ABSTRACT
Melanesian music and dance comprises those practices and expressions that islanders accept as their own, which were either inherited from their ancestors, acquired through trading networks, or absorbed from diverse influences following contact with the wider world beginning in the nineteenth century. Besides its encouragement of participation, Melanesian music possesses no single defining characteristic. On the one hand, traditional communal dancing features strident upper register unison singing that is often accompanied by a rhythm instrument, whether the hand-held hourglass skin drum, the log slit drum, rattles or some other idiophone. On the other there is the richly sonorous part-singing that resulted from the interaction of Melanesian, Polynesian and European Christian vocal cultures, as well as the multiple dialects of densely textured, synchronised guitar- and ukulele-based string bands that owe a debt to Hawaiian and American old-time styles and swing. Phonographs, films and wartime troop entertainment shows were sources of the latter elements. Following the establishment of radio, the post-war popular styles of country, rock and roll, and later reggae, hi-hop (rap) and R’n’B, all left their mark. An observer in the 1940s summed up music processes in the Pacific Islands as follows: ‘Every new governing power, every shift of history, leaves a moraine of adapted alien tunes behind it’ (Furnas 1947: 349). In this overview of Melanesian music and dance performance, the absorption into local repertoires over time of the music of outsiders is understood in the wider context of the ways islanders acted out agency and asserted new identities from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It begins however, by considering the sonic connections that Melanesians make between ‘the natural world, the anatomical self, and the world of social and spiritual relationships’ (Knauft 1999: 84), which is the foundation of their beliefs about the expressive power of performance.
