Table Of ContentMUSIC IN NEW GUINEA.
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VERHANDELINGEN
VAN HET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT VOOR
TAAL·, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE
DEEL 53
MUSIC IN NEW GUINEA.
THREE STUDIES
BY
JAAP KUNST
ENGLISH TRANSLATION AND CORRECTION
BY JEUNE SCOTT· KEMBALL
PUBLISHED UNDER A GRANT
FROM THE NETHERLANDS MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. - 1967
Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com
ISBN 978-94-017-5728-7 ISBN 978-94-017-6083-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-6083-6
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1967
FOREWORD
About a year after my husband's death I reread his three studies
on Papuan music and was again impressed by the wealth of material,
which he had gathered and analyzed in the course of many years, that
was in them and it occurred to me that it would be worthwhile to have
them republished. The Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land en
Volkenkunde (Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology) has
now made this possible, and I am deeply indebted to them. The three
studies are now in one volume. Two of the studies were already in
English, which has been revised, and the third has been translated into
English. New data that my husband collected in the years following
the publication of the studies, comments he made on them and the
conclusions he formulated have been included in the new edition.
The publication of my husband's first study of the Papuan music
of Western New Guinea dail:es from 1927, the third, and last, published
by the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (Royal Tropical Institute)
came out in 1950. Since ·then no musicological studies on the music
of Western New Guinea have appeared in print.
The material forming the basis of these studies came under my
husband's scrutiny over a period of time and, correspondingly, his
conclusions were also made over a period of time.
The Dutch-American New Guinea Expedition of 1926, lead by
Mr. Ch. le Roux, the expedition's ethnographer and topographer,
furnished my husband with 14 phonograms on which the songs and
music for the flute of the Takutamesso or Kauwerawet tribe had been
recorded. Unfortunately, it had not been possible to make recordings
o£ the songs of the Awembiak and the Dem, but since two members
of the expedition knew some of their songs by heart they could
perform them for my husband - one sang them and the other played
them on the violin.
The next opportunity he had to make a direct contact with Papuan
music came in May, 1929, when the 150th anniversary celebrations
of the Batavia Society of Arts and Science coincided with the holding
of the Fourth Pacific Science Congress in Batavia where an ethno-
VI
graphical exhibition was held at which groups of peoples, represen
tative of the whole of the Archipelago, were present. Among them
were Papuans from a few tribes living on the north coast of New
Guinea, people from the Waropen Coast, from the island of Yapen,
and from some of the villages on the shores of Humboldt Bay, and
recordings were made of a number of their songs.
Then, in 1932, while on an official tour - of a non-musicological
nature - my husband had the chance of recording several songs of
Papuans from Waigeo and Sorong. It was also about this :time that a
e-
collection of Marind-, Y and Kanum-anim songs, recorded in the
neighbourhood of Merauke by Father V erschueren, was placed at my
husband's disposal and also a collection of twenty-four Marind-anim
songs that had been taken down by Mr. Soukotta, an Amboynese
police officer who was serving in the area.
Finally, in 1939 the expedition to New Guinea organized by the
Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (Royal Nether
lands Geographical Society) and again led by Mr. Le Roux, at last
secured recordings of the music of the mountain tribes living in the
Central Range and of songs of the coastal people of Utah (south
west coast).
Since my husband's studies were first published circumstances have
brought about many alterations in place names in the New Guinea
area, not leaS!t in the name of the island itself. To avoid confusion it
has, therefore, been decided to retain the name of New Guinea
throughout.
In conclusion, I wish to express my profound gratitude to the
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde for the
meticulous attention that has been given to this new edition and, in
particular, to Dr. ]. Noorduyn, the General Secretary of the Institute,
whose painstaking efforts have made it come up to my expectations.
I would also like to thank Miss Jeune Scott-Kemball for her admirable
translation of Part III and for her revision of the English of Parts I
and II, and Mr. Ernst Heins of the Ethnomusicological Archives,
University of Amsterdam, who undertook the checking of the musico ...
logical terminology.
C. J. A. KUNST-VAN WELY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
FOREWORD v
I. A STUDY ON PAPUAN MUSIC 1
1. Introduction . . . . . . 3
2. The Music of the Kauwerawet . 6
A. Vocal Music . . . . . . 6
B. Flute Music . . . . . . 13
3. The Tribes of the Nassau Mts. (Central Range) . 18
Songs (Tables I-III) . . . . . . . . . . 35
List of Musical Instruments and Guide to the Map. 39
Description of Line Drawings . . . 55
Line Drawings (figs. 1-62) . . . . . 58
Bibliography (and list of abbreviations) . 69
Map showing the diSitribution of musical instruments in
New Guinea, the adjacent islands, the Bismarck Archi
pelago and Bougainville Island . . . . . . . . at back
page
II. SONGS OF NEW GUINEA . 81
III. THE NATIVE MUSIC OF WESTERN NEW GUINEA 99
1. History of Musicological Research . 101
2. The Central Range . . . . . . 109
3. The South-west Coast . . . . . 119
4. The Western Part of the Vogelkop 121
5. Waigeo . . . . . . . . . . 123
6. Musical Instruments of the North- and West Coasts 126
7. The South Coast . . . . . 135
A. Melody . . . . . . · . 135
B. The Musical Instruments . 165
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES 177
PLATE I . . . . frontispiece
PLATE II . . . . facing p. 23
Illustrations 1-33 . . at bax:k
I
A STUDY ON PAPUAN MUSIC
based on phonogram recordings made by
C. C. F. M. LE ROUX
on the 1926 expedition to the
Central Range (Nassau Mts.)
with line drawings by
MAS PIRNGADI
second edition
first published by:
The Netherlands East Indies
Committee for ScienJtific Research
Weltevreden 1931
1. INTRODUCTION
It is a somewhat onerous task to write about exotic music when
one has not heard it in its natural surroundings and has not, therefore,
felt its impact. There is the particular atmosphere, which is created by
a variety of interacting elements: the sense of dedication of the musi
cians and their concentration ; the contact between performers and
audience; the local conditions ; the effect of the hour and of the season,
all things that cannot be recreated when one is listening to recordings
made by another person, for the phonograph, however excellent and
even indispensable a medium, only reproduces the sound correctly.
This is undoubtedly the most important factor when one is conducting
research into music, but it cannot re-establish that indescribable intang
ible other-world atmosphere which surrounds this music when it is
heard on its "native heath".
Despite this difficulty, however, I felt bound to comply with Mr.
Le Roux' request thart: I should make a study as complete as lay in
my power, of the melodies he had recorded and had brought back from
New Guinea, because I was convinced of the great interest of such
an investigation and also because I knew that anybody else undertaking
this task would be faced with the same problems.
The making of recordings cannot be done quickly enough and neither
can analysis of them be too detailed. Von Hornbostel says rightly :
"The few thousand phonographic recordings hitherto collected in
museums and archives are only a beginning; !they are haphazard frag
ments, instead of giving a general view. What we need above all is to
register systematically the musical material of all the peoples of the
world by means of the phonograph." 1 And what this musicologist says
in the same paper about African music, might be said with equal truth
of the music of a large part of the East Indian Archipelago and of the
SoUJth Sea Islands: "It is ... to be feared that the modern efforts to
protect culture are coming too late. As yet we hardly know what
African music is. If we do not hasten to collect it systematically and
to record it by means of the phonograph, we shall not even learn what
it was." 2
1 Von Hornbostel VI, p. 4 et seqq.
2 ibid. p. 33.
