Introduction
A place in the mind's eye, an opening,
an emptiness, a song and a number of places in hundreds, thousands of
songs, the promised land is the
ground beneath our feet, the recurring
motif of our histories of migration, real and mythic, a transcendental
figure of speech for the already epic,
always almost impossible journey;
as layered as the geological strata beneath the land itself, the promised
land could be anywhere, not least Europe.
Seldom what they seem, promised lands
reveal as much about the fatal limits of our civility as they do the
myths that underpin our claims to civility.
Promised lands are elliptical spaces:
the circle of salvation is never complete, redemption never fully secured.
The poetics of the necessity that
drives the desire for a promised land is a poetics of contested space
governed by aesthetic acts of remembrance
and futurity whose forms are sonic,
textual, polyvocal, visual, open ended...
[On Promised Lands, Flow Motion, 2006]
About the project
Promisedlands.info is the component of
our Promised Lands project that engages with music and migration. Our
interest in songs and music about
promised lands, in compositions
whose names comprise, include, or evoke these two words, goes
back at least to the beginnings of the project in
2006. Two years later, we began our research
residency at Iniva.
During our residency we traced the theme,
the trope, of the promised land across Europe, the Middle East, the
Americas, Australasia, Africa [and
Mars], by bringing together compositions
that span a 400 year history of migration beginning in the 1600s and
going right up to the present. We
then narrowed the material down to ninety
seven compositions and three essential songbooks, for which we created
one hundred textual and
visual narratives.
Of all the compositions we found, the
ones that resonated most with us were the ones that were intersections
between history, fantasy,mythology,
past, present, and future - and the ones
that provided openings onto other accounts, other narratives, as well
as their own.
The music here is all in one way or another
migrant music, music of migration, about migration, for migration. Music
made because or in spite of
migration, exile, internal displacement,
or statelessness. Music of the coloniser and colonised, of kings and
queens, of slaves and serfs. Anthems
of dispossession and national belonging,
compositions for countries that no longer exist and countries that have
yet to – and may never - exist.
On reflection, on the value of music
and the music of promised lands for thinking about migrant history,
memory and fantasy, about struggles for
land, power, and identity, we’d add
the following:
1. Music cuts across the lines that divide
and bond the powerful and the powerless. Through music both groups are
empowered. Music maps the
movement of migrant desire through time,
across space, and gives expression to his and her struggles, aspirations,
experiences, reflections and
reveries, wishes, defeats and victories.
2. Music makes public the inner worlds,
the desires and demands, fantasies and phantoms, the otherwise illicit
rages, projections and necessary
fictions, of both the oppressed and the
oppressor. In music the migrant returns to the present and even in death
is close to the listener who
otherwise may not have felt something
of the migrant’s physical presence. Through music the distant migrant
touches the listener; sound brings
to life, brings to mind, the body [and
soul] of the migrant, makes the migrant’s quest immemorial and thus
timeless.
3. Music – a body of music on promised
lands – documents and suggests an archive of claims and counter claims,
an archive of futures and pasts,
whose function for us was to serve as
a means of thinking and feeling our way through, through art and writing,
the idea of promised lands.
4. Phonography provides a technology,
a movement machine for terranean and subterranean journeys into migrant
past and future projections of
promised lands.
5. In music, the promised land trope
is recurrent, indomitable, moving back and forth across time, splitting
and permutating, as old as the Biblical
text from which comes the first promised
land song, as contemporary as the most recent report or account of migration
from our century.
We used each piece of music as an opening,
a window onto the world of the composition and a window onto the world
toward which the composition
gestures – the worlds of history and
memory, of terror, strangeness, and the uncanny, of the mystical and
the mundane, worlds made visible and kept
in motion by the act of bearing witness
through music – and writing.
We spent the residency reading, looking
at documents from a whole range of textual sources – writings around
the themes of migration, displacement,
exile, statelessness, as well as poetry
inspired by these themes; writings on the idea of promised lands; writings
on music, history, geology, cinema,
and theology; archival and official documents,
news journalism and NGO reports, scholarly, sacred and visionary writings,
biographies, autobiographies,
personal testimonies and eye witness
accounts.
From this raw material we assembled a
hundred narratives, stories told - sometimes across more than one song
and often through recurring groups
and individuals – using essays, textual
montages, textual extracts, and historical documents.
We also spent the residency documenting
visual material and not so much thinking about as being permeated by
the presence of spectrality which
appeared in many of the narratives unexpectedly
and without our bidding.
Promised lands, we discovered, are haunted
lands, haunted by the stories of other promised lands, haunted by the
migrant, the displaced, the forcibly
removed, the vanquished, and the past
and place from which s/he is part and apart.
Our visual research provided the basis
for the creation of one hundred triptychs. The triptych, with its roots
in the presentation of early Christian art
and texts, through which the sacred is
given aesthetic form, made it the ideal form for conveying the effects
left with us by the music, narratives, and
images of promised lands.
The hundred pages presented in this website
do not ascribe a descending or ascending order of significance to the
musical excerpts or the narratives.
The pages are fragments, collected and
created, of a work which could go on for some time if not indefinitely,
considering the persistence of the
promised land trope in the ways we talk,
write, make music, in the ways we think about, live and relive the experience
of migration.
We have uploaded the first fifty pages
[100 – 50], which you will find in the songpage, and will upload the
remaining fifty throughout October and
November.
We hope you enjoy promisedlands.info
and we welcome your responses, which you can leave in the Comments section.
Promisedlands.info is a non profit, educational
artwork. The musical extracts, transcribed lyrics, and archival images
belong to their
respective owners. We will remove any
such items from the site at the request of their respective owners.
Edward George & Anna Piva
Flow Motion