Music of New Guinea

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The music of New Guinea includes the musical styles of the island of New Guinea , as they were practiced in cultic rituals that have been practiced for centuries and for entertainment by the various Papuan and Austronesian ethnic groups, as well as the new styles that initially emerged with the beginning of colonization in the 19th century Christianization and, since the middle of the 20th century , have developed from the coastal cities through Australian and Indonesian influences of the respective pop music.

Vocal music dominates, which can be heard monophonic or polyphonic . Widespread musical instruments include hourglass-shaped drums ( pidgin : kundu ), slit drums ( garamut ), bamboo flutes , pan flutes and mouth-amplified lamellophones ( susap ). In the 20th century, guitars were added, which are played by an ever-increasing number of local string bands and power bands and which can often be heard on the radio.

One of the tasks of traditional music practice is to strengthen social cohesion. The music of New Guinea, like other forms of cultural expression, is in a process of change from a means of community self-identification to a progressive loss of tradition that began with the onset of western civilization.

Kundu drummers at Port Moresby

Function of music

Sing-sing in Wabag in the Enga Province

In New Guinea there are over 700 Papuan languages that do not represent a unit in terms of language genetics . The majority of the Papuan ethnic groups are only a few thousand members strong. There is no uniform cultural development. Each village owns or previously had its own songs, dances, musical instruments and cult objects carved from wood, the possession of which is considered a privilege.

The diversity of the ethnic groups has its origin in the respective cosmogonic myths, which mostly presuppose an already existing world, but in which one's own existence is based on it and emphasized as unique compared to neighboring tribes. Large festive events that are held periodically serve as a repetition of the creation process. In order to remain effective, the myth must be regularly brought to life in a ritual drama. Each tribe can be traced back to a founder figure who, according to tradition , is worshiped in an ancestral cult . With the worship of ancestors, a connection to the mythical prehistoric times is established through a long chain of ancestors. Another reason for the independent development of many cultural phenomena is the different habitats, isolated from one another by natural barriers, in difficult-to-access high mountain valleys and swamp areas near the coast or along rivers.

In certain regions in the highlands, a festival lasting several days is held at irregular intervals, at which the clans of several villages come together. The reason for this major event called on Pidgin sing-sing can be that money is to be collected to pay a bride price or, more recently, to build a church. Before the introduction of the currency, pigs, oil and shell money changed hands. In any case, a sing-sing is an important social event that serves to promote understanding and at which a lot is donated for reasons of prestige and pigs are slaughtered as a feast. The dances of Goroka and Mount Hagen , performed in splendid costumes, have been discovered by tourist tour operators.

Initiation through scarification on Sepik 1975

Music and dance are indispensable components of all ceremonies that serve to evoke necromancy , as well as plays in which birds and other animals of the forest are imitated in symbolic acts, of annual Thanksgiving celebrations for yams and initiation rituals for boys and girls. Initiation is only partly a religious phenomenon, it mainly means the integration of the boys into the community of the grown men of their clan. The hardly practiced initiation rituals were staged with different efforts depending on the tribe. After the typical course of a transition period , there was a difficult-to-bear separation phase outside the village. The concluding ceremony often contained the idea of ​​death and subsequent rebirth, which was represented in the Gulf of Papua by a meter-long monster, in whose open mouth the initiator had to crawl before he was violently shaken out.

Sacred music serves as a means of communication with the dead. Birds are summoned in rituals because spirits are articulated through their voices. Basically, a certain melody or a rhythmic pattern of the music has real power, as the voices of the ancestors are heard in it. The meaning of ritual music can only be inferred from the respective social context. Even within the same culture, there is no universal understanding of the content of a musical structure. The musical content only becomes clear when its frame of reference is known.

There is a fundamental distinction between publicly accessible and secret music. Music intended for all members of the community can also have a sacred meaning. On the other hand, the secret sacred music, which is required for invocations of the spirits and initiations, must not be heard by women and uninitiated boys. Already at the sight of the musical instruments used in these rituals, women are threatened with severe, fateful misfortune.

Margaret Mead described in 1930 how boys on the Isle of Manus learned the activities of adults through impartial imitation. At a dance they usually sat next to the large slit drums and drummed in time on small wooden blocks. Like all slit drums, the garamut have a function as a message transmitter and can use fixed drum sequences to announce the beginning of a festival or the death of a villager and invite someone to return home.

In 1927 the Australian colonial administration banned headhunting in Papua New Guinea. It took several years and several times the imposition of draconian punishments until the prohibition was observed and so inevitably the socio-religious rituals associated with it disappeared, at least in the accessible areas. From 1960 the Australian administration began to penetrate into the areas previously closed off from the outside world. The rapidly advancing missionary work by Christian churches, some of which went to work with fundamentalist ideas, the building of schools, the introduction of the monetary economy, the trade in crocodile skins and the deforestation led to fundamental social and cultural changes in the most remote areas. Due to the abandonment or destruction of the men's houses, material culture disappeared in many places if it had not entered the art market in good time.

Research history

To this day, Western New Guinea , the Indonesian part of the island, is one of the most poorly explored areas in the world in terms of music ethnology . The reason for this is not only to be found in the fact that many areas are difficult to reach, but is historically based mainly on the division of New Guinea during the colonial period. The colonial rule of Dutch New Guinea barely extended beyond the coastal strip of the western half of the island. Inland expeditions to research music took place from the end of the 19th century from the port towns of German New Guinea with the northeastern part of the island baptized Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land .

The first investigations into music were made by the German doctor and ethnologist Otto Schellong in 1899 and by the colonial official Victor Schmidt-Ernsthausen in 1890. How difficult it was to gain access to the musical forms of expression of the “natives” because the theoretical tools for an adequate notation were lacking and you could get through a Eurocentric feeling of superiority was limited in the assessment, becomes clear in an article in the quarterly journal for musicology:

“The wild howling with which the natives perform their chants while dancing at the same time, which is extremely physically stressful, usually makes a dance seem less than beautiful. A little moderation of the voices and movements would give the eye and the ear a better impression of the melodies and dance figures, which are not bad in and of themselves. "( Victor Schmidt-Ernsthausen : About the music of the natives of German New Guinea, 1890, p. 268)

In the area around Potsdamhafen in today's Madang Province , the doctor and ethnologist Rudolf Pöch made recordings of chants of the Monumbo (subgroup of the Torricelli languages ) with the Edison phonograph on phonograph cylinders from 1904 to 1906 . All war dances were accompanied by choirs with one or more voices with hourglass drums. Walter Graf analyzed the rollers in the phonogram archive in Vienna in 1934 . The German Naval Expedition (1907–1909) sent by the Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin produced plenty of material . In addition to collecting objects, the ideas and behavior of the peoples visited should also be recorded as a new goal. This was followed by the Hamburg South Sea Expedition from 1908 to 1910 and the Kaiserin Augusta River Expedition 1912/1913, which explored a large area on the Sepik .

Between 1904 (by Emil Stefan) and 1907 (by Richard Thurnwald ) the Melanesia collection in the Berlin Phonogram Archive grew to 651 music recordings made during this period. The Berlin doctor Richard Neuhauss made 139 wax roller recordings from 1908 to 1910 at various locations with a focus around Finschhafen and added explanations, lyrics and translations. He did not record a vocal tone and gave no information about the speed, so the pitch of the pieces of music can only be estimated. Other sound recordings, including those from the Solomon Islands , were made by Ernst Frizzi in 1911. Until the First World War , German New Guinea remained the focus of music-ethnological research. From there, 118 phonograph recordings were still preserved after the Second World War, the poor technical quality of which is compensated for by the fact that the preserved pieces of music are still practically free of Christian influences. Marius Schneider published 27 transmissions of these songs in 1934 in his History of Polyphony in a different context and without explanation.

The musical research carried out in British New Guinea during this period was much less. For this region the Englishman Charles Seligman (1904), the Finnish ethnologist Gunnar Landtman (1910–11) and the Polish native Bronislaw Malinowski should be mentioned. Seligman's student did research in New Guinea from 1914 to 1918. In the period that followed, ethnologists' music recordings fell significantly. A notable exception is the Swiss Paul Wirz , who carried out field research in western New Guinea in 1927 and 1930–31 with the Marind-anim . Jaap Kunst made the first attempt at a musical overview in 1931 with A Study of Papuan Music.

Much of the material collected at the beginning of the century was not evaluated until the 1950s in the Berlin phonogram archive. From the 1960s onwards, a methodological change took hold, researchers now stayed in one place for a longer period of time. Only since then has music ethnological field research in the actual sense been carried out, which is mostly limited to Papua New Guinea . Wolfgang Laade brought back extensive sound recordings from his stay in the Western Province from 1963-64 , which he published in 1971 and 1993. The ethnomusicologist Vida Chenoweth , born in Oklahoma in 1929 , wrote the first dissertation on the music of New Guinea based on her own field research after a long stay in New Guinea. Previously, the scientific analyzes had come about on the basis of other collected material.

One of the few field researches in western New Guinea was carried out by the Japanese Hiroko Oguri on the north coast from 1973. In 1978 Artur Simon worked in the central highlands and in 1981 Gerald Florian Messner worked in several places in the region. In 1981, K. van Arsdale published the results of his stay with the Asmat on the south coast.

In 1972 a music department was established at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby . In addition to teaching classical western music, local music traditions are also taught there.

Regional musical traditions

Highlands of the Papua region

Most of the Papua region is located south of the central, west-east running mountain ranges. In the two central highland provinces , Western and Eastern Highlands Province , the hourglass drums ( Kundu ) are used almost everywhere , but not all ethnic groups make them themselves. Some get them in barter. In contrast to the instruments of the coastal regions, the Kunduz have no carrying handles carved from the side of the wood, but only a loop of string with which they are held while playing. The lower half of the drums can be decorated with carvings , the depressions are painted with earth colors. In the past, the Kunduz were rubbed with pork fat before each ritual use, which is interpreted as an act of renewing their magical powers.

In addition to the Kunduz, side-blown bamboo flutes are among the sacred instruments. They are played in pairs syncopated by men. During the preparation time for their initiation, boys learn the secret of how to play. The "ghost flutes" without finger holes are open at the bottom. The pitch can be varied by blowing over and closing the end opening with the palm of your hand.

Eastern Highlands

Pan flute from the New Ireland archipelago in the east

In the south of the Eastern Highlands (Angan language family) there is also secret ensemble of pairs played bamboo flutes, the end closed ( Gedackt is). In general, such flutes rarely produce more than one note. There are no Kunduz among the Angan. Further east in Morobe Province , another Angan group plays bamboo flutes in public.

In addition, flutes with four finger holes are represented throughout the highlands, with which bird calls are imitated. In one region they were therefore often made from a specially shaped root wood of a type of bamboo, whereby the sound hole ended in a stylized bird's head. Another secret instrument were bamboo trumpets with a bottle gourd as a bell , the pitch of which could be varied by pushing into one another and pulling out bamboo tubes.

As Idiophone pumpkin come rattle before or bamboo sections that are filled with seeds and are shaken by women. The Kunduz are covered with the skins of possum , lizards or snakes. An earlier and rarer instrument is a two-string mouth-reinforced musical bow. The Usarufa used to know bundled panpipes that were seven to twelve centimeters long.

Western Highlands

Initiation ceremonies and secret instruments have disappeared right around Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands. To this end, the exchange-based sing-sing festivals are organized there, which are accompanied by Kunduz. They are called tea in the Enga Province , moka by the Melpa spokesmen for the region and mok-ink in Mendi (capital of the Southern Highlands Province ) .

Enga Province

The approximately 200,000 Enga speakers of the highland province of the same name settle north and west of Mount Hagen and form the largest population group in New Guinea. The dance songs performed at the sing-sings are called mali lyingi . In their famous dances, the men form a row with their elbows crossed. They wear long fiber skirts and tufts of bird feathers on their heads and beat their knees to the rhythm of the drums.

The headdress worn in many variations by men has a magical meaning in the highlands. On the one hand, the main hair should be specially protected, on the other hand there is a belief that one's own magical powers can be strengthened by putting on a headdress. In addition to individual long feathers of certain (symbolically significant) species of birds, there are colorful wigs made of knotted nets and helmets made of bark material.

Kundus are called laiyane , their covering consists of the raw hides of lizards or pigs, which are raised when wet and glued to the edges. There are also pan flutes ( pupe ) and 40 centimeter long bamboo flutes ( kululu ) with three to five finger holes and about three centimeters inside diameter.

Chimbu Province

The bamboo flutes ( kuakumba ) played in pairs by men in Chimbu Province have an open distal end and are closed at the near end at the bamboo knot. The side blow hole is 15 centimeters away. The pitch can be varied with the palm of the hand at the bottom. Their length is 60 to 70 centimeters. Women are not allowed to see these secret instruments, so they are kept in special containers in a corner of the house.

For entertainment, pan flutes ( perurupe ) made of bamboo and bamboo lamellophones (pidgin: susap, locally: tambagle ) are played. Longitudinal flutes are called pumingi (from pu , "to blow" and mingi , "container"). Near the far end they have four finger holes. Since the 1980s, some flutes have been made of metal or plastic tubes.

Southern Highlands

Huli dancers

The Southern Highlands Province is culturally homogeneous and is inhabited by 100,000 to 150,000 Huli . The instruments are mostly played solo. Lamellophones made from wild bamboo are called hiriyula or yulambe , and one end is wrapped with string. Hourglass drums are called tabage . They are held with the left hand and hit with the right palm. A special drum is the dindanao tabage , which can only be beaten by male necromancers . In the corresponding ritual, two to three necromancers with long skirts and feather headdress walk while they drum around a fire. Their strange appearance should make the ghosts laugh and thus make them disappear more easily.

There are three sizes of bundled panpipes that can be up to two or three feet long. The gulupobe has one closed tube and six open tubes with a length of up to 77 centimeters. The gulungulu is up to 100 centimeters long. A Huli singer who blows to his voice in rapid succession in a pipe flute, generates a Hoquetus -like toothed tone sequence, with the Eintonflöten vocals hindewhu the Central African pygmies Ba-Benzele was compared.

A two-stringed, mouth-amplified musical bow ( gawa ), tuned to a third , which is played by women, is 20 to 30 centimeters long, the one played by men is 50 centimeters. They are used for courtship and general entertainment. The language of the Huli is tonal , so a linguistic exchange can also take place by means of melody instruments. The singing includes solo voices, collective yodelling , love laments, and storytelling.

North coast of Papua New Guinea

This area, known as the Mamose Region, encompasses the hills north of the central mountain range to the sea and is divided into the four provinces of Sandaun , East Sepik , Madang and Morobe .

Sepik

In the river region of the Sepik , several ethnic groups, who were already known for their artistic products at the beginning of the 20th century, live in a fertile coastal plain and a swampy middle and upper reaches. The livelihood on the middle Sepik is the harvest of sago palms , fishing and the sale of handicrafts to tourists.

The music is just as diverse as the artistically demanding wood carvings. Only men blow the closed flutes, they are used in the ensemble at initiation. They are played alternately in pairs, longer bamboo flutes have finger holes.

Seed and leaf rattle worn on the ankles of dancers in East Sepik Province

In the Iatmul (Ndu languages) on the middle Sepik flutes are called wapi , the term wapi for “long yams” in a neighboring tribe indicates the importance of the instrument. They are two to three meters long flutes that are closed at the end and usually have no finger holes. They are played in pairs and, like the large panpipes, are only used ceremonially. Each pair of flutes bears the name of an ancestor whose voice they visualize. Wooden trumpets are conical and a little over a meter long. Flutes are used exclusively in ceremonial music in other parts of New Guinea.

The wooden slit drums, which are up to 4.5 meters long and represent certain ancestors, are known. These slotted drums, whose name comes from the hardwood with the local name garamut ( Vitex cofassus, English New Guinea teak ), which was previously used for their construction , are hollowed out with axes over a period of several months to a wall thickness of around 50 to 80 centimeters in diameter 2.5 centimeters remains. On one side they end in a head shaped like a pig's snout, a crocodile or similar revered animal. At night they should be heard up to 18 kilometers away.

A special feature of the Iatmul are water drums played in pairs , which were previously used for initiation and are now shown to tourists. They are in the form of large wooden hourglass drums with side handles, by which they are held and pounded with a thud on a surface of water. In terms of the type of sound generation, they are not drums, but percussion idiophones. Alternatively, you can hit the water with an oval board. Vessel flutes ( ocarinas ) and buzzers have become rare.

As in many regions, musical instruments are often played in pairs, an expression for a dual principle of the world order that relates, for example, the sun to the son and the earth to the mother. The flutes played in pairs imitate the voices of birds and represent the ancestral spirits , whereby a pair of flutes only visualizes a specific spirit. Longitudinal flutes, jew's harps, small panpipes and musical bows, which are also played by women, are used for entertainment.

Tambaran

Tambaran House on Sepik

The ethnic groups of the Arapesh live in a long area that extends from the mountains on the northwest coast in an easterly direction to the lowlands on the lower reaches of the Sepik. Flutes are used in their secret music for the Tambaran rituals. The pidgin word tambaran denotes a religious idea, the group of spirits revered in it and the symbolically performed cult acts . The complicated religious concept flows into a social system that is vertically structured through a series of initiations from childhood to old age. The strictly controlled exclusion of women and children from the Tambaran cults result in two separate cultural worlds within the same social order. Music, like any artistic activity, was felt to be something supernatural that women stayed away from. Women were not allowed to see a Tambaran ghost under any circumstances, so its approach was heralded by noises and loud flute tones, as Margaret Mead observed in 1930. She was the first to describe the general beliefs of the Arapesh and introduced Tambaran, the "supernatural patron saint of adult men", as the universal term instead of several regional terms in the ethnological literature. The center of the cult for each clan is the Tambaran house decorated with carvings (crocodiles, fertility symbols) , the secret men's meeting house (ceremonial house) and the whereabouts of the spirits. It is avoided by the women of the village, even if it is the main attraction for tourists today. Meetings of men still take place in the existing Tambaran houses, but they had to give up their political power to the Australian colonial administration before the middle of the 20th century.

In parts of the Huon Peninsula to the south of the Madang Province, flutes evoke the voice of the Tambaran spirit. The player pushes a thick branch into the lower end of a bamboo flute, shortening the column of air, increasing the tone.

In parts of the Sepik area, ensembles of two to nine bamboo flutes and a Kundu, occasionally with a trumpet, are at the center of the Tambaran rituals. With the open length flutes, the knot is provided with a small hole at the upper end as an injection opening.

Oro Province

Binandere speakers in the Oro Province on the northeast coast have a complex dance drama (ario) in which the behavior of the hornbill , bird of paradise or the movements of wood in the water are shown. The ario consists of twelve scenes whose content and movement patterns are fixed. The idea of ​​the natural environment is made vivid with artistic means.

Like Binandere, Managalasi is a Papuan language. South of the provincial capital Popondetta , the Managalasi speakers live in small villages at an altitude of 900 meters. They accompany their singing at nightly festivities with snake-leather-covered drums and rattles. The scene is lit by a bamboo fire. The men dance with the hourglass drums ( chaja ) that they occasionally hold over their heads, the women play a supporting role with their rattles on the edge. The rattles ( kiji'i ) consist of bundles of 15 centimeter long seed pods. There are also rattles made of 30 centimeter long bamboo tubes ( itiuri ), which each singer holds in his left hand while he hits one end with his right hand so that the tube hits the thigh. The same bamboo tubes used by women in dances are called 'urutu . A 30 centimeter long flute ( hurisia ) made from a pipe two centimeters in diameter has two finger holes near the lower closed end. The open end is blown diagonally over the edge. This creates long flowing melody lines. The local bamboo lamellophone , played only by young men, is called pupuaha .

Here, too, an octave doubling occurs occasionally in choir singing, the pitch ranges up to the fourth and a little further in dance songs.

South coast of Papua New Guinea

In the coastal villages of the Gulf Province songs are sung for entertainment with drum accompaniment polyphonic often with parallel quart - or bottom are recited spacings, sometimes the melody is one octave above or below doubled.

Ethnic groups of the Angan language family hold sing-sings in the mountains , which mark the end of the lamentation period for a deceased person. There are four Angan languages ​​in the Gulf Province, three of which have fewer than 1000 speakers, and the more than 30,000 speakers of the fourth language (Kamea) live mainly in the north in the Morobe Province. At the end of the nightly dance event, the meat brought by the guests is cooked and then distributed. The choral music of the Angan consists of melodies sung by the members side by side in unison and at a non-coordinated tempo, which move around a common sequence of notes. The most common is the solo singing, which is usually accompanied by a constant drum beat. The pitch range is often an octave. In duets, similar phrases are sung alternately. One singer holds a note at the end of a melody sequence, while the other starts the melody again.

Little research has been done on the traditional music of the great Western Province . There are dances that are accompanied by hourglass drums, as well as slit drums, longitudinal flutes open at the bottom with a finger hole, bundled panpipes and jew's harps.

Between the Fly River and the New Guinea border, the solo instrument used is an open, 60 to 75 centimeter long flute ( agöb burari ), which has a finger hole near the lower end and consists of a thin-walled bamboo tube. It imitates bird calls. The pan flute ( agöb ta'taro ) with six to eight pipes of different lengths made from the same thin-walled bamboo tube is blown lightly through the upper openings. There is also a bamboo lamellophone ( agöb darombi ) with a tongue 18 to 30 centimeters long that is plucked rhythmically with the thumb.

Western New Guinea

Asmat

Often in songs of the Asmat in the swamps and forests on the south coast ( Arafura Sea ) stories are told of men who were mistreated by women. Women, on the other hand, sing songs of mockery against the men, which the audience acknowledges with laughter. Women don't play musical instruments. Both sexes know circle dances, which are accompanied by hourglass drums.

The drum covering on both sides of the Asmat with a diameter of 12 to 15 centimeters consists of lizard or iguana skin and can be tuned by a wax coating in the middle. The drums are mostly made of ironwood .

Already in the Asmat creation myth it is about music in addition to wooden figures. Her ancestor Fumeripits built the first men's house, then felled trees from which he carved figures that he set up in the men's house and also made the first drum. When he hit them, the characters began to dance and they became the first people. Since then, no festival has been imaginable without the hourglass-shaped drums.

The Asmat organize ceremonies according to the seasons, life cycles, in order to establish a connection to the ancestral spirits and as initiation festivals. No festival can take place without music. Music is assigned a power that helps against diseases and calamities and is supposed to equip the village for defense against the enemy. Initiation ceremonies used to take place after headhunting. End-blown trumpets made of wood or bamboo were used for head hunting. The last large-scale ancestral ritual ( bis ) took place in 1974. Up to nine meters high wooden posts in relief were set up, which symbolized the ancestors.

Eipo

Initiation chants are widespread in the central mountains; the popular war songs celebrating a victory have lost their current occasion. The most common style of singing is alternating chant , in which the voice of the first singer is repeated slightly modified by the second. The pitch range is rarely more than a fifth.

The small mountain people of the Eipo on the upper reaches of the Eipomek River live in round huts in settlements with 20 to 250 inhabitants. Their only own musical instrument is a bingkong , ten centimeters long lamellophone, which, unlike the other lamellophones in New Guinea, is not made of bamboo but of the sweet grass species Miscanthus floridulus . The habitat of the Eipo at an altitude of up to 2000 meters is unsuitable for bamboo with its cold, wet climate. Hourglass -shaped drums are obtained from the lowlands and used for ceremonial songs ( mot ) and men's dances, which deal with war, initiations or compensation payments to neighboring clans. Mot are only performed by the men on the dance floor in the village. Boys are also allowed to learn the dance elsewhere. First there is a short lead singer who articulates monotonous meaningless syllables until there is multiple sounds in a choir. The dancers form a semicircle and then form a snake. They wear wide grass aprons that make a noise when they hop. These are the names of entertaining chants by men and women that deal with love, nature or special events. Private lamentations are called layalayana . The fourth style of music fungfungana is intended to cure diseases of humans and pigs. This requires a male specialist who sucks the diseases out of the patient with magical chants.

At large sing-sings , so many pigs are taught and eaten for reasons of prestige that the village communities need about five years to have enough pigs bred for the next festival to take place.

North coast

Centuries ago, the north coast of Western New Guinea was in cultural exchange with Indonesia. Hump gongs made of brass were possibly introduced by fishermen from Seram Island , with which Mairasi men are accompanied by the usual drums in Fakfak village dances. The men run counter-clockwise in circles as they beat their instruments. There are two sizes of gongs: mamonggo have a height of 6 centimeters, the unguni of 11 centimeters, both with a diameter of about 35 centimeters. They hang on a string and are beaten with a wooden mallet.

There are or were at least secret flutes around Jayapura and on the island of Yapen . The Isirawa speakers, around 2000 people who live in the Jayapura district east of Sarmi, call the bamboo flute, which is only played by initiated men, asiina . According to the length: Asiinaya is the name of the 1.5 (1.7) meter long flute, the tiikiire is 1.3 meters and the faafrataya is one meter long. Women are caught in the storm or struck by lightning in the face of the flutes. Many chants of cultic music ("real chants") were already lost at the beginning of the 20th century, as the Dutch colonial administration had banned certain ceremonies such as the inauguration of the men's houses.

For popular music, the Isirawa men and women play a short bamboo flute (fatiya) and a snail horn . The jew's harp is called a caawa . Occasions for the performance of profane music today are for example the inauguration of public buildings or the New Year celebrations.

Modern developments in music

The Asmat have had constant contact with the outside world since the 1950s. The festivals of the creation myths and their ancestral festivals ( bis ) are officially forbidden. The Asmat must register all ritual celebrations with the Indonesian government in advance. Today, Indonesian pop music or the traditional music of neighboring peoples has reached even the most remote villages in western New Guinea via the radio, causing a rapid change in traditional forms of music.

The musical change began at the end of the 19th century in the parts of the island that were then accessible to Europeans and North Americans through missionary work, with which western hymns ( gospel music ) were introduced. The musical instruments brought into the country were harmonica , accordions and ukuleles . Radio broadcasts began in Papua New Guinea even before World War II. After 1945, the first string bands with guitars and ukuleles formed, brought by soldiers who had previously been stationed in the Philippines and Hawaii . From 1962 pop bands started using electric guitars . They often no longer sang their songs in the regional languages, but in pidgin . Blasius To Una, born in 1925, is considered to be the best singer of this time. He - influenced by the Country & Western style - reached a wide audience with songs in his mother tongue Kuanua for guitar accompaniment. He belonged to the Tolai people . On a long-playing record published in 1978, he alternated between singing and speaking. The annual Tolai Warwagira Festival for choral music and string bands has existed since 1971 .

In 1977, a little over a year after Papua New Guinea gained independence in September 1975, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) began releasing music tapes by local groups, opening the commercial market for phonograms containing music produced in the country. In the 1990s, two Port Moresby-based companies dominated the music business, Chin H. Meen Supersound Studios (CHM) founded in 1980 and Pacific Gold Studios (PGS) since 1983 . Apart from a few well-known and original musicians, the companies produced masses of similar-sounding pop music.

Today there are four main styles of music in Papua New Guinea, which mix traditional and originally foreign music styles: Sing-sing tumbuna (literally "songs of the ancestors") is the name of the traditional song, which changed in the 20th century under the influence of the Christian churches Has. Kwaia is the general name of all choral music, as well as the string bands mentioned , which mostly only play for tourists, and as a further development the power bands that emerged in the early 1960s , which imitate American rock 'n' roll with electrical instruments. Their alternative name is laiv ben ("live band").

One of the most famous singers in Melanesia is George Mamua Telek , born in 1959 near Rabaul, who started out as a singer in string bands in the 1970s and since the 1980s in power bands the traditional music of his Tolai people with American pop music and reggae brings together.

The contemporary further development of the sing-sings in remote highland villages are the cultural shows organized as major cultural events such as the Port Moresby Show , in which the traditional music styles (tumbuna) of different ethnic groups are performed together with modern pop music. Musicians and audiences attach great importance to these events in accordance with the traditional role of music. Occasionally chaotic situations arise because music performed outside of its cultural context can have an uncontrollable effect on those involved or certain behaviors are perceived as breaking taboos. These events have a major impact on the development and experience of music in New Guinea.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Heeschen: Above and Below. The categorization of the environment in the languages ​​of New Guinea. In: Mark Münzel (Ed.): New Guinea. Use and interpretation of the environment. Volume 2. Museum of Ethnology, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 601
  2. ↑ Waldemar Stöhr: The religions of New Guinea. In: Mark Münzel (Ed.): New Guinea. Use and interpretation of the environment. Volume 2. Museum für Völkerkunde, Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 428–435
  3. Jump up ↑ Goroka show - 1957 and 1958. The Papua New Guinea Association of Australia Photos
  4. ↑ Waldemar Stöhr: The religions of New Guinea. In: Mark Münzel (Ed.): New Guinea. Use and interpretation of the environment. Volume 2. Museum für Völkerkunde, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 433
  5. ↑ Margaret Mead : Youth and Sexuality in Primitive Societies. Volume 2: Childhood and Adolescence in Samoa. dtv, Munich 1970, p. 42f
  6. ↑ Milan Stanek: The men's house assembly in the culture of the Iatmul (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea). In: Mark Münzel (Ed.): New Guinea. Use and interpretation of the environment. Volume 2. Museum of Ethnology, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 631
  7. ↑ Simon, MGG, Col. 1272
  8. ↑ Quoted from Martin Müller: Comparative Music Psychology - a Berlin variant of Völkerpsychologie. In: Psychologie und Geschichte, Volume 3/4, April 1995, p. 298
  9. ^ Walter Graf: The musicological phonograms Rudolf Pöchs from the north coast of New Guinea. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Rudolf Pöch's estate, Series B, Volume II, Vienna 1959
  10. ↑ Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, Lora Wildenthal (eds.): Germany's Colonial Pasts. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2005, p. 44
  11. ^ Richard Neuhauss: German New Guinea. Berlin 1911, vol. 1
  12. ↑ Dieter Christensen: The music of Kate and Sialum. Contributions to the music of New Guinea. Dissertation Free University of Berlin 1957, pp. 7–12
  13. ^ Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Don Niles: The Music and Dance of New Guinea. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 478-480
  14. ^ Papua New Guinea. The Coast of the Western Province. Recorded in the field by Wolfgang Laade 1963-1964. Released as CD in 1993 by Jecklin-Disco JD 655-2
  15. ↑ a b Simon, MGG, Col. 1273
  16. ↑ Heinz-Christian Dosedla: Art and Artists in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. In: TRIBUS, No. 27, September 1978, pp. 104f
  17. ↑ Lorenz Lhazaleh: The Moka with the Melpa . lorenzk.com
  18. ↑ Don Niles, Allison Jablonko, Andrew J. Strathern, and others. a .: Highland Region of Papua New Guinea. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 511f
  19. ↑ Heinz-Christian Dosedla: Art and Artists in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. In: TRIBUS, No. 27, September 1978, p. 100
  20. ↑ Don Niles, Allison Jablonko, Andrew J. Strathern, and others. a .: Highland Region of Papua New Guinea. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 522-526
  21. ^ GCJ Lomas: The Huli People of Papua New Guinea. ( Memento of September 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) gabelomas.org
  22. ^ Victor A. Grauer: Echoes of our Forgotten Ancestors . In: The World of Music, Vol. 48, No. 2, (Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors) 2006, pp. 5–58, here p. 21
  23. ↑ Simon, MGG, Col. 1280
  24. ^ Terence E. Hays: Sacred Flutes, Fertility, and Growth in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. In: Anthropos, Vol. 81, H. 4./6, 1986, pp. 435-453
  25. ↑ Don Niles, Richard Scaglion, Vida Chenoweth et al. a .: Mamose Region of Papua New Guinea. In: Garland Encyclopedia, p. 556
  26. ^ Water Drum, 19th – early 20th century. Papua New Guinea, Middle Sepik region, Mindimbit village, Iatmul people. Wood, fiber. Metropolitan Museum
  27. ^ Gordon D. Spearritt: The Pairing of Musicians and Instruments in Iatmul Society. In: Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 14, 1982, pp. 106-125
  28. ↑ Simon, MGG, pp. 1283f
  29. ↑ Margaret Mead: Youth and Sexuality in Primitive Societies. Volume 3: Gender and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. dtv, Munich 1970, p. 71
  30. ↑ Milan Stanek: The men's house assembly in the culture of the Iatmul (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea). In: Mark Münzel (Ed.): New Guinea. Use and interpretation of the environment. Volume 2. Museum für Völkerkunde, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 623
  31. ^ Don Niles, Virginia Whitney, John D. Waiko, Vida Chenoweth, Wolfgang Laade: Papuan Region of Papua New Guinea. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 499-505
  32. ^ Don Niles, Virginia Whitney, John D. Waiko, Vida Chenoweth, Wolfgang Laade: Papuan Region of Papua New Guinea. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 496f
  33. ↑ Simon, MGG, Col. 1285
  34. ↑ Volker Beer: Drums of the Asmat. A round worldview? ( Memento from June 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) journal-ethnologie.de
  35. ^ Artur Simon: Types and Functions of Music in the Eastern Highlands of West Irian. In: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 22, No. 3, September 1978, pp. 441-455
  36. ↑ Simon, MGG, Col. 1277
  37. ^ Vida Chenoweth, Kathleen van Arsdale, Artur Simon: Irian Jaya Province of Indonesia. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 580-592
  38. ^ Vida Chenoweth, Kathleen van Arsdale, Artur Simon: Irian Jaya Province of Indonesia. In: Garland Encyclopedia, pp. 582f
  39. ^ Historical Periods in Papua New Guinea Music. In: Music Archive for the Pacific , Southern Cross University , Lismore, Australia
  40. ↑ Denis Crowdy, Philip Hayward: From The Ashes: A Case Study of the Re-development of Local Music Recording in Rabaul (Papua New Guinea) Following the 1994 Volcanic Eruptions. In: Convergence , Vol. 5, No. 3, September 1999, pp. 67–82, here p. 67f ( doi : 10.1177 / 135485659900500306 )
  41. ↑ George Telek : Homepage The Blunt Label, Australia 2004
  42. ^ Karl Neuenfeldt: Grassroots, Rock (s), and Reggae: Music and Mayhem at the Port Moresby Show. The Contemporary Pacific. A Journal of Island Affairs, Volume 10, Number 2, 1998, pp. 317–343 (PDF; 168 kB)