Category Archives: Australia and Pacific islands

by | October 28, 2024 · 6:00 am

RILM Launches DEUMM Online

RILM cordially invites you to join us for the release of DEUMM Online on Wednesday, 30 October 2024, at 7:30 pm CET / 1:30 pm EST. Co-sponsored by the Associazione fra i Docenti Universitari Italiani di Musica (ADUIM) and IAML-Italia, the event will take place in the Teatro Palladium auditorium in Rome, Italy.

Teatro Palladium, Ph. © Francesco Ciccone

DEUMM Online digitizes, enhances, and extends the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), the most important modern music dictionary in the Italian language. Comprising a broad range of entries (persons, topics, dances, genres, geographical locations, institutions, instruments, and works), DEUMM Online uses advanced and intuitive search and translation functionalities. This venerable music encyclopedia, which has set the standards in modern Italian music lexicography, is, in its new online format, once again an indispensable node in a comprehensive, international, networked research experience.

For those unable to join the Rome event in person, the event will be live streamed on YouTube by Fondazione Roma Tre Teatro Palladium, accessible directly from the following QR code:

The program (below) will include Daniele Trucco’s DEUMM-inspired music, greetings from Luca Aversano (President, ADUIM), Marcoemilio Camera (President, IAML Italia), and Tina Frühauf (Executive Director, RILM), as well as presentations by Zdravko Blažeković (Executive Editor, RILM), Stefano Campagnolo (Director, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma), Alex Braga (composer), and DEUMM Online’s general editors Antonio Baldassarre and Daniela Castaldo. Pianist Giuseppe Magagnino will also perform works by Ellington, Beethoven, The Beatles, and more.

And mark your calendars: DEUMM Online will be featured again at the following events:  

  • 19 November 2024: Turin, hosted by Istituto per i Beni Musicali di Piemonte at the Teatro Regio
  • 21 November 2024: Milan, hosted by the Archivio Storico Ricordi in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense

Hear more about DEUMM Online and download the DEUMM Online brochure and logo.

DEUMM Online trailer (Italian)

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by | October 25, 2024 · 6:00 am

Utopian desire and ukulele music in Japan

Historical and contemporary Japanese attitudes toward the ukulele have framed both the instrument and Hawaii as objects of idealized longing and utopian desire. This yearning embodies what Christine Yano describes as a “plucked paradise”—a concept that combines music-making on a stringed instrument with the imagery of flowers being harvested for personal enjoyment. In this context, plucking a string creates a soft, fleeting sound, while plucking a flower represents a subtle act of aesthetic appropriation. Both evoke a paradise that is temporary, sensual, and aestheticized.

Cover of a Japanese book of ukulele sheet music.

These perspectives raise important questions about the meanings that participants ascribe to the ukulele and its music in Japan. How do infrastructural elements, particularly the influence of Japanese Americans, contribute to the growth of ukulele culture in Japan? For instance, Japanese Americans like Haida “Harry” Yukihiko, considered the “Father of Hawaiian music in Japan”, and his brother Katsuhiko brought their knowledge of and enthusiasm for the ukulele to Japan in the 1920s when they visited to repatriate the ashes of their father but stayed to study at a university. Their enthusiasm for Hawaiian music and in-between status, with direct access to both Hawaii and Japan, helped foster the first ukulele boom in Japan. By examining the various dimensions involved in creating this “plucked paradise,” we can uncover the tensions, conflicts, and creative forces that shape this cultural exchange.

This according to “Plucking paradise: Hawaiian ukulele performance in Japan” by Christine R. Yano (Japanese studies 35/3 [2015] 317–330; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-82904).

Below, the Japanese duo Fukulele perform Clap your hands and sing with me, a song about world peace composed by Roy Sakuma. The group played the song at the 2022 Ukulele Festival Hawaii’s Global Play Along. The following video features the Japan Junior Ukulele Orchestra performing the same song.

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by | August 28, 2024 · 6:00 am

Radiation songs of the Marshall Islands

On March 1, 1954, the U.S. military detonated Castle Bravo, its most powerful nuclear bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Marshallese residents were evacuated to a nearby atoll two days later without their consent. For the next 75 years, Marshallese music has responded to the profound impacts of U.S. nuclear militarism on their homeland. This music reflects their religious, cultural, and political struggles to make visible the devastating consequences of nuclear violence. Marshallese singing in particular has become a powerful means of addressing the literal silencing of their voices, affected by radiation, as well as the broader suppression of information about the human radiation study.

U.S. Navy building new homes for Marshall Islands residents on Rongerik in 1946.

Composed during and after the nuclear testing era, Marshallese radiation songs offer insight into the processes of imperial ruination, rupture, and fragmentation by reflecting the pervasive impact of radioactive decay. Radiation songs reveal how radiation can be made sensible, illuminating the ways in which the U.S. nuclear project can be considered in terms of imperial ruination. U.S. geopolitical strategies have relied on systematically displacing the Marshallese from their indigenous agency, which is deeply rooted in their matrilineal culture. The performances of women from the Rongelapese community embody the presence of radiation, both in the lyrical content and the affective resonance of their music. These performances trace vocalized moments of decay, conveying how the physical and emotional aftermath of nuclear devastation is embodied and shared within their community.

This according to Radiation sounds: Marshallese music and nuclear silences by Jessica A. Schwartz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2021-4549) and “Listening to radioactive rubble: Vocal decay, gender, and nuclear ruination in the Marshall Islands” by Jessica A. Schwartz (Twentieth-century music 19/2 [2022] 200–208; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-3395).

August 29 is the International Day against Nuclear Tests. The image at the beginning of the post is of the Baker explosion, a nuclear explosion test conducted by the U.S. at the Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands in 1946.

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by | May 31, 2024 · 6:00 pm

The Hawaiian queen composer

Queen Liliʻuokalani was born into an extraordinarily musical family and was probably the most musically gifted of her class and time. She became Queen of Hawai’i in 1891 and reigned for two years, until she was deposed by the U.S. settlers under Sanford B. Dole, a Hawaii-born lawyer and judge who advocated for the Westernization of Hawaiian culture and government, and who later became the first and only president of the Hawaiian Republic. Under Dole’s orders, Liliʻuokalani was arrested in January 1895 and sentenced to life imprisonment; however, she was kept under house arrest in lolani Palace until her release in September of the same year.

Liliʻuokalani in 1853.

Her Hawaiian national anthem, composed circa 1868, was played at official functions for 20 years until a new anthem was written. In 1898, Liliʻuokalani wrote that her song compositions ran into the hundreds (after 19 years of composing at the time); even if that number was only half correct, it would still make her the most prolific Hawaiian composer of the 19th century.

Liliʻuokalani began her musical training around the age of seven with missionaries who taught her to sing. She was a multi-instrumentalist who was proficient on guitar, piano, zither, autoharp, and organ and was an adept sight-singer known to have developed perfect pitch. Liliʻuokalani’s early training took place during a unique period of Hawaiian history where Indigenous Hawaiian music traditions blended with Western cultures brought to the islands by sugar plantation owners and pineapple farmers.

Her aristocratic background exposed her to both worlds, as she learned about Hawaiian music, legends, and poetry along with Western waltzes and hymnody. Liliʻuokalani’s compositions often combined the melodies of hymns with storylines grounded in Hawaiian traditions. Although best known for love songs such as Aloha ‘Oe, many of her songs addressed political themes. For instance, the lyrics to one of her less-known compositions, Mai wakinekona a iolani hale, was published in a local Hawaiian language newspaper and informed people about the conditions of her imprisonment after being overthrown.

Read more in International encyclopedia of women composers (1987); find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

The painting at the beginning of the post is by Linda Ruiz-Lozito.

Listen to a 1904 recording of Queen Liliʻuokalani’s composition Aloha ‘Oe (Farewell to thee) below performed by Quartet of Hawaiian Girls from Kawaihao Seminary.

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by | November 21, 2023 · 6:00 am

Cultural politics of the Warlpiri purlapa

Performances of Aboriginal musical traditions have become widespread in various national and international contexts and are significant to the ways in which Aboriginal people from distinct regions project their specific identities to a broader world. In recent decades, Warlpiri people, from the remote settlement of Yuendumu in the Tanami desert of Australia, have increasingly attracted interest in the performances of their ceremonial songs and dances in intercultural spaces, often for audiences with little understanding of their religious significance.

Against a historical backdrop of settlement history and the shifts that have occurred to public ceremonial forms during this period, performances of purlapa at the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra have foregrounded issues of Aboriginal politics, systematized racism, contemporary social movements, and the basic difficulties of running a tent embassy on meager donations, especially during the Canberra winter when firewood supplies were low.  Purlapa is a genre of Warlpiri public ceremony involving a high-stepped dance style performed in circular movement with participants shifting their dancing sticks from side to side in rhythm with sung verses. Once held frequently for community entertainment, the performance of purlapa has declined drastically in recent years. Shifts in these performance opportunities show how Warlpiri people engage with a broader world in specific aspects of their identities while maintaining important links to a specific cultural heritage.

Read more in “Performing purlapa: Projecting Warlpiri identity in a globalized world” by Georgia Curran and Otto Jungarrayi Sims (The Asia Pacific journal of anthropology. XXII/2–3 [2021]).

Below is a 1978 performance of a purlapa ceremony recorded on 8 mm film.

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by | July 21, 2023 · 6:00 am

Revival of hula ku‘i

The reign of King David Kālakaua holds special significance for Hawaiian traditions. After decades of missionary-led censure, Hawaiian customs became revitalized when Kalākaua encouraged their revival. Master teachers (kumu hula) were summoned to the court at Honolulu, where they enjoyed royal patronage. From the environment, hula ku‘i emerged as a new style of dancing.

The term ku‘i means “to join old and new”, and refers to the mix of old and new components of poetry, music, dance, and costume. Traditional conventions gained a new format: texts were strophic, and each strophe consisted of a couplet. Indigenous vocal styles and ornaments were added to melodies based on tempered tones and simple harmonies. Each couplet was uniform in length, most commonly eight or sixteen beats. The format mandated the repetition of the melody for each couplet, and each couplet was commonly performed twice. An instrumental interlude, popularly called a vamp, separated the stanzas. In dances by seated performers, this interlude is called ki’i pā. New sequences of movements joined preexisting, named, lower-body motifs.

The defining distinction of the hula ku‘i was accompaniment from guitars and ‘ukulele. For dances by standing performers, mele composed in the new format also had the accompaniment of ipuor other Indigenous percussive instruments. In the 20th century, performances of those mele came to be called either ancient hula or hula ‘ōlapa, referencing the division of labor between dancers (‘ōlapa) and musicians (ho’opa’a).

Read the entry on hula ku‘i by Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman in The Garland encyclopedia of world music. Australia and the Pacific Islands (2013). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME).

The image above is of hula dancers and musicians, circa 1883. Photo courtesy of the Hawai’i State Archives. Below is a video of Hawaiian dance and music from the 2019 Merrie Monarch Festival held annually in Hilo, Hawaii.

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by | September 13, 2021 · 6:00 am

Lakalaka as sociopolitical discourse

Tongan lakalaka is an art form in which poetry, music, movement, scent, and dress coalesce into sociopolitical theatrical events.

Knowledge of Tongan politics, culture, history, and shared values is required for fully understanding lakalaka. This communicative competence makes it possible to decode and make sense of the processes and products of this cultural form, in which human bodies move in time and space according to cultural conventions and aesthetic systems of the Tongan people.

Individuals decode the discourses according to their backgrounds and understandings of particular performances as well as their own mental and emotional states at the time. For a viewer to respond, knowledge of movement conventions and dress is not sufficient; only through communicative competence can dance and dress reveal meaning as a sociopolitical discourse.

This according to “Dance and dress as sociopolitical discourse” by Adrienne L. Kaeppler, an essay included in Proceedings of the 17th symposium of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology (Nafplion: Peloponnīsiakó Laografikó Idryma, 1994 45-52; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1994-2706).

Below, a performance from 2009.

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by | July 9, 2021 · 6:00 am

Gumleaf redux

Herb Patten, an Elder of Koori, painter, and outstanding gumleaf player, has preserved this indigenous tradition by performing everywhere from pubs and parties to national television and the Sydney Opera House.

Patten (above) has enabled anyone to participate in this tradition with his book/CD set How to play the gumleaf (Sydney: Currency, 1999; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1999-14755). Patten’s book includes practical tips on how to select a suitable leaf and develop proper lip technique, and his demonstrations include popular and old-time songs along with the calls of several indigenous Australian birds.

Below, Herb Patten holds forth.

BONUS: Now there’s no need to imagine hearing John Lennon’s Imagine on a gumleaf.

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by | June 27, 2019 · 6:00 am

Hula, colonialism, and countercolonialism

Hula performers began touring throughout the continental United States and Europe in the late 19th century. These hula circuits introduced hula and Hawaiians to U.S. audiences, establishing an imagined intimacy, a powerful fantasy that enabled Americans to possess their colony physically and symbolically.

At vaudeville theaters, international expositions, commercial nightclubs, and military bases, Hawaiian women acted as ambassadors of aloha, enabling Americans to imagine Hawai’i as feminine and benign, and the relation between colonizer and colonized as mutually desired. Meanwhile, in the early years of American imperialism in the Pacific, touring hula performers incorporated veiled critiques of U.S. expansionism into their productions.

By the 1930s Hawaiian culture, particularly its music and hula, had enormous promotional value. In the 1940s thousands of U.S. soldiers and military personnel in Hawai’i were entertained by hula performances, many of which were filmed by military photographers. Yet Hawaiians also used hula as a means of cultural survival and countercolonial political praxis.

This according to Aloha America: Hula circuits through the U.S. empire by Adria L. Imada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2012-30915).

Above, dancing the hula for servicemen, 1944; below, Hal Aloma with Lani McIntyre and his Aloha Islanders, 1949.

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by | August 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Helicopters in music encyclopedias

Helicopter-PNG

The cross-volume search capacity of our new database RILM Music Encyclopedias offers some quirky surprises—for example, this resource currently includes nine different music-related articles with references to helicopters. These include entries on Madonna, Mickey Rooney, and the following excerpt from the article “Highland region of Papua New Guinea” in The Garland encyclopedia of world music:

“The texts [of girls’ coming-of age songs] address topics broadly sorted in four sets: daily routine, recalling netted bags (made by all women), sores (irritated by flies), and pleasure over good food (grown or gathered); unusual events, like sighting a helicopter, European missionaries’ arrival, and death in a hospital; desires, including the romantic, with meanings often hidden in metaphor, but also the adventuresome, like wanting to ride in a vehicle; and the coming-of-age performance itself speaking of dancing together, laughing together, and becoming adults.”

Above, an organization that searches for new species in Papua New Guinea by helicopter—perhaps the subject of the sighting; below, a performance by the Girl Guides Association of Papua New Guinea.

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