Talking in Tongues: Negotiating Archetypal Models for Musical Development in Intercultural Music Making

This paper examines some of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the hybrid intercultural music project, Ultimate Cows. A concert was performed at the Encounters: India festival in Brisbane in 2013, and featured the results of a collaboration between master percussionists Guru Kaaraikudi Mani and Ghatam Vaidyanathan Suresh from the South Indian Carnatic tradition, and musicians including violinist John Rodgers, percussionist Tunji Beier, and myself, a guitarist, from the Brisbane jazz and new music scene. The ways in which the intercultural work was conceptualised, developed, and received are explored with reference to the composition and collaborative process. The discussion reveals aspects of the ways in which musicians relate to culture, and the ways that culture is performed in intercultural hybrid work. In line with the critical theory around hybridity, Ultimate Cows is proposed as symptomatic of hybridity's pervasiveness, a natural consequence of musicians' desire to extend their practice through interactions with the musical Others that they encounter. The discussion of power and perspective is acknowledged as central to the discussion of hybrid works, and the various ways that difference is made manifest with reference to the musical work No Can Do. The compositional development of that work is shown to simultaneously explore and reconcile archetypal musical structures from Carnatic and jazz musics, and explore some of the inherent problems that are consequently implied for the works' reception. In the process it uncovers differences in musical approach, perception, and the notion of acquired cultural archetypes, which affect the way that musicians orient themselves to the music in performance.