Musicology/Women’s Studies Naroditskaya Austern and Austern “This powerful collection of essays presents a fascinating portrait of feminized musical power as embodied in the figure of the siren and her many sisters. MusIC OF THE Cutting across history, cultures, and disciplinary lines, these essays bring to- gether a vast literature on this mythical figure, who, like water, seems to flow effortlessly between the spaces of life and death, fantasy and certainty, music and silence. Reading this work reaffirms the notion that the combined power of women and their music is at once dangerous and enchanting.” —Ellen Koskoff, Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester M “Fascinating, provocative, erudite, and seductive, Music of the Sirens is sure to become an essential resource for anyone interested in cross-cultural figurations us of aural and/or sexual allure.” —Suzanne G. Cusick, New York University Whether referred to as mermaid, rusalka, or mami wata, the siren has inspired I music and its representations across the globe. This book, co-edited by a his- C Sirens torical musicologist and an ethnomusicologist, brings together leading scholars and talented newcomers in classics, music, media studies, literature, and cul- O tural studies to consider the siren and her multifaceted relationships to music across time and geography. F LINDA PHyllIS AusTern is Associate Professor of Musicology in the School of Music, Northwestern University. She has written extensively on issues TH concerning music in western European intellectual culture, concentrating on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Europe. Her previous books are Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (editor) and Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance. E INNA NARODITskAYA is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, Northwestern University. She specializes in music and cul- SI ture in contemporary central Asia, in the former Soviet republics, and in impe- rial Russia. Her most recent book is Song from the Land of Fire: Azerbaijanian rens Mugam in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods. INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis http://iupress.indiana.edu ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21846-9 ISBN-10: 0-253-21846-2 edited by INDIANA Cover image © Tim Ashkar. Mermaids of the Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya Canary Islands. Courtesy of McGaw Licensing/ The McGaw Group, LLC. Music of the Sirens Music of the Sirens Edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya Indiana University Press bloomington and indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] ∫ 2006 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. manufactured in the united states of america Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Music of the sirens / edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34736-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21846-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminism and music. 2. Women in music. 3. Sex in music. 4. Sirens (Mythology) I. Austern, Linda Phyllis, date II. Naroditskaya, Inna, date ML3838.M9495 2006 780.82—dc22 2005034293 12345 111009080706 CONTENTS acknowledgments / vii Introduction: Singing Each to Each Inna Naroditskaya and Linda Phyllis Austern / 1 1. Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages Leofranc Holford-Strevens / 16 2. ‘‘Teach Me to Heare Mermaides Singing’’: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and Danger in the Modern West Linda Phyllis Austern / 52 3. Devils, Daydreams, and Desire: Siren Traditions and Musical Creation in the Central-Southern Andes Henry Stobart / 105 4. ‘‘Sweet aluring harmony’’: Heavenly and Earthly Sirens in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture Elena Laura Calogero / 140 5. The Sirens, the Epicurean Boat, and the Poetry of Praise Stephen M. Buhler / 176 6. ‘‘Longindyingcall’’: Of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens Lawrence Kramer / 194 7. Russian Rusalkas and Nationalism: Water, Power, and Women Inna Naroditskaya / 216 8. Rheinsirenen: Loreley and Other Rhine Maidens Annegret Fauser / 250 9. The Mermaid of the Meyhane: The Legend of a Greek Singer in a Turkish Tavern John Morgan O’Connell / 273 contents 10. Siren Serenades: Music for Mami Wata and Other Water Spirits in Africa Henry John Drewal with Charles Gore and Michelle Kisliuk / 294 11. The Navel, the Corporate, the Contradictory: Pop Sirens at the Twenty-first Century Thomasin LaMay and Robin Armstrong / 317 12. The Cocktail Siren in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet Jeongwon Joe / 349 bibliography / 371 list of contributors / 409 index / 413 [vi] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Editors wish to thank all of the following, without whom this book would not have been possible: Megan Guenther and Stephen Houbeck for assisting tirelessly and cheerfully with preparation of the final version of the manuscript on top of their own teaching and graduate study; our husbands, James Borland and Anthony Elmendorf, for o√ering continual personal support and occasional research assistance; each other for com- plementary intellectual insight and editorial styles; and finally and most importantly, all of our contributing authors for letting us have such fas- cinating articles. [ vii ] introduction Singing Each to Each Inna Naroditskaya and Linda Phyllis Austern The siren and her sisters are the most elusive and paradoxical of all creatures. Neither fish, fowl, nor long-tressed mammal, they are impossible combinations of any of these, or none at all. Most often female, they may sometimes be male. Mortal or eternal, they may deliver death or bestow the kiss of everlasting life. They haunt the forests of Russia and the mountains of Bolivia, the foggy coasts of Norway and the warm seas of the East Indies. Sirens are beings of foam and fantasy, insubstantial as the play of moonlight across the surface of a pool, born of the desires of simple river-folk and ancient sailors. But they have also been subject to scientific scrutiny, care- fully documented alongside other fauna by learned men. They are the disembodied demons of dark watery depths, nightclub performers of the modern city, celluloid angels, zoological finds, carved capitals, consorts of Chinese sky-gods, and the frame for the strings of an Irish harp. Spirit- being or knowing body, they seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once, dwelling in the liminal spaces between earth, sea, and sky, between life and death, between imagination and the senses. One of the few qualities that draws them together is their music, the subject of this book. The impetus for this collection of essays came, like the siren and her [∞] inna naroditskaya and linda phyllis austern kin, from multiple places and traditions. In July 1998, two British music- scholars, one a historian of Western music and the other an ethnomusi- cologist, organized an international symposium on ‘‘Knowledge, Seduc- tion and Danger: Music and the Sirens’’ at Darwin College, Cambridge. Several of the present essays were born from this conference. Some time later, an ocean and a half-continent away from Cambridge, another con- trasting pair of scholars began a dialogue about culturally divergent aerial and aquatic musical beings who shared a surprising number of traits and who, in turn, inspired an astonishing array of narrative and visual representations. In this interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection, the term ‘‘siren’’ has several specific meanings. It indicates a particular mythological or folkloric figure whose name, in various languages, is drawn from the ancient Greek term siren, such as the Russian sirin, the Italian sirena, and the Andean sirinu. The term also incorporates a range of archetypal beings dwelling in or near water, at once human-like and inhuman, recognized by di√erent names in contrasting ethnic traditions, myths, folk legends, and rituals. Furthermore, as portrayed in this book, the siren is a human being whose particular musical abilities have led her to be referred to as one of these creatures, or who has chosen to usurp such a title or the behavioral signifiers that would mark her as one. Naiad or nixie, mermaid or merrow, undine or Lorelei or mami wata, she has many names and many homes across human time and geography. Her alluring vocal powers and other distinctive traits have been borrowed by nightclub singers and MTV stars many years and half-a-world apart. Sirens appear here in a number of guises as well as in varied forms and with many names: artifacts of living hybrid aquatic-human creatures, images in oral and literary narrative, specific individuals referred to as sirens, or works of music or the visual arts that pay homage to any or all of these. Virtually all human cultures seem to have invented myths or tales of enchantment that involve fairy-like stories of water-beings, or at least the cosmic love between some water-woman and an earthly or celestial man.1 The existence of ‘‘real’’ or biological sirens has often seemed as plausible as the existence of a spirit world or the peoples and traditions of unfamiliar cultures, as real as any other creature from air, land, or sea. Scholars, adventurers, and entrepreneurs have sought traces of the siren and her kin not only through myth and folklore but also in the realm of the natural and human sciences.