Aspects of Indigenous Music Education in Yarrabah and Cairns: 1907 to 1966

Abstract

Ethnomusicology is the study of music within cultural contexts, where place and time are of equal significance to the music itself. By focusing on how people teach their music to their next generation, much can be revealed about the culture as the actual performance of music reveals. In other words, the performance, and the learning and teaching of music are, in effect, aspects of the same phenomena. It is in the performance of music that we learn and teach, and music learning and teaching require performance (Merriam, 1964). Studying the music performances that occur over time when different cultures come into contact or collision with each other can reveal how educational processes and indeed cultures themselves develop (Kartomi, 1981; Schippers, 2010). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in Cairns and Yarrabah in the 20th century developed multiple musical lives while living under the culturally restrictive conditions of the dominant European culture.