Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific

Music, Media, and Technology

Lonán Ó Briain, Min Yen Ong, Lonán Ó Briain, Min-Yen Ong

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501360060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The popularization of radio, television, and the Internet radically transformed musical practice in the Asia Pacific. These technologies bequeathed media broadcasters with a profound authority over the ways we engage with musical culture. Broadcasters use this power to promote distinct cultural traditions, popularize new music, and engage diverse audiences. They also deploy mediated musics as a vehicle for disseminating ideologies, educating the masses, shaping national borders, and promoting political alliances. With original contributions by leading scholars in anthropology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media and cultural studies, the 12 essays this book investigate the processes of broadcasting musical culture in the Asia Pacific. We shift our gaze to the mechanisms of cultural industries in eastern Asia and the Pacific islands to understand how oft-invisible producers, musicians, and technologies facilitate, frame, reproduce, and magnify the reach of local culture.

Part One

Vocalizing Community

1

Getting Our Voices Heard: Radio Broadcasting and Secrecy in Vanuatu

Monika Stern

When I returned to Mota Lava in the northern Banks Islands of the Vanuatu archipelago in May 2018 after being away for more than ten years, I was struck that several musicians and groups wanted to be recorded and told me of their dreams of making their own albums.¹ The local journalist Edgar Howard Woleg also asked me to record a few musical examples for his radio programs. All I could offer was to record a few songs on my Zoom H4 and upload the recordings to Secure Digital (SD) cards on their phones so that they could exchange, distribute, and broadcast the recordings as they saw fit.

Vanuatu is a Melanesian archipelago made up of more than eighty islands, whose inhabitants, called ni-Vanuatu since independence in 1980, speak more than 130 vernacular languages, thus holding the world record for linguistic density. As well as these Austronesian languages, there are three official ones (French, English, and the lingua franca pidgin English known locally as Bislama). These three languages stem from the islands’ Anglo-French colonial history, known as the Condominium of the New Hebrides from 1906 to 1980. Mirroring this linguistic diversity, traditional (kastom) forms of music are many and various according to the different islands, regions, and even villages. Other music genres also exist: string band music, Christian religious music, and popular music (essentially, reggae and hip-hop).

Apart from the islands on which Vanuatu’s two towns (Port-Vila and Luganville) are to be found, the other islands are isolated, with poor transport services and often limited or no consistent access to electricity. For these reasons, inhabitants do not always find it easy to be part of national and international news networks or to make their voices heard. National radio and television stations do not consistently reach most of the islands; their main audiences are based in the two urban centers. Since the opening up of the telecommunications market to competition in 2007, mobile phone services have developed considerably, with 3G services now reaching most of the archipelago’s islands. However, these new means of communication are expensive and inconsistent. On some islands the network seldom works, while on others the network is only accessible at certain times or locations. Consequently, although its infrastructure does not always sufficiently meet its demand, radio remains as an essential public service for most of the population.²

The state-sponsored media broadcasts traditional music from the archipelago’s islands and many other genres. But how are choices made in the treatment of these repertoires? How do media practitioners make distinctions between the islands? Is all traditional music accessible to everyone? These questions are connected to an understanding of culture, democracy, and the possibility for everyone to access knowledge and information. Here we will not go into the debates on cultural democratization and democracy specific to notions of class in the West; instead, I deploy the vocabulary used by Harrison (1995) concerning openness and “freedom of access” to knowledge. Melanesia is known for its secrets—in the form of secret societies, secret spirit voices, secret instruments, and secret songs described in many classic anthropological works on the region.³ A great deal of specific knowledge and practices are reserved for one group, whether that be hierarchical or residential, or a secret society, and only the initiated or people belonging to these groups have access to this shared knowledge. Moreover, publicly showing one’s knowledge outside these groups (in the form of public dances for example) brings prestige. Thus in some cases: “knowledge increases in value by being shared. In the other approach… it decreases in value by being shared. There seem to be two contradictory models here for managing knowledge, and two incompatible theories of its value” (Harrison 1995: 12).

This chapter draws on Harrison’s (1995) and Lindstrom’s (1990) works, which argue it is not a question of simple dichotomy (secrets/open knowledge) but of strategies and political stakes put in place to conceal or reveal knowledge. This knowledge has been observed in Melanesia since the time of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. However, what appears to be a regional particularity can be found in many forms, less explicit perhaps, in other parts of the world. Foucault questions this opposition between the secret knowledge of certain cultures and the supposedly free circulation of knowledge in the West as “one of the great myths of European culture”:

To the monopolistic, secret knowledge of oriental tyranny, Europe opposed the universal communication of knowledge and the infinitely free exchange of discourse. This notion does not, in fact, stand up to close examination. Exchange and communication are positive forces at play within complex, but restrictive systems; it is probable that they cannot operate independently of these.

(Foucault 1971: 17–18)

Foucault demonstrates that these forms of “secret-appropriation and non-interchangeability” exist in numerous contexts in European societies. We shall therefore follow Lindstrom, who has suggested that Foucault’s theories have “considerable relevance for making sense of systems of knowledge and power in Melanesia” (Lindstrom 1990: ix).

Radio, which provides a key technological means of cultural broadcasting in the region, is connected to these questions of secrecy, disclosure, and power strategies for these communities. This chapter examines how the ni-Vanuatu use radio and recording technologies as a means of listening to, broadcasting, and producing music. Rather than analyze the media as transformative cultural elements (Bull 2005), I follow the example of studies that consider how specific historical, social, and cultural contexts deploy the technology (Miller and Horst 2012; Wall and Webber 2014). I begin with a historical overview of national radio and the role it played at the time of independence. The second section considers the constraints in uses of kastom music. The third section describes the emergence of the music industry, which favored the development of music for entertainment and its link to radio broadcasting. A final part will then return to the attempts to restructure the national media, based again on local knowledge.

Radio, Kastom, and National Identity

Let us first put the notion of kastom (in Bislama), which is at times hastily translated as “custom,” into context. In Vanuatu, kastom has a more complex meaning, particularly because of the political role it played during the push for independence. Jolly explains the double meaning of kastom and its revival: on a national level, it represents a means of distinguishing the indigenous ni-Vanuatu as a whole from their former European colonizers. On a local level, the particular practices of kastom (marriage, birth or rank-taking ceremonies, myths, dance, and music) are claimed by distinct communities and sometimes passed down in the form of secret or restricted knowledge with explicit ownership rules. This does not preclude the possibility of loaning or exchanging kastom (Jolly 1992: 341–4; Stern 2013).

Lissant Bolton (1999) has retraced the history of Vanuatu national radio and the role it played in the 1970s leading up to independence. She demonstrates how radio contributed to the valorization of the archipelago’s different oral traditions, especially traditional stories and music. According to Bolton, the history of radio in the New Hebrides began in the 1960s. Its interactive programs (e.g., personal messages, feedbacks, sending of recordings) were inward-looking and focused on national issues: “Rather than seeing the radio as a way of gaining access to the ‘world-out-there’, the ni-Vanuatu response was concerned mainly with programs that engaged with their own world, the knowledge and practice that arose out of the place itself, and with their own concerns” (Bolton 1999: 346).

Contrary to the fears mentioned in many studies on the introduction of radio in industrialized countries—that the technology would discourage people from talking to each other (Johnson [1988] 2017: 172)—in this island context it was quite the opposite: radio enabled the inhabitants of different islands to communicate. The technology was used—and still is to a certain extent—to send not only collective messages such as information on the circulation of copra boats, which also transport other goods and passengers, but also personal messages. Examples of these personal messages include information on deaths and births, parcels due for collection at the boat, letters carried by someone to be collected at the airport, or the announcement of a forthcoming arrival on the island—as Bolton notes: “Service messages have always been the most listened-to program” (1999: 345). In addition, as we shall see in this chapter, the early years of radio in Vanuatu present an example of a highly participative technology.

When the journalists Godwin Ligo (ni-Vanuatu) and Paul Gardissat (French) launched their respective programs broadcasting local music and oral histories in the early 1970s, people reacted positively across the entire archipelago and these journalists received a great deal of encouraging listener correspondence. Gardissat supposedly received fifty or so letters a day. He even set up a system of “traveling cassettes” by sending a Dictaphone with blank cassette tapes to people on remote islands, which enabled them to make recordings and send them into the station (Bolton 1999: 347). Ligo concentrated on the competitiveness of his listeners’ reactions:

People would hear a story from another island, or another village on their island, or even from another clan in their own area, that was similar to one they also told themselves, and would write to the radio requesting that their version be broadcast. Sometimes, Ligo said, they would write to say that the version first broadcast had been stolen from them. Or they might write to say that they had the same story in their own island, but that it went further than the story that had been broadcast.

(Bolton 1999: 346)

This bears witness to the way in which the inhabitants took advantage of the technical means radio offered in order to extend their possibilities for using the power and prestige surrounding their knowledge into the realm of broadcasting. Ligo clarified, “[t]his did not happen so frequently with songs, which were sung in local languages, and therefore not accessible to the majority of listeners” (Bolton 1999: 347). For, in Vanuatu, knowledge circulates in different ways: “[S]ome knowledge circulates secretly, narrowcast along lineal roads that snake through the forest, or in the private conversations between a knower and his heir. Other knowledge circulates publicly, broadcast from open clearings to surrounding audience” (Lindstrom 1990: 130).

In certain situations such as land disputes, secret knowledge can be divulged in order to testify to the legitimacy of one’s claim to this property (Lindstrom 1990: 130). Secret songs containing genealogies and geographical names can also be revealed in this context. Therefore, the creation or performance of songs and dances can protect or hide particular secret content. For example, some songs are sung in idiosyncratic vernacular languages that are difficult to understand even for native speakers (François and Stern 2013); this makes retransmission beyond the original performance difficult. In other cases, as for instance the newēt dances of the Torres Islands, the songs are performed by a soloist encircled by other singers and musicians who “cover” his song with a vocal and instrumental ostinato:

While stamping the board, the musicians sing a hocket “O ho, Ohé o—O ho, Ohéo”… Once this setting is created, the soloist can finally begin to sing the newēt song proper. Its melody and rhythm seem independent from the main rhythm, and is largely drowned out by the latter. This is in fact deliberate: most newēt poems are secret (toq; lit. “sacred”), and must remain inaudible to the non-initiated crowd—for fear that the song, which belongs to the singer and his family, be stolen from him. In the Lo-Toga language, the verb gupe “hide” designates the way in which the choristers, with their loud panting (“O ho, Ohé-o”), conceal the voice of the soloist.

(François and Stern 2013: 123)

In a language incomprehensible to the uninitiated, certain secret songs can be broadcast on the radio without divulging the secrets. In this way, kastom dances, instrumental music, and songs are known to be part of reserved or restricted repertoires belonging to a family, an island, a village community, or another form of hierarchical group; payment in traditional money is expected for their transmission (Leach and Stern 2020; Stern 2013). These special repertoires, even on a very local scale, regularly give rise to property and ownership claims when performed publicly. At times the inhabitants of neighboring communities accuse each other in ceremonial or festival contexts of stealing a particular song, dance, musical instrument, element of a dance, or even a whole genre, like water or bamboo band music. When this competitiveness and these “arguments” are broadcast on the radio, they are simply an extension and augmentation of the typical local strategies used to control the circulation of knowledge (Bolton 1999: 346).

Although listeners were especially drawn to programs on kastom during the early years of radio, other forms of music were also regularly broadcast at this time. Styles included string band music, popular music from other Pacific islands, and Anglophone and Francophone popular styles. We could therefore describe these early days of radio as a time of “cultural democracy,” in the classic sense of being open to all cultural forms, opinions, and criticisms: This participation is the democratic ideal par excellence: a society which does not make available to its members the resources necessary for their fulfillment as distinctive individuals and as fully participative members can be neither just nor democratic (Zask 2016: 44). For those who could pick up the signal, radio broadcasting created a space where all members of society could express themselves, share knowledge, discuss cultural matters, criticize, and reply to criticisms. Let us remember Foucault’s words about the “ambiguous interplay of secrecy and disclosure” (1971: 18). Through self-controlled disclosure and restriction of information, radio broadcasting enabled individuals on dispersed island communities to make their voices heard across the water.

Between Public Broadcasting and Private Secrets

The first known recordings of the archipelago’s music were made by John Layard in 1914 and soon followed by a handful of other researchers and travelers. Most of these early sound documents long remained in the obscurity of archives, scattered all over the world. A select few examples from former colonial archives were recently returned to the archives of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta [VKS]: formerly, New Hebrides Cultural Centre). The Cultural Centre expanded the earli...