|
Islands
The prefered place for longing and yearning always was and will be the island. Combined with exotic motifs, it becomes the symbol of the happier and definitely more interesting dream world right beyond the horizon. According to Ernst Bloch, the pleasant experiences during childhood of withdrawal into a small defined space, a space which could become a castle, cave, or any place in the phantasy continue later in life. This connection between narrowness and foreign beauty becomes the ideal of the island. In German literatur of the 19th century, Tahiti took the role as the prototype for foreign extasy and toward the beginning of the 20th century it was replaced by Hawaii. As a topic the island is a permanent element of popular music from operettas to popular hits.
On the one hand, the folkmusic and artistic music of these islands remain almost completely unknown. On the other hand there are musical forms that instantly evoke pictures of places like Hawaii or Trinidad.
The variable influences of different cultural forms of local and foreign traditions play a big role in the creation of such pieces. Hawaii is a good example of how a foreign cultural treasure (for example the guitar and the typical way of playing it) can be taken up, modified, and then exported as a newly developed tradition and then finally return in the form of definite expectations from tourists. The Island Night presents examples of traditional as well as mixed forms of music and their reception at our latitude: originals and copies.
Calypso
In 1883 in Trinidad the use of drums during the Mardi-Gras was forbidden, a length that was taken by the slave owners of North America; the energy of drums and rhythm was everything but comforting for them. Here, as well as there, this restriction strengthened the development of an individual musical culture, the blues in the US and calypso in Trinidad. Slavery disappeared in 1837 in Trinidad and the drum ban during Mardi-Gras was seen as more of a precaution to keep things form getting out of control as anarchistic elements were always an aspect of this festival.
The origin of the word calypso is not clear. It may be a derivative of the Venezuealean caliso (the guitar also came here from Venezuela) or from the West African kaiso. Free afro-americans and slaves had their own musical forms since the early 19th century, a blend of their own traditional and european elements. The Belair could also come from the West African tradition, which in the end evolved into calypso. These songs are largely about current themes such as social and political comment, that made calypso a type of newspaper at the beginning of this century. Every important daily theme was told and commented on; what happened today was on the radio tomorrow as calypso. When the Graf Zeppelin made a stopover in 1929 on Trinidad, the singer Atila the Hun released his report shortly thereafter on the radio. The role of the calypso as vox populi has more or less adherred to this day, the texts and opinions still play a much more important role than in the rest of Western pop music.
Calypso interpreters like to give themselves bombastic pseudonyms like The Executer, The Mighty Bomber, Black Stalin and naturally a large number of their songs concentrate on man-woman relationships. These can be very drastic and obscene, in which an unmistakeably chauvanistic masculine sound dominates (for example on Jamaica). In the musical sense, calypso has developed into soul calypso = soca, which indicates influences not only from rock music but also from other Carribean forms without denying its roots.
Hawaii
The traditional Hawaiian music, like other Polynesian music, is mainly poetry accompanied by song, rhythmn, and dance. The Hawaiian musical aesthetic has a great concern for elaborated expression of the individual schooled artists whose musical works offer a high grade of complexity (in opposition to the method on Tonga, where complexity was attempted through the assembly of larger groups of amateurs).
In the middle of the last century, Mexican vaqueros or cowboys contributed to the popularisation of the guitar on the Hawaiian Islands. Around the turn of the century there were already two special guitar techniques: slack key and the Hawaiian guitar. While the slack key remained almost unknown here, the sound that is created by moving a short metal rod on the guitar strings soon became known worldwide and was imitated everywhere. The performance of the Hawaiian entertainers at the Pacific International Exposition in 1915 seemed to be the initial flame that started the popularity of this form of music in America. In 1916 the best sold records were recordings of Hawaiian music and after World War I the Hawaiian craze made it to Europe. A second such craze took place in the late 50's. Numerous Hawaiian musicians seeked success in America, one being Joseph Kekuku who counts as the father of the Hawaiian guitar.
Slack key (ki ho'alu) is a form of finger picking using various different tunings. Originally these tunings were owned by the ohane, the family and were passed down like the songs to the next generation.
The decline of the traditional culture can be directly connected to the americanisation of Hawaii since 1959 when it became the 50th state in the union. In the meantime,the interest of the Hawaiians in their own culture is increasing and music is one of the elements that is profiting from this situation. Right now the slack key form is reliving a great comeback.
Hawaiian War Chant - A Classical Misunderstanding
The Hawaiians have special catagories of love songs. It is very difficult though, (especially for strangers), to define what a love song is because it is almost impossible to decide what is not a love song. The spoken literatur is full of ‘koana’, hidden meanings that often have an erotic character. It is a game that all Hawaiians play and much faster and with more agility than all Western psychoanalysts. (Marshall Sahlins, Inseln der Geschichte, 1985). A well loved Hawaiian title in the US is Hawaiian War Chant. Here is a beautiful example of what happens when the world is seen through the puritanistic spectacles of prude missionaries that also spread their mischief in Polynesia. Another quote from Sahlins: The slowly cooling passion of love and the peaceful atmosphere afterwords are also evident in another famous song from this time, whose title was translated in different forms: ‘Around us it is bubbling over or You and I, and then an eruption’. The last word explains perhaps why this song is offered to tourists as a Hawaiian war song (Hawaiian War Chant). The operative word is huaihua'i, breaking through, squirting, spouting which also symbolizes a sexual climax.
Around us it is spewing (huahua'i)
what a joy the two of us together
hugging each other firmly in the coolness.....
|
