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Kammu Songs: The Songs of Kàm Ràw by Håkan Lundström, Damrong Tayanin, and: I Will Send My Song; Kammu Vocal Genres in the Singing of Kàm Ràw by Håkan Lundström

2015; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/amu.2016.0003

1553-5630

Gisa Jähnichen,

Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior

Reviewed by: Kammu Songs: The Songs of Kàm Ràw by Håkan Lundström, Damrong Tayanin, and: I Will Send My Song; Kammu Vocal Genres in the Singing of Kàm Ràw by Håkan Lundström Gisa Jähnichen (bio) Kammu Songs: The Songs of Kàm Ràw. Håkan Lundström and Damrong Tayanin. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2006 (Kammu worlds, 2), ix + 292 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN, 978-87-91114-24-3 (Paperback), $29.00. Håkan Lundström and Damrong Tayanin, a.k.a. Kàm Ràw Tayanin, a.k.a. Kàm Ràw, appear from the outset to be unequally matched. One takes the role of the scholar who researches deeply into a subject; the other is quoted in third person, as if he were the author of another publication. In reality, Kàm Ràw is not only the subject of study and main contributor to the text of the book; he is also the main source of knowledge and the only representative of the cultural construction emerging from the coauthored work. The book is divided into two main parts: the first includes an introduction and a detailed description of the repertoire as text in its phonological transcription, as transliteration and as interpretation; and the second includes two sections, “Kàm Ràw’s Repertoire” and “Performances.” Although “Performances” consists largely of Kàm Ràw songs, it does include songs by other singers. For readers making first contact with Kammu vocal music, which to date has not been broadly researched from the perspective of anthropology, ethnology, or musicology, the 30 pages of introduction might be the most interesting part of this work. Lundström introduces Kàm Ràw, who traveled with a research team from Thailand to Sweden, where unexpectedly he stayed many years. His knowledge of Kammu singing was attained during his early youth and his time traveling as a young man through the provinces of Oudomxay, Luang Namtha, Bokeo, and northeastern Thailand. The cultural isolation from his homeland that may have already begun during this period of traveling shaped Kàm Ràw’s sensibility to language and vocal expressions. Lundström comments: “This has made him very observant of his own singing—and of other aspects of his cultural knowledge” (9). The situation is worth study, especially in the context of Lundström’s comment about Kàm Ràw: “he stresses that ‘if I had continued living in Laos, I would probably not [End Page 140] be able to sing at all today.’” (9). Unfortunately, this remark is not further analyzed or discussed. Following this section, Lundström gives an overview of sung poetry. The trnə̀əm principle,1 which is essentially based on a linguistic description of rhyme and line (stanza) orders, is his point of departure in structuring the repertoire. He enumerates six vocal genres in relation to the trnə̀əm principle, as “songs” called tə̀əm, hrlm̀ᵼ, hrwə̀, hùuwə̀, yàam, and yùun tìiŋ, which are made of one melody type each. Lundström returns to this principle in greater detail in “Categories of Trnə̀əm,” in which he counts nine different types of trnə̀əm being collected. He states, “The trnə̀əm has thus been placed within one mono-melodic system of vocal genres and one mono-melodic system of area melodies. This points towards a music which is organized in a rather specific way relative to social, spatial and situational factors” (13). Though Lundström deals very carefully with particular appearances of Kammu-language elements, he “translates” musical features such as melodic contours or other implications of tonal structures into a vocabulary that specifies European norms of musical thinking. He also mentions an “arch-shaped motif with a minor flavour” or melodies being “predominantly pentatonic,” which are clear simplifications possibly made to accommodate the expectation of linguistic rather than musicological experts. This simplification seems to apply to “European” music practices as well. He states that “[t]he compound is the form which resembles the Western concept of one song most” (20). What one song means in diverse European or European-derived music practices is...