Something has been stopping me from adding to this blog recently. I think I was getting in the habit of trying to say something ‘important’ every time. Meanwhile, I add ideas to an online notebook. There are pages and pages of them, or there would be if it was printed out on A4. So instead, I’m going to put down some thoughts, and see where they lead. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about music and culture. Actually I’m not sure what this means, but I did find that talking to Natasha Thomas on Music Therapy Conversations set me thinking about a lot of stuff. Here’s one question that came to my mind: could a Gnawa musician be a music therapist?
If you aren’t aware of Gnawa music already, maybe you’ve now googled it and found some YouTube clips. There are plenty. I did an ethnomusicology Master’s project on Gnawa music back in the early 90s. I looked at the role of the m’allem in the tradition. In a Lila, which is a night-long ceremony in which ancestral spirits called mluk are evoked and sung to/about, along with dance, the m’allem leads the musicians from the ginbri, a three-stringed bass instrument. He (usually he) also leads call-and-response singing, with the rest of the group singing the responses. It’s a complex and rich tradition which mixes Islam with West African influences.
The ginbri, to my ears, seems to have six notes encompassing one octave. Usually D-E-G-A-C-D. There is some flexibility around the C, I think, which can be more like a B sometimes. The vocal melodies also seem to stay within these pentatonic parameters, for the most part. There are two fundamental rhythms, one using a two-against-three pattern and the other like a lilting 12/8, which can’t be accurately notated because the ‘quavers’ aren’t straight, and seem to flatten out at faster tempos, rather as swing feel in jazz tends to. There’s my etic perception of the music.
In music therapy training in the UK, we tend to encourage musical flexibility, the ability to adapt to different styles, according to the needs of each individual client. What would we do if an experienced Gnawa m’allem enrolled on a training course? Talk about ‘coals to Newcastle’! Gnawa music is a healing tradition. Musicians are tasked with evoking ancestral spirits so that the dancers can reconnect, address problems of health and well-being with the mluk. If a m’allem enrolled on a training, surely they would be doing the tuition?
Or we would be comparing notes, so to speak? In fact, perhaps ironically in the context of this line of thinking, Gnawa musicians are very flexible, open to fusing their music with jazz and other traditions. More prosaically what I wonder about is: can six notes be enough? Clearly they can. Maybe, to make music work with only six notes is the sign of mastery. The fact that I feel like I need all that harmonic colour, the complexities of the well-tempered chromatic system of twelve notes equally spaced in an octave and the capacity to modulate, to play ‘atonally’, to create consonance or dissonance, that’s my stuff. You don’t really need it, not if you’re a true m’allem, which translates roughly as ‘master musician’. Six notes, or five, if you don’t count the octave, with flexibility of intonation, but no modulation. The same as the blues, and no doubt related in its origins.
I imagine a positivist perspective on Gnawa music would posit that the mluk are not ‘real’ and that any healing resulting from a Lila would be a sort of ‘placebo’. But if we adopt a culturally open and curious stance, reality shifts. We might realise that it’s not about that, that we’re looking at it the wrong way to understand it meaningfully. Have a listen to the Paul Nordoff lectures if you can get hold of them. This is a master preaching to his disciples. It’s every bit as culturally specific as the Gnawa tradition. Notes and rhythms are presented as pure communication, capable of reaching all human beings if the timing is right, but it’s all firmly within the classical tradition of major and minor scales, equal temperament, etc. etc. Are we more like the Gnawa, developing our own rituals and beliefs in musical relationship as a route to healing (for example) attachment difficulties, than we are like ‘clinicians’, using music to achieve therapeutic goals in a health context? And if we are, is this a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing?
