Songs and the Deep Present

Abstract

This chapter contributes to frameworks for understanding the deep human past by considering how expansion of attention to the present, through performance among other practices, can change one’s awareness of self in relation to the world in all its aspects. In particular, through close attention to repetition phenomena in one Warlpiri women’s ceremonial song, I explore how nonlinear temporal structures in music may contribute to time “collapse”—that is, how “Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, remembering and re-enacting the past in the present blur the distinctions between time, making all history ‘now.’” Even though past performances may have left few or no traces in the material record, I suggest that musical performance and cognition have operated and continue to operate as integral and deeply embedded components within an interplay of multiple interacting and socially negotiated responses to the world.