Festschrift Background and Contents

Kirsty Gillespie, Sally Treloyn and Don Niles

ICTM Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania

The Study Group on Music of Oceania was proposed at the 1977 World Conference, held in Honolulu, and formally established two years later with Ricardo D. Trimillos as the first Chair (1979–83). Barbara Smith (1983–2001), Stephen A. Wild (2001–05), Raymond Ammann (2005–09), Denis Crowdy (2009–13), Kirsty Gillespie (2013–15), and Brian Diettrich (2015–17) have been Ric’s successors.

The Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania (SGMDO), as it is presently named, has held nine symposia in Australia (four times), Japan, Palau, USA, Papua New Guinea, and Guam. It sponsors panels and holds business meetings at ICTM World Conferences, issues publications, and has discussions of relevant issues whenever a number of its members are able to meet informally.

Background to the festschrift

At the end of November 2013, Kirsty Gillespie (Study Group Chair), Neil Coulter, and Don Niles discussed what would be involved in organising a Study Group symposium in Papua New Guinea. At the time that eventuality seemed unlikely, so we considered other possible activities, and the idea of a festschrift was raised. After all, the Study Group had previously prepared festschrifts to honour the contributions of Barbara Smith (Lawrence 2001) and Mervyn McLean (Moyle 2007). Because of his long involvement in the Study Group and many aspects of ICTM, and his imminent retirement from ANU, Stephen Wild’s name immediately came up as someone to honour in this way.

But the idea of a festschrift had to wait a bit. We did indeed host a Study Group symposium in Papua New Guinea, 17–19 September 2014: the eighth such symposium, held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea, in Madang and Alexishafen. Our discussions about a possible festschrift for Stephen continued before, during, and after that symposium, especially during the business meeting where the idea was formally proposed and supported by the membership. Kirsty took the lead as editor, and by October 2014, Sally and Don had joined her. Kirsty had been a student of Stephen’s; as an ethnomusicologist working in Indigenous Australia, Sally had particular insights into his work; and Don had known Stephen through various ICTM activities for quite some time. On 22 November 2014, Kirsty sent an email to all Study Group members (minus Stephen, of course), asking for those interested in the idea to send in abstracts of their intended contributions. We were delighted to receive a great many expressions of interest.

On 5 March 2015, we asked those who had submitted abstracts to write their chapters, with 30 September as a deadline. Considering a possible publisher, we thought a natural choice would be ANU Press, both because of Stephen’s long and fruitful association with The Australian National University (ANU) and because of the Press’s outstanding reputation as a traditional and electronic publisher. Later in March we received encouraging comments from ANU about the possibility of a festschrift being published with them. We envisaged launching and presenting the book to Stephen at the ICTM 44th World Conference, which was planned to take place in Limerick, Ireland, in July 2017. This seemed particularly appropriate as Stephen had accepted the position of co-Programme Chair for that meeting—one of the few roles in ICTM he had never taken on before—and would therefore almost certainly be in attendance.

Because it seemed we had a liberal timeline to work with and in order to encourage as much participation as possible, the deadline for submissions got pushed forward a number of times, with the final one being in January 2016. After receiving and reviewing the manuscripts, the editors grouped the submissions and wrote introductory sections to get the volume into a form that could be considered by ANU.

Submission to ANU for consideration of the manuscript took place in March 2016, and the highly positive and encouraging reports were received in September. Final versions of manuscripts were requested from authors by 31 October. By the end of 2016, most of the content was finalised, with only a few chapters still in the final stages of editing. Early 2017 saw the final edited manuscript, replete with photographic material, come together and be submitted to the Press.

Contents of volume

The title of this collection honouring Stephen Wild—A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes—is drawn from his own essay celebrating the 50th anniversary of the journal Ethnomusicology (Wild 2006). While Stephen pondered whether there might be a distinctive voice in the ethnomusicology of Australia and New Zealand, we have turned his question into a statement of fact and applied it to him as someone who very much embodies such a distinctive voice through his writings, influence, and other academic activities. Further support for our appropriation of Stephen’s 2006 title can be found in the frequency with which that article is cited in the contributions here.

The chapters submitted for Stephen’s festschrift were written by scholars living in different parts of the world and with a diversity of backgrounds and interests. There is a similar diversity of approaches in the chapters themselves, both reflecting the state of ethnomusicological studies and also the range of Stephen’s own concerns.

The chapters seemed to fall quite naturally into three groups, in spite of the inevitable overlap that makes neat divisions impossible. These divisions nicely mirror some of Stephen’s own academic interests and passions.

Indigenous Australia

Understanding the musical traditions of Indigenous Australian peoples, including their relevance to all of Australian society, was a persistent feature of Stephen’s career. Six contributions address aspects of this theme.

Stephen forged new ground in long-term, collaborative approaches to the study of Aboriginal song and dance through his early research in Lajamanu and extending to his tenure at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. With a thick ethnographic and musical account of his own mamurrng ceremony in Gunbalanya, Reuben Brown’s ‘A Different Mode of Exchange: The Mamurrng Ceremony of Western Arnhem Land’ provides a framework to understand both performative, ceremonial negotiations of intercultural relationships in western Arnhem Land today and the historically significant 1982 rom ceremony conducted by a group from Maningrida in Canberra in which Stephen played a key role (Wild 1986). In ‘Warlpiri Ritual Contexts as Imaginative Spaces for Exploring Traditional Gender Roles’, Georgia Curran revisits and responds to Stephen’s relatively seldom noted piece on gendered and transgendered roles in the Warlpiri dance (Wild 1977–78) from a contrastive historical and social position, and demonstrates the currency of his early work to contemporary themes and issues in anthropology and ethnomusicology. Curran’s piece also gestures towards Stephen’s long history of research with Warlpiri elders (e.g. Wild 1984, 1987, 1994), including Jerry Jangala and his son Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu (Steven Patrick), both of whom appear with Stephen in the collection of photos included in the volume.

Paying homage to Stephen’s development of an approach to ethnomusicology in Australia that focuses on aesthetics, dance, sociocultural context, and deep cosmological significance, in hand with analysis of musical form, forged in his work with Margaret Clunies Ross on Anbarra clan manikay in northeast Arnhem Land (Clunies Ross and Wild 1984), Peter G. Toner’s ‘Form and Performance: The Relations of Melody, Poetics, and Rhythm in Dhalwangu Manikay’ examines song versions in Dhalwangu clan manikay to show how contrastive ‘versions’ of song subjects are based on dance, poetics, a range of musical elements, as well as underlying ritual contexts. In ‘Alyawarr Women’s Rain Songs’, Myfany Turpin, Richard Moyle, and Eileen Kemarr Bonney demonstrate the legacy of Stephen’s blended musical-ethnographic approach on the studies of Central Australian musical traditions, deploying a rich musical and linguistic analysis to a women’s alwely song series belonging to Alyawarr-speaking people in hand with translations of song texts. Following Stephen (Wild 1984), they find that musical systems embody aspects of the culture in which they are situated.

Sally Treloyn similarly draws on this legacy in ‘Singing with a Distinctive Voice: Comparative Musical Analysis and the Central Australian Musical Style in the Kimberley’, using musical analysis in hand with dance, performance context, and translations, to approach the intriguing use of Central Australian song forms in otherwise distinctly Kimberley-style junba repertories, and as an explicit response to Stephen’s question about the current and future state of ethnomusicology in Australia: ‘Where did the comparison go?’ (Wild 2006). Focusing on Stephen’s contribution to the ongoing task of decolonising musicology and ethnomusicology in Australia, Elizabeth Mackinlay and Katelyn Barney examine his legacy of a constitutionally recognised and mandated ‘Welcome to Country’ and the Indigenous music think tank within the Musicological Society of Australia (MSA) in ‘Turning the Colonial Tide: Working towards a Reconciled Ethnomusicology in Australia’.

Pacific Islands and beyond

Reflecting Stephen’s significant influence upon research across the broader Pacific region, particularly through his involvement with the SGMDO, a number of contributions to this volume focus on Pacific Islander musical traditions.

Brian Diettrich’s chapter, ‘Chanting Diplomacy: Music, Conflict, and Social Cohesion in Micronesia’, opens the second section of this volume, ‘Pacific Islands and Beyond’. Taking Stephen’s work on rom (Wild 1986) as a departure point, Diettrich examines music as mediation in the Pacific region of Micronesia, specifically Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia. Masaya Shishikura has another offering on the power of performance in forging social relationships; his chapter, ‘Songs for Distance, Dancing to Be Connected: Bonding Memories of the Ogasawara Islands’, considers the complex Pacific location of Ogasawara, Japan, with its European, Japanese, and Pacific Islander heritage, and how connectedness to a place marked by transience is forged through memory via performance. Shishikura’s touching dedication to Stephen at the end of his chapter evokes his (and Stephen’s) own experience of connectedness and memory.

As recognised by Stephen Wild in his 1984 publication (Clunies Ross and Wild 1984), music is often inseparable from dance, something that is reflected in the name change of the Study Group in 2007 to include dance, and something both directly and indirectly addressed in this volume. Shishikura’s chapter is also a paper about dance; the following two chapters in this section focus primarily on dance performed in new performance contexts. Naomi Faik-Simet’s chapter, ‘The Politics of the Baining Fire Dance’, describes a dramatic Papua New Guinean dance form well known for its elaborate costume and general spectacle, and how its popularity has drawn it out of its original context into the complex arena of festivals and shows, bringing with it equally complex issues around ownership and politics. Jane Freeman Moulin’s chapter, ‘Touristic Encounters: Imag(in)ing Tahiti and its Performing Arts’, on the other hand, considers how performance for touristic purposes, at least in the case of French Polynesia, may actually be in the interests of cultural sustainability.

The final two offerings in this section of the volume are chapters whereby the authors examine particular musical expressions from their own subjective standpoints as senior scholars reflecting upon their careers and how their scholarly and musical experiences have shaped them. Jill Stubington, in her chapter ‘Heritage and Place: Kate Fagan’s Diamond Wheel and Nancy Kerr’s Twice Reflected Sun’, speaks to a musical tradition that originates from beyond the Pacific, in particular contemporary Australian folk song with roots elsewhere, and reflects upon the significance of place in relation to identity in music. Closing this section, Ric Trimillos’s chapter ‘Living in Hawai‘i; The Pleasures and Rewards of Hawaiian Music for an “Outsider” Ethnomusicologist’, provides us with a heart-warming account of his friendship and collegial relationship with Stephen. Trimillos shares with us his own trajectory in becoming an ethnomusicologist living and working in Hawai‘i, while also documenting two specific musical occurrences there (the Merrie Monarch Hula Festival and slack-key guitar in a recent film soundtrack). He reflects upon the significance of a career in ethnomusicology, and his afterword appropriately honours Stephen as a valued friend and colleague.

Archiving and academia

Involvement in academic concerns and various aspects of archiving have been recurring areas of interest to Stephen for many years, both in relation to his own work and the SGMDO events he has hosted. Six contributions further develop these concerns.

In ‘Protecting Our Shadow: Repatriating Ancestral Recordings to the Lihir Islands, Papua New Guinea’, Kirsty Gillespie discusses how century-old cylinder recordings from Lihir located in a Berlin archive stimulated local performance and discussion, leading to their repatriation and raising more general concerns over issues of cultural heritage. Gisa Jähnichen’s contribution, ‘The History of the ‘Ukulele “Is Today”’, considers evidence suggesting slightly different ideas about the origin of the ‘ukulele in Hawai‘i that challenge many of the oft-repeated stories about this iconic instrument. Archives and resources, some only recently becoming available, are welcome documents for the communities concerned and are often able to provide a better understanding of important historical events.

‘“Never Seen It Before”: The Earliest Reports and Resulting Confusion about the Hagen Courting Dance’ by Don Niles taps into key written and photographic documents from early contact in the Papua New Guinea Highlands to explain apparent discrepancies in ethnographic writings of the time. Such archival materials reveal much about the contact situation as well as the genres being documented. In her chapter ‘Capturing Music and Dance in an Archive: A Meditation on Imprisonment’, Adrienne L. Kaeppler explores fundamental questions about music, dance, and archives. Two films from the 1930s and 1960s from different parts of Polynesia, and photos from a still earlier period, highlight her concerns over access, preservation, repatriation, and ultimately cultural identity.

Developing on ideas presented by Stephen in a 2015 lecture, Barbara B. Smith’s contribution ‘Some Comments on the Gradual Inclusion of Musics beyond the Western Canon by Selected Universities and Societies’ considers the gradual embrace of music outside the ‘Western canon’ by some American universities and academic societies from the 1950s onwards. Also drawing inspiration from the same article by Stephen that provided the title for this volume, in ‘Ethnomusicology in Australia and New Zealand: A Trans-Tasman Identity?’, Dan Bendrups and Henry Johnson overview ethnomusicological scholarship in Australia and New Zealand, concluding with insights into the development of a possible identity for such activities in the region.

The volume closes with a listing of publications by Stephen, information about the contributors, and an index.

On behalf of the authors and the Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania, we bring together these papers to celebrate Stephen’s numerous accomplishments, a man recognised in a review of this volume by Andrée Grau, Professor of the Anthropology of Dance at University of Roehampton, London, as ‘a great facilitator and a scholar who serves humanity through music’. In doing so, we hope to not only draw attention to the significant role he has played in shaping the field of ethnomusicology in the region, but to provide a rich account of aspects of his life and career that may not be well known, and which form and also reflect our colleague, mentor, and friend, Stephen A. Wild.

References cited

Clunies Ross, Margaret, and Stephen A. Wild. 1984. ‘Formal Performance: The Relations of Music, Text and Dance in Arnhem Land Clan Songs.’ Ethnomusicology 28 (2): 209–35. doi.org/10.2307/850758.

Lawrence, Helen Reeves. 2001. ed. Traditionalism and Modernity in the Music and Dance of Oceania: Essays in Honour of Barbara B. Smith. Don Niles, technical ed. Oceania Monographs. Sydney: University of Sydney.

Moyle, Richard M. 2007. ed. Oceanic Music Encounters—the Print Resource and the Human Resource: Essays in Honour of Mervyn McLean. Research in Anthropology and Linguistics Monograph, 7. Auckland: University of Auckland.

Wild, Stephen A. 1977–78. ‘Men as Women: Female Dance Symbolism in Warlpiri Men’s Rituals.’ Dance Research Journal 10 (1): 14–22. doi.org/10.2307/1478492.

——. 1984. ‘Warlbiri Music and Culture: Meaning in a Central Australian Song Series.’ In Problems and Solutions: Occasional Essays in Musicology Presented to Alice M. Moyle, edited by Jamie C. Kassler and Jill Stubington, 186–203. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger.

——. 1986. ed. Rom: An Aboriginal Ritual of Diplomacy. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

——. 1987. ‘Recreating the Jukurrpa: Adaptation and Innovation of Songs and Ceremonies in Warlpiri Society.’ In Songs of Aboriginal Australia, edited by Margaret Clunies Ross, Tamsin Donaldson, and Stephen A. Wild, 97–120. Oceania Monographs, 32. Sydney: University of Sydney.

——. 1994. ‘Aboriginal Use of Narrative: The Warlpiri of Northern-Central Australia.’ In Dance and Narrative: The Green Mill Dance Project Papers 1994, edited by Hilary Trotter, 80–83. Canberra: Australian Dance Council (Ausdance) Inc.

——. 2006. ‘Ethnomusicology Down Under: A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes?’ Ethnomusicology 50 (2): 345–52.