Lisa Girard and Sally Oldfield

How many people know and like Lisa Girard of _Dead Can
Dance_, and know what it is she's doing with "language"?
On "Into the Within," is "Tristan," number thirteen,
just scat, glossolalia, or is she singing some kind of
Middle High German?  Ditto with "Pilgrimage of Lost
Children" in _Duality_.  I raised the question of Bobby
McFerin and his _Circle Song_ last spring, and someone
said it was just "Scat."  Now I think that what Louis
Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were doing was decidedly
different from what Girard and McFerin and his singers
are doing.  Scat is intended to be recognized as nonsense,
but unless I'm mistaken, McFerin's songs, and possibly
Girard's, are intended to be taken as foreign languages that
express some kind or exotic, hieratic sentiment.  You listen to
McFerin and you listen to Bittova, and you can't understand either,
but they sound authentically foreign.  One is a made-up language
and the other is Czech.  But to the ignorant ear the one sounds
as authentic as the other.

Has anyone ever done a study of this?  The reason I ask about
the Lisa Girard is that a student of mine wanted to know if
Tristan on "Into the Within" was a medieval language.  I
honestly can't recognize it as anything I'm familiar with.
Possibly medieval German.

Another question:  how many of you are familiar with Sally
Oldfield, that blast from the past?  I was dusting off my
old albums and came across _WaterBearer_!  She sings
snatches of Elvish on this record to a kind of pseudo-Carribean
accompaniment.  How I loved her!

        Ella galalea kolotya lo
        He ana hella kiellessa niova nya

I don't even know if she's accurate or not, but it
was spellbinding!

Sally
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SALLY CAVES
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves (bragpage)
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html (T. homepage)
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html (all else)
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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