Chapter 15: Tongan Musical Instruments.

Ethnomusicology, 2010

Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux 1791-1794, ed. Bronwen Douglas, Fanny Wonu Veys, and Billie Lythberg (Leiden: Sidestone Press), 255-66, 2018

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2016

Music in Motion signal a fresh tide of music histories is washing in from Hawai'i, exposing established ideas about Hawaiian musicians and their music to renewed scrutiny. Troutman, whose titular claim for the Hawaiian steel guitar is boldly provocative, argues that by keeping "the instrument in the center of our view, we can move nimbly across space and time, cresting the waves of the instrument's greatest prominence in several cultural landscapes and moments" (6), allowing him to cover the widespread impact of the instrument beyond Hawai'i. Carr argues that the repertoire of nineteenth century seamen's "songs, ballads, and chanteys" (3), these "lost sailor songs of Hawai'i," were the basis for the development of hapa haole and hula ku'i (175), two of the more well-known and widely used forms of modern Hawaiian music. Both of these books ask us to think differently about the music we think is "Hawaiian" largely by expanding the historical reach of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) musicians. Carr's Hawaiian Music in Motion was a deserved cowinner of last year's Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam Prize and it would be surprising if Troutman were not to receive similar accolades. 1 Kīkā Kila and Hawaiian Music in Motion share an expansive view of the influence Hawaiian musicians and their musicking exerted on musical traditions not conventionally connected to Hawai'i, heightening the visibility of Hawaiian musicking that has often slipped through the disciplinary gaps between folklore, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and Hawaiian studies. The centrality of Hawaiian music to global music culture, as both books convincingly argue, was in outsized proportion to the small Kanaka Maoli population and the island archipelago's purported isolation from the rest of the world, propelled by the increasingly dispersed Native Hawaiian population from the nineteenth century forward due to the impact of imperialism at home and the richer opportunities abroad. While Troutman is a historian and Carr is an ethnomusicologist, both scholars tackle this issue borrowing liberally from one other's respective disciplinary toolboxes. Carr's work is largely historical, tracking Hawaiians' musicking through sea chanteys, ship's journals, travelers' accounts, and newspaper articles. For his part, while also conducting extensive archival work, Troutman includes a number of interviews with current practitioners of the kīkā kila (Hawaiian steel guitar) lending his work a contemporary edge that speaks to the continued vitality of Hawaiian steel guitar musicking. These books and their authors' hybrid methodological work are a welcome breath of fresh intellectual air, enlarging both historical and ethnographic work. Carr's archival work invests Native Hawaiian musicians with agentive musical production and traces their influence and participation in the sea chanteys and other seafaring music idioms that traveled along with them on the whaling and trade ships on which they were employed, their "day gigs," so to speak. Hawaiian presence in the various vernacular songs, on land and at sea, circling the globe throughout the nineteenth century also testifies to their wide range of

Western Historical Quarterly, 2015

In this paper, I follow the paradigm set out by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) that ‘traditions’ appearance and establishment rather than their chances of survival (...) are our primary concern’. I discuss this drawing on ethnographic data collected during my one-year fieldwork on the French Overseas-Department of La Réunion in the southwest Indian Ocean. Focus is on how some local musicians reproduce their visions of culture, local identity and tradition in Maloya. Maloya is a Réunionese music that has been listed as 'Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ by UNSECO in 2009. In this article, the music is presented as a framework through which musicians describe the cultural setting in which they locate themselves. I argue that Maloya is used in diverse ways in order to mediate Réunionese tradition and culture for different people and in various contexts. As such, the music is nothing fixed, but a musical production and continuous (re)invention of traditions influenced by political, economic, and social interests.