The best reviews that could be given to a CD for children would come
from children themselves. My wife recently took up a position as a children's
librarian in a public library and needed some music resourses to accompany
her story and activity programmes. Without having heard the music on
the Ben Mackenzie's CD Little Star, she tried a few tracks to
introduce each session. She found that "Good Morning" quickly
became her theme song. Mums and kids would come into library singing
the song, ready for storytime. Little Star has since become a
feature of her programme that integrates well with book themes and children's
activities.
The music on Little Star was created for pre-school and school-aged
children up to nine years old. Let's live as one is a family
album suitable for upper primary school children and adults. As a primary
school teacher with a music and drama background, Ben Mackenzie appreciates
the need for an integrated holistic approach to a learning-thinking
head, feeling heart and doing limbs. The songs on Little Star
have been written using these principles and they were developed in
collaboration with pre-school and primary-aged children as well as music
teachers. The music is designed to fully engage the child through listening,
talking, playing, imagining and singing.
The twelve songs on the family album Lets's live as one were
written in conjunction with a specific class that Ben Mackenzie was
teaching and are quite varied in mood and character. His playing and
singing on this CD is complemented by a range of other instrumentalists
and a small children's chorus. The songs have a positive inspiring message
which not only highlights the wonders of the world but also addresses
global concerns and the responsibility we all have in making this a
more harmonious place in which to live. This is evident right from the
impressive opening song "Beautiful World". Stylistically,
the music ranges through a folky feel in songs such as "Make a
home" to the more rocky "It's calling on you" and the
smoky atmosphere of "Better World".
The music is potentially a great resource for school counsellors, psychologists
and therapists, family counsellors and parenting organisations as well
as teachers. It is intended that practical resource books will be produced
in the future to accompany each album. They will contain the music,
chords and lyrics of all the songs as well as creative ideas and activities.
They will be designed to enable parents and teachers to share the joy
of discovering music with their children.
More information about Ben Mackenzie and his music is available at
www.benmackenzie.com
Occasionally we experience dreams that are more than dreams: they are
revelations. For reasons which will become clearer I feel compelled
to begin this review of Sonic Archaeologies by sharing one such
revelation I experienced on the Greek Island of Crete nearly twenty
five years ago.
It seemed as if I was awoken by the sound of thunderous hooves so powerful
the earth shook. As I looked towards the mountain tops they began to
turn orange and gold until, as the sound of hooves grew louder, the
mountains turned into mighty bulls, their fleece burning as fire. I
was enveloped in sensations of strength emanating from the bulls and
mountains.
I often ponder about what was revealed to me in this dream. Suffice
to say here that it involved an experience resonating with past and
present human experience: a kind of corporeal and spiritual experience
of connection and reconnection.
Sonic Archaeologies also explores pathways to these experiences.
The music does so by investigating "the remnants of ancient language
and ancient land as they exist today, as the source material for a modern
electro-acoustic reconstruction which celebrates them" (Bandt,
Move Records, 2003). Sound artist and composer Ros Bandt attempts to
"re-sound antiquity so that some of its essence may be rekindled"
(loc.cit.).
Thus, Bandt's idea of aural/acoustic archaeology involves fusing new
technologies with ancient texts and landscapes. The composer examines
the past, "as if looking backwards through the telescope of time,
to rehear the perennial constants that these ancient archaeologies still
hold" (loc.cit.).
In Sonic Archaeologies Move Records presents two of Bandt's
works dealing with past worlds: Thrausmata premiered in 1998
and Mungo, premiered and performed as an installation performance
by the artist in Cologne in 1992. In both pieces she aims to "illuminate
[the] passage of time as it affects the physical environment and culture
of communication through language" (loc.cit.).
Thrausmata uncovers and investigates fragments of six ancient
Greek texts (a Sappho fragment is realised twice) read by classical
scholar Arthur McDevitt.
Treated with old and new technologies the seven renderings of text
reverberate through time enabling the listener to resonate with "a
world which has almost slipped beyond our reach" (loc.cit.).
Each rendering of the fragments provides a multi-layered listening
experience in a similar way that music-theatre makes possible simultaneous
yet different experiences of time and narrative. This fragment, Homer
Illiad Book XI 618-652, for example, re-sounds interior and exterior,
individual and public sounds of a simple meal preparation, sea-pounding,
footsteps on dry ground and voices reverberating as if intact (not archaeological
ruins open to the sky) cool stone rooms.
Sappho Fragment 1 connects us with the intimate laughing of
women, the acoustic icon of cicadas stridulating in a dry, Greek summer,
muted voices, the meanderings of a psaltery suddenly interrupted with
the release and rush of bird wings.
In contrast Bacchylides ode 5 16-49 invokes the "messenger
of Zeus loud-thundering...". horse hooves drum, the wind moans,
water streams, footsteps trample, bells ring as we (as it seemed to
me) race through the sky with the gods as the text is sounded variously
as a ritualistic proclamation, priestly intonation or poetic declaration.
The sounds described above seem to me to be Ur sounds. That is, sounds
emanating from ancient, human experiences of the earth, landscape and
customs and rituals associated with them. In Mungo, the reverberations
of Ur sounds emanate from more ancient origins.
Lake Mungo is an ancient dried salt lake which was an important meeting
place and trading centre for aboriginal tribes over 40,000 years ago.
Here, Bandt set up are aeolian harps to be activated by the hot, day
winds and cool, dawn breezes. For the Mutti Mutti elder, Alice Kelly,
the sound of the harps "seemed to be reaching back to the Dreamtime,
drawing us all together in what has been and what is" (loc.cit.).
My hearings of Mungo engaged me in a meditative process in which
confluences of time past and present seem to be more easily sensed.
The ever-present song of the aeolina harps responding to winds which
have transversed this landscape for millennia under-pins this sonic
archaeology. It is not difficult to hear the element of of wind/air
as human soul or spirit. Mungo evokes an awe-inspiring sense
of time and space in which micro-elements of human experience lace the
macro-elements. This is achieved with the interpolation of the gentle,
rattling of shells, fragments of bird-song, footsteps, brief rhythmic
dances played on kangaroo bones and the occasional, breath-spirit sounding
of a didgeridoo across time and the soundscape.
Sonic Archaeologies provides opportunities for multiple hearings
of ancient texts and landscapes. How many of us will have the opportunely
to experience a live performance? The pieces also contribute to issues
of particular concern to music educators and ethnomusicologists. For
the former, Bandt's work challenges us to question the nature of listening.
How do we make meaning from re-soundings of human experience? Is listening
to, for example, a Beethoven symphony or traditional song, a kind of
sonic archaeology for each listener? Could a prolonged listening to
a local land/soundscape encourage musicians (young and old) to experience
duration and time in a fundamental way? For the ethnomusicologist Bandt
provokes questions related to the discourse about musical authenticity
posing questions such as "Can we hear the sound of the past and
if so how? Is it a philosophical possibility to try and rehear the past,
given that no moment can be repeated?" (loc.cit.).
Sonic Archaeologies takes us to the heart of what music is about:
the sounding and re-sounding of trans-temporal, cross-cultural, past
and present human experience.
