Browse Titles - 9 results

This 58-minute video tells the story of two senior musicians from Laos who play instruments and sing for a variety of American audiences, adapting their presentations for Hmong and non-Hmong listeners of all ages. The first-person narrative by U.C.L.A. ethnomusicologist Amy Catlin interweaves footage from Rhode Island, Fresno, San Diego, Santa Ana, and Laos, including:

• Hmong New Year festivals
• courtship dialog songs
• Lao lamleuang folk opera
• Lao mohlam folksong with khen accompaniment
• school classrooms
and a TV sitcom representation of a Hmong healer in an American hospital.

A social history of the Hmong from China to Laos to America unfolds, illustrated by Hmong music, drawings and embroideries, archival photos, maps, and interviews. Subtitles translate song texts and illuminate Hmong "thought-songs" played on free-reed pipes, mouth organs, jew’s harps, banana leaves, flutes, and fiddles.

The story concludes by returning to the deceased musician’s children and grandchildren after an eleven-year hiatus, to give them copies of the original footage. The family members reflect on their experience of "generation loss" in Hmong music and culture, and express the hope that Hmong music will continue in America.

This narrated video explores the sacred music, dance, and rituals of devidasis and devidasas, women and men dedicated to the goddess Renuka/Yellamma. Worshipped by millions of devotees in the border regions of southern Maharashtra, northern Karnataka, and adjacent areas of India, this fertility goddess is best known through media representations and social activism protesting practices linked to sexuality and prostitution. Her musical and social traditions have parallels in the devadasi (women dedicated to male deities) system in Tamilnadu before its reform and classicization in the early twentieth century.

The video attempts to balance the typically negative representations of the tradition, which tend to focus on controversial practices and to exclude the unique musical forms essential to the worship of the goddess Renuka/Yellamma. "Fictive documentary" techniques employed include the autobiographical voice of the Goddess, who reflects on elements of her own varied histories and some of the practices of her followers, and the voice of her son Parasuram. Virtuosic performances by women and men practitioners (jogtas and jogappas, including transgenders) are featured in ensembles including the chaundke, a one-stringed variable-tension 'plucked drum' believed to have first been fashioned by Parasuram from a demon’s skull. These musical ritualists are necessary for calendrical festivals shown in the video such as pilgrimage during Rande Purnima ("Widows' Full Moon"), when the goddess and her devidasis are temporarily widowed, processions in the "Baby-Dropping Ritual", and for biweekly mendicancy rounds and oracle rituals. Police threats to confiscate musical instruments, and protest songs sung within the tradition against the dedication of children, attest to contemporary conflicts surrounding the goddess and her music, the endangerment of her chaundke, and the human rights issues at stake.