Indigenous Australian Culture - Music

Music

Aborigines have developed unique instruments and folk styles. The didgeridoo is commonly considered the national instrument of Australian Aborigines, and it is claimed to be the world's oldest wind instrument. It was traditionally played by Arnhem Land people, such as the Yolngu, and then only by the men.

It has possibly been used by the people of the Kakadu region for 1500 years. Clapping sticks are probably the more ubiquitous musical instrument, especially because they help maintain rhythm. More recently, Aboriginal musicians have branched into rock and roll, hip hop and reggae. Yothu Yindi is one of the most well known modern bands playing in a style known as Aboriginal rock.

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Famous quotes containing the word music:

    But the dark changed to red, and torches shone,
    And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop
    Shouldered a litter with a wounded man,
    Or smote upon the string and to the sound
    Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
    —W.H. (Wystan Hugh)

    As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
    Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
    To none, awaiting espousal to the sound
    Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
    And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
    The final relation, the marriage of the rest.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)