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A striking feature
of għana is its ambiguous status within both
Maltese society and, relatedly, in Maltese
scholarship. In Maltese scholarship the 'multivocality'
of għana, the fact that it is simultaneously
music, performance, and song, has both dissipated
interest in the phenomenon, and prevented a
comprehensive tackling of the subject. As an example
of 'traditional folkloric' għana has been the
preserve of folklorists (Cassar Pullicino, 1989;
Cassar Pullicino and Galley, 1981); as music it has
received attention by ethnomusicologists (Herndon
1971, McCleod and Herndon, 1980) and composers
(Camilleri 1966, 1973); as poetry by literary
scholars (Friggieri 1979), and as performance by
anthropologists (Sant Cassia, 1989; Fsadni 1993).
Each discipline inevitably brought its own scripted
and unscripted agendas to bear on the study of the
subject. Thus, folklorists saw in għana a
retention and repository of 'tradition', composers
discovered vibrant musical roots for a culture that
was rather poor in popular musical culture which
enabled them to pursue a synthesis of 'Mediterranean
music', anthropologists viewed għana as a
bubbling antihegemonic counter-culture, and literary
historians discovered the connection with the
Italian ottava rima. This fragmentation
marginalised the study of għana, although the
marginalisation of għana in Maltese society
is due to a complex series of factors which I have
alluded to elsewhere (Sant Cassia, 1989). In this
paper I suggest that the nature of the
marginalisation of għana has changed over time, and
that scholars are far from innocent of complicity in
this process. Għana has moved from having a
concealed marginalisation in relation to official
high culture to possessing a proclaimed
marginalisation. The 'discovery'
 of
għana thus becomes part of the way it is
performed talked about, and legitimated. In so doing
I will be referring to other studies of music in the
Mediterranean such as Rebetika in Greece
(Cowan, 1991), Arabesk in Turkey (Stokes
1992, 1994), Flamenco in Spain (Mitchell,
1994; Washabaugh, 1996), and the Folk Revival in
England (Boyes, 1993).
Like many aspects of Maltese culture, such as
language, which forms a model of and for culture
especially by local scholars, għana has also been
viewed as a good example of local syncreticism
(Ciantar 1994, Camilleri, 1988, Camilleri and
Serracino Inglott, 1988), though with some
ambiguity. It has also been seen as a type of
'aboriginal' music (especially when juxtaposed with
traditional instruments which have largely
disappeared from use) predating romance culture. At
others it has been interpreted as a quintessential
example of 'Mediterranean music' or of possessing a
'Mediterranean dimension'. Maltese scholars and
musicians, as well as politicians have long harped
on the 'Mediterranean' dimension of local identity
and culture. As far back as the 17th century
historian Commendatore Giacomo Abela, the 'Father of
Maltese History', there has been a concern with
'where' is Malta, and it may well be significant
that apart from għana there are no examples of
extant musical popular culture apart from the band
club tradition traceable to the mid 19th century (Boissevain,
1994 a). Ghana would thus come to represent both a
timeless past of aboriginality, and a living
demonstration of the island as an examplar of a
contemporary pan-Mediterranean culture. Concern with
għana's Mediterranean dimension is a perspective
that reappears continually. It is related to Maltese
concerns with their island as a synthesis of various
Mediterranean cultures.
There is an additional problem with għana as musical
tradition. The few transcriptions of it as music
date from the mid 19th century, with the bulk from
the post WW II period. Traces of għana as texts are
more common, in the fatt booklets. This same dearth
of documentation applies to more instrumental pieces
(Partridge/Jeal, 1977). There are very few
recordings or transcriptions of 'traditional
instruments' being played, along the lines that
Bartok, for example, undertook for traditional
Hungarian folk music or Turkish music (Bartok,
1976). Why no literati or intellectuals attempted to
record or transcribe (or even to invent) such
examples is an interesting question. It differs to,
for example, England where folksong has long been
manufactured into 'fakesong' according to Harker
(1985). It suggests that għana and popular music was
never considered important or worthwhile recording
or salvaging in this way, and that it was largely
peripheral to the nationalist enterprise. Certainly
it has long had 'popular' associations. In the
process għana has acquired a history of a lack of
history, or more precisely it has acquired a history
of being perceived as 'traditional' but without much
historical examples. Indeed in a literate society
that minutely records monumental time, that measures
change in terms of building and incising marks on
the landscape, that very lack of a history, and
therefore of change, may have encouraged the notion
of għana as 'timeless' and as 'sounds/voices from
the past'. Ghana becomes metaphorically like the
Maltese language which was not a widely used written
language until the mid 19th century: it acquires a
long history of no history.
The contrast to formal instrumental music is
striking . Over the past few years many musical
scores have emerged from the Church archives of
music performed in Malta for the Church and the
Knights of St John in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Thus, traditional music and music making which is
believed to have a long history has actually got a
shorter documented history than formal 'European'
music composed and performed in Malta. Consequently
many Maltese, especially the middle classes, tended
to see Culture in terms of a European heritage and
consider għana as a performance of singing and music
as a cultural embarrassment that they cannot place
at least in cultural evolutionist terms (Sant
Cassia, 1989). In the next sections I examine the
status of għana within folklore as an index of
popular culture. |
