HKU Bulletin May 2005 (Vol. 6 No. 3)

8 COVER STORY 9 The Language of Music S ongwriters are often asked whether the lyrics or music came first. But in tonal languages, the relationship between music and words is far more complex. Do the words determine the melody, or is it the reverse? Two University researchers, and friends, set out to investigate the matter. In the process, their University-funded project has been picked up by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) for use in its World Heritage series to record and preserve cultural traditions from around the worl A d. ssociate Professors Dr Adams Bodomo of the Department of Linguistics and Dr Manolete Mora of the Department of Music were keen to test emerging theories that question the accepted wisdom about songs in tonal languages. Until recently, in the study of African music, the meaning of the words was assumed to take precedence over melodic beauty, so if a word had a high tone, the melody would shift to a high note. The two men went to Dr Bodomo’s native Ghana to record songs, folk tales and music and dance performances by the country’s Dagaare-speaking people. Dagaare has two tones. They then spent months sifting through the recordings, pulling out those that were intellectually and culturally important and of good quality, and analysing the results. What they found supported suspicions about the role of language in determining melody. “We found the correlation was weak and not as strong as it has been made out to be. Aesthetic considerations are much more important than previously thought,” Dr Mora said. “I may be sticking my neck out at this point to say this, but music has the power to bring groups of people together. You can see this in the way that it underpins ritual and ceremony, and the songs we’ve analysed are ceremonial songs. That may be why music takes precedence here – it has the power to engage people in symbolic behaviour.” Dr Bodomo said the meaning of the words could still be conveyed in context, even if the need to create a good musical phrase overrode linguistic construction. He also drew attention to the fact that their work is helping to preserve the products of an oral culture. It was this aspect of the project that attracted attention from UNESCO. “Some of these things are disappearing as children grow and leave the village. One of our aims was to record and document their traditions. We talk about environmental preservation, this is preservation of a culture,” Dr Bodomo said. The results of their work have been presented at several seminars and an international conference, and will soon be published by UNESCO. Dr Bodomo has also adapted them as teaching materials for courses such as the African Studies programme he runs in the summer, with input from Dr Mora. In addition, a PhD student is picking up their thread and investigating the relationship between language and music in Cantonese. “This is one of the reasons why diversity in a university is important, i t provides a broader range of examples for comparative study,” Dr Mora added. For details of the University’s Summer Programme 2005 which includes, amongst the courses offered, a programme on the music and culture of West A frica, visit the University’s website on http://www.hku.hk/summer.