami culture and music and we had become fast friends, he invited me along… 

Since then I have travelled much, been to the festival and in people's homes, and I am still processing so much of what I have learned in this short amount of time. I have been working mostly through intuition and opening myself up to people in great, meaningful ways in which we can connect. I read and write and hike and other human things. I give and give what I can and get and get what I need... that sounds like communism doesn't it. But it has been working out extremely well and I have found myself in the right places at the right times, following signs when on the road looking both directions and deciding which way to go. The unknown stalks me as I stalk it.

I will post more - of which I already have much -when I get back from the next Sami Festival, Markomeannu. 

Suggestions/Comments?