Sounds of articulating identity. Tradition and transition in the music of Palau, Micronesia

Tradition and transition in the music of Palau, Micronesia Sounds of articulating identity. Sounds of articulating ide...

Author: Birgit Abels

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Tradition and transition in the music of Palau, Micronesia

Sounds of articulating identity.

Sounds of articulating identity Tradition and transition in the music of Palau, Micronesia

Birgit Abels

Sounds of Articulating Identity – Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia provides an overview of historical and contemporary music-making practices and their social contexts in the Republic of Palau, Micronesia. The study identifies and analyzes strands of musical development over the course of, roughly, the last century. Its secondary focus is on the conceptualization of the musical transition in Palauan discourse(s) and its interaction with (g)local identity negotiation. As the ethnomusicological exploration of the Palauan world proceeds, the book demonstrates how a study of the music of a small island nation is capable of transcending the boundaries of ethnomusicology as an academic discipline, and it adds rich material to the discourse about globalization and to the field of cultural studies.

Birgit Abels

Logos Verlag Berlin

λογος ISBN 978-3-8325-1866-0

SOUNDS OF ARTICULATING IDENTITY

TRADITION AND TRANSITION IN THE MUSIC OF PALAU, MICRONESIA

Birgit Abels

Von der Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaft der Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Deutschland) als Dissertation angenommen im Jahre 2006

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations and Music Examples Preface

1

Introduction

2

PART I – PALAU, PERFORMING ARTS, AND THE CURRENTS OF HISTORY: THE CULTURAL SETTING

11

1

The Pre-Contact Period

11

2

The Early Contact Period

20

Palau and the Europeans

21

The Colonial Presence

28

Religious Mission

45

PART II – REPERTOIRE, AESTHETICS, AND CHANGE: MUSIC AND DANCE IN PALAU 3

Chelitakl rechuodel: (Evolved) Traditional Music and Dance

64

Musical Genres

73

74

Derubesebes

86

Rebetii

91

Kesekes

97

Historical Perspectives

102 113

Omengeredakl, boid

113

Keredekiil, Kerrekord

131

Kelloi cheldolm

132

Delang

138

Llall

145

Bullachang

152

Ongúrs

152

Dances

154 Men’s Dances

158

Women’s Dances

179

Beches chelitakl: “New” Music and Dance

190

Religious Music

191

Other “New” Music

198

“New” Dances

205

Palau Pop

209

Tonal and Temporal Structures. Aesthetics of Sound

PART III – CULTURAL IDENTITY, LOCALITY, AND SOUNDSCAPE DEVELOPMENT IN PALAU 6

73

Chesols

Other Genres

5

57

Musical Instruments

Recitative Genres

4

53

The Roots of Music: Cut and Retied? The Flow of Cultural Change

215 227 227

EPILOGUE – RE-READING PALAUAN MUSIC

239

APPENDIX Appendix A

244 245

Otengelel a chesols

245

Informants

246

Recordings

250

Appendix B Bibliography Endnotes

251 251 273

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure I: Map of Palau, prepared by the Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror, Palau

3

Figure 1.1: Women apparently performing a séance dance during a feast of several days’ duration. Photograph from the bequest of Georg Fritz, dated ca. 1907. Archives of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Frankfurt (Germany)

17

Figure 1.2: Palauan community feast. Photograph from the bequest of Georg Fritz, dated ca. 1907. Archives of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Frankfurt (Germany)

19

Figure 2.1: Baseball had already become a popular sport in Palau during the Japanese days. Photo shows the All-Star team of 1976. From the collection of Belau National Museum, Koror

42

Figure 2.2: The Liebenzell church at Ngiwal. Undated photograph from the archives of the Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany)

49

Figure 3.1: Palauan blowing a debúsech. This photograph was taken by Protestant missionary Wilhelm Siemer and dates from between 1930 and 1938. From the archives of the Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany)

66

Figure 3.2: Ucherbelau Ngirubekbad playing the ngaok, 1963. Photograph from the collection of Barbara B. Smith

68

Figure 3.3: Mouthpiece of a ngaok, front view, without reeds or fastening bands. This instrument is part of the Ethnomusicology Instrument Collection at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, collection no. S40216

69

Figure 3.4: Mouthpiece of a ngaok, back view, without reeds or fastening bands. This instrument is part of the Ethnomusicology Instrument Collection at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, collection no. S40216

69

Figure 3.5: Born’s sketch of the Yapese ngall

70

Figure 3.6: Tonal material employed in the 1909 chesols (music example 3.3)

83


84

Figure 3.8: Inner tempo in the 1963 kesekes

100

Figure 3.9: Fundamental frequency development in recording Smith I-22, phrase 1

105


105


106


106


107


107

Figure 3.15: Fundamental frequency development in recording Abels 23, phrase 1

108


108


109


109


110


110

Figure 3.21: Spectrogram of phrase 1 of recording Smith I-22

111


112

Figure 3.23: Spectrogram of phrase 2 of recording Abels 23

112


113

Figure 3.25: Inner tempo of the 2005 omengeredakl

122

Figure 3.26: Phrasal durations in the 2005 omengeredakl

122


124


124


125

Figure 3.30: Spectrogram of phrase 2 of an omengeredakl recorded in 2005 (Abels 61)

126


126


127

Figure 3.33: Tonal progression in the phrases of the delang transcribed in music example 3.20

143

Figure 3.34: Overall progression in the delang transcribed in music example 3.20

144

Figure 3.35: Pitch progression in the llall transcribed in music example 3.22

149

Figure 3.36: Overall pitch progression in the llall transcribed in music example 3.22

150

Figure 3.37: Women on a diángel, dancing stage. From the collection of the Deutsches Kolonialarchiv, Frankfurt (Germany)

182

Figure 3.38: Undated photograph of the Emmaus brass band. From the archives of the Liebenzell mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany)

195

Figure 3.39: Crew and brass band of the German MS Condor on a visit in Palau in 1911. From the collection of Dieter Klein, Düsseldorf (Germany)

208

LIST OF MUSIC EXAMPLES Music example 3.1: Tonal compasses of pitch spectra in a kesekes recorded in 1963

62

Music example 3.2: Nuclear recitative kernel of chesols

77

Music example 3.3: Transcription of wax cylinder 69 from the Hamburg South Seas Expedition

79

Music example 3.4: Tonal inventory of wax cylinder 69 from the Hamburg South Seas Expedition

80

Music example 3.5: Transcription of an chesols recorded in 2005

81

Music example 3.6: Tonal inventory of the 1963 derubesebes

87

Music example 3.7: Derubesebes recorded in the 1960s, transcription. Item Dub I-2.3 in the Barbara B. Smith Collection. Chanter: Adalbai Omeliakl

88

Music example 3.8: Tonal inventory of the 1963 derubesebes transcribed in music example 3.9

89

Music example 3.9: Derubesebes chanted by Magdalena Demek Towai, recorded in 2005 (Abels 43)

90

Music example 3.10: Rhythmical “catch phrase” of rebetii

93

Music example 3.11: Tonal inventory of the rebetii transcribed in music example 3.12

94

Music example 3.12: Rebetii recorded in 2005 (Abels 51)

94

Musical example 3.13: Tonal inventory of the rebetii transcribed in musical example 3.14

95

Musical example 3.14: Rebetii recorded in 1963, transcription

96

Music example 3.15: Tonal inventory of the kesekes transcribed in music example 3.16

98

Music example 3.16: Kesekes recorded in 1963

99

Music example 3.17: Transcription of an omengeredakl recorded in 2005 (Abels 54). Ibau Demei Oiterong, Ilong Rubasch Isaol, Magdalena Demek Towai, singers

118

Music example 3.18: Transcription of an omengeredakl recorded in 2005 (Abels 61). Victoria Johanes, Belsechel Philip, Oribech Josep, and Vicenta S. Olkeriil, singers

128

Music example 3.19: Kelloi cheldolm, recorded in 1963 (Smith 4-2). Kiruu Dirrametuker, Dirrusekluk Sulikau, Dirralukes Ngerbai, Dirrenguleong Dirraubuuch, and Dirrareyuch Diralemau, singers (Smith recorded titles and first names)

136

Music example 3.20: Delang recorded in 2005 (Abels 58). Tilei Erungel, singer

142

Music example 3.21: Llall chanted by Tilei Erungel, 2005

148

Music example 3.22: Llall chanted by Harrilee Ubedei, 2005 (Abels 72)

149

Music example 3.23: Ruk recorded in 1963, opening part

164

Music example 3.24: Ruk recorded in 1963, second part

165

Music example 3.25: Ruk recorded in 1963, third part

167

Music example 3.26: Tune of a popular derebechesiil

199

Music example 3.27: Tonal inventory of the derebechesiil transcribed in music example 3.26

199

Music example 3.28: Madedók by Ymesei Ezekiel

202

Music example 3.29: Ezekiel’s composition A ianged a ungil, first page

204


◊

1

PREFACE Contrary to Palauan etiquette, the names of individuals are written in plain form throughout the book, without the hereditary title of the respective person. This is for the sake of clarity for readers unfamiliar with Palauan titles. By no means do I intend to convey disrespect, and I apologize to those who are concerned. I sincerely hope you do not feel embarrassed about seeing your names “naked” in black and white. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) funded the fieldwork for this research project by means of a doctoral fellowship. In 2006–07, it also financed the exchange research project Auditory-based measurement methods for instrumental sound analysis of musical instruments, which facilitated collaboration of members of the two participating institutions: the Rensselaer Institute of Technology (RPI) in Troy (NY/USA), and the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Being a member of this research group enabled me to prepare some of the acoustic sound analyses in this study with the invaluable help of Jonas Braasch in Troy (many thanks, Jonas!). The German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) generously funded my subsequent research with a doctoral fellowship. My gratitude extends to them, as well. Many people have had a part in making this book possible. First and foremost, I wish to thank my interlocutors in Palau, who shared their music, their lore, and their knowledge with me. I have listed your names in the appendix. The first person to whom I wish to extend my thanks and express my gratitude is, obviously enough, my teacher Christian Ahrens. This dissertation would not have been written without his persevering support over the years: he took good care to ensure I did not stumble over anything other than my own feet (which he always watched silently, with a knowing smile on his face, and I secretly appreciated that). From my perspective, you could not have done a better job. Thank you. Many other people also contributed to this study by offering information, help, or advice. My special thanks are due to Simeon Adelbai (Koror/Palau), Jonas Braasch (Troy, NY/USA), Dieter Klein (Düsseldorf/Germany), Barbara B. Smith (Honolulu, HI/USA), Sr. Ilse Szaukellis (Bad Liebenzell/Germany), Osamu Yamaguti (Osaka/Japan), and Susanne Ziegler (Berlin/Germany). Dianne MacFarlane (Köln/Germany) bravely proofread the whole manuscript, suggesting thoughtful linguistic corrections and improvements to the text (needless to say, all remaining mistakes are mine). Concepción Valverde-Alfaya (Bochum/Germany) provided me with linguistic input when it came to Spanish sources. Mesulang, danke, thanks, domo arigato, muchas gracias to all of you.

2

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INTRODUCTION Music and dance are conduits for the expression of ideas, values, and social relationships. In Micronesia, the performing arts provide a means of communication that is viable in a wide range of contexts ranging from personal to political realms: they articulate focal themes of identity, and in so doing, they themselves become one. In Palau, to dance1 is to take pride in one’s culture; to chant is to assert one’s bonds with local history. As the waves of turbulent political history washed onto Palauan shores over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both music and dance came to symbolize this small island people’s sense of cultural distinctiveness in the Pacific world. Palau, Belau in Palauan2, is a small island nation in the Western Caroline Islands, situated in the Western Pacific rim. Part of the Austronesian linguistic and cultural belt, this island group stretches between 6 and 8 degrees north latitude and 134 and 135 degrees east longitude; their northernmost island is the atoll of Kayangel, while the southernmost island is Angaur. The whole archipelago comprises about 340 islands and islets and is encircled by a barrier reef that creates a lagoon that is up to 12 miles wide. Some of the islands are of volcanic origin, while others consist of uplifted limestone. At 155 square miles, Babeldaob is by far the largest island in the group, and the second largest island in Micronesia. Philippine Mindanao is the nearest landmass, approximately 550 miles away. Due to its strategic geographic situation, Palau has long been a gateway into the Pacific for travelers from the West. About 300 miles south of the capital of Koror lie the so-called Southwest islands, including Sonsorol, Pulo Ana, Tobi, and Helen Reef. While they are incorporated into the Republic of Palau, the language and culture of the approximately 300 inhabitants of the Southwest islands are profoundly different from those of Palau proper: they share more with the island cultures to the east (Yap and Chuuk) than with the Palauan culture to the north. An analysis of their performing arts is not within the scope of this book, which focuses on the musical culture of the Palauan islands north of the Southwest Islands. After providing a thick description3 of past and present music-making practices in Palau, I will relate these practices to current debates concerning identity negotiation in Palau, especially in their historical dimension. In so doing, I will briefly touch upon contemporary globalization discourse in ethnomusicology and cultural studies.


◊

3

Figure I: Map of Palau, prepared by the Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror, Palau

4

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In identifying music and its many functions in cultural identity, I look at sound as audible symbols. These audible symbols are utilized by various agents to (re)define Self for the Self, and also to signify cultural distinctiveness to outsiders. They are employed to represent identity and to musically construct, evoke, or mark alterity of a socio-cultural kind. To get an analytical hold of these symbols and their effects, I apply to the analysis of these various univers de discours Appadurai’s concept of the x-scapes, those spaces in which identity, culture and tradition are continually reconstructed: mediascapes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes. 4 These five neologisms derive from the word “landscape”5 and denote spaces in which culture flows and wherein a given culture communicates. Appadurai designed these categories as tools to explore the disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that he diagnosed in the “the new global cultural economy.”6 In the context of this study, they provide a framework for exploring Palauan processes of negotiation of Self as they are manifested in music. These terms with the common suffix -scape […] indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors. […] Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger 7

formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes offer.

Appadurai’s concept is based on the incontrovertible fact that in today’s world, there is no continent into which members of non-indigenous linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic groups have not yet immigrated. This fact requires a new understanding of the space within which a given culture communicates. As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality […]. The landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous. […] The ethnoscapes of today’s world are profoundly interactive.

8

It is the “transnational cultural flows within which [new cosmopolitanisms] thrive, compete, and feed off one another in ways that defeat and confound many verities of the human sciences today.” 9 Cultures appear deterritorialized, and instead of being localizable on a geographical map, they disseminate into what Appadurai calls


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5

“ethnoscapes.” X-scapes add up to the “imagined worlds” in Appadurai’s terminology, to multiple worlds that are “constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.”10 An ethnoscape, the x-scape that is of perhaps greatest importance for the present study, is shaped by people moving, be they tourists, immigrants, expats, or people in exile. Ethnoscapes are contextgenerative because neighborhoods are context-providing. Media, including computers, telephones, and cameras, have created a new kind of neighborliness; accordingly, mediascapes profoundly interact with ethnoscapes. In facilitating communication with people “back home” as well as with other moving people, ethnoscapes establish a network through which realities of place and fantasies of elsewhere disseminate. On a larger scale, this leads to “men and women from villages in India” thinking… not just of moving to Poona or Madras but of moving to Dubai and Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find[ing] themselves in South India as well as in Switzerland, just as the Hmong are driven to London as well as to Philadelphia. And as international capital shifts its needs, as production and technology generate different needs, […] these moving groups can never afford to let their 11

imaginations rest too long, even if they wish to.

This, of course, is not an Indian phenomenon, but a global one. In this new conjuncture, determinants of identity—prominent among them signs of history (see below)—become intangible concepts because the “search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transitional communication.”12 For the study of music, this means that new arrivals, musical elements from outside, such as harmonization, can be appropriated. That is, new elements can be incorporated into the Own, within what seems to be very little time. In the context of expressive arts, appropriation is not a process of unilateral imposition. This is the point where the notion of x-scapes can unravel the tangle of contextualities that has made the adoption possible: considering an “imaginary landscape” as a communicative space for identity negotiation, it is not only the process itself that is being described (and categorized to serve comparative analytical purposes), but the process within its contextual space. A renunciation of pre-existent notions of “how things work” (such as “acculturation” and “westernization”) that are generally applied to a subject matter inevitably creates the need to (re)turn to a thick description in the sense suggested by Clifford Geertz.13 This is an inevitable prerequisite for the analysis of locality discourse: the imagined Own has to be seen and described in its contexts, i.e., in its relativity to Others as well as in its deterritorialized forms, be they virtual, real or narrative. This is so because ever since

6

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the emergence of an awareness of and communication with Others, all cultures have multiple origins—even if some may have more than others. For a particular cultural group, these contextual relationships add up to an ethnoscape. At the same time, they are shaped by the (other) x-scapes. Through migration, global communication, and other forms of deterritorialization, every ethnoscape relates with other ethnoscapes. Thus, in the words of Salman Rushdie, deterritorialization… can lead to […] a kind of multiple rootings. It's not a traditional identity crisis of not knowing where you come from. The problem is that you come from too many places [...] It's not that there are pulls 14

in too many directions so much as too many voices speaking at the same time.

The colonial experience that has shaped recent Palauan history is a form of deterritorialization, and the multifariousness of ethnoscapes clashing in the colonial enterprise allows for Rushdie’s roots to grow into variegated directions, just as exposure to media does. In this narrow sense, migration and colonialization are akin in that they yield one very similar effect: they challenge, undermine and fundamentally alter other contextual relations. An ethnoscape is the space in which the Own is constantly being renegotiated: it provides a relational context, which is never unilateral and always interactive; and it is in a constant state of flux. Even though a cultural group may be exposed to a more dominant power (e.g., through colonialism), this is never the only context-providing force at work. Defining the Own against the background of the Other in the direct geographical neighborhood or even somewhere entirely different may be just as powerful as or even more powerful than the comparison of the dominated with the dominant. 15 The immediate, the “neighborhood” (Appadurai), is of potentially equal influence as the “center power,” to draw on post-colonial studies’ terminology, while at the same time it is constantly being re-imagined and negotiated against the context of an ethnoscape. Hence, neighborhoods form a context for and at the same time require the context of an ethnoscape. They are constructed and projected against a non-local ethnoscape against which the (imagined) Own takes place. To perpetuate cultural change can in this context be considered a localizing activity. Locality is inevitably context-generative to the relationships between the contexts that neighborhoods create and those they encounter. This is a matter of social power and of the different scales of organization and control within which particular spaces (and places) are embedded.”

16


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7

Colonialism and related hegemonial relationships between two groups fundamentally alter the power relations that regulate localizing mechanisms in that they delineate (for instance marginalize, exploit, or subjugate) the local anew and from outside. These definitions of Other (an example would be that of the “noble savage”), once they become perceivable for the Self, trigger reactions that inevitably affect the localization of the Self within the neighborhood as well as within the larger ethnoscape. Appadurai identifies trends toward both global homogenization and global heterogenization, processes that through globalization and localization reinforce each other in the context of ethnoscapes. An analysis of a given culture’s ethnoscapes can thus yield insights into how cultural change is motivated. To look at music in connection with such an analysis is an auspicious enterprise in that it can inform us about both the music as a medium of expression itself and the context that has generated its development. Through x-scapes, music(al tradition) and musicians interact with assumedly “outside” flows and automatically—more often than not subconsciously—differentiate what to them is compatible with the Own and what is not. While this is initially an individual decision, it must be either enforced or rejected by the cultural collectivity in question. Music thus is not only a form of entertainment providing aesthetic satisfaction; it is also “a sphere of communication and symbolic representation, and both a means of validating social institution and ritual practices, and a challenge to them.”17 Music cannot be thought of outside the range of cultural settings in which people find meaning in it, and it therefore can be interpreted as an indicator of how a group defines itself in relation to those powers to which it is subjected. To the individual, music provides a plausible as well as flexible localizing tool within x-scapes. Living musical traditions simultaneously consolidate and reconstruct notions of cultural identity; perhaps more than any other medium of expression, they convey messages reinforcing, inverting or refusing changes in very subtle ways—messages that become discernible when music is read as text. This is the substantial contribution to cultural studies that ethnomusicology can make: beyond its value as a self-contained discipline, it is capable of making (musical) voices heard that are “subaltern” in the sense that they need to be decoded in order to be intelligible. The theoretical approach applied in the present study, then, is a hybrid that reverts to several tools which have been shaped by cultural and postcolonial studies (themselves disciplinary hybrids), and ethnomusicology. Against this background, I argue against a schematical classification of musical change, as has been often proposed in earlier

8

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ethnomusicological writings. 18 Instead of focusing forces as binaries—such as the active colonizer and the passive colonized, and, perhaps even more popular in today’s academic discourse, dominance and resistance—I suggest letting a thick description of music-making practices be followed by concentration on the discoursive spaces in which these very forces work. In an attempt to look at these univers de discours, I try to integrate Appadurai’s notion of x-scapes with an analysis of the cultural production of music: the assumptions innate to the above-mentioned theories animate most of this book. Inspired by cultural studies’ focus on culture’s conceptual deterritorialization and transnational flows, yesterday’s theory of musical acculturation is still in the process of being replaced with concepts that devote more attention to global power structures and their historical genesis than applications of the acculturation concept have done previously. The phenomenon formerly identified as acculturation is more often being considered as a multi-lateral interaction, a dialogue of diversity and difference. In this sense, islanders’ societies are not island societies. Like ethnomusicology, (Pacific) anthropology has struggled to find effective ways of incorporating cultural change and transformation into its various models and theories. The problem encountered by historical ethnomusicology is that historical sources are very rare, and that at some point, only sources other than sound can be drawn upon, such as written sources, archeological findings, and, to a certain extent, pictorial evidence. In the case of Palau, where early history is oral in nature, these sources are meager. But the Palauan understanding of history is not ahistorical, or “mechanical,” to apply Lévi-Strauss’ famous term. Chants, those archives of oral history, give descriptions of events that took place in the past—documentation that, like all historiography, is by nature relative to perspective. In the available sound recordings of Palauan music, some of these perspectives have been captured; fortunately, these recordings cover a time span of nearly a century (1909–2007). In both myths and the telling of history, the past becomes actualized in the present, and Palauans have a relationship of contiguity, iconicity, or symbolization with past incidents. Parmentier has introduced the concepts of “signs in history” and “signs of history” into the historiography of Palau, and I found these to be effective explanatory concepts for my purposes, although I do not apply the terms here to any significant (in the true sense of the word) extent. With signs of history, Parmentier means “representational expressions which, through their iconic, indexical, and residually symbolic properties, record and classify events as history, that selective discourse


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about the diachrony of a society.” 19 The corresponding Palauan term olangch (“distinguishing mark,” “external sign,” “mnemonic marker”) includes narrative wood carvings, glass beads, monoliths, stone grave pavements, oral narratives etc. Sounding signs of history, such as Palauan chants and songs, also fall into this category: like the prescribed and ancient seating patterns deployed at the chiefs’ council meetings, or the anthropomorphic stone figures on Babeldaob, they originate from and therefore encode particular historical or mythological events. “The ‘aura’ derived from their contiguity with the original […] context makes these objects appropriate signs of history.” 20 Physical objects and phenomena, including sound, replace written records, which is not unusual for non-literate cultures. Unlike linguistic discourse, Palauan signs of history are non-descriptive, and they appeal to the individual’s knowledge; considering how hierarchically restrictive the diffusion of knowledge is in the Palauan tradition, Palauan signs of history are an elite device for conveying information to those, and only those, who are equipped for it. In and by the individual is how signs of history can be utilized to perform specific functions in Palauan social life, where they are constantly being evoked and concealed, modified, altered and manipulated: where they turn into “signs in history.” As per Parmentier’s definition, signs in history are… those signs of history which, as objects, linguistic expressions, or patterns of action, themselves become involved in social life as loci of historical intentionality because of their function as representational vehicles. These objects are frequently considered to be concrete embodiments or repositories of the past they record, that is, to be endowed with the essentialized or reified property of historicity.

21

In other words, the aura of the past is invoked by calling on selected historical or mythological contexts. Therefore, the interaction between cultural framework and representation always exists, constantly reshaping the relationship between the two as well as their functions. Sound is one of the signs of and in history: in Palau, it is one of many markers of a highly localized cultural context. This is possible because of the particular nature of the Palauan understanding of “history,” which is vastly different from the corresponding Euro-American notion(s). In Palau, the past is not much different from the present: events largely follow a “replaying pattern well documented in myths, chants, and narratives.” 22 Traditionally, signs of history thus become an allinclusive, self-referring matrix for a way of life.

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With the advent of external presences in Palau, not only has this set of signs begun to change, but so has its mode of utilization on the part of those individuals who have originally been acting from within this matrix. On the cultural level, anthropologists have applied the rather spongy concept of acculturation to such processes, invariably equating change in a non-European cultural system with cultural decline. It is neither within the scope nor is it the intention of the present study to theoretically discuss the anthropological discourse on the phenomenon of change and the effects of globalization, but a basic premise of the present study is that globalization is “a deeply historical, uneven, and even localizing process. Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization. […D]ifferent societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently.”23 To relate the development of Palauan music to global and transnational forces, and to study how locality comes into being and changes a “glocal” island in the Western Pacific, a broad historical narrative of the islands will be provided here. Since Palau and most of Micronesia are still something of a blank spot on the ethnomusicological world map, I incorporate more general information on the country’s history and culture than is perhaps usual for a musicological study. Part I on Palau’s history and culture is not intended to be comprehensive, though, and further relevant literature is listed in the bibliography. I proceed to explore the repertoire of musical idioms in Palau as far as it is documented. In doing so, I draw on written sources and travelogues as well as on several collections of historical sound recordings, which I shall briefly describe at the outset of Part II. An analysis of the lyrical content of chants cannot be within the scope of this study; neither can an ethnochoreographic stocktaking of the dances. While the present study would immensely benefit from such analyses and can by no means be considered exhaustive without them, both topics provide materials for studies of Palauan culture in their own right. Hopefully, they will be undertaken soon. In Part III, I shall briefly look at the role of music in the process of culture negotiation and identity discourse, and the manner in which music is utilized in the quest for Self.


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PART I – PALAU, PERFORMING ARTS, AND THE CURRENTS OF HISTORY: THE CULTURAL SETTING Contemporary Palauans commonly divide their history into three phases: the precontact period, the contact period, and the period of independence.24 The period of independence is often considered to have begun with the formation of the constitutional convention, which paved the way to self-government in 1981; 25 Palau regained its independence from foreign domination in 1994. This contemporary indigenous conceptualization replaced the customary structuring of time and history into the three periods of the Dark Age, where the Palauan islands and customs were created, the age where gods and men co-existed, and finally man’s age.26 Although the term “precontact period” is misleading in that it seems to suggest that Palauans did not have contact with any other peoples before the arrival of the first European ships in their waters, I shall use it for practical reasons.

1

THE PRE-CONTACT PERIOD

While Micronesia’s earliest human history is still largely unclear, there is scholarly consensus that traffic and migration, particularly from Southeast Asia, laid the foundations of West Micronesian cultures. According to the Palauan genesis, on the other hand, the Palau islands and its inhabitants were created by the gods, and many historical sites bespeak the mythological beginnings of life. Accordingly, immigration into the Palaus from outside occurred only after the act of creation. To date, scholars cannot agree about the exact beginning of migration into West Micronesia, but 3000 to 1000 BC evolves as a reasonable approximation. Immigrants brought with them their notions of art and aesthetics, which over time developed into discrete traditions—traditions that grew and changed, and thereby in time led to a highly diversified land- and soundscape in the Western Pacific region.

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This

diversification can be attributed to the regionally differing nature of migration processes, intercultural contact and, of course, internal changes. At present, information on the waves of migration into Palau is contradictory. It is generally assumed that the Austronesian peoples of the Western Pacific originated from various Southeast Asian megalithic seafaring societies, 28 and carbon dating reveals that Palau’s northern Kayangel atoll was settled around 40 AD (+/- 70 years).29 If this was the date of the first permanent settlement, Palau would have been inhabited

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centuries after its neighboring islands, and even 1500 years later than Guam. As with most of Oceania, but not mainland and island Southeast Asia, no evidence exists of an island population millennia old in Palau; the Pacific was one of the last regions of the world to be penetrated by humans. Remains of what is generally taken for the first settlements—rock paintings, vestiges of food and tools—were found in Palau’s Rock Islands, sites which were evidently abandoned in favor of the northern islands of Koror, Arakabesang, and Babeldaob, several centuries before contact with European sailors. 30 Archaeological findings that indicate a cultural drift from the Southwest Islands, including Angaur and Peliliu, to the three northern islands are in keeping with cultural lore. 31 However, radiocarbon dating places the huge, artificial terraces of Babeldaob at around 200–1200 AD, while the villages sited here have been dated at around 1500 AD. Given that the Rock Island sites seem to neatly fill the gap between these two periods, Parmentier assumes 32 two major internal population movements: the first one from the high islands to the Rock Islands around 1200 AD, and the second one from the Rock Islands to the high islands two or three centuries prior to contact with Europeans. Local legends and songs only mention the second movement. Also, the rock paintings found on the Rock Islands bear no resemblance to the stone chiselings of Babeldaob and/or today’s carving practice. Linguists and archeologists have come up with a variety of possible spatial relationships regarding both the Palauan people and their contact with possible trading partners from outside the Pacific basin. While Palau’s material culture displays a “unique simplicity”33 that suggests a period of cultural isolation of about 1000 to 2000 years, the glass beads and valuable stones used as currency in Palau “may be explained by supposed trading contact with Chinese, Malay, Filipino, or even Arab merchants.”34 The roots of the Austronesian peoples that populate West Micronesia cannot be determined with any certainty; linguists and other scholars have suggested various possible points of origin, such as Melanesia35 and Taiwan.36 There is general agreement, however, that Austronesian peoples traveled extensively through the Pacific region before they eventually settled in the West Micronesian islands, including Palau. According to this evidence, Palau was the endpoint of a migration movement, which partially explains the multiple cultural rootings scholars have detected in the islands’ culture and language.37 The external influences on Palauan society, the scope of which is by nature interrelated with internal processes of constant (re-)imagination and negotiation of the Own, did not begin with foreign traders or with the advent of the chad er ngebard, the


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“men of the West.” 38 In pre-contact times, considerable external influence was also exerted by way of inter-island communication among Pacific peoples: Palau conducted intensive long-term trade relationships with Yap, and sporadic contact with Southeast Asian islanders and New Guineans who called at Palau has also been recorded. 39 Palauan navigation, part of the acclaimed west and central Carolinian sea-going tradition, was largely restricted to traffic between the Palaus themselves, and the Palauans “lost” their navigational skills at an unidentified point in time. Today, this development is attributed to the abundance of building materials and food their islands supplied40—here, another moment of cultural disruption surfaces.41 Occasionally, castaways who became stranded on one of the Palau islands would be naturalized. This, too, added to the Palauans’ knowledge of the geographic neighborhood: as in much of the region, cultural “change was the rule rather than the exception.” 42 Palauans did have a consciousness of Other(s) in their immediate environment, and they related to it through a permanent process of (re)localizing themselves within their dynamic ethnoscape. Societies that rely on oral history do not themselves leave written sources that allow for conclusions regarding such developments of their ethnoscape. There is a source, however, that provides a glimpse at how distinctly aware a Pacific people’s consciousness of its own cultural discreteness was in the context of its ethnoscape, and how other Pacific islanders, in this case, a group of people traveling from the Micronesian island of Faraulep, located the Palauans in their ethnoscape. This document was written by Jesuit missionary Juan Cantova, based in Guam, who in 1721 spent eight months with a group of castaways from Faraulep, and afterwards gave a detailed account of that encounter. According to him, the shipwrecked islanders related the following about the Palaus: These islands are inhabitated by numerous people, but they are inhuman and barbarian. Men and women go completely naked. They gorge themselves on human flesh; the natives of the Carolines look at them with horror, as the enemy of the human race with whom it is dangerous to engage even in small-scale trade.

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Considering them cannibals, the Faraulepese thus shunned the Palauans. They also told Cantova that beyond Chuuk, there lay the island of “Falupet” (Ponape), “whose inhabitants worship the shark and are negroid, and whose customs are savage and barbarous.” The inhabitants of Yap, according to them, were an uncivilized people who worshipped a demon in the form of a crocodile and thus acquired the power to work sorcery on their enemies.44

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This document is revealing not so much because of its views on regional practices of worship, but rather because it shows the mechanisms with which a particular notion of locality (as relation and context45) is reinforced in the Pacific context. In part, this notion seems to be akin to European Orientalism in the Saidian sense: the We and the Other are represented as clear-cut, non-congruent categories, resulting in an ethnoscape in which the Self can locate itself. The Faraulepese conveyed to Cantova their idea of the Palauans’ (and, for that matter, the Chuukese and Yapese, if to a lesser extent) cultural distinctiveness from the other atolls in the Carolines, which tells as much about their self-perception as it does about their conception of their neighborhood: European sailors were not the first to be considered Others by Micronesian peoples. Palauan trade practices had a unique feature among the Oceanic peoples in that the main commodities were not made in Palau: Palauans traded glass beads and fragments that were used as currency in Palau.46 The regional provenance of Palauan money has been the subject of speculation, and its physical features point to it originating from outside the Pacific basin, 47 which suggests trade relationships with partners from beyond the immediate vicinity. As for communication with neighboring islanders, significant contact between the Palauans and the Yapese is documented: the Yapese mined aragonite stone discs in the Rock Islands, which they used as currency. This repeatedly required them to temporarily live with the Palauans and perform services in the Palauan community in order to be granted the right to carve the desired stone money. While most of their services seem to have been domestic in nature, the Yapese also performed “cultural services” like fortune telling and performing magic,48 rites which were not unlikely to include short pieces of music and/or dance. Unfortunately, due to a lack of musicological information on most of the region, including Yap, it is impossible to pinpoint potential remnants of mutual musical influences between Palauans and Yapese. Yapese stone mining took place in precontact times, although it cannot be determined when this arrangement first began. Palauan oral history records that the Yapese had been coming to Palau “from time immemorial“49 to mine stone money. In terms of contact with other peoples, Palauan lore brings up only single instances.50 Parties from other, possibly mythical, islands are mentioned; among other things, these men are said to have “held dances“51 on Palau. Other islands mentioned are today uninhabited and within the close vicinity of Palau, 52 or unidentifiable. The only foreigners that Palauan mythology—the documented part of which was written down in the twentieth century, in full geographical knowledge of the region—cares to repeatedly


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mention in particular are Yapese and Englishmen, 53 which mirrors the Palauans’ greater familiarity with the Yapese islands and their inhabitants than with other islanders. Other than that, the lack of supporting evidence impedes conclusive conjectures pertaining to the network of contacts within which the Palauans were moving prior to the advent of foreign ships in their waters and during the early contact period. According to reports from the contact period, there was regular contact among neighboring islanders in West Micronesia which included mutual visits. Songs and dances, often composed and invented for a particular visit, were considered possessions of a group of people (mostly villages) and served as gifts to the host: this way, musical information and inspiration was exchanged.54 This practice had its roots in the pre-contact period, and within Palau, inter-village visits also followed prescribed patterns, which included the offering of chants to the other party (see Part II).55 The Palauans seem to have had no intensive, regular and long-term cultural exposure to the cultures of other islanders. All things considered, it is impossible to identify the processes of internal cultural change that took place in pre-contact times. In Parmentier’s words, “it has been […] difficult to join together data […] to make a statement which would integrate the problem of prehistoric derivation with the question of internal cultural sequence.”56 The world view and mythology that formed the basis of Palauan pre-contact society form an inseparable entity that provides a closed cosmology in that all elements and processes of the physical world were related to social and historical patterns, which in turn were determined by mythological cosmology. It was an inclusive system: Palau was the universe and nothing else was believed to exist beyond the horizons.g Individual places in Palau are associated with historical and mythological events because the latter took place in the physical world. 57 Accordingly, a great deal of Palauan oral history is mythological in nature. Palau’s highly complex mythology relates stories about the genesis of the Palauan lands and people;58 Palauan political structure, hierarchy, and laws were established by the gods as well. The gods also appointed the village rubaks (chiefs). Rubaks have decision-making power through the institution of the klobak, the village council bestowed with judicial, legislative, and administrative power. The klobak held meetings in the bai (community house). Such meetings followed prescribed patterns in seating arrangements, food distribution, etc.; they also formed the exclusive performance space for particular types of chants, as shall be described in Part II. The mode of

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communication was kelulau, that of “whispering principles”: a rubak whispered his statement to a messenger, who in turn proceeded to pass it on to the rubak who was supposed to receive that information. 59 In a broader sense, kelulau was used to describe the process of decision-making and legislation in the bai. So Palauan lore identifies gods as the originators and inventors of elements that are integral to Palauan cultural behavior and technical improvements. Gods also created dance and, subsequently, music—a conception not uncommon in Micronesia. 60 The “inclusivist” nature of the Palauan conceptualization of culture becomes clear in light of the fact that oral tradition stresses the connection between dance and nature: the god Uchelechelid coincidentally watched a bluefin jack jumping after a sardine, and was so amused by what he saw that he turned the wooden replica of a mackerel into an insignium, which dancers still carry today.61 There is also a story that Uchelechelid was inspired by the hunting movements of a fish, and modeled the ruk dance after it. The cultural linkage between dance and divinity, as well as its nascency in the mythical age where gods and men coexisted in the physical world, add up to a legitimizing power that lends cultural meaning to dance. It is this kind of associated context that makes Palauans perceive indigenous music as “traditional.” Deities have direct power which they execute over men by sending illnesses, curing them, etc. The chelids (gods) and the bladeks (ancestral spirits) can be contacted by men through kerongs (spirit mediums), through which the god or spirit then speaks; however, they are only called upon when there is sufficient reason for doing so.62 In the case of major and minor afflictions, the deities were placated with festivities including offerings, dances, and songs, in an amount depending on the nature of the malady;63 the songs and dances were then dedicated to the chelid causing the illness.64 Both women and men also made use of incantations or magic spells, which did not seem to have involved musical elements to any significant degree. Magic of various kinds: sorcery (bokolai), “white” magic (melecholb), divination (mengelil), and oracles,65 played an important role in Palauan life, and was intertwined with local cosmology. Within this cosmological system, the physical and the spiritual worlds were not wholly separable; they intersected in many places. Krämer notes that at the time of his research, people in Ngardmau considered a special type of crab to be chelids;66 and similar notions have survived in contemporary Palau.


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Figure 1.1: Women apparently performing a séance dance during a feast. Photograph from the bequest of Georg Fritz, dated ca. 1907. Archives of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Frankfurt (Germany)

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The purpose of mythology, in Palau as elsewhere, is not least to make sense of the world and to explain its structure to the people. But it is also evident that myths are interrelated with changing environments, and that they themselves adjust to these shifting surroundings. For example, mammals introduced into Palau by foreign ships appear in several stories collected by anthropologists. Often, the physical appearance of previously unknown creatures would at first be taken as the manifestation of an chelid,

67

which was a popular explanatory model for any changes otherwise

unaccountable to Palauans until well into the twentieth century. Palauan pre-contact society was highly stratified, and it allowed “a rare glimpse of a fairly large-scale polity without a single overarching system of kingship” in what has been classified as early states.68 The conceptual sequence of order in the overall social fabric is individual/family/clan/village/village complex/district/village federation. Rank was the most important property of the individual Palauan islander. A man could demonstrate his or her rank through outward appearance, i.e. by wearing adornments, including tattoos, which carried a distinct semantic meaning representing one’s innate position in society.69 This hierarchical position depended on the individual’s (maternal) family’s position; upward mobility to a limited extent was possible through individual achievement and merits.70 The community of women had a separate but corresponding organizational structure. Female chiefs supervised matters concerning women and womanhood, held assizes in cases involving women, and passed sentences. The hierarchical organization of female titles was equivalent to that of male titles, so that all title-holders had a counterpart of the opposite sex.71 The two structures co-existed largely independently, aside from the fact that female chiefs elected the members of the village council from among the male chiefs. Like elsewhere in the Western Pacific, 72 knowledge and skills were transmitted depending on the individual’s social position. Education included the strengthening of mnemonic skills in order to be able to memorize the knowledge canon of Palauan oral culture. Palauan children were taught the skills, ethics, and sensitivities that their respective hierarchical status called for.73 In this way, the flow of knowledge, including cultural knowledge of rites, songs, and dances, was highly channeled, and the possession of such knowledge added to a person’s kudos, so much so that a deceased’s cultural knowledge would, in places, be recounted in his/her funeral eulogy.74


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In addition to family and clan structures, the affiliation of villagers with different village clubs was a structuring tool in Palauan society. A village had at least one village clubhouse (bai) on each side of the village, which served as the home of the men’s club(s). The members of each club belonged to a homogenous age group. Communal tasks such as construction and renovation work, village improvements and fishing, were executed by these clubs. Clubs were an essential focal point of men’s identity formation, and, from an early age in the individual’s life, they partly substituted family bonds.75 Women’s clubs did not possess a bai; however, their social functions were essentially comparable to those of the men’s clubs. On the economic and communal level, they also contributed to the economic well-being and, more importantly, prestige of themselves, their families, and their clans, by performing the blolobel customs. These customs called for up to ten armengol (concubines), representing a village’s ten titleholders, who were kidnapped or volunteered to travel to another village to stay in a bai and offer themselves for sexual intercourse to the men. Each woman was assigned to a specific man in order of the men’s rank; for this assignment, personal preference was of less importance than the individual’s hierarchical position.

Figure 1.2: Palauan community feast. Photograph from the bequest of Georg Fritz, dated ca. 1907. Archives of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Frankfurt (Germany)

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The women fulfilled other functions in addition to prostituting themselves, although this has been commonly neglected in academic literature: they occupied themselves with basic domestic work such as cleaning the bai, and they used to “entertain [… their] consort[s] with their […] artistic charm.” 76 In the course of their stay in the bai, the young girls also familiarized themselves with the “political manners and customs”77 of the men, which included chanting. Feasts were important community events, particularly for funerals and particular rites of passage. The arrangement of feasts, their lengths and the effort put into their preparation, followed prescribed patterns according to their purpose.78 In any type of festivity… the old men and women play a main role in the dances. In their call and response they begin to praise themselves. Memories of war are evoked. Victors, chiefs and their brilliant feats are sung about, as well as the land’s prosperity, wealth, money, land and sea and their treasures, and not least of all, their deities and personified representatives are wooed in order to win favor.

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THE EARLY CONTACT PERIOD

Early in the sixteenth century, Europeans began exploring the Pacific Ocean. They were following a two-fold quest that was nearly two millennia old in European intellectual history: to find out what lay on the other side of the world, and to discover a tropical island paradise. Speculation had been rife since the times of Ancient Greece about the existence and physical characteristics of a Utopia, an earthly Eden,80 and by the time of the first great navigations, travelers entered… the Oceanic world […] with a well-established mental landscape of the tropical island paradise— sweet airs, glorious abundance of flora and fauna, running fresh water, riches, and their human inhabitants living in a natural innocence and ready for co-option in imperial designs.

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Magellan, sailing in 1521 under favorable weather conditions, for the first time demonstrating the gargantuan size of the southern ocean to the interested European public,82 coined the name “Pacific,” the peaceful ocean. Names like “Solomon Islands” and “Isles of Martyrs” speak of the biblical associations of early navigators upon discovery of the “new” islands. However, soon blood was shed and encounters with native life, fascinating as it still was, began to cloud romantic imaginations.


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By the time of Cook’s voyages between 1768 and 1779, mutual violence between explorers and islanders had thoroughly dashed the romantic dream of an earthly Eden. Paradisical as the new lands appeared to be, voyagers also experienced another side of living in the islands: violence, loathsome sexual “perversions,” cannibalism, diseases, and death.83 But apart from the bruised dreams of paradise and the noble savage, other inducements still existed for charting and exploring the region. Motivations included both worldly and religious aspirations in addition to explorational curiosity: the islands had great economic potential, and a plethora of pagan souls were waiting to be saved by missionaries.

Palau and the Europeans

Accordingly, it was the vying of the European naval powers for mercantile supremacy in the Pacific that provoked a well-known Papal bull, and along with it Palau’s first affiliation with a foreign power. In the year following Columbus’ discovery of the West Indies in 1492, Pope Alexander VI divided all of the “new territory” between Spain and Portugal to settle the two countries’ quarrel for exclusive territorial rights. Everything west of the meridian 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands went to Spain. India, Africa and Malaysia became Portuguese, and the “New World,” except for Brazil, became Spanish. 84 Technically, Palau was Spanish even before it was actually discovered; however, this was of little consequence in the following years. It took until 1522 for Palau to be spotted by navigators: Gomez de Espinosa and the crew of the Trinidad sighted the small island of Sonsorol, thereby becoming the first Europeans to have seen any of the Western Carolines.85 In 1543, Palau was spotted by Spaniard Ruy Gomez de Villalobos,86 and this is usually cited as the date of the discovery of Palau. Neither Espinosa nor Villalobos set foot on the islands, and their logbook entries were really all that their respective “discoveries” resulted in. In 1686, Francisco Lazcano happened upon a group of islands (the Palaus) which he named “the Carolinas,” and he seized them in the name of Carlos II of Spain. But Spain, whose standing in Europe had considerably weakened by then, did not have any colonial ambitions east of the Philippines. Hence, while the islands and islets were formally under the Spanish crown, Spain took virtually no action to actually colonize her “new” territory. However, there remained missionary ambitions. In other parts of Oceania, more or less successful missionary stations had already been established, and when in 1696 two canoes from Sonsorol (one of the Southwest Islands) were

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stranded at Samar on the Philippine coast after veering off course—by no means an unusual event—the Spanish priests seized the opportunity and persuaded the Sonsorolese to guide them to their home islands to take up missionary activity. After several luckless attempts to find and evangelize the Palau islands, Sonsorol and, a little later Palau, were visited by Francisco Padilla on the Santissima Trinidad during its seventh trip in 1710. Essentially, Palau had remained a rather secluded spot until then. It was the crew of an East India Company ship, the Antelope, under Captain Henry Wilson, that was to finally establish a more durable contact. The Antelope shipwrecked on August 10, 1783; the 50 man crew was picked up by a Palauan canoe patrol and brought to Koror. The Palauan population at that time is approximated at about twenty thousand.87 Among the Antelope’s complement was a Portuguese crewman who spoke Malayan, and among the Palauans was a Malayan named Madan Blanchard, who had been stranded on the Palauan coast ten months earlier. 88 So unlike most other occasions of “first encounters,” verbal communication facilitated mutual declarations of peaceful intentions. Contact to the ibedul of Koror, or Abba Thule, as the Europeans called him, 89 was established, and friendly relations developed. Upon being actually introduced to the ibedul, the English demonstrated their firearms in order to leave the Palauans astonished; subsequently, the ibedul asked Wilson to support him in local warfare in the Palau archipelago by equipping him with arms, an entreaty which would be repeated in the weeks to come. In the intervening three months, construction work on a new ship named Oroolong, based on the Antelope’s remnants, had been completed. Madan Blanchard decided to stay behind on the island90 while the ibedul sent one of his sons, Lee Boo (also spelled: Li-Bu) with the departing Englishmen. The exchange of goods and individuals with a visiting group upon departure was a common Micronesian practice;91 however, the ibedul‘s ulterior motives were clearly to familiarize a Palauan with English technology and knowledge in order to partially appropriate them. The ibedul expected Lee Boo to return,92 and he instructed him as to what to pay particular attention to.93 Wilson/Keate’s94 account includes a few descriptions of occasions where music was played or involved. Common to all of them is a descriptive character paired with an apparent reluctance to apply a strong value judgment that would exceed the description of immediate responses; the accounts differ greatly from the bulk of travelogues of the time. This benevolent disposition was probably shaped by the unique relationship between Wilson and his crew and the natives. The visitors found themselves relying on the Palauans because the construction of a new ship required a


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certain degree of compliancy on the side of the islanders. The crew noted the “benign character of the inhabitants”95 when they were confronted with indigenous music for the first time. The perceived appropriateness of the Rousseauesque image of the “noble savage” to a description of the Palauans’ general mental disposition certainly had an impact on how their actions and their music-making were represented. Nonetheless, the music remained strange enough to ears unfamiliar with it for the Europeans to mistake it for battle cries: After the guard was fet, and the centimels placed, our people were going to rest, when, on a sudden, the natives began a song, the shrillness and manner of which made them think it was their war-hoop, or the signal for the King and his party from the back of the island to come upon them; the English instantly took their arms [… But Wilson] was soon relieved from every anxiety, by finding that they were only tuning their voices, in order to begin a song; of which as soon as they had in their manner properly pitched, RAA KOOK gave out a line, or stave, which was taken up by another Rupack, seated at a little distance, who sang a verse, accompanied by the rest of the natives present, except himself and the Prince. The last line they sung twice over, which was taken up by the natives in the next tent, in chorus; RAA KOOK gave out another line, which was sung in the same manner; and this continued for ten or twelve verses. They talked at times between the verses, as if setting some of the singers right who had not been properly in tune. Their song ended, they requested to hear some English songs, which was readily complied with, and several songs were sung by one of our people with which they were exceedingly pleased.

96

Elsewhere, Wilson/Keate describe the performance of a war dance: In the evening our people were entertained with a dance of the warriors, who were just then returned, which was performed in the following manner: The dancers have a quantity of plantain leaves brought to them, which they split, and shiver into the form of ribbands, these they twine and fix round their heads, wrists, waists, ankles, and knees […] They make also bunches or tassels of the same, which they hold in their hands. When drawn out, they form themselves into circles of two or three deep, one within another. In general an elderly man amongst them begins something like a song, or long sentence, in a very solemn tone, for our countrymen could not discriminate which it was, and when he comes to a pause, or what we should call the end of a stanza, a chorus is struck up, and the dancers all join in concert, still continuing their figure. Their dancing does not so much consist in capering or agility, as in a particular method they have of balancing themselves, and this frequently very low sideways, singing together all the while; during which, they will flatten their circles, so as to bring themselves face to face to each other, lifting up the tassels they hold in their hands, and giving them a clashing, or tremulous motion; after this there will be a sudden pause, and an exclamation from every voice, Weel! Then a new sentence or stanza is repeated, and danced to as before, and the same ceremony continued, till every man who is engaged in the dance has in his turn had his repetition and chorus.

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As mentioned above, Captain Wilson had supported the Abba Thulle with manpower and gunpowder in a local battle and upon the return of the victorious troupe, the described dance was performed. According to Wilson/Keate, it was solely meant to be an entertainment for the English. The war dance is a ritual that is usually performed following a victory in warfare, and technically it includes the inauguration of the new (victorious) rubak,98 and usually also the presentation of the head of a high-ranking member of the rival party.99 Wilson/Keate’s assumption is probably partly true because as per ritual, a ruk ra mekemad is performed to ascertain new power structures and communal identity; in the description above., the ritual seems detached from its original context for the purpose of demonstration. The dancing continued all through the night. The collective, responsive shouts mentioned by Keate are still part of dance performances and chants today. Reciprocating fascination for the Other, the Palauans asked the English to demonstrate some of their music, as Keate relates: Our songs were sea songs, and of battles; and the King was so pleased at the account he afterwards heard of them, that whenever he met the young lad COBBLEDICK, who sang them, he would stop him, and make him sing one or two songs.

100 101

At this point at the latest, the Palauans realized that their idea of music was not only distinct in the regional context, but also conceptually different to Others’ music. The musical aspect of the confrontation was ancillary, though, to the general and more pragmatic aspects of the encounter which had a direct effect on local power constellations, such as the adoption of firearms. Nothing in the reports available today suggests that at this early stage the Palauans were keen to acquaint themselves more thoroughly with the foreign sounds. In addition to Madan Blanchard, who by the time of the arrival of the next British ship in 1790 had died in warfare and had apparently not enjoyed a good reputation among the Palauans,102 the British left several goods impayable to the Palauans when they left on November 12, 1783, among them tools and arms. But what probably had a more permanent effect than these were shifts on the conceptual level, among other things “a deep appreciation of the value of gunpowder in the struggle for political ascendancy among the local villages, and a strong desire to continue to use foreigners as powerful allies in this struggle.” 103 Whether or not the Palauans had been acquainted with firearms prior to this event is of little importance, because it was during Wilson’s stay that guns had been utilized to alter local power constellations for the first time.


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Moreover, the involuntary stay of Wilson and the possibility to communicate verbally had begun to fill the Palauan image of the “white man” with content. The Palauans’ ethnoscape had, by way of a first “real” encounter, been substantially expanded. Prince Lee Boo accompanied Captain Wilson up to London, where the latter’s family lived; they arrived there in July 1784. Keate depicts him as a very smart, witty, and alert young man with a keen perception. Lee Boo acquired a good command of the English language given the short time scale, and during the voyage to England, he requested a member of the crew to teach him literacy.104 There is one recorded instance at which the young man encountered European music: One day […] a lady sat down to the harpsichord, to see how he [i.e. Lee Boo] was affected with music; he appeared greatly surprised that the instrument could throw out so much sound; it was opened, to let him see its interior construction, he pored over it with great attention, watching how the jacks were moved, and seemed far more disposed to puzzle out the means which produced the sounds, than to attend to the music that was playing.

105

Keate writes that the music did not really catch Lee Boo’s attention, but that the prince was more impressed with the instrument’s mechanics and possibly with its tonal quality. His focus on the technical aspect was not rooted in a lack of musical talent, however: Keate himself reports that “when he had been some time here, he rapidly caught two or three English songs, in which his voice appeared by no means inharmonious.”106 To Keate/Wilson, this comes as a small surprise, for when Lee Boo had been asked to perform a Palauan song, he… obligingly began one as soon as asked; the tones, however, were so harsh and discordant, and his breast seemed to labour with so much exertion, that his whole countenance was changed by it, and everyone’s ears stunned with the horrid notes.

107

Lee Boo’s fascination with the harpsichord and the idea of mechanical sound production can perhaps be ascribed to the vast predominance of vocal over instrumental genres in traditional Palauan music; other than the conch shell used for signaling and the Jew’s harp, musical instruments were, by all evidence, unknown in Palau until the introduction of foreign instruments (which in all likelihood also includes the ngaok flute). Therefore, sound production by a medium other than the human voice would be more likely to arouse curiosity on the part of a Palauan than vocal music or the nature of the music itself, even more so when the sound-producing medium is a

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string being plucked. Lee Boo’s disinterest in the music itself can thus be attributed to the sensation of the new. Lee Boo was not to return to Palau to share the experiences and observations he made during his stay with Wilson: he died of smallpox a few months after arriving in England. George Keate compiled and published Henry Wilson’s diaries as An Account of the Pelew Islands (1788). The book was translated into several languages and circulated widely. While this applied to many robinsonades and travelogues of the time, the popularity of this particular report seems to have grown out of something more than the mere curiosity and the general penchant for adventure stories that was prevalent at the time. In the spirit of the French Revolution that was lurking around the corner at the time of publication, the story of the shipwrecked English crew of the Antelope peacefully living together with a native people on an island in the far East for months served as a model of lived liberty, equality, and fraternity. With the rising demand for whaling products in Europa and America in the course of the following years, whaling ships scoured Micronesian waters in search of prey, and although Pohnpei and Kusaie were most frequently called at, Palau also received several visits. 108 The whaling industry brought mostly transit traffic to Palau, but naturally, it led to more intensive contact, too. Living in an oral history tradition, Palauans recorded outstanding events by composing songs. These oral devices served the triple purpose of either honoring or mocking the visiting party, of remembering special events, and of marking time, a dimension not otherwise organized into absolute sections or units. 109 American whaler Captain Edward C. Barnard, who was shipwrecked in Palau about 60 years later in 1832, relates that the Palauans performed for him and his crew a dance in response to their presence: […] there were at another town about six hundred She-Savages, soon after dark thay began the song & dance. To have a correct idea of the scen You have only to immagin some four or five hundred naked women standing close togeather jumping claping hands and singing, many with children in their armes during the night […] Their was one group of juvenile dances that caused 110

conciderable merriment the burden of their song was in allution to the Inglis [.]

German biologist Karl Semper, doing his research in the 1860s, also observed the custom of recording outstanding events and of honoring respected people by composing songs.111 Not only the performance of such a song, but also the creation of


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it is highly contextual, he relates; it has to be timed depending on the sequence of events it describes, be it warfare or a friendly visit: The women in the clubhouse already formed a circle to compose a song about this day. But Mad restrained these presumptuous ones with a scathing oration. “Don’t ridicule our guests, you foolish women. They leave early tomorrow morning. That’s the time to sing your songs. Don’t you know any more what the good customs here in Palau demand?

112

The list of resident Europeans in Palau 113 from Wilson’s time onwards shows the relatively constant presence of foreigners on the islands. This added further points of contact between islanders and foreigners to those arising from the commercial ship traffic coming in every now and then. Also, traders had established what were meant to be permanent trading posts in Palau.114 This resulted in a slowly increasing familiarity with the sight of white men. Unlike their successors—missionaries and colonial officers—these “white men” had no intention of altering the indigenous set-up of political structures, the religious system, or culturally prescribed behavior. However, beachcombers and traders did import European skills and knowledge. But culturally, these innovations were of limited consequence. More important was the sensation of innovation itself, which in the Palauan context had far-reaching implications, for as mentioned above, Palauan lore regards the “proper” way of life as the one that was implemented by deities. Accordingly, it was also deities who communicated to humans various improved techniques and innovative ideas; the possibility of external sources for change was not normally considered. Therefore, European innovations, acknowledged by Palauans for their usefulness, took on an aura of the divine. 115 Naturally, there were other ways of explaining the novel and alien as well, such as the explanation which Krämer recorded, according to which the Japanese people—at that point a relatively new presence—were believed to be descended from a group of Palauan castaways. 116 Numerous techniques can be used to make sense of an expanding ethnoscape, and from this perspective, “milestones in a Westerner’s history of Palau suddenly become only incidental to other events more salient to the Palauan historian.”117 Generally, it is assumed that “the culture recorded at the time of Western contact was the outcome of a long and complex development involving multiple sources of influence, as well as adjustment to diverse and changing local ecological conditions.”118 While the magnitude of influence of these sources cannot be determined with any certainty, it is important to note that they amounted to a homogenous set of beliefs and

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customs which, at the time of contact, was considered distinctly Palauan—distinctly Palauan not as opposed to European, but within the Palauan ethnoscape of the time.

The Colonial Presence

Contact between Palauans and Europeans was not intensive until the end of the nineteenth century because Palau was not on any major trade route. What contact there was, however, was dominated by commerce and individuals. Nearly every visitor was, in some way or other, introduced into local politics by the Palauans by being utilized in political competition among the paramount chiefs. 119 This was mostly motivated by warfare considerations, since sailors normally brought firearms. Thus, visitors and resident traders were made tools in the inner-Palauan struggle for supremacy, which in varying degrees they leveraged themselves by manipulating locals for their own benefit.120 The extent of mutual utilization increased, as shown in a most revealing document drawn up in 1861 by Andrew Cheyne. Cheyne was a Scottish-born trader who bought the island of Malakal and established a trepang (beche-de-mer) breeding facility there. Officially functioning as a witness only, Cheyne, in the name of “Abba Thulle, King of the Pelew Islands,” and the other chiefs of Koror, petitioned the British government for military assistance to settle inner-Palauan conflicts. This assistance, according to the document, was necessary because inhabitants of certain parts of the country had obtained firearms and were challenging Koror’s supremacy.121 To that end, the document asked the British crown to “take the Pelew Islands under the Protectorate of the crown of Great Britain and assist them to disarm the rebellious districts.”122 Hence, the high chiefs of Koror asked for all of Palau to be colonized by the British in order to maintain their own political supremacy. Notwithstanding comparable cases in early colonial history, and irrespective of the outcome of the petition and its reception by the addressee, this request shows that at that point in time, Palauans were still thinking of politics as a local structure, within which the non-local could be utilized as a manipulating factor without major consequences. No consideration was given to the consequences of such a move within the larger political context. This was to change decisively in the century to come. Moreover, and of greater importance to the subject of this study, no general anxieties seem to have existed toward contact with other cultures in the Palauan mind at this time.


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There occurred an immense depopulation in the Pacific from the time of early contact until the early twentieth century. In Palau, the pre-contact population is estimated to range between 25,000 and 40,000, and in the 1880s, it fell to under 4,000. 123 This decline in population is commonly attributed to diseases, which came in with foreign ships. In the context of Palauan politics, the population drop led to a loss of men’s clubs, and occasionally hereditary hierarchical positions could not be passed on to legitimate successors. 124 Culturally, it resulted in fewer traditional specialists, and weakened cultural stability, and “Micronesians were being enervated by the very changes that they welcomed with open arms, the prophets warned.”125 Yet, Europeans and Palauans had found an arguably peaceful modus of co-existence until Spanish missionaries institutionalized their presence by formally establishing both a government and a mission, thereby introducing into the islands two foreign complexes of meaning,126 i.e. Christian religion and state authority.

The Spanish Era (1886–1898)

Palau had nominally been Spanish territory since the Papal bull of 1493. But Spain had never made a real effort to establish administrational structures or colonies anywhere in the Carolines. Spain made her historical claims only when German, English, and American economic interests in the territory had become evident. In order to reassert those claims, in 1874 Spain began to officially require foreign ships to obtain permission of passage from the Spanish authorities in Manila. Anxious to uphold their Pacific trading and certainly displeased with Spain’s sudden shift in this undesirable direction, the affected countries protested vigorously. They refused to comply with the new requirements, and officially rejected Spain’s dominion over the territory. The situation escalated when a Papal bull assigned the Carolines to Spain and the Marshalls to Germany, but allotted full trade and settlement rights on the Carolines to Germany. With the Papal bull, Spanish dominion had been confirmed. In 1886, Spanish Queen Maria Cristina signed a royal decree selecting Colonia on Yap as the Spanish Carolines’ government headquarters. At that point, Spain’s knowledge of the region was marginal,127 and accordingly, the colonial government established on the islands was ineffective, except for the fact that, “white man’s” juridical canons officially replaced traditional patterns of rule and leadership, even if they do not seem to have been applied very strictly.128

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Little documentation exists of the Spanish period in Palau;129 however, written sources relate that there were no attempts on the side of the colonial government to replace the indigenous educational system with a European-style public school system. From the Palauan perspective, though, the mere institutionalization of the foreign presence in their territory—protected by armed forces as it was—was an enormous change, for any prior contact had been fluctuating, and had not challenged indigenous power constellations by claiming authority for the foreign party. Measures taken by the Spanish government—the efforts to close clubhouses and destroy culturally significant stone monuments in particular—were ineffective. Spain’s apparent lack of motivation to actually ‘run’ her colonies may be attributed to her own gradually weakening position in the European political context. Motivated in part by the natural resources awaiting exploitation, it was the successive German government that was to implement wider-reaching social reforms.

The German Period (1899–1914)

Over the course of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, political and public opinion in Germany began to warm to the idea of acquiring colonies.130 Spain’s state of emergency in the aftermath of the Spanish-American war in 1899 came just in time for the German government, presenting it with the opportunity to purchase the territory of the Carolines, the Marianas, and the Palaus in 1899. For the bargain price of 25 million Pesetas, Germany bought the land from Spain.131 With the change of government, German law was enacted.132 The government seat for the German Pacific territory was situated in Herbertshöhe (New Guinea), and it presided over three districts. Again, the district headquarters responsible for Palau was situated in Yap. Due to a lack of government-owned vessels, regional travel remained problematic until 1905, and early communication between the Palauans and the German government was rather limited. In 1901, district governor Arno Senfft appointed 73-year-old Jamaica-born Palauan resident James Gibbons aide-de-camp and established the prototype of a local police force, which was supposed to guarantee the enforcement of government decrees; after Gibbons’s death in 1904, a permanent government station was established on Palau.133 The permanently visible presence of a foreign government and executive authority, the submission to a foreign canon of law, the appointment of the newcomer Gibbons as its agent and instructor, and the attempts to level perceived class differences 134 ran


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31

counter to the hierarchical Palauan societal organization, particularly since the high chiefs were made accountable to Gibbons. However, the colonial government’s actions were not solely guided by ignorance of the Palauan situation and/or economic considerations:

against

their

background

of

European

history,

the

German

administrators interpreted Palauan society organization as feudal, and part of their adjudication can be regarded as an effort to eradicate the perceived unjust class differences.135 On the cultural level, the abolishment of the blolobel custom was of primary concern to the authorities as well as to the missionaries. To prevent prostitution in clubhouses and perhaps at the same time to recruit labor forces for government projects, district administrator Senfft tried to prohibit men from staying in clubhouses during the day.136 To the same end, the number of Palauan feasts—perhaps the most important of cultural events, guaranteeing the flow and maintenance of several elements of traditional culture—was limited in order to improve work efficiency.137 Complementing missionary efforts, the official agenda included the replacement of indigenous religion and beliefs with Christianity. Since spiritual mediums had proven to be stiff and active opponents of the German administration, far-reaching and radical attempts were undertaken to deprive them of their power and destroy their infrastructure.138 In addition to employing local laborers in infrastructural construction projects and agricultural plantages (copra, beche-de-mer), the German administration used them in great numbers for mining natural resources. The southern island of Angaur was important to the economy of all of the German Pacific territory because it had the highest sources of phosphate in the region. Phosphate was discovered there by Senfft in 1905, 139 and a mine was opened in 1909 by the Deutsche SüdseephosphatAktiengesellschaft. The company was granted a concession to mine phosphate on Angaur for the next forty years. A basic communicative network was set up for Angaur by installing a regular sea transportation schedule and a radio station;140 also, the Jaluit line vessels from then on included Angaur in their itineraries. The government opened a post office in the same year; the branch in Palau’s “capital” Koror had been opened two years earlier.141 Since the labor force available on Angaur itself was insufficient, workers were (sometimes forcefully) imported, mainly from China initially, 142 and afterwards also from the Marianas and all over the German Pacific territory, including Palau’s main islands. 143 Mining labor was also imposed on Palauans and other islanders as punishment for any action that was considered reactionary.

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Another moment of change was the extension of the missionary school system, which had been initiated by the Spanish Capuchins. In 1908, the Spanish Capuchins were replaced with German Capuchins, and by the academic year of 1910–1911, 273 students were enrolled in Palau’s three elementary schools, which worked on a generally regular attendance basis.144 Given Palau’s low population figures at that time (an estimated 4,200145), this was a remarkably high rate of attendance, even if the schools did not live up to the standards elsewhere in the German Pacific territory.146 Although schooling was not mandatory, the German promotion of formal education proved effective. Scholars have attributed this willing acceptance of the foreign educational system to the Palauans’ competitiveness: “Palauans have recognized that to be schooled is to be modern and such modernism often confers power, prestige, and wealth.”147 For the German period, though, this statement needs a little qualification: The children who attended the missionary schools were mostly the offspring of the highest-ranking families. 148 Since they were culturally privileged to deal with the foreigners and to be considered for positions in the German administration, they obviously were more receptive to schooling than members of other layers of society. Therefore, it seems that while competitiveness was generally a trait pertaining to all social strata, it was the meteet, the elite class, who first accepted the introduced school system as a tool in their quest for superiority, thereby adapting it to Palauan life. Irrespective of the more pragmatic early problems, such as difficulties concerning the language of instruction, lack of equipment, etc., European notions of knowledge and its transmission clashed with indigenous educational systems in Palau and in all of the German Pacific territory.149 To the Europeans, conveyance of knowledge is inseparably linked with the “cultural cornerstones” of literacy, written language, and belles lettres, and it therefore relies heavily on abstract thinking. This was an alien concept to Pacific peoples,

whose

non-vocational

learning

techniques

were

largely

based

on

memorization of the spoken word. Moreover, educating the youth had formerly been embedded in daily community life, and educational content had invariably depended on the youngsters’ hierarchical position. With the new school system, the indigenous mnemonic techniques that had been indispensable “culture carriers” began to be replaced with the written word—a long-winded process, which for a long time remained of arguable effectiveness.150 Knowledge was democratized in that everybody was given access to the same information. Pragmatic reasons impeded the co-existence of the old and the new forms of education, because the daily rhythm of Palauan life was significantly altered by the new institutions. If Captain Felipe de Canga-Arguelles y


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Villalba witnessed in the 1880s that “every evening some young women meet, and in the king’s house they sing to him in quiet voices until the king sleeps, or asks them to be silent and depart” 151 then the general organization of life under a foreign administration, with its school schedules and work time organization plans, fundamentally changed the basics of Palauan life, which had formerly provided the framework for an educational system based on regular gatherings such as witnessed by de Canga. The decreasing importance of the spoken word as a carrier of cultural knowledge inevitably affected the transmission of traditional lore, including songs. In Wunapope and Jaluit, the (missionary) teachers offered instruction in piano and violin playing;152 for Palau, this was not the case. Still, music was a regular subject that mainly involved singing European songs and hymns, which had sometimes been translated by the missionaries themselves. With the beginning of the German period, German poems 153 and songs, including German hymns, were taught extensively throughout the German territory, particularly for representative purposes: at the festivities for the Kaiser’s birthday in 1914, for example, Palauan children sang several German songs and performed dances.154 Given the incompatibility between traditional structure and newly introduced legal regulations, the overwhelmingly marginal Palauan response to the new order as reported by Senfft and administrative director Born155 comes as little surprise. But as far as the alien concepts that were being introduced are concerned, whether educational, religious, economic, or ideological, it seems that the Palauan reception was more stratified. This fragmented Palauan society, for the first time introduced the notion of “backwardness,” and introduced negative associations with certain strata of society, which immensely accelerated socio-cultural change. A “new elite” emerged, with greater contact with foreigners, and more access to European goods and tools than the rest of the population. To date, Palauan society and culture remain highly fragmented in that the bulk of popular rhetorical pronunciations of identifications come from a distinct layer of society—generally, they are articulated by leaders with US American education. Such fragmentation of identification and expression within a society is by no means exceptional within the Pacific region; similar developments have been described for the Marianas and New Zealand,156 to name but two. The colonial administration exploited indigenous power structures as well as resources for their own benefit. Palauans, in turn, utilized the newly emerged structures to improve their individual positions within the changing indigenous social texture.157 The year 1905 was marked by indigenous uprising against German colonialization, and as

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the year when the authorities generally maintained a pax communis in Palau among Palauans as well as between Palauans and the administration. With awareness of the radical changes that the Germans implemented, in part forcefully, indigenous historians today describe both the German and the Spanish colonization as a “benign control” of Palau.158 This is a statement which is relative to the diametrically opposed judgment of the subsequent phase in Palau, the period of the Japanese administration.

The Japanese Period (1914–1945)

Japanese aspirations in the Pacific were not a novelty in the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the notion of “southward advance” (jap. nanshin) had become a popular theme in Japan, envisioning that… the nation would find glory, prosperity, and new territory by moving into the “South Seas,” the Nan’yo, a geographical concept as nebulous as the ambitions directed toward it, but which, in the first years of the Meiji era, was generally defined as the tropical Pacific, particularly Micronesia.

159

So the original motives for venturing South were at least partly the same as those that had drawn European sailors East centuries before; the strong emphasis that the Japanese put on the national aspect of Nippon’s planned territorial expansion added another set of motivations, and so did the burgeoning rivalry with the European maritime powers. Before the turn of the century, the Japanese controlled the major share of exports in copra and trepang (beche-de-mer) in Palau.160 Economic interest, dawning nationalism, and the military importance and strategic value of the Palaus made the West Micronesian islands very appealing to Japan. In October 1914, at the outset of World War I, Japanese military forces displaced the virtually unarmed German administration staff in Micronesia and occupied the Carolines (except for Guam). 161 The official reason for the usurpation was that the Japanese government considered her economic networks in the region threatened by the restrictive German politics.162 Until 1920, Palau was to remain under the control of the Japanese Imperial Navy. In 1920, the League of Nations allotted the former German Pacific territory to Japan as a Class C Mandate. The basic agenda of Class C Mandates was formulated in article 22 of the League Covenant, which speaks of “those colonies and territories […] which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” 163 the tutelage of which “should be entrusted to advanced nations who, by reason of their resources,


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their experience, or their geographical location, can best undertake this responsibility […] on behalf of the League.”164 The trustees’ tasks, among others, were to “promote the material and moral well-being and social progress of the Micronesian people;” to “allow missionary activity and church worship;” and to “allow no slavery or trade in arms or ammunition and alcoholic drinks.” 165 The mandate thus prioritized education and culture to “prepare” Micronesians for the “strenuous conditions” of market economy, which translates into an attempt to implement a cultural framework then thought of as universal, “developed,” and modern rather than culture-specific. The emphasis given to such development was one that tied in with Japanese intentions, for motivations were not confined to rendering altruistic foreign aid. Japan intended to “turn the Pacific into a Japanese lake”166 to make use of the strategic value of the islands, to exploit their economic potential for national purposes, and to relieve the Japanese islands of their starving rural population 167 by relocating Japanese farmers to Micronesian islands (by 1935, Palau’s Japanese population equaled the indigenous population 168 ). The Japanese interpretation of the League Covenant is perhaps best summarized by a subordinate clause found in a semi-official report on the Micronesian islands: here, a C-mandate is defined as “not a possession, but [as the] nearest approach to it among the three classes of mandate.”169 To “prepare” the Micronesian islands, the Japanese administration readily accepted the League of Nation’s regulations regarding the islanders’ cultural education to culturally incorporate Japanese Micronesia into the Japanese nation. In their efforts to “assimilate” the islanders toward Japanese values, they concentrated on the schooling and organization of the Micronesian youth, the demonstration of religious zeal for Shinto, and the acquainting of high-ranking indigenous community members with Japanese reality (by arranging group travel to Japan).170 Much more than the Spanish and the German administrations before her, Japan took an active role in altering the Palauan social and cultural fabric. She systematically suppressed and/or eliminated selected elements of customary life in order to substitute them according to her own agenda; in doing so, the Japanese Other was presented as culturally and morally superior.171 One important working point was the weakening of indigenous hereditary power structures, which was successful in that Palauan political leadership was instrumentalized and thus virtually emasculated. 172 This climate of forced change was a continuation and intensification of a development which had begun in the Spanish and German days. On the other hand, it was at the same time fundamentally different: the changes that both earlier administrations had tried to work,

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manifest e.g. in the proscription of blolobel custom and inter-village warfare, had set out either from religiously inspired morals or from political considerations. The Japanese administration made no secret of Japan’s unquestionably greater cultural advancement and superiority in every regard. While such comparative tensions between Palauans and foreigners had certainly not been a novelty since the beginning of the contact period, the extent to which Japan displayed her conviction of her own preeminence was to have traumatic effects on Palauan identity negotiation. The government implemented structural changes which had a significant effect on daily life. All land that had customarily been owned by communities was turned into government property. Koror was made the administrative headquarters of the Japanese Pacific territory, which necessitated an infrastructure of concrete roads and buildings, telecommunication facilities, an executive authority, etc. Being the center of Japanese Micronesia and accommodating 23,767 inhabitants in 1940, most of them Japanese, 173 Koror became a little metropolis with paved roads, electricity, movie theaters, and geisha houses.174 A public health system was set up, as well as the first mandatory public school system in Palau.175 Both systems provided for the different requirements of Japanese and Palauans.176 School teachers were Japanese, and so was the language of instruction; the use of Palauan on school grounds was prohibited.177 In both form and content, a strong sense of loyalty towards the Japanese emperor was conveyed. For Palauan children, learning the Japanese language was the most time-intensive part of their education (12 hours per week), followed by basic arithmetic (five hours), singing and physical education (three hours), and ethics, drawing, and craftsmanship (one hour). 178 Attendees of Japanese schools recall today that the music/singing lessons were spent listening to gramophone recordings of Japanese folk music and memorizing Japanese children’s songs.179 Schools were the only places where Palauans were exposed to Japanese music; nearly every school was equipped with a gramophone and, according to the memories of former students, recordings were “limited to Japanese folk music.”180 Like the German missionary schools—which had not been compulsory—, the Japanese school system treated its Palauan students in an egalitarian manner, which further eroded the meaningfulness of customary hierarchical structures, for the customary education of youth had earlier channeled the transmission of knowledge according to the rank of the respective student, as mentioned above. The Catholic missionaries had been expelled by Japan in 1915, and they were not to return until 1921. During these six years of religious “abandonment,” an indigenous


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religious movement entered the scene. The Modekngei religion (name derived from the verb dokngéi, “to get together”) is usually described as “a syncretism of Belauan shamanistic elements and Catholic doctrine and rituals,”181 and sometimes the name is also used for the religion prevalent in pre-colonial Palau. The movement was prohibited by the Japanese authorities, which led to it often being depicted as a resistance movement against Japanese control; 182 however, since it became visible as a “new religion” so immediately after the Japanese seizure, it is perhaps more appropriate to view its heightened presence in daily life as a conscious effort to clarify a Palauan position in context with recent colonial experiences. In that sense, Modekngei would rather have been pro-Palauan than anti-Japanese. Aoyahi identifies the absence of religious specialists in 1914 as a crucial factor for the new religion’s favorable reception by the Palauan population; kerongs had been banished and/or exiled by the Europeans since the advent of foreign administrations. She also considers Modekngei a conciliative marriage of custom and innovation183 which reflected changes in Palauan minds and x-scapes that had occurred over the last three decades: prophecy, healing, future-telling, and local gods were as much part of the new system as the banishment of other local gods, the abolition of food taboos, and certain Christian elements.184 The hypothesis that in practice, Modekngei was sometimes taken by its adherents to be a religious commitment as much as a cultural and political credo seems to be backed by the increase in followers over time, for “the ebb and flow of the number of believers seems also to coincide with the degree of social disorder.”185 Modekngei continues to play an important role within contemporary Palauan cultural discourse, both as an active and a passive contributor. Indeed, several elements of customary lore have survived (only) in Modekngei teachings and liturgy. Japanese efforts to establish a “little Japan” on the islands and to transform the Palauans into Japanese-minded citizens not only fundamentally altered the appearance of the streets in district centers like Koror, and changed the framework of daily living and the outlook of the Palauan mind, but also fostered a sense of cultural inferiority in the islanders. Furthermore, as compared with earlier administrations, Japanese rule has been described as equipped with an energetic and “extraordinary determination and a sense of purpose in every action,”186 the ultimate target being the “Japanization” of the Micronesian islands. The 1973 appraisal of Lazarus Salii, an early Palauan leader and later a senator, summarizes an assessment that has since remained popular throughout Palau:

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Had [the Japanese administration] been permitted to continue its complete control of almost all aspects of Micronesian life, [it] would have all but obliterated Micronesian races and cultures within one more generation. […] Japan’s assimilation of Micronesia would have resulted in the permanent 187

loss of our cultures and our ethnic identities.

World War II, American Trusteeship (1947–1981), Independence (since 1994) The United States had suspected the development of military fortifications in Japanese Micronesia since World War I. In spite of the deployment of US secret services, Japan had been successful in making it difficult to obtain factual information in this sector, which only fostered American mistrust towards Japan.188 In 1942, the American military went on the offensive in the Southwest Pacific; in 1944, three years after the traumatic events at Pearl Harbor, US air forces began attacking the Japanese bases and industrial sites in Micronesia. US interest in Micronesia had from the beginning been prompted by security and military concerns. Increased importation of Japanese military personnel to Palau and an infrastructure blockage resulted in a serious famine on the islands; bombing attacks, military recruitment of the youth, the strong Japanese grip and the dislocation of local population by evacuation were the determining factors of Palauan life in 1944 and 1945.189 In spite of the bad reputation the Japanese pre-war government has today, it seems that at the end of World War II, a large part of the Palauan public displayed no grudge against the Japanese administration. In 1948, American anthropologist Barnett found that two old men he talked to… recounted the now familiar stories about the abuses of Japanese soldiers and the American war superiority; […] they laughed in telling about Japanese cruelty to them. I have never seen an expression of hatred on their faces.

190

Other Palauan reports and re-narrations of World War II also convey the impression that the US “liberators” in Palau were not welcomed with the ardor they had expected. In the Palauan case, this permits conclusions to be drawn regarding the “success” of the Japanese mission civilisatrice. In spite of its sometimes brutal dissemination of Japanese values and its policy of forced assimilation, the Japanese government apparently managed to create among Palauan rank and file a climate of general endorsement conducive to their goals. Apparently the Japanese grip was “so strong


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that it was able to absorb the Micronesian people into it to such an extent that the people did not feel any sense of loss and alienation within their homeland.”191 Perhaps the insecurity of the post-war years further added to the speed with which “the Japanese period’s changes […] became a nostalgic memory of paternalistic security.”192 After the formal surrender of the Japanese government in September 1945, the US Navy remained on the formerly Japanese Micronesian islands until 1947 as the official administrative interim authority; during that period, all Japanese settlers were repatriated.193 In July 1947, the United Nations and the United States signed the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands agreement. While this entitled the US to full power and authority over the Trust Territory, it also committed her to… foster the development of such political institutions as are suited to the trust territory and shall promote the development of the inhabitants of the trust territory toward self-government or independence […]; and to this end [the US] shall give to the inhabitants of the trust territory a progressively increasing share in the administrative services in the territory; shall develop their participation in government; shall give due recognition to the customs of the inhabitants in providing a system of law for the territory.

194

During the first years of the trusteeship, however, more mundane issues had to be tackled than the envisioned self-government. The war and its subsequent change of administration had led to a disruption of any “normality” in everyday life: the population was starving, basic health care was sorely needed, and infrastructure was ailing in nearly every respect.195 “Except for strategic concerns, there was no overall policy,”196 and more importantly in the context of this study, there was little evidence… of any real concern [on the side of the US administration] for the preservation of indigenous cultures (which in any event had been radically altered by three previous colonial regimes), and decisions were made in far distant Washington, where little knowledge about or interest in the islands existed.

197

Yet, the formal political organization of the entrusted territory into municipalities, although a clearly Euro-American organizational scheme grafted onto a society defined by hereditary power structures that were technically still in existence, has been considered a “government sanction of the remnants of the traditional systems”198 rather than an enforcement of an alien grassroots level form of government because the inclusion of indigenous structures into the new administrative system was tolerated.

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The right of the public to elect indigenous local magistrates, for example, enabled hereditary chiefs to enter politics; even if by that time their power had been decisively eroded already, the bulk of elected magistrate positions was filled with local chiefs.199 Obviously, this did not provide for a framework in which customary structures could be re-established if desired. But it did leave a small margin to bring into play once more (perceived) customary practices in legal grey zones, and in a peculiar way, it even formally asserted traditional power structures that were declared politically irrelevant by foreign administrators for more than half a century. The Palauan Congress, established in 1947, was the first indigenous advisory body to be created in all of Micronesia; it took a couple of years for other local congresses to follow suit. 200 While these institutionalized congregations had little vigorous political effect, they fulfilled an important task in spreading political consciousness among the islanders; also, they provided aspiring indigenous leaders with their first experiences on the “playground” of politics. The women of Palau too began to work towards an organization of their own, and the Palauan Women’s Conference met for the first time in 1955. Of no direct political authority, the Conference has, through its annual meetings, acted as an advisory corrective to the elected government; 201 in this particular function, the Women’s Conference can be considered a modified contemporary version of the customary women’s clubs. Also in 1955, Belau National Museum was established as the first museum in Micronesia, which mirrors the unfolding realization of Self in Palau at that time. According to a contemporary Palauan appraisal, the “high clans of Palau increasingly regained their prestige and power” under the US government. This, however, was not necessarily considered a positive development by the country’s Japanese-educated young people.202 While a greater awareness of old customary hierarchical structures is ascertainable indeed, it has to be noted that functionally, the high chiefs’ role appeared fundamentally altered. Under the American administration, political power was no longer a birthright in Palau; in fact, dynastic transfer of power diametrically opposed American ideology, so that the distribution of political authority had to be mediated by election. This democratization of the process of power allocation left other aspects of chieftainship, such as social prestige, untouched; these were to be renegotiated in indigenous discourse. The attempt to canalize indigenous cultural practices into channels complementary to the overall goal of “education toward self-government” is obvious. The political institution of the klobak was substituted with that of the elected government, but hereditary title-holders were given access to the latter. Since this was


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much more than any prior foreign administration had ever conceded, the conceptual change of the meaning of chieftainship went largely unnoticed over the sensation of a liberty that allowed for a perceived revitalization of indigenous power structures. As far as the overall process is concerned, this development is representative of the bulk of political transformations that were arranged by the American administration. During the early years of American administration, US efforts in Micronesia concentrated on rebuilding the healthcare and education systems, and attempted to revitalize indigenous economies. Like Japanese schooling before, the comparatively less limited American educational offers were eagerly embraced by Palauans. All through the Trust Territory, regional high-schools were established, and from the 1970s onwards, selected students were sent to colleges abroad to prepare for a future task: to occupy the position of political leader in a nation-yet-to-emerge. Lazarus Salii described his perspective as follows: They sent us […] to colleges abroad, and kept us there. And there—not on the playing fields of Eton but in the Trust Territory dormitories in Guam and Hawaii—Micronesia’s battle for a new political status was begun. It was there that we learned the familiar lessons of unity, sovereignity and self-government, the lessons which generations of American students have absorbed and taken for granted, the lesson[s] which—upon our return to our home islands, to the crowded district centres, to the equally crowded government offices—we found could not be satisfied in Micronesia. Our expectations could not be fulfilled: not in a strategic trusteeship, not in a United States territory, not by an administrator who alternated uneasily between his role as conqueror and his role as liberator.

203

Education is such an effective stimulus of change because it not only transmits knowledge, but also opens up minds to global influences and thinking. This very process, in which the individual takes an active role, has perhaps been the most powerful agent of change in the colonial context worldwide. American education came hand in hand with an immersion into American culture. Among many other fascinations, it brought to the islands the idea of critical thinking, and it inspired an appreciation of the right to self-determination. In 1965, the bi-cameral Congress of Micronesia, bestowed with certain legislative capacities, was formally created204 as the first institutional indigenous adversary to a foreign administration in the region. From its inception, it proved to be a platform for indigenous political discourse and a growing decolonialization movement; it embodied the young Micronesian liking for self-determination. As such, it was also an agent of social, political, and economic change from within. Carrying high symbolic meaning as

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a vehicle towards political self-determination somewhere in a distant future, the Congress, among other things, with varying success sensitized the Micronesian population to things political, so that the issue of identity started to become topical. Micronesia had been treated as a political entity by the Americans ever since their arrival, and while this did instill in the islanders a “new sense of themselves as ‘Micronesians’,”205 it also provided a framework for the beginning of an awareness and negotiation of a distinctly Pohnpeian, Chuukese, or Palauan identity. It is not surprising, then, that in the course of the 1960s, a greater awareness of the distinctiveness of Palauan culture and its value becomes discernible.

206

At the same time, the

administration of John F. Kennedy contemplated American Micronesia’s future with respect to its political relationship with the US. Considerations were based on the assumption that “the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands had to remain closely tied to the United States.”207

Figure 2.1: Baseball had already become a popular sport in Palau during the Japanese days. Photo shows the All-Star team of 1976. From the collection of Belau National Museum, Koror

The Congress’s political status commission, created two years after the inception of the Congress itself, suggested four options for further development: free association with


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the US, independence, integration with the US, and the retention of the trusteeship. Free association was the recommended option, perhaps inspired in part by the recent arrangement between the Cook Islands and New Zealand (1965); negotiations with the US were taken up, and they were to last a decade.208 At the same time, the “American Way” had begun to change Palauan daily life. Palauans increasingly moved into concrete houses, wore foreign clothes and subsisted on a diet largely based on imported foods and beverages, a course already chosen in Japanese times and characterized by urbanization, 209 economic dependence, and cultural change. This lifestyle was for the most part financed with financial aid programs, particularly from the 1970s onwards. This development had far-reaching implications for Palauan economy, public health, and domestic life, and for some it clearly illustrated that “in Micronesia, the life of our fathers was being lost and the ideals of their sons could not be realised.” 210 In later years, the influx of media, particularly television from stateside metropolitan centers, brought America to even the more remote Palauan villages. A rather pessimistic appraisal formulated in the 1990s stated that in the course of the twentieth century and during the American administration in particular, the way of life of the peoples of [the Pacific Islands] has been largely transformed by what might loosely be called the ‘modernising’ effects of high and recurrent levels of aid. […] Overall, there is no great difference between the situations of the majority of the peoples in these states and territories and those of the poorest groups in New Zealand, France, and the United States. The direction of change in these islands is one of gradual assimilation to the values and aspirations of the dominant power.

211

A direct comparison of Pacific islanders with Americans, which would make the American Pacific some kind of a swimming, underclass suburb of mainland America, is certainly misleading. It is true, however, that the grafting of the US education system onto Pacific societies and the implementation of various social programs, which had originally been designed for the special requirements of American society, had in retrospect a destructive rather than a constructive effect. In addition, these measures even added to Micronesia’s financial dependence on the US, so that “a massive welfare state was created.”212 A basic assumption in the negotiations of Micronesia’s political future was the unity of the Micronesian islands. That unity, however, was not a given factor, for “the incentive for their [i.e. the island groups’] alliance has been an introduced one—the effect of outside forces upon their lives—rather than an internal one based on a desire for

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unity.”213 As talks were prolonged and the very different colonial histories of the various island groups were reflected in more detail, separatist tendencies flared up. To quote Palauan politician Salii again: Micronesia begins to divide and fragment. The unity we developed under our liberator-conqueror begins to desert us. […] We must concede that thus far in our history, it has always been the threatening presence of foreigners, of conquerer-liberators, which has united us. Fear of what others might do to our islands has united us. […] The America we loved and we fought is now on the edge of withdrawal from the government of Micronesia and we Micronesians find ourselves 214

looking at each other in a new light.

It was in the early 1970s that the United States conceded to take into consideration a free association status for the Trust Territory. Soon it became clear that the US was not eager to give up its control of those islands that were of strategic value to it—such as the Marshalls, the Northern Marianas, and Palau. The “rest”—Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, and Yap—were to unite as the Federated States of Micronesia (F.S.M.) in 1978. The Marshalls put its constitution into effect in 1979; the Northern Marianas had in 1975 voted to emerge from the situation as the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. Palau contemplated joining the F.S.M, but in 1978 decided to enter negotiations on its own. These talks climaxed with the summoning of a constitutional Palauan government and the ratification of the first constitution, which also allotted certain authority to a council of hereditary chiefs, in 1981. From now on, Palau had acquired the status of a republic. The US had arranged a compact of free association with all of F.S.M., the Marshalls and Palau.215 In the Palauan case, the term of agreement was 50 years; although the overall cost cannot be precisely determined, US$1 billion is the figure commonly estimated. In 1983, the Micronesians went to the polls; the F.S.M. and Marshalls compacts were approved, and US President Ronald Reagan signed the decree putting them into effect in 1986.216 As for Palau, things turned out to be more complicated: the Compact of Free Association allowed for the presence of US nuclear material and weapons on Palauan territory in cases of military necessity. The Palauan constitution, however, generally prohibits all nuclear and toxic material on Palauan land, thus compact and constitution were incompatible. Factional divisions further prolonged the process of decision-making, and strikes and violence characterized Palau in the early 1980s.217 Following further amendments and plebiscites, the Compact of Free Association was finally implemented in 1994; Palau finally regained her independence. In exchange for financial compensation, the US retained her strategic military interests in the Palaus.


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This immense subsidization has led to Palau’s relatively healthy economy in comparison with other Pacific island groups. In the event of official inaugurations and other political occasions, celebrations in contemporary Palau will be opened by a chant; routine government meetings and sessions, however, will not be preceded by a chant, as custom would dictate. Thus, in daily life, assertions of Palauan identity happen on a selective basis and depending on the context and on the perceived appropriateness of these symbols—symbols which in the case of Palauan chant signify a variety of things, such as dignity. This promotes a national identity as opposed to a less distinguished past, along with cultural uniqueness and adaption to global political requirements, social hierarchy and, in a political context, democratic egalitarianism. I will argue that unlike other symbols of Palauan past, the sonic signifier “chant” retained a place in Palau because the identification of the signified is so much in the hands of the listener.

Religious Mission

Naturally, the Christian mission was the conduit by which European music actually entered Palauan daily life. For missionaries, music serves a double purpose: first, it is essential to the practice of their faith, just like in their respective home countries; and second, it is a means of propagating religion, more so than at home. Hence, musicmaking in Christian contexts has always been given particular emphasis, so much so that up until today “the music they [i.e. the missionaries] introduced, and the songs composed by Micronesians in these styles and styles derived from them, are major components of music in Micronesia.”218 Christian music, hymn singing in particular, has been the strongest among all identifiable musical influences that have left a mark on contemporary music all over the Pacific islands.219 The above-mentioned unsuccessful attempts at Christianizing early in the eighteenth century notwithstanding, three main active missions operated in Palau: the Catholic mission begun by Spanish Capuchins in 1891, the Protestant-Lutheran mission of the German Liebenzeller Mission, and the Seventh-Day Adventist mission that started in Japanese times. The dispute between Germany and Spain over colonial claims in the West Pacific had in 1885 caught the attention of Rome, which was rather suddenly drawn to the Carolines, a blank spot on the missionary map up to that point. Rome’s involvement may well have been a major reason for the Spanish to finally send off missionaries, for in keeping with past practices, missionary and colonizing measures went hand in hand

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again.220 The first missionary stationed on Palau affirmed this when he wrote “we are working not only to convert the natives here to the Catholic faith, but also to make Palau a real Spanish land.”221 The Capuchin Caroline mission in Palau was established in 1891. The missionaries’ early practices concentrated on discouraging ancestor worship and rituals related to it, and since power structures and leadership were organized according to sanctions provided by these beliefs and rituals,222 this was bound to have a lasting impact on societal organization at large. Protestant missionaries at later times would follow a similar course of action. Other points of intervention were cultural: in architecture and visual arts, such as woodcarving, any allusions or depictions of sexuality and/or nudity were considered objectionable by the missionaries (and the colonial government).223 Efforts at eradicating those elements of “pagan” culture that were incompatible with Catholic morality also had a direct impact on visible daily life in that the missionaries strongly objected to the traditional Palauan dress code (except for the men’s loincloths and the women’s grass skirts, Palauans customarily went undressed). According to Palau’s missionaries’ letters, the pains taken to convey to the natives a Catholic sense of shame and coenesthesia were of limited success in early times as measured by the missionaries’ expectations, and the Catholic notion of family life remained an alien concept to Palauans well into the 1920s.224 However, as evangelization proceeded, the missionaries became more successful in this and in other regards. The gradual, but slow, acceptance of the Spanish missionaries by the Palauans was immensely accelerated by the Europeans’ commitment to the sick during an influenza epidemic,225 a disease against which the Spanish appeared to be immune from the Palauan perspective. Naturally, the performing arts were also affected by the missionaries’ condemnation: all through Micronesia,226 missionaries considered dancing sinful, even more so when the dancers were only lightly if at all appareled, and to them performing music—except for Christian hymns—was a dispensable pastime as well.227 To the degree to which they had a bearing on local practices, the missionaries prohibited the newly converted from engaging in either. In the Marshalls, missionaries reportedly taught their own dances in order to substitute something “safe” for the perceived licentious, sexually charged indigenous dancing; 228 everywhere else, dancing was subjected to highly restrictive measures or even vetoed altogether. These restrictions changed the course dancing was to take.


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In the first decade of the twentieth century, German Capuchins replaced Spanish missionaries all through the Carolines. Palau’s last Spanish mission left behind 140 Christians out of a total population of roughly 4,000 in 1906. A year later, German government representatives were all but satisfied with the success of Christianization: “Almost twenty years of activity had done little to distance the Palauans from their old customs and employments.” 229 The German missionaries stressed the educational aspect of their work even more than the Spanish had: every parish and every missionary station had a school. Basic level teaching was held in German and included religious instruction, reading, writing, basic mathematics and singing. Language instruction was subsidized by the colonial government. As for the teaching of music, missionaries continued the Spanish efforts to compile and translate song books into Palauan. For older students, music instruction was generally given more importance than for younger students.230 The European-style superstructure that the missionaries promoted naturally had an impact on indigenous music making, for hymns were taught to the freshly converted. With the growing familiarity with Christian music, Catholic ethics were more and more absorbed, and indigenous ethics were proportionately strongly vilified. Accordingly, traditional songs communicated moral concepts perceived to be despicable and were therefore entered into a process of radical renegotiation, during which they began to be considered questionable or even worth eradicating. The fast adoption of Christian values thus came partly at the expense of traditional lore, and today some Palauans explain the (from the individual’s perspective, not necessarily deplorable) loss of traditional songs and dances by adducing the “badness” of the original lyrics.231 Over the course of World War I, the Japanese government proclaimed obligatory attendance of Japanese schools for Palauans;232 private and missionary schools were closed.233 Missionaries in Palau were expelled in November 1915; in 1919, the treaty of Versailles evicted all German missionaries from their other stations in the Pacific.234 A Japanese Congretionalist missionary named Nanyo Dendo Dan took over the work on Chuuk and Pohnpei, and German Catholic priests were replaced with Spanish Jesuits on other islands235 before Japan allowed the return of other foreigners to the Pacific islands in 1925. In Palau, the Spanish Jesuits arrived in 1921;236 from 1915 until that point, no missionaries had been on the islands. In the 1920s, the Catholic Church in Palau was clearly growing along with the expansion of the missionaries’ territorial scope, which increasingly included more remote places on Babeldaob and outer islands. From 400 Catholics in 1921,

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membership had increased to over 1,000 by 1931—in spite of the Japanese environment and public education, which “was reinforcing […] materialistic values in a learning environment far more congenial to atheism than to the religious beliefs the missionaries were working to instill.”237 The Catholic missionaries had been allowed to re-enter due to the League of Nations mandate, which obliged Japan to follow a liberal policy of religion. Later, German Protestant and Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries would add to the religious landscape of the islands (see below). This religious diversity—even subsidized in part by the Japanese government—has been considered remarkable, given the Japanese official agenda; however, Japan’s tolerance, which was to last until the late 1930s, was partially rooted in the utilitarian view that the Christian missions’ “attempts to ‘civilize’ the Micronesians complemented the efforts of the South Seas Government to do so.”238 Obviously, Buddhism and state Shinto were the most popular religions among the Japanese residents of the Japanese South Seas. State Shinto was the government’s religion of choice in this heyday of nationalist sentiment, and “its shrines dotted the Pacific from Angaur to Arno.”239 The greatest Shinto shrine of the mandate territory, the Kampei Taisha Nan’yo Jinja, was built in Koror in 1940; its dedication ceremonies lasted for days. Participants vaguely recall “Japanese recitations” 240 which were chanted on this impressive occasion. Palauans, including Palauan children, were not actively involved in the festivity, but attended the ceremonies as spectators.241 In spite of the evident religious zeal, the Japanese administration did not put much of an effort into either a Buddhist or a Shinto mission. Enthusiastic evangelism seems to be more a western cultural phenomenon than an Eastern one. The Japanese missionaries, unlike their Christian counterparts, were not interested in saving souls from the fires of eternal damnation.

242

Obviously, inherent religious reasons exist for this lack of missionary aspiration; additionally and again, further efforts to maintain and demonstrate clearly marked boundaries within an established two-class society shine through here. In 1927, missionaries of the German Protestant-Lutheran Liebenzeller Mission (founded in Hamburg as the Deutscher Zweig der China-Inland-Mission in 1899), which had been stationed in parts of the Pacific other than Palau from 1906 until 1919, returned to the Pacific islands. In 1929, it established a local branch on Palau. Missionaries Wilhelm and Margarete Länge were sent there and built a church in Ngiwal; surprisingly quickly after their arrival, their parish counted 160 Christians. In


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1934, another Liebenzell parish was established on Palau by missionaries Wilhelm and Hanna Fey in Ngarchelong on Babeldaob.243 In 1930, a missionary couple, Pastor and Mrs. Miyake, arrived from Japan to begin spreading the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) faith;244 by 1970, this community totaled approximately 300 members.245

Figure 2.2: The Liebenzell church at Ngiwal. Undated photograph from the archives of the Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany)

Even though government records show 600 Palauan converts to Buddhism in the same year, these conversions are generally considered formal. 246 In the late 1930s, the Japanese displayed a growing hostility towards foreigners, including missionaries. Missionaries of non-Japanese citizenship were increasingly restricted in their liberty of movement, and the accession of new missionaries was discouraged more actively the closer the war came. In the summer of 1944, Palau’s six Jesuit missionaries were detained in a remote hideaway on Babeldaob; they, or their remains, have not been recovered, and evidence suggests that they were executed by the Japanese at the end of the war.247 As for the Liebenzell missionaries, they were completely cut off from their home station in Liebenzell, and had to subsist on their own. Obviously, parish life was reduced to a minimum during these years in all the communities. After the war, the

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Protestant mission was continued by the missionary society of the American Board; in 1946, two Spanish Jesuits arrived to resume the Catholic mission work. In 1947, the Caroline-Marshall mission was handed over to the American Jesuits.248 The Liebenzell mission has been operating on a regional level in West Micronesia. In the course of the 1970s and early 80s, their branches on Palau, Chuuk and Yap all developed into organizations of local administration and leadership. In the case of Palau, the Palau Evangelical Church (PEC) is the resultant organization. All three local churches run today with support from American missionary organizations.249 Both in the Catholic and Protestant communities, ministers of local origin are employed. Officially, the majority of today’s Palauan population is Christian, with 49% of the roughly 20,000 citizens in 2005 Catholic;250 in 1995, a census counted 590 Modekngei adherents.251 The Eastern religions of Buddhism, Shrine Shinto, and Tenrikyo, have virtually disappeared, which may be attributed to the fact that the representatives of these religions always tended to cater to the spiritual needs of the Japanese residents in all of West Micronesia, while Christian missionary efforts were directed towards the Palauans. 252 Palau received her first missionaries relatively late compared to other Pacific islands. The emotionally laden, ardent Christian longing to save pagan souls from hellfire, a romantic notion far from the rather harsh and stressful reality of everyday missionary life, had already produced vivid missionary interest in most of the region by the mid-eighteenth century. Even earlier than that, missionaries had begun to penetrate the Pacific: the Marianas, for example, already had their first missionary station by the late seventeenth century. The “style, vigor, and success with which missions pursued their activities in the Pacific varied markedly,” 253 for they all commenced their enterprises from different starting situations and backgrounds, and with diverging emphases on certain aspects of their work; and they all experienced different reactions, and different developments in the change of attitudes brought toward them by the islanders. In the case of Palau, it seems that as imported diseases decimated the Palauan population, his seeming immunity and healing powers helped “the white man” to win the Palauans’ respect and confidence, as Kubary254 reports. A sense of the superiority of the “men of the West” emerged, which on occasion led to speculation about presumed divine capacities of the foreigners. 255 Therefore, the effects that early missionaries and colonial governments had cannot always be clearly distinguished from one another.

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In terms of music, however, these effects can be identified, and the degree and speed of musical appropriation is telling regarding the Palauans’ current state in negotiating, in the broadest sense, the associated origin(ator)s of sound, whether secular or religious, at a given point in time. Change, musical or cultural, cannot be effected by grafting some Other structure onto an existing system of symbols carrying culturespecific meaning. To deny Pacific Islanders’ willingness to become involved and to exchange both commodities and ideas with the “white man,” as has been done not only in colonial literature, but also in some academic writings,256 is a highly colonial stance in that by defining islanders as generally naïve and passive, it invalidates these very societies’ cultural discourse. It is true that “the total life-style of these islands has been affected by the forces of history, which have played a determinative role in molding the people and their lives. The result is perhaps a classic example of colonialization at its worst.” 257 But the very process of “molding people and lives” is not a unilateral procedure. While x-scapes can be expanded by external forces, (re-)contextualizations can only be processed from within, even if they are triggered by outside agents of change. Thus, ever since the arrival of the first foreign ship, “culture contact throughout much of the Pacific was not a one-way process so much as a more subtle and complex interaction.”258 The processes of change that have characterized Micronesian life since that period have

been

manifold.

Christian

missions,

the

creation

of

urban

centers,

commercialization and the influx of media are among the major agents of change, working in unique and insular environments. During the decades and centuries following first contact, closer acquaintance with foreigners initiated a process of disruption from traditional bonds in cultural and societal realms, followed by ongoing processes of relocation. With the rise of colonialism on the islands, Micronesian cultural lore began to be channeled by outsiders as well as by the colonial experience itself; again, Micronesians have been playing both a passive and an active role in that process. Not least, this has led to great differences in the societal, political, economic, and cultural landscape—not to mention their imagined worlds—of island groups, which are technically neighbors to each other. Perhaps the introduction of Euro-American and Japanese education has been the single most powerful agent of change at work in both Palau and Micronesia at large. Considered a vehicle for individual material and social progress, education has been sought by Micronesians ever since the opening of the first school through foreign colonial powers. Foreign teachers conveyed a notion of culture diametrically opposed

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to the Palauan idea of knowledge transmission, i.e. one that centers on the written rather than the spoken word. The success of the implementation of this fundamental novelty, the written word, proved limited: “Although the foreign culture of the book—the school—has displaced Palauan culture of “the word,” the transplant is in several ways superficial. Palauans are not avid readers nor are they comfortable writing.” 259 This peculiar development—the incomplete appropriation of an imported system of culturally significant meanings as partial substitution for the indigenous equivalent, which leaves both systems deficient—may perhaps be taken pars pro toto for the Palauan predicament of today. Education “has been the chief instrument in the creation of a class destined to rule the future of Micronesia,”260—with the consequence that today’s political elite was educated in an educational system designed to fit the needs of a foreign culture. By no means does this devalue today’s government—it just amply demonstrates the dichotomies that drowse in many an aspect of Micronesian life in the twenty-first century.


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PART II: REPERTOIRE, AESTHETICS, AND CHANGE: MUSIC AND DANCE IN PALAU Contemporary Palauans view their chelitakl rechuodel, a term which for taxonomic purposes may be translated as (evolved) traditional music261 in the present context, as conceptually unchanging and timeless, even if it emerged at a particular, though mostly unidentifiable, point in time. This music, for them, conveys their past and symbolizes their cultural roots. Highly valued as cultural heritage, these sounds are not open to manipulation, and consequently, they cannot be thought of in terms of purposeful change and innovation. Accordingly, musical change is generally considered a breach of customs as far as (evolved) traditional music is concerned. This is particularly true for the recitative genres. In the survey of Palauan music that will follow, I also include descriptions of those musical styles that are remembered by contemporary Palauans and/or are mentioned in historical sources of various types, but have virtually or completely ceased to exist as active repertoire. That there should be considerable loss of cultural memory in spite of what was just said regarding the value placed on the various musical genres may seem contradictory at first, but over the course of the musical analysis it will become clear why this development is not at all paradoxical in Palau. 262 Naturally, descriptions of extinct musical genres are bound to be fundamentally fragmentary, a shortcoming which mirrors characteristics of the recent development of music and knowledge thereof in Palau. Evidence 263 suggests that many genres have not only become obsolete, but have also been forgotten completely. For this reason, the picture I am assembling here does not depict the entirety of Palauan music yesterday and today—a sobering actuality which any writing on performing arts in the Pacific, and, for that matter, any diachronical ethnographic endeavor, has to grapple with to some extent. The Palauan terminology I present is, unless marked otherwise, a consensus of the descriptive vocabulary that my interlocutors in Palau used. Local conceptions of musical styles gathered from my informants in the field are reflected in the structure of this chapter, which treats instrumental music separately from vocal music, then makes a distinction between the musical styles that existed prior to documented contact with cultures from outside the Pacific rim (chelitakl rechuodel, lit., “songs of the past”264) on the one hand, and those which emerged after the arrival of foreigners (beches chelitakl, lit. “new songs”) on the other. This distinction is largely, but not entirely, a definition made on the basis of chronology for practical purposes, for there is also a strong sense of nostalgia that is attached to the chelitakl rechuodel, an associated sentiment which

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demarcates that body of songs from the beches chelitakl, and a distinction that will be looked at in more detail later. One important difference between the two categories is that a great amount of chelitakl rechuodel is considered to be of divine origin. The assumed disjuncture between the two categories “old” and “new” is considered by Palauans to either coincide with the advent of colonial powers and church music in Palau in the 1890s, or the first foreign contact. These local conceptions seem to conclude mainly from the lyrics of the chelitakl rechuodel, which are perceived as “classic,” i.e., as sophisticated, archaic high-level language that makes use of a wide variety of now obsolete vocabulary, and to a far lesser extent from musical structure. However, clear references to post-contact era events can be heard in some of the songs that are commonly referred to as chelitakl rechuodel, and assertions of antiquity and stableness as a central feature across the genres of traditional Palauan music partly serve other ends, as will become clear. Within the body of the songs of the past, the musical styles described here as “recitative genres” hold a particular place today, not so much because of distinct musical features, but because of their functional context and their strong message: in contemporary Palau, they are commonly considered an emblem of what it means to be Palauan. In this, their role in present-day Palau is similar to that of the corresponding genres in neighboring Yap and other Micronesian islands. Accordingly, the recitative genres are discussed here as a set of musical styles which, for reasons to be identified in more detail in the course of this and the next chapter, stand out from the overall spectrum. Music in Palau is essentially conceptualized and distinguished on the basis of function.265 Therefore, some of the song types discussed here share many or even most of their musical features with others; yet, they are considered something entirely different from each other, and therefore will be treated separately. Although much of this chapter is structured in keeping with Palauan notions of music, in some places it is not. For instance, I categorize the genre ongúrs with the other song types listed, even though ongúrs is not always considered music by Palauans. This is due to the fact that ongúrs is, in the end, coordinated group manipulation of sound which is considered different from speech, and as such it has a place in any endeavor to provide a thick description of Palauan music.266 Another special case, which reveals fundamental weaknesses of the binary categorization into “old” and “new” songs when the latter is applied in an academic context, is that of the kesekes ra Modekngei. This is a type of religious music firmly rooted in pre-contact musical culture but it emerged as


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late as between 1914 and 1920, which is when the Modekngei religion was officially founded. According to a merely temporal dichotomy between “old” and “new,” it would have to be qualified as clearly beches chelitakl: new song. Yet, contemporary kesekes ra Modekngei will be shown to be more closely related to what we know about early Palauan music-making in terms of tangible musical features than most music commonly classified as contemporary Palauans as pre-contact music, and they are generally referred to as chelitakl rechuodel. Kesekes ra Modekngei are located in the gray area, so to speak, between chelitakl rechuodel and beches chelitakl: the concept of evolved traditional music is applicable here, but the nature of this evolution will have to be elaborated upon. Kesekes ra Modekngei will be discussed in context with other types of religious music. For the description and analysis of Palauan music, I have referred to several collections of recordings:

1) The Hamburg South Seas Expedition recordings (1909): Among the six wax cylinders in the collection that, according to the expedition members’ field notes were recorded in Palau by Augustin Krämer and colleagues, four contain Palauan music, while the remaining two contain pieces from other Micronesian islands.267 The collection is today stored at the Phonogramm-Archive Berlin, Germany, under the name of “Hamburger Südsee-Expedition” (“Hamburg South Seas Expedition”).

2) The Muranushi recordings (1936): Iwakichi Muranushi was the director of a Japanese anthropological excursion to the Micronesian islands in 1936. In Palau, he recorded 36 songs and stories on Dictaphone cylinders. Unfortunately, there are major differences in speed among the recordings, so many of the songs appear distorted. The collection was published (Tatar 1985).

3) The Siemer recordings (1936). Wilhelm Siemer was a missionary in Palau for the Liebenzell mission from 1930 to 1938. 268 In 1935, he was requested by Marius Schneider, then head of the Phonogramm-Archive Berlin, Germany, to document local music on behalf of the Archive. The collection, stored as “Siemer Palau” at the Phonogramm-Archive Berlin, includes 52 recordings originally taken by means of a phonograph.

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4) The Barbara B. Smith recordings (1963). Barbara B. Smith, then professor at the University of Hawai’i, undertook a field trip to, among other islands, Palau. Her intent was to document Micronesian music for preservational, rather than scholarly, purposes. Smith went at the request of student members of the Micronesian Club of Honolulu at the University of Hawai’i, who, in the face of rapid cultural change, had expressed their urgent wish that music-making in the West Micronesian islands be documented as soon as possible.269 The Barbara B. Smith collection includes six CDs with digitalized reel-to-reel recordings that were prepared by Smith herself, and three CDs with dubbings given to her by the Palauan radio station WSZB Palau. This collection is stored in the Pacific Collection of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA; a copy is held by the Belau National Museum, Koror, Palau.

5) The Yamaguti recordings (1965–66). Osamu Yamaguti, then a Master’s student at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, went to Palau in 1965 as part of preparation for his 1967 Master’s thesis on Palauan music (see bibliography), which was supervised by Barbara B. Smith. The resultant tape recordings are owned by the collector himself, who kindly provided me with nine of his recordings.

6) Local Palauan recordings. These include private recordings not generally available to the public as well as recordings prepared by and stored at the governmental Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror, Palau.

7) Recordings that I prepared myself during my fieldwork in Palau (2005 to 2007); these total 124 items.

In spite of this seemingly good material basis, particularly as far as its diachronic scope is concerned, very few sound documents exist for some genres, which considerably constricts musical analysis. This is a shortcoming which, of course, mainly mirrors the development of these genres over time. However, other reasons for a lack of recordings of an otherwise popular musical genre can also be identified (see, for instance, the chapter on delang). I will describe the individual documentary situation for specific genres as applicable.


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Chelitakl rechuodel: (Evolved) Traditional Music and Dance

Sound and movement, music and dance, are generally subservient to verbal content in chelitakl rechuodel. Content and poetry in places determine musical structure, as early analyses of Palauan music have already suggested.270 In fact, form follows function in most genres of Palauan (evolved) traditional music not or not entirely designed for the purposes of entertainment, and the same is true for the lyrics insofar as content is given priority over linguistic aesthetics. Therefore, it is not so much a preference of linguistic over musical aesthetics, but a concentration on verbal content which led to the development of a musical repertoire that has at its disposal a small number of standardized styles, each of which is associated with a particular sentiment and/or a distinct social function, and the melodic contours of which are largely fixed, as shall be seen. In an oral history tradition, for which the spoken word is the palladium of invaluable knowledge and the foremost medium of instruction, a reduction of musical variety in favor of content where the latter is given prime importance comes as no surprise, and these specifics are by no means unique to the Palauan musical system: they can be found throughout the Micronesian region. That the value attributed to content tends to be inversely proportional to the complexity of musical form in Palau is also suggested by the clear musical differences between functional and non-functional music, i.e., those genres the sole function of which is to entertain, as shall be seen. Local music and dance in Palau, as elsewhere in Micronesia, are "primarily […] systems of knowledge in the heads of known bearers of tradition.”271 As I have mentioned earlier, the chelitakl rechuodel form a closed body of texts; it is generally held that no additions can be made anymore. Several informants advanced the opinion that this has been so since the first contact with Europeans, i.e., since 1783.272 However, many song texts include references to historical events which took place well into the twentieth century, and individuals in present-day Palau occasionally write new lyrics for particular genres. In the Palauan conception this is synonymous with “composing” a new song, for the musical array of expressive forms is generally taken to be fixed. This is so because most of the chelitakl rechuodel (for instance chesols, derubesebes, and kelloi cheldolm273) are considered creations of the gods. As such, they are conceptually capable of working magic on both gods and men. The magic power attributed to music is mirrored in a legend, according to which a wellknown singer from the northern Kayangel atoll brought eight baskets, “filled with songs and securely locked,” 274 to Koror. In order for these songs not to work their

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supernatural power on humans by accident, they had to be stowed away safely. This legend suggests that a song’s arcane power does not need the mediation or esoteric knowledge of a singer to galvanize into action: it can do so all by itself. In the hands of a well-versed singer, though, such songs are a source of prestige and power, and potentially harmful to other people. 275 Such songs cannot be composed by men: instead, they are brought to them by gods or ancestral spirits who relate them to individual persons, most often by entering their dreams when the latter sleep.276 Songs can also serve to appease the gods in case of illness, and invoke ancestral spirits. In doing so, they are often directed towards the moral education of the listener at the same time.277 A great deal of the corpus of songs serves as a means to record oral history and local knowledge, such as mythology, as is common in many of the oral history cultures of the Western Pacific and Oceania at large. 278 Various genres of songs serve to point out notable historical events and persons, and this is not considered contradictory to the belief that these songs were created by supernatural beings in the first place. The performance of most songs and dances is interlinked with a particular occasion. Such an occasion may be a community event, a political event such as a meeting in a bai, or a daily event which demands culturally prescribed behavior. Polish-born anthropologist Kubary gives an example: Also every theft of the club’s property, every injury to a member of the club led to their revenge [...] So for example, when Kubary was present in Koror a relative of the ibedul stole a betel nut plant which was the property of a Kaldebekels [i.e., men’s club]. Because of this, two of these clubs, 120 men, went together to the house of the king in Aidit. When they arrived they spread themselves out around the house and began dances, during which they wailed horrible chants. The ibedul sitting in his house had to endure this shaming caterwauling and on top of that had to give the club members something to drink and make reparations through payment to the leaders.

279

Here, music fulfills a distinct function within prescribed behavior, i.e., it is used to express a group sentiment or statement (in this case, a reproach) in instances when regular conversation is considered too ordinary.280 Where custom predefines the shape of a ritual, for example when a party from one village pays a visit to another village in a different state or island, one “proper” song type is associated with the respective event. The offering of a song (type) other than the “correct” one, or a faulty performance of the correct one, is a great breach of custom and can only be made up for by another, “proper” chant proposed by the same group.281 In a particularly formal context, such as when the highest local title-holder is directly addressed, such a mistake may be considered unpardonable and the singer executed. Hence, proper judgment of


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functional context and a flawless rendering of the appropriate musical item are essential to the acceptable performance of Palauan chelitakl rechuodel and to chants in particular. While a faulty performance can lead to the killing of the culprit, an outstandingly good performance may, according to oral history, find recognition, too: The legend holds that a long time ago, the chief of Melekeok gave the order that nobody was allowed to enter the village. A man, unaware of this rule, came to deliver betelnuts. Only when he heard the men’s club singing that they were going to kill him and take his head, did he realize the imminent danger he was in. When he was about to die he asked the Reklai, the high chief of Melekeok, if he could sing a last rebetii. On the spur of the moment the desperate man composed a song in which he begged the Reklai for mercy and explained his ignorance of the newly imposed 282 law. His rebetii was so well composed and performed that the Reklai granted him his life.

Singers who have properly performed chesols ra odanges, chants of praise, in the presence of the praised person or his family, are commonly rewarded with Palauan money. The satisfying delivery of kelloi cheldolm at a funeral will be recognized by the family of the deceased by payment in kind.283 Another performance space for song and dance, less rigid in its prescriptions, is the omilil buil 284 (lit., “play outside in the moonlight”), where songs are being performed for mere entertainment. Accordingly, songs different from those that are entangled in a dense network of rigid prescriptions and functions as described above will generally, though not exclusively, be performed here. The omilil buil is an event that is generally attended by the society’s younger generation. During an omilil buil, which not least for practical reasons takes place on a full-moon night when the scene is lit, young men and women gather at the beach or an open space near a village to play games,285 dance, and sing songs. The characteristic merriment of these events emanates from the constant teasing between the genders, which is full of sexual innuendos and allusions, and it leads to an inter-mingling between young men and women in public, which is otherwise uncommon in Palauan society.286 This is the only occasion in Palauan life where men and women can perform a dance together, for instance by dancing a bullachang.287 Since these events are held for social entertainment and tend to be attended by a village’s young crowd only, the overall atmosphere was reported by early anthropologists to be more vivid than that observed during other community events.288 However, some of the prescriptions that govern the performance of dances in other, more rigid contexts, will also be followed during an omilil buil, for instance when the dancer of the omengereal(l),289 a solo dance accompanied by a rebetii, has to obtain the crowd’s permission prior to starting the dance.290 During these events, the focus is on the aesthetics and the entertainment

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component rather than on the function of music and dance, whereas those performances that are governed by the prescribed customs of social interaction concentrate on correctness and extra-musical appropriateness. The overwhelming priority attributed to the function of music is evident. Culturally prescribed behavior maintains the shape of music, and since it attaches high value to long-established musical form, musical creativity that affects the form of a given musical item may be considered destructive. Hence, it is the triumvirate of functionality, ritual appropriateness, and “musical correctness” in a performance that adds up to perfection and triggers local sensibilities. The ritualization of the musical item in Palau has been far-reaching, so much so that the bulk of lyrics over the course of time became largely unintelligible to Palauans. This is not a development of the twentieth century, for anthropologist Krämer291 and, even earlier, biologist Semper,292 have noted this already. It is by no means unusual that the lyrics of chants are comprised of specialist, esoteric knowledge that remains partly or wholly unintelligible to the common listener. But in Palau, which in this regard forms no exception in the Pacific region,293 it is not only the contemporary listener who cannot relate to the verbal content of indigenous music, but often also the specialist, that is to say the chanter himself294—and what is more, it is not only the corpus of chants which is linguistically inaccessible, but also other song types.295 Such phenomena tend to be interpreted as cultural ruptures in anthropology; after analytical consideration of the musical forms concerned in this chapter, I shall revert to this judgment in Part III. The question of “who chants/sings/dances?” will have to be considered separately for each individual genre. However, two basic criteria are crucial and relate to all musical genres: the first is related to gender, the second to hierarchy. Yamaguti was told a legend regarding women’s perceived superiority in composing song texts, which, although it has to be considered an unreliable source and its validity has been questioned,296 remains remarkable: God Uchel er Chulsiang and God Ngirchongor were intimate friends. Ngirchongor was living in Beliliou Island [Peliliou] with his wife, Ngerebluut. One day he fell down from a breadfruit tree and died. Ngerebluut buried him and sent two men for Uchel and Chulsiang, asking him to compose a song for her dead husband. He came from Ngerechelong and arrived in Beliliou. Some people were waiting for him on a high hill. They ran to the bai and immediately asked him to sing a Dalang. He did, but they were not satisfied with the song. They thought it was bent and distorted. Suddenly it occurred to them that this must have had something to do with the bent leaves of betel nut trees, whose nuts men are obliged to get, climbing up high. It should be women’s work to compose 297

songs, they thought. So it was decided from that time.


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Unlike in beches chelitakl, which show the increasing tendency of considering authorship, individual authors are not acknowledged in Palauan (evolved) traditional music in general; it is the local specialists, the performers who possess the knowledge of the song, who are highly honored. In the case of the chants that are of divine origin, however, the authoring deity can sometimes be identified. As far as human-derived songs are concerned, women are generally credited with a greater expertise in song composition, according to the legend quoted above. This belief can be related to the more general, and perhaps also more contemporary, habit of Palauans as well as other Pacific islanders to consider women as the pillars of cultural continuity.298 Generally, Palauans consider the gender-specific cultural knowledge of men and women to be complementary. As for the performing of chants and songs, there is no perceivable quantitative or qualitative domination of one gender over the other. A large part of the musical repertoire can be performed by both genders. Since men and women mostly acquire and exercise their musical skills among groups of their own gender, and both gender groups produce music specialists, this is not surprising. The hierarchical element associated with musicianship is also connected to the aspect of gender, albeit loosely. Members of high-ranking clans are generally expected to be local experts in things traditional, including knowledge of the canon of music and dance, and even today, they themselves consider it part of their duty to attend to the application of custom, at least in representational contexts. In contemporary Palau, title-holding women are more likely to be referred to as human repositories of musical knowledge than men, and there is also a general tendency among Palauans to show greater appreciation for a person’s demonstration of his or her musical abilities if s/he is a title holder. Since chants in particular are highly functional, the question of “who chants?” is not least determined by these societal structures, which largely accounts for the connection made between rank and musical competency. In contemporary Palau, however, this general conception is not of a rigid nature, as is illustrated by the fact that state and nationwide competitions in single musical styles are held on a regular basis. Here, it is musical excellence that leads to public appreciation for mostly artistic reasons.

Remarks on the music notations in this chapter

With the exception of a few particular genres, the tonal framework employed in Palauan (evolved) traditional music rarely exceeds a fourth. The tonal space between

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peak and bottom pitch of a given piece appears subdivided into scale degrees. These scale degrees are pitch spectra rather than distinct pitches, and innate to their conceptualization is a considerable degree of intonational flexibility. In the material under study here, a scale degree’s pitch spectrum may cover up to 288 cent in one and the same piece. Moreover, as the tonal progression generally evolves in narrow steps and within a small overall framework, pitch spectra also overlap in places. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to view them as exclusive as far as their horizontal function is concerned (see chapter 5 on tonal aesthetics below). Music example 3.1 gives a typical example of the distribution of tonal space over a piece’s pitch spectra. In this example, it also becomes evident that the lower inflection of the lower framing pitch spectrum (notated here as a’-flat) covers a comparatively narrow ambitus, which is due to both its role as finalis within tonal progression and its demarcational character with respect to the piece’s overall tonal space and the latter’s boundaries. This is typical in the Palauan musical idiom. The example also illustrates that as their peak and bottom absolute pitches usually cross each other, the tonal compass of neighboring pitch spectra is usually interlocked.

Music example 3.1: Tonal compasses of pitch spectra in a kesekes recorded in 1963. Also see the transcription of this item in music example 3.16

This poses several problems for notating music. While the preparation of all music transcriptions in this chapter involved pitch analysis,299 the absolute pitches that were measured do not necessarily reflect the functional setup of a given piece, and in places even contradict its sonic impression. “Perceived tonalities,” that is to say, “can differ from measured frequencies.”300 In general, therefore, efforts have been made in the present study to partly reconcile the Euro-American notion of absolute pitch and the Palauan practice of performing pitch as tonal spectrum in the notations, as far as this is possible at all. Both the division of a tonal continuum into clearly defined pitches and


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the writing down of music is a concept derived from Euro-American reasoning about music, which makes staff notation a conceivably poor medium for Palauan music. However, for the sake of its benefits for musical analysis, and for want of a convincing notational alternative, I use it. This means that in the notations given throughout this book, indicated pitches aim at representing pitch spectra rather than frequencies. To visually differentiate between common staff notation and pitch spectrum notation, I use triangular note heads. The notated pitch is that around which the pitch spectrum unfolds. Per definition, pitch spectra cover a certain ambitus rather than corresponding to a distinct pitch. When pitch spectra function as framing pitch spectra of a piece’s overall tonal inventory in Palauan music, two discernible functional variations mostly occur within them, occupying different parts of the tonal spectrum. In most cases, these pitch inflections lay roughly 100 and 200 cent apart, and accordingly they are notated here as neighboring pitches according to the Euro-American system. They will be identified as the two variants of one pitch spectrum in a separate music example that illustrates the tonal inventory for each item. The higher pitched inflection (in the case of the lower framing tonal spectrum) usually functions as a leading note either towards the lower inflection of the same tonal spectrum, particularly at phrasal and other formal conclusions; (in the case of the upper framing tonal spectrum) as a leading note towards the respectively higher inflection of the same tonal spectrum; or, in the middle of melodic flow, towards an adjacent tonal spectrum. The relationship of the two functional variations is partly comparable to that of the natural and sharp varieties of a scale degree in Euro-American music. While in the music notations, these two variants appear visually set apart in order to distinguish them from each other for their functional differences, they are still defined as parts of a shared pitch spectrum because their boundaries toward each other are fundamentally blurred, and they clearly form two points of one and the same continuum within the melodic progression. Nevertheless, to point out crucial characteristics of intonation and modes of tonal exploration among various musical items, especially in connection with diachronic comparisons

of

historical

and

contemporary

recordings,

notations

will

be

complemented with acoustic analyses of the parameters important for each case where applicable. Rhythm is slurring in most of Palauan music. While no meter in the musical sense of the word emerges outside of particular dance songs, strong beats can be distinguished from weak beats, and there is a strong tendency to group two rather than three beats

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into a unit. The elasticity in rhythmic pulse and metrical details can be regarded as a counterpart to the intonational flexibility allowed in the dimension of pitch. In the notations here, the conceptualization of rhythmic pulse as divided into strong(er) and weak(er) beats has been given preference over the absolute durations of single notes. In their visual representation, i.e., notation, that is to say, two eighths may stand for slightly different absolute durations. This, however, does not mean the temporal dimension is handled arbitrarily in Palauan music. On the contrary: in certain genres, durational relationships underlie very subtle musical laws, as shall be seen.

Musical Instruments

The most important musical instrument in Palau is the human body: feet stamping and hand clapping are, as in much of Micronesia in pre-contact and early contact times, accompaniment to most group song and dance performances.301 Other than that, five musical instruments in Palau were recorded by early anthropologists. Gab r dorod, tumtum, tumtum ra lild, debúsech, and ngaok

The pre-contact Palauan concept of music includes vocal music, but not generally instrumental music. The only items known to have been used in Palau as a means to generate sound prior to the advent of colonialism are the gab r dorod,302 the tumtum, the tumtum ra lild, the debúsech, and the ngaok. “Gab r dorod,” tumtum The sound of the gab r dorod, a simple aerophone made from coconut fiber, according to Krämer resembles “a beetle flying into fire;” however, he adds, the instrument is more of a children’s toy than a musical instrument. 303 Krämer also mentions the tumtum, a type of buzzer which he neglects to describe in any detail and which, according to him, is also a children’s toy.304 Linguistically, the word tumtum actually describes someone “who talks too fast or too much.” To my knowledge, neither of these instruments have been mentioned elsewhere in historical sources; no drawings exist and they are extinct today. While the word tumtum is used to refer to the harmonica today,305 none of my informants were familiar with the term gab r dorod.


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Tumtum ra lild The tumtum ra lild (“tumtum made of bamboo”) or Jew’s harp is no longer in use, either. Krämer called it a “rare sight” in 1909 already,306 and renders a drawing of a bamboo Jew’s harp that matches the type of instrument so widely spread throughout Southeast Asia. Palauans consider it an introduced instrument; Yamaguti was told that it had been introduced from the Philippines307 and that it served as “one of the sources of pleasure when a couple of lovers spent a night alone in a cave or under a tree“308 in Palau. It is not clear from this statement how the instrument was played; it simply suggests that it was used in a playful rather than a musical manner. The association of the tumtum ra lild and other, similar lamellaphones, with sexual activity is widely spread in Micronesia and the Western part of the Pacific, including the Philippines,309 and also in Melanesia, where such instruments are even considered “agents of love-controlling magic.”310 While the codified behavior in Palau of both courtship activity and working a magic spell (olai) on a subject of desire to win his/her love is comparable to that found in places of Melanesia, the tumtum ra lild was not reportedly part of such pursuits in Palau. 311 However, in an omengeredakl recorded in 1963, an unambiguous textual reference is made to the tumtum ra lild as an allegory for sexual intercourse.312 The correspondence of the instrument’s associations and connotations, but not of its local ritual contexts between Palau and Melanesia, suggests the possibility of the tumtum ra lild’s introduction to Palau from Melanesia at a relatively late stage, i.e. in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Another possible origin for the tumtum ra lild is the Philippines, as Yamaguti’s informant suggested: the instrument could have traveled along the Spanish sailing route from the Philippines to Guam, or found its way to the islands with the Spanish army, which at that time was employing Filipino soldiers in their Pacific island bases. In this case, the time of the earliest presence of the Spanish military on the islands would be the terminus post quem for the arrival of the tumtum ra lild. Debúsech The usage of the debúsech, which unlike the gab r dorod and the tumtum is still in existence in Palau, resembles that found in other Pacific island and Pacific Rim cultures. 313 Like the gab r dorod and the tumtum, however, the debúsech is not a musical instrument in the common sense: rather, it is a signaling device used for such

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various purposes as to communicate the arrival of a visiting party, to mark the end or beginning of phases in a ritual or the beginning of a particular section in warfare ritual (accordingly, the debúsech is also used in war dances), to announce the death of a title-holder or the beginning of a meeting in a bai, etc.314 All of these are events which demand specific, culturally prescribed behavior.315

Figure 3.1: Palauan blowing a debúsech. This photograph was taken by Protestant missionary Wilhelm Siemer and dates from between 1930 and 1938. From the archives of the Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany)


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Like many tools of daily life, the debúsech was introduced to Palau in ancient times by an chelid: The Galid Guodel once went together with other spirits onto the beach of Melekeiok by the jetty, which had been built by spirits at Cape Gogiberames. There he went out to the reef and found an empty conch shell. He made a hole in it and blew into it, this was followed by all his companions running away scared. Soon all the Galids in the area came and wanted the tritons horn which has been known since that time.

316

Blowing the conch shell, the sound of which carries relatively far, is a privilege of titleholders and priests. Figure 3.1 shows a Palauan posing with a debúsech; the klilt (dugong bone bracelet on the man’s left arm317) and the ebakl (Palauan adze) are also attributes of a high-ranking rubak and/or a wealthy person. All three elements taken together signify Palauan chiefdom, and for today’s Palauans, they also embody the essence of Palauan past and cultural heritage. It is for this visual and acoustic symbolic content, deeply embedded in social structures, that the debúsech is still being used today in the context of music and dance. Ngaok The ngaok flute is extinct today. In the 1860s, Karl Semper first encountered the instrument: “In the Palaus, only the young women in the clubhouse, the armungul [armengol], are allowed to play the flute; any other musical instrument is forbidden.”318 Krämer, on the other hand, could not retrieve any information about it roughly half a century later, even though he was aware of the information given by Semper. 319 Nevertheless, at least one ngaok performer existed in 1963. He was able to not only play the ngaok, but also to make one upon request (Ucherbelau Ngirubekbad is pictured in figure 3.2). 320 However, familiarity with and information about the ngaok seems to have become specialist knowledge by then. The information given by Ucherbelau Ngirubekbad suggests that the restriction in the instrument’s usage that Semper had observed a century earlier is just one aspect of ngaok playing practice. He mentioned the loose linkage between playing the ngaok and sexual activity, which also shines through in Semper’s remarks, saying that in the “old times,” women would play the ngaok in the bai (which is a clear reference to the armengol custom). After the prohibition of the armengol practice through foreign administrations,

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if an unmarried woman had several boyfriends, the boys would play ‘their melody’ on the flute; if it was the boyfriend the girl wanted to see she would come out, if not she would hide in the abai [= bai]. Women did not play flutes in love making. However, married women did play the flute in the mersai (work house). Each played only her own tune. […] In general, flutes were played by ‘rich 321

people,’ but they were not restricted to one person or category of person.

Both sexes used to play the ngaok, according to this informant, and mainly for the purposes of communication during amorous relationships. The phrasing “women did not play flutes in love making,” however, is a little unclear. Given the Palauan code of gender-specific use of language, it probably means that although women played the ngaok in the bai, i.e., in the sexually charged armengol environment, they would not do the same outside of the armengol practice, because women are not commonly expected to take an active role in courtship. Hence, in everyday activity, women would only play the ngaok among company of the same sex (“in the work house”), where playing the ngaok would not evoke associations of romance, or signify an invitation to sexual activity. Men, on the other hand, freely utilized the flute for precisely these communicative capacities.

Figure 3.2: Ucherbelau Ngirubekbad playing the ngaok, 1963. Photograph from the collection of Barbara B. Smith


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The tendency to limit one’s ngaok playing to a personal “catch tune” for a (potential) lover to recognize and react accordingly illustrates how strongly the ngaok was connected to its symbolic connotation and inter-personal communicative function. This function was clearly the main motivation behind ngaok playing, whereas absolute musical aesthetics were of inferior importance. This inference is corroborated by the plain musical form that ngoak playing usually takes, which speaks of a functional rather than a predominantly aesthetic framework. The ngaok has an external duct. Its windway is formed by a thinly sliced piece of the same material as the flute itself (i.e., reed) that, slightly angled, is tied above the surface of the projecting lip by means of a fastening band, which is usually made from the leaf of a tree, or a part thereof. 322 Unfortunately, neither a reed nor an original ligature has survived; owing to the fragility of the organic materials used. Figures 3.3 and 3.4 show an ngaok’s mouthpiece without reed and ligature.

Figures 3.3 and 3.4: Mouthpiece of a ngaok, front and back views, without reeds or fastening bands. This instrument is part of the Ethnomusicology Instrument Collection at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, collection no. S40216

In a short article on the arts in Yap written for an anthropological journal, German administrative director Born mentions the Yapese ngall bamboo flute, which he

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describes as half as long (15 cm = about 5.9 inches) but otherwise identical with the “Palauan flute,” i.e., the ngaok.323 This means that Born encountered ngaoks that were about 30 cm long. However, Born’s drawing of the ngall (figure 3.5) shows an instrument that is entirely different from the ngaoks documented and collected in the 1960s, as it clearly depicts a flute with an endogenous air channel, whereas the ngaok in figures 3.3 and 3.4 has an external duct. But the accuracy of Born’s drawing should be questioned for another reason: it does not show a labium, fipple, or the like, to agitate the column of air and allow sound production. As depicted in his sketch, the instrument cannot produce sound. On the other hand, Born’s drawing is very straightforward in its differences to the ngall/ngaok described above, and he certainly had no reasons to misrepresent the instrument. If his sketch was a partly faulty, but otherwise faithful graphic reproduction of the original instrument, his article would be the only known extant source of a second type of flute in Yap and Palau. However, it seems much more likely that his drawing is simply inaccurate.

Figure 3.5: Born’s sketch of the Yapese ngall324

The ngaok flutes collected by Barbara B. Smith during her 1963 trip to Palau measure 50 cm (about 19.7 inches) and 52.5 cm (about 20.67 inches) respectively. Smith also collected two ngall flutes during a trip to Yap in the same year, which were identical in type325 to those given to her in Palau, but considerably shorter, so that there seems to be a considerable difference in the lengths and thus pitch of the ngall and ngaok flutes. This is also seconded by Born’s description, which quotes lengths from 30 cm to 50 cm. The number of finger holes may vary, but does not seem to exceed six.326 According to Born’s observations, 327 which should be interpreted with caution given their lack of reliability, the usage of the ngall flute on Yap is comparable to that on Palau in that it is confined to the rather private realm, meaning the instrument is not played during festivities and community events. During the Hamburg South Seas expedition, Augustin Krämer recorded an ngall player on Yap.328


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Organologically, the ngaok is related to the other simple flutes with an external duct popular in the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the wider region.329 The ngaok has no roots in Palauan mythology and oral history that are still being remembered; moreover, Palauans consider the flute an imported instrument. If it is an imported instrument, the question of how exactly the ngaok (ngall) reached Palau (Yap) remains a subject of speculation. But in any case, the popularity of this flute in the wider neighborhood of the Carolines suggests that in the course of contact with Southeast Asian seafarers, the ngaok arrived on Palau and Yap. Three recordings of the ngaok were prepared in 1936,330 and three made in 1963.331 To the best of my knowledge, these are the only extant sound documents. By 1963, the ngaok had become very rare already, and the person playing the flute on the recordings is believed to have been one of the last, if not the last player, to have played the ngaok. Ngaok: Music

The ngaok was used as a solo instrument. According to Yamaguti, it could also serve as an accompanying instrument in derebechesiil singing, 332 a function which is not recalled by Palauans in the ethnographic present. However, on two recordings from the Siemer collection,333 the ngaok is indeed used in connection with group singing. The usage of the ngaok together with song, then, seems to be a historical practice. As far as soloist ngaok playing is concerned, Yamaguti distinguishes between two modes of performance: “One is called esch (literally, owl) and is an indication of the bird’s call in musical stylization. Another is nagashi (phrases with accelerando) [Japanese], for which the native term is forgotten.”334 During my fieldwork, I could not verify Yamaguti’s information on the esch335 mode of performing on the ngaok, which is not surprising, given the instrument’s extinction. Also, imitations of bird songs and/or other sounds of nature do not occur elsewhere in Palauan music-making.336 The term nagashi is not in usage or remembered in the ethnographic present either. The three recordings from 1963 take 34’’, 26’’, and 28’’, respectively. The older soloist recording from 1936, 337 on the other hand, lasts 3’35’’. In spite of this difference in overall length, the four soloist recordings share the same musical idiom in terms of melodic progression, timbre, and formal structure. The overarching melos is always descending: it commences on the peak pitch of the tonal inventory, approached from below, and then proceeds to gradually lower pitches, concluding on the bottom tonal

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spectrum. As in all Palauan (evolved) traditional music, the tonal inventory is explored through pitch spectra. The intonational scope of all pitches that occur in a piece leaves a palpable margin to lower or raise pitches without conceptually changing their function in the melodic flow; players make ample use of this particular characteristic of Palauan music by exploring the pitch bending capacities of their instrument. The peak tonal spectrum is usually set off from the remaining tonal inventory in that it stands an intervallic whole-tone apart from the remaining pitches. All other pitches that occur fulfill distinct functions within the melodic flow, but at the same time, their intonational demarcation from each other is blurred, particularly as far as the lower framing tonal spectrum is concerned. This is typical for the Palauan exploration of tonal space. Glissando-like fading from one tonal spectrum into the next is frequent, and adjacent scale degrees that occur as two separate pitch spectra in an abstract depiction of the tonal inventory may show some overlap in their ambitus in musical practice. Most pieces tend to draw on three central pitch spectra that are usually within the range of a fourth. In most vocal genres, both peak and bottom spectra of the tonal inventory contain distinctive variant inflections that have a semantically different meaning within the musical text, as mentioned already: these variants are usually located a loosely defined semi-tone above (bottom pitch) or below (peak pitch) the framing pitch. This way, tonal space is laid out, but the borders of tonal range appear sketchy rather than clearly cut into the tonal texture. The final pitch of a piece, however, is usually the respectively lower inflection of the bottom tonal spectrum, which gives a clear framework to the piece as a whole and at the same time characterizes the lower variant as finalis. This organization of tonal space into spectra rather than punctual pitches corresponds to the conceptualization of the vertical tonal dimension as a sound band, which will become evident in the analysis of non-soloist vocal practice in Palau. Melodic progression, which generally proceeds legato, is characterized by intensive use of ornaments that work towards melodic resting points in ngaok music. In the course of the large-scale descending melos, all three pitch spectra can serve as such. The prolongation of these ornamental passages that lead to a melodic resting point is the main tension-generating device in ngaok playing. Early in a given piece, these units consist of a tonal kernel that revolves around two or three pitches. As the musical form unfolds, their number gradually expands until in the last line, the number of pitches touched upon within one unit reaches its maximum. This coincides with an increase of inner tempo as the piece approaches its culmination. Therefore, the term nagashi,


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which Yamaguti collected from his informants in the mid-1960s, seems to be a lucid description. Frequent usage of leaps amounting to intervals up to a fourth distinguishes the mode of exploring tonal space from that which is commonly established in the vocal genres of Palauan music (in all other Palauan music, that is to say). The musical idiom employed in these three recordings shares fundamental characteristics with that of Palauan chants: the melodic resting points resemble the “recitative pitches” that occur in all Palauan chants (see below), and the upward leaps at or near phrasal ends (here, at all three phrasal ends) are reminiscent of the final formulae that bring formal units to a close in rebetii. The final pitches of the piece’s phrases prompt the first pitch of the subsequent phrase, which is a technique widespread throughout several genres of Palauan music. On the two recordings from 1936 on which the ngaok is used in connection with group singing, 338 the flute is used to accompany derebechesiil or omengeredakl singing. Ngaok passages appear interspersed between the formal units of the respective piece, and moreover, in the recorded omengeredakl (Siemer wax cylinder 17) the ngaok doubles the rokui part in the later stages of the piece. While this mode of performance seems to have been somewhat common practice early in the twentieth century, it was only remembered as a historical performance option by the second half of the century. The similarities of ngaok playing to the idiom of Palauan chants and Palauan singing will become evident as the descriptions of the respective genres proceed in this chapter. Other characteristics of ngaok playing are clearly inspired by the particular possibilities of the instrument, such as the intensive usage of decorative figures with a high inner tempo as a means to establish musical form, a device which the ngaok literally proposes by way of its haptic characteristics; the gliding mode of progression through tonal space over an ambitus roughly amounting to the interval of a major second; and the establishment of phrases that are of slightly longer duration than those occurring in vocal genres.

Musical Genres

Recitative Genres Palauans invariably refer to chesols, derubesebes, rebetii, and kesekes as “chants.” Other genres are sometimes colloquially subsumed under this generic term as well,

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and in order to distinguish these four genres among the remaining “chant” repertoire, I describe them as “recitative genres” for systematic purposes, which according to this conception form a subgenus of “chants.” There is no generic term comprising all four genera in Palauan. Musically, they all are monophonic recited songs with a formulaic structure. A shared feature of Palauan chants including recitations, and of much of Pacific musicmaking, is frequent reference to places and persons. This can be attributed to the fact that places and persons are held to be a… relatum, part of a social relationship, a locus of shared biographies. People’s expectations of one another reflect their knowledge of others’ biographies, what they themselves have done, and their 339

styles of doing what they do.

The recitative genres of Palauan music serve as a mnemonic device to memorize cultural knowledge and at the same time to relate that knowledge by chanting when long-established structures demand it. Palauans consider recitation as a means of situating the individual within the grand context, and “an integral part of our identity.”340 According to Palauan mythology, most recitations were composed by the gods. Given the nature of the Palauan “closed cosmology,” this strongly interconnects recitations with religion, place, and contemporary life. Technically, some individual chants and recitations can be traced back to the particular deity who composed it within a distinct mythological context, which in turn is part of the overall genesis, and therefore perceived as closely related to the essence of daily life. It is for this reason that recitations, chesols in particular, carry a strong “patina,” 341 a strong varnish of nostalgia.342

Chesols Recitations, chesols in particular, are contextually bound musical genres: their contexts define who chants when, and how. The musical structure and form of chesols is standardized for all subcategories. Contemporary knowledge of the various functional types does not account for all categories of recitations mentioned in historical written sources, and the information given here is a synopsis of the data found in the available documents and that which I collected in the field. The grouping into categories presented here, then, may be partly academic in nature when compared to contemporary practice: most contemporary Palauans, though not all, would eloquently


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describe the appropriate occasion for each chant rather than group them into categories. —Chesols ra odanges comprise recitations which are customarily sung by rubaks taking turns; the strophic arrangement of the lyrics of chesols facilitates this rotation scheme. Wilson/Keate encountered the performance of an chesols ra odanges during the Antelope’s stay in Palau in 1783 and described it.343 This mode of performance seems to have fallen into desuetude. 344 The words of chesols ra odanges deal with the deeds and accomplishments of rubaks of the past; they are rooted in ancestor worship. They will be performed in the course of ceremonial communal festivities, such as the celebration following the completion of a new bai, or any other group achievement for the benefit of the village. —Klou chesols, literally “great, old” chesols, may be offered to an chelid as pleading songs in the event of an important person falling ill. Depending on the nature of the god and the status of the sick individual, it may also be necessary to perform a mur (feast), which involves further performances of music and dance.345 Klou chesols, then, are directed towards the gods in order to stimulate their benevolence. —Rederad ra chesols denote chesols which can be constituted by verses of different sources; one informant likened them to a “medley.” They may also deal with topics related to death. —Ulengokl chesols deal with “the desire of becoming something. [They] can be about a chief’s wanting to become chief prior to his actual becoming chief.”346 They will be performed during bai meetings of political character, and the firstperson narrator in ulengokl chesols is the person who puts forward the wish. During the celebration following a bai completion, chesols are performed as a part of the osebekel347 a melech rite, which has the purpose of expelling the melech348 and evil spirits from the bai. Other occasions may also require the performance of chesols. Chesols ra kemeldiil, for instance, express grief and may only be performed on the occasion of a funeral.349

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Another particular type of chesols is chanted by a specialist to end a possessed person’s state of trance.350 Since a possessed person is considered an operator of the will of the chelids—the chelid speaks through that person—and a repository of divine power, the chesols appropriate for this occasion are directed towards the respective chelid. Other musical forms involved in trance sessions are not documented; however, pictorial and other evidence suggests that séance dances were part of Palauan repertoire. Chesols, then, are generally related either to the kelulau (“whispered principles”)351 or occult functions352 including spirit exorcism and other spiritual purposes.

Musical Form Chesols are recitations divided into verses. The verses subdivide into recitative line and cadence, and not all verses of a given chesols have to be presented together: the performance of one verse only at a time is also possible; commonly, the number of verses lies between one and twenty. Verses are not necessarily identical in melodic or rhythmic details. Technically, the performance of chesols has to be preceded by the okisel a chesols (“rising of chesols”) and the otengelel a chesols (“bringing down of chesols”). The okisel a chesols consists of the spoken preamble “o-desuokl,” exclaimed by the chanter; the audience responds with a likewise prescribed shout, usually transcribed as “huei!,” which Wilson/Keate mentioned already.353 This sequence has to be repeated with slight alterations (“o-desuoklel,” response: “hu-a-huii”). No longer an intelligible phrase to contemporary Palauans, “o-desuokl” is taken to signify to the audience the beginning of a chant performance, thus to evoke the appropriate attitude of mind among the members of the audience. The reply “hm… huei!” is interpreted as an expression of approval and encouragement for the chanter; it has to be inserted at the end of each verse, and is integral to the performance of a chant. It makes the audience active participants in an chesols performance.354 While the interstrophic reply “hm… huei!” is part of contemporary chesols performances, the “o-desuokl”-preamble is slowly falling out of use. Such performances are considered “disrespectful” by elder chanters.355 The otengelel a chesols directly follows the okisel a chesol, and it consists of a distinct chesols that is supposed to be chanted before delivering the actual chesols (see Appendix A). It is intended to establish a connection with the spiritual world to seek the deities’ and ancestral spirits’ blessing for the upcoming performance of


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chesols (the composition of which is ascribed to the deities). The otengelel a chesols is only on rare instances still included in chesols performance, certainly a side-effect of the religious conversion that has taken place in Palau over the last century and a half. An chesols’ recitative line consists of a loose sequence of variations on the nuclear recitative melodic kernel of chesols, the basic shape of which is standardized. This melodic cell is characterized by the repetition of one central tone in simple punctuated rhythm which bends down one semi-tone to reach its final note:

Music example 3.2: Nuclear recitative kernel of chesols

The succession of longer duration followed by shorter duration may also appear inverted. Repetition of the nuclear cells results in phrases, and phrases generally display a descending melos. The tendency to shift downward in pitch, which is evident in the nuclear cell, is mirrored in the overall descending spatial movement of the verses: verses generally proceed from the upper framing tonal spectrum of the tonal inventory at the beginning to lower pitch spectra, thereby producing a slightly downward-arching melodic shape, as shall be seen. In the course of this descent, up to two more pitch areas usually serve as melodic, or recitative, “resting points;” this is what identifies them as functionally significant tonal spectra. The intervallic framework for this movement, and thus of an chesols, does not normally exceed the interval of a fourth. Generally, pitch is relative. As in all other Palauan vocal music, the performer chooses the range of an chesols individually according to the range of his/her voice. Tonal space is conceived of as a set of pitch spectra, and the horizontal movement between tonal spectra rather than intervallic relationships between distinct pitches bestows musical meaning on the sonic fabric. A clear emphasis is placed on the linear development of the chant rather than on the parameters of micromotion, and the “tune,” as pitch progression is usually referred to in Palau, progresses in a slightly undulating manner. 356 All these are specific of Palauan music, but they are given varying prominence in the different genres of Palauan (evolved) traditional music, as will be seen.

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The nuclear cell appears rhythmically altered according to the requirements of the lyrics (see, for instance, music example 3.3). The number of melodic cells per verse again depends on the lyrics, and the first accentuated pitch in a phrase is normally approached with a glissando from below. Verses may also open by way of introduction with a simple wave-like melodic pattern (see music example 3.3), which is then followed by the melodic cell. Every verse is finished up with a cadential line that reinforces the descending spatial movement by gravitating towards the lower framing tonal spectrum. Moreover, the end of each phrase is prominently marked by the final formula ngii yang in the words. Also in the final formulae of chants, the omission of one tonal spectrum in the otherwise generally linear melodic progression (which results in an interval that approximates a major or minor third) functions as a structural marker, signifying to the listener the final development of the formal unit (here, the verse). It provides semantic information to the listener, which is inevitable for orientation in a musical form. A ratio of approximately 2:1 emerges as a common device to structure the timing of chesols, often governing the temporal relationship between recitative and cadential lines. As in other genres of Palauan music, large-scale durational relationships are a crucial marker of form in chesols. The ratio 2:1, determining the temporal proportions between the formal units of a given piece, is also a frequent occurrence across musical genres in Palau. But other durational ratios among recitative and cadential lines, 4:1, and 3:2 in particular, can also be found in chesols. Most remarkably, it is mostly harmonic ratios that occur, i.e., numerical relationships that are identical with the frequency ratios of harmonics to fundamental frequency. Palauan chanters do not theorize or conceptualize proportionality or harmonic ratios: they seem to be applying these simple harmonic numerical proportions—that fundamental basis of any sound production—to the formal organization of music in a purely intuitive manner. The body of recordings available for study is too small for conclusive statements, but a historical development seems palpable: in the six earliest recordings in the corpus—1 from 1909, 5 from 1936; 8 verses in total—, it is only the proportions 2:1 (6 verses), 4:1 (1 verse, see music example 3.5), and 3:2 (1 verse, see music example 3.3) that occur. In the 1960s (20 recordings), these were still the standard values, but they turn out to be less accurate and leave a slightly greater margin. Also, these harmonic proportions sometimes occur inverted (1:2, 2:3), so that the recitative line is of shorter duration than the cadential line of the same verse. The ratio 1:1 is also being introduced into the genre. Recordings made after the year 2000 (21 recordings) show that this trend has


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continued to the present day: the results from the 1960s and after 2000 are comparable, but 1:1 has emerged as a much more significant relationship currently. The material thus suggests that proportion is not only a major shape-giving force, but also an important moment of change in chesols. This change seems to have worked its most lasting impact between the late 1930s and the early 1960s. There is a clear pulse in chesols, which is generally slurring. Every phrase is conceptualized as a closed rhythmic unit, so that rhythmic accents do not result in a regular meter in the Euro-American sense. However, strong beats, marking the outset of phrases, are distinguishable from weak beats. By way of illustration, music example 3.3 gives a transcription of an chesols recording made during the Hamburg South Seas Expedition in 1909.357 This chesols displays the basic features of the genre as evident in the corpus studied, and can thus serve as an exemplarily model.

Music example 3.3: Transcription of wax cylinder 69 from the Hamburg South Seas Expedition

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Music example 3.4: Tonal inventory of wax cylinder 69 from the Hamburg South Seas Expedition

The piece can be divided into two verses (lines 1–3 and 4–5 respectively). Verse 1 is 40’’ long, verse 2 takes 19’’ (note the durational relationship of approximately 2:1). The punctuated rhythm, encapsulated in the melodic kernel, spans the entire length of the piece. The melodic cell itself is consistently varied throughout the piece. The number of mostly indefinite pitches preceding the first note of a phrase is clearly defined by the number of syllables to be accommodated. Each verse is introduced by such a glissando. As is common in the Palauan musical idiom, tonal space is explored by gliding from one pitch spectrum to the next rather than through clear-cut, pitch-distinct impulses coordinated with melodic movement. One phrase is made up of one or several appearances of the melodic cell, slightly varied each time. Except for the final phrase of the cadential lines, all phrases end on weak beats. Cadences rhythmically proceeding from a strong beat at the outset to a weak beat at the end, necessitate a short melodic resting point at their end. The resultant clear-cut contours of phrasal cells, which prevent a continuous rhythm from flowing, thus have the effect of slightly detaching phrases from one another. This obviously serves to highlight the logical units of the words. The phrasal end is also the place where the melodic stream pushes into the lowest pitch spectrum of the phrase, which has only slightly, if at all, been touched upon earlier in the same phrase. Because of the large-scale descending melos within a verse, the recitative line concentrates on recitative pitch spectra above the lower framing pitch spectrum, so that in the cadential line, the melodic stream gravitates into the latter for the first time within a verse. In the second verse, the pitch of departure is raised about a half-tone in comparison with the first verse. This does not represent a conceptual shift, rather it is in keeping with the concept of pitch spectra, which accommodates such pitch inflections. While the temporal relationship between recitative and cadential lines had been about 2:1 in the first verse, in the second it approximates 3:2. Although there are temporal ratios which may be perceived as standard (e.g., 2:1, 3:2, 6:5), there do not seem to be discernible prescriptions pertaining to a set sequence of durational relationships


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between formal units. The inner tempo of both verses in the example given above is similar, and amounts to roughly 108. This 1909 chant, then, is characterized by flexibility in the organization of basic musical details, tangible for instance in rhythmic variation and pitch fluctuation. These characteristics are determined by the superordinate conceptions of tonal and rhythmic dimensions in Palauan music. On the formal level, repetition is a major shape-giving force in the overall design of chesols: melodic cells are repeated to constitute a phrase; phrases are repeated to constitute a line; and the melodic cell’s tendency to display melodic motion towards a nadir is mirrored in the downward-arching melos of both the phrases and the verses. Musical example 3.5 gives a transcription of an chesols chanted by a seventh grade girl in front of an audience of between 100 and 150 people on the occasion of the annual Palauan Women’s conference in 2005. A microphone was used. Because of its musical features, this chesols performance contrasts with the 1909 recording in several aspects. The nature of these differences is analyzed below.

Music example 3.5: Transcription of an chesols recorded in 2005 (Abels 29). The brackets at phrasal beginnings indicate the tonal framework of the melodic phrase preceding the first accentuated beat

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The transcription shows there is much less variation in the melodic cells here than in music example 3.3. The first verse stands out from the next four by virtue of its reduced tonal material. As a matter of fact, the concept of tonal spectra appears to have been replaced with a pitch-distinct conception of melodic progression, as is reflected in the usage of common note-heads in the notation; in other words, with the Euro-American notion of linear musical movement. Within this first verse, variations occurring in the appearances of the melodic cell are confined to minor rhythmic modifications of the opening version. These are due to syllabic specifics of the lyrics. All through the next four recitative lines, the repetitions also remain as close as possible to the initial presentation of the nucleus; the conclusion of phrases on c’’ in the first two and on b’’ in the last three phrases divides the piece into two parts. The audience did not realize the singer was performing an chesols, as is evident in the fact that they failed to deliver the customary exclamation hm… uei! at the end of verse one. There are at least five reasons for that. First, the vocal rendering is leaning much more towards actual singing; while chesols performers usually avail themselves of a vocal style heavily shaped by the sonic peculiarities of the speaking voice, the chanter here clearly focuses melodic movements and vocal timbre, as a singer would. Second, the chanter seems to conceptualize tonal space as a matrix organized into clear intervals rather than space that is organized into partly overlapping tonal spectra. Musical texture, for her, consists of intervallic relationships, and not of a tonal framework to travel by gliding from one pitch spectrum to the next, as the chanter on the 1909 recording did. As a result, her vocal rendition is much closer to a melody than a recitation in its sonic effect. Third, five of the six phrases of the first line finish on a strong beat,—but the phrases of chesols normally end on weak beats, as shown above. These five phrases contain five beats each, and they are accentuated like a 4/4-meter each. Both strong or “masculine” cadences and regular meter are means to establish a melodic flow; however, the structural design of chesols as exemplified in music example 3.3 prevents exactly that. Fourth, the nuclear motive employed throughout the first line is characterized by the minor third d’’–h’, an interval not normally featured in chants outside of their final formulae: the inner-phrasal melodic stream commonly moves spectrum by spectrum, employing pitch distances that do not normally exceed the interval of a major second in inner-phrasal contexts. In fact, the minor third signals the final development of a verse. Therefore, the first line of this chesols puzzled the listeners also because it used this familiar sign in an unfamiliar manner. Fifth and finally, the spatial design of this performance significantly departs


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from that distinguishing chesols, as is illustrated by the following two diagrams relating to the wax cylinder recording from 1909 and the chesols discussed here, respectively. The diagrams (figures 3.6 and 3.7) illustrate the tonal ambitus covered in the single phrases. Phrases are displayed on the horizontal axis, and the vertical axis captures the relative tonal range used per phrase.


Figure 3.6 shows a clear wave-like development of tessitura in the 1909 recording, which connects the recitational line with the cadential line of verse 1 and glides into verse 2, running out towards the end, thus creating the feeling of an arrival point. The lowest pitch spectra occur in the cadential lines. The diagram shows that the downward-upward exploration of tonal space pervades the whole piece, thereby creating a sense of large-scale form which transgresses the phrasal units without compromising their detachedness from one another. Figure 3.7 shows the substantially different development of ambitus which characterizes the second recording. The first verse (phrases 1–6) actually lacks a cadential line as well as any variation of tonal material among phrases. It employs the lowest pitches right from the beginning. This was probably a main reason for the audience’s lack of recognition. Verses 2 and 3, and 4 and 5, respectively, are identical in terms of tonal material. The downward-bending, melodic arch form which frames verses in older chesols performances is established for the first time in verse 2. The verses are like building

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blocks; the tonal development that links the verses of the 1909 recordings and unifies them into a whole is missing here.


Another major difference between the two recordings lies in the inner-strophic durational relationships. In the 1909 recording, 2:1 and 3:2, the “classic” rations were determinants of the item’s temporal structure. In the 2005 recording, the first verse does not have a cadential line, thus escapes analysis in this regard; verses 2, 3, and 4 display durational relationships among recitative and cadential lines that approximate 1:1, and verse 5’s proportion is roughly 2:1 (1,8:1). Contemporary and historical performance practices of chesols share a lot of the same fundamental characteristics. However, the differences between them, as exemplified in these two recordings, are obvious, and they pertain to core features of chesols. Yet, it would be wrong to simply consider the 2005 recording the result of unidirectional musical change. Also, chesols are that musical genre which can be said to display more tangible stability in musical features than all other genres of Palauan music. This can be attributed to the functionality of chesols for the most part, but perhaps another reason has also been decisive here. It has been mentioned that the lyrics of chants are vanishing from cultural memory, and that those lyrics that are still around have become largely unintelligible to contemporary Palauans. Performers of chesols very often cannot translate or summarize the content of an item’s archaic words, and what little knowledge that exists is fading away as performers age and pass away. Since this is not a recent development,358 this situation has prevailed for several generations, which


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has inevitably worked changes on the transmission of chesols: with the appreciation of verbal content fading away, music instruction gradually had to shift its focus from making a student understand to making him/her repeat and copy. Students today do not grow up in a musical culture which over the course of their childhood automatically familiarizes them with chesols, although chanting does play a somewhat important role in contemporary communal life. For an upcoming performance, they will be prepared ad hoc for a one-time recital and learn the respective item by heart. This has reduced individual musical agency and individuality and, somewhat paradoxically, contributed to what is now perceived as stability in the genre’s musical shape. And it also points out another, extra-musical development: chanting at communal events is no longer the exclusive domain of the elder stratum of society, even if this tendency persists. As it has become the “event chant” that fulfills the function today, and no longer solely the chant’s content and context, it is increasingly youngsters that are called upon to perform this representative function in order to demonstrate the younger generation’s bond with Palauan customs. Arguably, this has also affected the perceptions of the listeners, who tend to reconcile a rather wide scope of performance modes with their passive knowledge of chanting. In this particular case, however, the 2005 chesols musically exceeded this scope, which led to the audience’s confusion. Subsequently, the listeners showed a willingness to accommodate this musically deviating performance practice within their notion of chesols. It seems to be the sensation of chanting itself rather than actual musical content that gives value to chanting in representative contexts like the one that formed the setting for the 2005 chesols. Chesols are performed with the performer “looking back.” The situation just described has also fostered the development of the current stage encapsulated in the 2005 recording, for this chesols is representative in terms of musical features of the younger generation’s performance practice: musically, this chesols is formulaic on all levels. While elder performers may still be able to gain musical understanding from “looking back” because they possess a personal, sonic memory of what they are looking back at, young performers lack this experience, and must revert to acquired schematic knowledge. I shall look at the implications of this phenomenon in Part III.

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Derubesebes Derubesebes are widely considered a type of chesols. 359 Yet, they will always be referred to separately by Palauans. Some disorientation prevails today regarding both the functional context and the actual definition of derubesebes, a fact which, together with the small number of recordings available and the rather low overall popularity of derubesebes in contemporary Palau, allows for the conjecture that the genre is on the verge of becoming extinct, or is being conceptually merged with the genre chesols. A main performance space for derubesebes is a funeral;360 here, derubesebes would only be sung by women.361 Accordingly, their lyrics often express mourning and/or personal grief. Also, derubesebes often narrate events that have taken place between rubaks and states, and they are part of the melech rite.362 A special type of derubesebes, the demalasoi derubesebes, is also considered a subgenre of chesols (demalasoi chesols) at times. Demalasoi derubesebes are expressive of interpersonal relationships, and often communicate admiration and respect for the addressee. They are chanted when welcoming visiting parties from other villages or islands in order to pay deference to visiting rubaks, and this function is also documented in early historical sources.363 If demalasoi items are offered as tokens of respect in this manner and the performance turns out to be faulty, or the chosen chant is inappropriate to the occasion, a proper chant has to be performed by way of apology. According to one source, there seems to be at least one documented instance where a singer was killed as a consequence of such a faux-pas.364 Demalasoi chesols, according to older sources, can also serve to indirectly express wishes, and requests for favors; anything for which expression through verbal communication is considered potentially offensive, such as complaints,365 can be brought forward through this genre. When the addressee remains implicit, he is not approached forthrightly: in a fable-like manner, demalasoi items bring up a topic, but they do not make explicit requests or purposefully compromise individuals for the sake of ridiculing them. Yet, if a concern is put forward in a demalasoi item, it is made clear enough so as to be graspable for the listeners. The person concerned is expected to respond to the chanter by proposing a chant himself.366 But this only highlights one aspect of demalasoi chants. The word “demalasoi” means lover, and in common language, it can only be used by women to refer to a male lover. In its narrower sense, therefore, demalasoi items are a medium for women to speak about topics related to their lover, and in a highly personal way. Since demalasoi is a


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word that can only be applied by a woman to a man, demalasoi chants that are addressing a lover are clearly female repertoire. The relationship that is the subject of a demalasoi chant can be very personal or political in nature, such as when the actions of rubaks are being described. The primary function of demalasoi chants is the first of the two mentioned. There are only three derubesebes recordings in the corpus of available recordings. In addition, Augustin Krämer recorded the words of a single derubesebes during his 1909 stay in Palau.367 Hence, the gradual fading away of derubesebes from the repertoire seems to have begun prior to 1909. In two of the recordings, the derubesebes performance directly follows (the 1961 recording) or precedes (the 2005 recording) that of an chesols. This performance practice is consistent with the information given by one informant that derubesebes “are a counterpart to chesols in the sense that they cannot be sung by themselves: they precede an chesols,”368 even though this obviously is not the only function of the genre.

Musical Form In this chapter, I shall compare the musical shape of derubesebes with that of chesols to investigate a potential relationship in terms of musical form. Given that the documentation of this genre has such a scant basis to it, any conclusions remain hypothetical. Two of the available derubesebes recordings are monostrophic. The lyrics collected by Krämer, in contrast, comprise three verses, and the other derubesebes in the corpus, recorded in 1936, includes five stanzas. The latter is set entirely in the chesols musical idiom.369 The following description, therefore, focuses on the two later recordings. The tonal material used in the derubesebes to be discussed first (see music example 3.6), dating from 1961, 370 an item which was part of a radio program aiming to contribute to the preservation of cultural “heritage” through public education, covers three pitch spectra:

Music example 3.6: Tonal inventory of the 1963 derubesebes371

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Music example 3.7: Derubesebes recorded in the 1960s, transcription. Item Dub I-2.3 in the Barbara B. Smith Collection. Chanter: Adalbai Omeliakl

Generally, the movement through tonal space is characterized by intensive use of glissando in both recordings, and Herzog’s observation that in Palauan music, neighboring pitches may in places be “functionally identical, melodic variations of the same pitches […] The intonation is often […] swaying,”372 is applicable, as it lies at the core of the concept of pitch spectra. It is particularly evident in the singular occurrences of the extreme points of the lower (notated here as b’-flat) and upper (notated here as f’’) framing pitch spectra. Overall, the main tonal framework comprises roughly a third (c’’-e’’), an ambitus comparable to that commonly employed in chesols. This derubesebes takes 29.5’’. The five phrases, the contours of which are determined by linguistic specifics, are 9’’, 6.5’’, 6’’, 3’’, and 5’’ long, respectively. The inner tempo ranges from 70 in the last phrase to double that in the third. This peak in the inner tempo coincides with the extension of the tonal compass to include the lower framing spectrum. Note that the maximum inner tempo is exactly double that of the minimum inner tempo, and that among phrases there is a tendency to establish harmonic proportions, if marginally inaccurate, in durational relationships among each other.373 The melodic flow has a descending overall structure, oscillating between the upper framing pitch spectrum and the middle pitch spectrum (evolving around d’) in the first part of the item before proceeding downwards in pitch so that in the second part of this


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derubesebes, the melodic progression fluctuates between the pitch spectrum evolving around d’’ and the lower framing pitch spectrum. The overarching descending melos, as featured in this derubesebes, does not seem to be a genre requirement, as the second music example below suggests. While with the exception of the degree of importance attributed to descending phrasal melos, derubesebes share these characteristics with chesols, a significant difference also exists between the genres. It concerns the inner-phrasal as well as the overall structure: the arch-generating, descending melos found in the phrases of chesols in most cases is less prominent in the phrasal (as well as overall, see above) design of derubesebes, and there is no clear distinction between an item’s main line and its final development (as in recitative and cadential lines in chesols). The final pitch spectrum of derubesebes is usually the lower framing one, and not in its lower variant, but in its higher-pitched inflection. This contributes to the sonic impression of openness in the derubesebes musical form. In derubesebes in which the descending melos is little or not at all pronounced, there seems to be, then, only modest or no tonal development that makes the listener anticipate the final phrase and intuitively grasp the item’s structural organization, as tonal progression in chesols does. No particular development in rhythm, speed, or timbre assumes this function in its place. Music example 3.9 shows the transcription of a derubesebes recorded in 2005 (Abels 43).

Music example 3.8: Tonal inventory of the derubesebes transcribed in music example 3.9

The 2005 derubesebes employs a smaller tonal framework than the item from 1961. The tonal matrix is confined to two pitch spectra, the lower of which appears in two inflections. The two spectra function as the poles between which the phrases oscillate back and forth. Since the architecture of all phrases is uniform, they share the same melodic contours. In their course, phrases melodically proceed from a higher pitch spectrum to a lower pitch spectrum twice, resulting in a mildly wavy melodic outline which is a prominent general feature of the Palauan musical idiom.

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Music example 3.9: Derubesebes chanted by Magdalena Demek Towai, recorded in 2005 (Abels 43), transcription

Comprising three phrases which add up to a complete verse, the piece takes 22.5’’. The phrases are 7’’, 7.5’’, and 8’’ long respectively—unlike in the 1961 recording, durations are distributed more or less evenly among phrases. The inner tempo, too, is more unified in the 1961 recording, ranging from 106 to 113. Rhythmic differences among the phrases are minute, and, as usual, can be attributed to the words’ metric requirements. Like the 1961 derubesebes, this later performance finishes on the upper inflection of the lower framing pitch spectrum, thus leaving the chant without an apparent concluding melodic movement to create a sense of closed musical form. Both derubesebes share those musical features with chesols that relate to the musical idiom: tonal material, the mode of traveling tonal space, frequent usage of punctuated rhythm, and recitative character. The one significant difference is of a structural nature, relating to formal development. Unlike chesols, in which the phrases are marked by descending meloi that evoke a sense of inner coherence, the two derubesebes come across as fundamentally open in form, each one in a different way: while they seem to open up tonal space, they are clearly not designed to take the piece to a musical ending point. Rather, they seem to “open up” musical territory for a subsequent item. Since such architectural structures do not appear in any of the self-contained genres of Palauan music, it seems indeed plausible that derubesebes should have had the function of serving as preambles to another chant that belongs to a genre which shares both idiom and social function, rather than merely serving as exclusive women’s chesols repertoire. The fact that two out of three available recordings were chanted by a male performer also seems to challenge the latter hypothesis. Although there is little


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contextual information on derubesebes, the little we do know suggests that derubesebes served as optional introductions or epilogues to chesols, to be inserted on appropriate occasions; on the other hand, they were considered as somewhat complementary to chesols, and particularly popular in the women’s community, as is evident in the words. Technically, some informants maintain derubesebes can only be chanted by women in either function, but historical recordings speak of a different performance practice.

Rebetii Rebetii are often described as the traditional Palauan love song, 374 whereby a love song is conceived as a song dealing with content related to either a current or bygone love. A rebetii is normally sung by one person, although others may join in.375 It can tell of courtship, divorce, yearning, or any other topic loosely connected with love. In the formalized course that courtship takes, rebetii can adopt the role of proclaiming the singer’s attraction to the beloved, and it is not necessarily the act of performance itself that fulfills this function, but the rebetii itself. A semi-legendary narrative popular in Palau illustrates such a case, where a rebetii was composed by the person in love, but presented to her sweetheart by someone else: A lady in Peleliou fell in love with the high chief in Koror, and composed a rebetii expressing her love for him. This rebetii was brought to Koror, so that the chief know about her. It must have been after the war, but rebetii are not usually composed anymore today.

376

Some rebetii, on the other hand, simply contemplate love as a phenomenon, or a particular love affair; most often, but not necessarily, they directly address the attracted, the subject of attraction, or partner. Depending on the content, a number of rebetii are meant for public entertainment, while the performance of others is usually confined to the secluded intimacy between two lovers, and again others will only be sung when the singer is on his or her own, for example “when a man goes out to fish, when the moon is right and the wind is calm.”377 But rebetii are also performed for purposes that are not necessarily related to the relationship between lovers. They may serve as an appraisal of individuals, men’s clubs or whole villages, or as expressions of respectfulness towards them. This is a function which is akin to that of some chesols. However, rebetii are generally considered to be a nuance less formal and functional than chesols. As far as musical

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form is concerned, a violation of formal rules leads to the singer being penalized, which may lead to his or her execution (see introductory paragraphs to this chapter), and demands the immediate offering to the addressee of an chesols as an apology. These are the same rules that apply for chesols and derubesebes. Another occasion for presenting a rebetii is the ruk, grand men’s dance, of which the chanting of a rebetii is a part.

378

Women’s dances may be concluded with

omengereal(l)l, a solo performance which also includes a rebetii. 379 Yet another performance space is the omilil biul, where rebetii may be performed in connection with choreography.380

Musical Form Rebetii should be preceded by a short preamble (okisel a rebetii) and concluded with a final formula (orekil a rebetii). These preambles range from roughly 2’’ to 8’’ in duration, and anticipate the tonal material of the following performance. There are about ten different types of okisel a rebetii, and chanters can choose among them at liberty. A common feature of all the preambles is their emphasis on a prolonged note towards which the whole phrase leads. Typically, it is approached step-wise from above. The downward approach to the final pitch, which spans the whole phrase, is similar to the phrasal structure found in chesols. The rules governing melodic progression within the preambles are consistent with those of the upcoming rebetii. The framing of rebetii with preamble and final formula is falling out of use. The number of verses in the available rebetii recordings typically ranges between one and five. The shortest verse is 10’’ long, the longest takes 67’’. Stanzas invariably end with the words “ngii yang,” which in contemporary Palau is a mere phonetic element signifying the end of the formal unit, thus serving a purpose comparable to that of “a dot at the end of a sentence,”381 as one informant put it. No semantic meaning could be retrieved. There seems to be no fixed durational relationship between the phrases, which constitute a verse in the manner that they do in chesols: as in other chant types, phrasal lengths are governed by linguistic structures. As with chesols, the verses of a rebetii can be subdivided into recitative line and final line, both of which are made up of several phrases (in exceptional cases, the final line may consist of only one phrase). Unlike chesols, however, the final line of a rebetii is not typically spatially cadential in nature: its main difference from the recitative lines lies in the prolonged note at its end, which is similar in form and function to that of the rebetii preambles, and which does


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not feature in the recitative lines. It always coincides with the “ngii” of the verbal final formula “ngii yang.” Moreover, the final line tends not to employ tonal material from the upper realms of the piece’s ambitus. The nature of melodic progression is generally in keeping with what has been described for chesols. Melodic steps are likely to be narrow; a certain flexibility is inherent in intervallic relationships, and in the exploration of the tonal texture through pitch spectra, emphasis is placed on the melodic flow. There is a simple rhythmical “catch phrase” to rebetii, which is centrally characterized by the flexible sequence of this nuclear motive’s two basic variants:

Music example 3.10: Rhythmical “catch phrase” of rebetii

The rhythmical divisions of the basic values are variable. Depending on the requirements of the verbal structures underlying the rebetii, the quarter-note within the rhythmical catch phrase may be rendered as two eighth notes and vice versa. Rhythmical values may also appear punctuated; they are followed by an eighth (or, respectively, sixteenth) note. In any case, the perpetual repetition of the broad rhythmical kernel eighth note/eighth note/quarter note or quarter note/eighth note/eighth note remains a central characteristic of rebetii and is perhaps the main constituent of what Palauans like to refer to as the “sound of rebetii.” 382 As a consequence of the two-beat structure of this rhythmical core unit with its inherent succession of weak beat after strong beat, rebetii generally seem to the listener to be based upon a straight meter at first listening, an impression which is amended at once by the general tendency in Palauan chanting to slur the pulse of a piece, i.e., to accelerate and decelerate the speed of the succession of beats throughout the performance. An up-beat at the beginning of a phrase is common. As in chesols, the phrases that constitute recitative and final lines appear as closed rhythmic units followed by a short silence. Music example 3.12 illustrates this description and highlights further details. It is a transcription of a 2005 recording of the rebetii “Osisang” (Abels 51).383 From the man’s perspective, this chant narrates two lovers’ anticipation of their next meeting, its time

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and place, the way to get there, and the landmarks that will show the way. The path to the meeting place is described as a “straight road,” an expression which, like much of the words, is metaphorical. This rebetii was performed by a female chanter.

Music example 3.11: Tonal inventory of the rebetii transcribed in music example 3.12

Music example 3.12: Rebetii, recorded in 2005 (Abels 51), transcription

The recitation begins with an up-beat, followed by eight variations of the basic two-beat unit in recitative phrase I. Early in all three recitative phrases, the omission of one pitch spectrum in the course of melodic progression (notated here as the leap d’–b), which otherwise proceed step-/spectrum-wise, clearly indicates the leaving behind of the spatial plateau (or, upper framing pitch spectrum) for the rest of the phrase. Hereafter, spatial development is confined to oscillation between the melodic resting pitch spectrum (notated here as c’) and the lower framing pitch spectrum, before the melodic


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line gravitates into the final pitch of the phrase, which is the lower inflection of the lower framing pitch spectrum. The one exception to this is the tonal leap at the end of recitative phrase I (notated here as b–d’), which in this position in the piece is characteristic of rebetii; chesols and other chants do not feature an upward jump in pitch at the ends of phrases. As in the above example, this leap mostly results from the omission of one pitch spectrum in an otherwise linear melodic progression. The resultant intervallic gap stands out from the remaining texture because of its size. By emphasizing the end of the first recitative phrase in a rebetii, it functions as a clear section marker, and may occur at inner phrasal ends as well. In the final phrase, the spatial plateau appears extended in duration when compared with those of the recitative phrases. It divides the final line into two halves of roughly equal duration. Except for the final upward spectrum omission, all phrases of the rebetii show a generally descending melodic movement. Musical example 3.14 gives a transcription of the same rebetii, “Osisang,” chanted by a male performer in 1963.384

Musical example 3.13: Tonal inventory of the rebetii transcribed in musical example 3.14

Among the palpable differences between the two renditions is the prolonged dwelling on the upper framing pitch spectrum (notated as g-sharp) in the first phrase of the 1963 version: the chanter of the 2005 recording quickly left the tonal plateau in favor of lower realms of the tonal ambitus. In the final phrase, this constellation appears reversed: while the 2005 recording sojourned on the upper framing pitch spectrum for about half of the final line’s overall duration, the 1963 recording immediately leaves the melodic apex after touching upon it right at the beginning. The respective treatment of recitative phrase III is comparable. In recitative phrase III, the 1963 rebetii keeps returning to the peak pitch throughout the first 7 beats, as opposed to the 3,5 beats the 2005 recording allocates to the tonal plateau. There is no clear two-part structure in the final phrase of the rebetii studied here. But several final lines consist of two discernible halves, as evident in the short silences

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inserted between them. However, this possibility is not exclusive to final lines, as it also occurs in recitative lines (see recitative line III of music example 3.14).

Musical example 3.14: Rebetii, recorded in 1963, transcription

There is, then, a considerable flexibility in the performance of a rebetii, as this brief comparison of two versions of the same piece shows. This flexibility pertains to the apportioning of the lyrics into phrases, the durational relationships of these phrases to each other, the overall shape of the words, and also the melodic and rhythmical contours of the actual recitation. The chanter of the 2005 recording denied the possibility that she rendered the rebetii differently than she would have 40 years earlier, thereby conceptually ruling out mere change in performing practice as the main cause for the existing disparity among the two versions of “Osisang.” But change is tangible in rebetii. Although conclusive evidence is lacking, the corpus of rebetii available for study, the oldest of which was recorded in 1909, 385 suggests a gradual expansion of the tonal framework of rebetii in general. Another moment of change seems to lie in the gradual fading away of the practice of framing rebetii with a preamble and a final exclamation. It is likely that the purpose of these introductory and


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epilogue phrases is comparable to that of the equivalent phrases of chesols, in which case the frames were intimately linked with the performance’s functional context. However, it seems that as these original performance contexts and knowledge thereof fade away, the frame, which is meant to establish a connection to social context and function, increasingly operates in a vacuum, and consequently disappears from local knowledge and performance practice.

Kesekes Two types of kesekes exist, the purportedly older of which is often defined as a lullaby performed to sing babies to sleep. 386 The other type is referred to as kesekes ra Modekngei, and is part of Modekngei worship. Kesekes ra Modekngei will be discussed separately in chapter 4, while this chapter deals with the lullaby kesekes. Kesekes have been described as “heroic” and “epic” chants,387 probably based on the observation that kesekes is an open form that can easily accommodate any number of poetic lines without necessarily dividing them into stanzas. Krämer in 1909 collected and translated a kesekes that comprises as many as 160 lines, ranging in length from a few words to more than 30 words.388 This further illustrates the flexibility in the musical form of kesekes: the text is the prime dimension of kesekes, and musical form adjusts to the specifics of the words. Kesekes mostly deal with historical events, crucial battles or heroic deeds of the past.389 Given that kesekes are used as lullabies, the words strike one as a little lurid in places. A secondary function of kesekes is clearly to serve as a medium of oral historiography: they are an archive of local history. Generally, the language is archaic, and many of the kesekes texts known today are incomprehensible to contemporary Palauans, a fact which perhaps also contributed to the contemporary belief that kesekes are the oldest genre of Palauan music. The lyrics are local in scope, describing events from a (village’s) subjective position, which makes them potentially embarrassing or even offensive when performed in front of the “wrong” audience, for instance in front of a village that was outgunned in a battle that is the subject of the kesekes. Kesekes are usually chanted in a rather relaxed voice, which sometimes evokes a contemplative atmosphere.

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Musical Form In a kesekes, all phrases tend to be approximately the same length, normally deviating 2’’ to 3’’ at most from the piece’s “phrasal reference duration.” Proportion has already been described as perhaps the most important shape-giving musical parameter in Palauan music. Here, it is not the durational ratios 2:1 and 3:2 among or within verses that figure prominently, but a relationship of roughly 1:1. This is owing to the formal openness that characterizes kesekes, and according to which the overall number of verses per kesekes is not predefined. Moreover, all verses are similar, but not identical, in terms of musical form, so that there is no structural difference between, for instance, recitative and final sections of verses. Therefore, there is no clear reference frame within which odd durational proportions among lines, such as 2:1 and 3:2, could be aligned. The text recited in kesekes is also composed in lines of approximately equal lengths,390 and musical structure is clearly predefined by this architecture. However, there are other means of establishing proportional relationships and thus providing a point of orientation to the listener, as shall be seen in the following music example 3.16: a kesekes recorded in 1963.391

Music example 3.15: Tonal inventory of the kesekes transcribed in music example 3.16

This kesekes comprises nine lines. On the melodic level, the phrases consist of an oscillation between the two adjacent pitch spectra of the tonal inventory. All phrases are modeled after the first line of the kesekes, and the development of variation tends to progress in twin lines, so that for the above item, the pattern that the evolution of melodic contours takes across phrases could be represented as A A1 A’1 A2 A’2 A3 A’3 A4 A’4. Once more it becomes obvious that in Palauan chants, it is not absolute pitch that governs the melodic movement, but undulating spatial exploration of melodic space within a narrow ambitus. In other kesekes, where the melodic progression is not characterized by predominantly undulating contours, a phrase consists of a sequence of adjacent notes in descending order. In these cases, the addition of the musical ornaments of short duration that are


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invariably included by the chanter results in the genre-typical upward-downward exploration of the narrow tonal inventory, so that the undulating melodic structure becomes discernible to the listener in spite of the actual melodic shape’s disposition to the contrary.

Music example 3.16: Transcription of a kesekes, recorded in 1963

In music example 3.16, all phrases conclude by repeating and prolonging the final note, a practice of distinguishing final formulae from the preceding part of a phrase that is comparable to that found in other genres of Palauan music. All phrases end on the lower inflection of the lower framing pitch spectrum. With the exception of the first two

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lines, early in their course all phrases also feature the lower framing pitch spectrum’s higher inflection (notated here as a’) in exposed position, i.e., as the first note in the phrase with the duration of at least an eighth note in the above notation. This is interesting in that the pitch employed in the inevitable, glissando up-beat varies considerably. This suggests that it is not the starting interval, but the absolute pitch of the first accentuated beat that, as both pivotal and starting point of the phrase-defining melodic undulation, provides a point of orientation to the chanter. The opening phrase of this kesekes lasts 5’’, the third phrase 6.5’’, and the concluding phrase 5.5’’; all others take 6’’. Although the difference of 1’’ of the opening phrase length from the standard phrase length of 6’’ seems negligible at first glance, and although there is also a minute deviation from the reference length in phrase III, the framing of the kesekes with durations that slightly jut out from the overall texture seems to be a shape-giving structural marker. It also accounts for the noticeable tempo fluctuations within the piece and within single lines, the extent of which is remarkable even when measured by common performance practice in Palauan music. This artifice establishes durational weighting of formal units by marginally breaking proportional parity among the item’s lines. Although this technique occurs often in kesekes, it is not a compulsory feature of the genre. Another means of structuring the otherwise open form of kesekes is the progressive development of inner tempo. Figure 3.8 shows the evolution of that parameter per phrase:

Figure 3.8: Inner tempo in the 1963 kesekes


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The undulating pattern discernible in figure 3.8 has already been noted in the earlier analysis of other musical genres of Palauan music. As in the other genres, it functions as a tool to unify the various parts of a musical item into a whole. In other genres, however, it is not the inner tempo that evolves this way, but other parameters: pitch, duration, and durational proportions. Duration and durational proportions among phrases are non-dynamic formal categories in kesekes except in opening and concluding phrases, and the development of pitch roughly follows the same pattern for all units of the item. Given these genre characteristics, the parameters of absolute and relative duration as well as pitch are not freely available as tools to structure musical time and space, and to revert to inner tempo as a parameter open for modification in order to signify form instead is a compensatory technique unique to kesekes. As figure 3.8 shows, the time-structuring role allotted to the inner tempo does not necessarily mean that at the piece’s end, the curve of that parameter has to return to its point of departure; it is not the completion of a cycle or entity at a given point in form that matters, but the movement. The corpus of kesekes analyzed here suggests the only prescribed features of inner tempo development are: 1) Decrease in inner tempo at the beginning of a kesekes, i.e., at least from phrase I to phrase II, after which the inner tempo unfolds according to its undulating pattern (the curve begins in descent); and

2) Increase towards the item’s end, typically the last line (the curve concludes in ascent).

Both can be observed in figure 3.8. The degrees of increase and decrease seem flexible, but always exceed 10 bpm. In this way, the formal openness characteristic of kesekes is maintained, while at the same time the inner tempo provides the listener with a point of reference. The wavepattern governing the evolution of inner tempo also corresponds with the similar development of melodic contour. Perhaps it is this rather subtle correspondence in the structuring of musical layers that provides the Palauan listener with the sense of musical interplay and unity that distinguishes kesekes from other genres of Palauan music, so that from the emic perspective, kesekes “have more of a melody than the other chants.” One may further speculate that the emphasis placed on the musical

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swaying motion in kesekes is supportive of the activity of cradling a baby and rocking it to sleep, and therefore at least partly motivated by the functional purpose of the genre. Any phrase can take on the role of concluding phrase in a kesekes. While the musical contours remain the same, concluding phrases can be distinguished by:

1) Increase in inner tempo; however, this is not a sufficient criterion due to the undulating progression of that parameter throughout the piece; and 2) Concluding “ngii yang,” or a linguistic variety thereof, in words that function as a verbal final formula in many forms of Palauan chants. In terms of musical structure, kesekes stand out from the remaining spectrum of Palauan chants by virtue of their formal openness, which is rooted in the characteristics of the textual template. This openness is to some extent mirrored in musical form, for instance when those parameters that elsewhere in Palauan chants provide the listener with a point of reference (such as duration and pitch evolution) maintain a rather uniform guise across formal units. On the other hand, this seeming laxity in form is made up for by transferring form-shaping capacities to other layers of musical texture, such as inner tempo. Kesekes are on the verge of vanishing from contemporary cultural knowledge as they have become more or less confined to being performed in private homes by family elders. Given the development in family structures and social environment over the last century, the decline in the importance allotted to kesekes comes as no surprise.

Historical Perspectives

In addition to the historical developments in the performance practice of the various types of Palauan chants discussed, there is also a more general difference between past and current performance practices that pertains to all of the above chant types. This aspect touches on an observation made earlier in this study in connection with performances of chesols, i.e., that of a tangible change in the underlying conceptualization

of

tonal

space

in

Palauan

chanting:

vastly

different

conceptualizations of the “grammar” of melodic progression in historical and contemporary chant performance are obvious.


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From an acoustical point of view, among the main parameters by which recitation can be distinguished from singing, are vibrato, rhythm, frequency range, and F0 (fundamental frequency) stability. The criterion of vibrato does not apply as widely in Palauan music as it does in other musical contexts, as singing does not necessarily involve this particular voice technique in Palau. Rhythmic particularities and developments have already been discussed within genre-specific contexts. The criterion of frequency range, or ambitus, applies to Palauan music to a lesser extent only, as has become clear by now; this aspect has also been addressed already, with regard to particular genres. The fourth criterion, stability in fundamental frequency, deserves extra attention as its importance in the historical development of performance practice of all genres of Palauan chants proves to be unambiguous. To illustrate this point, figures 3.9–3.20 392 show the contours of the fundamental frequency development in single phrases of chesols and rebetii. Figures 3.9–3.14 display this parameter for recordings prepared in 1963, while figures 3.15–3.20 have been produced from 2005 recordings. It can easily be gleaned from these illustrations that the analyzed historical performances show much greater variation in fundamental frequency than the contemporary ones, which, of course, results in a completely different sonic outcome. In a nutshell, this contributes to a “speaking” vocal effect that prompts the listener to identify these items as recitations, and as clearly “not song.” In more recent recordings, on the other hand, the fundamental frequency is characterized by a visually eyecatching stability and uniformity, which in the cases concerned is decisively conducive to the production of a vocal sound characteristic of the singing voice. Since both historical and contemporary performers describe their vocal technique in the respective items as recitation, this marks a conceptual shift. Whereas historically, recitations seem to have been conceptualized by performers as rhythmic language with both greater ambitus and degree of pitch variation when compared with spoken language, present-day performers seem to conceive of relative pitch consistency as the crucial determinant that distinguishes recitation from song. Thus, the “reference sound ideal” in Palauan chanting has switched from speech to song. While at first glance, this seems to be an artistic development rooted in purely aesthetic grounds, it has implications that go much farther. Throughout the musical analyses in this chapter, it has become clear that the complexity of musical form is largely antiproportional to the non-musical function of sound. The more complex the ritual and/or societal contexts of a given chant, the more reduced the variety in the musical idiom.

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Actual singing (as opposed to recitation), in Palauan music, is largely confined to musical genres that hold considerable entertainment value, and little, less rigid, or even no clearly defined ritual and/or societal function. This has been attributed to the overwhelming priority given to the spoken word over the musical form in culturally prescribed behavior. As in contemporary performances of Palauan chants, distinct extra-musical functions appear guised in an idiom that approximates that of nonfunctional musical genres (i.e., the singing vocal sound)–which is of eminent importance within an oral history culture. Thus, this hierarchical and reciprocal relationship between expressive form and non-expressive function dissolves. Therefore, said musical development bespeaks another, non-musical, conceptual shift: in spite of rhetorical assertions to the contrary, Palauan chants, in their contemporary context, work outside of their customary functional and societal milieu. In this way, they have been moving closer to that segment in the spectrum of Palauan music which accommodates predominantly recreational musical genres, and which is popularly considered as “less serious.” Yet at the same time, chants are attributed a decisive degree of patina, which per definition393 is vague in nature. This notion of patina seems to have widely replaced the bonding with customary structures that used to link Palauan worldview, rituals and society with the characteristic vocal sound of Palauan chants. Unlike these earlier contexts of Palauan chants, patina has not been linked to particular sound events, such as a distinct vocal technique like recitation. Because of this earlier modification in their ideational definition and function, contemporary Palauan chants accommodate such vital musical changes as the one just described without openly violating the average Palauan listener’s formerly rigid mindset towards the definition, demarcation, and discursive contextualization of distinct, functionally bound musical genres. On the other hand, in keeping with Palauan discursive priorities, it might be argued that it has been function that has changed, and only at a later stage did musical language follow suit. Moreover, the graphs show the historical and contemporary phrasal development of pitch to be quite dissimilar in detail as well as in the resultant overall phrasal form: the much greater fluctuation of pitch on the micro-level of melodic progression in the historical recordings is coupled with a clearly downward-arching melodic shape of the overall phrase. In contemporary recordings, phrases tend to be commenced and concluded with an intervallic leap, all the while the inner-phrasal fundamental frequencies form a recitative plateau. These acoustic findings confirm the results drawn from the comparative diachronical analysis of melodic progression in Palauan chants.




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Figure 3.13: Fundamental frequency development in recording Smith I-34, phrase 1 .


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To take the point further, figures 3.21–3.24 show spectrograms of single phrases of chesols; figures 3.21 and 3.22 have been produced from the 1963 recordings, whereas figures 3.23 and 3.24 are visuals taken from performances that were recorded in 2005.394 The spectrograms indicate the greater frequency fluctuation over time; a more frequent usage of glissandi and pitch slurs; and the presence of short breaks that function as speech interpunction in the earlier performances. In return, this suggests a difference in the degree of stability in fundamental frequency over time in the two “modes” of performing chants, which confirms the acoustic findings on historical and contemporary chanting given above.


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Other Genres

Omengeredakl, boid Omengeredakl is a musical form that accommodates a variety of content. A basic characteristic is that it is performed by a group of people.395 Omengeredakl, as a word, implies something sung in a loud voice. The term is etymologically related to the nouns kerredakl, or keredekiil, and kerrekord. In a musical context, Omengeredakl is taken to mean “to begin a song.” The word boid is related to the verb omoid, which means to “travel between places.”396 As a musical term, it refers to a genre that is most often sung in the omengeredakl idiom. Omengeredakl denotes a musical form, while boid is a specific textual content in the first place.397 The labels keredekiil and kerrekord, on the other hand, which are also often applied to omengeredakl items, refer to a mode of performance. In common conversation, the terms boid, keredekiil, and kerrekord tend to be more common than omengeredakl, and they are sometimes used as interchangeable terms.

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In this chapter, I shall look at musical items that are set in the omengeredakl musical form, and that can be described as omengeredakl, boid, and keredekiil or kerrekord. Boid Augustin Krämer says that boid is a “song that is usually performed by three men, sung softly, and then picked up by the crowd.”398 As a matter of fact, some boid can also be performed by an individual instead of a group (which normally consists of more than three persons); in this case, the text will be recited rather than sung. In these cases, boid are not performed in the omengeredakl musical form. When performed by a single individual, boid can also be delivered in the musical idiom of chesols, or in nearly any other musical form. Boid is usually a song “which mentions people traveling to many places,” 399 and it describes an “event which takes you traveling around with this song.” 400 Traveling inevitably means interaction with other communities, whether clubs, villages or individuals, and therefore boid implicitly or explicitly deal with the relationships between the respective groups.401 As such, boid “can be praising as well as teasing” the other party;402 in either case, they directly address the opposite group or individual. Boid may also deal with traveling in a metaphorical sense, as is illustrated by Hijikata: If a man committed adultery, and people knew about it, someone would bring this hearsay to the cheldebechel (club), and a song would be composed about it. Everyone then sings this song and dances all over the village.

403

Here, it is the hearsay of adultery that “travels;” accordingly, boid has also been described as a “popular rumor-song.”404 Boid can also be sung as a mere pastime.405 In the ethnographic present, boid and omengeredakl are cultural knowledge mainly of the elder generation, who consider them a decisive part of Palauan lore: community elders have even been making efforts to revitalize boid and omengeredakl singing by deliberately putting such items on the programs of local cultural fairs, which earlier tended to feature more chesols, rebetii, delang, and various dances than boid. In recent years, the number of boid performances by young singers has increased, albeit slightly, and today boid are part of contemporary repertoire. Nevertheless, many boid have been forgotten. Unlike many other genres of Palauan traditional evolved music, new boid have been composed at least throughout the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most popular boids in today’s Palau was composed as late as at


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the end of World War II by people from Peleliou, who had been moved to Babeldaob’s Airai State during the war. When they returned to their island, they offered this boid as a token of gratitude to the people of Airai, whom they thanked for their support and hospitality during war times. This shows that until the end of World War II, the genre was not only an active part of culturally informed behavior, but that it had also maintained its function within the social fabric of Palauan society. In the following decades, it seems boid declined considerably in importance, which led to a loss of repertoire in the course of the second half of the twentieth century, until in recent years, the genre regained some of its earlier popularity. Krämer calls boid “dance songs,” a term that, judging from his further qualification of this term, might place a little too much emphasis on the dance component.406 As far as performance practice is concerned, historical descriptions and contemporary performances are in accord. One singer, acting as a prompter (see musical analysis below) who inserts spoken interfaces between the formal units of a boid, usually claps his hands at a certain point, and underlines the lyrics by means of gestures and dance movements; boid are usually performed in a sitting position. Other singers may join him/her in clapping hands. While gesture dance may play a considerable role in boid performance, the degree of importance apportioned to body movement seems to be very much at individual liberty today. Musical Form of omengeredakl Omengeredakl are sung by a group: the leader explains the verses, and one person “deviates” from the group, keeping the rhythm. The leader starts the chant, the “paddlers” continue the chant—this is the crowd, at least four people—, and then there is the person who departs from the main melody.

407

Within the group that delivers the boid, this informant states, individuals fulfill distinct functions, for which there is a Palauan terminology: the melemotem prompts or “explains” the song texts between the formal units of the omengeredakl; the meruchodl is the singer who, as a soloist, commences the singing section of an omengeredakl; the esbe is the “counterpart” singer (the “one person who departs from the main melody”);408 the melikes is the leader of the chorus; and the rokui is the chorus itself.409 Melemotem, meruchodl, esbe, and melikes are referred to as the lebuchel, the “leaders.”410

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The primary function of the melemotem part is to serve as a reminder of the lyrics, which may be lengthy. In omengeredakl singing, the upcoming text lines are recited in full length by the melemotem singer between the formal units; the line is then taken up by the chorus. Recited and sung text lines may slightly overlap. The melemotem part may be delivered in anything from ordinary speech to parlando singing. The melemotem is followed by the meruchodl part. The meruchodl “starts” the singing part of the omengeredakl by singing the first line of the respective stanza. Melikes means “to speak (i.e., words of song which others will sing in response).”411 This word is actually part of canoeing vocabulary, as it primarily means “to pole (a canoe),” hence the maritime metaphor used by the informant quoted above. This image neatly conveys the melikés’ function: to guide the “crew” or chorus through the “water” or musical fabric. The word esbe, related to Palauan mengesb, describes the lunar constellation during which the moon stands right in the center of the sky. This word is applied to the solo part of omengeredakl because its “sound is almost like the moon up there,” a phrasing which mirrors the Palauan notion of tonal space. Interestingly, the term also means “to sing out of tune,” 412 which, however, in Palauan does not carry the negative connotation that it has in English, as will become evident in the description of the omengeredakl tonal language. Given the term’s distinct musical significance, the dictionary also gives the meaning of the word field of esbe as “to sing with especially high-pitched voice as the only person in the group.”413 The esbe is an important part of omengeredakl singing: it significantly shapes the musical form, and functions as a marker of form in the musical texture, as shall be seen. If the esbe function is not delivered, however, the piece is still distinguishable to the Palauan listener as omengeredakl.414 (El) Rokui, finally, simply means “all of them.” 415 In the context of omengeredakl, it refers to the chorus. The choristers usually join in un à un: there is no clear “chorus entry” which underlines the demarcation of the formal units. Given the tonal characteristics of the chorus’ part, this leads to a gradual build-up of a frequency band rather than to its rapid entry. In the music examples below, the chorus has been notated in a single system. However, the melodic line is inevitably rendered as a sound band rather than a sequence of distinct pitches, which is the main constituent of the characteristic Palauan group singing sound.


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These assignments made to individual singers apply to the performance of omengeredakl. Technically, a comparable, but more basic division of functions is also readily identifiable in kelloi cheldolm singing. Omengeredakl consist of a flexible sequence of four roughly standardized structural units plus the interpolated, spoken or recited melemotem passages. These five elements can be interpreted as the building blocks of omengeredakl. The melodic progression of the four units (A, B, C, D) generally follows a scheme which is roughly uniform throughout one piece, but which may differ to some degree among different performances. In any case, the contours of the phrases maintain their recognizability across different performances. Music example 3.17 is a transcription of an omengeredakl that was recorded in 2005 (recording Abels 54). It was sung by three elderly women. Three is the lowest possible number of participants in an omengeredakl, and this partly accounts for the fact that in this recording, the esbe function is nearly absent. Another, perhaps more important, reason is the growing unfamiliarity with some boid repertoire in contemporary Palau, which might have installed a feeling of insecurity about musical and/or textual details even among these singers, who are considered specialists in boid repertoire. With the vanishing of the traditional performance spaces, even specialists’ knowledge is crumbling. This omengeredakl has the following structure:

(line 1-1) A B B C B B [melemotem: spoken intersection] (line 1-2) A B B [melemotem: spoken intersection] (line 1-3) A B B B

(line 2-1) A B C D [melemotem: spoken intersection] (line 2-2) C D D [melemotem: spoken intersection] (line 2-3) A B C D D D D

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Music example 3.17: Transcription of an omengeredakl recorded in 2005 (Abels 54). Ibau Demei Oiterong, Ilong Rubasch Isaol, Magdalena Demek Towai, singers

All phrases of this bi-partite piece are rhythmically self-contained, and separated by a short break. The rhythmic pulse accelerates and decelerates in the course of the piece to an extent that cannot be captured in staff notation. Phrases A, B, and D also show the undulating melodic structure that is typical of pitch progression in Palauan music. Phrase C has a descending melos which is approached from below at the outset. Phrases B and D are melodic variations of each other. Their main difference lies in their rhythmic rather than their melodic development. In D, singers also accentuate beats with more strength than they do in B. D is the core element of the final formula of omengeredakl. This function accounts for its non-syncopic, beat-oriented rhythmic structure, which stands in contrast to the rhythmic designs of phrases A and B. Giving room to increased vocal accentuation and rhythmic acceleration, it allows for the piece’s tension to culminate towards the end. A decisive means of achieving this climax is the stretta architecture of the inner tempo, which for the last four D phrases of the music example amounts to 128, 154, 154, and 308 (the inner tempo of the fourth D phrase is exactly double that of the second and third D phrase). The spectrum of inner tempo for the five phrases in this example is shown in figure 3.25. With an accuracy of 0.5’’, phrases A and C are stable in absolute temporal design when compared with the durational compass of phrases B and D. Due to the fluctuations in tempo, their minimum and maximum inner tempos are 24 bpm apart, which equals 0.4 beats per second.

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Formal Unit

Spectrum of absolute duration

Spectrum of inner tempo

Phrase A

4.5–5

96–120

Phrase B

3–6.5

60–140

Phrase C

2.5

120–144

Phrase D

3.5–10

120–154; concluding phrase D: 308

melemotem section

3–8.5

160–280

Figure 3.25: Inner tempo of the 2005 omengeredakl

Unit A functions as a reference point for the temporal design of the phrases, which, melemotem passages notwithstanding, is as follows:

Part line Phrase duration in seconds part 1 line 1 A B B C B B 5 6 3.5 3 6 3.5 line 2 A B B 5 6.5 3.5 line 3 A B B B 5 6 6 5.5 part 2 line 1 A B C D 5 5 2.5 10 line 2 C D D 2.5 7 7 line 3 A B C D D D D 5 6 2.5 7.5 3.5 3.5 5 Figure 3.26: Phrasal durations in the 2005 omengeredakl

In most non-harmonic ratios, the difference from actual relationship to harmonic ratio amounts to 0.5’’. With the exception of the penultimate phrase, which is the opening unit of the final movement, all phrases begin with phrase A followed by phrase B. In general, AB is a typical line opener in omengeredakl, but it is not necessarily used as continuously as shown here. Another characteristic feature is the tendency to substitute B with D, usually in the second half of the item. All items in the corpus finish on D, and the stretta repetition of D at the end is also characteristic of the genre. The emphasis on D rather than B in the second half seems to be a rule of thumb only, for B does surface in concluding lines, and first halves do contain D in places.


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A highly characteristic feature of the tonal language of omengeredakl singing, which distinguishes the genre from all others in Palauan music, is the rendition of the chorus’ part in a heterophonic way that can only remotely be captured in conventional staff notation. On the basis of the possibilities inherent in group singing, it takes the concept of pitch spectra further than it is applied in soloist singing in Palau. While the melodic line as notated in the music examples serves as a point of reference to all choristers, usually only one singer actually follows it (within the tonal scope of the respective pitch spectrum). The remaining vocalists, with the exception of the esbe, literally fill out the remaining space within the scope of the respective pitch spectrum. By producing pitches within the immediate vicinity of the main melody’s pitch, that is to say, they establish a frequency band (also called sound band). The esbe (not featured in the above example), entering either roughly on beat with the chorus or with a slight timedisplacement, then proceeds to add another vocal part to the thick musical texture, which usually commences on a pitch spectrum above that employed by the rokui. In the following, the esbe melody slowly descends in pitch towards the phrasal ends, while the chorus remains within the established frequency band. Within a phrase, therefore, the esbe and chorus parts slowly converge. As the esbe part draws nearer to the rokui, the effect of a sound band with narrowing upper contours is evoked. Two descending melodic esbe phrases usually occur per formal unit. In this regard, the esbe part may be viewed as a quasi-diminution of the chorus’ unit that occurs solely on the level of musical form and does not affect that of (inner) tempo. The end of the first esbe phrase can be identified as an interior phrase conclusion. The final movement of the phrase differs from this interior phrase conclusion in that the rokui part narrows the frequency band. An interior phrase conclusion in omengeredakl is therefore signified by converging contours of the frequency band and concurrently maintained tonal friction. This is generated by a frequency band that is stable in contours, whereas in the final formula, the frequency band appears narrowed down to a width that is perceived by the listener as a distinct pitch, and no longer as a dense frequency band. In this way, the development of tonal friction is utilized as a marker of musical form, as it defines the shape of those musical phrases that involve the rokui. Figures 3.28–3.30 illustrate this by showing the development of spectral density in the course of individual rokui phrases in an omengeredakl recorded in 1963:

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Clearly, the musical development occurs mainly in the vertical dimension of sound. All three diagrams show the final narrowing of the frequency band, which, by establishing a small plateau of narrow range at the end of the phrase, brings the phrase to its conclusion. Figures 3.30–3.32 show a visual of this phenomenon with respect to a recording prepared in 2005.416 Representative of the other items in the corpus, the figures show that this musical characteristic is a constant in the diachronical comparison of omengeredakl singing. Music example 3.18 is a transcription of recording Abels 61, from which the spectrograms figures 3.30–3.32 have been produced. Unlike in the earlier notated example, there is an esbe singer in this piece. Her part is notated in small staff.

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Some additional general characteristics of esbe parts in omengeredakl can be pointed out in this example: 1) The esbe part may fall below the chorus’ melodic line. 2) While in omengeredakl, there tends to be no descending melos in the chorus’ melodic lines, the esbe phrases proceed in a descending course. Given the vertical orientation of sound development as described above, the overall sonic impression is therefore that of a descending melos in spite of the rokui’s nondescending melodic contours. 3) In all other genres, one descending melodic line normally matches one formal unit. In omengeredakl, on the other hand, a two-phrased esbe part matches one rokui’s overall phrase. This is possible because the final musical development mainly focuses on the development of the frequency band, i.e., that of tonal friction, instead of punctual melodic evolution. This shows that in Palauan singing, a marker of musical form such as descending melos can be assigned a different function in a context where the respective original function is fulfilled by another musical parameter.

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Music example 3.18: Transcription of an omengeredakl recorded in 2005 (Abels 61). Victoria Johanes, Belsechel Philip, Oribech Josep, and Vicenta S. Olkeriil, singers

4) Omission of pitch spectra (i.e., the occurrence of intervals larger than a major second) during the course of the exploration of tonal space, which generally


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proceeds stepwise, usually appears in the context of musical densification in Palauan music, i.e., when a piece is in the stage of building a dramatic climax. In omengeredakl, an acceleration of rhythmic pulse is applicable in such places as well. In such a context, pitch distances between esbe and the rokui’s frequency band’s reference pitch as large as a fourth may occur. Such dramatic highpoints are commonly followed by the piece’s final movement. In climaxing passages, the esbe also tends to stress the upper tonal center much more than through the rest of the piece, which also serves as a means to increase musical tension. Per genre-specific formal prescriptions, the omengeredakl transcribed in music example 3.18 structurally resembles the one transcribed in music example 3.17. Units A, the “cornerstones” of omengeredakl form, are of identical duration (however, they appear only twice), and are in both cases directly followed by a unit B, resulting in the typical line opener AB. The melodic and rhythmic progression of the units is recognizable as a derivative of the “reference units” given above, yet they are slightly altered versions. There are no melemotem sections in this piece. Unit D occurs only once, albeit of comparatively long duration; it concludes the overall item. These two features are within the accepted scope of the omengeredakl musical idiom.

Keredekiil, Kerrekord Both keredekiil and kerrekord are modes of performance rather than song types. Etymologically, the words are related to the verb merodel, “to start.” The meaning of the word kerrekord, moreover, was described to me with the following, quite original metaphor: If you take a hair clipper, and cut a person’s hair any way you want it, it will be all messed up in the end. That is how it works with kerrekord singing: you pick up parts of a song, of any song type, and one singer starts another song, sometimes before the old song has been finished by the crowd. People try to fool each other by doing that.

Kerrekord, then, is a mode of performance that is chanted for the purpose of entertainment and simple merriment; it usually involves dancing and hand-clapping. Singers may also point their fingers at the audience or their fellow singers.

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Technically, the terms keredekiil and kerrekord can be applied to any type of song, merely indicating that “one person starts the song and the rest of the group joins in.”417 In the narrow sense, keredekiil is used to describe a boid performance. In the broader sense, they describe a song that is performed in such a way that a “leader starts, and the group follows.” In this sense, kesekes ra Modekngei, kelloi cheldolm, omengeredakl, and delal a nglóik can be referred to as keredekiil. Accordingly, a variety of content is possible.

Kelloi cheldolm Kelloi and cheldolm are used to refer to two types of funeral chants. Musically, though, the terms denote the formal units of a funeral chant. While in contemporary Palau, this sequence kelloi–cheldolm is usually referred to as kelloi only, Krämer always calls it “kel’loi galdólom” (= kelloi cheldolm), which is a term for the complete piece that is also approved of by Palauans. Therefore, in the following I shall adopt Krämer’s terminology suggestion and use the expression kelloi cheldolm when referring to the genre popularly described as kelloi in Palau.418 Kelloi cheldolm are dirges that are part of the women’s repertoire, and they cannot ordinarily be performed by men. 419 Technically, their performance requires the presence of a dead body, as the word itself is derived from kloi, which refers to the position in the middle of the room where the dead, not yet buried body of the deceased person is placed.420 They may not be performed outside the funeral or actual mourning situation within the presence of the deceased’s corpse. Hence, performance is restricted to the four-day mourning period (klomengeiung). On the fourth day of mourning (olengel), the sis (ti plant) ritual is performed, with which elder women in the clan of the deceased inquire into the reasons for the deceased’s death. After the ritual has been completed, kelloi cheldolm must not be performed again. Kelloi cheldolm “tell the story of the clan of the deceased, or the person himself. [The genre] expresses grief in a sober manner, as opposed to personal pain.”421 The grief expressed in kelloi cheldolm is customarily considered to be the deceased’s grief, which was communicated to the surviving family post mortem.422 Felipe de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba, who spent some time in Palau on behalf of the Spanish administration in Manila in the 1880s, describes a kelloi cheldolm that he witnessed:


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Once the corpse is in the coffin, one of the women gives the graveside speech in a high voice. The characteristics of the deceased, the beauty of his body, the nobility of his heritage, his elegance in dancing, his talent in fishing and his bravery in war are celebrated.

423

According to Canga-Arguelles y Villalba’s summary, kelloi cheldolm serve as a eulogy to the deceased. This is plausible considering the custom according to which the funerals of a) beheaded corpses, b) women who died in childbirth, c) men or women who died as a consequence of “marital revenge,” 424 and d) suicides go without ceremonies, including chanting. In these cases, the corpse is quietly buried, and communal as well as personal mourning is reduced to a minimum. 425 When kelloi cheldolm are being performed, it is usually on the occasion of the burial of a person who is respected by the general public. Cheldolm, actually the second part of kelloi cheldolm, are chants complementary to kelloi in the sense that they convey the same sentiment, i.e., grief. The performance of a kelloi immediately precedes that of an cheldolm; their musical contours are identical to that of kelloi, but they are performed at a slower tempo and lower volume. This is illustrated in music example 3.19. The most recent performance of kelloi cheldolm that informants could remember was in the early 1990s, by which time it had already become an exceptional event. 426 Accordingly, kelloi cheldolm have nearly vanished from cultural knowledge. Only eight recordings exist, which can partly be attributed to the Palauan conviction that chanting this dirge outside its proper context brings death to those who chant, and so does writing or talking about it.427 Today, on occasions appropriate for the performance of kelloi cheldolm, people tend to refer to chesols and omengeredakl/boid items instead.

Musical Form Krämer describes a “kel’loi galdólom” (= kelloi cheldolm) he heard when he attended a Palauan funeral. “Those which I heard in Ngarmid were made up of two, long drawn out tones, the second a whole tone deeper than the first. [At the same time] the hands were clapped.” 428 Kubary, too, notes the hand clapping in “kaldólan” (= cheldolm): “Kaldólan are Košolš (= chesols), followed by a slow widening and clapping together of the hands, sung also at funerals and in the breaks of Mur dances.” 429 The hand clapping is not featured in any of the existing recordings. The “two longish notes” that Krämer mentions are a main characteristic of cheldolm. Kubary’s classification of cheldolm as chesols needs a little qualification, though. For him, chesols are:

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Songs with serious content, sung at funerals and to call a god. They are sung without accompanying gestures in a sitting position with two callers following each other and a choir, singing just a short refrain.

430

The performance practice he describes is not in keeping with the contemporary mode of chanting chesols, unless his “short refrain” refers to the shouted “hm… huei!” audience response in chesols. However, his description bears certain similarities with that of Captain Wilson, who described a 1783 performance of an chesols ra odanges. It is possible, then, that musically, the older, now obsolete performance practice of chesols ra odanges was related to that of kelloi cheldolm, and that the latter could be referred to as a type of chesols in earlier times. The Palauan notion that kelloi cheldolm, along with kesekes, is among the oldest genres in Palauan music and is, in part, the basis of all other genres, fits in with this. But since chesols are also to be sung during funerals, it cannot be decided whether Kubary was actually describing an chesols ra odanges or a kelloi cheldolm. In any case, he was referring to music that was being chanted during a funeral. In another place, he describes cheldolm as follows: At the “Homonodólom” (von Kaldólom), one woman leads the singing, for example—Kann ho o ho tmo er niy, el tmo ngallekél a wel—this being followed by the woman dancing the Melíkes picking that line’s note and repeating it: Kau bo–oó–oó–oó–oó–oó–oó– and then the other people present join in as a choir: ey-Eéy-Eé following the length and melody of the sung line. The song’s content is supposed to express the situation of the soul or of those left behind, it is understood as coming 431

from the soul of the departed.

In kelloi, he says, “there is also call and response and the Melíkes, but in the choir the women move their hands and clap at the end of the same.”432 Kelloi cheldolm are supposed to be performed by a group, and only exceptionally by a single individual. If performed by an individual, the mode of performance will be recitative.433 When performed by a group, kelloi cheldolm are strophic in structure. The kelloi, invariably the first part of a stanza, is followed by an cheldolm, which functions similarly to a refrain, and is sung by the chorus. The number of stanzas of the kelloi cheldolm available for analysis ranges from five to seven. Unlike in other genres of Palauan music, strophic arrangement implies a certain fixity in musical contours, so that all verses of a kelloi cheldolm resemble the architecture of the first verse. Only slight variations occur in subsequent verses.


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The kelloi part consists of two recited lines chanted by different performers. The melodic progression in these lines reaches its peak pitch spectrum early in the line, and then proceeds in an overall descending melos, normally ending on the lowest pitch in the line. The first accentuated beat is usually approached with an up-glide, which in places employs pitches below the remaining line’s lower framing pitch spectrum (see music example 3.19). The tonal language of kelloi is in keeping with that of Palauan chants, and bears similarities to the musical idiom of chesols. A kelloi’s last line prompts the entry pitch for the cheldolm, which is sung by the chorus. The cheldolm consists of three lines of similar architecture: after the chorus has entered on the pitch spectrum of the verse’s last note, usually the lower framing pitch spectrum’s lower inflection, it slowly oscillates between this pitch and its neighboring, i.e., upper, inflection. The line concludes on its entry note, i.e., on the lower inflection. In the cheldolm section, the words of the earlier kelloi are repeated at a slower pace. This structure is made denser by the solo part that one of the verse chanters adds to the refrain. The soloist’s vocal entries are usually rhythmically syncopated against the main pulse, and melodically, they often employ a pitch spectrum adjacent to that used in the chorus’ melodic line (see music example 3.19). This generates considerable tonal friction, which is essential for the establishment of musical form in kelloi cheldolm. The solo part’s function is to add melodic and rhythmic layers which thicken the musical texture; its entries are determined by musical structure, and not by the verbal content. Music example 3.19 is a transcription of a kelloi cheldolm recorded in 1963,434 and it illustrates the core characteristics of the genre. The cheldolm takes up the narrow melodic progression again that had been introduced earlier, in the kelloi. The chorus, which in this recording consists of five women, sways back and forth between the two inflections of the piece’s lower framing pitch spectrum (notated here as b’-flat and b’). The starting and ending point is the lower inflection. In rendering this plain melodic undulation, the singers produce a vocal sound which is characterized by a prominent widening of the tonal ambitus of a given pitch: the choristers generate a frequency band that stretches over much, sometimes all, of the respective pitch spectrum’s intonational range. The soloist then proceeds to break this heterophonic texture by adding a descant to it, which may use the tonal material of the preceding kelloi’s phrases. As in the melodic progression in the kelloi, the vocal solo part reaches its peak pitch early in the line, and ends on its bottom pitch.

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Music example 3.19: Kelloi cheldolm, recorded in 1963 (Smith IV-2). Kiruu Dirrametuker, Dirrusekluk Sulikau, Dirralukes Ngerbai, Dirrenguleong Dirraubuuch, and Dirrareyuch Diralemau, singers (Smith recorded titles and first names)


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Inner pitch development evolves mainly as a glissando between neighboring pitch spectra. In the refrain’s first line, the soloist enters on the peak pitch of the piece (the interval of a fourth above the chorus’ pitch spectrum), and glides downwards to join in on the chorus’ second rendering of the lower framing pitch spectrum’s lower inflection (notated as b’-flat); putting forward peak and bottom pitch, the descant part clearly marks the piece’s tonal framework. Thereafter, it moves in friction-generating intervallic distance to the chorus’ pitches, 435 before it jumps up again to the upper framing spectrum in order to repeat the down-glide to the lower framing pitch spectrum by way of phrase conclusion. These two glissandi that open and close the line (marked by the dotted brackets in music example 3.19) are the two pivotal points of the refrain’s phrases. Lines two and three proceed accordingly, except for the up-glides at their beginning, which open up the vertical dimension of sound right at the phrasal beginning by producing tonal friction. To demarcate the refrain’s conclusion, chorus and soloist both gravitate into the lower inflection of the lower framing pitch spectrum. While the pivotal glissandi of a phrase are of equal length (exactitude of measurement 0.5’’), the concluding glissando of the final line tends to be slightly longer. Again, it is impossible to infer general information from a body of only three recordings. But evidently, the musical form of kelloi cheldolm in group performance bears certain similarities with the omengeredakl form. Major differences between the two, on the other hand, pertain to tempo (cheldolm are usually sung in slower tempo) and vocal timbre, particularly in the solo part (in kelloi cheldolm, the soloist often increases adductive tension, i.e., produces an even more pressed voice quality than in omengeredakl forms). All available kelloi recordings performed by a single individual are monostrophic, and lack the cheldolm part (the performance of which would require the presence of a chorus). Their musical language is that of the Palauan recitative genres, with a strong affinity to chesols. They consist of a sequence of simple variations of a recitative line as put forward in an item’s first line. Subsequent lines maintain these melodic contours, and adjust the rhythmic details according to the necessities of their individual words. Only the concluding line deviates from this pattern: it does not touch upon the upper realms of the tonal inventory (resulting in a descending melos), and it lacks the omission of a pitch spectrum that is otherwise characteristic of the final formula of these chants. Also typical is the framing of equidurational inner phrases with slightly longer framing phrases. This is the same technique employed to structure the musical

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fabric of kesekes. The concluding intervallic leaps resulting from the omission of a pitch spectrum in melodic progression, on the other hand, are reminiscent of rebetii phrasal conclusions, and the downward melodic movement preceded by an up-glide is similar to the opening of stanzas in (group) kelloi. Kelloi cheldolm and (solo) kelloi, then, are set in different musical forms: solo kelloi borrow from, but are not identical to the musical idiom of group kelloi, and they also emulate characteristics of other types of Palauan chants. As mentioned at the outset, kelloi cheldolm do not surface in contemporary Palauan life. This comes as no surprise since both their original function and their lyrics are closely related to a nearly obsolete religious system, and not consistent with the funeral rites accepted by the strongest religions prevalent in Palau, i.e., the various Christian denominations.

Delang Delang (derived from omelang, “sexual intercourse”) is an entirely recreational musical genre. Performance spaces formerly included informal meetings of mostly young Palauans belonging to the same sex group, but also situations where members of both sexes are present, such as the omilil buil. Here, delangs would be addressed by one sex group to the other, after which the party addressed would respond (also see the chapter on llall). Today, delangs are also chanted for public entertainment. A delang relates a comical story which normally deals with sex and erotic innuendos. Either the narrated incident or a (real) person involved in it may be the target of satire, and delangs also serve to tease or even humiliate a person, mostly women, in public. It is because of its sexual content that contemporary Palauans “don’t normally sing delang when there are ladies around.” In recent decades, however, delang has become presentable in representative contexts, which is illustrated by the fact that the genre is sometimes performed on the occasion of public events even when these are of semi-political character, such as the Palauan Women’s Conference in 2005. This recent development of delang from a somewhat dubious genre to a musical item considered suitable for public presentation is captured in the characteristics of the body of recordings that forms the basis of this chapter: even though Krämer frequently encountered delangs during his 1909 fieldwork,436 he did not record any, and neither were any of the three later ethnomusicologists presented with one. The oldest recording available for study was made in 2002,437 all other recordings were made in


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2005–07. Apart from the problems this situation poses for research, this perhaps shows the historical timidity of Palauans to present a song type popularly considered wicked—a notion which had been predominantly fostered by missionary ethics, but which has been replaced by a generally more relaxed attitude in the course of recent decades. On a related note, the picking of other genres over delang for ethnographic purposes tells of the relative value attributed to the various musical genres by Palauans: while chesols and other chants and non-chants have been considered worthy of documentation ever since music has been subject to ethnographic endeavors, delangs were not considered “representative enough” of Palauan culture as to be proposed to ethnomusicologists for recording. As a matter of fact, delang has not always even been considered music, as Yamaguti noted in 1965.438 This conceptual change, however, seems to have been a matter of individual opinion rather than a linear development, for Krämer’s informants clearly described delang as a type of song in 1909.439 It is possible that the classification of delang as non-music is owed to the increasing consciousness of Euro-American conceptions of music in the 1960s and earlier, which categorically differentiates between the spoken and the sung word. Delang is a type of dramatic vocalization intermediate between speech and song, generally ranging closer to the former. A type of speech song, the performer’s individual preference ultimately decides the degree of the sung component in a delang. According to Euro-American notions, then, delang could be described as poetry recitation with a strong rhythmic component, which may account for the classification reported by Yamaguti. Today, delang are invariably referred to as a musical genre.

Musical Form Delangs are mostly mono- or bi-strophic, and stanzas (or verses) consist of a sequence of phrases. The durational spectrum of the items in the corpus ranges from 9’’ to 1’40’’, and 20’’ to 40’’ emerges as a common length. The number of phrases per verse ranges between three and six, their shortest being 3’’ and the longest 9’’ long. While there is a tendency for the phrases of a verse’s final line to be longer in duration than earlier ones, no discernible rules govern temporal relationships between phrases, and the length of a phrase is mostly defined by the specifics of the poetic text. The inner tempo of phrases tends to increase in the second half of a verse. The temporal flexibility evident in the corpus seems to be a matter of individual choice, and

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one may also hypothesize slight local differences in performance practice between Palauan regions. This presumption is supported by the fact that other local particulars in the conceptualization of the genre delang appear, especially in the Koror area, where specific delang performance practices have been seen in association with those characterizing a related genre, llall (see below). Rhythmic flow in delang is characterized by a quick succession of pitches of short duration, often in punctuated rhythm, which is reminiscent of rhythmic characteristics of rebetii. Since delangs are declamations closer to speech than to song, their vocal timbre is sonically different from that of other genres of Palauan music, as is evident in the sound examples, and so is their tonal treatment of space. Male singers sometimes, though by no means always, chant whole delangs or passages thereof in falsetto (compare music example music example 3.20). The gender-specific use of this particular vocal technique serves to distinguish this genre from others, which is a common practice in many regions of Oceania.440 Like elsewhere in the region,441 both falsetto and high male voice are used in Palau to mark a genre which deals with sex and sexuality and/or courting activity. Given this connection between erotic content and the use of high register among male singers, one may hypothesize that the use of falsetto, which makes use of a tessitura normally employed by women singers, is part of a subtle, sometimes satirical play with gender and sexuality, which adds further spice to delang. Since historical delang recordings are not available for study, it is impossible to explore the role of falsetto in delang over time. Remarkably, elder male performers tend to chant in falsetto, while young performers are not likely to do so. As one elder put it, “high pitch in delang is better than low pitch; in-between is okay; low pitch is not good.”442 In spite of the weak documentary basis, this observation makes room for the hypothesis that falsetto has historically been a more significant genre characteristic of delang than it is today. As for tonal space, the phrases of delang utilize intervallic frames which characteristically span roughly an octave, a remarkably large ambitus within Palauan music. This applies to both falsetto and non-falsetto performances and it shows that although delang are considered recitation rather than song, the musical component is considerable. Initial and peak pitch spectrum are usually identical. For many phrases, the same is true of final and nadir pitches, and where this is not the case, the bottom pitch is usually touched upon shortly before the final pitch, thus resulting in a slightly upward-bowing spatial movement at the phrasal end, which again is reminiscent of


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rebetii. Generally, phrases tend to display either a melos descending linearly, or a movement doing so in a wave-like manner, as is illustrated in figures 3.33 and 3.34. The ambitus of final lines is often narrower than that of preceding phrases: its phrases tend to range in the lower half of the overall item’s tonal compass. Where the final line consists of two phrases, the first of them is often “open” in form in that it does not contain the characteristics common to final phrases of delang, and its melodic development is then directly linked to that of the second final phrase. Final phrases 1 and 2, then, are two segments of one formal unit, separated into two halves by demarcation in the temporal dimension, i.e., by the same short break between phrases that also separates all other phrases from one another (see figure 3.33). In these cases, the final musical development is executed primarily at the rhythmic level. Due to the melodic architecture of delang, they often finish roughly an octave below the opening pitch, thus giving a sense of form to a set of sequent, closed phrases, the inner structure of which is aligned with the scope of the respective phrase rather than with large-scale structural design. Music examples 3.20 and 3.21 illustrate these general structural characteristics. Music example 3.20 shows a transcription of a delang recited in 2005 by a renowned specialist in this musical genre. In the satirical manner characteristic of delang, a story dating from the Spanish period is narrated: Catholic missionaries had established the first hospital in Palau, an institution foreign to the islands at that time. Word spread among Palauans that in this place, “the mattresses were small, and the smell intoxicating,” which led a young woman to pretend to be sick in front of her husband in order for him to bring her to the hospital overnight. In the congested hospital, she would lie next to many other patients of both sexes, a situation which, according to the somewhat liberal sexual customs of pre-contact Palau, had to lead to an orgiastic night. The punch line here is two-fold: first, the woman’s plan for a “night out” is considered witty; and second, the sternly Catholic institution of the hospital is turned into the very opposite of what its founders should have had in mind.

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Music example 3.20: Delang, recorded in 2005 (Abels 58). Tilei Erungel, singer

This delang divides into two times three phrases, taking 5’’, 5’’, 5’’, 3’’, 3’’, and 3.5’’ respectively. 443 It is bi-strophic (phrases 1–3, 4–6). Generally, the tonal compass is much wider than in other genres of Palauan music. Except for phrases 4 and 5, the opening pitch spectrum marks the upper limit of the phrasal tonal ambitus, up-beats notwithstanding.


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Figure 3.33: Tonal progression in the phrases of the delang transcribed in music example 3.20

Figure 3.33 shows the absolute spatial progression of delang. The runs of curves mirror pitch progression per phrase, and they depict the descending/undulatorily descending meloi described above. In phrases 1, 2, 4, and 5, the tendency to create tonal plateaus of flexible duration early in the phrase is strongly manifested. However, the duration allotted to such plateaus varies in the material under study, and the handling of this parameter seems to be very much at the singer’s liberty. Tonal leaps of up to as much as an octave occur frequently in this example; musically, this further distinguishes delang from other genres of Palauan music. The final line of this delang consists of two separate phrases. Figure 3.34 illustrates this delang’s overall pitch progression. It shows the downward bend in the overall melodic shape as well as in the two verses. The downward melos

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that characterizes inner-strophic pitch progression, but more clearly the two verses’ final phrases, is evidently the major form-giving factor in the design of delang. In keeping with the description of typical final development given above, the second verse, and the whole piece, reaches its bottom pitches in its final seconds, thus creating a sense of structural conclusion.

Figure 3.34: Overall progression in the delang transcribed in music example 3.20

The similarity of some musical characteristics of delang with those of rebetii is not surprising, given that both genres centrally, if in different ways, deal with matters relating to love and sexuality in a broad sense. This correlation reconfirms the momentous role that verbal content plays in Palauan music making. On a related note, it should be noted that delang are defined in terms of verbal content: the word delang first and foremost denotes verbal content that deals with sex, and only secondarily a musical genre. While the musical genre that has just been described is unambiguously identified as delang, this has further implications: the words of a delang can be transferred to another genre, namely rebetii, and presented in that particular musical style. Yet, it will be referred to as a delang because the content cannot be mistaken for that of another genre. The same is true for llall, the genre that the following chapter deals with.


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Llall Delang and llall are usually mentioned in the same breath. The two genres are assumed to have been performed alternately between gender groups during the omilil in order to sexually tease the other, and to trigger greater vulgarity and obscenity in the other group’s reply; they are sometimes referred to as the female group’s answer to the male group’s delang.444 According to another piece of information, one party’s llall was to be reciprocated by another llall rather than a delang; this “exchange” of llalls addressing the other group during the omilil is called klakellall. Llall is a musical genre which is about to vanish from Palauan cultural memory—not only in terms of performance practice, but also in terms of conceptual understanding, for llall is a very diffuse term in present-day Palau. This, apparently, is connected with the fact that the word llall has always been used to refer to a musical genre, but at the same time it simply denotes a specific content, the musical form of which is changeable. This second denotation is not part of active cultural knowledge in contemporary Palau, even though musical practice does switch forms in performing llall. But the former ambiguity of the word seems to have brought forth a widespread insecurity concerning the meaning of llall among Palauans, so that in the field, I have received numerous definitions of the genre, many of them mutually contradictory.445 As no historical recordings exist, the material basis for this chapter is comparable to that of the chapter on delang, and even a little feebler. But delangs are still performed today, and they are an active part of contemporary cultural knowledge—I have outlined the situation and speculated on its historical development above—but not so llall. One reason for this might be that the main performance space for llall, the omilil,446 had nearly completely vanished by the early twentieth century. However, delang shared that performance space, and they are not extinct. Another possible and perhaps more plausible explanation is that in the course of the last century, llall have been merging with delang, a speculation which is fostered by the conceptual confusion concerning llall: delang and llall have apparently always been considered at least closely related, and Yamaguti suggests that there was already a general confusion concerning the delimitation of the two genres in the 1960s.447 This certainly has to do with the generic meaning of the word as an umbrella term. Moreover, the nature of the recordings available for analysis suggests that there is great uncertainty concerning the characteristics of llall, as shall be seen as the chapter proceeds.

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To the best of my knowledge, llall are first mentioned in writing in 1873, namely in the reports of biologist Karl Semper, who was in Palau in the 1860s.448 Semper tells of two llalls 449 performed for him. Both were composed by women’s clubs of the village Ngesias,

“Inatoluck”

(Ngaratoched

450

(contemporary

spelling:

Ngaratoluk)

and

“Inatokete”

) respectively. The first llall was composed by the women of

Ngaratoched for a man named Gonzalez, who apparently was a foreigner living on the Palaus at the same time as Semper. This man had been staying with his “female friends” for some time, which Semper’s informant quotes as the reason that this “beautiful composition,” 451 the llall, was composed. The details of both this and the second llall that Semper gives, including their words, are most interesting considering that nowadays, llall is invariably considered a genre closely related to delang. But these llalls differ considerably from the contemporary definitions of delang, from the scattered contemporary knowledge regarding llall in terms of structure as well as in content, and from the two recordings available for analysis. Semper’s remark that the singer recited the verses “half whispering, half singing,” 452 however, clearly refers to the speaking voice with which delang and pieces that are called llall are still today normally delivered. The comment has to be taken all the more seriously since throughout his text, Semper gives rather detailed descriptions of the voice quality employed by Palauan singers. And since, moreover, Semper was told by his informants that the following item was going to be a llall, one can exclude the possibility that Semper simply confused generic local musical terms. Semper’s llalls have a clear verse-refrain structure, and he was also given the Palauan terms for verse, “augull” (contemporary spelling uchul, lit. “basis, source”) and refrain, “serssel” (contemporary spelling sersel, lit. n. poss. “fence”). These terms seem to be obsolete today. Upon Semper’s inquiries into the structure of the item, his informant related that… First comes the verse, in which someone says what Gonzalez does; he rests in Messabölu—where Inatokete gathers—and rises high in the air with his friends, so that no people shall see them. In the refrain, Inatokete reveals its wishes to him. It strongly wishes that a ship would ome to Angidobil, our harbor. Then in the second verse, Gonzalez with the young women from Messabölu hovers in the air, and the people of the village no longer find the house and sit down under the banana tree instead of going inside. [… And the refrain] is always repeated in the song. But the verses must always be different.

453

The following are the lyrics to which the description given by Semper’s informant relates (contemporary Palauan version in brackets; English translation in italics):454


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1. Augull [Uchul] Verse Adabadanga-e-Gonzalez / kolongaranaroder / -a-Messabölu madangardi [A bedengang e Gonzalez / aleko ngara ngerdel a Messabeluu medengardil] Gonzalez stretched out to sleep / rises up into the air with Messabeluu

Serssel [Sersel] Refrain e-Gonzalez katim-robo-makutirurur-a-diall / eleme-alulak angidobil [E Gonzalez, ng chetim el mo okerir a diall / el le mei el molak era Ngebungel] You, Gonzalez, don’t want to go to summon a ship here, / so that she comes and anchors in Angidobil [Ngebungel, the harbor at Ngesias]

2. Augull [Uchul] Verse Messabölu madangardi / a-la-me-arroi-i-blai / dilikiju akul-a-tu [Messabeluu medengardii, ma le mei, e al cherroid a blai, e te di kiliei era chul a tuu] Messabeluu is risen up high, and they [other people of the village] come close to the house and sit down at the foot of a banana tree

Serssel [Sersel] Refrain e-Gonzalez katim-robo-makutirurur-a-diall / eleme-alulak angidobil [E Gonzalez, ng chetim el mo okerir a diall / el le mei el molak era Ngebungel] You, Gonzalez, don’t want to go to summon a ship here, / so that she comes and anchors in Angidobil [Ngebungel, the harbor at Ngesias]

The division of verses into three lines, as shown here, is not binding: in the other example given by Semper (not quoted here), verses are divided into two lines each. In both cases, the verse structure chosen at the outset is kept up throughout the piece. Again, the scant information prevents the development of reliable conclusions, but the material further suggests that the metric relationship between verse and refrain follows certain patterns: in Semper’s first example, three-line verses come with a two-line refrain, and in his second example,455 two-line verses concur with a one-line refrain. Unfortunately, there are no recordings of these two llalls; however, it may safely be assumed that the metric relationships characterizing these llalls are mirrored in the resultant durational relationships, i.e., that a metric relationship of 3:2 also approximates a durational relationship of 3:2 of verse to refrain. Informants in 2005-07 did not see any verse-refrain structure in llall, and all llalls recorded include one verse only, so that one cannot identify underlying verse structures by textual analysis. Another considerable difference between the llalls

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quoted by Semper and those recorded in 2005-07 lies in their content. While in keeping with the one undisputed characteristic of llall, both 2005-07 llalls are satirical in nature and used to sneer at other individuals, often by using sexual allusions. The older items seem to do just the opposite: they also address a non-fictional person, but in a highly venerating way. This is palpable in the first llall quoted above, but even more so in the second llall composed by the women’s club Ngaratelok in honor of Semper. As the song has it, Look how the Doctor, like a tropic bird, swoops down from the cliff in the evening […] When the people stand bunched tightly together, him, Doctor, most splendid of all, I love very much […] Like 456

a precious possession, I would like to hide you, Doctor, in my chest […]

It seems that llalls were used for both teasing and praising individuals prior to the twentieth century, but the second function has since become obsolete. Today, llalls are reduced to the humorous or bantering aspects of the genre. The two recordings made in 2005-07 are revealing as far as the conceptual confusion mentioned at the outset of this chapter is concerned, as will be seen shortly. However, both items were unambiguously called llall by the performers. Music example 3.21 (Abels 60) shows a transcription of one of these recordings, performed by the same singer who also performed the delang transcribed in music example 3.20.

Music example 3.21: Llall, chanted by Tilei Erungel, 2005.

This llall conforms to the formal features rebetii: spatial movement, rhythmic characteristics, significant formal markers (e.g. the recitative plateau and the intervallic leap at the end of line 1), and also the concluding “ngii yang” in the words all fulfill the criteria of rebetii.


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Music example 3.22: Llall, chanted by Harrilee Ubedei, 2005 (Abels 72)

Figure 3.35: Pitch progression in the llall transcribed in music example 3.22

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The musical form of the second llall recording from 2005-07 (Abels 72), transcribed in music example 3.22, is similar to that of delang in many regards, as is obvious from the transcription; at the same time, it deviates from the genre typology of delang as outlined above. This llall is bi-strophic: the verses cover phrases 1–3 and 4 respectively. Verse 1 consists of a one-phrase recitative and a two-phrase final line. The phrases of the first verse’s final line form a structural unit in terms of melodic movement. Obviously, the curve of the final lines of this bi-strophic llall (phrases 2 and 4 in the table) do not bow downward in the same manner as the final lines both of this item’s first verse or the earlier example. While this is not a unique phrase design in newer delang recordings, statistically most structures of items set in the contemporary delang musical form would in this regard tend to compare to figure 3.34 concerning delang rather than to this llall. In the second example, spatial progression is not as prominent a marker of form as in the first example. While figure 3.34 shows a wave-like pitch development for the delang (music example 3.20), in the course of which the bottom pitches gradually shift downwards and which in the end reaches the lowest realms of the ambitus, figure 3.36, which illustrates the same parameters for the llall recording, reveals that while the undulating movement generally remains a major structural marker, the spatial descent highlighting the concluding phrases is less prominent in this llall:

Figure 3.36: Overall pitch progression in the llall transcribed in music example 3.22


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In terms of musical form, the two llalls clearly belong to two separate and selfcontaining genres. It is the lyrics that make llall: “llall” denotes a content and/or particular function rather than a musical form. Evidence suggests that the omilil was the main performance space for llall, which further corroborates the assumption that the genre’s performance practice was closely linked to that of delang, since during the omilil, the two genres are reported to have been performed in a “constant to and fro;”457 llall, in this context, might denote “an answer” to a delang, i.e., a function, and not so much a particular musical genre (so that several genres are “potentially llall”). Indeed, while the lexical meaning of llall is “a kind of chant (used to ridicule),”458 the meaning of the appertaining verb meláll is given as “sing chant in order to ridicule (person).”459 Whether or not llall is or ever was an independent, self-containing genre—a question that cannot be solved here—, it seems clear that functional aspects are pervasive in this genre of Palauan music. If this hypothesis should prove true, then there are two options: either the usage of the term llall for a function rather than a musical genre has emerged only recently, i.e., after or around the turn of the twentieth century; or, the functional context that has been described so far is just one among others. Discrepancies remain between the descriptions of llall in Semper’s report and the characteristics of what is called llall today. In Semper’s description, the llall was neither used during an omilil, nor to ridicule someone, in fact quite the contrary. Also, the structure of the lyrics that Semper renders have nothing in common with either those of a contemporary delang or those of a contemporary rebetii, the two musical forms that have been used for llall performance in 2005–07. From his report, it rather seems that what Semper was presented with was an omengeredakl song, i.e., yet another musical form, although Semper’s mention of the speaking voice as of a remarkable quality does indeed point in the direction of delang. In summary, the material seems to suggest that the change from llall as an umbrella term for those musical forms related to either praise or banter to llall as the name for a diffuse musical genre coincided with the fading away of the performance spaces of llall in pre- and early-contact times. This implies that along with the social context, conceptual knowledge has been evanescing at a great pace, so that today, llall tend to be equated with delang.

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Bullachang Technically, bullachang are children’s songs, or songs for the entertainment of children. However, they need not necessarily be performed by children, as they can also be sung by teenagers and adults. Bullachang are to be accompanied by dance or at least gesture; they can be performed by either a single individual or a group. When performed by a group, the group may also consist of members of both sexes: together with dances accompanying keredekiil singing, bullachang is one of the very few Palauan dances that may be performed by men and women together. 460 This is certainly connected to the fact bullachang are non-sexual and non-allusive. This recreational genre is nearly extinct today, and is considered to have faded away during the Japanese colonial administration. The main performance space for bullachang, particularly when performed by teenagers and adults, is the omilil; when sung by children, they can be delivered at nearly any time. According to Yamaguti, children would sing bullachang while visiting the home of one rubak after another, where they would receive food and a small amount of money in return.461 The musical texture of bullachang in places resembles the idiom of rebetii, for instance in its quick inner tempo, penchant for punctuated rhythm, and melodic contours (including the intervallic upward leap at phrasal ends).462 Other common features, such as the demarcation of short rhythmic units at the beginning of lines, however, is not featured in rebetii; this certainly serves to support the accompanying dance movements and/or gestures. Also, unlike rebetii, no discernable final formula is evident in bullachang which distinguishes final from opening and inner lines. The body of available recordings is too small for conclusive statements on the genre bullachang. It does suggest, however, that bullachang are short songs consisting of equidurational lines that, in support of playful dance movements, place an emphasis on the rhythmic dimension. The repetition of certain words, central to the performance of a bullachang, coincides with the repetition of a catchy, yet simple rhythm.

Ongúrs Ongúrs are not commonly considered music by Palauans, not because they are speech rather than song—for so is delang—, but because their function is very clearly not related to that of music.463 Ongúrs literally means “rope,” and in its broader sense


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denotes anything that is used for pulling. In the musical sense, ongúrs is rhythmized, pitch-indistinct group speech used to coordinate a working group’s pulling movements when the object that needs to be pulled (by rope)—a tree, for instance, or a boat—is very heavy. It also serves to encourage the workers. For instance, ongúrs accompanied the pulling of a canoe from the dry-dock to the ocean. Kubary mentions the “wild Hongúrus” (= ongúrs) in connection with the “Oháro” (ocháro, see below), 464 but unfortunately, he does not provide any details on the particular position of the ongúrs within the ocháro. Krämer, on the other hand, subsumes “war and rowing songs” under the term “gongúres” (= ongúrs). 465 As a matter of fact, ongúrs are used for rowing (also in wartime) and other competitive purposes; the nature of their lyrics depends on their functional context. The texts of ongúrs in the narrower sense usually make references to mythology. The lyrics of an ongúrs collected in 2005 read as follows: Pull it, pull it. It’s me, Rekesesiuall, be a good tree and come up so we can pull you down.466

According to Palauan lore, “Rekesesiuall” is the father of the rubak Tebang, who once wished to build a canoe from a large tree log. The log, however, got stuck in swampland. Frustrated, Tebang secluded himself in Ngiwal, leaving behind his aged father, who was barely able to survive on his own. After a while, Tebang asked an oracle for the reasons for his mischance, and he was told that it was related to his father, whose chelid was vexed with Tebang’s earlier neglect of his father. Tebang, then, went to stay with and look after his father; when he told his father that he was doing so in order to placate the spirit, Rekesesiuall asked his late mother to pacify the family’s god, and she was successful. Thereafter, Tebang and some villagers went to pull out the tree log from the swamp. While doing so, they shouted the above ongúrs.467 Two of the three ongúrs that are documented in writing, including the one given above, feature Rekesesiuall’s name. 468 In doing so, they link a worldly, physical action to Palauan lore and evoke its larger mythological context. Muranushi, in 1936, recorded an item he classified as klaiskurs ma klaidesachel, a term he translated as “canoe competition song.”469 This item is indeed a competition speech song; however, it is not used exclusively for a canoe competition, but also for the occasion of a klaiskurs ma klaidesachel, a tug-of-war,470 or comparable competitive activities. The word klaiskurs is related to the word ongúrs, and the item that Muranushi recorded is also an ongúrs; klaiskurs ma klaidesachel, accordingly, are ongúrs

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performed within the context of a competition. The lyrics also indicate that in the competitive context, the text of ongúrs may well be provocative and goading towards the competing team; the language may also include swear words.471 As klaiskurs ma klaidesachel and other competitive games were often performed during the omilil, night time playing on the moon-lit beach was also a main performance space for those ongúrs that are playful in character.472 Ongúrs used for competition serve to elevate the spirit of the participants and to coordinate group movement, just like labor ongúrs. Canoe songs, for instance, were a means for the strokesman to unify the paddle movements of his rowers. German administrators were startled at the “shrill sounds” 473 uttered by this person while delivering the canoe speech song.474 Playful competition, war, and physical work, then, were the main contexts for the various types of ongúrs.

Dances

Dances played an important part in pre-contact community life in Palau. They were a central part of inter-village visits as well as of mur activities, where they would usually be paid for. 475 Also, they were offered to the gods as pleading dances for an individual’s health; in places, such as when a woman who is pregnant for the first time falls ill, the offering of a dance to the responsible deity was culturally prescribed.476 War dances were also a compulsory part of warfare, and served to announce new power structures after the defeat of an enemy. The context of dances, therefore, could be of economical, political, or religious nature, or a mixture of any of the three; moreover, the omilil provided an important performance space where dances could be held informally and for mere entertainment.477 When performed during a major festivity, preparations for the feast included the building of a wooden construction that would serve as stage for the dancers. This underlines the central place that dance performance held in any major festivity in pre-contact Palau. The performative contexts of ruk and nglóik will be discussed further in the respective chapters. The invention of certain dances, including the ruk (men’s dance), is attributed to an chelid (also see Part I), 478 which validates their place in Palauan life, and partly accounts for the consideration paid to both the training of dancers and the proper transmission of dances, including dance music. Choreography is…


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predetermined by the ancestors. Their movements, executed in unison, especially those of the upper body and the hands, transmit the expression of the dance. Hip movements are only 479

important in the women’s dances and also have to be executed simultaneously.

The proper execution of prescribed body movements is of great importance. Preceding a major dance performance, therefore, such as during a mur chelsimer, a “closed feast,” or a mulbekl, a feast mostly on the occasion of victory in warfare, the dancers would undergo a rigid training period of up to three or four months. To this end, they would ritually seclude themselves in the community’s bai,480 which leads to the feast being called “closed.” The intensity and length of pre-performance training (mesub) depends on the size and significance of the mur that provides the framework for the performance in question as well as on the size and power of the host (beluu).481 Its main aim was to coordinate dance movements as closely as possible, for, like elsewhere in the West Pacific, unison in movement is of prime aesthetic importance: “All of the performers must know the positions and their sequence, for if one makes a mistake or gets out of time or order, the whole dance is ruined.” 482 A secondary purpose was to keep the dancers away from sunlight, so that their skin would be lighter than usual by the time of performance. The application of turmeric oil to the dancers’ skin, an indispensable part of a dance costume, would then yield a more intensive visual effect. Moreover, the dancers were supposed to fully concentrate on the upcoming performance and limit their freedom of movement and contact with other people, particularly of the opposite sex.483 A German government official, describing a ruk (men’s dance), noted the “thorough practice” evident in a ruk performance that he witnessed during the German period: Then about 60 men entered the dance structure moving in a slow dance step and accompanying their movements with a deep, melodic song. In a skillful manner they paraded in dances to the front and to the side in which one immediately noticed how thoroughly they had rehearsed. Eroticism came only very little to the forefront. The whole thing made a festive, truly unusual impression, in a way that I had never before felt at the dances of colored peoples.484

Krämer recorded a story which further illustrates that a ruk demands a certain degree of seriousness on the side of the dancers, and that the overall conception is not open to manipulation and satire:

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The sloppy singer of Ngardorok Once in Ngardorok when a ruk dance was to be held, the singer was not paying very much attention. The men were fooling around on the dance stage and put on women’s skirts. Then, when the singer’s wife came and called him, he got down and left with her. Those remaining left and complained.

485

Hijikata also mentions the solemnity that characterizes the ruk: The [dance] song, performed with low voices, has such a richness that it makes you think that it is being sung in front of the gods. There is the solemn, deep feeling. […] the ruk of Palau has a solemn, awe-inspiring feeling that the Palauan people normally don’t exhibit. It even makes you feel strange. […] it can make you feel pious.

486

The solemnity and seriousness described in the historical sources quoted above characterizes the ruk and the nglóik. At the same time, other types of dances are “more vivid” in nature, as Krämer put it in reference to the dances held rather informally during moonlit nights.487 However, these nightly performances vary considerably in terms of the function and, accordingly, the degree of formality attributed to them. De CangaArguelles y Villalba, in his report from ca. 1887, describes a nightly dance which he witnessed, and his description does not suggest any extraordinary hilarity on the side of the dancers. On the contrary: They have no musical instruments and when they dance, which is generally by moonlight in front of the king’s house, they sing as well as they can and move in time to the voices: head, arms, hands and feet rhythmically backwards and forwards without moving from the spot they began in. Their poses and movements are artistic and graceful, they decorate their heads with flowers and feathers or scented plants and in/on their ears they use earrings artistically woven from palm leaves and on every other limb, arms, hands, feet, calves, they have special and characteristic jewellery.

488

The performance he describes was clearly not part of an omilil in the narrow sense of the word, it rather belonged to a slightly more formal event where a dance would be dedicated to a rubak (called “rey” by de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba), who in turn would reward the dancers with a small gift of a turtle shell.489 In all probability, de CangaArguelles y Villalba is here describing an ultutelel (“function, significance”) dance.490 The ultutelel is a type of ruk that would be performed at night time. It has two main performance contexts: first, when a community task is being performed by a village or a men’s club—the construction of a new bai, or a boat house, for instance—the men would work at daytime and dance the ultutelel at nighttime. Second, it could be


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performed in celebration of a rubak, which is the function that de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba cites. The body adornments of the dancers mentioned by de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba are not prescribed in detail, rather they are subject to the dancers’ consent, which is agreed upon prior to a performance. Coming to such an agreement is part of the ritual preparation of the ruk, which naturally involves mutual consultation among the participating men’s clubs. All dancers must comply with the chosen decorations. 491 Accessories, however, are another matter. Specific dances and performance contexts demand particular accessories, such as the wooden oruidel fish mentioned in Part I. As far as dancing during the rather playful omilil is concerned, historical sources do not give much information. Krämer merely describes omilil dancing as “more vivid” than daytime dancing: “As far as dancing is concerned, the movements are in general leisurely; only at the moonlight dances does it seem to get livelier.”492 This vividness is probably not least owed to the fact that the omilil provides one of the very few opportunities for gender interaction through dance: In the full moon nights when the young people meet in groups outside the village, some men will dance in front of the women. After their performance they return to their group, then several women start dancing in front of the men. These dances create much laughter and merriment because men and women tease each other in their songs. The men sing about lazy women, how small their taro corns are, inedible because of the worms. In the songs of the women the emphasis is placed on men’s cowardliness, their poor performance as fishermen and their small catch. For those who listen carefully these songs are filled with sexual innuendoes.

493

Technically, most Palauan songs can be used as dancing songs.494 From the above description, it seems that delang and llall were part of the situation evoked in the quotation, as the sequence resembles or, maybe even describes, that of the klakelall, where llall and or delang items would be exchanged between the two gender groups in order to tease the other.495 Another dance likely to be included during an omilil is the bullachang, which is technically a song rather than a dance. During an omilil, it would be performed as a song accompanied by a set of informal, non-prescribed gestures and body movements; “people are being funny and they go as they please; there are no strict patterns”496 governing the dance movements of a bullachang. As mentioned above, the bullachang can be danced with members of the opposite sex intermingling, which otherwise is only common in dancing to a keredekiil. Since musically, dance repertoire draws on the musical canon of Palauan non-dance music, the following brief overview over Palauan dances is a diachronical

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terminological survey rather than an analytical comparison of the various dances with each other.

Men’s Dances Ruk The ruk has been, as Kubary noted, “one of the fundamental institutions of Palauan life.”497 A part of community feasts, it was to be paid for by visiting parties and thus contributed decisively to the maintenance of the Palauan economy. The task of hosting rotated among the districts.498 This way, the ruk acquired political significance: paying a prescribed amount for a ruk is a necessary, codified reassertion of amicability between two parties. When Krämer carried out his research in 1909, he still found that the ruk belonged to the most important events of island life.499 The divine origin of the ruk has been mentioned in Part I, and this strong rooting in Palauan mythology lends the ruk its importance in community life. During large feasts, ruks were performed during both daytime and nighttime. The number of dancers depended on the size of the host village; in 1871, Kubary attended a performance involving 50 dancers, which was considered to be a small number.500 The ruk is actually a variable sequence of several different dances. The individual characteristics of these dances will be discussed separately. Local preferences and individual overall structures exist for the choice of dances, as well as for the prescribed pre-dance customs.501 While there is a discernible evolution concerning the structure and conceptualization of the ruk, as will become evident, flexibility in the overall ruk form as mirrored in historical descriptions is a main characteristic of this “grand men’s dance.” Kubary describes the complicated communication processes that precede a ruk performance when it is part of a major community festivity such as the mulbekel (village feast). These preparations are intertwined with those pertaining to other aspects of the mur. The reasons for holding a mur can vary. Among them, are the reconstruction of land destroyed by warfare; the inauguration of a new bai; or the completion of a community task. When a relatively long period has passed without a mur being held, a feast may be announced without a distinct reason.502 The rubaks’ decision to have a mur is announced to the public,503 and the high chiefs appoint the dancers after contacting the men’s clubs of both bitang of the respective


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region. This assignment is of direct effect on the actual performance because the chosen dancers will fulfill particular choreographic functions within the ruk: From both sides one or two Kaldebekels [= cheldebéchel, men’s club] volunteer […] and first they come to an understanding as to who shall play the Horuídel [= oruídel, lit., “blue fin jack“] and who the Kotobádel [related to contemporary Palauan tebér, sardine]. Then the Kaldebekel takes a wooden fish (Caranx) in his hand at the Ruk and makes a variety of movements with the fish. The last one makes do with his empty hands. The Horuídel is the most important group of the dancers.

504

The assignment of choreographic functions is followed by the mesúb, which itself follows predetermined and rigorous rules,505 which may vary in strictness according to local customs and the individual context of the ruk performance. 506 According to Krämer, only that club which is assigned the oruídel function is completely secluded in this training period, whereas the other ones may train in partial seclusion or no seclusion at all. Therefore, according to Krämer, the oruídel club was also called klemeai, 507 a concept Krämer compares to the Polynesian tapu. The length of the mesúb is determined by a chief,508 who is also in charge of marking its various phases by blowing the debúsech. In Melekeok, the bedeklél a mesáng509 is a central element of ruk dancing. Its main part is the erection of a long, red-striped coconut trunk with a ripe coconut mounted on its end; 510 according to Krämer, the mesáng is the “walking stick (skors […]) of the God.”511 In the same process, in Melekeok as elsewhere, other props are also put into their place.512 While in general, the layout of the ruk is similar throughout Palau, in certain places local specifics apply,513 such as the choice of these props. This preparation of the actual performance is followed by the oltóbed ra ruk, the “letting out of the ruk,”514 which is the privilege of one particular cheldebéchel from a state other than that of the host.515 Prior to the actual “letting out,” members of a local women’s club prepare the men by rubbing their bodies with turmeric oil, which gives the dancers’ bodies a distinct color and scent. Young coconut leaves (meólt) and hibiscus fibers (chermáll) of various forms serve as further adornments (besíich; ulerrátel): Worn around the neck or wrapped around the head it is called lebuu. Coconut fronds tied to the middle finger, to make clicking sounds, are called cherkderid and when they are tied to the upper arm, wrists or ankles they are simply referred to as besiich, decoration.

516

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In the subsequent early phase of the oltóbed ra ruk, the wooden replica of the oruídel holds a central position in some parts of Palau: In a festive procession, holding the wooden image of the Horuidels [= oruídel] in the raised right hand, the Kaldebekel moves against the beach where at the halfway point on the stone path, on a small structure, half of a Tridacna bowl stands, filled with water. The leader dips the tip of the fish head into the water, which is called homárak et horuidel, meaning to braise the Horuidel, and returns followed by the silent line to the Bay el pelu where the women who let the Horuidel out are in the meantime performing dances on the Koyláol. The Horuidel now steps on the raised floor and publicly performs the rehearsed dances while the whole area and the neighboring states fill the Bay 517

el pelu as spectators.

In evoking associations of the creation of the ruk by Uchelchelid by means of dance accessories laden with mythological connotations, this prelude to the actual men’s dance places the ruk within the framework of Palauan history. While the women’s clubs also possess their equivalent to the ruk, the nglóik, it is important to note that women still play an important role in the ruk, too: in the preparation of the male dancers as well as in the actual sequence of dances, where they contribute a women’s dance that fills the time of the men’s omárech. 518 This interpolated women’s dance, which neither Kubary nor Krämer describe in any more detail, is followed by a dance performed by the (men’s) oruídel or klemeai club. Depending on the overall set-up of the framing occasion, i.e., the festivity, this can be a “small dance,”519 which then would be followed by the midday break, after which the most attractive dances would be held; or, the oruídel’s main repertoire. After the dancing of the “kotobádel,” the main part in the festivity, the dancing may be followed by a playful demonstration of individual skills through sportive games such as a bedóel game, a game in which one person “throws a javelin to an opponent, who catches it by hand.”520 The dance performance of a ruk in its original context is usually followed by dancing by all of the other men’s clubs before the day is concluded with a communal banquet.521 Descriptions of ruk from the 1930s by Hijikata and a contemporary source deviate from the above, and the earlier description explicitly distinguishes possible ancient ruk structures from the ruk as danced in then contemporary times. According to that source, the ruk is generally divided into two parts: chelitakl er a ruk [“song of ruk”] and klou el ruk or delal a ruk [“grand ruk;” “mother ruk”]. Chelitakl er a ruk, Hijikata elaborates, was a “prelude” during which…


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people dance by standing from the beginning and holding chelebed522 and chaus523 in their left hands. […] Nowadays, either a wooden instrument shaped as a sword or a short stick is held in the right hand, and a long stick is held in the left hand. The dance is performed by a single group in a line that dances forward and to the right. There is another form of the dance in which two groups, 524

formed by splitting the main group in the center of a line, dance facing each other.

Although Hijikata does not provide in-depth information pertaining to the nature of the chelitakl er a ruk, his brief description suggests that he is referring to a male counterpart to what Krämer describes as the gatlituk (= chelituuk) dance (see below); however, in another place, 525 Hijikata briefly mentions the chelituuk, and does not directly relate it to the chelitakl er a ruk. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid an overly technical vocabulary, said contemporary source characterizes the opening part of the ruk as follows: Ongurs means, literally translated, “pulling,” but in the men’s dance it is the entry dance where men are aligned. Led by the lebuchel, the four leaders, they perform the ongurs while moving in rhythmic motions to the dancing place.

526

This description implies that while chanting an ongúrs, the dancers march up to the stage in single file, like the dancers in the first form of the dance described by the source from the 1930s. The two descriptions further correspond with each other in that the next part of the ruk is a sitting dance, which the earlier source calls chetakl527 el tet, i.e., a dance during which the performers carry their tet. 528 The next item in this sequence is the blechobech (“to put into a straight line or row”529), which is a standing (dechor ra ruk) or walking dance, while the contemporary source quotes a squatting dance variously called derreder ra ruk (“lead dance” 530 ) or ulemechall ra ruk (ul(l)emáchel is the “discarded cud of betel nut 531 ). According to the source, the “dereder” is a “musical prelude” to the klou el ruk; 532 since the derreder ra ruk, according to these authors, is followed by the oruidel dance, alternatively called delal a ruk533 or mother dance, which denotes the same central dance as the term oruidel. According to the two sources, the derreder ra ruk’s position in the overall scheme is identical. The reference to the ul(l)emáchel in the naming of the dance refers back to the visual presentation of the tet and the chaus earlier in the dance, which might in places be intended to represent an offering to a god. 534 The ideal performance as described in the contemporary source is concluded by an chetakl el tet, and finally an optional omengereal(l) (see below). Hijikata names the beluulecháb (“Yapese dance;”

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see the chapter on “new” music and dance) as the concluding dance of the ruk, which was a then-contemporary performance practice.535 In sum, the written documents on the structure of the ruk give a variety of possible sequences of single dances. This mirrors the flexibility inherent to the ruk: local preferences and local mythological contexts, the content of the dances, the character of the framing festivity, and, also, to a small degree, practical considerations have an impact on the set-up of a ruk. The actual presentation of the ruk, however, is not open to individual creative action, for the strong rooting of the ruk in Palauan mythology and the resulting belief in its divine origin demands respect for the transmitted form of music and dance; this also limits the extent to which practical considerations altering the prescribed formalities pertaining to the ruk are allowed. Such practical considerations can run counter to inherited prescriptions. One example where this might be so is in the casting of the dancers. Choreographic function within a dance is connected with musical function: “musical lebuchel” are at the same time “dance lebuchel.” However, lebuchel dancers are not chosen for solely musical and/or choreographic reasons. It is of vital importance that each of them be… a member and representative of one [of] the four saus, the four highest clans in the village. They are positioned in the middle of the line of dancers. For a men’s dance the lebuchel are four men while for a women’s dances the lebuchel are four women.

536

Among the lebuchel, the musical function will be assigned depending on the individual’s vocal skills: 537 while every choreographic lebuchel also has a musical function, the question of which musical role he takes on will be answered depending on his singing proficiency. The same terminology usually applied to musical roles in omengeredakl singing can be applied to the individual singers in the performance of a dance song. As far as the assignment of crucial roles within dance ensembles is concerned, then, there exists a clear hierarchy of criteria: musical and choreographic aspects appear subordinated to formal requirements that are dictated by longestablished customs. 538 How strictly these rules have been implemented over time, however, is impossible to pin down. Musical Form539 As has become clear, the various written descriptions of ruk performances suggest a certain flexibility in the overall set-up of the Palauan men’s dance. This variability in


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large-scale design pertains to the choice of dance types included in a particular performance, but also to their musical rendering: if most Palauan songs can be used as dance chants or dance songs, this means a functionally distinct part of the ruk, such as the delal a ruk, can take on various musical forms, only some of which are unique to the ruk. The musical form of a ruk, and of any other type of dance for that matter, is not uniform. However, keredekiil and call-and-response structures dominate. In the following, a 1963 ruk performance will be described.540 It consists of four musical parts, which in music examples 3.23–3.25 appear separated by double bar lines; they take 32’’, 51.5’’, 125.5’’, and 42’’, respectively. The example has been selected because it draws on musical repertoire unique to the ruk rather than solely on chants that are adaptable to the ruk. The first part begins with the mesuchokl’s brief introductory recitative passage, which is immediately answered by three high-pitched shouts by one of the dancers. These shouts serve as section markers, and they can also open or conclude other parts. The whole group of dancers, in an assertive manner, concludes this introduction to part 1 with a two-beat shout; this practice is comparable to the crowd’s response in chesols chanting. Throughout any ruk, these shouts occur at phrasal ends, and their pitch inevitably progresses upward. When the shouts serve as inner section markers, they may also occur as one-beat shouts only. The musical contours of the mesuchokl’s opening recitation form the template for further musical development, as variants of it are repeated four times, always followed by the crowd’s shout; this call-and-response structure, which is sometimes referred to as ongúrs, will provide the form-giving musical layout throughout the dance. In this part’s final line, the inner tempo appears slightly heightened as two mesuchokl phrases, both curtate when compared with the opening recitation, and two corresponding shouts bring the section to a close. The tonal inventory employed in the course of the overall item is broadly marked out in this opening part by the mesuchokl. The dancers’ shouts generally move in the quint range one octave above the mesuchokl’s ambitus, which is owed to the dancer’s young age and the resultant boyish quality of their voices.

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Music example 3.23: Ruk, recorded in 1963, opening part


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Music example 3.24: Ruk, recorded in 1963, second part

In the second part, the mesuchokl delivers the chant that properly introduces into the subject matter, here, a war narrative. In this example, the chant’s structure is not modeled on the musical idiom of chesols, rebetii, or other chant types. However, these distinct musical idioms can also be brought forward in the course of a ruk. The chanter delivers recitative phrases of short duration in close temporal succession. These are uniform in musical shape in that they commence on one of the bottom pitch spectra of the tonal inventory (notated here as f, f-sharp, and g), and display a straight and simple upward speech melody, ending on this passage’s upper framing pitch spectrum (notated here as b-flat and b). The interval of a third, both major and minor, is pivotal. Again, it results from the omission of a pitch spectrum within the melodic progression, and throughout the ruk, its occurrence is frequent. This distinction given to the third in the horizontal as well as in the vertical dimension (see part four) is a prominent feature in ruk chants, and it can be observed throughout this music example. Part three begins with a call-and-response formula that receives 23 repetitions, during which only minute variations to the musical material occur. Here, the mesuchokl’s call again covers its full quintal ambitus, this time by a quasi-imitation of the first part’s call phrase: he begins on the upper framing pitch spectrum, while an upward glide continues to the latter’s higher inflection, and finally proceeds to the bottom pitch

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spectrum at the end of the phrase. As opposed to the former shape of this phrase in part 1, the call is not fully arch-shaped, as it was in the first part, where it both commenced and concluded on the spatial bottom of the tonal inventory. On the rhythmic level, the group’s reply is largely uniform. Any modifications are owing to textual requirements. The final two beats are accentuated by rhythmically clapping wooden sticks, which also serve as choreographically significant dance accessories. The dancers’ part generally displays a greater emphasis on regular pulse, which coincides with an increase in verve. Sporadically, a second part is added to the dancers’ generally monophonic melody by varying individual dancers who, in most cases, do so by duplicating the tune about a third above the original pitch. This is clearly a means to thicken musical texture. This device, however, is neither continually applied nor necessarily in accordance with phrasal structures: single or several notes may also be doubled, with the singer of the upper part returning to the main melodic line afterwards. Unlike in omengeredakl, the dancers clearly do not intend to produce a frequency band, instead they focus on paralleling the melodic line. After call and response have been articulated 24 times, the mesuchokl’s remaining four recitative calls appear altered in overall duration and inner structure: the initial pitch now serves as an extended recitative pitch, whereby the regular pulse receives emphasis, also through the dancers’ rhythmical stamping. This emphasis is further heightened by the rhythmic organization of speech into triolic units. The choral replies that occur in this part are structurally identical to those that occurred in the preceding part, but the tendency to add a second voice in parallel thirds is much more prominent. While the major third is most pronounced, the minor third and also the fourth occur, adding a sense of horizontal melodic movement to the otherwise pitch-constant response. The addition of second parts is handled flexibly, and involves an improvisatory component. In the final part of the ruk, the mesuchokl’s call again appears reduced to the recitative kernel that had defined the call’s shape in the first half of part three; the final movement notwithstanding, the tonal ambitus has shifted upwards in such a manner that the former upper framing pitch spectrum is now the lower framing pitch spectrum. Accordingly, this passage is marked by new tonal material. The intervallic leap or omission of one pitch spectrum, which is often the only spatial movement in these calls, is accentuated; rhythm is more punctuated. The dancers’ response is a uniform shout throughout (two pitches from adjacent pitch spectra) until the final movement begins.


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The final movement contains four call-response units. The mesuchokl’s call is condensed to a mere glide between e’, the “new” peak pitch of the tonal inventory, and g, which has become the lower endpoint of the ambitus. The response is a simple diversification of the previous two-beat shout, and its main characteristic is the punctuated rhythm. The increasing emphasis on both beat and punctuated rhythm throughout this part as well as the general upward shift in the mesuchokl’s tonal material are means of leading towards the overall items’ musical climax.

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Music example 3.25: Ruk, recorded in 1963, third part

The concluding call-response unit completes the final movement by another expansion of the tonal range through the mesuchokl, which in conclusion extends the upper


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framing pitch spectrum upwards (to touch upon f’ in the notation), and also by changing the mode of melodic progression: while throughout the ruk, melody had been progressing in a linear manner—either upward or downward—, the small, interlocked pitch sequence (f’ - d’ - e-flat’ in the notation) in this final unit stands in contrast with this earlier musical idiom, which had been emphasized by an even reduction of spatial movement to a mere glissando in the preceding calls. This minute dramatic device suggests to the listener a change in tonal language, which further increments musical cumulation. The concluding response to this call takes on the basic two-beat structure again, which can be said to be the archetypical shape of this type of shout, which is characteristic of Palauan dances. Types of Men’s Dances In general, Palauan men’s dances include standing, stamping and walking dances, whereby these categories interlock in places. Moreover, Palauan concepts of dance only marginally draw on these distinctions to delineate dances from each other, and contemporary terminology tends to be descriptive rather than technical: Palauans are inclined to describe Palauan dances in terms of function rather than choreographic and/or musical characteristics. The functional context of dances, however, is a dynamic dimension of mainly historical connotation, and awareness of these historical derivations is fragile in contemporary Palau. This results in multiple terms being used to refer to the same dance. In writings by both Palauans and non-Palauans, many of these terms are vague and form a description of body movement in a more general sense rather than providing straightforward terminology. Each of them will be briefly mentioned here and defined as far as possible. Concerning musical form, it has been mentioned already that various Palauan songs can be used as dancing songs. However, some musical forms are also unique to particular dances. In contemporary Palau, most of these dances are extinct, so that a description has to rely on the meager written sources. The historically inconsistent use of terminology when referring to dances, i.e., the application of different functional, musical, or even general and descriptive terms to specific types of dance, complicates any attempt to present a clear picture of the repertoire of Palauan dances. Moreover, many dances have, in all probability, never been mentioned in writing. The general uncertainty concerning the diversity of Palauan dances, however, is not a recent phenomenon: Yamaguti, writing in the 1960s, already subdivided Palauan dances according to mainly

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choreographic categories (“introduction dances;” “standing dances;” “stamping dances;” “sitting dances;” “stick dances;” “war dances”),541 which only partly reflect local conceptualizations of dance as they can be traced in contemporary Palau. Omeruadel The omeruadel, according to Hijikata, is an improvised dance performed during the omilil “to liven up the affair.” 542 He mentions this dance in connection with various games played at such occasions as well as with the klakellall and ongúrs, two musical genres he considers to be “indispensable to the Moon Play.” 543 He does not provide any further information. The word omeruádel means “to slap thighs with hands while dancing.” 544 It is therefore highly likely that this is a descriptive term for any choreography that includes such body movement, and that as such, the dance can take on various musical forms. The performance space of the omilil further suggests that its character is rather informal and playful. “Golekisél“ Krämer mentions the “standing dance with handclapping”545 golekisél. The word seems to be derived from contemporary Palauan olekíis, “to awaken, to make (something) stand, to set upright.”546 He recorded the words of one such dance, a “dance song of death” bidél a kodal.547 Bidél is derived from boid,548 so that the musical form of this item is in all probability omengeredakl. Accordingly, Krämer’s golekisél describes the dancers’ standing position when dancing to a boid, or one possible position. The term only occurs in this particular source, and it is highly likely to be a non-technical, descriptive word.549 Temngul a uék / Molúyoker a ruk Kubary mentions the temngul a uék (his spelling: tamangél a wak), 550 which he considers a local dance of Ngebuked village in Ngaraard. According to Kubary, Ngaraard has neither the mulbekel feast nor a ruk in the narrow sense, but only a “ruk of inferior degree”551 that is called temngul a uék.


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The usual details of the Ruk were kept, but only to a small degree and the participation was limited just to the community of Angarads [= Ngaraard], who had to pay no or only very little money to the mainland.

552

Elsewhere, he refers to the temngul a uék as “the last and most important form of the murs arranged at the bidding of the gods. It is distinguished from the Ruk only in its smaller scale and the absence of political state visits.”553 In this later writing, he does not confine the feast temngul a uék to a particular region, he rather distinguishes it from the common ruk mainly in terms of function and size, as it is a ruk “which the smaller villages of a district attend.”554 The temngul a uék, then, would, according to Kubary, be a sequence of dances rather than a type of dance itself. And indeed, Kubary describes the opening dance of the temngul a uék: “The same is opened with a men’s dance which the women attend with torches. This is called ‘to molúyoker a ruk’.”555 Molúyoker is probably derived from the contemporary Palauan melúich, “to illuminate.”556 Molúyoker a ruk, then, merely means “illuminating the ruk,” and is probably another descriptive expression for a functional part of the temngul a uék rather than a technical term for a distinct dance. In any case, the fact that it is explicitly the ruk that is illuminated (molúyoker a ruk) clarifies that the temngul a uék is considered a type of ruk. Temngul is derived from temáng, which denotes the present that a visiting party, such as a village, would give to the host: this might be fish, clams, or any other gift. If, however, the visiting party offers the host the dance temngul a uék, the dance is accepted in the place of a present, i.e., it serves as a present itself. Uék is the Palauan name for a rail,557 a bird frequently found in the Palauan taro patches; however, the connection between the dance and this particular bird is unknown today. In contemporary Palau, because of its function as gift, the temngul a uék is considered a regular dance, and not a ruk dance. Medal omerael Muranushi recorded a medal omerael, a “marching dance song of Ngeremlengui village.”558 Medal a omeráel means “in front of the procession.” Musically, it is set in the call and response form that is ubiquitous in Palauan dances and comparable to the one found in the ruk, which was described in detail above. Given that this is supposed to be a marching dance, the tempo is slow, and rhythm receives little emphasis.

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Omengereal(l)l The omengereal(l)l is a solo dance for both sexes; the dancer sings a rebetii while dancing. There are two main performance spaces for the omengereal(l)l. The first one directly succeeds a group performance, such as a ruk or nglóik, so that “the dancers have a chance to show their skills.”559 Although in this context, the omengereal(l)l is an afterplay to a more formal foregoing event, the performance cannot be proposed spontaneously by the solo dancers; the lebuchel, or, in rarer cases, the audience has to grant permission.560 The second performance space is the omilil, where likewise, the crowd of young people has to approve of an upcoming omengereal(l)l before the dancer can begin. The uatechutem ma omengereal(l)l561 is an omengereal(l)l that is danced stamping.

Ngededebuu The ngededebuu is a men’s dance of which early anthropologists made particular mention because it was perceived of as “rather wild.”562 In the course of the dance, “people jump up, all at the same time, and when coming down, they clap their inner thighs.” Musically, contemporary informants state that it draws on the same repertoire as other men’s dances, i.e., omengeredakl and call and response songs. Blechóbech The blechóbech, says Hijikata, is part of the ruk. 563 Again, the term seems to be descriptive rather than technical, meaning “to put into a straight line or row” 564 in common language. According to the information given by Hijikata, the blechóbech is accompanied by songs that either commemorate village history, or praise a particular rubak. This suggests that blechóbech merely describes the dancers’ alignment during the performance within a ruk of an chesols (ra odanges) or another chant in the narrow sense. Omengesebuu el ruk Omengesebuu el ruk is another term that describes a distinct body movement within a dance that is part of the ruk. The accompanying song can be of various genres.


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Mengesebúu, in contemporary Palauan, means “to slap biceps when dancing;” 565 accordingly, this choreography includes slapping various parts of the body, the upper arms in particular, and also stamping sounds. Since usage of the hands is required for slapping, this dance is performed without a lild, stick.566

Nglóik er a sechál The nglóik er a sechál, mentioned by Hijikata,567 is the “male nglóik.” […] yet it is not like the female ngloik. It is said that this ngloik is a work song that is performed during hard work, such as the construction of a road or pier, and that it can be danced through the night. The dance itself is quite simple and not so attractive. Normally, one man stands […] and dances playfully.

568

It has been mentioned already that Hijikata’s might use the term nglóik er a sechál to refer to the same dance as with the term ultutelel (see above). Although here, he does not specify whether a group or just the soloist himself sings to the individual dancer’s movements, in another context he mentions that in the nglóik er a sechál, there is no esbe part, which implies that he is talking about a group performance. The application of the word nglóik to a men’s dance, however, remains curious, for in contemporary Palauan, the verb “to dance” is gender-specific: melóik refers to women dancing, while ourúk is the equivalent for men dancing. 569 But there are four other references in written sources where the term nglóik is used in connection with a men’s dance. The first one is Krämer’s description of the “klegadáol mlóik.”

570

Klechedáol, in

contemporary spelling, means “invited guest; group of travellers; tour group;” 571 Krämer’s klegadáol mlóik, accordingly, is a “dancing visit.”572 The klegadáol mlóik, he further explains, is part of the ritual inauguration of a new men’s club. After having captured a blebáol, an enemy’s head, they display this symbol of bravery in all villages, “dancing the mlóik, and after three days they leave [for the next village].”573 The second reference is older and found in Kubary’s description of headhunting (blebáol) practices.574 When a new rubak is going to assume his function, he has to live in seclusion for a certain length of time until another village formally releases him from isolation. (Kubary’s “móloik” procession is comparable in outer function to Krämer’s klegadáol mlóik.)

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The community searches for a head, which they are paid for, and brings the head dancing. Only after this can the new Rúpak move about freely and go to the beach, which was forbidden to him before. He also takes part in the “Móloik” procession and for the first time visits the friendly 575

communities who all give him a piece of Audoud [= Palauan money] for the visit.

The third reference, which is found in context with Kubary’s description of warfare customs,576 mentions a klechedáol within warfare ritual, the central part of which is the performance of the war dance. Clearly, in all three cases only male dancers are involved. In a fourth instance, Kubary names training the nglóik as one of the “merriments” of the men’s clubs.” 577 It seems possible that the strict linguistic association of melóik with the female sex is of recent origin.578 This would imply that nglóik was formerly used as a term to describe any type of dance which was part of a klechedáol; by the 1930s (the time of Hijikata’s research), it had become a word to denote any dance that was not part of the ruk repertoire, for due to their connotations and strong ritual bondage, the ruk’s dances convey a very particular sentiment. Nglóik, then, by that time, would have been used as a negative description under which falls any dance not suitable for the ruk.579 Hijikata’s references to the playful character of such a dance would be in keeping with this conjecture. Musically, Hijikata likens the nglóik er a sechál to the ruk ra mekemád, or blebaol (“headhunting”), as he calls it, except for the esbe part that is lacking in the nglóik er a sechál.580 This means the nglóik er a sechál, according to Hijikata, follows the simple call and response form.

War Dances

War in Palau is the high chiefs’ traditional means of collecting duties. After victory in warfare, the winning party travels those districts with which it is on friendly terms, displaying the severed head of a member of the defeated party and performing the war dance. The duties are then received in tribute to the war dance; the amount payable depends on the size of the visited district. In order to keep the monetary flow mutual, the visited party must perform a war dance before the battle is won.581 De Canga-Arguelles y Villalba attended a staged performance of such a dance and was apparently particularly impressed with the dancers’ body adornments:


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The men color their faces for the war dance. On their chests and faces with vertical lines, on their forehead and cheeks they decorate themselves for this pleasure with green palm leaves which they attach to their heads, chests and arms.

582

There are two main types of war dance: the oeáng and the ruk ra mekemád. Oeáng is commonly translated as “war dance,” but it also refers to the training in preparation for warfare.583 As a dance, it is considered unsuitable as a performance for the purpose of mere entertainment.584 Hijikata concludes that “this dance is sometimes performed as a drill when there is not a war.” 585 This, however, must have been a recent development at the time of his research,586 for the original purpose of the oeáng was to heighten the warriors’ passion and aggression just before the battle. As preparation immediately preceding the battle, oeáng was usually held in a bai, and the accompanying dance chants dealt with the imminent taking of an enemy’s head. Oeáng choreography imitates the actual battle situation: it is performed in two groups that face each other. According to Hijikata’s description, one dancer from each party will step forward and dance with a lild, a bamboo (pole). This choreographic function was called olskósk, literally “to push vigorously (with both hands).”587 Hijikata gives a detailed account: […] one of the elders became an olskosk, leading the people with a bamboo pole. The rest of the people lined up behind him in a serpentine fashion. At a given location, all the people stopped, except the elder. Only the elder acted as though he was facing the enemy. He opened and closed his arms, twisted his body, acted as though he was throwing his spear, dodged invisible spears, and jumped around. During this performance, the rest of the group made loud, high-pitched, clucking sounds from behind. This activity reached a peak, and the rest of the people, standing behind the elder, joined him again. They made a circle, and lined up behind him. The end was marked by the circle of people gathering in one place and dancing in a simple but very animated way. […] there once were so many people that they were divided into two groups and the dance 588

was performed from two sides. They gathered into eight lines, mixed, and lined up again.

Ruk ra mekemád, the second “type” of war dance, is a generic term for war dance, meaning precisely that in Palauan. Its performance is embedded in warfare rituals, and associated with the blebaól custom in particular: technically, without a head being presented, a proper war dance cannot be performed.589 Hijikata, who calls the dance ruk ra mekemád blebaól, notes that at the time of his stay in Palau in the 1930s, the dance had not been performed in a long time, and he describes a performance that was staged for him as follows:

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A circle is formed, and the dance consists of simple hand gestures accompanied by a song. The tune is the same as that for nglóik er a sechal, except that one person performs mengeseb (the lead in singing with a high-pitched voice). Some of the participants dance standing, while others dance while sitting. This dance performed from one village to another [sic]. The songs accompanying the dance are odanges er a rubak (anthem for the rubak). It is said that this dance starts in the evening and that people dance throughout the night until the morning.

590

The oldest description available, the one provided by Wilson/Keate and quoted in Part I, confirms that the musical structure follows the call and response form, while the overall mood was perceived of as “solemn,” comparable to that conveyed by a common ruk. Missionary Raymund gives a vivid description of a ruk performance on the occasion of the Kaiser’s birthday party in Palau in 1909, which illustrates many details: Then the dances began. A squadron of young, strong beautifully built men, perhaps 70 in number, marched up in pairs. They were people from the area Ngarart [= Ngaraard], in the north from Babelthaob, the biggest island of the Palau group. They had really done themselves up; wide, red loincloths, a red tie around the neck, on their heads rings and other figures from the thick, white pulp of a tree, arms and feet were decorated with bands from young, yellow coconut leaves. Of course the war and celebration color—yellow turmeric—was not missing but had been lavishly applied to the faces and chests of the warriors. In their hands they carried bamboo sticks approx. 1 meter in length and a small oar. They lined up in two long rows. A light, penetrating call opened the dance which consisted just of body movements, facial gestures and marching to and fro. The accompanying song is very slow and monotonous and the rise and fall of the voices moved within few half tones. The text is most often an old war or epic song. Throughout the song the words are so garbled, from the stretching of vowels, swallowing of short syllables and modification of the words through the singing melodiousness that the Palauans themselves cannot grasp the sense of the song. One must hear the text without the melody. This, however, makes the movements even more beautiful. So exact, so elegant and varied are the many gestures, steps and turns that one is amazed. Meanwhile the men from Melekeok, another village, moved closer. Half of the people carried a small, triangular canoe sail in their hands, the others were armed with small oars. The hair decorations were very unusual; from strips of coconut leaves they had created rosettes, chalices and similar figures, beautifully covered and decorated with strong, white spider web, with yellow and red threads of wool and strips of cloth. Some of these hair adornments really would have done credit to a stylist. This dance reenacted a successful war journey on the Gabekl [= kabékel], the big war canoe, which is why they carried the small sails and oars in their hands. The man at the very back was excused from singing and the general gestures. He played the navigator, who with huge effort and great talent should keep the long, heavy canoe in the right shipping channel. His leaps and grimaces, the seriousness and eagerness with which he portrayed his highly responsible office were such that every clown in the best German circus could have been seen doing it. He was the head person and biggest appeal for the audience; laughter often drowned out the singing.


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The dance groups from Ngarart and Mallegejok performed a war play together. A young man from Mallegejok lay down in the shade of the soldiers house and “slept.” Behind the station house men from Ngarart crept up quietly in full battle gear; meaning they were armed with wooden spears, axes, sabers or long knives. One bold hero quickly “beheaded” the sleeper, meaning, as if possessed, he beheaded a coconut lying next to the sleeper with his long wooden knife, impaled it and ran back to his companions. Full of joy at the successful attack, they screamed and danced so that the people of Mallegejok (who in the meantime had found the “headless corpse”) came running, equally armed, to seek revenge. The warring masses, each perhaps 50 men strong, sprang at each other, swinging their weapons threateningly, blowing into shells and screaming at the top of their voices. When they got to 3 steps away from each other, each time the one at the front turned and moved back after making a threatening face at his opponent, showing him his weapon and spitting in front of him. Among their armed men the people from Ngarart had two men with “pop-guns,” two wooden cudgels which had the approximate shape of guns. These two flanked the battle line. They sprang like cats close to the enemy, knelt down, groped around in the areas where real soldiers carry bullets, acted as if they were loading their weapons, shouted “puff!” and looked on victoriously at the effect of their shots. They repeated this maneuver so often and so quickly that they would have wiped out the whole enemy crowd with their rapid firing. The enthusiasm with which they took part in this game was amazing. How terribly seriously they rolled their eyes and shook their heads sneeringly at the enemy, even old men with fluttering white beards sprang about and shouted with the enthusiasm of youth. Finally the gruesome slaughter seemed enough. Without there being any further dead or injured an agreement was come to, peace declared and both parties performed the so-called “head dance” around the “head of the murder victim.” This war dance was a faithful depiction of the warfare of the old Palauans, who would cowardly murder an opponent from behind; those seeking revenge would advance, scream, threaten and mock. Then a piece of Palauan money would be paid, a celebratory dance held, a feast held in the conquered village and finally the return home to a victory celebration. In one of the last wars a brave young hero shot a hole into the body of an enemy canoe with his flint so that it sank. [...] So dancing, eating and games were alternated until the sun disappeared behind the steep, green coral island.

591

In this passage, Raymund describes an oeáng followed by an chetakl el tet; after an interpolated skit-like play, the (staged) ruk ra mekemád concludes this war spectacle. Apart from its narrative value, the quote also proves that war dances were indeed performed for the purpose of mere entertainment, including both the oeáng and the ruk ra mekemád. Here, a fake head would be severed and presented to the enemy. Iyod The iyod’s provenance is not clear, and there is only one textual reference to such a dance: according to Krämer, the iyod (his spelling: geivod) is identical with the “gamál,” a stick dance that was introduced from Yap 592 at an unidentified point in time. In

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contemporary Palau, too, the dance is considered an import from Yap. The gamal is part of contemporary Yapese dance repertoire. 593 However, its history is equally unclear: according to a missionary’s detailed report on Yapese dances that dates from 1916,594 the dance was imported from Palau. German administrator Born, for his part, considered the Yapese gamal a round dance of Woleain derivation.595 Similarities in the dance repertoire of the various Caroline Islands are by no means uncommon, so that one may indeed assume a typological resemblance among Krämer’s Palauan iyod and the Yapese gamal, whatever the original provenience was. Unlike the gamal in Yap, however, the iyod is rarely performed in Palau today, which suggests that the former has a stronger rooting in Yapese culture than the latter had in Palauan cultural knowledge. Walleser gives a detailed description of the Yapese gamal, which can be performed by either sex:596 Gamal’ are war dances which were introduced from Palau. The festively decorated participants enter the dance area seriously and with dignity. They place themselves silently in a straight line. At the actual beginning of the dance both of the men in the middle make a front against each other and with them both flanks, whose leaders they are. After a passionate challenge to fight the combat begins. Arm-long bamboo sticks, which take the place of spears, are hit together in a rhythm to a monotone song mixed with deafening war cries. The tempo becomes faster and faster, the movements more diverse so that the singing stops and the Jerur

597

must come into action. The

greatest varieties of positions are taken during the dance. Soon the brown figures are hopping wildly all over the place, still constantly dealing out blows with the bamboo sticks, defensively against their opponents. Soon they organize themselves into groups of two or four men in order to test their skill. Individual participants must possess great agility and form if they want to emerge with honor from this bamboo battle. In all the apparent confusion, he cannot disregard the rules for a moment or else the Gamal’ will stay with him as an unpleasant memory; he would find it difficult 598

to come away from it without some large bumps and bruises.

If one assumes a typological relationship between the gamal and the iyod, and transfers the gamal’s basic characteristics to the iyod, one arrives at a men’s stick dance with a competitive character that evokes warfare techniques, which is also a common dance format in Palau. Choreographically, the distinction of two warfaring parties that use bamboo poles as spears is also in evidence. The musical form described by Walleser is that of a large-scale stretta layout with an energy curve that rises proportionally. Although generally, the ruk’s build-up of tension is comparable, there is no documented dance which culminates in a way that is comparable to Walleser’s description; the function of the jerur is unknown in Palau. During the


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Hamburg South Seas Expedition, two gamal were recorded; afterwards, they were partially transcribed by Herzog.599 Unfortunately, these transcriptions do not provide the full picture. Certain parameters, however, correspond to musical features evident in Palauan ruk performances: the heightening of musical tension by means of accelerative dynamic, triolic rhythm, and the high-pitched responsive insertions by the crowd in particular. Given that Yapese music has not been documented and analyzed in detail so far, let alone its relationship to Palauan music, any inferences need to be treated with caution, and the relationship between the iyod and gamal cannot be clarified here. Women’s Dances Nglóik The probable linguistic development of the term nglóik has been discussed above. In written sources, the term is also used to refer to community feasts.600 In contemporary Palauan, nglóik refers to the grand women’s dance, which is considered the women’s counterpart to the men’s ruk. Here, the term will be used in this sense. Naturally, the historical sources are less yielding in terms of information on women’s dances than on men’s dances: observations were mostly made by men, and much of today’s knowledge of historical Palau goes back to Kubary, a central figure of early Palauan ethnography upon whose information Krämer drew to a considerable extent. While his access to Palauan men’s culture may have been significant, the women’s culture remained much less accessible for him throughout his stay. Like the ruk, the nglóik is the essential part of any type of community feast, particularly so when the feast is sacrificial or otherwise religious in nature, in which case the performance of a ruk is not necessary.601 In the early 1860s, Karl Semper attended a nglóik performance that concluded a community feast, mur, and described his observations: A quickly circulated rumor that the high point of the whole feast had come put an end to their bustle, which I observed with real pleasure. Women immediately laid aside their work, sleeping men were wakened, and every one gathered as local custom prescribes—women and children together in front, men behind—impatiently awaiting the procession, widely rumored to have pompus trimmings and heralded from a distance by a few rifle shots and wild screams. A crowd of women emerged from one side with red applied to their bare upper bodies and legs, swung lances in their hands with furious gestures and approached a smaller mass of women similarly dressed and armed which

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advanced from the opposite side. From a distance of about three of four steps, they charged as if to start fighting; both sides quickly stopped, formed themselves into several lines, and began to sing an unvarying, but still not unmelodious, song unisono. It was the first time in many years that I had heard a full-voiced tone. Without moving from the spot, they set their hips to a well-ordered rhythm and in a pleasantly swaying movement and produced a loud rustle by the hitting of one grass skirt against another which accompanied their music. A loud cry ended the pantomime which, I was told, supposedly depicted a scene from the most recent battle. Then they all went up on the platform with their bright red decorations and formed a long row. There might have been thirty women; they began a sort of pantomime-like dance, sometimes moving their arms slowly through numerous figures, sometimes only swaying their upper bodies while keeping their arms motionless. Or they bent their knees, held their upper bodies erect, and swung their lower bodies rhythmically to the left and the right, so that the whole line of yellowish red, still, and voluminous aprons joined in one uniform, unbroken, swell. Singing was also accompanying the dancing. The leader seemed to improvise the words, which were, unfortunately, completely unintelligible to me, and the chorus repeated—as during a mass—in unison the verse. As night fell, the dance, as well as the feast, ended with a loud shot.

602

The type of dance that will be presented by women of a particular family background varies according to the mur’s function. In the event of a young child falling ill, for instance, the women of the stricken family invite women from other clans, but the dancing is confined to their own family.603 In the context of larger festivities, the ruk and nglóik dances alternate, as described above in connection with ruk performance practice. Mur chelsimer that are preceded by the seclusion of women dancers can last several months in addition to the mesub period, and the actual dancing is performed on a stage that is hidden from the public eye.604 Like in the men’s ruk, the alignment of the dancers follows the order of hierarchy in any case. As in the ruk, local communities hold certain privileges pertaining to the performance of the nglóik, a fact which yet again emphasizes the political function of dance in Palau. During the “terúgol” (Krämer; Kubary’s term: Mur turúkul), for instance, which is a feast held by a rubak in honor of his wife, the nglóik is performed on a dancing stage the building of which is the privilege of Kayangel people; both Kubary and Krämer note this specificum, but Krämer remarks that this was in all probability already a custom of the past at the time of his research.605 Semper also witnessed an nglóik depicting an English assault on Ngebuked (his spelling: Aibukit).606 This dance marked the end of a two-month ceremony held for a local god in order for him to heal the host’s wife. The offering of a feast, the heart of which is the nglóik, is required by the chelid: “If it is a woman who is suffering and if she is pregnant for the first time, the kalit [= chelid] demands a moloik [= nglóik]—a dance


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which lasts only three days but which requires about a month’s time and great expense in preparing for it.”607 In the forefront by the gravestones of Ebadul’s [= Ibedul’s] ancestors, sat all the women, and in their middle those of high-ranking blood. In the second row, were young women of the village. […] The rustling of grass skirts could already be heard as the long file of approaching dancers swung them in rhythm. […] Their naked bodies were fantastically and arbitrarily covered with a reddish yellow color. In one hand, they held some short wooden instruments—they appeared to represent weapons—and in the other a staff made of a large white wood shaving topped off by a reddish colored crown cluster. In a single file, they went up on the raised platform whose roof protected them from the sun’s great heat. Now the dance began. A leader sang a verse without moving. The entire choir repeated it with an accompanying rustle of their grass skirts and graceful movements, as if pointing to something in the distance. They soon became more animated. Those were apparently scenes of joy and of greeting that they wanted to express. Now they seized those wooden instruments—my neighbour verified that they represented weapons—and their arms parted the air in front of them with a supple swinging motion. The war party moved farther and farther away from where it set out. Then a loud shout, wild arm movements and the entire body. A stanza was sung emphatically, and sparkling eyes conveyed expectation of the impending battle. […] The appearance of the dancers grew more and more ferocious. Their feet stamped the floor. Their armed hands struck down an enemy here and cut off a head there, all in time with the singing. The battle was won. They grasped the sticks with the yellow colored clusters and, in a straight line, raised and lowered them alternately to the floor.

608

In both descriptions given by Semper, the women dancers carry accessories: lild (bamboo sticks) and short wooden imitations of weapons. Both dances depict a battle, i.e., they are technically war dances. Semper’s usage of the term nglóik is, of course, rather confusing. The nglóik, like the ruk, is a sequence of dances, and the dances described by him are one dance from such a sequence respectively. Semper emphasizes the effect of the rustling sounds of the grass skirts, which, as percussive effects, are incorporated into the music. Indeed, apart from the difference in body movements, this characteristic sound distinguishes the women’s from the men’s dances. Musically, the first dance described by Semper seems to have been modelled on the call and response layout also formative of the ruk musical structure. In contemporary dancing, the musical setup of the two dances is very similar, so that the information on the actual music can be gleaned from the chapter on ruk. Concerning the overall shape of the nglóik, historical sources are even more fragmentary than in the case of the ruk: Semper gives some descriptions in his writings, Krämer attended a “dance feast” in Airai during his stay in the Palaus, and

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Hijikata describes the observations made in the 1930s. In the case of Krämer’s dance feast, four women’s dances were performed.609 Two of them used dance paddles as accessories; the remaining two relied on body adornments only for decoration and props. As in the ruk, turmeric oil and coconut fibres are used for body decoration; body painting completes the dance costume.610 About 40 women dancers performed on the diángel (dancing stage).611

Figure 3.37: Women on a diángel, dancing stage. From the collection of the Deutsches Kolonialarchiv, Frankfurt (Germany)

Unfortunately, Krämer does not provide any details pertaining to the purpose of the overall feast. However, his description of the nglóik clearly suggests the context was of mainly religious nature: Two women appeared for the first dance, each with a deláseg figure on her head [see figure 1.1], one representing the goddess Túrang and the other an ice bird. They positioned themselves before the singer, upon which many of the women present were overcome by convulsions and screamed. Therefore both women were quickly taken to the Bai. A circle of coconut leaves was constructed on the ground into which the figures were placed. In the third dance two trees called mesáng were brought with branches beribboned like the mangerengér snake and put up in front of the dancer.


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It meant that this would be planted after the dances finished (about 6 days). Finally, at the last dance, a tree hung about with money and betelnut currency was brought as payment for the dancers. [...] What must still be mentioned is that at the show on the stage the daughter of the person holding the celebration stands at the front, in the middle and either side of her stand the women of the first families who, on Goréor, have the prerogative of wearing particular, exquisite pinafores.

612

Signifying the dance’s end by means of tree branches is common practice.613 Unfortunately, Krämer does not give any information on the music; he only mentions the presence of the prompter. What is interesting in this description is the reference to the “convulsions,” for it suggests a trance-like condition for the two dancers in question. Since the nglóik is directed towards the responsible god in an effort to effect the healing of a particular person, Krämer’s observations suggest that the nglóik is not conceptualized as a one-way plea from man to god, but as a means to enter a reciprocal communication. The immediate removal of both the two dancers and the delásech to a more secluded spot seems to confirm this. In the course of his description of the mesub period, during which the women prepare their dances, Krämer writes: On Goréor the dancers were locked away in the dance performance building […] for 3–4 months, mostly it was only 1–2 months. The locking away was not strict, individual dancers changed around so that only a part of the troop was ever present. Then 5–8 days before the celebration began noone was allowed out because sexual relations were then forbidden. Two women were particularly 614

strictly partitioned off because of the Galid.

Krämer’s mention of two women who hold special functions and the falling into trance of two women, is certainly not a coincidence. Krämer had apparently not been given any further information relating to the two women’s assignment, but it seems clear from the descriptions that within the dance, they fulfilled a function comparable to that of the kerong. Krämer’s account even gives rise to the supposition that the two women were, in fact, kerongs. However, Krämer did not record their names or any further details, which makes it impossible to decide whether or not they were kerongs. In either case, the potentially religious component of the nglóik is clear. To some extent, this emphasis on the nglóik’s spiritual function is also evident in Hijikata’s description, which relates to the situation in the 1930s. Hijikata knows of only one set sequence of dances within the nglóik:615

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1. Blechóbech 2. Delal a nglóik 3. Erritelel 4. Besós 5. Oulild or chetakl el tet 6. Beluuelcháb The first five of these, he maintains, are “all songs to the gods,” 616 whereas the concluding beluulecháb was a more mundane way to finish up the nglóik. The word blechóbech means “line, arrangement,” and also “to put into a straight line or row;”617 it denotes the dance being performed while entering the dancing stage. The blechobech is characterized by a particular way of clapping hands, 618 and not accompanied by singing. In contemporary Palau, sometimes the word ocháro is used to refer to this introductory part of the nglóik (on the dance of the same name, see below).619 The hand-clapping is not considered compulsory, as the dancers might also be carrying lild sticks in one hand. After the introductory dance, the main part of the nglóik follows, the delal a nglóik, a term which is commonly translated as the “mother dance.” Like the main part of the ruk, and its direct counterpart delal a ruk, the delal a nglóik tends to be solemn in sentiment; its main conceptual difference to “regular” dances is that prior to its performance, permission has to be sought from the responsible rubaks. In contemporary Palauan, an alternative, though rarer, word for this part is ulerrátel (“rake”), a term used to refer to the body decoration of the dancers. 620 In terms of music, the historical recordings show the form of an ongúrs entry followed by an omengeredakl; contemporary performances tend to retain the call and response introduction, but afterwards proceed with extended call and response structures in keredekiil style, thus partly emulating the ruk performance style. Irratel ra nglóik, in contrast to ulerrátel, is a generic term for any ordinary women’s dance. This term corresponds to the item named erritelel in Hijikata’s list. Besós, the name of the next dance in Hijikata’s description, means “paddle” and “war spear,”621 and its choreography revolves around the imitation of the paddling movement, for which a wooden imitation of the canoe paddle is normally used. This can be either a standing or a sitting dance, and in contemporary performance practice, it has become rare. The oulild, next in Hijikata’s description, is a stick (lild) dance, which still enjoys great popularity today (see below). Hijikata equates the oulild with the chelitakl el tet because they are similar. Chelitakl el tet is merely a description of this functional part of


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the nglóik on another conceptual level, and it corresponds functionally to the homonymous dance within the ruk, which, however, usually has a different position in the overall sequence of dances. Today, the oulild is sometimes also called bruchél.622 The oulild is usually performed in two groups the lebuchel who face each other; using the lild and extensive hip movements, the event that is the subject of the lyrics is narrated. The beluul(e)chab (see below), for Hijikata, concludes both the ruk and the nglóik. Hijikata’s description is certainly not as reliable as he seems to suggest, for the flexibility in the set-up of the nglóik is evident. Nglóik are devoted to a particular purpose, and as such songs and dances are picked according to the requirements of the respective aim. Hijikata does not give any details that relate to the music that was performed as dance accompaniment. However, it is clear that the terminological confusion pertaining to the names of the single parts of the nglóik, and the ruk, for that matter, is not so much confusion of musical with choreographical terms, but of a vocabulary that relates to different levels: the nature of dances, their functional position within the nglóik, the accessories used, etc.

Types of Women’s Dances The general remarks made on the various types of men’s dances also apply to women’s dances: terminology is versatile, and musically, the various genres described earlier can be adopted for dancing.

Sitting dances

Unlike men, women also perform sitting dances. De Canga-Arguelles y Villalba even seems to have considered the sitting dance as the only women’s dance: “The women do not seem to have the habit of dancing, they sit on the floor in two rows and begin to move the arms, the head, and the body in the rhythm of a solemn song which pleases everybody.”623 Sitting dances are still part of contemporary repertoire. However, they were certainly not the only type of women’s dance at de Canga’s time. Yet, a certain development in the conceptualization of the sitting dance seems to have taken place, which becomes tangible when looking at one particular term that has historically been applied. For Krämer, one of the most important women’s dances was the nglóik ra gútum,624 i.e., the nglóik ra chútem, “floor nglóik.” He seems to use this expression as a

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generic expression for a dance performed while seated. During the festivity that surrounds the inauguration of a new bai, he explains, women perform this particular dance, “the nglóik ra gútum, the “dirt floor dance,” held on the galdúkl surface, is one in which the dancers slap their hands on their thighs.”625 He relates the dance term to the word “oategútum,” which today would be spelled uatechútem. The prefix uat-, here, implies that the dance is performed either sitting, or standing while stamping feet. In contemporary usage, uatechútem a meráel 626 refers to a dance performed while walking. Uatechútem dances are not exclusively women’s dominion. They can also be performed by men, and children: Children are trained to dance at an early age. They like to perform and show their proficiency. One efficient way to demonstrate their skills is dancing uatechutem. A group of children go to the house of a rubak, chief, where each will do a solo dance. They sing while slapping their upper arms and stamping their feet. If their performance was pleasing they will get some food as a small reward.

627

Another way of dancing while sitting was observed by Krämer: “The dancers sat in a more or less circular grouping and made casual arm movements to monotonous singing.”628 Krämer does not qualify any further the “monotonous” chant, however, he seems to consider this musical characteristic a feature that distinguishes this “nglóik ra gútum” from others. This again supports the conjecture that repertoire and choreography can be joined in various ways, and that “nearly any Palauan song can be used for dancing.” Nglóik Oulild629 The nglóik oulild, or simply oulild, is a stick dance. The stick, originally made from bamboo, is referred to as lild or, rarer, bruchel.630 Their impact is mainly visual in the early part of the dance, whereas in the later part, they will also be used as percussion instruments to set rhythmic emphases. The oulild is popular in contemporary Palau. The historical recordings available,631 with one exception, display a similar form: after a call and response or an ongúrs introduction, an omengeredakl musical form with shrill shouts interpolated between stanzas follows, rounded up with a final formula of call and response shouts that is stylistically characteristic of Palauan dances. The one exception to this is revealing regarding the musical flexibility that was attributed to the oulild at the time of recording


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(1963): the item opens up with a derebechesiil tune in Japanese style, i.e., a rather contemporary, imported musical style at that time. Today’s performance practice tends to emphasize call and response structures possibly followed by keredekiil formats, a strategy with which the overall structure comes close to that of the ruk. Nguk dance The nguk dance is only mentioned in writing, and it is entirely extinct in contemporary Palau. Nguk is the Palauan name for a blight insect that periodically infests taro patches, causing great harm. The nguk dance is the main part of a ritual performed by women, who are customarily the keepers of taro patches, in order to free the gardens from the pest: During an entire night the women, assembled at the village community hall “munch” on a variety of chewy foods—not eating very much but chewing a great deal. This ritual imitation of the fly is to gain his trust and friendship, since the fly is a great eater. Having attracted the spirit of the nguk, the women proceed to the gardens early in the morning. Dressed in minimal clothing, abbreviated grass skirts, they perform a provocative dance by which the nguk is seduced. The women dance out of the gardens to the beach and into the water where the raptured nguk follows and is drowned.

632

Chelituuk Krämer and Hijikata give slightly varying definitions of the chelituuk, which cannot be resolved here because the chelituuk is extinct. Krämer describes the chelituuk (“galituk”) as a walking dance which was connected to singing songs (chelitakl): The dancers often stand in five rows, one behind the other, but then start off in single file called blsúkl, blseklél a galituk and walk in a dancing manner along the stone path, often with branches in their hands (klbógel).

633

Krämer’s descriptions, scattered throughout his writings,634 suggest that the chelituuk is a women’s dance in which the dancers align themselves in a row and walk, using the upper body for additional dance movements, and at the same time sing some kind of chelitakl, which Krämer does not describe in any detail. There seem to be no explicit formal prescriptions as to choreographic aspects.635 A central aspect of the chelituuk seems to be that a message is expressed, and directed towards an addressee. The

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addressing as well as the addressed party can be an individual or a group; in either case, the dance is performed by a group. Two characteristics seem to be essential: first, the context is that of a ritual, and second, the chelituuk accompanies the carrying of something, most often a gift of foodstuff, to another party. This is illustrated in the following example: Gongéd, a village festival, actually just a celebratory fishing catch as part of large festivals and therefore often called múr pelú [...] The [women’s] club holding the festival employs a men’s club which goes fishing. When they bring in a big catch, a put, then the women send the greatest part of it to the women of the other side who are gathered in their Bai. However, the last put is held back as on the last day the pu líus takes place in order to appease the spirits living in the fish. A big meal of pork (slaughtered by the men), fish, taro etc is prepared. All the clubs from one side get dressed up and decorated with combs and go seven times to the other bital táog and the club from this side reciprocates seven times. They finally come back, approaching each other with branches in their hands doing the galituk dance, and then they all sit down in front of the Bai and eat. After this they both dance until the following morning.

636

Hijikata also acknowledges the ritual component integral to chelituuk. He characterizes it as a simple walking dance which could be danced “with other dances such as boid etc.;”637 for him, it is clearly directed towards the gods, and he interprets it as either “prayer, exorcism, or purification.”638 Ocháro Kubary remarks that “naked dances […] usually finish all religious festivals.”639 With this, he refers to a women’s dance, at the end of which the dancers would fling off their grass skirts. This dance is the only documented instance of women appearing naked in public. Otherwise, great care is taken so as not to surprise a woman bathing or otherwise being naked,640 as omelngok, voyeurism, is a source of “public disrepute and disgrace.” 641 In two other places, Kubary describes the ocháro, which, according to him, is performed during a funeral and which is a… wild rally of members of another clan [than that of the deceased], who, in a wild dance, are all over the house; they threaten everything and prevent [the deceased’s family] from digging the grave until they are set to rest by presents, usually money. If it is a lower rubak who died, the women of a higher, befriended [!] clan will come and sing obscene songs and dance wildly all over the house, until they are given turtle shell items and mother-of-pearl bowls.

642


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Later on in the same text, he writes about the particularities of funerals of members of the first or second family in Ngchesar: An apparent dispute among the suppliers [of the wooden “coffin”] and the clients will come up here, during which the former will refuse to deliver the coffin to the house. While some pull it there, shouting a honorus (ongúrs), the others pull it into the opposite direction and fix it with ropes, which will be torn by force, until the transfer of some pieces of false money will settle the dispute. Then, a wild “manoharo” takes place, in which the members of the other house, supported by members of the general crowd and the women of Naranasan, paint their private parts with pictures and sing erotic songs, raid the house of the deceased, and there dance until they will be set to rest by presents.

643

Although nowadays, the term ocháro is no longer applied to this dance, it is reported to have been performed in recent years in Kayangel, if in a modified form. According to this interlocutor’s information, this type of women’s dance is (today) only performed on the occasion of a funeral, and not, as Kubary took it, at the end of a major religious festivity. It will be delivered by the women of a clan other than that of the deceased person’s, who will show up at the funeral in order to disgrace the deceased and his family by dancing around the coffin and, in the end, kicking it. It seems that the kicking has replaced the taking-off of the grass skirts of former times, as women do not take off their clothes anymore. The message behind either—flinging off the skirts or kicking the coffin—is identical, as both are expressive of disdain and inter-clan resentments. As far as the music is considered, nearly any Palauan song of rather fast tempo which is “rhythmic, and kind of wild” is considered appropriate. Ongúrs may be inserted in order to coordinate kicking movements among the dancers, which corresponds to Kubary’s description quoted earlier. This seems to be one historical meaning of the word ocháro. Ocháro, however, is a term of more complex meaning, as it seems to denote a very special aspect of all the dances that can be subsumed by it. The one contemporary dictionary gives the meaning of the word merely as “stick dance,” and there is no entry for the ocháro in Yamaguti’s 1967 taxonomy. Ocháro has been described as the opening part of the nglóik, during which the dancers walk up to the dancing stage without singing, as is also documented in Semper’s description quoted above. It therefore refers to a procession of women who are about to perform a prescribed custom at a particular place, in this case to perform an nglóik on a dancing stage. Outside of the nglóik, the ocháro will also be performed…

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when, for example, Ngchesar invites people from Koror to come and attend the feasts, the women among the guests arriving at the landing dock will align and perform an ocharo while walking to the bai, where they are met by the women from Ngchesar also doing an ocharo. Even though this is an official dance occasion, each group has only one leader, usually a woman renowned as a good dancer.

644

Here, too, the term is used to describe a dance in which two parties, moving forward in single file, walk towards each other in order to meet at a particular place, here a bai. Kubary, while describing local privileges pertaining to the oltóbed of the ruk, mentions an “exclusively local” custom in Airai: The villages called Adaspadal645, which lie in the north of Eyrrays, land with their Dolul on a landing placed called Hohomiy and march on the northern stone path against the Bay el pelu, the southern villages called Ngarakadam which land in Diberdiy march along the southern path and both sides meet at the Bay el pelu. There they begin to fight violently and neither side wishes to give way. They shout at each other, challenge each other and throw spears and it could turn into an actual fight if the government of the main island didn’t mediate. It does this by going to the leaders of both sides and creating peace through handing out pieces of money. In the past a bloody finish was not impossible but not punishable.

646

From historical sources and contemporary performance practice, it seems that ocháro describes a dance during which the women dancers march up in single file towards a place where a particular, prescribed event is going to take place—a nglóik, a foreseeable confrontation, or rioting during a funeral. Technically, the term ocháro only refers to the marching up itself, as is also evident in today’s usage of the word, which describes the entering of the stage of the dancers that precedes the actual dancing.

4

Beches chelitakl: “New” Music and Dance

Unlike (evolved) traditional music, beches chelitakl or “new” music is not “conceptually timeless”: in this sense comparable to Euro-American popular music, it is rather generation-specific. Nevertheless, it needs to be pointed out that if this dichotomy can be drawn between chelitakl rechuodel and beches chelitakl, it relates to the conceptualization of these musical expressive forms only. While a great deal of chelitakl rechuodel is considered to be of divine origin, “new” music is clearly not. The survey over the chelitakl rechuodel repertoire has already indicated that this does not necessarily result in musical stability. Nonetheless, stability in musical form is the ideal


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in chelitakl rechuodel, while it is not in beches chelitakl. While both repertories have evidentially been changing continually, musical flux is decisively more rapid, and also decisively more accepted, in beches chelitakl than in chelitakl rechuodel. In the second half of the twentieth century, a great part of beches chelitakl benefited from the parallel rise of various media of dissemination in Palau, radio in particular. The growth of this mediascape, moreover, accelerated a process during which entertainment music gained a higher profile in comparison with ritually-bound music. However, the advent of various media did not start off that shift of weighings in the first place: with the fading away of sense-giving social superstructures, the importance attributed to earlier music, chants in particular, changed in character. In contemporary Palau, the so-called popular music is ubiquitous, while chelitakl rechuodel retain their importance as aural assertions of identity. Historically speaking, non-religious beches chelitakl adopted one particular function of chelitakl rechuodel in its early days, i.e., at least throughout the first half of the twentieth century: to record and comment on outstanding local events. Religious beches chelitakl, on the other hand, provide that channel of Palauan music through which external musical influences worked most efficiently. Religious Music In pre-contact Palau, music and religion were inseparable, as the bulk of chants were fundamentally embedded in Palauan cosmology and mythology, and as many of them were performed in communication with the gods, or to work magic. In post-contact Palau, religious music mainly means Christian music: virtually the only other religion that plays a significant role on the islands today is the Modekngei religion. In both, music and the singing of hymns are central to worship.

Christian Music

Christian music first entered Palau with the Spanish missionaries, who brought with them the music of the Catholic Church. Like elsewhere in the Pacific, hymn singing was to have a decisive impact on later music-making, and it has been argued that the primary driving force for the Pacific islanders’ general willingness to appropriate church chants has been the emotional vigor of religion behind hymnody.647 The history of Christian mission in Palau has been set forth in Part I. Unfortunately it is not possible to determine which hymns were the first to be taught to Palauans.

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Generally, missionaries focused on the younger generation in their efforts to spread Christianity,648 and instruction in singing, both Christian and secular songs,649 was part of the mission schools’ curriculum. As for the teaching of music, any Catholic missionary efforts to compile song books in the local language 650 cannot be traced in detail. It is not known whether the missionaries brought with them a hymnal in the first place, or whether they relied on other means in their efforts to spread Christian hymns. Palauan church officials today ascribe this lack of information to the fact that written records started to be kept only recently, i.e., in the 1980s. In Catholic services today, most tunes are of English or American derivation, while the words are an approximate translation of the original content into Palauan. English words have been retained in congregations where the minister is American, and in services that mainly cater to expat communities, particularly the large Filipino population; 651 here, hymnals from the US are used. In these English-language services, the musical accompaniment usually differs from that prevalent in Palauan services, as individual parishioners with a non-Palauan background often accompany the congregation’s singing on the piano or with a full band.652 Some of the hymns that are part of contemporary Catholic repertoire are said to have been composed by Palauans in the 1950s and 1960s, but detailed information is lacking and non-reconstructable. In any case, all tunes that are in use today are either part of European and/or American hymn repertoire, or composed in this style. No attempts at reconciling indigenous music-making practices and Catholic worshipping are remembered in the Catholic community. A member of the Seventh-Day Adventist community recalls her late uncle trying to chant the Lord’s Prayer in “Palauan style,” i.e., in the musical idiom of chesols, but stresses that this was a one-time, singular attempt to combine the Palauan musical language with Christian liturgy.653 In mission schools, hymn singing was widely practiced. The existence of a Catholic parish choir that on a regular basis practiced hymns arranged for up to four parts is first documented for the largest Catholic parish, Sacred Heart Church in Koror, in 1947.654 With varying intensity of regular practice, this choir has persisted ever since. Currently, interested parish members meet on the eve of weekly services to rehearse the repertoire that will be part of the upcoming service. For want of a church musician or an instrumentalist to accompany the singing, the choir members usually intone the hymns sung during service and prayer.


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For the Protestant community, the historical development after World War II 655 is somewhat better documented, not least because the Liebenzell mission’s archive kept some of the relevant documents. The existence of a choir and several guitar and mandolin players as accompaniment is pictorially documented for the time before 1940. At that point, Rev. Wilhelm Länge, in Palau from 1929 to 1941, 656 had already translated several hymns into Palauan.657 In 1940, the first Palauan hymnal (Chelitakl e Katechismo era Eklesia el Protestant era Palau) was printed,658 and it included 138 hymn lyrics and responsive readings translated into Palauan.659 Unfortunately, a 1940 edition of the Palauan hymnal could not be retrieved; the second edition, printed in 1978 (Chelitakl Ar Kristiano), however, also allows for basic conclusions as to the historical development of hymn repertoire in the Protestant community. For this edition, hymns of later date were incorporated into the repertoire of the earlier hymnal, and the music for all 250 hymns was added. It seems that the Liebenzell missionaries were using the Reichs-Lieder book as one of their teaching aids when introducing new hymns. At least 76 of the 250 hymns in the Palauan Chelitakl Ar Kristiano (30%) seem to be taken without alteration from the Reichs-Lieder song book. In all of these cases, both the keys and the four-part arrangements used are identical to those found in the 1909 Reichs-Lieder book.660 Also, the rendering of hymns in four parts is characteristic of the Reichs-Lieder book, while German Protestant hymnals would merely give a hymn’s tune. Conformities between the Reichs-Lieder book and the Cheliktakl Ar Kristiano are so great that the first item of both is identical; not coincidentally, it seems, this song is considered the first song that Reverend Länge translated into Palauan, which does not correspond to the information given by Länge himself. Moreover, Palauans recall the existence of “a hymn book” which reverends Länge and Fey 661 referred to when teaching songs. As missionaries from the United States joined the Liebenzell team, American hymns were added to the repertoire.662 Ymesei Ezekiel, a member of the parish who later on also became conductor of the church choir, re-arranged a small number of hymns663 and purportedly also composed some; however, none could be identified with certainty. In general, Palauans seem to have made little effort to compose new tunes for liturgical singing, which is not surprising given the stability in musical form that is essential for the more “serious” genres of Palauan indigenous music. Informants stated that those few tunes that were made up by indigenous members of the parish were simply not written down; the composer would sing and teach them to the people. Therefore, their transmission ultimately depended on the community’s decision on whether to keep

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them in repertoire or not, and even today some Palauan hymns are part of shared repertoire without existing in written form. While the musical style of these items is that of European and, partly, American hymns, the mechanisms of a society that in context of non-prescribed cultural knowledge customarily relies on group consensus shine through here. Judging from the types of musical arrangements found in the 1978 hymnal, there seem to have been three more main sources in addition to the Reichs-Lieder. Those hymns identified as belonging the Reichs-Lieder collection divide into roughly three groups: one that is obviously set for guitar accompaniment; one that was arranged for an accompanying

three-part

women’s

choir;

and

one

that

was

intended

for

accompaniment by a chord instrument, probably a keyboard instrument. Whether these arrangements were prepared in Palau or brought in from outside cannot be determined. How early the missionaries reverted to teaching several parts of a hymn’s arrangement is not clear. Missionary Länge in his memoirs writes: We began to gather the scattered youth into our own home. We studied the glorious songs of Jesus so that our gatherings would also be suffused with music as our dear elders were not really to be won over by a lively melody influenced by heart and spirit. Over the years we gathered together a lovely mixed choir which with light tongues sang the redemption in song with great enthusiasm but also participation in our shared gatherings, particularly those celebrations resounding to the glory of God. The singing attracted many outsiders. Through these songs some grains of the truth were planted in the hearts of the natives. [...] The singing was their [i.e., the 664

youth’s] greatest passion. Of course it often went into harmonies.

Sr. Ingelore Lenging, in Palau from 1954 to 1985, recalls that Palauan singers would still immediately add up to five parts to a tune in group singing without referring to sheet music twenty years after the time of initial learning. To a smaller extent, this can still be observed in Sunday services, when individual congregation members will add up to two counterparts to the main tune. During their training in Bad Liebenzell, the missionaries were also educated in harmonium playing. Both missionaries Länge and Fey possessed a reed organ in Palau, which still exist, but are no longer in use. Both used the instruments to accompany the congregation. The sisters who at the time were working at the Liebenzell Bethania girls school, Hildegard Thiem and, later, Ingelore Lengning,

665

instructed their students in

harmonium, guitar, recorder, and, curiously, xylophone

666

playing. They also


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systematically taught them to read music, as did Juanito Simpson,667 so that Bethania was one of the few places in the second part of the twentieth century for students to acquire this kind of knowledge. Sr. Elsbeth Reumann (in Palau from 1958 to 1986) brought a number of melodicas when she arrived in Palau, the playing of which was from then also part of Bethania musical life. But playing musical instruments never really took root in Palauan culture. Angelica Leuice Simpson, referring to the years from 1962 to 1980, remembers that… as the sisters left or retired, and no teachers came who could teach them [i.e., teach the girls] those instruments, the new girls did not learn them. However, most of the girls during the time we were there could play guitars, ukuleles,

668

and harmonicas (as well as spoons—this was something that

had been used in the Marshall Islands […]).

Another place where musical literacy was taught was Bethania’s counterpart, also a Liebenzell educational institution: Emmaus High School in Koror. After World War II, the above-mentioned Sr. Hildegard Thiem had received a donation of brass instruments, which she brought to Palau.

Figure 3.38: Undated photograph of the Emmaus brass-band. From the archives of the Liebenzell mission, Bad Liebenzell, Germany

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As can be gleaned from the picture, the brass band consisted of three trombonists, one euphonium player, five trumpet players, and a drummer. The trumpets seem to each be of different mensur; note in particular the long trumpet played by the second student from left.669 The band was started by pastor Fey in 1953. He established a music class for selected students of Emmaus School and taught them to read music and play the instruments that were available. The repertoire mainly consisted of hymns. When Fey left Palau two years later, the brass band ceased to exist. As the instruments were no longer used, they were handed over to Palau High School, where music classes were held at that time. Here, too, the music classes were taken from the curriculum after a while for want of teachers with an expertise in that area. In 1997, the Japanese government donated to PCC another set of roughly 50–60 brass instruments; the college’s efforts to establish a permanent brass bands also failed. In 1984, the band was re-established by missionary Richard Jones.670 By the end of its first year, it consisted of 14 members who were playing brass instruments, drum, bass drum, snare drum, and electric organ if electricity was available. Particularly on religious holidays, the band also traveled to the more remote villages, presenting fourpart arrangements671 of mostly hymns, occasionally Bach chorales, and the Palauan national anthem. When Jones left Palau in 1986, the band continued to exist for a short time only. To my knowledge, the Emmaus and the Palau High School groups have been the only brass bands in Palau. In spite of the frequent presence of foreign brass bands throughout Palau’s history, which is amply documented in photographs, the availability of appropriate instruments, and the efforts to establish such bands made by missionaries, the brass band idiom was never really appropriated by Palauans. Possible reasons for this are discussed below. Like the Catholic community, the Protestant congregations in Palau have church choirs that practice on a regular basis. Modekngei Music The Modekngnei community is generally secretive about the essence and content of their theology and faith. In kesekes ra Modekngei, as Modekngei music is referred to, this theology is expressed in lyrics that are characterized by high-level language (often perceived of as archaic and difficult to understand), and there is a tendency to allude to a particular story or religious figure rather than render the complete story. 672 Both


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features are clearly inherited from Palauan pre-contact musical lyrics, and so is the musical form, which is not that of the lullaby kesekes discussed above, as the name would suggest, but usually that of omengeredakl;673 or, in rarer cases, kerrekord. The name kesekes has been applied because followers see correspondences between the lyrics of Modekngei hymns and the lullaby kesekes. These correspondences firstly relate to the hymns’ content. The epic character evident in the lullaby kesekes has parallels in Modekngei hymns: in both genres, deeds and actions of gods are recounted in a manner that adumbrate rather than fully narrate the complete mythological/theological context. Secondly, the structure of the lyrics is considered similar. In both genres, the formal organization of the lyrics is characterized by structural openness. Finally, both the lullaby kesekes and its Modekngei counterpart serve to communicate with the gods, albeit in different ways. In the mythical age prior to the arrival of mankind in the world, the lullaby kesekes were sung by the gods among themselves. Singing kesekes, therefore, is considered to establish a direct connection of the individual with the world of the divine, as it puts them in immediate contact with the gods. Modekngei hymns likewise address the gods, and they are offered to them as prayer: while singing, Modekngei believers “might picture them swaying back and forth to the rhythm of our song.”674 In contemporary Palau, Modekngei worshipping has thus become an important niche for omengeredakl, which otherwise enjoys only limited popularity today. The reasons why omengeredakl was chosen over other musical forms of the Palauan repertoire are obvious. First, it is one of the few forms that accommodate a group rather than an individual as singers, thus allowing for the shared social experience that lies at the heart of much non-soloist religious music. Second, it is a genre that emanates a relatively high amount of vigor by virtue of its musical structure. In omengeredakl, the effects of the dramatic suspension arc appears much heightened through the creation of the tension-generating frequency band, which opens up the vertical dimension of tonal space, creating a considerable amount of musical energy. Therefore, omengeredakl is an apt medium for carrying a strong sentiment, such as a religious message, and there are no discernible musical differences between omengeredakl as sung in the Modekngei context and outside of it other than the lyrics, which are specific to Modekngei in the context of worship.

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Other “New” Music

In this chapter, some of those musical genres that have emerged only after the establishment of foreign presence on the Palau islands will be briefly described. With the partial appropriation of functional harmony and the adoption of foreign tunes and musical instruments, the indigenous concept of tonal space has transformed dramatically in course of the twentieth century. This development is traceable in the development of “new” songs, beches chelitakl. How rapidly musical change has been progressing is evident in the relative ephemerality of certain genres: some song types, such as beritotou and derebechesiil, are unmistakably associated with the colonial administration of their heyday. As songs, they “belong” to the generation that consciously lived through the period in question, while younger generations cannot necessarily relate to them. Often, no particular terms are used to refer to these songs; instead they are simply called “popular songs.”675 Beches chelitakl seem short-lived when compared with pre-contact musical styles, for which perceived longevity and stability of musical form has been shown to be essential. Apart from the tangible differences in musical idiom(s), it is the increased rapidity of musical change and conceptual acceptance thereof that most strongly distinguishes post-contact from pre-contact Palauan music-making. Derebechesiil Derebechesiil are generally unaccompanied love songs. As a genre, it emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, and its musical language bespeaks its roots in the Japanese period.676 Although they are still part of the contemporary repertoire, this is also the time when derebechesiil enjoyed their greatest popularity, which is not least reflected in the fact that they were sometimes equated with chelitakl, the generic word for “song.”677 Derebechesiil consist of lyrics that were fit to a foreign tune. An overwhelming majority of tunes are of Japanese derivation, and only very few songs, which are of later origin, are modeled on a Euro-American melody; many songs are based on melodies of hybrid Euro-American and Japanese character, which formed a major element of preWorld War II Japanese popular music.678 Yamaguti mentions that derebechesiil were in places accompanied by a ngaok flute instead of the “regular counterpart voice,”679 an


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expression with which he seems to refer to the esbe part in omengeredakl. This practice is not popular today, nor do contemporary informants recall it. Derebechesiil were sung unaccompanied in their early days. In the second half of the twentieth century, guitars and/or keyboards were first included for musical accompaniment, 680 and today, keyboard accompaniment in a style similar to that applied in Palau Pop (see below) is very common. Derebechesiil tend to be similar to each other in terms of melodic features. Certain melodic turns and rhythmic motives permeate the whole repertoire. One derebechesiil tune that is very popular today is the following:

Music example 3.26: Tune of a popular derebechesiil

To accommodate the number of stanzas laid out in a derebechesiil’s lyrics, the tune will be repeated. In their different versions, alterations to the main tune occur. If rhythmic variations to the tune are made, these serve to accommodate the number of syllables in the respective lyrics. Rhythm in derebechesiil may slur, albeit not as extensively as in Palauan chants. In case of melodic variations, intermediate tones and tonal variations of distinct scale degrees are added to the tonal inventory, which, like in the example, is normally pentatonic:

Music 3.27: Tonal inventory of the derebechesiil transcribed in music example 3.26

These pitch additions may also macerate the generally anhemitonic scale structure. The Japanese derivation of this tune is obvious. The Japanese min’yō, “folk song,” was a source of inspiration for Palauan derebechesiil singing: it provided an inventory of tunes from which Palauans borrowed for derebechesiil. Derebechesiil is a genre that displays a certain stability, or: similarity in terms of both musical features and resultant

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sonic effect that is not unusual in the Palauan context. Curiously, in adopting min’yō repertoire as a stock of melodies for derebechesiil, Palauans were drawing on a musical genre the songs of which were sometimes claimed to all “sound alike.”681 One reason for adopting this musical genre was certainly that the Japanese administration propagated min’yō as politically correct music through schools and other educational institutions, 682 so that Palauans became familiar with the genre as the Japanese colonial period proceeded. But another, perhaps more decisive reason is inherent in the conceptualization of min’yō as a comparatively simple song with limited idiomatic array: albeit not as radical as in Palauan music, min’yō are defined by a rather narrow set of musical features, a conceptualization with which individuals raised in the Palauan musical culture may have felt intuitively familiar. Beritotou Like derebechesiil, beritotou are said to be rooted in the Japanese period. Unlike derebechesiil, however, the popularity of which they never seem to have measured up to, they are on the verge of extinction from cultural memory. Beritotou is also referred to as a dance in places, and its main performance space was the omilil. Beritotou,683 actually, is a strophic monophonic song that is structurally reminiscent of bullachang. In terms of tonal material and melodic build-up, however, it resembles scalar and modal characteristics of the Japanese musical system. Beritotou is considered to be suitable “for the babies […]. Beritotou tell stories, and may be accompanied by dancing and gestures.” 684 Often, they are also presented in the omengeredakl form, which is “complete” in that all musical functions including the esbe part are present. Then, the tonal material and musical contours are that of omengeredakl, and unlike in the first form of beritotou, no incorporations and appropriations from the Japanese or other musical styles are discernible. Technically, beritotou in omengeredakl form are not beritotou anymore, however, it is often referred to as such. Reasons for choosing omengeredakl over the monophonic musical form of beritotou seem to be the number of available singers on the one, and function on the other hand: while during a community gathering, the omengeredakl form would be preferred, the monophonic version would be used when rocking a baby to sleep.


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Contemporary composed songs

Contemporary composed songs include items that were intended as children songs, and items that are “open” in terms of their target audience. In the context of beches chelitakl, several genres, such as bullachang, were also part of the children’s repertoire; no song types specific to children only were identified by my interlocutors. The repertoire of contemporary composed songs in Palau for the most part goes back to a single individual, namely Ymesei Ezekiel, who in the second half of the twentieth century composed a large number of songs both for children and others. Along with several translations of foreign songs, these were compiled into a song book that is also used in schools throughout the country today.685 Ezekiel is widely considered the first Palauan to actually compose tunes. While Ezekiel was working as elementary school teacher, he taught his songs to the students, and sometimes also tried to compose tunes in class. The tunes Ezekiel composed for children as well as for adults were generally loosely based on the musical idiom of (contemporary) hymnody, and he mostly arranged them in four to six parts.686 Interestingly, in actual practice the regular meter that these songs are built on tends to slur in performances by both adults and children. Music example 3.28 687 shows one of Ezekiel’s compositions, the song “Madedók” (“well-spring”), and illustrates some of the peculiarities that characterize Ezekiel’s musical technique. The arrangement is basic and repetitive with a tendency towards basic root position chords. The overall structure approximates the A-A-B-A’ song form. However, Ezekiel first begins this melody with an up-beat, although the melody seems to be configured to start on a full beat; and then he proceeds to break the four-bar periodic structure that finally becomes evident in the A’ part. 688 The up-beat is not resolved in the first bracket of A, and in spite of the graphic separation of parts A (second bracket) and B not here, either. This seems to be a problem of notation on the one hand. As a missionary who used to work with Ezekiel’s sheet music commented, as time passed… I learned […] how to interpret what he meant. He explained it once to me, and I did not really follow his reasoning exactly. And a lot of his music changes rhythms from one section to the next, so I think he did not know how to write that down.

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Music example 3.28: Madedók by Ymesei Ezekiel


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As other details in this and many more of Ezekiel’s notations show, this is certainly the case. In the rhythmic dimension, many indications such as time signatures, bar meters, and upbeats, are handled arbitrarily and as exchangeable instructions; the real structure of the melody only emerges once one strips the melody of the formal structure that Ezekiel’s way of notating has grafted onto it (for an even clearer example in this regard, see music example 3.29689). But on the other hand, Ezekiel’s apparent indifference to rhythm and the various ways to capture it in writing might indeed have its roots in his original musical upbringing. Even in communal singing in Palau, meter is not necessarily a straightforward dimension of song, and fluctuant rhythm is a core characteristic of much of the indigenous music. Ezekiel’s peculiar way of handling the rhythmic dimension in notation, therefore, might be related to either 1) an insecurity about the abstract, Euro-American concept of regular meter in music, or 2) his attempt to translate into an inept system musical ideas that evade precisely that concept of regular meter because in spite of their Euro-American guise, they have emerged against the background of the Palauan musical culture. Probably both aspects play a part; however, since Ezekiel also struggles with notating rhythm in songs which he merely translated into Palauan, the first possibility cannot be neglected.690 With regards to the arrangement of this and other pieces on the tonal layer, the high number of parallel fifths and octaves is eye-catching. A lack of familiarity with musical technique might be accountable for it, but again, other motivations might have been equally decisive: parallel fifths and octaves might not only be the obvious musical tool in the grey area between heterophony and polyphony, they might also approximate Ezekiel’s—or, the Palauan—conception of the vertical dimension in music much better than the rules of “correct” Euro-American four-part singing. This possibility will be discussed in more detail below. As mentioned above, individual singers tend to render Ezekiel’s songs with a certain amount of liberty, particularly in terms of rhythmic flow. In choral singing, naturally, the conductor normally emphasizes regular meter, thus adjusting the composition to EuroAmerican listening habits. Not least because they have been part of nearly every Palauan student’s learning environment for the last twenty years, Ezekiel’s songs enjoy great popularity in contemporary life across generations, and they are widely considered to be “new folk songs.”

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Music example 3.29: Ezekiel’s composition A ianged a ungil, first page


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“New” Dances

Since nearly every organized sound can conceptually be used for dancing in Palau, many “types” of dances have come up in the rapidly changing soundscape of the colonial period. Among them are the beluulecháb, “Yap(ese dance),”691 a sitting dance that was very popular in the Japanese period already; and, still very popular today, the matamatóng. How and precisely when the beluulecháb came to Palau cannot be reconstructed, but given the improved communicative structures between Palau and Yap during the German period, between 1899 and 1914 emerges as a reasonable guess. Even today, beluulecháb are sometimes danced along with musical items in the Yapese language. 692 As with most Palauan dances, beluulecháb is a reference to choreography rather than a particular song type: beluulecháb dancing is regularly combined with rebetii as well as other Palauan chants and songs, and it “allows dancers to make fun and joke about current events.”693 Matamatóng, which can be performed by men, women, or a group of mixed gender, is often translated as “marching dance.” Contemporary Palauans trace it back to the German period, assuming that both the choreography and “the tune” were inspired by the marching and the military brass bands of presumably German soldiers.694 However, one also has to take into account the possibility that earlier than that, English and American sailors might have introduced marching to Palau. True to these roots, rhythmic structures based on two-beat units, resembling a marching rhythm, predominate in matamatóng. A typical matamatóng performance consists of a sequence of songs, historically often of Japanese derivation, with interspersed instrumental items that may be accompanied by the dancers’ shouts. Unless the dance is accompanied by music from a tape or another form of sound reproduction, these instrumental introductions or interludes are still today mostly performed on the harmonica. It is unclear how the harmonica came to Palau, but it is first mentioned in writing in 1910. 695 Most interestingly, the Palauan word that was applied to the harmonica at that time already is tumetúm, i.e., the same word that had been used to refer to the Jew’s harp earlier. The connection between the two instruments that led to naming the harmonica after the Jew’s harp is, I assume, firstly the similarity in the way in which the two instruments are played. As the only other known mouth-blown musical instrument at that time in Palau was the ngaók flute, which is played in a different manner, the association of the harmonica with the tumetúm ra lild is not surprising. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, another shared feature of the two instruments

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might have established the conceptual association between them: both are free-reed instruments, and therefore produce sound in a way that was definitely novel in Palau at the time of the introduction of the tumetúm ra lild. The matamatóng accompaniment that is played on the harmonica draws on EuroAmerican and, in rarer instances, Japanese melodies performed with a distinct emphasis on the binary rhythm in order to support the dancers’ marching movements. On recordings made during the Trust Territory time, the music used for matematóng is clearly inspired by American square dance music, which further illustrates the genre’s adaptability to temporary musical tastes. The matamatóng is considered contemporary, however, this term also implies a certain strictness as far as the musical content is concerned, particularly in regard to the rhythmic component. Given the evident musical development that the matematóng repertoire underwent in course of the twentieth century, however, this consistency attributed to the dance music seems to be meant to ideationally delineate the repertoire from that of newer popular music, i.e., Palau Pop, rather than to deny musical change. The matamatóng is conceptualized as a contemporary dance which “stands between the traditional dance and the more flexible contemporary dance that draws on a variety of sources.” This intermediate position refers to the chronological emergence of the respective types of dances as well as to their indexical value, or, patina (see above). The name of the “more flexible contemporary dance” that the above-quoted informant referred to is matamahula (see below). In 1970, dance researcher Mary Browning described the matamatóng as follows: The matmatong [= matamatóng] certainly shows foreign influence, for it is a true march. The tromp is broken occasionally by a sequence of individual improvisation, but the dancers soon return to a sort of follow-the-leader march. Stanzas are separated by stepping in place while the leader calls out, “Lep… lep…lep.” It’s done in high spirits, everyone has a good time, including the spectators, 696

and it is certainly parody—whether intentional or not, I couldn’t say.

The original intentions behind the historical parody of the (foreign) marching soldiers’ movements cannot be determined. However, it seems unlikely to me that the foreigners’ movements were appropriated in a mocking or teasing intent on the side of the Palauans in the first place. Also, Palauans today do not see any satirical component in the matamatóng. It has been reported that often in Pacific colonial history, the marching in of foreign soldiers into local villages was mistaken by islanders as a welcome dance, which prompted them to reply to that assumed gesture by


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performing a welcome dance to the “visitors” in return. While against this background, a distinctly satirical imitation of military marches at a later point in time cannot be ruled out, to me it seems more likely that actual marching as well as characteristics of marching music were emulated in a non-satirical way, particularly because the marching character is so prominent in matamatóng. Browning quotes the interspersed “lep… lep…lep” shouts, which a prompter recites in a rhythmicized form. In contemporary matamatóng dancing, they are often rendered as “left” rather than “lep.” In a similar manner to that described by Browning, these shouts are also featured in a Pohnpeian marching dance that has even been named after them: the lehp dance.697 “Le(h)p” is a pidgin pronunciation of “left” as recited in “left, right, left, right” by soldiers marching in formation. Petersen assumes that in the Pohnpeian context, English and American whalers brought the concept of marching with them. Compared with Pohnpei, considerably fewer whaling ships called at Palau, but there was regular contact. 698 Therefore, an import of marching chants through English-speaking whalers seems possible and, given the apparent linguistic inheritance that still shines through in matamatóng, even probable, particularly because marching bands were part of “whaling culture” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Local oral history, however, identifies the German colonial period, and the marching German soldiers in particular, as the inspirational source for the matamatóng marching choreography. Since there was never a permanent German military presence in the Palaus, visiting officials (such as depicted on figure 3.39) would most likely have familiarized the Palauans with their marching and marching music.699 Given these two apparent possible origins, a composite provenance seems highly likely. Then, several independent elements would have been appropriated and then merged into the matamatóng. As the word matamahula indicates, this dance is conceptualized by Palauans as a dance which… in a way reflects the matamatóng and, more vaguely, the Polynesian hula, but it’s not really hula, or matamatóng, but a combination. […] And the music goes accordingly. The matamahula is some kind of combination of Palauan [words] with the tunes of modern-day music. […] Matamatóng is 700

more traditional than matamahula, […] but it is not a real traditional Palauan dance.

In most cases, the music used for the matamahula is played from cassettes or CDs. Like the matematóng, the matamahula is clearly a homogenization of several distinct regional musical styles. The German period had brought about an increased intensity of contact with neighboring island cultures because for the first time, large numbers of

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potential workers and, also, personae non grata, from the various islands of the administrational territory were (temporarily) resettled in Palau. While until World War I, therefore, the scope of the various soundscapes that merged into a “new” Palauan sound had rarely transgressed the Micronesian islands, with the advent of the Japanese administration, influences from Polynesia clearly become stronger—in music as well as in the arrival on the islands of the ukulele, which enjoyed great, however temporary, popularity.

Figure 3.39: Crew and brass band of the German MS Condor on a visit in Palau in 1911. From the collection of Dieter Klein, Düsseldorf (Germany)

The decisive contextual difference between dances that emerged in post-contact times and earlier ones is that while the latter, with few exceptions, stand in a context determined by ritual and other prescribed structures, the former are recreational and secular in nature. Barnett, writing in 1949, observed already that the performance practice of pre-contact dances had not remained unaffected by the rapid changes on the islands at the time of his research:


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Dances and celebrations that are in part survivals of the ruk and mur are still being held, but they seem to be completely secularized. Practically nothing in the way of taboos, prayers, or incantations remain in connection with them. The dances have been much modified. The nglóik, the womens’ dances, are given to entertain members of other districts during a three-day celebration; and while they preserve much of the form of the past, their meaning has changed. […] dances of foreign origin are now incorporated into the celebration along with the ancient nglóik. So are a variety of vaudeville-like performances depicting well-known historical episodes that go under the Japanese names of shibai. Most of these are humorous and satirical. They have no connection with religious 701

belief.

Obviously, it is impossible to track down actual musical and choreographical changes in the evolution of the performance practice of pre-contact dances. In any case, the detachment of dance from ritual context and, in particular, religious function, led to the abandonment of a presumably large part of the repertoire of which only scarce traces are left today (for instance, dances involving entrancement). On Chuuk, female chiefs have been encouraging women dancers to continue dancing “the old way,” i.e., topless.702 In contemporary Palau, this question is not at issue: it is generally taken for granted that women dancers wear bras, mostly made of coconut, in combination with (artificial) grass skirts. This uncontestedness of contemporary components even in dances shows that Palauan dances today are considered an expression of the contemporary and composite Palauan way of life rather than a means to attempt and reconstruct as well as propagate a historical dance culture.

Palau Pop

Palauan popular music is omnipresent in contemporary island life, as it is disseminated over the local radio stations and widely available on cassettes and CDs. More than other musical genres, popular music generally tends to be linked to a particular time and place, especially in the colonial context; it often embodies the changing local reflections on cultural differences between Self and Other. As a creative act, it can also be an adaptive strategy to locate the Own in a rapidly changing political and cultural landscape. In Palau, the evolution of popular music clearly sketches the search for a credible, twentieth century cultural identity in response to the external dominant (cultural) power. While this quest is by no means unique in the Pacific region of the time, the development of popular music in Palau is fundamentally different from that

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found in the corresponding genres that have been developing on other islands across the region, as shall be shown in the following. In the Palauan context, several genres within the performing arts that emerged in the twentieth century would have to be referred to as “popular,” including, for instance, the above-mentioned derebechesiil and matematóng. Many of the mechanisms that will be described in this chapter apply to these genres’ development also, and in fact, contemporary performances of derebechesiil only distinguish themselves from contemporary popular music by their history; their arrangement and performance spaces are identical with those of Palau Pop. Some Palauan musicians also consider derebechesiil as “Palauan classics,” and they conceptually include derebechesiil into Palau Pop.703 For practical purposes, however, and in the line of Simon Frith’s argument,704 I shall use the term “Palauan popular music” in a more narrow sense and confine it to song types that are modeled on musical idioms of the Euro-American and/or Japanese urban mass cultures, mostly targeting youths. A defining feature, moreover, is that their dissemination has mainly been channeled by the mass media in Palau (cassettes, CDs, radio, TV; the Internet does not play any significant role in this context). Derebechesiil, in contrast, have received inspiration from min’yo, a music that is perceived of as ‘folk’, even if this is not an uncontestable view, and that only in a limited sense can be referred to as mass culture. Although the functioning mechanisms that characterize “mass” cultures—the distribution networks, the dissemination strategies, and the influence of the transnational music industry in particular—are fundamentally different in a country as small as Palau from those that are at work in economically larger and more accessible contexts, the general characteristics are identical: music generally appears as commodified and purposefully designed for a target audience which consumes the sounds offered to them; interaction with the musical product, if any, largely evolves along the channels envisaged and/or created by the same music industry in the first place, such as karaoke singing. But on the other hand, the music industry is far from being a profitable business in Palau, and musicians who produce recordings normally do so as private persons, ordering copies of their master tape from a recording studio in the Philippines. Musicians generally provide the financing, recording, and distribution through local stores themselves. The driving force behind such efforts is not economic reasoning:


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Musicians today are mostly driven by the desire to become famous, which can happen overnight in Palau because everything is so small. The ease with which you can produce cassettes and CDs plays a significant role. But only the best musicians can really make any profit from them, as they [= the recordings] are produced in the Philippines, and the minimum order there is 1000 copies. Only 15%–20% are sold, and most musicians will end up with numerous leftovers.

The Palau Music Artists Association, a small musicians’ association, is perhaps the only institution that has access to more professional means of recording, as is also evident in their CDs issued for representative purposes, for instance in context of the Ninth Festival of Pacific Arts, which was hosted by Palau in 2004. The first cassette that was produced for the Palauan market came out in the 1970s and also saw distribution on neighboring islands. This, however, was not the result of a planned market strategy: many students from throughout the region were attending classes at Palau’s community college, and they brought back the recording to their home islands. Although Palauan pop music shares fundamental characteristics with transnational popular music, the networks of a music industry that facilitate commercial distribution and marketing of such music through other channels than the media are virtually nonexistent. This has led to a certain distinctiveness of the consumption practices of Palauan popular music that in a subtle manner distinguishes the same from transnational musical products and that lets remnants of cultural practices that have prevailed on the islands since before the arrival of foreigners on the islands shine through. In the Japanese period, a preference among Palauans for tunes of Japanese derivation took root, and today, musical borrowing from the Japanese pop music idiom and repertoire is still common. This may partly be attributed to the ideational novelty that the Japanese concept of melody constituted for Palauans in the first place: The invention of melodies was not a part of our entertainment culture: chants are plain and simple, and the same melody is used for about the whole genre. As time went by, people began to understand Japanese popular music, how a melody can express the text. They started to translate songs, not in that they translated the lyrics word by word, but in that they picked melodies to fit a particular content.

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Songs were not necessarily translated into Palauan as a whole: they could also be rendered in a mix of Japanese and Palauan.

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Howard Charles, a Palau Pop musician, draws a broad distinction between the formative period of the genre and contemporary styles: I like to consider modern Palauan music from the 1920s until the 1960s and 70s as the classic songs because the texts are very poetic and in line with Palauan thinking and Palauan ideas of respect. They are sophisticated in that they may allude to sexual issues, but always in a very censory way. You might just overhear it, or, if your sit at a family table, the kids won’t notice.

The music accompanied by the lyrics quoted by Charles as a distinguishing feature was usually directly borrowed from foreign cultural material. Naturally, between the wars, the Japanese inventory of popular tunes provided a pool of melodic templates, while with the beginning of the US administration, American pop and country standards gained popularity. Tunes were generally taken over without alterations, except for rhythmic changes that served to better accommodate the Palauan lyrics. Musical accompaniment of the “classic songs” was usually provided by guitar, ukulele, or mandolin; emerging bands usually consisted of several players of these instruments. The usage of the ukulele as well as the playing technique usually employed by guitarists on music documents from 1963706 clearly shows another important musical influence. It came from Polynesia, Hawai’i in particular, and it also brought into being the above-mentioned matemahula. Musically, it introduced into Palau Pop a considerable component of the Hawai’ian style slack key (Hawai’ian: ki ho'alu) guitar music idiom, which is usually considered the predecessor of the Hawaiian steel guitar music. Playing techniques, namely the “hammering-on" and "pulling-off,” and the characteristic emphasis on harmonic progressions that are distinctive of slack key guitar playing contribute to what is sometimes referred as “that smooth and pan-Pacific island sound” in Palauan popular music. However, unlike in slack key music, the basic tuning of the guitar will not normally be changed in Palau Pop. Another main influence in contemporary Palau Pop which entered the Palauan soundscape through American channels is that of another “island sound,” i.e., Jamaican reggae. In contemporary popular music, the instrumentation has changed in comparison to the “classic songs.” Generally, there are two ways of accompanying pop songs: first, by using a full band that usually includes guitars, keyboards and synthesizers, a drumset, and vocals; or, second, by using only a keyboard. With the exception of major community festivities or other events that provide space for a full band, a singer accompanying him or herself on a keyboard is the most common option, also because there are very few bands in Palau. In the case of mere keyboard accompaniment, the


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singer usually uses the preset rhythm-and-chord patterns available on a keyboard and adds a basic melody in places with the right hand. 707 The arrangement normally emulates the Euro-American template as closely as possible. This results in a rather uniform overall sound to much of Palau Pop. Performances involving a full band, on the other hand, provide more musical variety, including (sometimes improvised) instrumental solos. Professional recordings, in contrast to recordings prepared in basic home recording studios, usually involve “real” musicians rather than solely drawing on a keyboard’s or synthesizer’s resources of artificial sound reproduction; yet, here, too, the usage of keyboard jingles and other pre-configured sound events is ubiquitous. However, they are few in comparison to the more basic recordings, and most of them have been prepared in connection with the above-mentioned Palau Music Artists Association. Many of the Palauan pop songs are directly borrowed from Euro-American and Japanese cultural material. Since the general intention is to emulate the original as closely as possibly, changes to the original material, if any, are minute. Musical creativity envisaging the composition of new tunes emerged relatively late, particularly from the 1950s until 1970s onwards, and is often associated with the compositions of Ymesei Ezekiel, who in this context is considered the “most original Palauan composer.” According to local appraisals, however, this development did not initiate a durable course of development, as “the creativity went down again with the impact of new media,” so much so that today, “most of the tunes are adapted […] and most [nonadapted] Palauan songs are old Palauan songs in a new arrangement.” Before and after the “Golden Era” of the “old Palauan songs,” the main working point of musicians was the writing of new Palauan lyrics to an existing tune. Whether this really has to be attributed to the impact of mass media or more appropriately to other forces, will be discussed in Part III. Both the songs from the “Golden Era” and those that are composed anew by Palauans generally move within the spaces of the Euro-American and Japanese popular music languages, with adapted tunes rendered mostly unaltered, involving preset rhythm patterns and chords, and a simple (improvised) melody with the right hand. This is a common accompaniment elsewhere in Micronesia as well. 708 Often these songs explore the musical “middle ground” between the Euro-American and Japanese idioms. A lucid example for such a rapprochement of the two dominant musical influences is the song Chedam (“Father”) by Howard Charles.709 While the song does not directly borrow a Japanese tune, it evokes the Japanese pop music idiom by, for instance,

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oscillating between major and minor chords and thus somewhat softening the functional harmony that is part of the song’s general Euro-American set-up. Attempts to reconcile chelitakl rechuodel music with the contemporary pop repertoire are very rare, and most contemporary Palauans see no relationship whatsoever between traditional and contemporary Palauan music. Unlike in other Pacific popular music cultures,710 no concerted attempts have been made in Palau so far to create a distinctly Palauan “island sound.” And still, Palau pop music is strongly connected with chelitakl rechuodel, and can even be considered a direct descendant of the latter. This relationship, however, is not musical, but functional, and in this, Palau pop picks up on and takes as its starting point an aspect of (evolved) traditional music that throughout this study has been identified as its perhaps most important parameter. This functional similarity shall be briefly illustrated by two examples. In addition to the nightclubs—perhaps an omilil in a contemporary setting—, a main performance space for contemporary pop music (musicians) are family functions. During such an event, “the musician likes to tease the honored guest by singing a song which refers to his ancestors, or something similar. Then the honored guest is obliged to stand up and dance and sing a song in response.” The described performance context here is similar to that of the klakellall, and the loosely prescribed exchange of addressing songs permeates the Palauan pre-contact performing arts. Likewise, Palau Pop began to be played during first childbirth ceremonies in the late 1980s, thus fulfilling a function identical to that of pre-contact recreational music genres. According to a Palauan custom, the man’s side of the family is expected to perform dances and songs during this big festivity, and the guests might join in afterwards. Around 1990, the first-ranking female chief of Koror (bilung) banned the involvement of pop bands in first-childbirth ceremonies on pain of a fine of US$1000. This ban became a hotly debated issue, and was finally lifted in about 1996. Nowadays, pop bands are a common sight during such feasts. The reasons for the ban were that… band members often became drunk and abused the event for partying, and this is not what it is supposed to be like. [… The childbirth ceremony] is a rather intimate event, and it’s sacred in a sense. […] But they turned the ceremony into a secular party like any other, looking for a reason to drink […] The dance and music were originally to help the spirit of the occasion, but people misused it.


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Whether alcohol abuse on the part of musicians was the deciding, or just a secondary, factor cannot be decided. But from the above statement and the overall debate it is evident that Palau Pop and the “sacred” spaces of pre-contact customs are considered incompatible by some parts of Palauan society. This, in turn, shows that while Palau Pop might have taken over many functions formerly fulfilled by (evolved) traditional music, it is not looked at as an equally valuable part of culture, for it lacks the both the longevity, the rootedness in ancient culture with its manifold implications for Palauan identity discourse, and the patina of chants and even recreational pre-contact songs, for that matter: like a rebetii and a pop song, the first childbirth ceremony and pop songs can coexist, but not combine forces in order to create a homogenous space for cultural practice. The eclectiveness of such a combination, however, is very much part of today’s Palauan cultural spaces.

5

Tonal and Temporal Structures. Aesthetics of Sound

In the course of the above descriptions and analyses, the main characteristics of the Palauan aesthetics of sound have become clear. In this chapter, a synoptical overview of fundamentals of the Palauan tonal language will be followed by a brief identification of crucial loci of change.

Tonal Structures

The greater part of Palauan vocal music is monophonic. Terms used for the concept of melody in Palau are tol (“tune”) and the Japanese term fu.711 Pitch is conceptualized as relative, not absolute, and terminology is relative: the words cheteluchel (“low”) and chetererek (“high”) are used to describe the pitch of a voice. The melodic frame of chelitakl rechuodel does not normally exceed a fourth, and only very rarely a fifth. Melodic progression hardly ever proceeds on the exact beat: rhythmic pulse is always present, but invariably slurred. As melody evolves, it is enriched with ornamental embellishments such as inner-note glissandi, glissandi between adjacent pitches, trill-like grace notes, and decorative pitches preceding an accentuated pitch. These besichel a cheuikl (“to color a pandanus leaf”) are tonal ornaments that form one of the few parameters through which a musician can and, at the same, is expected to, display musical individuality.

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Melodic contours are mostly defined by genre-specific prescriptions, as the descriptions of the various genres have shown; so is the shape of phrasal cadences. Musical and textual phrases coincide, and the pauses between them function as punctuation of verbal content. Therefore, the latter have a nearly semantic function, underlining the sense units of a piece by grafting a corresponding musical structure on them. Misapplication of breaks—due to shortness of breath, for instance—is considered a serious mistake, which, however, is generally pardonable if the performer’s old age is accountable for this breach of rules. In this case, the great cultural competence associated to old age outweighs musical shortcomings in the Palauan conception. The concept of tonal spectra has been used in the above descriptions of Palauan music712 because the frequency of scale degrees may vary considerably. Accordingly, it is “the relative relationship of the tones, not their absolute placement on a pitchbased continuum” 713 that matters to a description of the Palauan tonal inventory. Moreover, it is not an academic definition of an abstract set of scales that is applicable here, but an analysis of the syntax underlying the progression of melodic development—sequentially (horizontal) as well as simultaneously (vertical)—that is of interest here, and formative for the Palauan concept of musical tonality. In Palau, the prescriptions governing the evolution of the fundamental musical parameter of melodic progression in a given piece are precise in some, and only broad in other regards, as the analyses of the individual musical genres have revealed. In either case, notions pertaining to the principles of the “tonal grammar” are not verbally formulated, or reflected and theorized on, in contemporary Palau. So, tonal space in Palauan pre-contact monophonic, vocal music (chesols, rebetii, kesekes, delang, llall) is arranged into pitch spectra. In most cases, albeit not always, the two tonal centers of a piece are identical with the two extremes of the piece’s overall tonal inventory, i.e., with the piece’s peak and bottom pitch spectra. It has been shown that in such cases, the lower pitch often serves as a primary, the higher pitch as a secondary tonal center. In items where there is one tonal center rather than two, there is a strong tendency for the bottom pitch spectrum as tonal center. In either case, the bottom pitch spectrum is the preferred final note, a function pre-defined by the descending melos that is ubiquitous in all of Palauan vocal activity. The framing pitch spectra usually occur in more than one tonal quality: they typically include several semantically different pitch areas, which have been called inflections in this study. Inherent to such pitch variation within a tonal spectrum is some potential to alter a pitch


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spectrum’s linear function within the melodic progression, which illustrates the concept and special possibilities of the notion of tonal spectra. The tonal space between the tonal inventory’s extremes is usually explored in narrow steps of flexible size. Within the tonal space marked by the framing intervals, two to three additional pitch spectra tend to become discernible, and due to the inherent intonational flexibility of the concept of tonal spectra, these scale degrees may overlap. Accordingly, the functional scope of such overlapping inner tonal spectra appears less distinct and characteristic than that of the framing pitch spectra, and in places, the individual scale degree’s functional context may become decisively blurred in the course of a vocal phrase. This practice then reinforces the sonic impression of melodic gravitation towards a well-defined melodic point of orientation, i.e., a tonal center. Moreover, this mode of exploration of tonal space further explains why pitch extremes tend to be chosen as tonal centers. Because of the inherent intonational flexibility, it does not make sense to speak of distinct scale types in Palauan music.714 Instead, the determinants of melody are the framing tonal spectra, which often provide the piece’s tonal centers at the same time. These rules of melodic progression in group singing also apply. Additionally, tonal space is also explored in the vertical dimension here, which in Palauan singing is a means to change and thicken the overall musical texture. Partly, this is achieved by adding a soloist counterpart voice to a chorus that produces a frequency band rather than a distinct pitch. These two components, the soloist and the chorus, proceed in close vicinity of pitch: usually the intervallic gap between the soloist and the frequency band’s “center pitch” (which per definition evades a precise identification) does not exceed a fourth, and the space between them amounts to a minor or major second throughout large portions of a formal unit.715 The two melodic lines—the monophonic esbe, counterpart voice, and the heterophonic chorus, rokui, which produces a tensionladen frequency band—generate friction of pitch, the manipulation of which is used as a marker of musical form. This has been shown by means of acoustical sound analysis: while the rokui part evolves around a relatively stable pitch, mostly the lower tonal center, and at the same time unfolds the vocal sound into the vertical dimension, the esbe melody enters on the phrase’s pitch peak and in the course of the phrase nears the rokui’s pitch band in order to arrive on or around the rokui’s pitch spectrum by way of conclusion. As vocal sound expands into the vertical dimension, the development of “friction content” proceeds parallel with the development of musical tension. The musical texture generated by the rokui on the one and the esbe on the other hand,

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melts into a continuously variable pitch band.716 In leading up to a musical climax, this pitch or frequency band expands; at the same time, the spatial distance between the two parts grows, and this usually coincides with rhythmic acceleration, and, if applicable, other tension-increasing means. The pitch band is a core device within the fundamental vocabulary of tonal possibilities, i.e., the Palauan concept of musical tonality and form. This utilization of the vertical dimension of sound within linear “melodic” progression can be interpreted as in some ways related to the concept of pitch spectra, I argue. In both cases, the respective sound phenomenon is looked at as a range of (possible) pitches rather than a distinct, punctual pitch: in the case of monophonic song, a distinct pitch from the culturally accepted (vertical) intervallic scope of a spectrum has to be picked by necessity (applying the vocal techniques prevalent in Palau, one voice can produce only one pitch). The underlying conceptualization is that of a horizontal (melodic) band rather than that of a line. This way, linear melodic progression does conceptually involve the vertical dimension. In group singing, on the other hand, the pitch range of a tonal spectrum, or a considerable part thereof, is covered (or: filled out) through multiphonic production of a narrow tonal cluster. In both cases, the conception of pitch is that of a pitch band. This conception of sound and the phenomenon of pitch band escapes the distinction between

homophony

and

heterophony

that

has

historically been

made

in

ethnomusicology, as its basis is a notion of the vertical dimension of sound that is entirely different from the one prevalent in the Euro-American musical system. The fact that a central stylistic device, a parameter the manipulation of which is a formgenerating tool of immense aesthetic importance, is completely alien to Euro-American musical thinking, partly accounts for the rather rigid ethnocentric value judgments that have been made by early navigators and ethnographers alike, cumulating in statements such as “music is very poor in Palau.”717 Not least because of a general lack of analytical research on the music of the larger region which still perseveres today,718 this value judgment has been commonly accepted, if tacitly, for long time, and research has tended to concentrate on the societal and ritual functions of the performing arts in Micronesian societies. But actually, the multiphonic exploration of the vertical dimension of vocal sound is an example of a highly sophisticated tool in the Palauan musical idiom, and musical analysis into other island cultures’ idioms might well reveal other musical techniques which work equally subtly, but have so far escaped analytical description. As for the Palauan frequency band and also other form-


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shaping practices (for instance durational proportions, see below), they do not receive rhetorical assertion or explanation by the performers themselves today, nor are such descriptions documented in earlier musicological writings on Palau. Gaps between the performative, so to speak, and verbal discourses still tend to be interpreted by ethnomusicologists as a lack of reflective thinking about aesthetics, thus legitimating a premature “academic dismissal” of their validity. Although the first-mentioned assumption cannot be whole-heartedly contested with respect to the role of music in contemporary Palauan society, it is certainly not as generally valid for all Micronesian performing arts over time as it has sometimes been implied or suggested. As a matter of fact, any verbal discourse about the foundations of music would have been considered privileged knowledge in pre-contact Palau, and not been made accessible to the wider population. With the subsequent blurring of the channels through which musical knowledge was to be transmitted, verbalized aesthetics of music would very likely have ceased to be passed on to younger generations because of internal social boundaries. A lack of verbal discourse that would manifest itself in written historical documents and contemporary formulations, that is to say, does not prove (nor does it disprove) that there has never been thorough reflection on the aesthetics of sound in Palauan music. However, this tacit assumption, together with a weak documentary basis, seems to have informed not only the early disapproving opinions of seafarers, but also survived into the early days of Micronesian ethnomusicology, as Krämer’s lapidary statement shows. The contemporary performance practice of group singing in Palau often dismisses some part of the general concept of frequency band as it has been described in connection with musical analysis. Those musical genres that are primarily intended for singing, and only secondarily, if at all, as dance accompaniment, for instance, omengeredakl and kelloi have been vanishing from living cultural memory, and are rarely performed today. If they happen to be sung, the esbe part might simply be omitted because of a lack of familiarity with musical rules. In contemporary renditions of dance songs, which are much more alive in contemporary performing arts than absolute songs, the pitch band concept of musical space tends to be abandoned in favor of parallel thirds, fifths, and, rarely, octaves in the choral part, particularly when the dances are performed by members of the younger generation. The sound band in the rokui’s part in omengeredakl, on the other hand, is mostly maintained, and it is a constant

that

links

historical

with

contemporary

performance

practice;

but

omengeredakl are rarely sung by that younger generation which tends to substitute

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omengeredakl’s mode of exploration of vertical space in dance songs. It thus seems at first glance that unlike in the case of chants, where tonal language to some degree has been emulating sound preferences of Euro-American musical concepts, the musical language of omengeredakl and kelloi was not brought closer to the latter; instead, it has been partly abandoned, a process in which it is still involved. Arguably, this is so because of the vast conceptual differences between the two notions of tonal space that characterize Palauan group singing on the one, and the Euro-American idea of musical development on the other hand. A monophonic musical texture, such as chanting, can more easily adopt or accommodate such a conceptual shift at first glance because its musical fabric is not directly affected by it, i.e., with an immediate audible effect on the sonic product that is discernible for every listener. On a less immediate route, however, this shift becomes discernible here as well, for instance in timbre and melodic contours, as has been described above. The fact that the underlying conception of tonal language in Palau has received fundamental changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, if not earlier, is undeniable. The effects of this change are more tangible in some musical genres than in others; this is partly due to musical reasons, such as in omengeredakl singing, and partly to extra-musical aspects, which will be discussed Part III. The penchant for parallel fifths and, to some extent, octaves, which surfaces in other genres of contemporary group singing, has also become palpable in the compositions and arrangements of Ymesei Ezekiel. In this context, I have suggested the contemporary Palauan concept of vertical musical space rather than a mere lack of familiarity with the structure of four-part arrangements might be accountable for this. Originally, the usage of consecutive fifths and octaves was strongly discouraged, if not ruled out entirely, in the European common practice period in order to maintain an individuality of individual voices within the resultant overall sound. Consecutive fifths and octaves were perceived to lead to an undesired sonic mergence of voices. In Palauan pre-contact group singing, on the other hand, the merging of the esbe and rokui parts is the musical ideal; a pitch band, one might argue, is a combination of individual voices into one sound event. The tendency towards consecutive fifths and octaves may thus be regarded as a remnant of this ancient performance practice in Palau. This way, a historical and very intuitive conceptualization survives, albeit decisively altered, in musical genres that are commonly considered as entirely EuroAmerican in style, such as (new) church song. Perhaps more aptly put, it is an intuitive and historical conceptualization of vertical musical space stealed into a musical genre


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that had been offered to Palauan listeners from outside. This inference, of course, is speculative, but it does offer a plausible explanation for a phenomenon that all too easily might be attributed to musical ignorance following the appropriation of a foreign musical idiom. The tonal language of contemporary chant performances also shows significant differences when compared with that of historical recordings. Fundamental frequency analysis in chesols and rebetii has suggested that as this parameter reduces the variation inherent to it in historical recordings, in the course of the twentieth century the singing voice more and more served as reference sound ideal. This is a matter of conceptually structuring the tonal matrix on the one hand; on the other, it also decisively alters the resultant vocal timbre employed by performers, and in this way completely changes the sonic outcome. The implications of this change in the treatment of a fundamentally important musical parameter, timbre, have been discussed: chants, today, have become de-ritualized, conceptually detached from their rigid societal functions, and as musical items been brought in the vicinity of entertainmental performing arts.

Temporal Structures

There is no Palauan term for rhythm. A division of beat into duple rather than triple units prevails. In the logocentric, monophonic genres, rhythmic pulse may increase and decrease in speed in the course of an item without affecting the formal layout. In connection with musical development towards a dramatic climax, however, a stark increase of tempo is a means to generate and densify musical tension in accordance with the item’s formal development. Rhythmic emphases may be generated by handclapping and stamping, particularly in genres that involve a component of dance or gestures. Songs are generally syllabic, and the time span of phrases is defined by the capacities of the human breath. Accordingly, rhythmic flow spans across one phrase, after which a separate phrase will be taken up. While some musical genres accommodate a broad range of tempos, others roughly prescribe one “proper” tempo. Descriptive terms for such “proper” speed, however, is rather general: songs are supposed to be sung mereched (fast), kmal mereched (very fast), ameoud (slow), or kmal meoud (very slow);719 the terms kmal mereched and kmal meoud are also used as value judgments for a performance perceived as too fast or

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respectively too slow. Like tonal space, thus, temporal space is conceptualized in relative rather than absolute terms. Inner tempo is a parameter that is manipulated in order to shape musical form, as analysis of, among other genres, kesekes has revealed. In kesekes, the dynamics of inner tempo offer a sense of orientation in an otherwise open musical form. In a subtle manner, the development of inner tempo corresponds with the equally wavy melodic contours of the chant. In this way, through interaction between musical parameters, a point of reference to hold on to is offered to the listener, while at the same time, the formal openness that the genre’s lyrics require is maintained (see, for instance, the analysis of the genre kesekes). The penchant for harmonic proportions in the temporal dimension of soloist chelitakl rechuodel, which is neither expressed in verbal discourse nor identified as a constituent of musical architecture by the chanters, is as obvious as it is striking: the durational relationships between the formal units of a given piece tend to be aligned with the proportions that structure the relationship of harmonic pitches to fundamental frequency (2:1, 3:2, …). These simple numerical proportions, which form the basis of any natural sound production, are used to structure the musical fabric in an entirely intuitive manner. Curiously, they have been found to be historically dominant in those genres that are identified by Palauans as of divine origin, and less strong in other genres. Yet, a tangible development could be identified here as well: the exactitude with which harmonically proportional, durational relationships are rendered seems to increase along with the age of the recordings. That the occurrence of such proportions should not necessarily be restricted, but still remain particularly strong in those musical genres which carry a considerable patina and are embedded in the Palauan mythological concept of the real world, is not surprising. The transmission of such musical styles, especially when they are associated with the realms of the divine, is often executed in a more authoritative manner than that of more “mundane” genres, lest changes to the “divine” original music be made by the human performer.

Aesthetics of Sound Descriptions of tone quality do not usually exceed general statements such as ungil (“good”), kmal ungil (“very good”), or diak ungil (“not so good”).720 Further explanation of the shortcomings is rare, as this would be considered a disgrace to the performer. In delang and contemporary songs that have been inspired by Japanese song types,


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some singers use a falsetto voice throughout or for parts of the item. High-pitched male voices, a description used by local informants which seems to imply falsetto voice, are also considered particularly apt for omengeredakl singing; however, as no singers seem to consider themselves able to deliver this part today, this performance practice seems to have become historical by now. In all other contexts, chest voice is employed by singers.721 Vibrato is rarely featured in performances of (evolved) traditional Palauan vocal genres, but generally acceptable. A voice manipulated by vibrato is referred to as udaol a cheuikl, whereas a non-vibrato technique is called bersoeoch a cheuikl.722 In 1963, Yamaguti found clear pronunciation of a chant’s lyrics to be an important criterion for the judgment of a performer’s musicianship. This criterion is still valid today. However, the Palauan language has undergone considerable changes, and apparently at a particularly rapid pace in the second half of the twentieth century. In keeping with this linguistic evolution, the recordings of chants that were taken during the 1960s document a language that makes extensive use of fricatives. At that time, this particular way of pronouncing certain phonetics in Palauan had faded away from colloquial language already, and chants provided one of the rare spaces for this “oldfashioned” language to be used. Today, chanters generally employ the phonetics as used in contemporary colloquial Palauan, while at the same time frankly acknowledging that they attribute greater aesthetic value to the “more ancient” pronunciation of earlier chanters, pointing out that the latter “still knew how it is supposed to sound.” Unlike the phonetics, which have simply been replaced for the most part by their contemporary counterparts, ancient vocabulary has tended to be maintained; although often unintelligible to both chanter and listener, the wordings of a given chant will not be changed. Given the divine origin of many chants, altering lyrics would amount to a great infringement of custom, and the intactity of chants is an important component of the patina that characterizes them. Phonetics as a criterion of a performance’s aesthetic value, therefore, is a historical element of Palauan musical aesthetics that today receives passive appreciation only.

Change

Drawing on comparative analyses of historical and contemporary recordings, this study has shown that crucial dimensions of musical change in Palau include the areas of

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—repertoire and song structure of chelitakl rechuodel. Yamaguti observed that on an occasion in 1965, the prescribed sequence of a traditional all-night singing session was remembered, and the performance began; however, the lyrics of single items were recalled in fragments only, so that the overall pattern of the performance had to be altered by substituting missing parts.723 This way, parts of musical lore had to be changed out of necessity, i.e., for a lack of knowledge. Since similar developments were noted by Krämer as early as 1909, the fragmentation of the Palauan cultural knowledge must have begun long before Yamaguti’s time of research.

—the conceptualization of tonal space. Intervallic thinking was appropriated in genres that emerged in the post-contact period. In evolved traditional music, this conceptualization of the tonal fabric has found less conspicuous, but significant and partly unconscious, ways into musical practice. This greatly contributed to manifold changes in musical idioms.

—the sense of durational patterns. A linear diachronical development could be detected in connection with the subtle durational architecture that characterizes pre-contact song and, in particular, chants: the exactitude with which the durational setup of formal entities, which follow simple, but very subtle and, for the performer who is expected to deliver them in minute detail, challenging, relationships, has decreased continuously until today. It is, however, difficult to define the importance of this fundamentally significant locus of change within Palauan aesthetics because it is not rhetorically asserted. —the sense of rhythmical patterns. In beches chelitakl and contemporary performances of chelitakl rechuodel, metrical structures tend to be applied to the musical texture, particularly by young singers. This is clearly a result of the changing soundworlds within which chanters have been growing up ever since the mid-twentieth century at the latest.

The driving forces behind these various processes of change are manifold, and have been discussed in connection with the respective genres’ descriptions. As far as motivations are related to music’s (former) functional context, they will be looked at in Part III.


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In the 1960s, the appraisal that “the older generation with its knowledge of Classical music is dying out” in Palau was formulated. 724 At that point in time, the “older generation” consisted of the last age group that had been born into a societal system unaltered by external political powers, i.e., colonial administration. The members of this generation had received their musical knowledge mostly because of inherited status in the hierarchical system or any other virtue that, according to custom, entitled them to the possession of such knowledge. With the advent of foreign domination, the internal boundaries of society were softened, before in the course of the following century, they would finally develop a community structured completely differently. Given the tendentially secretive mode of knowledge transmission, this meant a gradual maceration also of the channels that had formerly been supporting cultural flow; at the same time, it curtailed not only the right to such knowledge, but also the responsibility to carry it further, and thus loosened the anchorage of cultural products in their referential world. It is therefore true that culture carriers, in their pre-contact sense, were “dying out” by the 1960s. But with the gradual liberalization of the musical item, the diminishing group of “hereditary” music specialists began to expand because of non-hereditary specialists who enlarged their cultural knowledge out of individual motivations (which will be discussed in Part III). This is a decisive shift in the conceptualization of cultural flow and knowledge, and it somewhat redefined the character of those who held the “knowledge of Classical music,” all the while, as has been seen, that very knowledge was in a rapid process of change itself. In any case, the statement as made by Yamaguti is being made today as well—in spite of the great cultural renaissance that in the 1970s emerged in Palau just as elsewhere in the Pacific basin.725 Research has shown that on many Pacific islands, “tradition,” kastom, and other concepts are dynamic categories that are capable of accommodating considerable change to a master idiom as well as elements imported into it from the outside 726 —in spite of historical predictions to the contrary. 727 Both this active incorporation of the new into an existing idiom and the appropriation of Other sounds, for instance in Palau Pop, are of central importance to collective and individual identifications and identities (see Part III). Palau Pop illustrates the immediate relationship between sound and local sentiment particularly well, in spite of its musically foreign derivation. It is a relatively new way of performing the making of meaning, of producing identity by performing, and a way that is not involved with a transnational music industry in that it is subject to large-scale commodification.

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If an imminent loss of culture is rhetorically as important today as it was in the 1960s, and if at the same time, public consensus sanctionizes the current “state of the arts,” then a discrepancy between the performing arts as cultural category and lived reality surfaces. This thematic complex will be looked at in the next part.


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PART III – CULTURAL IDENTITY, LOCALITY, AND SOUNDSCAPE DEVELOPMENT IN PALAU

6

The Roots of Music: Cut and Retied? The Flow of Cultural Change

Music and Identity in Palau

Music is performance in flux; at the same time, it is a site for the sounding, yet nonobtrusive, negotiation of Self. Put reversely,

identity is mobile, a process not a thing, a becoming not a being; […] our experience of music—of music making and music listening—is best understood as an experience of this self-in-process. Music, like identity, is both performance and story, describes the social in the individual and the individual in the social, the mind in the body and the body in the mind; identity, like music, is a matter of both ethics and aesthetics.

728

There is a direct interaction between (social and individual) identity and music-making practices. Because of the necessarily dynamic nature of the former, the latter can be looked upon as one expression among several of the discursive status quo, a snapshot of a perpetual development. Music “isn’t a way of expressing ideas; it is a way of living them.” 729 As such, it is inextricably linked with several conceptual categories and/or parameters of the individual’s world of thinking, all of which relate to the imagination of Self in its diachronical and spatial environment. This linkage, in turn, bonds the individual as well as the community with the sonic item, and different ways of expressing ideas—different musical items, that is—produce different statements of musical identity. Some of the various constructions of identity that find expression in Palauan music exclude and repudiate the Other by musically appropriating it. At the same time, they tend to maintain a very local essence on those levels that have always been of primal importance to the Palauan concept of the performing arts, as has become abundantly clear in the foregoing chapter: function, and message. In this chapter I look at the implications for identity construction in and through musical change in Palau over the last century. The latter shines through in the continuum from historical to contemporary practice. To adopt a term that has recently been established in Pacific Studies, I aim to adumbrate selected musical “shifting images of identity”730 in Palau. Before addressing the question of just what has been changing in the lifeworlds from which these sounding emblems of Self emerge, and how, I will briefly look at

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some aspects of the dynamic dimension of identity, which rests on the pillars of a (perceived) continuity with conceptual constants; the ethics and aesthetics that motivate individual musical decisions and communal sanction thereof; the relationship between the individual and the larger societal network, the community; and the contemporary sonic and verbal discourse, as each of these points reverberates in Palauan music of the last century.

Palauan chants—an archival tradition? Its ascribed divine origin was a main determinant of chelitakl rechuodel’s cultural value, because this defined its place in the existing societal value structures. Without this immediate connection to Palauan mythology and oral history, chants would have amounted to sound events of only limited meaning; but on the basis of this direct association, they linked the individual to their larger, profoundly spiritual, context, and made sense of their being to themselves. In chanting, the individual (re)constructed, and at the same time related to, his referential world. In this way, he followed prescribed patterns of behavior, which bore their own varnish or patina of nostalgia; they were parts of a ritual in their own right. Thus relating themselves to the larger context of a cultural product (chants), the individuals made audible “an integral part of our identity.”731 The emphasis on the collectivity (“our identity,” rather than “my identity”) points to the fact that for the individual, expressing one’s identification(s) through chanting primarily meant, and to some degree still means, localizing oneself within one’s societal environment. This assertion of one’s place in the x-scapes needed the approval of the community, and therefore required the listeners’ prescribed response (in the case of chesols, the interpolated, responsive shout). Chants, in pre-contact Palau, were practiced world view. In contemporary performance practice of chelitakl rechuodel, chants are still considered emblems of communal identity. However, in their present-day setting, chants no longer work within a referential world with which they are inextricably and cosmogonically intertwined. As their contextual conventions have changed altogether, chant performances no longer necessarily elicit prescribed behavior. If earlier their place and function in daily life were the subject of tacit group consensus authorized by mythological lore, their contemporary conceptualization is, in practice, at the same time personalized in that it appears to be individually-sanctioned and valued. Place and


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function may be determined by conscious choices, representative purposes, and personal agendas that are projected onto them by the individual or an interest group. All the same, the patina of the chants, the nostalgia attached to them, remains prominent and holds legitimizing power. This is a phenomenon not uncommon in quickly changing lifeworlds, 732 and it expresses a cultural predicament because it indexes a “special relationship to a way of life that is no longer available […it] indicates the fact that a way of living is now gone forever.”733 But, for chants, their ambiguous place in daily life and contemporary function of evoking a nostalgic yearning for a vague and imagined past in which this very place was clearly defined does not make them museal sonic objects: chants, in contemporary Palau, are purposely entered into public discourse and are constantly filled with new meaning. Neither is this ongoing transformation a homogenous, unchallenged process. The transient meanings that chants convey are multi-layered and multivocal, as several voices at a time express differing and individual constructions and interpretations of cultural identity. A schematization of cultural knowledge most consequential for musical practice has evolved, as has become clear in connection with contemporary chesols performance practice discussed in Part II. Also, a considerable part of the body of chant lyrics has become inaccessible across musical genres. Such situations are sometimes referred to as cultural ruptures in cultural anthropology, a term that implies a certain detachment from the cultural rootings of the more recent cultural phenomenon. But such disruption from former practices is not without historical precedent in Palau, as I have already suggested. Also, the metamorphosis of cultural knowledge, which may or may not bring about a reshaping of the musical idiom, is to some degree inherent in some aspects of any musical tradition a main function of which is to serve as collective memory and historiographic record: as the importance of more recently recorded events surpasses that of older ones, priorities in content shift. Since Palauan chants never relate the complete story of a particular event or legend, this likewise leads to a gradual reduction in known content, to a schematization of a plot to, eventually, the fading away of a story from cultural memory. In the textual dimension, that is to say, such processes are known in connection with Palauan chants. At the same time, the transformation of cultural knowledge and practice has been conceived as extremely rapid since the beginning of the colonial era, by Palauans and foreigners alike, and it is also commonly associated with cultural decline and degeneration. There is a perceived disruption of contemporary music from the historical flow of transmission, and this also finds expression in verbal discourse.

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But in spite of all tangible change, it is clear that unlike other symbols of the Palauan past, the sonic signifier “chant” has retained an important place in Palau. This is so, I argue, because in chants, the identification of the signified is very much up to the listener (or, to the “ear of the beholder”). In the pre-contact context, the signified was a non-dynamic category. But in the contemporary context, it is not static any longer in this regard. This flexibilization of the musical item on the functional level, which also brought about a certain expansion of the array of accepted modes of musical performance on the musical level, paved the way for an old genre to be filled with new meaning—meaning generated by the circumstances of the contemporary world as collectively and individually perceived. This flexibility is not actually inherent in the pre-contact conceptualization of chants in Palau, a fact which allows for some conclusions concerning the place of chants in the contemporary context. The patina attributed to chants bespeaks the felt distance between collective identity and the “object” chant: only when the object itself is historic, can it take on a patina. But… the problem of patina […] disguises a deeper dilemma, the dilemma of distinguishing wear from tear. That is, while in many cases wear is a sign of the right sort of duration in the social life of things, sheer disrepair or decrepitude is not. Wear, as a property of material objects, is thus itself a 734

very complicated property that requires considerable maintenance.

“Wear or tear” is also a question that has been raised in connection with Palauan chants. There is no consensus about how to distinguish the one from the other in contemporary performance. But while various rhetoric may lament this wear, public action, such as the readiness to answer to an, at first, confusingly different mode of chesols performance, bespeaks wear—potentially nostalgic wear, which allows both performer and listener to (re)construct a (imagined) continuity with the ideational cultural constant “chant.” This (re)construction entails a host of implications concerning the ethical and aesthetical values that are negotiated through the micronarrative chanting. Contested values735

The ethics and aesthetics that motivate individual musical decisions and communal sanction thereof have undergone decisive transformation from pre-contact times until today. The contemporary set-up of society has not actually added further voices to the


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cultural discourse. But it provides the channels that enable those voices to become audible which in pre-contact society had been categorically confined to subaltern ways of communication, either by definition (such as, having a hierarchically low rank), or strategy (such as, the channelling of knowledge in the first place). In the contemporary setting, each voice can enunciate its rhetorical pronunciation of identity: today, the right to speak up and be heard is not a privilege. Palauan culture has always been “an inherently dynamic process of domination and marginalization, in which individuals are positioned differently.” 736 But it is only in the twentieth century that the right of expression through all, and not only selected, channels was extended to every individual. This introduced into Palauan thinking the possibility of political and discursive contestation independent from and across societal categories. Within the novel structures of this political univers de discours, chants have emerged as reified conceptions of culture,737 and as such, as efficient tools of contestation in various, but often profoundly politicized, contexts. In the course of this process, their function was eventually changed completely: formerly being elite knowledge legitimized by the social status of their owners, they have turned into cultural symbols legitimizing the performers themselves. The multitextuality of music and the potential nesting of signification and generation of meaning in musical sound allow many voices to speak through the same or similar media, making vastly different statements. In this way, chants are used by many to legitimate multiple agendas at a single time. It is usually accepted in cultural anthropology that… there is no simple connection between the ideological basis of a movement and the idioms chosen; yet both have implications for subsequent boundary maintenance, and the course of further change.

738

But in the Palauan case, the mastering of a musical idiom was knowledge equated with political power in pre-contact times. The appropriation and use of sounding symbols of narrowly defined and incontestable authority towards a variety of opinionated goals, therefore, comes as little surprise. And once more, this is all but a new phenomenon in Palauan cultural history. If it was the associated divine context (i.e., the creation of music and dance through deities) which lent authority to certain pre-contact musical styles over others, then symbols like the wooden mackerel replica or the debuséch were used to evoke these associations and perpetuate a (mythological) past in a contemporary performance context. But the right to call upon such symbols, which bestowed worldly authority on their owners, was

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prefigured by the customary social structure. As such, symbols have become accessible for unrestricted usage in the ethnographic present, and they now hold the power to turn an otherwise innovative cultural performance into a cultural expression that invokes linkage to a past by visual or sound symbolism. Chelitakl rechuodel have thus been adopted as a power-lending symbolic device in the public arena. But this is only one side of the coin, for a “discrepancy emerges between politicized constructions of culture and identity, on the one hand, and culture and identity as lived realities on the other.”739 Because of this inextricable knot among sound, sentiment, motivation, and context, the question: “Are traditional markers of identity […] motivators in themselves or externalizations of motives?”740 can only be tackled in connection with Palauan music after looking at some of the forces at work in the ever-changing and multi-dimensional relationship among the individuals and groups that add up to the collectivity of social actors who authorize (re)constructions of the cultural Own, because “music, an aesthetic practice, articulates in itself an understanding of both group relations and individuality, on the basis of which ethical codes and social ideologies are understood.”741

Individual and Collectivity

Culture is a framework for identity construction. Music, as a content of this framework, “does not […] simply provide a marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed.”742 Music has formative power with respect to the shifting images of identity, which, by their nature, are representations and symbols of identity always in flux, changing in response to new situations and events. They “come to be embodied dynamically in musical cultures, which then also form the reproduction of those identities—no passive process of reflection.”743 In the post-colonial circumstances of the contemporary Pacific, identities are commonly being reconstituted and rephrased in terms of a revival of traditional culture, which simultaneously involves the mobilization of historical symbols of ethnicity to express identity of [S]elf in relation to 744

[O]ther.

Palauan chelitakl rechuodel in the contemporary context have become one such historical, mobilized symbol. Because the connotations that music carries have been turned into emblematic icons, these connotations cannot be thought of outside the context of the struggles Palau has been facing, be they internal boundary and


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competency negotiations among the customary and elected leadership, political autonomy, or, very generally speaking, the search for a place in the world. In analyzing musical symbols as changing markers of these shifting images of identity, de facto differences need further qualification. It is not only actual musical difference that makes cultural change; it is also the actor’s mode of contextually perceiving and dealing with difference that functionalizes, ignores, denies or minimizes “the audible obvious,” thereby integrating musical difference into identity negotiation. In other words, music is highly laden with contextual meaning, never absolute, and it is an embodied imaginary evocation of identity.745 With respect to Palauan music, the crucial question is who (all) is speaking, and what the speakers’ dialectic relationship among one another is. Obviously, authorial subjectivities are diverse, and multiple individual self-identifications and collective identifications may co-exist in one individual as well as in society at large, producing creative tension. 746 In, among other things, displaying the complexities of these sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually complementary identifications, Palauan music and music history displays the internal conflicts and disjunctures of a society. In the context of Palauan music, the discursive relationship between the individual and the collective is profoundly shaped by societal pre-figuration. Just how immediately this is articulated in music is illustrated by the fact that chants, for instance, are invalid if the audience does not partake in the individual chanter’s performance by delivering the prescribed, shouted response. Chants are thus aural expressions of an understanding of group and individual relations. Discourse between individual and collective understandings of the creative medium of music is confined to popular music, while the “music of the past” is conceived of as non-negotiable, though it does accommodate similar processes, as analysis has revealed. Generally, individual agency interacts with collective discursive formations and larger contexts, such as colonial, post-colonial, and other discourses, and the flow of knowledge in transnational x-scapes. All three—individual, collective, 747 and deterritorialized discourses—are constantly both mediating one another and, at the same time, being mediated by one another. The question of how to get an analytical hold on this triangular relationship continues to pose perhaps the greatest challenge to the study of cultural identity. 748 For the study of music, the questions appear even more challenging, given the particular relationship between the two localized forces of individual and collective identifications in any given society.

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It seems that in Palau, the public domain is the space for maintaining and reestablishing one’s bonds with a perceived “traditional” past, whereas the private realm is the place to negotiate the “advanced” and modern.749 This speaks of the multiple identities of the individual, although I hasten to acknowledge that in the private realm, small groups and group dynamics are of course applicable as well. In pre-contact Palau, the individual (or: the private realm) was always under the control of the community in the sense that the latter was the approving or disapproving authority and the focal point of customary law and “proper” conduct and behavior. Individual agency, as a consequence, was strikingly reduced, as the following description of the background of the chiefly kelulau suggests. There was a… reluctance with which people assumed personal responsibility for decisions. Pains were taken to avoid this. In village meetings it became important to arrive at a general consensus with no individual statement of opinion. The chiefs would be seated according to rank and would discuss problems by sending out messengers or by whispering. Finally, the first ranking rubak would 750

announce a decision, but one that had already been agreed upon by the others.

It was thus expected that individual agencies be categorically subordinated to (tacit) group consensus, a practice the long-term traces of which still shine through in the act of confining clearly innovative decisions to a realm that either does not or just barely challenges existing value structures and authority patterns—the individual’s private realm. The private realm is also the place where Palau Pop will be enjoyed, whereas at official, representative functions, (evolved) traditional music will be performed. Palau Pop is a site for musical innovation and the application of new sonic symbols, whereas (evolved) traditional music is expected to be subject to protective preservation; although the meaning of the symbols in use here may change, the symbols themselves, conceptually, do not. The negotiation of novel sonic symbols, including appropriated elements from other musical cultures, one might argue, tends to be located in the less authoritative scope of the individual rather than in the community’s shared social space; the sounds of collectivity, however, remain those of (evolved) traditional music, naturally in its contemporary state. The individuals’ varying outlooks may be projected on those sounding emblems of collective identity—the sound of an chesols, that is to say, may carry vastly different connotations in the perception of individual A than in the perception of individual B—, and the changes in performance practice, even in (evolved) traditional music, are considerable. But what is important is that the accepted concept of these “emblems of our identity” remains salient. A


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reduction to schematized patterns of this accepted concept serves this purpose: evolved traditional music, like the same genres in pre-contact times, reifies a mobilized group identity. Whether it is the chant that brings about group identification, or the group identification that requires expression through chant, the question here is not “Are traditional markers of identity […] motivators in themselves or externalizations of motives?” For, chants are discourse in the most Foucauldian of senses: they are in many ways productive and form the idea/object about which they speak; they produce and require knowledge and power, while at the same time subverting both; and they produce effects of truth.

Change

More simply put, “the aesthetic is held to portend social change; it can stand in psychically for wider social change.”751 In the case of Palauan chants, the meaning of that change is not so much found in the text itself, but in the performance of the text, in which the self continuously projects and dissolves itself. In chanting today, multiple temporalities are present in one moment, including many (re)constructed pasts. Research into the performing arts in the Pacific region has shown that in order to be considered as such, “tradition” need not be age-old, transmitted in an unbroken chain, 752 and may indeed have incorporated elements from outside. 753 The strong conjuncture of expressive arts and identity negotiation remains, and performing is not least a valid representative practice in various political arenas. In no way does this compromise the Own, the own cultural distinctiveness. It is in the entanglement of the “small cycles […] and the more open-ended historical sequences in which they are embedded”754 that Palauan chants today find the flexibility to retain meaning, precisely because of the great number of potential references they bear depending on the individual listener’s mindset: It is important to see that the tempo of these small-scale periodicities may be set in more than one longue durée, with the processes implied by history and genealogy creating multiple temporalities for any given practice. It further follows that in studying the consumption practices of distinct societies, we must be prepared to encounter a host of different histories and genealogies present at the same moment.

755

Histories, in this sense, lead…

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you outward, to link patterns of changes to increasingly larger universes of interaction; genealogy leads you inward, toward cultural dispositions and styles that might be stubbornly embedded both in local institutions and in the history of the local habitus.

756

A major conceptual change, therefore, lies in the fact that as they started to be utilized in vastly diverging referential worlds, certain vocal genres of Palauan music, and chants in particular, have taken on several “lives.” This is by no means unusual in the contemporary Pacific, where oftentimes “a discrepancy emerges between politicized constructions of culture and identity on the one hand, and culture and identity as lived realities on the other.”757 Chants have become a resource for the expression of various agendas, and also “a sometimes potent ideological weapon in contemporary political action aimed at furthering sectional interests.”758 At the same time, the patina attached to them legitimizes this tool by calling upon constructions of a bygone past. But why, then, is this nostalgia limited to particular genres? Why do contemporary Palauans wonder about the future of chants, but comparatively little about the loss of other vocal genres, for instance omengeredakl and kesekes? The seeming contradiction in Pacific constructions of identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the focus on continuity with (imagined) yesterday’s lifeworlds, while identities are re-constituted in order to re-articulate the self within rapidly changing circumstances. History has, in other words, become a resource in the articulation of identifications in the present and the future: of prime importance is “not the so-called return to roots,” argues Hall,759 “but a coming to-terms-with our ‘routes.’” For reasons that stand in connection with the thematic complexes outlined above, chesols and other chants are clearly felt to be more immediate reconnections with roots, but also with the routes. This is not a merely oppositional representation of culture, proposing a “sound of Self” as a counterpart to the various Other(s’) sounds. 760 The occupation with Other influences has been more audible in popular musical genres, and is less obtrusive in chants; yet the rapprochement of the chant idiom with Euro-American musical language is discernible. In Pacific cultures where cultural or ethnic differences within island society are prominent determinants of public identity discourse, for instance when clear binary oppositions (a “we” opposing a “them”) that are innate to a community form the main spaces of identity contestation, as on Fiji, where the “resources for the “middle ground” of cultural rapprochement, a stated political priority, often come from neither local domain, but from outside,” 761 internal boundary negotiations have much greater weight in identity discourse. Popular music of Euro-


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American idiomatic provenance, this line of argument goes on, can therefore provide two or more opposing parties a neutral, common denominator, and thus, a shared musical place in an otherwise bifurcated cultural environment. In small Palau, however, the negotiation of the Self has always proceeded along other lines: the (re)defining of local identity has largely occurred through the localization of an ideationally homogenous Self in relation to the politically superior Other(s). EuroAmerican mass culture, therefore, could at no point provide a neutral cultural space in the Palauan context; rather, the pop idiom was just another Other sound. In contemporary Palau, the sound of the chant is the evocation of age-old knowledge; the act of chanting is the implementation of rightful authority. The construction and consolidation of power structures, as well as the individual’s place therein, has always been the main purpose of chants, unlike in other musical genres, and therefore, they are much more than any other musical genre capable of localizing Self by communicating a sense of predisposed continuity, and a cultural raison d’être. The local is not a hotly contested space in Palau, but local authorities are, and more than any other musical genre, chanting provides the space to assert them. This is neither the politics of pastness, nor a colonial univers de discours; this is nostalgia and fragmentary memory as sources for the work of the imagination, that “constitutive feature of modern subjectivity.”762 As… the musical imaginary works to prefigure, crystallize or potentialize emergent, real forms of sociocultural identity or alliance […] labile or emergent sociocultural identities come to be prefigured, negotiated, and constructed in music, so re-forming (or re-constructing) the boundaries between social categories, between self and other.

763

Palauan music is thus a core ingredient in the self-making process, providing “scripts for possible lives;”764 at the same time, performing music and dance is motivated by the search for a valid notion of identity, which “comes from the outside not the inside; it is something we put or try on, not something we reveal or discover.” 765 From this perspective, identity is an ideal, “what we would like to be, not what we are,” 766 idealizing Self in its social environment. In being performed, identity is at the same time very real, Frith goes on: “Music gives us a real experience of what the ideal could be”767 by involving language, mimics, gestures, and desires in performance. In this way, different styles of music work to give the listener different identities by placing these styles in a particular social context. In this sense…

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style is another word for the perception of relationships. […] Identity is thus necessarily a matter of ritual, it describes one’s place in a dramatized pattern of relationships—one can never really express oneself ‘autonomously’.768

On the functional level, then, the purpose and effects of Palauan music have maintained its core, all the while its referential world has been undergoing vast changes, expansions, and alterations. It is amply evident that authenticity, that virtually historical anthropological concept, is really not of great importance here. The musically Own, in its permanent metamorphosis, and ever-changing as it is, does have a distinct shape to the indigenous listener. To take up again this chapter’s metaphor: in accepting a formerly unknown aura of ephemerality, the roots of music have not been cut and retied in Palau: they have been adjusting to what is required from them if they are still supposed to feed the tree.


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EPILOGUE – RE-READING PALAUAN MUSIC

Palau’s and Micronesia’s pre-contact days were characterized by a long-distance flow of various goods and commodities, as, among many other witnesses of that time, the history of glass bead money in Palau shows. Palauan society incorporated these newly arrived goods into existing exchange and trade structures, which serves as just one example of how considerable changes were worked on value structures, and what fundamental role “imported” goods would acquire in the course of time. The idea of a “static” pre-contact society in Palau as an ever-unchanging object is clearly misleading. So is the idea of a perpetuated colonial marginalization and denigration of the Palauan culture through the various colonial administrations: certainly marginalization through outsiders has taken place to a considerable extent, and left lasting imprints on the Palauan negotiation of Self up until today. But Palauans were never passive victims of cultural domination from without. The history of their music is the history of a dialectic relationship between musical communication and political and cultural power relations, and the impact that the latter have had on the changing contours of identity discourse and expression. The concept of globalization has often been used as a “conceptual blackbox” 769 to describe (any and all) phenomenon of syncretic developments of music all over the world. However, this is also a marginalizing practice, as it invariably imputes an unpreparedness of the local to respond to the Master Narrative; 770 moreover, it is based on the idea of a homogenous cultural identity in a given society, an outdated concept that by now has been substituted with the acknowledgment of the complexities of

“multiple

and

overlapping

identities,

transnational

consumerism,

diasporic

communities, migration, and the Internet explosion”771 within any given society. Not all musical appropriation is the result of colonial oppression and domination from without, but to some extent, musical change is always a sounding interim result of ongoing processes of negotiation of Self. Several musical principles have contributed to the aesthetics of sound in pre-contact Palau in the first place. Not all of these find verbal expression today, and although in contemporary Palau, some remnants of these aesthetic conventions seem to be applied in an intuitive manner, it cannot be decided whether they have ever been conceptualized into a sanctioned canon of aesthetic laws or not. That what makes music both meaningful and beautiful to the Palauan listener is its referential context, but precisely not only that. Chanters and singers also apply to their performance very

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subtle techniques of structuring the musical matrix which are absolute and derive from the appreciation of concepts such as abstract harmonic relationships, and communication and entanglement of various musical parameters (such as tempo, inner tempo, and melodic structure). All of these practices have one thing in common: they are performance in the sense that their effect is wholly dependent on the musician’s ability to render minute details according to their requirements. Musical appropriation, whether the incorporation of foreign elements or the adoption of whole musical idioms, has played a central part in the history of Palauan music in the last century. Some musical genres have incorporated decisive changes into their idiom, whereas others have maintained the core features of their pre-contact form. Incidentally, the latter are all genres with a performance rate that has been diminishing throughout the last century. Other genres, such as derebechesiil, are set in an idiom that is of foreign derivation. All these appropriations and incorporations are “children of their time:” derebechesiil, for instance, emerged during the Japanese administration, and its idiom and structure closely emulate particular Japanese vocal genres. Likewise, those musical developments that have been shown to be major sites of change in Palauan music of the second half of the twentieth century are clearly inspired by EuroAmerican concepts of tonal and rhythmic space in music. Other musical styles that have been brought to Palau have simply been ignored or rejected over time. An interesting example is that of the brass band. Missionaries and others have repeatedly tried to instill a tradition of brass band music in various contexts (Christian mission, schools, community college), but in spite of the ready availability of brass instruments, the brass band idiom did not take root in Palau. The brass band flourished for the short time of its (invariably foreign) director’s presence on the island, but thereafter it came to a halt quickly. There are, in my opinion, at least three reasons for this. One is related to the general tendency of Palauans to dismiss musical instruments. Unlike other Pacific island cultures, Palauans have not actually appropriated foreign instruments (ukulele, accordion, keyboard instrument) to any significant extent in spite of various attempts of outsiders to spread them. This is a remnant of pre-contact cultural legacy, in which actual musical instruments did not play any significant role until the introduction of the ngaok flute (the debuséch conch shell forms a category of sound-producing devices separate from musical instruments). Sound production, in Palau, is closely associated with the human voice. The intermediation of a (mechanical) device between sound producer and sound product runs counter to this association, and perhaps also evokes a certain discomfort because of haptic (and customary) unfamiliarity with instrumental


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sound production. Although today, the phenomenon of non-vocal sound generation is, of course, as ubiquitous in contemporary Palau as elsewhere, it is not apparently felt to be an appropriate medium for wide-spread, active expression of local sentiments. A second reason for the non-appropriation of the brass band certainly lies in the dynamic relationship between music and function in Palau. The brass band was introduced in connection with Christian mission in the first place, i.e., in the context of religion and ritual—in which music and performing arts have customarily played an important role in Palau. This connection was based on the spoken or chanted word in pre-contact Palau, and verbal content could not be separated from its musical manifestation in chants, as this connection had been established by the deities in the first place. Verbal content and musical rendition thereof legitimized each other. Brass bands in Christian contexts, on the other hand, serve accompanying purposes; all the while the supremacy of the textual component remains unchallenged. Brass bands as accompaniment for choral singing and other religious and liturgical purposes can be said to serve the festive aggrandizement of the Christian message, whereas according to Palauan pre-contact custom, message and musical form cannot actually be looked at separately; chorals, on the other hand, had originally been introduced a cappella, without instrumental accompaniment, so that no functional necessity for musical accompaniment was felt. Against this background, one might argue that the brass band did not have to fill any functional void in a cultural niche that customarily was characterized by dense functional networks of ritual and symbolism. In more entertainment oriented realms, the appropriation of new elements without attributing to them a particular function has been possible at any time, as for example derebechesiil show. But not so in a cultural practice the ritual aspects of which have been historically dominant. A third reason lies in the lack of qualified instructors to carry on the practical music lessons begun by the missionaries. The history of the brass band in Palau illustrates how unpredictably mechanisms of musical appropriation work, 772 and how significantly, if subtly, they depend on precontact value structures. Although the latter are hardly recognizable in today’s musical practice, they have crucially shaped the historical development that led up to it. In Palau, song and chant are considered an essential part of public events, particularly when these occasions are of representative nature; rather little attention, on the other hand, is paid to music instruction. Also, concessions to the musical form of chants are possible to a considerable degree. And yet, they not only carry an important layer of

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patina, but are also looked at by many individuals as repositories of ancient knowledge that also today translates into magical and political power. There is, then, a fundamental discrepancy between the role attributed to music in individual and collective identity expressions. Nationalist agendas, a major voice expressing collective identity, commonly portray a group’s homogenous cultural boundaries, evoking an unbroken chain of culture transmission in order to describe the political entity.773 Ultimately, the old anthropological theorem holds well for pre-contact Palauan music that it is firstly the contextual boundary that counts—and only secondly, content.774 But in today’s world of transnational flows of information, these boundaries of various cultural lineages are characterized by a differential permeability. 775 As referential frameworks multiply, cultural boundaries multiply. To return to the argumentative point of origin, in a world with people on the move, in which a commodifying music industry and communication networks spread around the globe, analyses of musical developments cannot be reduced to a post-colonial reading of the text against the background of political power structures in history. Migration, to name but one, has been effecting significant changes into island x-scapes. The cultural Self has become an intangible concept because of multiple identifications relating to historically determined imagined worlds.776 An important aspect of these multiple identifications is the coincidence of nostalgia and a fragmented memory. It is not unusual that “symbols of historical events […] are […] continually manipulated to give new meaning to old events.” 777 In Palau, new sound is given (an imagined) old meaning in order to legitimate the performer or a particular agenda. Sound is made olangch, an object that contains and carries history. Strikingly, one is reminded of the representational reductionism that Edward Said detected in European depictions of the Oriental Other.778 History and images of Self are constantly reinvented in all human societies,779 and a study of the transformation of self-imagining in Micronesia with respect to the apparently prevalent tendency to “orientalize” the Pacific Self(s), and the relationship that these transformations have to the performing arts, might yield most interesting results pertaining to the localization of Self in island x-scapes. As a referential framework for identification, a certain degree of musical indigeneity is indispensable. Yet, the entire array of Palauan music, including entirely adopted genres, is Palauan; not so much because it has been defined by enduring features from times immemorial, but because it is relatable to Palauans of diverse backgrounds. It consists of audible cultural signs (of and in history) which carry ever-changing


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emotional connotations to the ever-changing insider, who moves in ever-changing xscapes. It asserts identity in keeping with various political and personal agendas. Syncretic and reconstructed musics are not necessarily insincere and purely propagandistic; they are a part of processes of identification, and thus by nature in flux. It must further be accepted that not every islander’s negotiation of identification(s) is a struggle, as it is to some ethnographers. The arts, and music in particular, are as much shaped by the individual’s intuition and imagination as they are by ideological considerations, and “culture” as well as “identity” remain dynamic rubrics780 rather than the mathematical result of juxtaposed dialectics such as stasis/change and old/new.

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Appendix


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Appendix A Otengelel a chesols 1. E-Reberbong obom ngasech ra ngesechelel a meseksikt, e tourengreng er kau obil meaii mang, arturang el ngara sob a chilat er kau e Reberbong, el kmo ngika ngelekel a chelid, mengdi imong ra delal e, e meremang ngera kosisiik—iiang. 2. Me-ngera kosisiik e ngii, a meringel er rakt a, ileko er eouluades, meng dikea ar kiei ra rcheleoch, ma ruulengesall—iiang. 3. Ma-ruulengesall e, koldi kubenge sesei, era ikel ungeil tut, me koldi lolim ar rcheleoch, ma ruulengesall e, eng meringel al cheroll—iiang. 4. E-mlechei metilecha el udoud e, el kumeketang erngii, tilcha mle ngeum, eolkerim, me kedemo metengel el moriou el uades, eng esols—iiang. 5. O-bora ianged a Mlechei, me okerim lebong, e Mlechei a kmera el memlai er kau, me kedemo mtei elmo ra ioulades, elmo meruul ra nglaikede, e tuuelkeloll eru, bang elmo mellomes—iiang. 6. Ema-kbora ianged e temengiut erngii ra bai, ma ormuul el kmo kid amoriou eluades, elmo meruul a nglaiked e, eng tuuelkelol—iiang. 7. Ma-kedimle melcha er olbetelem, el kekeriel beruadel, eungil kesuobel ra, medal a bai ra, rengklemai—iiang.

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Informants Names are followed by institutional affiliation, if any, and the state in Palau with which the individuals or institutions are associated. In the case of places outside Palau, the associated city is followed by an indication of the respective country in parentheses.

Simeon Adelbai, Belau National Museum, Koror Kyoko April, Ngarchelong Dwight G. Alexander, Ministry of Education, Koror Alois Alonz, Koror Kuiroy Arurang, Koror Dirk Anthony Ballendorf, Micronesian Area Research Center (University of Guam) Harry Benge, Koror Meked Besebes, Belau National Museum, Koror Howard Charles, Palau Community College, Koror Lydia Charles, Palau Evangelical Church, Koror Cristin China, Belau Modekngei School, Ngatpang Bedbii Chokai, Belau Modekngei School, Ngatpang Tilei Erungel, Koror Winman Erungel, Koror Mandy Etpison, Etpison Museum, Koror Emmy Ezekiel, Koror Tita Famboa, Koror Evangelical Church, Koror Sandy Fernandez, Belau National Museum Library, Koror Jonah Florentino, Jehova Witnesses, Koror Merline Halieliang, Satawal (Yap, Federated States of Micronesia) Vicenta Idip, Koror Informant A (contact details known to the author) Ilong Rubasch Isaol, Koror


Kerngerong Iyechad, Airai Victoria Johanes, Melekeok Oribech Josep, Melekeok Vicky Kanai, Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror Katherine Kesolei, Koror Humiko Kingzio, Koror Morimats Kingzio, Koror Kaelani Kinney, Koror Rose Klewei, Koror Chiokai Kloulubak, Kayangel Richard Knecht, Historical Preservation Office/Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror Uodelchad Krai, Melekeok Billy G. Kuartei, Palau Evangelical Church, Koror Angela Leuice Simpson Kempis Mad, Koror Terrence McClure, Airai Rengiil Medalarak, Ngatpang Molau Megreos, Melekeok Roland Merar, Historical Preservation Office/Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror Walter R. Metes, Historical Preservation Office/Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror Melson Miko, Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror Yorang Miner, Koror Masako Mongami, Melekeok Rikel Mosel, Koror Feverlyn Ngiramengior, Ngchesar Josepha Ngiramengior, Ngchesar

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Singeru Ngiramolau, Koror Idip Ngiratiou, Koror Osisang Ning, Emmaus High School, Koror Ken Norton, Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Koror Ibau Demei Oiterong, Koror Vicenta S. Olkeriil, Melekeok Matsko Omengkau, Melekeok Earnest Ongidobel, T8AA Radio Station, Koror Caled Otto, Koror Belsechel Philip, Melekeok Ibul Rechelbang, Melekeok Faustina K. Rehuher, Belau National Museum, Koror Kiyoko Rengiil, Koror Wilhelm Rengiil, Koror Rusk R. Saburo, Sacred Heart Church, Koror Carlos Salii, Koror Gloria Salii, Koror Riosang Salvador, Ngarchelong Ulrich Schmitt, Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany) Tosko Sehat, Melekeok Alexander Simpson, Pearl City (USA) Nelson Sisior, Koror Barbara B. Smith, Honolulu (Hawai’i, USA) Johannes Staerkel, Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany) Kiyoko Sumang, Melekeok Sr. Ilse Szaukellis, Archives of the Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany) Melvin Takeshi, Belau National Museum, Koror


Elsie K. Tellei, Koror Sr. Ingelore Thiem, Liebenzell Mission, Bad Liebenzell (Germany) Perpetua Tmetuchl, Airai Johnson Toribiong, Koror Magdalena Demek Towai, Ngardmau Pauline Towai, Koror Harrilee Ubedei, Ngarchelong Benhart Wong, Palau Evangelical Church, Koror Nancy Wong, Koror Iyechad Yaoch, Airai

◊

249

250

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Recordings Commercial Recordings MCs —Howard Charles & Deborah Toribiong, Tial A Bung Era Eanged. Cheliteklel a sengk ma deurreng, HMC Music Studio Koror [no year] Howard Charles, Belau Er Kid, HmC Productions S.W. Florence 1995, HMC7001 —Deborah Toribiong, Kolebrang Kristina, Nadia Dirraitih & Howard Charles, Kotek, Van Nuys [no date] —Halley Eriich, Halley’s Best Hits vol. 1, ET Records, [Koror] 1996, ET-016 —Halley Eriich, Ai Sa Nangyo, ET Records, [Koror] 1994, ET-010 Historical Recordings 1) The Hamburg South Seas Expedition recordings (1909; six wax cylinders). Collection currently stored at Phonogramm-Archive Berlin, Germany, as “Hamburger SüdseeExpedition” (“Hamburg South Seas Expedition”).

2) The Muranushi recordings (1936; 36 recordings). Collection published as Tatar 1985.

3) The Siemer recordings (1936; 52 recordings). Collection currently stored at the Phonogramm-Archive Berlin, Germany, as “Siemer Palau.”

4) The Barbara B. Smith recordings (1963; 6 CDs with digitalized recordings). Collection stored in the Pacific Collection of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA; copy held by the Belau National Museum, Koror, Palau.

5) The Yamaguti recordings (1965–66; 9 recordings available to the author).

6) Local Palauan recordings, both private and prepared by and stored at the governmental Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror, Palau.

7) Recordings prepared by the author during fieldwork in Palau (2005–2007; 124 recordings).


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251

Appendix B

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Dipesh Chakrabarty

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Amasa Delano

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Jay Dobbin and Francis X. Hezel Micronesian Migration Since World War II, in: Micronesian Counselor, vol. 19, August 1996 William W. Donner

“It’s the Same Old Song But With a Different Meaning“: Community ad Ethnicity in Sikaiana Expressive Culture, in: Pacific Studies, vol. 15 (4) (Special Issue: The Arts and Politics), December 1992, pp. 67–81

Maria Dunkel

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Donald Evans

Musical Instruments of the Eastern Caroline Islands, in: Micronesian Reporter 13 (1976), pp. 13–20

Ymesei Ezekiel

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Stephen Feld

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Hans Fischer

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J. L. Fischer & Marc J. Swartz Socio-Psychological Aspects of Some Trukese and Ponapean Love Songs, in: Journal of American Folklore 73 (1960), pp. 218–224

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Judy Flores

Kanton Chamorrita revisited in the new millenium, in: Helen Reeves Lawrence & Don Niles (eds.), Traditionalism and Modernity in the Music and Dance of Oceania: Essays in Honour of Barbara B. Smith (= Oceania Monograph 52), Sydney 2001, pp. 19–32 Artists and Activists in cultural identity construction in the Mariana Islands, in: Toon van Meijl & Jelle Miedema (eds.), Shifting Images of Identity in the Pacific, Leiden 2004, pp. 119–134

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Leadership and Cultural Change in Palau, Chicago 1960

Georg Forster

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Jobst P. Fricke

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Simon Frith

Introduction, in: S. Frith (ed.), World Music, Politics and Social Change, Manchester 1989 Music and Identity, in: Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity, London 1996, pp- 108–127

Clifford Geertz José Mauricio Gojénola

The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York 1973 [no title; letter dating April 24th, 1922], in: Noticias de los Misioneros de las Islas Carolinas y Marianas, Madrid 1923, pp. 51–54

Line Grenier

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L. Grossberg

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P. Hambruch & A. Eilers Musik und Tanz, Ponape, in: Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908– 1910, IIB/7/ii, Hamburg 1936, pp. 184–225 P. Hambruch

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George Herzog

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(2001a) Schule und Ausbildung in der deutschen Südsee, in: Die Deutsche Südsee 1884-1914. Ein Handbuch, Paderborn [2001] 22002, pp. 198–238 (2001b) Zur Einführung: Die Deutschen und die Südsee, in: Die Deutsche Südsee 1884-1914. Ein Handbuch, Paderborn [2001] 22002, pp. 1–24 Bilder aus der deutschen Südsee. Fotografien 1884–1914, Paderborn 2005 Hermann J. Hiery & John M. MacKenzie (eds.) European Impact and Pacific Influence. British and German Colonial Policy in the Pacific Islands and the Indigenous Response, London & New York 1997 Hisakatsu Hijikata

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Pandora Hopkins

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Mariano de la Hoz

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Shuzo Ishimori

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Monique Jeudy-Ballini The Lives of the Mask. A few Sulka reasons for perplexity, in: Toon van Meijl & Jelle Miedema (eds.), Shifting Images of Identity in the Pacific, Leiden 2004, pp. 101–118 Lewis S. Josephs

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Mannerism and Cultural Change: An Ethnomusicological Example, in: Current Anthropology 11 (4–5) 1970, pp. 465–475

Adrienne L. Kaeppler

Epilogue: States of the Arts, in: Pacific Studies 15 (1992) 4, pp. 311–318 Profile of Oceania, in: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998, pp. 2–6 Accordions in Tahiti — an enigma, in: Helen Reeves Lawrence & Don Niles (eds.), Traditionalism and Modernity in the Music and Dance of Oceania: Essays in Honour of Barbara B. Smith (=Oceania Monograph 52), Sydney 2001, pp. 45–66

Adrienne L. Kaeppler & J.W. Love (eds.) The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Boris N. Putilov, Lamont Lindstrom, Geoffrey M. White, J. W. Love, Martin M. Marks, Stephen A. Wild & Deborah J. Scratch (Kaeppler et. al. 1998) Encounters with “The Other”, in: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998, pp. 7–52 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Karen Stevenson, Stephen A. Wild, Don Niles, Vida Chenoweth (Kaeppler et. al. 1998a) Encounters among “Ourselves”, in: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998, pp. 53–68 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Faustina K. Rehuher, Eve C. Pinsker, Deirdre Marhall-Dean, Mac Marshall, Larry Gabriel, Joakim Manniwel Peter, Juliana Flinn, Karen L- Nero, Judy Flores (Kaeppler et. al. 1998b) West Micronesia, in: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998, pp. 722–747 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Don Niles, Steven R. Nachman, Vida Chenoweth, Regis Stella, Jill Nash, J.W. Love, Jared Tao Keil, Ryuichi Tai, & Hugo Zemp (Kaeppler et. al. 1998c) Solomon Islands, in: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998, pp. 630–670 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, J.W. Love, Catherine J. Ellis, Harvey Whitehouse, Margaret J. Kartomi, Anne M. Gee, Peter Russell Crowe, Deirde Marshall-Dean, Helen Taliai, Siupeli Taliai, Paul Vaiinupo Pouesi, Amy Ku’uleialoha Stilllman (Kaeppler et. al. 1998d) Music and Religion, in: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol.9 (Australia and the Pacific Islands), New York 1998, pp. 185–210 George Keate

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1

‘Are ‘Are Classification of Musical Ethnomusicology 12 (1978) 1, pp. 37–67

Types

and

Instruments,

in:

Although dance is of central importance among the Palauan performing arts, I look at it from the

musicologist’s perspective only. The study of dance is a discipline in its own right, and a more holistic and thorough analysis of the artistic interplay between dance movement and dance chant would undoubtedly not only yield most interesting results, but also provide background information that would be complementary to the present analysis (which is limited to the music used to accompany dancing). However, it is beyond the scope of this study and, in the chapters on dance, I concentrate on the accompanying music and the history of specific genres. 2

Where possible, the spelling of Palauan words in this study follows that stipulated by Lewis S. Josephs’ New

Palauan-English Dictionary (Honolulu 1990), unless noted otherwise, or unless written sources that make use of a different spelling are being quoted. When referring to places, I use the spelling commonly employed in English. In using Palauan terms, I employ the plural form popularly used in English (e.g., rubak, pl. rubaks; chesols, pl. chesols). According to Palauan orthography and phonetics, ch indicates a glottal stop; and ng resembles the pronunciation of “ng” in the English word “sing”. 3

Geertz 1973:6–10.

4

Appadurai 1996:33.

5

Cf. Appadurai 1996:48ff.

6

Appadurai 1996:32.

7

Appadurai 1996:33.

8

Appadurai 1996:48.

9

Appadurai 1996:49.

10

Appadurai 1996:33.

11

Appadurai 1996:34.

12

Appadurai 1996:44.

13

Geertz 1973.

14

Rushdie 1983.

15

Cf. Appadurai 1990: 5–6.

16

Appadurai 1996:186.

17

Connell & Gibson 2003:43.

18

E.g. Nettl 1985; Kartomi 1981.

19

Parmentier 1987:11.

20

Parmentier 1987:11.

21

Parmentier 1987:12. The italics are in the original.

22

Parmentier 1987:3.

23

Appadurai 1996:17.

24

For instnace, Faustina Rehuher, personal communication, January 20, 2005.

25

Cf. Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:275.

26

Also see Krämer 1929 passim.

27

Cf. Kaeppler et. al. 1998:7.

28

Parmentier 1987:28.

29

Takayama 1981:3f.


◊

273

30

Parmentier 1987:28f.

31

Cf. Krämer 1929; Hijikata 1996. Also see Smith 1997:10.

32

Parmentier 1987:29.

33

Parmentier 1987:26, 36. Also see Takayama 1981:4.

34

Parmentier 1987:38. Also see Krämer 1926:157.

35

Murdock 1968.

36

Bellwood 1980.

37

Sakiyama 1987:43.

38

“Men of the West” is a term applied to any visitor to Palau. It does not refer to the visitor’s point of origin, but

to the fact that due to the currents, any ship calling at Palau had to do so by approaching the islands from their Western side. 39

Nero 1990:66.

40

Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:47.

41

All island societies of the Western Carolines likewise ‘unlearned’ how to navigate by the stars. The Central

Carolinians, in contrast, are considered to be the world’s only people to have retained their noninstrumental navigation skills. See Smith 1998:715. However, single individuals in twentieth century Palau still seem to have possessed the knowledge of sailing by the stars. Informant A, personal communication, January 19, 2006. 42

Kiste 1992:vii.

43

« […] que ces Isles sont habitées par un Peuple nombreux, mais inhumain & barbare ; que les hommes &

les femmes y sont entierement nus, & se repaissent de chair humaine ; que les Indiens des Carolines regardent cette Nations avec horreur, comme l’ennemie du genre humain, avec laquelle il est dangereux d’avoir le moindre commerce. » Cantova 1728:218. 44

Hezel 1983:50f. Hezel refers to the castaways as Woleians; the source itself says that the group was from

Faraulep. 45

Cf. Appadurai 1996:178f.

46

Force & Force 1981:77ff.

47

Imported goods were traded as most valuable commodities and also entered local exchange patterns

elsewhere in the Pacific. See, for example, Jeudy-Ballini 2004:106ff. on shell money used by the Sulka of New Britain; and Palau Society of Historians 1997:49, for a brief note on Palauan money. 48

Shorett 1970, Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:35. Also see von Bennigsen 1901:448.

49

Krämer 1929:200. Interestingly, Alfred Tetens reports that when he visited Yap in the 1860s, the “natives of

Yap […] fear [… the Palauans] greatly”, and showed a hostile attitude towards the Palauans, even though they were still carving stone money in the Palaus. Tetens 1888:10; 12. 50

Krämer 1929:f.; Hijikata 1996:82ff.; 130; 157.

51

Krämer 1929:200; Hijikata 1996:82ff.; 130.

52

Hijikata 1993:14; Hijikata 1996:108.

53

In this context, European and American foreigners form a particular case. The first of a long row of foreign

“beachcombers“ in Palau is Madan Blanchard, who was a crew member of Captain Henry Wilson’s Antelope, a British East India Company ship which shipwrecked in Palau in August, 1783. See Hezel 2004. 54

Smith 1998:715.

55

See Semper 1873:76.

274

◊


56

Parmentier 1987:39.

57

In this, the Palauan conceptualization of the world is in line with world views found elsewhere in Micronesia.

See Käser & Steimle 2001 for a further discussion of various Micronesian cosmologies. 58

Krämer, Hijikata, Parmentier, and others recorded different variants of the Palauan genesis. See Krämer

1929:1ff.; Hijikata 1996:9ff.; Parmentier 1987:passim, but in particular pp.127ff; also see Smith 1997, Palau Society of Historians:1996 and 1997. In spite of the availability of several accounts, written documentation of Palauan genesis and oral history remains fragmentary. 59

Palau Society of Historians 1997:63; informant A, personal communication, January 19, 2006.

60

For instance, Ponapeans also trace their music into the mythological past. See Bailey 1978:23.

61

Krämer 1926:315. The members of the highest club participating in the ruk were entitled to carry such a

replica (Krämer 1926:313), which also functioned as a marker of hierarchy. Also see Kubary 1885:105. 62

Kubary 1888:24; Krämer 1929:92.

63

Semper mentions a healing ceremony that lasted two months. Semper 1873:202.

64

Kubary 1888:27; 1888b:43f.

65

See Aoyagi 2002:40–47.

66

Krämer 1929:130.

67

See, for example, Krämer 1929:107.

68

Parmentier 1987:55.

69

De Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol. 62r.

70

PCAA n.d.1:3.

71

Kubary 1873:217.

72

See Bailey 1978:27.

73

See Shuster 1982:145.

74

Spanish captain Felipe de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba, who in the 1880s attended a funeral in Palau, gives a

part of the text of a funeral chant. 75

Barnett 1961.

76

Parmentier 1987:94.

77

Kubary 1885:52. Translation mine.

78

See Kubary 1888:27ff.; Krämer 1926:306ff.

79

“[...] spielen die Tänze der alkten Männer und Frauen eine Hauptrolle. In ihren Wechselgesängen fangen

sie an, ihr eigenes Lob zu verkündigen. Kriegserinnerungen werden wachgerufen, Sieger, Häuptlinge und deren Glanzleistungen werden im Lied besungen, ebesno der Wohlstand des Landes, Reichtum, Geld, Land und Meere und deren Schätze, und nicht am wenigsten ihre Gottheiten, und deren personifizierte Vertreter werden umschmeichelt, um Gunst zu erwerben” Länge 1936:47. 80

Howe 2000:12.

81

Howe 2000:13.

82

Kiste 1994:18.

83

For excerpts from various explorers’ accounts and travelogues, see Hezel & Berg 1979.

84

Heine 1973:11.

85

Hezel 1972:26.

86

Krämer 1917:1.

87

Nero 1990:66.


◊

275

88

Hezel 1983:67; Heinemann 1995:19.

89

The phonetic similarity between ibedul and Abba Thulle suggests that Wilson’s version is no more than a

misspelling of the Palauan title ibedul. 90

Keate 1788:217f.

91

Hezel 1983:72.

92

Delano 1968:67, quoted from Hezel & Berg 1979:81.

93

Forster 1977:191.

94

Keate compiled the report on the basis of Wilson’s documents. Keate 1788.

95

Forster 1977:5. Original in German.

96

Keate 1788:66f.

97

Keate 1788:116f.

98

Yamaguti 1967:50.

99

According to Palaun custom, the presented head is that of the one person killed in the battle; additional

casualties do not normally occur. See Semper 1873:168; Kubary 1873:197; Kubary 1885:129ff. 100

Keate 1788:67.

101

Cobbledick seems to have left a lasting impression: when the East India Company sent two vessels to

Palau in 1790, the Bombay officers found that the Palauan “King […] made many inquiries about the English, and about different people whose names he remembered, especially the boy COBBLEDICK, who used to sing to him.” Hockin 1803:13. 102

Keate 1788:254f.

103

Hezel 1983:73.

104

Forster 1977:218.

105

Keate 1788:349.

106

Keate 1788:349.

107

Keate 1788:349.

108

PCAA 1977:135.

109

In pre-contact Palau, special events serve as mnemonics and thus provide relative orientation in time. See

McKnight 1961:4ff. 110

Report of Captain Edward C. Barnard. Martin 1980:28f.

111

See, for example, Semper 1873:258ff.

112

Semper 1873:174.

113

List by Francis X. Hezel, http://www.micsem.org/pubs/articles/historical/bcomber/palau.htm.

114

PCAA 1977:148ff.

115

A chief of Kayangel in Palau’s north, reflecting on the European technique of extracting coconut oil from the

coconut palm, expressed to Karl Semper his conviction that “you men of ngebard [i.e. the West] are really smart people, almost as clever as our rechelid. We knew about the oil from the coconuts for a long time [but did not know how to fetch it]”. Semper 1873. The Italics are mine. 116

Krämer 1929:141.

117

McCutcheon 1991:148.

118

Parmentier 1987:34.

119

Shuster 1982:11f.

120

See Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:98.

276

◊


121

The document is given in Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:100f.

122


123

Parmentier 1987:46.

124

Parmentier 1987:46.

125

Hezel 1983:317f. The idea of the “fatal impact”, which turned the noble savage into a dying savage, was a

popular theme in contemporary anthropology as well as in romantic literature. See Howe 2000:42. 126

See Shuster 1982: passim.

127

See the report of Captain de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba (1887).

128


129

Sources used include Krämer:1938, letters written by Capuchin priests stationed on Palau, and official

government reports (see bibliography). 130

See Hiery 2001b.

131

Gründer 2002:46.

132

For details on German judiciary on Palau, cf. Sack:2002.

133

Senfft 1902; Hardach 2001:516f.

134

Senfft 1902:263.

135

This is evident in the reports of district administrators throughout the region. See, for example, Senfft

1902:263. 136

Senfft 1905:51f.

137

Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:124f.

138

Senfft 1902:263.

139

Hardach 2001:522.

140

Reichs=Kolonialamt 1911:188.

141

See Klein-Arendt 2001:180ff.

142

Hiery 2001b:17.

143

At the opening of the mine in 1909, 23 Europeans, 55 Chinese, and 98 Yapese were employed. See PCAA

1977:208. By 1913, the work force consisted of 10 Germans, 500 Palauans and Yapese, and 100 Chinese. Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:127. 144

169 boys, 104 girls (Hiery 2001a:212f.).

145

Shuster 1982:150.

146

In 1911, 97% of the school-aged islanders attended missionary schools. See Hiery 2001a:201.

147

Shuster 1982:12f.

148

Shuster 1982:62.

149

Hiery 2001a:198ff.

150

Colonial government teachers of both German and Japanese schools often complained about their

students’ low proficiency regarding literacy in the language of instruction as compared to oral fluency. See Shuster 1982:166; 232. 151

“Todas les tardes se reunen al_ // gunas jovenes y en casa del rey // le cantan en voz baja hast que // el

rey se duerme ó las manda // callar y retirarse.” De Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol. 18r. 152

Hiery 2001a:209.

153

Mühlhäusler 2001:248ff.

154

See Krämer 1929: 302f.


◊

277

155

Senfft 1905:52; Born 1907:288.

156

Flores 2004; Kolig 2004.

157

Hardach 2001:530.

158

PCAA 1977:iii.

159

Peattie 1988:2.

160

Parmentier 1987:48.

161

The Japanese also occupied the German territory in China; British troops invaded German New Guinea,

Samoa, Nauru, and the Solomons. 162

Yanaihara 1940:22.

163

Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Quoted in Rechebei & McPhetres 199:148.

164

Quoted in Peattie 1988:81.

165


166

Peattie 1987:37.

167

In addition to Japanese immigrants from rural Japan, great numbers of Okinawans entered Palau. They did

so not only to escape economic hardship, but also to leave behind the social discrimination they faced from Japanese mainlanders. See Peattie 1987:159. 168

Parmentier 1987:48. From 1930 to 1940, the Japanese population grew by 21,000.

169

Yanaihara 1940:23.

170

Peattie 1987:104.

171

Force 1960:86.

172

Parmentier 1987:48,

173

Parmentier 1987:49.

174


175


176

The differences between the two branches were considerable. The education system, for example,

included a full range education of 12 years for Japanese, while Palauans were taught for three years with an option of two years of “advanced studies.” 177

Leo Ruluked, quoted in Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:154.

178


179

Iyechad Yaoch, and Kerngerong Iyechad, personal communication, February 22, 2005; also, Lydia

Charles, personal communication, February 11, 2005. 180

Iyechad Yaoch, Airai, and Kerngerong Iyechad, Airai; personal communication, February 22, 2005; Idip

Ngiratiou, Koror; personal communication, February 27, 2005. 181

Aoyahi 2002:1.

182

E.g. Shuster 1982:12.

183

Aoyahi 2002:2.

184


185

“For example, a great number of Belauans came to the Modekngei leaders asking for talismans during

World War II, but they left the Modekngei soon after the war.” Aoyahi 2002:9. According to a 1988 estimate, there were 800 Modekngeis in Palau (Tellei 1988:1); a 1995 census revealed 590 followers (Aoyahi 2002:191). 186

Hiery 1995:130.

278

◊


187

Salii 1973:41.

188

Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:180ff.

189

The refuge in Hinangbas (jap. hinang basho: place for refuge), usually sites in the jungle, is the subject of

many a song. 190

Barnett 1970:21.

191

Heine 1974:17.

192

Parmentier 1987:52.

193

Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:198;204.

194

Trusteeship Agreement for the Trust Territory of the Pacific islands (1947). Rendered in full length in Heine

1974:188ff. 195

See Heine 1974:4ff.

196

Kiste 1994a:230.

197

Kiste 1994a:230.

198

Heine 1974:7.

199


200

The Marshall Islands Congress was approved in 1950; the Yap Islands Congress, which had existed for a

couple of years already, was officially accepted in 1951; the Ponape Islands Congress was established in 1952; the Mariana Islands District Legislature and the Truk District Congress in 1963 (after the end of the nuclear test series on the Bikini and Eniwetak atolls). All congresses were designed as advisory bodies to their respective district administrators without legislative authority. See Heine 1974:7. 201

Faustina K. Rehuher, personal communication, January 20, 2005.

202


203

Salii 1973:42.

204

Heine 1974:6.

205


206

This is evident, among other things, in individual efforts made by Palauan college students in Hawai’i to

initiate a musicological documentation of Palauan musical culture. These led to the 1963 field trip of Barbara B. Smith, then piano professor at Hawai’i University, and the resultant collection of recordings which are described in more detail Part II. Personal communication with Barbara B. Smith, September 3, 2005. 207

Kiste 1994a:231.

208

Kiste 1994a:232.

209

In 1960, a third of the Palauan population (3,600) lived in the urban center Koror. Rechebei & McPhetres

1997:243. 210

Salii 1973:42.

211

Schoeffel 1994:351f.

212

Kiste 1994a:232.

213

Heine 1974:8.

214

Salii 1973:44.

215

“The compacts […] define an arrangement in which the island nations grant the United States strategic

prerogatives in exchange for financial subsidies and certain federal services.” See Kiste 1994a:233. 216

Kiste 1994a:234.


217

◊

279

Violent acts first culminated in the assassination of first president Haruo Remeliik in 1985. See Rechebei &

McPhetres 1997:304ff. 218

Smith 1998:719.

219

For an overview of hymnody in Pacific island music cultures with special reference to Polynesia, read

McLean 1999:431ff. 220

Hezel 1971:36f.

221

Quoted in Hezel 1971.

222

As mentioned above. See also Force 1960:77f.

223

See, for example, Born 1907:288.

224

See the report of missionary Indalecio Llera. Llera 1922a:50f.

225

Hezel 1971.

226

See Bailey 1978:19 on Ponape.

227

Smith 1998:720. Also see Krämer 1926:317.

228

Browning 1970:45.

229

“Eine fast zwanzigjährige Tätigkeit der Mission hat wenig vermocht, die Palauaner ihren alten Sitten und

Gebräuchen zu entfremden.” Born 1907:288. 230

For a detailed account of the German school system in the Pacific, see Hiery 2001a.

231

E.g. Osisang Ninh, personal communication, January 16, 2005.

232

Peattie 1988:92ff. This applies to the youth on the larger, central islands. Children living on remote islands

were selected by local chiefs and then sent to the district centers to study. See Hezel 2002:566. 233

After the war, mission schools were allowed to resume their work, but were “gradually driven into a

supplementary role”; by the 1930s, Micronesian children were required to attend Japanese schools. Peattie 1988:85; 91. 234

See Hezel 2002:566. The missionaries left behind on Palau a Catholic community of 400 members.

235

Peattie 1988:84.

236


237

Hezel 1991:71f.

238

Peattie 1988:84.

239

Peattie 1988:85.

240

Among others, Rikel Moses, Koror, personal communication, February 27, 2005.

241

Idip Ngiratiou, Koror, personal communication, February 27, 2005. This clear duality in spite of evident

educational efforts on the side of the Japanese seems to have been the general policy pursued by the Nan’yo authorities. 242

Shuster 1982:97.

243

See Liebenzeller Mission 2003:13f.

244

Shuster 1982:83.

245

Shuster 1982:108.

246

Shuster 1982:85.

247

Compare Hezel 1991:75.

248

Hezel 1991:76.

249

Liebenzeller Mission 2003:15ff.

250

Compare the CIA World Factbook, available at http://www.cia.gov.

280

◊


251

Aoyahi 2002:191.

252

Shuster 1982:83.

253

Macpherson 1992:443.

254

Kubary 1873:188ff.

255

See Semper 1862.

256

See Macpherson 1992; Howe 2001.

257

Heine 1974:16.

258

Howe 1988:95.

259

Shuster 1982:232. While this statement seems rather general in respect to literacy, it interestingly holds

true for musical literacy. 260

Heine 1974:37.

261

The term “evolved traditional” is borrowed from Kaeppler (1992:314ff.). In Kaeppler’s use, “evolved

traditional” art forms are those which are in “continuation of traditional art (for example, as it was recorded at the time of European contact) that has evolved along indigenous lines, retaining its indigenous basic structure and sentiment.” In identifying musical structure and sentiment as constants, Kaeppler uses the term to prevent music that has incorporated non-structural changes (such as pitch and timbre variations) from being categorically distinguished from their pre-contact forms, while at the same time pointing out that a perceivable difference to earlier forms does exist. Such differences need qualification in each individual case. But music is also a signifying practice, and the sentiment attached to both signifiers and signified is highly contextual, and therefore not stable or resistant to change in its social environment. I shall use the term in a broader sense: evolved traditional music, in my usage here, describes musical genres that may display tangible sonic deviances from earlier forms as well as developments in the conceptualization (including Kaeppler’s “sentiment”) of certain genres or sound events, while being identified by Palauans themselves as standing “in continuation of traditional art.” Any developments in sonic result and sentiment have to be described in due detail for every case. For an earlier usage of the term “traditionally evolved”, see Bailey 1978:12. 262

On local perceptions of musical “decline”, see Part III.

263

Krämer (e.g. 1926:319) mentions musical genres that did not prompt any associations whatsoever among

my informants, and which do not occur again in any later writings. 264

Also see Yamaguti 1967:14.

265

Also see Kubary 1885:103.

266

Moreover, the genre can be used within musical context, for instance dances. See the section on dance in

Part II. 267

One recording was in all likelihood taken on Tobi, one of the Southwest Islands. Paul Hambruch, a member

of the expedition, used the phonograph to play German military marches to a bewildered audience on Tobi. Hambruch’s subsequent attempt to record Tobian chants, however, was less well received by the islanders; only one individual, his local interpreter, eventually volunteered to recite into the device. Tobian oral history recounts how a “shaman” was forced to chant for the ethnographers to record. But instead of providing the requested chant, he recited a curse on the device and thus put a spell on the phonograph. Hambruch himself does not relay any information on the content of that recording. Peter W. Black, personal communication, September 5, 2006; Buschmann 1996:330. My thanks to Peter W. Black for pointing me to this significant detail.


268

◊

281

Personal communication between Sr. Ilse Szaukellis and Susanne Ziegler, April 22, 2002; this letter is

contained in the documents belonging to the collection Siemer Palau, Phonogramm-Archive Berlin, Germany. 269

Barbara B. Smith, personal communications, February 11, 2005, and May 10, 2006.

270

For instance, Krämer 1926:320; Herzog 1936:265, 269.

271

Kaeppler et. al. 1998b:722.

272

Compare Yamaguti’s distinction between “classical“ and “contemporary” Palauan music. Yamaguti

1967:passim, but p. 16 in particular. 273

Compare Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:19.

274

Krämer 1929:225f; 1926:320.

275

Compare Kubary 1888b:46f. on the usage of the magic power innate in things.

276

See the example given in Parmentier 1987:301ff.

277

See the example given in Kaeppler et. al. 1998b:724f.

278

See Bailey 1978 and Petersen 1992 for Pohnpei; Ishimori 1987 for Satawal; Kaeppler et. al. 1998:28ff.

279

“Ebenso ruft jeder Diebstahl am Eigenthum der Clubs, jede Verletzung einzelner Mitglieder rächende

Thaten von Seiten derselben hervor [...] So hatte z.B. während Kubary’s Anwesenheit in Korror ein Verwandter des Ajbatuls [i.e., ibedul] Betelpfefferpflanzen [...] gestohlen, welche Eigenthum eines Kaldebekels [i.e., men’s club] waren. In Folge dessen zogen zwei solcher Clubs, 120 Mann hoch, vereint vor den Wohnsitz des Königs nach Ajdit. Dort angekommen, breiteten sie sich vor dem Haus aus, begannen Tänze, wobei sie in furchtbarer Weise Gesänge heulten. Ajbatul [= ibedul], in seinem Haus sitzend, musste sich diese entehrende Katzenmusik gefallen lassen und obendrein noch den Clubmitgliedern zu trinken geben, schliesslich durch Bezahlung [...] an die beiden Anführer die Sache sühnen.” Kubary 1873:41. Kubary’s aesthetic judgment is personal, and not in all probability intended to indicate that the men performed badly on purpose. 280

See Kaeppler et. al. 1998:28ff. for additional examples of songs from other islands that are designed to

communicate disappointment. 281

Compare Yamaguti 1967:46f.

282

Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:24.

283


284

See Palau Society of Historians 1997:62. Omilil alone has been mistaken as a song type in its own right in

places; see Yamaguti 1967. 285

See Kubary 1885:101ff; Krämer 1926:321ff; Hijikata 1993:183ff.

286

On the omilil buil, see Kubary 1885:100, 103; Krämer 1926:320f.

287

Also see Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:16.

288

Krämer 1926:316f.

289

Both spellings, omengereal and omengereall, occur in writing.

290

Compare Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:13.

291

Krämer 1929:294f.

292

Semper 1873:202ff.

293

See, for example, Bailey 1985:127. Bailey describes a parallel development for the island of Pohnpei.

294

Several informants who chanted for me to record were not able to translate or explain the chanted lyrics.

295

See Krämer 1929:294f.; Semper 1873:202ff.

296

Several fundamental inconsistencies occur with other bits of oral history in this brief legend, which local

specialists have attributed to faulty transmission. Among them is the relationship between the two gods in the

282

◊


legend (e.g., the marriage between Ngirchongor and Ngerebluut), but, first and foremost, the performance of a delang on the occasion of a person’s death, which is considered offensive according to the standards of Palauan customs. The version of the story as related by Yamaguti also deviates substantially from musical forms that this story takes, particularly kesekes, and from the oral narrative versions. 297

Yamaguti 1967:31; Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:18.

298

“In the late twentieth century, women tend to be seen as the keepers of traditional culture in the Pacific

Islands, and tradition is the frequently invoked rationale for criticizing women who attempt to adopt modern lifestyles and values.” Schoeffel 1994:369. 299

Pitch analysis was carried out by means of the software transcribe!, version 7.30.1 for Microsoft Windows,

Seventh String Software, London (UK), and with the aid of the algorithm “YIN” [Alain de Cheveigné und Hideki Kawahara, YIN, a fundamental frequency estimator for speech and music, in: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America vol. 111 (2002), S. 1917–1930] under MATLAB version 7.0.0.19920. 300

Love et. al. 1998b:291

301

See Herzog 1936:266; also Smith 1998:716.

302

“Gab r dorod“ is Krämer’s spelling, which generally differs from that of other contemporary authors and

modern Palauan orthography. For want of cogent alternative spellings and a modern, orthographically correct version, I use Krämer’s proposed spelling. 303

„Ein Schwirrblatt […], das tönt, wie wenn ein Käfer ans Feuer fliegt.“ Krämer 1926:319. Similar instruments

have been documented in Kusaie, New Guinea, and the New Hebrides. See Evans 1976:18. 304

See Krämer 1926:319.

305

Simple instruments producing buzzing or humming sounds are popular throughout the Pacific. See

Kaeppler & Love 1998. 306

Krämer 1926:319.

307

Insufficient proof exists for his hypothesis. On Pohnpei, where the instrument is also known, locals attribute

the introduction of the metal Jew’s harp to whalers from Europe or America; they claim to have developed it later into a bamboo instrument (see Bailey 1978:18). Given the similarities between the Palauan and Pohnpeian Jew’s harps and their South East Asian counterpart as suggested by pictorial evidence, this explanation does not seem plausible, and one has to assume the introduction of the instrument in its Southeast Asian bamboo form. The instrument could possibly have come to Palau by “mediation” of other Pacific islands in the first place. 308

Yamaguti 1967:55.

309

See Santos 1998:904f.

310

“Several Western Oceanic societies liken the rhythmic twanging of a lamellaphone to the sexual action of a

penis.“ Love et. al. 1998 :374. 311

Compare McKnight 1991:15.

312

The omengeredakl “Ngirakoranges” relates the story of Melelem and his wife. Melelem’s wife’s vagina was

covered with a thick layer of skin that prevented the couple from having intercourse. Melelem, who had no knowledge of female anatomy at all, indirectly approached his friend Ngirakoranges for help. Ngirakoranges took a clam shell and cut Melelem’s wife’s skin, and from that on, Melelem and his wife “played the tumtum every night.” (Palauan: outumetum, to play the tumtum) This omengeredakl was recorded by Barbara B. Smith (item I-10 in her collection). Also see Krämer’s version of the story of Melelem and Ngirakoranges (1929:113). 313

See Bailey 1978:47 for a description of similar practices in Pohnpei.


◊

283

314

See Kubary 1873:8, 27, 44; Kubary 1885:44, 103, 11, 126, 133; Kämer 1926:298; Länge 1936:46.

315

See Krämer 1926:314; 1929:69, 137; Semper 1873:76; Kubary 1873:220.

316

“Der Galid Guodel ging einst mit andern Geistern an der Landungsbrücke beim Kap Gogiberames, die von

den Geistern gebaut worden war, am Strand von Melekeiok hinaus aufs Riff und fand dort eine leere debusogSchnecke. Er machte ein Loch hinein und blies, worauf alle seine Begleiter erschrocken davon liefen. Bald kamen aber alle Galid der Umgebung herzu und wollten das Tritonshorn haben, das seit jener Zeit bekannt ist.” Krämer 1929:125. 317

See Kubary 1873:27; Krämer 1929:23ff.

318

Semper 1873:302.

319

Krämer 1926:319.

320

The request was made by Barbara B. Smith during her fieldwork in Palau in 1963. She was given two

flutes, one of which the manufacturer played on the ngaok recordings that Smith made on that occasion. The instruments are now stored in the Ethnomusicology Instrument Collection at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, collection nos. S40215 and S40216. Barbara B. Smith, personal communications, February 11, 2005, and May 10, 2006. 321

Field notes of Barbara B. Smith, no pagination (comments on items I-17–23), stored in the library of the

University of Hawai’i at Manoa. A copy is owned by the Belau National Museum. 322

Barbara B. Smith, personal communications, February 11, 2005 and May 10, 2006.

323

See Born 1903:134ff. On the context of the ngall, also see Kaeppler et. al. 1998b:730; Fischer 1958:123.

For a critique of Born’s article, see Marshall Dean 1996. 324

Born 1903:134.

325

Barbara B. Smith, personal communication, February 11, 2005.

326

Field notes of Barbara B. Smith, no pagination (comments on items I-17–23), stored in the library of the

University of Hawai’i at Manoa. A copy is owned by the Belau National Museum. 327

Born 1903.

328

A transcription of this recording was provided by George Herzog. Herzog 1936:298.

329

For instance, the bangsi flute of the Mangyan in the highland region of Mindoro, the Philippines. Bangsi is a

word of Sanskrit derivation (“bansari”), merely meaning “flute.” It is applied to a variety of flute types in the Malay and South(east) Asian regions, but with the Mangyan, it specifically refers to a flute similar to the ngaok in type. On other flute types in Micronesia, see Evans 1976. 330

Wax cylinders 16, 17, and 18 from the Siemer collection.

331

Items I-17, I-18, and I-19 from the Barbara B. Smith Collection.

332

Yamaguti 1967:55.

333

Siemer wax cylinders 16 and 17.

334

Yamaguti 1967:55.

335

Esch is a term not understood in contemporary Palau. The only owl in Palau is the chesuch, the Palau

Scops owl (Pyrroglaux podargina); esch might very well be an obscure spelling of this word. 336

Yamaguti’s brief description brings to mind Steven Feld’s seminal study of the Kaluli imitations of bird calls

in music (Feld 1982). Such musical practices are generally known within the South Pacific region. 337

Siemer wax cylinder 18.

338

Wax cylinders 16 and 17 from the Siemer collection.

339

Love et. al. 1998a:329.

284

◊


340

Also see Abels 2008.

341

“Patina” has been proposed by Grant McCracken (1988) to refer to that trait of goods and items through

which their age becomes indexical of their high position in existing value structures. “The patina of objects takes on its full meaning only in a proper context, of both other objects and spaces for these assemblies of objects and persons who know how to indicate, through their bodily practices, their relationships to these objects.” Appadurai 1996:75. 342

This feature is shared by regional musical equivalents, such as the chants on Yap. Sonja Hegge, personal

communication, July 25, 2005. Also see Marshall Dean 1996:60. 343

Keate 1788:66f.

344

In 1965, Yamaguti attended a community event where the performance of chesols ra odanges had to be

modified due to individual participants’ lack of musical and textual knowledge. Yamaguti 1967:10. 345

See Krämer 1926:326.

346

Iyechad Yaoch, personal communication, February 22, 2005.

347

Derived from Palauan olsébek, to make or let (something) fly. Josephs 1990:239.

348

The melech is a god who is said to possess a particular amount of negative or destructive energy. When he

moves a “village will be torn like a ruul (fishnet) and ruined. It is said that a melech is something big and bright that brings with it a long tail.” (Hijikata 1993:250; also see Hijikata 1996:153f.) According to mythology, he once flew out from the roof area of a bai as a fireball (Josephs 1990:156), and he will inevitably be depicted on the gable of a bai. Palau Society of Historians 1997:63. 349

On the usage of particular kemeldiil (funeral) ‘songs’ during the otur-bladek (i.e., outside of an actual

funeral), which are communicated to a spirit medium by the chelids in order to announce the cause of a person’s death, see Hijikata 1996:13 and Palau Society of Historians 1997:46. 350

See Yamaguti 1967:52.

351

A great deal of the chant repertoire related to kelulau stands in connection with inter-village and inter-

community politics. Often, another village’s kelulau is praised in such chants, for instance for its effectiveness; they can also criticize the same (see the example given in Parmentier 1987:302). 352

Kubary 1888b passim.

353

Keate 1788:116f. Keate’s spelling is “weel”. John Pearce Hockin, who in 1803 published a supplement to

Keate’s account, translated this Palauan expression into English as “good, good!”. See Hockin 1803:9. Nevertheless, it seems to have had a far wider meaning, as it was also used as an expression of personal resignation (Hockin 1803:10). 354

Wilson/Keate describe this interaction between performer and audience, see part I.

355

Wilhelm Rengiil, personal communication, March 12, 2005.

356

Wavy melody patterns are frequently found throughout Micronesia. For further information on the role of

undulating pitch progressions in contemporary Yap, see Love et. al. 1998b:304ff. 357

This is a notation of the recording on wax cylinder no. 69 from the collection Hamburg South Seas

Expedition (“Hamburger Südsee-Expedition”), stored at the Phonogramm-Archive Berlin (Germany). Herzog 1936:295 gives a partial transcription of this item. No musicologically significant information was given by the members of the expedition on the single recordings in the collection. 358

Krämer recorded words to chesols which were unintelligible to the Palauans in 1909. See Krämer

1929:294ff.


359

◊

285

More such derivatives of chesols seem to have existed, but documentation is scarce. Their

appropriateness and performance spaces seem to have been dependent on function and embedded in prescribed patterns of temporal sequence of chesols and their derivatives. 360

Hijikata briefly mentions a “funeral chant called derubesebes.” Hijikata 1993:258

361

But see Hijikata’s remark that derubesebes can be performed by men during a funeral. Hijikata 1993:258.

362

See footnote 348. Palau Society of Historians 1996:18.

363

See Hockin 1803:15f for a brief description of a demalasoi chesols.

364

See Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:20, and Yamaguti 1967: 47.

365

See Krämer 1929:281f.

366

“It was a long known tradition to in this way publicly express complaints about one’s relatives which would

be answered accordingly.” („Es war von alters her Sitte, auf diese Art Beschwerden gegen Verwandte öffentlich anzubringen, die dann dementsprechend beantwortet wurden.”) Krämer 1929:281f. 367

Krämer 1929:282f.

368

Belsechel Philip, personal communication, February 18, 2005.

369

It is not uncommon in Palau to perform certain items in another musical genre’s musical idiom, for instance,

a derubesebes as chesols, or a delang as an rebetii. 370

Smith Dub I-2.3.

371

The lower framing pitch spectrum’s two inflections are notated here as c’ and c-sharp’’, and at one

exceptional point, the ambitus is extended considerably lower than that (notated here as b-flat); the upper framing pitch spectrum distinguishes between the two inflections evolving around, e’’-flat and e’’, and in correspondence with the structure of the lower framing pitch spectrum, an exceptionally high-pitched inflection is notated here as f’’. Both actually mark the extremes of the respective pitch spectrum according to the singer’s conception, but they stand out from the musical texture. According to their usage, they are not a functionally separate inflection of the respective framing pitch spectrum, but rather a coloration of the lower resp. higher inflection. Their function is in both cases identical to that of the adjacent inflection of the respective pitch spectrum. Therefore, they appear bracketed in music example 3.6. 372

“[...] funktionell identische, melodische Varianten desselben Tons […] Die Intonation ist [...] oft

schwankend.” Herzog 1936:268. 373

Allowing a little margin to accommodate the second phrases’ deviation of 0.5’’ from 6’’, one may interpret

proportions to be 3:2:, 1:1:, 2:1, 6:5; 3:5. The ratio of peak and bottom inner tempo is 2:1. 374

Rebetii is in places referred to as “moraklsau” by Muranushi. Moraklsau is a generic term for songs dealing

with love, and can be used to describe songs of different genres. See Tatar 1995:19; 38. 375

Krämer (1926:320) even takes it as normal that several singers sing along once a single individual has

started a rebetii. However, the few musical details he mentions–the use of body percussion, but more importantly the division of singers into prompter and choristers–lead to the assumption that he witnessed the performance of a rebetii in keredekiil mode (see below). 376

Riosang Salvador, personal communication April 12, 2005.

377


378

The eminent position of rebetii within the ruk performance has led Krämer (1926:319) and Siemer [field

notes (1936), stored at the Phonogramm-Archive, Berlin, Germany] to call rebetii “dance songs”. Compare Krämer 1929:295f. However, also see footnote 375. 379

Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:13.

286

380

◊


In 1965, Yamaguti noted that a distinction was made between soilokel rebetii and urunguul rebetii, a

conceptual differentiation which is obsolete nowadays. According to his information, soilokel rebetii are “resentful love songs”, whereas urunguul rebetii comprise “wishful love songs” (also see Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:13). The difference, according to him, is in the verbal content, and in that the words of a soilokel rebetii most often start with the word soilokel, which is the name of a male person. Furthermore, he states, soilokel rebetii mostly contain only one verse (see Yamaguti 1967:276). Smith recorded a rebetii which, according to her field notes, consists of three parts: rebetii, olekal, and cholengchongch. These terms mentioned by Yamaguti and Smith seem to serve to further distinguish function and verbal content of the respective items rather than refer to a difference in musical form. 381

Informant A, personal communication April 8, 2005.

382

Several informants.

383

The singer is Magdalena Demek Towai, Ngardmau. “Osisang” is the name of the woman addressed in this

rebetii. Literally, osisang means “(female) lover.” 384

Smith Collection I-15a.

385

Wax cylinder 68 in the Hamburg South Seas collection.

386

For a description of the Pohnpeian equivalent to kesekes, see Bailey 1978:58.

387

„Heldengesang“. Krämer 1929:209; 222; 240f; 243. See for samples of lyrics. Also see Yamaguti 1967:49f.

388

Krämer 1929:209ff.

389

Compare the function of lullabies in New Caledonia. Baudet et. al. 1998:672f.

390

See Krämer 1929:209, 222, 240, 243.

391

Barbara B. Smith Collection IV-16a.

392

Detection of fundamental frequency was performed with the aid of the algorithm “YIN” [de Cheveigné &

Kawahara 2002] under MATLAB version 7.0.0.19920. 393

See footnote 341.

394

Recording Abels 23.

395

Palau Society of Historians 2002:27.

396

Josephs 1990:260.

397

See Krämer 1929:296, 297, 300ff, for examples of boid.

398

“[…] gewöhnlich von drei Mann leise gesungen, dann von der Menge aufgenommen [...]” Krämer 1929:297.

399

Josephs 1990:26.

400

Informant A, personal communication April 8, 2005.

401

Palau Society of Historians 2002:27; Parmentier 1987:98.

402


403

Hijikata 1993:196.

404

Hijikata 1993:196.

405

Compare Palau Society of Historians 2002:27.

406

Krämer 1926:317. Krämer associates boid with the “hand-clapping dances” “malagolei” and “iangsól.”

407


408

A tendency seems to have persisted in Palau to assign the esbe part to exceptionally high-pitched male

voices whenever possible. Although there were few such voices, these men were sought after, and considered to be capable of delivering the esbe part particularly well. Informant A, personal communication May 12, 2006.


409

◊

287

Yamaguti in 1965 recorded a slightly different Palauan terminology: the mesuchokl prompts or “explains”

the song texts in between the formal units of the omengeredakl; mengíder is the “start-off,” which commences the boid; the meliikes is the leader of the chorus; the mengesbch is the “counterpart singer.” See Yamaguti 1967:64. However, this terminology was not approved by my interlocutors in 2005–2007, and they proposed the one given in the text instead; in connection with ruk, however, mesuchokl is used. The term melikes is also used by Kubary (1885b:6). 410


411

Josephs 1990:163.

412

Josephs 1990:179.

413

Josephs 1990:179.

414

As a matter of fact, in contemporary omengeredákl singing the esbe part is sometimes omitted for want of

skilled singers or sufficient familiarity with the repertoire. 415

See Josephs 1990:190, 293.

416

Recording Abels 61.

417

Informant A, personal communication September 8, 2006.

418

In the collection Barbara B. Smith, there is one item labeled an “Oloi” (= cholloi). Cholloi, however, merely

means “to be about to perform a kelloi,” so that the proper designation of this item would be kelloi (cheldolm). Yamaguti (1967:12) has an entry for “Ouelloi” in his taxonomy of Palauan music; his English translation for the genre is “song to call attention” (ibidem). This function, however, is not evidenced, and ouelloi actually merely means “to do a kelloi.” 419

Social expectations are gender-specific. “Women are expected to be grief stricken at death and so they

are. Men cannot be so emotionally involved.” Barnett 1961:21. 420

Restricting formalized mourning to performances near the corpse is not unusual in Oceania. See, for

instance, Kaeppler et. al. 1998c:645f. for laments of the Banoni (Solomon Islands). 421

Informant A, personal communication May 8, 2006.

422

Kubary 1885b:6.

423

“Una vez en el féretro, una da // las mugeres pronuncia en alta voz la oracion fúnebre en la que // se

celebran las cualidades del di_ // funto la bellera de su cuerpo, no_ // bleza de su rasa, su agilidad en // el baile, su dicha en la pesca, su // valor en el combate.” de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol. 16r. 424

Kubary 1888b:10.

425

Kubary (1885:43ff.) describes the procedure following the assassination of a title-holder. For general

description of mourning customs in Palau, see Kubary 1888b passim, but particularly pp. 9ff. Also see Keate 1788:323, who mentions that at a funeral, “the lamentation of the women attending was very great.” 426

Faustina Rehuher, personal communication June 12, 2007.

427

Compare Palau Society of Historians 2002:28.

428

“Die ich in Ngarmid hörte, bestanden aus zwei langgezogenen Tönen, der zweite um einen ganzen Ton

tiefer als der erste. [Dabei werden] die Hände zusammengeschlagen.” Krämer 1926:320. 429

„Kaldólan sind Košolš (= chesols), gefolgt von einem langsamen Ausbreiten und Zusammenschlagen der

Hände, ebenfalls bei Begräbnissen und in den Zwischenpausen der Mur-Tänze gesungen.” Kubary 1885:104. 430

„Lieder ernsten Inhaltes, die von Personen ohne Begleitung von Gesten, sitzend mit zwei nacheinander

folgenden Vorsängern und einem einfallenden Chor, der nur einen kurzen Refrain nachsingt, bei Begräbnissen und dem Berufen zu einer Gottheit vorgetragen werden.“ Kubary 1885:103f.

288

431

◊


„Bei dem “Homonodólom” (von Kaldólom) singt eine Frau vor, z.B. -Kann ho o ho tmo er niy, el tmo

ngallekél a wel- worauf eine Frau, die den Melíkes ausführt, den Ton der Zeile aufgreifend nachsingt: Kau bo– oó–oó–oó–oó–oó–oó – und dann vereinigen sich die Anwesenden in einen Chor: ey-Eéy-Eé sich in der Länge und der Melodie der vorgesungenen Zeile haltend. Der Inhalt der Lieder soll den Zustand der Seele oder der Hinterlassenen ausdrüclen, jedenfalls wird er aufgefasst als von dem abgeschiedenen Geiste herkommend.” Kubary 1885b:6. 432

„[...] giebt’s auch das Vorsingen und den Melíkes, aber bei dem Chore bewegen die Frauen die Hände und

schlagen dieselben zusammen bei dem Beendigen desselben.” Kubary 1885b:6. 433

Three of the kelloi recordings are in the group mode, while the remaining three are performed by single

individuals. 434

Barbara B. Smith Collection, IV-2. The piece drifts down a whole tone in course of its 5 verses.

435

The highly intonated b-flat and the low c-sharp approximate a second.

436

Krämer 1926:320.

437

Prepared by the Bureau of Arts and Culture, Koror.

438

Yamaguti 1967:30.

439

“A simple type of song” (“Gesänge einfacher Art”), Krämer 1926:320.

440

Compare Love et. al. 1998b:297.

441

For example, in the highlands of New Guinea (see Love et. al. 1998b:297). Outside delang, falsetto voice is

reported to have been used by spirit mediums in possessed state and in course of divination rituals. See Semper 1873:216f, 254f. Since by invoking the deities and bringing a spell (olai) over a person, strong emotions of love may be purposefully evoked, there is indeed a conceptual connection between these two known usages of falsetto voice in the religious realm on the one hand and in the sphere of sexual contacts on the other in Palauan culture. 442

Iyechad Yaoch, personal communication, February 22, 2005.

443

A Palauan informant commented that this performance was rather speedy (“most Palauan men chant in

medium pitch [whereas here, the chanter chants in high pitch] and slower”) which he takes to be the individual style of this particular chanter. Informant A, personal communication November 12, 2006. 444


445

One informant maintained that llall and delang were identical in musical form and referred to as llall in

Babeldoab, and as delang in other parts of the country (Iyechad Yaoch, personal communication, February 22, 2005); however, this statement was challenged by other informants. 446

Llall were a favourite pastime during the omilil. Also see Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:26.

447

Yamaguti 1967:30. Unfortunately, Yamaguti does not go into any detail. Some Palauans suggested that in

reciprocal performance practice, the llall chanted by the second gender group in response to an earlier delang addressed to them by the first gender group was called delang (Palau Society of Oral Historians 2002:26). No evidence is available to support this hypothesis. 448

Semper 1873:253ff.

449

Semper’s spelling is “allal” (p. 258), an outdated orthographic variant of llall.

450

But also see Krämer 1919:25, who lists “Ngaratogedi” as a men’s club of Ngril.

451

Semper 1873:255.

452

Semper 1873:256.

453

Semper 1873:257.


454

◊

289

Semper 1873:256. The modern Palauan version and the original English translation (rendered here with

minor changes) were prepared by the editor and translator of Semper 1873, Robert D. Craig and Mark L. Berg. 455

Semper 1873:258ff.

456

Semper 1873:258ff.

457

Palau Society of Historians 2002: p. 26. This was also expressed by several informants in 2005–07.

458

Josephs 1990:152.

459

Josephs 1990:152. Lexically, delang is merely translated as “chant (which ridicules people),“ the

appertaining verb melengdáng as to “tease” (pp. 71, 160). Both translations concerning delang point to content, while the translations of the terms relating to llall aim at describing function. 460


461

Yamaguti 1967:54.

462

Yamaguti, on the other hand, suggests that in bullachang, chanters would be “using similar melodic

contours and body movements [as in llall]” (1967:54). See the chapter on llall on the relationship between the musical forms of rebetii and llall respectively, as it informs on the musically palpable similarities between the genres. 463

The genre is also referred to as ngerel a ongúrs (Josephs 1990:269). Yamaguti (1967) has classified

ongurs as well as melauch and olai as music, probably because it may involve something reminiscent of musical recitation. In keeping with its ethymological meaning, however, melauch (derived from Palauan olechau; to attract a person’s attention, to call out to someone) is merely a formal shout to draw a person’s glance or attention. While ongurs may in places be considered “musik-like” by Palauans, melauch are “clearly not music.” The same is true for olai. Olai are incantations that were taught in secret because they were believed to affect daily lives (McKnight 1961:18f); “when anxiety was heightened in aspects of Palauan life, such as love afairs, competitive activities, or subsistence efforts in fishing and taro patch work, the people performed series of incantations.” (Yamaguti 1967:52) There are no extant recordings of melauch, but in any case, olai are not considered music. For a general note on charms and spells in Oceania, see Kaeppler et. al. 1998d:186. 464

Kubary 1885:125f.

465

Krämer 1926:319.

466

Aik e muu, aik e muu [repeated] a kerekar bekiis e ngak a Rekesesiuall ma ke kmal mo ungil e kerrekar.

Text and translation provided by Victoria Johanes, Belsechel Philip, Oribech Josep, and Vicenta S. Olkeriil, personal communication, February 18, 2005. 467

Krämer 1929:127.

468

In addition to the one given above: Krämer 1929:127; Yamaguti 1967:24.

469

Tatar 1985:22. The number of the recording is A-2. Compare Yamaguti 1967.

470

Klais- is the Palauan prefix for “two“; -kurs is derived from mengurs, to pull/tow/drag; and klaidesachel

means “race, competition.” Compare Kubary 1885:101f. 471

Compare the lyrics documented by Muranushi in 1936, published in Tatar 1985:22.

472

Compare Hijikata 1993:195.

473

Deutsches Kolonialblatt 1901:448.

474

Compare the story recorded by Krämer (1929:53, story 17b), wherein chelids row a boat while singing a

canoe song.

290

475

◊


Palau Society of Historians 2002:4f. Kubary goes as far as calling the ruk a means to maintain the

circulation of money (Kubary 1873:22f. Also see Krämer 1929:30). 476

See Kubary 1888b:27.

477


478

Also see Krämer 1929:294.

479


480

Krämer 1926:312. The term for this seclusion is mesúub, lit. “to study, to learn, to imitate.” Kubary

1885:105 (Kubary’s spelling: mesúb). 481

Kubary 1885:111.

482

Walleser 1970:33.

483

See Krämer 1926:312f. for his description of the dancers' seclusion. Dancers were supposed to be celibate

in the days before performances. 484

”Hundreds of people of both sexes and every age had turned up as spectators to the dance [...] The dance

was performed only by men and boys on a 200 to 300 meter long and some meters wide wooden structure. Red hibiscus blooms blazed in black hair, on shoulders and arms streaks of bright colored leaves were wound around shoulders and arms and moved like castanets while dancing. In the right hand a spear-like bamboo stake was swung or held in a graceful manner to the body’s rhythmic movement. The dance began, portraying a historical event with spear fights between pairs by which one of the pairs, without throwing a spear himself would catch the spears thrown at him until his opponent, now weaponless, surrendered and disappeared into the crowd of spectators. Then about 60 men entered the dance structure moving in a slow dance step and accompanying their movement with a deep, melodic song. They paraded in a skillful manner dances to the front and to the side in which one immediately noticed the thorough rehearsals. Eroticism came only very little to the forefront. The whole thing made a festive, truly unusual impression, in a way that I had never before felt at the dances of colored peoples.” („Dann betraten etwa 60 Männer, in langsamen Tanzschritt sich bewegend und ihre Bewegungen mit einem tief melodischen Gesang begleitend, das Tanzgerüst und führten in kunstvoller Weise Frontal- und Seitentänze aus, denen man ein sorgfältiges Einüben auf den ersten Blick anmerkte. Das Erotische trat bei dem Tanze nur wenig hervor. Das Ganze machte einen feierlichen, wirklich eigenartigen Eindruck, wie ich ihn bisher noch nie bei den Tänzen farbiger Völkerschaften empfunden hatte.”) Report in the Deutsches Kolonialblatt 1901, quoted by August Krämer (1926:316). 485

„Der liederliche Vorsänger von Ngardorok

Als einst einmal in Ngardorok ein ruk Tanz abgehalten wurde, paßte der Vorsänger schlecht auf. Die Männer machten auf der Tanzbühne Unfug und zogen Frauenröcke an. Als die Frau des Vorsängers kam und ihn rief, stieg er herunter und ging mit ihr davon. Da brachen auch die übrigen auf und schimpften.“ Krämer 1929:132. 486

Hijikata 1996:191.

487

„Was das Tanzen betrifft, so sind die Bewegungen im allgemeinen ruhig; nur bei den Mondscheintänzen

melil a buiel [...] scheint es lebhafter zuzugehen [...].“ Krämer 1926:316f. 488

« No tienen ningun instru // mento de música y cuando // bailan que suele ser a’la luz // de la luna delante

de la casa // del Rey cantan la mejor que // pueden y al compás de la // voz agitan todos en cadenzia // la cabeza los brazos, las ma // nos y los pies pero sín avan // zar una linea del sitio en qe // al principo se colocaron. // Sus actitudes y movimien // tos son artisticos y agradablez // se adornan la cabezo con con flo // res y plumas o’plantas oloro // sas y en las orejas usan zarei [zara?] // llos artisticamente tejïdos de hojas // de


◊

291

palmera y en cada una de // los otros miembros, brazos, ma // nos, pie, pantorilla tienen su // adorno especial y caracterís // tico. » de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol. 16v. 489

de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol. 17r.

490

Hijikata (1993:194) also mentions the nglóik er a sachel, i.e. the “male” nglóik (women’s dance). This term

does not occur in any other documents. Hijikata’s description matches the first performance context described above; in all probability, his nglóik er a sachel refers to the same item that is elsewhere called ultutelel. 491

Kubary 1885:105.

492

„Was das Tanzen betrifft, so sind die Bewegungen im allgemeinen ruhig; nur bei den Mondscheintänzen

melil a buiel [= omilil] scheint es lebhafter zuzugehen [...].“ Krämer 1926:316f. 493


494

Hijikata, therefore, even refers to rebetii and boid as dances (Hijikata 1996:195ff); Krämer calls boid a

“dance song”. Krämer 1926:317. 495

On the klakellall, see Palau Society of Historians 2002:16. Also see Krämer 1929:292; 293; and Hijikata

1996:195. 496

Informant A, personal communication November 12, 2006.

497

„Eine der Grundinstitutionen des Palau’schen Lebens.” Kubary 1873:198.

498

Kubary 1873:198. On the many contexts of the Palauan ruk, also see Kubary 1885:104ff.

499

Krämer 1926:312.

500

Kubary 1873:23; Kubary 1873:199.

501

See the detailed description provided by Kubary (1885:104ff; 112); and Krämer 1926:315ff.

502

Kubary 1885:104.

503

”If the decision is reached to hold a Mulbékel, then the chiefs gather in the area’s main bay and smash a

Tolúk, a small round table upon which food is usually served and the individual pieces are hung around the perimeter of the main bay. These are called “Mesiuker a tolúk” and they inform the community that a Ruk is coming up.” („Ist der Beschluss einen Mulbékel zu geben gefasst, so versammeln sich die Häuptlinge in dem Haupt-Bay des Landes und zerschlagen einen Tolúk, einen kleinen runden Tisch, auf welchem sonst Speisen aufgestischt werden und die einzelnen Theile werde auf der Aussenseite des Bay rund um aufgehangen. Dieses heisst „Mesiuker a tolúk” und zeigt der Gemeinde an, dass ein Ruk im Anzuge ist.”) Kubary 1885:104. Tolúk is a particular type of Palauan money in form of a plate that is made of turtle shell (see Josephs 1990:331). According to a newer source (Palau Society of Historians 2002:2), on the other hand, the rubaks’ “resolution is made public by breaking a round taro bench, normally used for offerings to the gods, and hanging the broken pieces outside on the village bai.” 504

„Es bieten sich […] von beiden Seiten ein oder zwei Kaldebekels an und erfolgt nun erst eine

Verständigung, wer den Horuídel und wer den Kotobádel [related to contemporary Palauan tebér, sardine] ausmachen soll. Den ersten bildet ein Kaldebekel der bei dem Ruk einen hölzernen Fisch (Caranx) in der Hand hält und damit verschieden Bewegungen ausführt, der letztere begnügt sich nur mit den Händen. Der Horuídel ist der wichtigste Theil der Tänzer.“ Kubary 1885:105. 505

Described in Kubary 1885:105f; Krämer 1926:314ff.

506

Krämer 1919:185f.; Krämer 1926:313.

507

Klemeai is derived from meáng or meai (modern spelling: meáech) (Krämer 1926:313). Being meáng

“makes the bearer holy […] and inviolable, also for the enemies in war”; it has “a religious character and

292

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belongs […] to the field of the Galid [= chelid].” Krämer 1926:305. In modern Palauan, meáng means “miraculous, marvellous, awesome.” Josephs 1990:142. 508

Krämer 1926:314. “Often a coconut is hung on the top, which is left there after the celebration; should it

germinate and fall down it is planted and the plant’s survival is seen as a good omen.” („Oft hängt eine Kokosnuß an der Spitze, die man nach dem Fest belässt; keimt sie und fällt herab, so wird sie eingepflanzt und das Gedeiehen des Baumes gilt as gute Vorbedeutung.“) 509

“Stützstock (skors […]) des Gottes.” Krämer 1926:314. Kubary’s term for this is “mo omedík a mesáng.”

Omedík (“to set a trap to catch an animal”) and bedeklél are ethymologically related and derive from omedíkl, to erect. 510

Krämer 1919:101.

511

Krämer 1926:314.

512

Kubary 1885:107; Krämer 1919:101.

513

Kubary 1885:112; Krämer 1919:185f.

514

Kubary 1885:107f. (“ottóbot a ruk“); Krämer 1926:314 (“goltóbed ra ruk”; also, “klóul tebedél”, “his great

coming out”). 515

Kubary 1885:109; Krämer 1919:101.

516

Palau Society of Historians 2002:11. On the lebuu, also see Krämer 1926:313 (“lebú”).

517

„Der Kaldebekel zieht in einem feierlichen Zuge das hölzerne Bild des Horuidels [= oruídel] in der

erhobenen rechten Hand haltend gegen den Strand, wo mittelwegs auf dem Steinwege auf einer kleinen Rüstung die Hälfte einer Tridacna-Schale mit Wasser gefüllt stehet und der Anführer taucht die Kopfspitze des Fisches in dasselbe, was homárak et horuidel, den Horuidel garmachen, heißt, und kehrt von der schweigenden Reihe gefolgt nach dem Bay el pelu zurück, wo die Frauen, die den Horuidel herausgelassen haben, einstweilen auf dem Koyláol Tänze ausführten. Der Horuidel betritt nun den erhöhten Fussboden und führt die eingeübten Tänze öffentlich aus, wobei das ganze Land und die nachbarlichen Staaten das Bay el pelu als Zuschauer erfüllen.” Kubary 1885:108. 518

In addition to Kubary’s report, also see Krämer 1926:315.

519

Krämer 1926:315.

520

Hijikata 1993:185. Kubary’s spelling is “blodóyol”, Krämer’s “bedóiel.” Also see the Palauan story recorded

by Krämer 1929:173ff., where the bedóel is also performed as part of a ruk. A ruk, including this type of game, was also witnessed by von Bennigsen, and described by him in a report in 1901. See Von Bennigsen 1901:449. 521

Kubary 1885:109; Krämer 1926:315f.

522

A chelebed is a “whip; club; bat; anything to hit with” (Josephs 1990:42). Hijikata himself considers a

chelebed as “a type of percussion instrument” (Hijikata 1993:191), which is a misleading circumscription of the translation provided by Josephs: while the items mentioned by Josephs will indeed be used for sound production in the course of the dance, they are not technically musical instruments. 523

Chaus literally means “lime“ [for betel nut]. In this particular context, it denotes the lime container, which

comes together with the tet ma chaus, the Palauan “betelnut bag,” in which everything required for betelnut chewing is carried. See Palau Society of Historians 2002:10. 524

Hijikata 1993:191f.

525

Hijikata 1993:197.

526

Palau Society of Historians 2002:10f.


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293

527

Chetákl means “trolling line.” Josephs 1990:57.

528

According to Hijikata, “a clown character often takes part in chetakl el tet.” He likens the latter to a dance

from “the Oleai area. A person jumps out from a line in the middle of the dance and makes funny faces or imitates action from the song, such as a crocodile or a flying airplane.” Hijikata 1993:193. This is described by Fr. Raymund, who attended a 1909 ruk performance: “The man at the very back was excused from singing and the general gestures. He played the navigator, who with huge effort and great talent should keep the long, heavy canoe in the right shipping channel. His leaps and grimaces, the seriousness and eagerness with which he portrayed his highly responsible office were such that every clown in the best German circus could have been seen doing it. He was the head person and biggest appeal for the audience; laughter often drowned out the singing.” („Der hinterste Mann war vom Gesang und den allgemeinen Gesten dispensiert; er stellte den Steuermann vor, der mit vieler Mühe und großem Geschick das lange, schwere Kanu im rechten Fahrtwasser halten sollte. Seine Sprünge und Fratzen, sein Ernst und Eifer, womit er sein verantwortungsvolles Amt darstelle, waren so, daß damit sich jeder Clown im besten deutschen Zirkus hätte sehen lassen können. Er bildete auch richtig für die Zuschauer die Hauptperson und Anziehungskraft; das Gelächter übertönte oft den Gesang.”) Müller 1910:25. 529

Josephs 1990:23.

530

Derived from deréder, “power, authority”; related to mengederéder, “head; […] explain […]; lead; guide;

give instructions or directions.” Josephs 1990:76. 531

Josephs 1990:343.

532

Hijikata 1993:193.

533


534

On local specifities attributed to the role of the tet, and therefore, also the chaus, during the mesúb, see

Krämer 1926:315. 535

Hijikata 1993:193.

536


537


538

The mesuchokl function, for instance, is a privilege of members of high-ranking families. Krämer 1926:307;

1929:168. Krämer’s term for both the male and female prompter in dances is ked ra nglóik. 539

The historical sound documents for the ruk include two wax cylinder recordings from the Siemer collection

(39, 40), and two recordings from the Smith collection (I-16, IV-19). 540

Recording I-16 from the Smith collection is titled Mekemedil a Terebkul Melai ra Ulong. Smith does not

quote the dancers’ names, but indicates that the 21 performers were members of the Meyuns Boy Scouts aged between 5 and 15. 541

Yamaguti 1967.

542

Hijikata 1993:186.

543

Hijikata 1993:186.

544

Josephs 1990:257.

545

Krämer 1926:317; 1929:297.

546

Josephs 1990:235.

547

Krämer 1929:297.

548

Bidél is the possessive noun to boid. Josephs 1990:26. Krämer also mentions the connection between the

words bidél and boid: Krämer 1929:297.

◊

294

549


In a modern English-language description (Palau Society of Historians 1997:64), no technical terminology

for the dance movements that can accompany a boid is used, which further backs this assumption. Hijikata, moreover, even equates the musical form of boid with a dance. Hijikata 1993:196f. 550

Kubary 1885:112. Krämer’s spelling is temengel a vag. Krämer 1926:316.

551

„[...] einen Ruk geringeren Grades.“ Kubary 1885:112.

552

„Die üblichen Details des Ruks werden beibehalten, aber nur in geringem Grade und die Theilnahme

beschränkt sich nur auf die Gemeinden Angarads [= Ngaraard] allein, die auch kein Geld oder nur ein sehr geringes and das Hauptland zahlen.” Kubary 1885:112f. 553

Kubary 1888:28.

554

Kubary 1873:198.

555

„Derselbe wird mit einem Männertanz eröffnet, welchem die Frauen mit Fackeln beiwohnen, was „to

molúyoker a ruk“ heißt.” Kubary 1885:112. 556

Josephs 1990:169. Also see Krämer 1926:316.

557

The uék is the purple swamphen, porphyrio porphyrio. Josephs 1990:337.

558

Tatar 1985:43; recording A28 from the Muranushi collection.

559


560


561

Mentioned in Palau Society of Historians 1997:62.

562

Kubary 1885:103; Krämer 1926:317. Kubary’s term is angadewu (1885:103); Krämer’s ngadebu

(1926:317). 563

Hijikata 1993:193.

564

Josephs 1990:23.

565

Josephs 1990:179.

566


567

Hijikata 1993:194.

568

Hijikata 1993:194.

569


570

Krämer 1926:283.

571

Josephs 1990:123.

572

„Tanzbesuch“. Krämer 1926:283.

573

Krämer 1926:283.

574

Kubary 1885:124ff.

575

„Die Gemeinde sucht einen Kopf und bringt den Kopf mit Tanz, für welchen sie bezahlt wird. Erst nach

diesem kann der neue Rúpak sich frei bewegen und auf den Seestrand gehen, was ihm vorher verboten ist. Er macht auch wohl den „Móloik“-Zug mit und besucht zum ersten Male die befreundeten Gemeinden, die ihm sämmtlich für das Landen ein Stück Audoud [= Palauan money] geben.“ Kubary 1885:124. 576

Kubary 1885:130f. Here, the word Kubary uses is “Molóck”, which he seems to use as a derivative of

nglóik. 577

Kubary 1885:103.

578

Josephs translates ourúk as “to do a man’s dance” (1990:281), and gives the meaning of melóik, as “to

dance”, independent of the dancers’ gender (1990:167). Krämer, moreover, translates the term ked ra nglóik as “prompter, usually “a man or a girl from a high-ranking family.” Krämer 1926:307.


579

◊

295

Muranushi in the 1930s recorded an item that he labelled as nglóik, which was sung by male performers;

he did not comment on this. Elizabeth Tatar, the editor who in the 1980s prepared his recordings for publication, felt compelled to remark that the nglóik is technically a women’s dance. (Tatar 1985:34) The conceptualization of the term nglóik over time as evident in this example is in keeping with what has been infered above. 580

Hijikata 1993:194f.

581

Kubary 1873:197.

582

« Los hombres se tinen la ca_ // ra para sus bailes guerreros // en el pecho y en la cara for_ // mando

rayas verticales en la // frente y megillas adornandose // adanas para esta diversion // con hojas verdes de palma que // colocan en la cabera pecho y // brazas. » de Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol. 62v. 583

Josephs 1990:226.

584


585

Hijikata 1993:196.

586

The last performance of an oeáng that was remembered by my informants is said to have taken place in

the 1950s. 587

Josephs 1990:240.

588

Hijikata 1993:196.

589

Kubary 1885:130.

590

Hijikata 1993:195.

591

„Nun begannen die Tänze. Eine Schwadron junger, kräftier, schön gebauter Männer, vielleicht 70 an der

Zahl, kamen zu zweien aufmarschiert. Es waren Leute aus dem Bezirk Ngarart [= Ngaraard], im Norden von Babelthaob, der größten Insel der Palau=Gruppe. Sie hatten sich wirklich fein herausgeputzt; ein breiter und roter Lendenschurz, um den Hals einen roten Schlips, auf dem Kopfe Ringe und andere Figuren aus dem dicken, weißen Mark eines Baumes, Arme und Füße waren mit Bändern aus jungen gelben Kokosblättern geziert. Natürlich die Kriegs= und Festfarbe, gelber Reng [= turmeric], fehlte nicht, sondern hatte in dem Gesichte und auf der Brust der Kriegerschar sehr reichliche Verwendung gefunden. In den Händen trugen sie einen ca. 1 Meter langen Bambusstock und ein kleines Ruder. Man stelle sich in 2 langen Reihen auf. Ein heller, durchdringender Schrei eröffnete den Tanz, der eigentlich nur aus Körperbewegungen, Mienenspiel und Hin= und Hermarschieren besteht. Der begleitende Gesang ist sehr schleppend und monoton, und das Fallen und Steigen der Stimme bewegt sich in wenigen halben Tönen. Der Text ist meistens ein altes Kriegs= oder Heldenlied, dessen Worte aber duch den Gesang, durch Dehnung der Vokale, Verschlucken der kurzen Silben, Abändern der Worte wegen des gesanglichen Wohlklanges so verstümmelt werden, daß selbst Palauer den Sinn des gehörten Liedes nicht erfassen können. Man muß sich den Text ohne die Melodie aufsagen lassen. Dafür aber sind die Bewegungen um so schöner. So exakt, so elegant und vielfältig waren die vielen Gesten, Schritte, Drehungen, daß man staunen mußte. Unterdessen waren die Männer von Mallegejok [= Melekeok], einer anderen Ortschaft, herangerückt. Die Hälfte der Leute trug in den Händen ein kleines, dreieckiges Kanusegel, die andern waren mit kleinen Rudern bewaffnet. Der Kopfputz war eigenartig; aus den Rippen des Kokosblattes hatten sie Rosetten, Kelche und ähnliche Figuren gebildet, schön überkleidet und verziert mit dem starken, weißen Gewebe einer Spinne, mit gelben, roten Wollfäden und Tuchstreifen. Ich sah einzelne dieser Haarzierden, die wirklich einer Modistin alle Ehre gemacht hätten. Dieser Tanz markierte eine siegreiche Kriegsfahrt auf dem Gabekl [= kabékel], dem großen Kriegskanu, weshalb sie die kleinen Segel und die Ruden in den Händen trugen. Der hinterste Mann war vom Gesang und den

296

◊


allgemeinen Gesten dispensiert; er stellte den Steuermann vor, der mit vieler Mühe und großem Geschick das lange, schwere Kanu im rechten Fahrtwasser halten sollte. Seine Sprünge und Fratzen, sein Ernst und Eifer, womit er sein verantwortungsvolles Amt darstelle, waren so, daß damit sich jeder Clown im besten deutschen Zirkus hätte sehen lassen können. Er bildete auch richtig für die Zuschauer die Hauptperson und Anziehungskraft; das Gelächter übertönte oft den Gesang. Die Tanzgruppen von Ngarart und Mallegejok führten hierauf miteinandern ein Kriegsschauspiel auf. Ein junger Mann aus Mallegejok legte sich in den Schatten des Soldatenhauses und „schlief“. Hinter dem Stationsgebäude hervor schlichen nund leise die Männer von Ngarart, in voller Kriegsausrüstung d.h. bewaffnet mit Holzspeeren, Beilen, Säbeln oder langen Messern. Rasch schlug ein kühner Held dem Schlafenden „den Kopf“ ab, d.h. hieb mit seinem langen Holzmesser wie besessen auf eine daneben liegende Kokonuß los, spießte sie auf und rannte zu seinen Gefährten zurück. Diese, voller Freude über den erfolgreichen Kriegszug, schrieen und tanzten, sodaß die Leute von Mallegejok, die unterdessen den „Leichnam ohne Kopf“ gefunden hatten, ebenfalls bewaffnet herbeiliefen, um sich zu rächen. Die beiden Kämpferscharen, jede vielleicht 50 Mann stark, sprangen einander entgegen, schwangen drohend ihre Waffen, bliesen in die Muscheln und schrieen aus voller Kehle. Als sie bis auf 3 Schritte aneinander gekommen waren, bogen jedesmal die vordersten um und zogen sich wieder zrück, nachdem jeder dem Gegner ein drohendes Gesicht gemacht, ihm seine Waffen gezeigt und vor ihm ausgespuckt hatte. Die Leute von Ngarart hatten unter ihren Bewaffneten zwei Mann mit „Schießgewehren“, zwei Holzprügeln, die so ungefähr die Form eines Gewehres hatten. Dieselben bildeten die Flanken der Schlachtlinie. Sie sprangen katzenartig bis nahe an den Feind heran, knieten nieder, griffen in jene Gegend wo sonst die richtigen Soldaten die Patronentasche tragen, taten, als ob sie laden würden, legten an, schrieen „puff!“ und blickten siegesbewußt nach der Wirkung ihres Schusses. Dieses Manöver wiederholten sie so oft und so schnell, daß sie mit ihrem Schnellfeuer die ganze Gegnerschar hätten niederstrecken müssen. Es war zum Verwundern, mit welchen Eifer die Leute dieses Spiel trieben, wie sie mit Seele und Leib dabei waren, wie sie fürchterlich ernst die Augen rollten und die Köpfe so verachtungsvoll den Gegner anwackelten, wie selbst alte Männer mit weißen flatterndem Bart in jugendlicher Begeisterung mitsprangen und mitschrien. Endlich schien es des grausigen Gemetzels genug zu sein, ohne daß es weitere Tote oder Verwundete gegeben hatte Man einigte sich, schloß Frieden, und beide Parteien führten um „den Kopf des Ermordeten“ den sog. Kopftanz auf. Dieser Kriegstanz war ein getreues Abbild der Kriegsführung der alten Palauer, die feige aus dem Hinterhalt einen Gegner ermordeten; die Rächer rückten an, schrieen, drohten und spotteten; dann wurde ein Palaugeldstück bezahlt, Festtanz aufgeführt, Festessen im besiegten Dorf gehalten und endlich Heimkehr mit Siegesfeier. In einem ihrer letzten Kriege schoß ein kühner junger Held mit seiner Flinte einem feindlichen Kanu ein Loch in den Rupf, sodaß dieses sank. [...] So lösten sich Tanz, Essen und Spiel ab, bis die Sonne hinter den steilen grünen Koralleninseln sich verbarg.“ Müller 1910:24ff. 592

Krämer 1926:317.

593

Marshall Dean 1996:65ff.

594

Walleser 1916:655.

595

Born 1903:141; also see Marshall Dean 1996:65.

596

Herzog 1936:297f.

597

The jerur in Yap is a man “[...who] takes up a position behind the dancers [and] who has the task of

speaking the song’s text loud and clearly as soon as the speed of movement makes singing impossible.” („[...der] hinter den Tänzern Aufstellung nimmt, [und] der die Aufgabe hat, den Text des Liedes laut und


◊

297

deutlich auszusprechen, sobald die Schnelligkeit der Bewegungen den Gesang unmöglich macht.“) Walleser 1916:655. 598

„Gamal’ sind Kriegstänze, welche von Palau eingeführt wurden. Ernst und würdevoll betreten die festlich

geschmückten Teilnehmer den Tanzplatz und stellen sich schweigend in gerader Linie auf. Bei Beginn des eigentlichen Tanzes machen die beiden Mittelmänner gegeneinander Front und mit ihnen die beiden Flanken, als deren Anführer sie gedacht sind. Nach einer stürmischen Herausforderung zum Kampfe beginnt das Handgemenge. Zu monitonem Gesange, untermischt mit ohrenbetäubendem Kriegsgeschrei, werden armlange Bambusstäbe, welche den Speer ersetzen, im Takte aneinander geschlagen. Das Tempo wird nach und nach schneller, die Bewegungen immer mannigfaltiger, so daß der Gesang unterbleiben und der Jerur in Aktion treten muß. Die verschiedensten Stellungen werden im Verlaufe des Tanzes eingenommen. Bald hüpfen die braunen Gestalten wild durcheinander, fortwährend mit dem Bambusstabe Schläge austeilend und die des Gegners abwehrend; bald verweolen sie in Gruppen von zwei oder vier Mann, um gegenseitig ihre Geschicklichkeit zu erproben. Große Gewandheit und Übung muß der einzelne Teilnehmer besitzen, wenn er mit Ehren aus dieser Bambusschlacht hervorgehen will. Bei all dem Wirrwarr, der sich den Augen der Zuschauer darbietet, darf er keinen Augenblick die Regeln außer Acht lassen, nach denen er zu handeln hat, sonst dürfte ihm der Gamal’ noch lange nachher in unliebsamem Andenken bleiben; ohne einige kräftige Beulen würde er schwerlich davonkommen.“ Walleser 1916:655. 599

Herzog 1936:297f.

600

Kubary 1888:24ff; Krämer 1926:307ff.

601

Krämer 1926:307.

602

Semper 1873:44f.

603

Kubary 1888:27.

604

Kubary 1888:27.

605

Krämer 1926:309.

606

Nature and time of this assault are not elaborated on further. Most likely, the battle in question is the one

between Koror and Ngebuked in 1862. See Rechebei & McPhetres 1997:99. 607

Kubary 1888:27f.

608

Semper 1873:202f.

609

Krämer 1926:309ff.

610

See Palau Society of Historians 2002:13 for details on body decoration in nglóik.

611

Diángel actually means “boathouse, canoe shed” (Josephs 1990:78). Krämer’s description of the diángel

goes as follows: “The goiláol stage was provided with a roof house, meaning it was a díangel dance house. At the start the roof side of the approximately 25m long dance house facing the spectators was lifted with bamboo sticks like a trapdoor so that there was an approximately 6m high, sloping wall in front of which stood 40 painted and beautifully decorated dancers who then began the dance.“ („Die Bühne goiláol war mit einem Dachhaus versehen, war also ein Tanzhaus díangel. Zu Anfang wurde vor Beginn die den Beschauern zugewendete Dachseite des etwa 25m langen Tanzhauses mit Bambusstangen wie eine Falltür in der Angel hochgehoben, so dass eine etwa 6m hohe schiefe Wand entstand, vor der etwa 40 bemalte und schön geschmückte Tänzerinnen standen, die dann den Tanz begannen.“) Krämer 1926:309f. Nglóik dances, when performed on the diángel, are sometimes referred to as nglóik ra diángel. See, for instance, the catalogue to the Barbara B. Smith collection, n.p.

298

612

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„Beim ersten Tanz erschienen zwei Frauen, jede eine deláseg-Figur auf dem Kopf, die Göttin Túrang und

einen Eisvogel darstellend und stellten sich vor der Vorsängerin auf; mehrere der anwesenden Frauen wurden dabei von krampfartigen Zuckungen befallen und stießen Schreie aus. Die beiden Frauen wurden deshalb rasch zum Bai gebracht, neben dem man einen Kreis von Kokosfiedern auf dem Erdboden bildete, in den man die Figuren hinein stellte. Beim dritten Tanz wurden zwei mesáng genannte, oben mit Zweigen versehene, wie die mangerengér Schlange gebänderte Bäumchen gebracht, und vor der Vortänzerin aufgebaut. Es hieß, daß diese nach Beendigung des Tanzes (nach etwa 6 Tagen) in der Rifflagune aufgepflanzt werden. Beim letzten Tanz endlich brachte man ein Bäumchen, an dem Geld und Betelprimchen aufgehängt waren als Lohn für die Tänzerinnen. [...] Zu erwähnen ist noch, daß bei der Schaustellung auf der Bühne die Tochter des Festgebers in der Mitte vorn steht, zu beiden Seiten stehen die Frauen der ersten Familien, die vorzüglich auf Goréor als Vorrecht bestimmte Schürzen tragen.“ Krämer 1926:310f. Túrang is the family goddess of the host, the th second-ranking blai of the village; the kingfisher, Krämer was told, was the representation of the 14 blai.

Krämer in no place specifies the type of kingfisher that he is refering to; however, in all likelihood the delásech figure he is describing is supposed to resemble the cheroséch, or Micronesian kingfisher (halcyon cinnamomina). Also see the details provided in Krämer 1919:186f. Delásech (Krämer’s spelling: deláseg) means “carved”, and as a noun is used to refer to any carved object. Krämer’s “deláseg” figure, then, is a wooden presentation of a deity. Mengerénger (Krämer’s mangerengér) is the laticauda colubrina. 613

After a ruk or nglóik ended, “two branches of sis [= ti plant], gerdéu [?] and coconut leaves were bound

together, which a man held high in seawater as a sign of the end of the celebration.“ („[...] wurden Zweige aus sis [= ti plant], gerdéu [?] und Kokosfiedern zusammengebunden, die ein Mann in Salzwasser emporhielt als Zeichen des Endes des Festes.“) Krämer 1926:310. 614

„Auf Goréor wurden die Tänzerinnen im Tanzbühnenhaus […] 3–4 Monate eingeschlossen; meist waren es

nur 1–2 Monate. Der Abschluß war nicht streng, die einzelnen Tänzerinnen wechselten ab, so daß immer nur ein Teil anwesend war. Erst 5–8 Tage vor dem Fest durfte niemand mehr hinaus, weil dann auch ein geschlechtlicher Verkehr verboten war. Zwei Frauen waren immer besonders streng wegen des Galid abgeteilt.“ Krämer 1926:312. 615

Hijikata 1993:194.

616

Hijikata 1993:194.

617

Josephs 1990:23.

618

“[…] first the right hand on top of the left hand, then the left hand on top of the right hand.“ Hijikata

1993:194. 619

Palau Society of Historians 2002:13. Ocháro is also refered in this source to describe the concluding

dance. 620

Palau Society of Historians 1997:62; Palau Society of Historians 2002:14. Ulerrátel also refers to the rallina

eurizonoides. The mythological connection between this bird and the delal a nglóik is unclear. Since, however, ulerrátel is used as a term for the decorative items used by the dancers, such as young coconut leaves tied around the arms and legs, etc., it may be speculated that the resultant look is meant to refer to this bird. 621

Josephs 1990:18.

622

Bruchél means “to be speared”, thus also refers to the dancing device. Josephs 1990:28.

623

De Canga-Arguelles y Villalba 1887:fol 17r. “Las mugeres no tienen costum_ // bre de bailar, se sientan en

tierra // en dos filas y luego empiezan a’ // mover los brazos, la cabera y el cuer- // po a’compás de un canto dulce y // monotona, que agrada mucho á // todos.“


◊

299

624

Krämer 1926:308; 1929:159f.

625

“[...] den nglóik ra gútum, den “Erdbodentanz”, da er auf dem galdúkl-Pflaster ausgeführt wird, wobei sich

die Tänzerinnen mit den Händen auf die Schenkel schlagen.” Krämer 1926:308. Cheldúkl (Krämer: galdúkl), “paved with stones”, refers to the area in front of the bai. 626

Meráel: to go, walk. Josephs 1990:188.

627


628

„Die Tänzerinnen saßen in einem Haufen etwa kreisförmig und machten bei monotonem Gesang

Armbewegungen in lässiger Art.” Krämer 1926:317. 629

Also spelled nglóik choulild.

630


631

Eight recordings from the Barbara B. Smith collection (I-11; II-7; II-8; II-9; II-10; IV-10; IV-20; IV-21); one

recording from the Yamaguti collection. 632

McKnight 1968:10.

633

„Oft stehen die Tänzerinnen in fünf Reihen hintereinander, setzen sich aber dann in Gänsemarsch blsúkl,

blseklél a galituk genannt, und wandern so tanzend auf dem Steinweg, oft in der Hand Zweige (klbógel).“ Krämer 1926:317. 634

Krämer 1926:317; 1929:80f; 123f; 294.

635

Krämer 1929:80f.

636

„Gongéd, ein Dorffest, eigentlich nur ein feierlicher Fischzug bei großen Festen, deshalb oft auch geradezu

múr pelú geheißen [...] Der festgebende [Frauen]Klub stellt einen Männerklub an, der Fische fängt; bringt dieser einen großen Fang, einen put, so senden die Frauen den größten Teil an die Frauen der andern Seite, die auch in ihrem Bai versammelt sind. Der letzte put wird aber zurückbehalten; denn am letzten Tage findet das pu líus statt, um die in den Fischen lebenden Geister zu beschwichtigen, und ein großes Essen von Schweinen (von den Männer geschlachtet), Fischen, Taro usw.; alle Klub der einen Seite gehen fein angezogen und mit Kämmen geschmückt, siebenmal zum andern bital táog, und die Klub dieser Seite erwidern siebenmal; sie kommen schließlich, den galituk-Tanz ausführend, mit Zweigen in der Hand einander entgegen, setzen sich dann alle vor dem Bai nieder und essen; dann tanzen beide bis zum folgenden Morgen.“ Krämer 1926:308f. 637

Hijikata 1993:197.

638

Hijikata 1993:197.

639

„Nackttänze pflegen […] alle religiösen Feste zu beschließen.” Kubary 1885:103.

640

Kubary 1873:43; Krämer 1926:280.

641


642

Kubary 1885b:7.

643

Kubary 1885b:11.

644


645

Despedall is a historical spelling of the Palauan name for Babeldaob’s East coast.

646

„Die Adaspadal genannten Dörfer im Norden Eyrrays gelegenen Dörfer landen mit ihrem Dolul an dem

einen Hohomiy genannten Landungsplatze und schreiten auf dem nördlichen Steinwege gegen das Bay el pelu, die südlichen Ngarakadam genannten Dörfer, die in Diberdiy landen, schreiten auf dem südlichen Wege und beide Seiten treffen sich bei dem Bay el pelu, wo es zu einem heftigen Zusammenstosse kommt, in welchem keine der Seiten ausweichen will. Man ruft sich wild zu, fordert sich aus, wirft gegeneinander Speere

300

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und es könnte zu ernstlichem Kampfe kommen, wenn die Regierung des Hauptlandes nicht vermittelnd eintreten würde. Sie thut dies, indem zu beiden Seiten Häuptlinge gehen, und durch Austheilung einiger Geldstücke Friede gestiftet wird. In früheren Zeiten sollte ein blutiger Ausgang nicht unmöglich gewesen sein, der der Sitte gemäss nicht strafbar sein konnte.” Kubary 1885:110. 647

McLean 1999:431.

648

Hezel 2001:560.

649

Hezel 1991:62f. Secular songs, it seems, were taught mainly for representative purposes. Missionary Fr.

Raymund describes the 1908 birthday party for the German Kaiser, which gives a vivid picture of the role of performing arts within representative community festivities: “Even we here in Palau, the most remote island group of all the still oceans, celebrated the Emperor’s birthday with true German joy, German pride, together with the whole brown population. [...] Already in November and December all of Palau was in lively activity. On Gorreor, the middle island where the Emperor’s place is and the highest chief has his seat, the men built fish crates and wove coconut leaves for big catches in order to provide enough provisions for the great celebration. [...] A similar flurry of activity also ruled on Babelthaob, the largest island, north of Gorreor. The smaller villages were almost empty; the men had all gone to the bigger villages and were together practicing the celebration songs and dances with which they wanted to shine on the Emperor’s day. For hours, until the morning, they sat in their bais–meeting houses–and orated, sang, rehearsed and repeated their dances until finally the moves of even the stupidest fit in with them all. [...] Which village had the most beautiful dance, which sailing canoe was fastest, in particular which war canoe would win victory? [...] A little lad who could barely see over the school desk said the “little-would-like-to-be-big”, so clearly and bravely, as if he would himself speak from his heart. From the mouths of all pupils: “The Emperor is a good man;” “True love till the grave;” “Germany, Germany, above all” etc. sounded strongly. But the “to the Emperor” that I said at the end of my Palauan speech sounded almost–cannibalistic!” („So feierten wir denn auch hier in Palau, der weltentlegenen Inselgruppe des Stillen Ozeans, Kaisersgeburtstag mit wahrhaft deutscher Freude, deutschem Stolz, im Verein mit der gesammten braunen Bevölkerung. [...] Schon im November und Dezember war ganz Palau in reger Tätigkeit. Auf Gorreor, der mittleren Insel, wo die Kaiserl. Station sich befindet und der oberste Häuptling seinen Sitz hat, bauten die Männer Fischkasten, flochten Kokosblätter für große Fischzüge, um sich für das große Fest mit genügendem Proviant zu versorgen. [...] Ein gleiches reges Treiben herrschte auch auf Babelthaob, der größten Insel, nördlich von Gorreor. Die kleineren Ortschaften waren alle wie ausgestorben; die Männer hatten sich in den größeren Dörfern zusammengezogen und übten gemeinschaftlich ihre Festgesänge und Tänze, womit sie am Kaiserstage glänzen wollten. Stundenlang, bis in den Morgen hinein saßen sie in ihren Bai’s–Versammlungshäusern–und dichteten, sangen, probierten und wiederholten ihre Tänze, bis endlich die Bewegungen auch des Dümmsten sich dem Ganzen angepaßt hatten. [...] Welches Dorf hat den schönsten Tanz, wessen Segelkanu fährt am schnellsten, besonders aber welches Kriegskanu gewinnt den Sieg? [...] Ein kleiner Knirps, der kaum über den Schultisch gucken kann, sagte den „kleinen Gernegroß“ her, so deutlich und mutig, als ob er sich selbst aus dem Herzen sprechen würde. Kräftig erscholl es aus dem Munde aller Schüler: „Der Kaiser ist ein guter Mann“; „Treue Liebe bis zum Grabe“, „Deutschland, Deutschland über alles“ &c. Das „Hoch“ aber, das ich am Schluß meiner Palaurede auf den Kaiser ausbrachte, klang nahezu—kannibalisch!“) Müller 1908:32f. 650

Hiery 2001a:209.

651

The three numerically largest denominations, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Seventh-Day

Adventist Church, still have American missionaries among their ministers in Palau.


652

◊

301

This is common practice for instance in the Koror Catholic (Sacred Heart church) and Seventh-Day

Adventist parishes, where Filipino community members are in charge of instrumental accompaniment to the congregation’s singing. 653

Kiyoko Rengiil, personal communication, April 23, 2005.

654

Hezel 1991:62f.

655

Missionary work by the Liebenzell missionaries was taken up in 1929. Documents pertaining to the period

before World War II are very rare. 656

Liebenzell Mission 2003:17.

657

The first hymn that he translated was Fest und treu wie Daniel, Reichs-Lieder book no. 336, Palauan 1978

hymnal no. 109; during the first year of his stay, he translated more than fifty hymns. (Länge 1936:56) Länge himself remembers that “I have translated nothing without the help of the natives. We learnt the subtleties of the language later. I remained the leader in my translation work. My helpers had their tasks to fulfill in fine tuning this.” (“Ich habe nichts ohne Mithilfe der Eingeborenen übersetzt. Die Feinheiten der Sprache lern[t]en wir erst später. In meinen Übersetzungsarbeiten blieb ich führend; im Feilen derselben hatten meine Helfer ihre Aufgabe zu erfüllen.”) Länge 1936:56. 658

The Katechismo was the result of a collaboration between missionary Wilhelm Länge, missionary Sr.

Hildegard Thiem, and Palauan deacon Johanes. The book was printed in Germany, and delivered to Palau at an unidentifiable point in time. 659

Kuartei 1978:9.

660

The Reichs-Lieder book was published in two editions. The older edition from 1909 is considerably more

popular; the more recent edition, in which about a third of the songs of the 1909 version had been replaced, was printed in 1931. The Palauan approach to musical notation, which is partly accountable for this practice, will be discussed below; in any case, the example shows how close the editors were trying to stay to the original template. 661

Wilhelm Fey was stationed in Palau from 1932 to 1955; while Länge was working in Ngiwal, Fey embarked

on establishing a Protestant community in Ngarchelong. 662

Juanita Simpson, in Palau from 1962 to 1980, played an important role in the musical life of the Protestant

community. She had come to Palau as the wife of John Simpson, who was principal and a teacher of Bethania High School and passed away in Palau in 1967. She herself was a teacher for Bethania as well. At Bethania, Juanita Simpson began a class in hymn-singing for all students, which in some years meant about 200 girls, and she also contributed many translations into Palauan to the 1978 hymnal. 663

For instance hymn no. 185.

664

„In unserem eigenen Wohnhause fingen wir an, die zerstreute Jugend zu sammeln. Mit ihnen lernten wird

die herrlichen Jesuslieder, damit unsere Versammlungen auch musikalisch durchdrungen würden; denn unsere lieben Alten waren kaum noch für eine lebhafte, Herz und Geist beeinflussende Melodie zu gewinnen. Im Laufe der Jahre bekamen wir einen schönen gemischten Chor, der mit gelösten Zungen die Erlösung im Lied mit großer Begeisterung, aber auch innerer Anteilnahme in unseren gemeinsamen Zusammenkünften, besonders aber zu Festzeiten zur Ehre des Herrn erschallen ließ. Der Gesang hat viele Außenstehende angezogen. Durch diese Lieder wurde manches Körnlein der Wahrheit in die Herzen der Eingeborenen gelegt. [...] Das Singen war aber ihre [i.e., the youth’s] größte Lust. Freilich ging es oft vielstimmig zu.” Länge 1936:59f.

302

665

◊


Ingelore Lengning served as director of the Emmaus “Gospel Kindergarten” during a part of her stay in

Palau (1954 to 1985). She was an avid accordion player, but apparently, she did not teach the instrument to any Palauan. The accordion is mostly associated with her in Palau, which further illustrates the narrow scope of the instrument.–Interestingly, the Palauan name for the accordion is oter(e)bákel. The word is derived from the verb olterébek, “to rape; to assault sexually.” (Josephs 1990:241) The meaning of the word oterebákel has been explained to me as “something that is supposed to be touched, or raped;” the verb olterébek, the informant added, has the implication of touching a person all over his/her body, and particularly the private parts of a woman prior to sexual intercourse “without looking at them.” This reference to avoiding eye-contact while touching something, in connection with accordion playing, might refer to the player’s not normally looking at his/her hands while playing. This playing practice must have aroused curiosity on the side of Palauans in the early days of the accordion in Palau, and apparently it triggered interesting associations as well. Informant A, personal commmunication, April 2, 2007. 666

The xylophones were already in a bad shape in 1962; Angela Simpson Leuice recalls that “after a while I

think they just got so termite-eaten that they were thrown out.” 667

See footnote 662.

668

The informant added that the ukuleles were most likely brought in by students from other islands,

particularly Pohnpei, Kosrae, Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi; she suspects they had been brought to these islands through Polynesia in the first place. 669

All trumpets have Perinet valves. Trumpets with Perinet valves were built by German companies; however,

they were mostly for export purposes as they were not commonly used in the country. If this donation of musical instruments had been made by a German institution, therefore, these instruments were probably new and had been produced for precisely such a purpose. In such a case, it would be unlikely that they had been used in Germany prior to their export. These instruments obviously do not belong to a coherent set of brassband instruments. 670

Jones, a teacher of Maths and Theology by training, had a background in teaching music, particularly band,

when he came to Palau in 1984. Billy Kuartei, then principal of Emmaus High School, favored the idea of reestablishing the Emmaus brass band with Jones as leader, and retrieved 40 trumpets from government elementary schools that had come to Palau from Japan, as Jones relates: “In World War II there was a major battle in 1944 on the Palauan island of Peleliu. On some anniversary of that battle some Japanese wanted to hold a memorial service for their dead. They brought 40 trumpets to Palau and taught students at the two government schools to play a couple of songs for the service. Apparently they did not teach how to read music but how to play only those songs by which valves to push at which times. After the service, the Japanese went home but left the instruments. Since there were no teachers and the students could not read music, they could not learn other songs. After playing their couple of songs another time or two the trumpets were piled in cardboard boxes and put in storage in the two schools–20 trumpets in each. At one school the instruments were put back in their cases, so they were in reasonably good shape, but at the other school the instruments were just piled in the boxes and many were dented.” The anniversary was, in all likelihood, 1969, 1974, or 1979; judging from the condition of the instruments, Jones assumes 1979. As the 40 trumpets were of identical type, he took them all apart, and assembled the parts into ten instruments that worked to his satisfaction. Bernd Seitz, a Liebenzell missionary in Palau from 1976 to 1989, organized additional instruments that at that time were held, but not apparently used, by the German mission on Yap. These


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303

instruments included 4 trombones, 1 baritone, 1 mellophone, one Bb French horn, a flugelhorn, and several trumpets. 671

Normally, two or more trumpets were used on the soprano part, two or more on alto, French horn and the

available number of trombones on tenor, and baritone and one or more trombones on bass. Jones taught all the performers to read in concert key, so that the players would be able to play directly from the hymnal. 672

Kesekes ra Modekngei were studied by Japanese anthropologist Machiko Aoyahi. In her publication on

Modekngei, she included the lyrics of numerous kesekes along with English translations (Aoyahi 1987). 673

Listen to Smith collection IV-14.

674

Informant A, personal commmunication, April 21, 2006.

675

Listen to CD III (dubbings) of the Smith collection, which contains songs that were popular in Palau in 1963.

676

See Fischer & Swartz 1960 for a psychological perspective on derebechesiil’s musical pendants on Chuuk

and Pohnpei. 677

E.g., by Muranushi. See Tatar 1995. The popularity of derebechesiil during the Japanese period is also

mirrored by the fact that 9 of the total 33 items that Muranushi recorded were derebechesiil (A-10; A-12; A-13; A-19; A-20: A-21; A-22; A-23; B-1). In the Siemer collection, three in 52 recordings are of derebechesiil. 678

Marshall Dean (1996a:93) describes the Yapese song type teempraa utaa as a “song in mixed languages”

that was first documented by Muranushi in 1936. It “combined popular Japanese melodies from the 1920s and 1930s with Yapese and Japanese lyrics. More recently, this genre has included songs based on American and European melodies, with mixed Yapese and English lyrics.” Unfortunately, Marshall Dean does not provide any musical information. However, Muranushi’s recording of a teempraa utaa (recording B-16, published on the MC accompanying Tatar 1985; also see Tatar 1985:53), the earliest one available, leaves room for the assumption that the Yapese teempraa utaa is a song type that emerged parallel and along the same lines as the Palauan derebechesiil. 679

Yamaguti 1967:55.

680

This development in instrumentation practice is also parallel to that of teempuraa utaa on Yap. Marshall

Dean 1996a:95. 681

Machida Kasho (1888-1981), folk song researcher and leading composer of shin-min’yo, quoted in Hughes

1990:12. 682

The discourse on min’yo in Japan reveals why the Japanese propagated min’yo in their Micronesian

territory. “Although scholars, singers, and audiences continue to debate the exact definitional boundaries of the term min’yo, most would agree that, in their traditional form, min’yo typically originated in rural Japan, were created by anonymous nonprofessional musicians and poets, and were transmitted orally. Although much has changed, the term min’yo continues to have a romantic implication-that the general populace, especially in the countryside, maintains a distinct musical tradition, different from either commercial or ‘art music’.” (Groemer 2000:599; also see 601f.) Although this statement comments on the more recent situation, the general idea behind it was precisely that in the early twentieth century. Given Japan’s aspirations concerning the Pacific islands under their control, which they were planning to turn into a settlement area for rural Japanese, particularly from the Japanese islands, the official dissemination of min’yo in support of their ideology of the peasant as a role model was conducive to the official policy. 683

The etymology of the word is unclear. However, an alternative spelling of beritotou is beritotong, which

might be related to the word totongél, the possessive noun to totáu, “cords tied from [… a part] of the outrigger” (Josephs 1990:331); totong, furthermore, means “to mingle with the crowd.”

304

684

◊


Ibau Demei Oiterong, Ilong Rubasch Isaol, Magdalena Demek Towai, personal communication, May 3,

2005. 685

Ezekiel [n.d.].

686

See Ezekiel [n.d.].

687

Ezekiel [n.d.]:116.

688

The reason for this breaking of the periodic structure cannot be identified, but one may speculate that

during his musical training, he might have been taught to conclude a song’s A-part on the dominant, which then might have prompted him to add the additional bar(s). 689

Ezekiel [n.d.]:157.

690

Several small mistakes in this notation seem to further affirm this.

691

Josephs 1990:15. Recordings in the corpus: Smith collection I-12, I-13, II-11.

692

See the documentation in the field notes by Barbara B. Smith (n.p.).

693

Kaeppler et. al. 1998b:725.

694

On the Yapese marching dance, see Marshall Dean 1996:69; on Pohnpeian marching dance, Petersen

1992:25. Barnett (1949:227) assumes that the matematóng was appropriated by the Palauans from the Chuukese during joint work in the Angaur mines; however, no evidence can be found to substantiate this hypothesis, which is also proposed in Kaeppler et. al. 1998e:159. 695

Müller 1910.

696

Browning 1970:40.

697

Petersen 1992:25. See Flinn 1992:63 on the maas, the Polapese marching dance. Polap Atoll is part of the

state of Chuuk. 698

PCAA 1977:135.

699

Yamaguti, probably relying on local oral history, also assumes German officials to have been the

(unconscious) importeurs of marching. He also mentions the Japanese in this context, however, no evidence can be found pointing into that direction. Yamaguti 1967:20. 700

The earliest documented performance of a Hawai’ian hula dance in Palau took place on May 6, 1966, on

the occasion of the “First Concert”of the Palau National Museum. Palau Museum 1966:10. 701

Barnett 1949:227.

702

Flinn 1992:65.

703

See the booklet of the CD The Tribute, published by Island Music Production, Palau.

704

See Frith 1978:11.

705

Howard Charles, personal communication, February 21, 2005.

706

Barbara B. Smith Collection, III 1–21. The CD includes recordings of the then (1963) popular ABC Boys

and from the also popular Friday Night Club. 707

Marshall Dean (1996a:95) describes similar practices in Yapese music-making.

708

See Marshall Dean 1996a:95.

709

On the cassette Belau er kid. Howard Charles, recorded at the Quasi-Motto Studio, Aloha (Oregon, USA),

manufactured by Disc Makers, New Jersey (USA). 710

See Goldsworthy 1998 for a case study of New Caledonia; Averill 1994 on Haiti. Both articles describe

conscious attempts to assert a local identity through music by combining distinctly local sounds with idioms imported from without. 711

Yamaguti 1965:64.


712

◊

305

The phenomenon of tonal spectra is not unique in Oceania. For these “culturally meaningful range[s] of

pitches treated as musical identity and analyzable as a scalar unit”, J. W. Love has proposed the term “tone” (Love et. al. 1998b:291). 713

Love et. al. 1998b:291.

714

Efforts to apply the Euro-American concept of scale to Oceanic music have in places proved to be counter-

productive. Mervyn McLean, for instance, catalogued 651 Maori scales (McLean 1969). 715

Incontinuous usage of parallel seconds is also popular in many other regions of Oceania. See, for instance,

the early analyses of Herzog (1936:270f.) and Thurnwald (1910:140f.). In this source, Thurnwald also quotes a letter from Erich M. von Hornbostel, in which the latter comments on this phenomenon. 716

This explanation is not usually offered by Palauan informants, as they do not verbalize the rules of musical

performance. However, upon suggestion, all informants approved of this interpretation. 717

„Die Musik ist auf Palau sehr dürftig.“ Krämer 1926:319.

718

In the 1970s, Mervyn McLean formulated the “urgent need” for ethnomusicological research in Oceania.

McLean 1979; 1984. Although the situation has improved considerably, it is still far from satisfactory. 719


720


721

This is also mentioned in historical sources. See Semper 1873:45; Krämer 1926:320.

722

Informant A, personal communication, May 7, 2006. Yamaguti 1965:66.

723

Yamaguti 1967:10.

724

Yamaguti 1967:21. With “Classical music”, Yamaguti refers to that canon of musical repertoire which has

been called (evolved) traditional music in the present study. 725

On the renaissance of performing arts on Ponape, to give but one example, see Bailey 1978:4.

726

See, for instance, Flinn 1993:561.

727

“The emergent generations are largely uninterested in their own musical heritage, desiring to taste

‘civilization’ even through music. This tendency has been increasingly dominant up to the present. It now seems likely that, inasmuch as the Classical music repertoire has lost its major function, it may disappear with the decline of the oldest members of the population, as is predictable for other parts of Oceania.” Yamaguti 1967:21. For a contemporary perspective on issues raised in this quotation, based on the present study, see part III. 728

Frith 1996:109.

729

Frith 1996:111.

730

See van Meijl & Miedema 2004.

731

Faustina Rehuher, personal communication, January 20, 2005.

732

For a description of the legitimizing power of dance on Pulap Atoll, Chuuk, see Flinn 1992:57; for an

appraisal of the role of song and dance in the negotiation of Self in present-day Sikaiana, Solomon Islands, see Donner 1992. 733

Appadurai 1996:76.

734

Appadurai 1996:75.

735

A focus on environmental, behavioral, and situational, i.e., the more dynamic aspects of Palauan music

over stable characteristics and static boundaries that are also inherent to it is a matter of analytical emphasis inspired by recent theoretical shifts in Pacific studies. See Linnekin & Poyer 1996: passim, but particularly p. 6; van Meijl & Miedema 2004:passim.

306

◊


736

Van Meijl 2004:5.

737

See Van Meijl 2004:10.

738

Barth 1969:35.

739

Van Meijl 2004:10.

740

Linnekin 2004:252.

741

Frith 1996:111.

742

Stokes 1997:4.

743

Born & Hesmondhalgh 2000:32.

744

Van Meijl 2004:6.

745

Also see Born & Hesmondhalgh 2001:38f.

746

“Identity, in other words, is a kind of nexus at which different constructions of self coincide, and sometimes

also collide.” Van Meijl 2004:3. 747

“Collective identities are symbolically constructed in the present (‘invented’), […] they are historically

contingent and malleable rather than static and enduring, and […] assertions of group identity are inextricably linked to all sorts of agendas, both personal and political.” Linnekin 2004:237. 748

Stuart Hall formulated related assessments in Hall 1996.

749

See Romero 2001 on the negotiation of the past and present in an Andean community. Romero describes

a contrary practice. 750

PCAA 1977:47f.

751


752

Flores 2004:120.

753

E.g., Flinn 1992:63.

754

Appadurai 1996:74.

755

Appadurai 1996:74.

756

Appadurai 1996:74. “Music and dance […] do not simply ‘reflect’. Rather, they provide the means by which

the hierarchies of place are negotiated and transformed.” Stokes 1994:4. 757

Van Meijl 2004:9f.

758

Tonkinson 2000:169.

759

Hall 1996:4.

760

“Culture and identity are generally constructed, or rather re-constructed, in opposition to a stereotypical

representation of the culture and world-view of western societies.” Van Meijl 2004:9. 761

Nilan 2005:21.

762

Appadurai 96:3.

763


764

Appadurai 1996:3.

765

Frith 1996:121f.

766

Frith 1996:123.

767

Frith 1996:123.

768

Frith 1996:124f.

769

Linnekin 2004:245.

770

“There exists a late-twentieth-century version of the noble savage”, says K.R. Howe (Howe 2000:71). The

ascription of such unpreparedness is part of the image of that new noble savage.


◊

307

771

Linnekin 2004:245.

772

Elsewhere, similar efforts by missionaries have yielded rapid appropriation of musical instruments.

Examples abound, but see Romero 2001:67 et seq. on the history of the appropriation of brass instruments in the Andes. 773

Linnekin 2004:244.

774

Barth 1969.

775


776

See Appadurai 1996:48.

777

McCutcheon 1991:149.

778

Said 1995.

779

Howe 2000:72f.

780

See Linnekin 2004:253.

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