10/07/2024
Dear People,
Klankbron 103 The Ainu
On Friday, July 12, 2024, there will be another Klankbron on the Concertzender. This time a program on the Ainu, a people living in Hokkaido in Japan and until recently also in Sakhalin, Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands, which are now part of Russia. There are still a few hundred descendants living there, but the language has been extinct in Russia since the 1980s due to relentless oppression. In Japan the language is also endangered, but a revival has been taking place since the beginning of this century. Since then, the Ainu, their language and culture have gained a degree of recognition.
The Klankbron starts with a few archive recordings. First a love song from 1957 from the collection of Indiana University in the United States. Then follows another archive recording made by Japanese Radio and recorded on recordable plates in Sakhalin. They are copies of a record that was in the possession of the Belgian ethnomusicologist Paul Collaer, a copy of which is now in the collection of the “Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie” in Paris. It creaks and ticks, but these are rare recordings, so please be patient for a few minutes and try to hear the special music. They are a dance song, a few unfortunately now disappeared Rekukara songs, songs that can be compared to the Inuit throat singing songs. Furthermore, a mouth harp and a Tonkori, an Ainu zither, solo. This is followed by six songs from the LP Ainu songs published by Philips in the UNESCO musical sources series. These are recordings from 1976 by the Japanese ethnomusicologist and head of the Hokkaido Ainu Culture Research Center Kazuyuki Tanimoto and the Canadian Jean-Jacques Nattiez. They are three Upopos, sitting songs with a ritual context, a dance song from the bear festival, a longer shamanic song sung by a woman from Sakhalin and a lullaby with a striking rolling r that is seen by the Ainu but also by many others cultures as a sign of beauty.
Since the beginning of this century, there has been a re-emergence of the Ainu music culture, with the central figure of Tonkori player Oki Kano, who started as a reggae and dub musician but has increasingly developed into an interpreter of the Ainu tradition and producer of Ainu releases. You will now hear two songs by the late singer Umeko Ando, who started out as a traditional singer but worked with Oki Kano and experimented with adding new sounds such as overtone singing or instruments from Central Asia. You will first hear a dance song and then an upopo. It is followed by six songs by the group Marewrew, a group of four women who mainly sing upopos, in this case a rowing song, an ice dance song, a song about the snow falling from a tree, a dance song, a song about killing a whale and a traditional song about the bear ceremony, which is the most important ritual of the Ainu, with a more experimental musical accompaniment. You can hear from Marewrew's way of singing that they are strongly influenced by the music school, i.e. Western standards of voice formation. Until the end of the broadcast, you can still listen to a song by Umeko Ando, Iuta Upopo, the song of the pestle, with Tonkori player and producer Onki Kano and two members of Marewrew as background singers.
https://www.concertzender.nl/programma/de_klankbron_775623/
