For 31 months between 1979 and 1995, James F. Weiner conducted anthropological research amongst the Foi people in Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. This book contains the transcriptions, translations, and descriptions of the songs he recorded. The texts of women’s sago songs (obedobora), men’s ceremonial songs (sorohabora), and women’s sorohabora are included. Men turn the prosaic content of womenís sago songs into their ownsorohabora songs, which are performed the night following large-scale inter-community pig kills, called dawa. While women sing sago songs by themselves, men sing their ceremonial songs in groups of paired men. Women also have their own ceremonial versions of such songs. The songs are memorial in intent; they are designed to commemorate the lives of men who are no longer living. Most commonly they do so by naming the places the deceased inhabited during his lifetime. These song texts and translations are introduced by Weiner. Ethnomusicologist Don Niles then brings together information about each type of song and considers these Foi genres in relation to those of neighbouring groups, highlighting aspects of regional performance styles. Consideration is also given to the poetic devices used in Papua New Guinea songs. Eighteen recordings illustrating the Foi genres discussed in this book are available for download. It remains uncertain how such songs may be affected by the major oil extraction project that has been undertaken in the region for more than two decades. This book will interest students of anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, verbal art, aesthetics, and cultural heritage.

This book, based on fieldwork spanning a decade, gives a comprehensive analysis of the musical life of a unique Polynesian community whose geographical isolation, together with a local ban on missionaries and churches, combine to allow its 600 members to maintain a level of traditional cultural practices unique to the region. Takü is arguably the only location where traditional Polynesian religion continues to be practiced. This book explores the many ways in which spirit activities impact on both domestic and ritual life, how group singing and dancing give audible and visible expression to a variety of religious beliefs, and how spirit mediums relay songs and dances from the recent dead. Takü’s community is well able to articulate the significance of their own strong performance tradition, and this book allows expert singers and dancers to speak passionately for themselves on subjects they understand intimately. Musical ethnographies from the Pacific are rare. Like Moyle’s earlier landmark volumes on Samoan and Tongan music, and also his trilogy on Australian Aboriginal music, this work will be of immense value to Pacific studies and will assume a place among the recognized staples of ethnomusicological research.

The genres of sung tales that are the subject of this volume are one of the most striking aspects of the cultural scene in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Composed and performed by specialist bards, they are a highly valued art form. From a comparative viewpoint they are remarkable both for their scale and complexity, and for the range of variation that is found among regional genres and individual styles. Though their existence has previously been noted by researchers working in the Highlands, and some recordings made of them, most of these genres have not been studied in detail until quite recently, mainly because of the challenging range of disciplinary expertise that is required--in anthropology, linguistics, and ethnomusicology. This volume presents a set of interrelated studies by researchers in all of those fields, and by a Papua New Guinea Highlander who has assisted with the research based on his lifelong familiarity with one of the regional genres. The studies presented here (all of them previously unpublished and written especially for this volume) are of groundbreaking significance not only for specialists in Melanesia or the Pacific, but also for readers with a more general interest in comparative poetics, mythology, musicology, or verbal art.

The Rough Guide to World Musicwas published for the first time in 1994 and became the definitive reference. Six years on, the subject has become too big for one book- hence this new two-volume edition. World Music 2- Latin and North America, Caribbean, India, Asia and Pacifichas full coverage of everything from salsa and merengue to qawwali and gamelan, and biographies of artists from Juan Luis Guerra to The Klezmatics to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Features include more than 80 articles from expert contributors, focusing on the popular and roots music to be seen and heard, both live and on disc, and extensive discographies for each country, with biography-notes on nearly 2000 musicians and reviews of their best available CDs. It includes photos and album cover illustrations which have been gathered from contemporary and archive sources, many of them unique to this book, and directories of World Music labels, specialist stores around the world and on the internet.

The guitar is one of the most evocative instruments in the world. It features in music as diverse as heavy metal, blues, indie and flamenco, as well as Indian classical music, village music making in Papua New Guinea and carnival in Brazil. This cross-cultural popularity makes it a unique starting point for understanding social interaction and cultural identity. Guitar music can be sexy, soothing, melancholy or manic, but it nearly always brings people together and creates a common ground even if this common ground is often the site of intense social, cultural, economic and political negotiation and contest.This book explores how people use guitars and guitar music in various nations across the world as a musical and symbolic basis for creating identities. In a world where place and space are challenged by the pace of globalization, the guitar provides images, sounds and styles that help define new cultural territories. Guitars play a crucial part in shaping the commercial music industry, educational music programmes, and local community atmosphere. Live or recorded, guitar music and performance, collecting and manufacture sustains a network of varied social exchanges that constitute a distinct cultural milieu.Representing the first sustained analysis of what the guitar means to artists and audiences world-wide, this book demonstrates that this seemingly simple material artefact resonates with meaning as well as music.

The garamut is a log idiophone that is found in many of the coastal and island areas of Papua New Guinea. The instrument’s primary use is as a speech surrogate and in some regions the garamut is also used in large ensembles to play complex music for dancing. In Baluan Island, within the Manus Province, this style of garamut playing is comparatively highly developed. This book follows the author’s processes and methods in learning to play the music of the garamut, to the level at which he became accepted as a garamut player by the people of Baluan. Lewis argues that analysis is essential in learning to play the rapid tempi and complex rhythms of Baluan garamut music, in a cultural context where there is no formal teaching process for the music. The transcription and analysis of the Baluan garamut repertoire is the centrepiece of this study, reflecting the cognitive structures of the learning process, and revealing the inner workings of the music’s complexity as well as a striking beauty of form and structure. The book concludes with reflections on the process of a ‘cultural outsider’ becoming a garamut player in Baluan and on the role of musical analysis in that process, on the ethnomusicologist’s role in transmission of the music, and on the nature of continuity and change in a musical society such as Baluan.

The island is a powerful metaphor in everyday speech which extends almost naturally into several academic disciplines, including musicology. Islands are imagined as isolated and unique places where strange, exotic, different and unexpected treasures can be found by daring adventurers. The magic inherent within this positioning of islands as places of discovery is an aspect which permeates the theoretical, methodological and analytical boundaries of this edited book. Showcasing the breadth of current musicological research in Australia and New Zealand, this edited collection offers a range of subtle and innovative reflections on this concept both in established and well-charted territories of music research.

Previous edition by Bruce M. Beehler, Thane K. Pratt, and Dale A. Zimmerman.