Past Programs
Acoustic - 2008
<i>Manikay</i> - Ancestral Songs of Arnhem Land
11/07/2008
In north-eastern Arnhem Land, the Yolngu people have been singing manikay for millennia. Manikay are series of songs, passed down through generations from the ancestral beings that originally shaped and named the Yolngu homelands. Accompanied by bilma (clapsticks) and yidaki (didjeridu), these manikay series are sung at ceremonies and contain ancestral knowledge essential to the Yolngu way of life. They are sacred ritual songs, but are also songs about the land, and the plants, animals, people and spirits that inhabit it. Mokuy, the ancestral ghosts, are everywhere in the landscape and mediate the transmission of the manikay. Their teachings offer a glimpse of the deeper ancestral treasures held in each Yolngu homeland.
Blowing Zen
11/01/2008
Japan in the 16th century was in the grip of civil war. Feudal lords fought each other for the right to rule, and bandits roamed the countryside. Yet out of this turmoil came a Zen sect with a tradition of music as spiritual practice whose influence continues today. They were the Fuke sect, and the monks of this Rinzai lineage became famous as the komuso, the Zen Priests of Nothingness. Drawn from the ranks of masterless samurai, the komuso were renowned for their skill in playing the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi.
Dress in white robes with short swords, they wore tall basket-shaped hats over their heads to suppress their identity and their ego. The repertoire created by the komuso was known as the honkyoku, 'original pieces'. More than just music of great beauty, these pieces were considered to be part of a spiritual practice, a Zen practice, and the act of playing them came to be called suizen, blowing meditation.
First broadcast 30 March 2007.
