Island Musics

Kevin Dawe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859737972
• eBook ISBN: 9781000189261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology
• Index: Social Sciences

What does the music of Madagascar or Trinidad tell us about the islands themselves and their inhabitants? Is there something unique about island musics? How does island music differ from its mainland counterparts? Drawing on a range of diverse examples from around the globe, this book examines the culture of island music and offers insight into local identities. Case studies look at how music, tradition, popular culture and islander life are linked in modern maritime societies. The islands covered include Crete, Ibiza, Zanzibar, Trinidad, Cuba, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. In revealing the current practice behind modern island musics, the book considers the role of world music, exotica, global tourism, novels and travel writing in constructing fanciful images of islanders and island life. Island Musics throws into question some of our most basic notions and assumptions about island societies. There are a number of problems common to all island societies that vary in significance depending on an islands size, demographics and its proximity to the mainland. Problems include remoteness and insularity, peripherality to centralized sites of decision-making, a limited range of natural resources, specialization of economics, small markets, a narrow skills base, poor infrastructure and environmental fragility. These issues are discussed in relation to the creation of music in the construction of an islander identity. Of particular interest is the way in which islanders discuss their music and how it articulates the idea of the other and diaspora. Finally, Island Musics considers the musical industry, music education and the preservation of musical cultural heritage.

– 1 –
Don't Rock the Boat – Sing! Maintaining Balance within a Coral Atoll Community

Richard M. Moyle

One of the world’s smaller island communities, Takū maintains its largely traditional lifestyle through a combination of geographical isolation, economic invisibility in terms of Papua New Guinea’s gross domestic product, discouragement of casual visitors, and a determination to continue traditional forms of social authority. The community itself, which has existed for possibly as long as 2,000 years, and which has survived multiple demographic disasters even within the historical period, has developed a set of social strategies designed to maximize survival chances through the exercise of the twin principles of egalitarianism and reciprocity. The means by which the community as a whole gives verbal expression to the approved means by which those principles are enacted is group singing. Song poetry idealizes interpersonal relationships, maintaining relevance by contextualizing specific references to both the living and the recent dead and to both human and ancestral identities, and it openly acknowledges the dependence on spiritual powers to complement human skills so as to ensure ongoing survival in often-difficult environmental circumstances. Singing, thus, is used as an instrument to sustain social integrity in a broad sense. Singing and dancing also give public and visible form to social balance of another kind, between maintenance of corporate solidarity and recognition of individual achievement and prominence. To this end, egalitarianism and male domestic dominance are occasionally reversed in circumstances tightly defined in time, place and content, and operating through the context of dance. Two unprecedented threats now confront the community: the arrival of a rival religion carrying the potential for the establishment of a competing form of social authority, and a reversal in physical terms of the atoll’s mythological rising from the ocean.

The Coral Atoll Community: Takū

From sea level only 15 km away, Takū’s tallest coconut trees are still invisible over the horizon, and the highest point of land on any of the atoll’s small islets is less than a metre above high tide mark. Its low outline caused several European ships to miss it altogether between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its smallness prompted most vessels sighting it to steer clear, fearful of its encircling reef and channel currents. Somewhat ironically, its inhabitants were renowned sailors until the late nineteenth century, regularly travelling in pairs of ocean-going canoes to other atolls several thousand kilometres to the south-east for purposes of trade. Situated some 200 kilometres east of Bougainville, Takū lies within Papua New Guinea’s North Solomons province, although its cultural affiliations are with a loose string of atolls running roughly north-west to south east through Melanesia: Takū is a Polynesian Outlier, most likely colonized from Samoa or Tūvalu in a reverse migration that, on linguistic evidence, may have occurred as much as 2,000 years ago (Green and Kirch, 2001: 292, note 7).

Almost circular in shape, the atoll consists largely of an encircling reef up to 100 m wide and completely covered only at high tide, when canoes can safely travel over it en route to ocean fishing grounds. Three reef channels also allow canoe access to the ocean but only one of these is deep and wide enough to allow the entry of larger vessels and, even then, a tightly twisting course must be followed immediately on entering the lagoon in order to avoid the several shallows and coral heads. Along the south-eastern edge of the atoll is a series of islets, and one further island lies at the northwest corner. Takū’s climate experiences seasonal variation. The south-east trade winds blow from around June to October, and from December to May the prevailing wind is the north-west trade wind. By contrast, there appears to be little seasonality in agriculture, and households plant and harvest their taro crops on an as-needs basis throughout the year. The sole community is currently located on Nukutoa island where most of the 140 houses are of the traditional type, with thatched roof, woven mat walls and a doorway at each end, and arranged in ten lines paralleling the beach front, the larger distance between the second and third row constituting the ‘main road’. This wider strip of land is necessary to accommodate groups of dancers as they process from the southern end to the marae, an unbounded ritual area adjacent to the house of the chief, the Ariki. At each tip of the roughly triangular island are yards where more than seventy canoes are stored and a further dozen or so are under construction at any given time. Men attend daily to their canoes, bailing them out after rain and checking their leaf or mat coverings on sunny days.

On Takū Island, which lies some 600 m to the south of Nukutoa, are the community’s gardens, some 8 hectares excavated to ground water level (Moir 1989: 43) which are visited by most families several times each week. Being the location of the island’s prehistoric settlement over many centuries, Takū Island is also rich in mythological, historical and religious associations. The other islands in the atoll are very small and are visited principally for their supplies of coconut and pandanus materials. Takū is a part-foraging, part-farming community, dependent in the first instance on the reliable availability and abundance of fish, and in a secondary sense on garden produce.

Because of the community’s small size, all the residents are well known to one another and most are connected by kinship ties. The primary kinship unit is the patrilineal clan, of which there are five, identified in terms of the name of the house in which its elder resides. Each elder is responsible for the spiritual leadership of his clan and, until 1974, also oversaw communication with recently deceased clan members via a medium. The Ariki, lying in direct though distant descent from the first founding ancestors of the island and thus being the senior direct descendant, is considered to have the best credentials to contact both deceased clan members and intermediary spirits and to request appropriate assistance from them in time of need on behalf of the community as a whole. His role is complemented by a secular counterpart, the Pure.

With locally derived annual family income averaging less than £50, the island does not represent a viable taxable income source to central government. Indeed, the opposite is the case for the provincial government, which funds a medical worker, the island council and ‘magistrates’ who preside over minor cases, as well as the sole ship servicing Takū and its neighbouring atolls. Even on the larger islands within the Province, Takū has a low profile, and its European name, Mortlock Island, has become a generalized term for the three Polynesian outliers at the extreme north-east corner of Papua New Guinea’s political territory.¹

In some respects, Takū itself represents an anomaly: its community has chosen to augment geographical remoteness by a policy of discouraging visitors, formalizing this by a permit system, but on the other hand its inhabitants have an rapacious appetite for artistic novelty, actively seeking out foreign performance material while travelling off-island and enthusiastically teaching and dancing it to an appreciative audience. The fact that this situation has endured throughout the historical period, and as far back as the mythological era according to oral tradition, suggests the existence of a system whereby social stability is maintained by a complementary accommodation of contrasting elements: a balance. In this chapter I explore forms of balancing which have been incorporated into the island’s survival formula, and the role of the performing arts in some of these.

Performance as Reaffirmation of Community

Takū has succeeded in coping with multiple vulnerabilities in the natural world by the creation and maintenance of strengths in the world of interpersonal relationships, matching force with counterforce. The principal means of proclaiming such relationships was – and is – singing. I use the verb form deliberately here, because ‘music’ suggests an abstraction whereas for Takū’s residents, ‘music’ is performance and all performances are vocal. For a community of some 160 adults, the more than 1,000 songs in the active repertoire is impressive, but to ask ‘why so many?’ is perhaps to miss the point. The more relevant question is ‘why is there so much singing on Takū?’ and to begin to answer that question, we must try to identify the functions of singing. What the people sing about represents their idealized world – ideal sets of inter-personal relationships, ideal catch levels for fishing expeditions and gardening productivity, and even ideal conditions for the dead to continue doing the activities they held dear in life, of which dancing figures most prominently. In a small, isolated community perpetually living within a few weeks of famine – if weather conditions turn bad and fishing is impossible – there is a constant need for reassurance that the sets of relationships binding a group of people into functioning networks still exist in the here and now. People need to know that they are still recognized, accepted and functioning individuals in that community, and singing about those relationships is one way they, as a corporate group, can affirm what amounts to a secular creed; not in any prescriptive sense but rather by detailing the domestic action consequences of a set of principles underpinning the society as a whole. Each day there are challenges to the unity of this community because of the potential dangers that fishermen face each time they paddle out onto the open ocean in small canoes, so it is not surprising that one principal theme of song poetry (by which I refer to the song lyrics) is successful and safe ocean fishing, along with the support of family members back on shore. These kinds of constant potential dangers to social unity are matched and neutralized by constant singing about secure and effective social relationships. Such relationships extend beyond the living to encompass ancestor spirits, whose accessibility and powers of assistance constitute an integral part of activities whose successful outcomes are believed to lie beyond purely human endeavour, such as the capture of prestige fish and successful gardening.

To put performance practice into clearer perspective: the free and potentially unlimited supply of coconut toddy, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Islands and Music Studies
• 1 Don't Rock the Boat - Sing! Maintaining Balance within a Coral Atoll Community
• 2 Spitting into the Wind: Multi-edged Environmentalism in Malagasy Song
• 3 Island Musicians: Making a Living from Music in Crete
• 4 'Ay Díos, Ampárame' (O God, Protect Me): Music in Cuba during the 1990s, the 'Special Period'
• 5 Chindo Music: Creating a Korean Cultural Paradise
• 6 'Chilled Ibiza': Dance Tourism and the Neo-tribal Island Community
• 7 Mainland Torres Strait Islander Songwriters and the 'Magical Islands' of the Torres Strait: Songs as Identity Narratives
• 8 Music in the Diasporic Imagination and the Performance of Cultural (Dis)placement in Trinidad
• 9 Between Mainland and Sea: The Taarab Music of Zanzibar
• 10 British Islands: An Obsession of British Composers
• Index