Tok means ‘path’, road’ or ‘gate’ to the people of Papua New Guinea. But as it is used in song, the sense is more that of ‘map’. It refers to the way a song, from start to finish, projects not merely a description of places, but a journey.
The song is successful when listeners are totally suspended into a journeying mood, experiencing the passage of song and poetic time as the progression of a journey.
Constructing a song as a path, or tok, sets the listeners on a journey during which they simultaneously experience a progression of lands and places and a progression of deeply felt sentiments associated with them.
All songs are sung from the point of movement through lands. The composer’s craft is not to tell people about places but to suspend them into those places. Singing a place is not a descriptive act but rather one that ‘impregnates’ identity into place, tree, water and sound names.
The Kogi people of Columbia also have songlines, subtle songs of the spirit world. The song leads along a path in the spirit world in the maze of memory and possibility to a point in the real world.
From: Wild by Jay Griffiths
The song is successful when listeners are totally suspended into a journeying mood, experiencing the passage of song and poetic time as the progression of a journey.
Constructing a song as a path, or tok, sets the listeners on a journey during which they simultaneously experience a progression of lands and places and a progression of deeply felt sentiments associated with them.
All songs are sung from the point of movement through lands. The composer’s craft is not to tell people about places but to suspend them into those places. Singing a place is not a descriptive act but rather one that ‘impregnates’ identity into place, tree, water and sound names.
The Kogi people of Columbia also have songlines, subtle songs of the spirit world. The song leads along a path in the spirit world in the maze of memory and possibility to a point in the real world.
From: Wild by Jay Griffiths
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