Sojourns- CD Notes

     In October of 1979, 25 women gathered in a meeting room at a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the first rehearsal of what I was calling a “women’s chorus.” I had spent the preceding months talking to my musical colleagues, friends, and voice students about forming a new group whose focus would be music written “by, for, or about women.” We spread the word to the larger community, held auditions, and soon stood in our first Monday night circle nervously introducing ourselves to each other.

The idea for a women’s music group came at a transitional point in my own life. My musical tastes and experiences were eclectic, the result of years spent performing classical, medieval, renaissance, baroque, contemporary, folk, and ethnic music in many different contexts. I was growing increasingly curious about women’s roles in musical history and about women’s traditions cross-culturally—what was our collective creative heritage about which I had learned so little? The image of exploring these questions in a creative, ongoing way with a group of women musicians quickly took hold in my mind, and the process of research and weekly rehearsals began.

I remember the first sound we made together. It was in its own way a sacred moment: a clear, resonant, sustained unison note. From that single tone through the ensuing decade, Libana has been an intensely challenging, transformative, and at times ecstatic experience for each one of us—an experience infused with a sense of commitment and community that transcends the usual parameters of a performing group. Six of us have been with the group from the first year (three of us from the first rehearsal!), and we have all spent the last five years of our lives singing, dancing, travelling, and in a sense, growing up together. It has been a profound experience for us to evolve from a group of fiery, idealistic women in our twenties to a more experienced, deeper community of women in our thirties. We have also witnessed the development of each others’ lives outside of Libana: we currently have among us two full-time musicians, a lawyer, a graphics designer, a caterer, a psychiatrist, a women’s health care worker, a tenant organizer, an astrologer, a nurse clinician, and two arts administrators. Several of us have gone through graduate school (in one case, medical school) while remaining active members; one member is currently working toward her PhD in anthropology, another toward her master’s degree in dance and body/mind transformation. And we have welcomed four children into our community—Aaron, Rachel, Jared, and Jamie.

Through the years, our primary musical focus has become the cultural expressions, both traditional and contemporary, of the world’s women. We seek to perform the music of each culture in a way that preserves its integrity as a unique musical language: we pay close attention to vocal timbre and instrumental styling, ornamentation, and the nuances of pronunciation. We’ve learned to play new instruments and to make vocal sounds largely unheard by Western ears. Many hours commuting to work by car or subway are spent with our index cards in hand, memorizing Berber, Bulgarian, or Serbo-Croatian song texts. The many devoted ethnomusicologists, ethnic music enthusiasts, and members of the diverse ethnic communities in the Boston area have served as willing resources—teaching us new repertoire, working with us on pronunciation and translation, lending us instruments and field recordings (from which we painstakingly transcribe, note by ornamented note, much of our music), and helping us to understand the cultural context of the music we perform. Our research also puts us in touch by letter, phone, and fax machine with people around the world—from a songwriter in Tel Aviv to a Quechua translator in La Paz. Passion for a certain people’s music has even taken some of our members to other countries, as is the case for our three Hungarian instrumentalists, who have studied in Hungary with leaders of the folk revivalist movement.

Our music and our creative process offer us glimpses into a community of women around the world whose lives are distinctly different from our own. By learning other women’s musical expressions, we begin to open ourselves to experiencing our lives within a larger global context. The daily realities of women from all corners of the Earth are uniquely shaped by environment, religion, political climate, legal status, racial and class situation, sexual politics, and cultural traditions. However, when we hear the voices of women around the world singing as they work together, dance together, and celebrate together, we feel an inherent, essential connection with other women on this planet. In playing the music of the women of the world, we take a step, from our hearts, toward a deeper knowledge of the spirit that the many diverse peoples bring to living on our shared Earth.

Susan Robbins, 1989

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