Music as mastication
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Pepino Pascual told me that a friend of his had recently been in the interior of Africa, outside the modern metropolis, and there they asked him, What do you do for a living in Europe? He said, I'm a music teacher. And they were very surprised. "Do you also teach how to eat there, how to chew?" In the worlds that in their own way resist the modernising tsunami, music is as essential as chewing, it is part of everyday life, of daily activities and obviously also of partys, where the great and small spirits rise again from the unfathomable depths of the cosmos that inhabits us to come and play dramatically in the community.
The so-called "primitive community" is neither a "community of neighbours" nor a "national community", based on separation, on the isolation of subsystems, as a cybernetic sociology would say, from the family to the school, housing, agriculture or prison, and on a pooling that is generally played out not from what is shared, but from an administration and a police, institutional regime of mistrust. In fact, as has been said, modern society is constituted on the basis of the destruction of communities, on the basis of the systematic attack and annihilation of sub-proletarian, peasant and peri-urban community forms. That is why "Society" leads to implosion, Josep Rafanell i Orra told me, because all relations have to be secured, monitored, subjected to policing, control, exclusion.
"Communities resist all invasion, all enslavement, all violation. The history of invasion is also the history of this endless resistance. Resistance is not primarily an armed confrontation [...] Resistance lies in the drums, not in the spears; it lies in the music, in the rhythms lived by the communities whose myths and customs continue to nourish and sustain them. Nor is the invasion primarily a military enterprise [...] The invasion is about silencing the music, to flatten the rhythm, to make time linear, to destroy the myths and usages in a process that will later be called culture; the invasion is a war against the communities that nurture freedom, visions and life" (Freddy Perlman, The Leviathan and its hi-story).
The resistance lies in the drums, not in the spears; it lies in the music, in the rhythms... The story of an endless resistance, where, if revolt and flight with weapons in hand play a role, the key is in the rhythms and in the songs that shape a way of living, a way of connecting with the continuous flow of the cosmic rhythms of the living. Deleuze said: "One can conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that runs through the world and even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who uses something of this flow".
Dídac P. Lagarriga, who has spent several seasons in Tuba, the city of the Muridiyya in Senegal, the Sufi path created by Sheik Ahmadou Bamba and his disciples, of which the Baye Fall are part today -a line of flight towards the intelligence of the heart in the face of French colonisation-, also commented to me that music and singing are everywhere, in the street, in houses and in the collective work of the tariqa, such as the current construction of a University. Any excuse is a good one for women and men, children and old people to start a dhikr, the continuous and monotonous recitation of praise, whose mystical rhythm surely dates back to the most remote antiquity. A practice which in Christian forms became public in the Orthodox Church in the 13th century, as a defence of the hesychastic monks, goes back as a "secret doctrine" to much older Coptic and patristic forms (Olivier Clément, Byzance et le Christianisme). In the dhikr as observed in Cairo confraternities in the 19th century, ethnographic "parallels" have been found with the dithyramb, practised by men in the Dionysian religion, as women practised the collective menadism, mania, rage and possession, "the practice of trance, of ecstatic agitation, even those mad races in the wild" (Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grèce antique).