Creative (ir)regularities: The intermeshing of text and melody in performance of central Australian song

In the introduction to his article 'Mystery and Change' (1987), Peter Sutton, while noting with implicit approval that ethnomusicology seems to be shifting away from 'close descriptions and essentially musicological analyses of Aboriginal songs' towards a 'deeper and more balanced approach' that investigates 'the relationships between music and the wider context of Aboriginal culture', states that 'there are always good reasons for some continuance of narrow and formalist studies of cultural expression' (1987:77). Sutton's article then goes on to discuss regularities and irregularities in song performance rights, song language, song text stability, and the ways in which song texts and their sequences relate to the events in accompanying mythological explanations. H e suggests that exceptions to the regularities proposed by Aboriginal theories are essential to the vitality of the culture: 'it is the dialectical interplay between regularities and irregularities which constitutes the system' (ibid.:88); and he concludes that a truly unchanging musical system (as appears to be proposed by Central Australian cosmology, and implicitly, by some ethnomusicologists) 'would have had far-ranging destructive effects on a traditional Aboriginal community. An evolving musical tradition in such a society is not merely decorative but essential' (ibid.:90).