Palauan Musical Obituary

Last October, Jim Geselbracht posted on his Palauan Music blog an obituary titled "Sorry, I Really Must Go" with his memories and also a long list of musical selections to listen to from the life of a very productive Palauan singer, composer, and educator, who began composing when Japanese enka  and evocative Japanese phrases permeated many Palauan songs.  Some of the recordings are very faint, pieced together from old tapes, but well worth a careful listen.

This week we lost another insightful voice in Palauan music: Mengesebuuch Yoichi K. Rengiil passed away at the age of 84 in Guam. Yoichi, both a singer and composer, was born in 1941 and grew up in Ngeremlengui.  In the early 1950s, he moved to Koror to attend the Palau Intermediate School and then left for Guam in 1956 to attend high school and start college.  He returned to Palau in 1963 and taught social studies at the Palau High School.  In the 1960s, he teamed up with Aichi Ngirchokebai, Hidebo Sugiyama and Julie Tatengelel to perform at Aichi’s theater in Koror and at village bais on Babeldaob.  He left Palau again in 1967 to complete his college education at the University of Guam and then obtained a Masters in Education Administration at UH Manoa in 1973.  Yoichi was an active member of the Modekngei, serving as the Principal at the Belau Modekngei School in the 1970s. His professional resume is deep, and I will leave it to others to remember that part of his life, but in this post I would like to acknowledge his contribution to Palauan music.

Yoichi and I met regularly via Zoom over the past five years to discuss Palauan music, language and stories and he was an important mentor to me in understanding the meaning behind the rich musical legacy of Palauan music. From our discussions, I learned of seven songs that he composed between 1963 and 1987:

• Did er a Sechou, 1963 or 64
• Oh! Somebody Me Keleng Saingo, 1968
• Sayonara, But I Love You, 1968 or 69
• Chellelengem ma Klungiolem, 1969 or 70
• Decheruk er a Capitol Hill, late 1960s (co-wrote with John Skebong)
• Merat el Kerrekar, 1970
• Ng Di Kmedu e ng mo Ngemeded, 1986 or 87

The first song Yoichi ever composed has become a classic: Did er a Sechou. Named for the bridge in the jetty at Ngeremlengui, the song was not autobiographical, as many people think, but rather Yoichi telling the story of a man from Ngeremlengui who was heartbroken over the end of his relationship with his wife and children. The first recording of this song is from the Ngerel Belau Radio tapes, recorded sometime between 1963 and 1967, with Yoichi singing and backed by the VOP (Voice of Palau) band consisting of Hidebo Sugiyama on mandolin and Aichi Ngirchokebai on guitar.

Cold, Cold Heart in Palau

I just discovered that I had missed the last two posts to Jim Geselbracht's wonderfully nostalgic (for me) Palauan Music blog. I heard lots of Palauan renditions of Japanese enka and American country and western music during my earliest fieldwork in Micronesia in the 1970s. In his latest post, Jim looks at the antecedents of the Palauan song Aggie Chiang from the 1980s, whose melody goes back at least to 1951 recordings by Hank Williams, Dinah Washington, and Tony Bennett. Hank Williams may have adapted it in turn from You'll Still Be in My Heart (1945) by "T" Texas Tyler and his Oklahoma Melody Boys. Jim posts links to all those renditions.

Polish Chopin Piano Competitors, 2025

Culture.pl profiles several Polish pianists in the latest International Chopin Piano Competition:

In our newsletter picks this week: First, Zuzanna Sejbuk is a rising Polish pianist whose early passion for the instrument, nurtured by her grandmother, has led to an impressive career marked by numerous national and international awards. Currently studying at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, she has performed widely across Poland and recently reached Stage I of the 19th International Chopin Piano Competition. Next, Piotr Ryszard Pawlak is one of Poland’s most versatile young pianists, equally at home on modern and period instruments, and as devoted to mathematics as to music. A laureate of major international competitions from Helsinki to Warsaw, he has performed in leading venues worldwide and continues to explore the intersections of analysis, improvisation and artistry in his dual life as pianist and mathematician. Also, Adam Kałduński is a Polish pianist admired for his lyrical tone, refined interpretations, and intellectual approach to music. A two-time participant in the International Chopin Competition, he has earned praise from critics for the singing quality of his playing and continues to perform widely in Poland and abroad. And finally, Jan Widlarz, a pianist from Warsaw, has gained recognition at numerous national and international competitions and was among the 13 Polish participants in the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. Known for his rich interpretations of piano literature, he has performed widely in Poland and abroad, earning scholarships and acclaim for his artistry.

Down the Danube: Serbia

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Serbia was the capital city, Belgrade. It wasn't Budapest, but it was a very pleasant surprise: lively, bustling, and well supplied. We opted for the Viking "included" (at no extra cost) excursion that focused on three attractions: the white limestone-walled Fortress that gave the city its name; the spectacular Church of St. Sava on the pattern of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia (without the minarets); and the Bohemian quarter of the Old Town (with break dancers). The Fortress, now a city park, housed two unusual displays: a dinosaur park and a display of artillery. Our group's guide was the best of our whole trip: a onetime professional singer who was now a professor of art history and a wonderfully wry storyteller. He demonstrated the acoustics in St. Sava by chanting liturgy at a central spot. On the church grounds was a statue of Nikola Tesla, born in what's now Croatia and buried in what's now Serbia.

Our fondest memories of Belgrade were not the architecture, the food, or the shopping, but the music. Later that Friday afternoon, when we climbed up the steep steps to the Old Town on our own, we chanced upon a crowd waiting outside a church for the wedding party to emerge. We stayed around long enough to enjoy the music and take video. In our ship's lounge that evening, we enjoyed a Serbian troupe performing Balkan folkloric music and dance.

When we woke up the next morning, we were at Golubac, site of an old castle on a steep hillside protecting the Danube border. After touring it and slowly climbing to the top, we boarded a bus for a hillside overlooking the Iron Gates, the site of the sunken Turkish fortress island of Ada Kaleh, and Romania across the river. On the sun deck in late afternoon, we listened to the cruise director's narration as we navigated through the narrow gorges and past the huge Decebal statue. We passed through the locks of the hydroelectric dams after dark.

Liszt's Languages

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 130-131:

The concert at the Pesti Vigadó (House of Merriment), a splendid Baroque building that had miraculously survived the [1838] flood, on 12 February 1839 was a huge success; tickets changed hands for fantastical prices and an enormous sum was raised for flood victims. Liszt played for an hour and a half without a break – Beethoven, Schumann, some of his own pieces – and then conducted the orchestra until late into the night....

From then on he returned frequently to Hungary and eventually he was made the first head of the Hungarian Academy of Music, where for years he wielded vast influence in music and the arts generally in Hungary. He was given a grand mansion on Pest’s principal avenue, Andrássy út, where he lived for around three months of the year during the winter. The civic authorities and ambitious politicians from the Reform Movement were using him cynically, and Liszt was willing to be used. The height of his national acclaim – or of absurd hypocrisy, depending on one’s view – was a ceremony in January 1840 when he was made an honorary citizen of Pest and with great solemnity ‘was presented with a sword [a sabre] of honour: a souvenir from the martial race to its noble-hearted and world-famous son’, as the official programme for the event portentously declared. Many people had not yet realized it – neither his admirers nor his few critics – but Liszt could barely speak a word of Hungarian. This became obvious to everyone during the sword ceremony. He could have spoken German, which would at least have been understood by almost everyone in the Pest of those days. But the point about the event – and the National Theatre itself, where at that time German was not allowed to be spoken on stage during a performance – was to emphasize the critical importance of Hungarians speaking Hungarian. He ended up making an impassioned Hungarian nationalist speech in French. ‘At the very climax of his Hungarianization…his alien reality was revealed most fully,’ one of his critics wrote angrily.

Liszt had tried a few times to learn Hungarian and employed as language tutor a young academic reputed to be a brilliant teacher who had managed to get several dignitaries from the court in Vienna to at least utter a few sentences in Magyar. But, as he once admitted, he gave up the effort after five lessons when he encountered the word for unshakeability – tántorithatatlanság. Many of those trying to learn the language would have lost the will to carry on well before then. Liszt wrote to a newspaper after the National Theatre debacle: ‘Notwithstanding my lamentable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I am and shall remain until my end, a Magyar heart and soul.’

And he meant it. To a Hungarian friend in 1842, while on a Europe-wide concert tour, he wrote: ‘Sometimes my heart beats faster even at the sight of a postal stamp from Pest. It gives me such pleasure to be in your company. What is loud applause and endless acclaim worth compared to what all of you give me? Everywhere else I play for the audience, but in Hungary I play for the nation. And this is a noble and great thing, to make emotional contact in this manner with a nation such as ours.’

Ambonese Musicians in Paducah, KY

The Far Outliers are near the beginning of a major road trip up the center of the U.S. Last night we arrived in Paducah, KY, from Murfreesboro, TN, taking the scenic route through the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. My retired librarian brother, who was born in Japan but has long worked and retired in Paducah, took us to Paducah Beer Werks, which was hosting a Bluegrass Jam with two sets of musicians, Wheelhouse Rousters, a local troupe, and Kaihulu from Ambon, Indonesia. I fondly remembered their hometown from an academic junket in 1990, which I memorialized in one of my earliest blogposts. The two bands connected at a UNESCO Creative City event in South Korea, and Kaihulu came to connect Paducah with Ambon, each now designated a UNESCO Creative City. We had the chance to chat with some of the musicians, who were astounded to meet someone who had visited their hometown and remembered Pattimura University and other places in Ambon. A small world story.

Angaur: Crucible of Pacific Arts

In researching the origins of modern Palauan music and dance, Jim Geselbracht has assembled many perspectives on the phosphate mine at Angaur, which seems to have served as a crucible where Pacific Islanders from Micronesia, Okinawa, Taiwan, and other parts of the Japanese Empire came together and learned from each other during their few precious leisure hours.

As I discussed in an earlier post, foreign workers who were brought to Palau to mine phosphate brought with them their music and dance, which in turn had a significant influence on the development of modern Palauan music.  This, I believe, was the “big bang” event in Palauan music, where it changed from chants with lyrics that were handed down from the gods (chelid) to modern, composed music (beches el chelitakl).  Let’s first explore the history of the mining operation in Angaur.

According to a USGS report [1]:

Mining of phosphate on Angaur begin in 1909 during German administration of the island and continued from 1914 to 1944 under Japanese administration.  Mechanized methods were introduced just before the start of World War II.  From June 1946 to June 1947 mining was carried out by an American contractor under the control of the US Navy.  Mining was resumed on June 30, 1949, by a Japanese company, the Phosphate Mining Co., Ltd. (Rinko Kaihatsu Kaisha).

The labor for the mining operation consisted of Palauan, Carolinian, Chamorran, Filipino and Chinese workers.  In a book on Micronesian development [2], David Hanlon describes the “troubled history” of phosphate mining on Angaur.  I’ve extracted a portion that describes the labor force used to mine the phosphate:

Begun in February 1909, the mining of phosphate and the environmental havoc it wreaked had quickly turned Angaur into the “hottest place in the Pacific.”  The construction of a railroad, drying plant, sawmill, loading dock, warehouses, thirty-two European residences and eleven workers’ dormitories further blighted a landscape already ravaged by the open-pit technique used to extract phosphate.  German overseers and mechanics drank excessively, fought each other, and openly defied their company supervisors.  The abuse of Carolinian and Chinese laborers brought to mine the island’s phosphate included low wages, frequent payment in the form of near worthless coupons rather than currency, forced purchases with these devalued coupons of overpriced goods in the mining company’s store, physical punishment and extended working hours.  By 1911, the situation had deteriorated so badly that German colonial officials elsewhere in the Carolines were refusing to assist in the recruitment of islander labor for Angaur.

Fr. Francis Hezel extends the story in his book Strangers in Their Own Land [4]:

As the German Phosphate Company made preparations to begin mining operations, the island population of 150 … were moved to a small reservation in the southeast corner of the island.  At first company officials intended to rely on Chinese labor for the Angaur mines, and they brought in eighty workers from Hong Kong.  The Chinese proved as troublesome to the German overseers on Angaur as they were on Nauru.  Dissatisfied with their working conditions and benefits, and insulted by the floggings they received, they killed a German employee and called a general strike during the first year of operations.  To provide “more complaisant material for the company than the Chinese”, the German government began recruiting Carolinians.  With the assistance of chiefs from Yap and its outer islands, a hundred men were sent to Angaur on a one-year labor contract; a second recruiting voyage produced another two hundred laborers, eighty of them from Palau and the rest from Yap.

Fr. Hezel continues:

In the evenings, during their few hours of leisure, they often entertained themselves by singing and dancing, thus passing on the stick dances, German marching dances and other stylized art forms that have come to be widespread in Micronesia today.

These dances are what are known as matamatong in Palau today.  By 1911, the initial 300 Carolinian laborers had doubled in size [4]:

the island now contained a polycultural community of 600:  a few dozen Germans, … Chinese, some Chamorros and Filipinos, and the five hundred Carolinians from various islands who worked there.

During Japanese time, the mining labor importation practices continued.  According to Hanlon [2]:

Japan’s later civilian colonial government assumed supervision of all phosphate mining on Angaur in 1927 and relied upon labor from the Marianas, Palau, Chuuk and Yap.  These island laborers were recruited by village chiefs or headmen who received a small bonus or fee as compensation for the loss of manpower from traditional activities.  Most of these laborers were drafted against their will for a year of “totally exhausting work.”

Hezel [4] describes the mix of workers on Angaur during Japanese times as a continuation of German times:

the 350 islanders at work in the mines … generally served year-long contracts and lived under slightly improved conditions … The mines had always drawn heavily on Yapese, who had the reputation of being the hardest workers in the territory, but their numbers fell off from 200 to 50 during the 1920s because of the serious population decline on the island. Chuukese were called on to provide a proportionately larger share of the labor force, at first under threat of imprisonment, but in time half-voluntarily as the allure of a salary grew among the people.

Virginia Luka describes the impact of the phophate-mining workers in Angaur in a paper written at the Southern Oregon University [3].  In it she cited the observations of Pedro [5]:

Foreign workers from places such as Guam, Saipan, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Japan and China introduced new plants, animals, food, dancing, singing and lifestyles.  In Angaur they learned how to bake bread, sew, western dance and how to play some musical instruments such as the guitar, harmonica and accordion from the Saipanese.

Based on these accounts, the 300 to 600 Carolinian workers far out-numbered the local Angaur community of 150.  The Palauans observing and participating in the Carolinian dances likely led to the adoption of the matamatong as a Palauan dance.  Junko Konishi [dissertation in English available here] states that the word matamatong likely derives from Pohnpei [7]:

The term [matamatong] seems to have originated from the progressive form of the Pohnepeian word mwadong (mwadomwadong) meaning “to play, to take recreation” and dancing.

In fact, Junko relates that over 400 Pohnpeans were exiled to Palau in 1911 after the uprising in Sokehs and over 100 Pohnpean males were sent to Angaur to work in the mines [8].

However, Konishi developed a detailed explanation [8] of how the Marshall Islands were actually the birthplace of the marching dance, with diffusion of the dance in the early 1900s from the Marshalls to the Eastern Caroline Islands (including Pohnpei) and Nauru.  She states that:

Yapese and Palauan elders recount that Chuukese spread the marching dance in Angaur.

The matamatong dance was also picked up by Japanese settlers in Micronesia.  During the 2004 Festival of Pacific Arts, held in Palau, a Japanese dance group performed [6]:

… a dance style called Nanyo-Odori (South Seas Dance) [links go to Youtube videos of Bonin Islanders, the latter with subtitles in Japanese, with katakana for foreign words], presented as an adaption of the songs and dances from the Pacific brought back to the Ogasawaran islands of Japan by Japanese people who had sailed around the Pacific for trading … [and] lived in Micronesia during the period of Japanese occupation and control … The dance is an adaption of a Micronesian dance called the Matamatong … The dance, which was accompanied by songs in a mixture of Palauan, Japanese and English, is said to have been created in about 1914 at the end of the German era in Micronesia and continues to be popularly danced today.

A fascinating exchange [at the Festival of Pacific Arts] ensued between Palauans … and the Japanese performers, in which they compared the dance steps of the Nanyo-Odori with those of the Matamatong (as well as the words of the accompanying songs, some of which the Japanese did not understand).  A Palauan musician … Roland Tangelbad, noted that the Japanese still danced the old way, with a German soldier’s style of marching step (goose step) whereas the Palauans had since adapted theirs to the marching step of the US soldiers.

The impact of the Eastern Caroline Islanders among the Palauans went beyond the matamatong dance step [8]:

The Chuukese, who had a tradition of love songs, created many dances for love songs in Angaur during the Japanese colonial period.  And those songs, composed with lyrics in Japanese (which was the common language at that time), became popular among different island groups.

I witnessed both marching dances (call maas in Yapese) and stick dances during my fieldwork in Yap in the fall of 1974. One feature that defined both as "modern" was that men and women performed together in the same dance, and not separately as they did in traditional dances.

Palau's Mandolin King

Pacific Island string bands are far better known for their guitar and ukulele artists than for their mandolin virtuosos, but Palau seems to have had a strong mandolin legacy. On his  Palauan music blog, Jim Geselbracht, an accomplished mandolin player himself, digs into the history of the local composers. Here's part of a post that summarizes an obituary of a mandolin composer, written by Jackson Henry based on his interviews with Neterio Henry in his later years, published in Tia Belau about 2011.

Neterio Henry was born on the island of Angaur, Palau on April 18, 1939. During the outbreak of WWII, Neterio and half of his family escaped the aerial bombings of Angaur by taking a boat to Ngaraard.  Neterio remembers enjoying the tranquility of living in Ngaraard and swimming in the river with the Bells brothers. The other half of his family had to endure the hardship of hiding in caves and having nothing to eat for months during the height of the battle of Angaur.

At the age of 12, shortly after World War II,  Neterio returned to Angaur and met Mr. Isii, a Japanese musician employed at the Pomeroy phosphate mining company.  Mr. Isii taught Neterio the basics of the 6-string guitar.  However, Neterio soon acquired a love for the Mandolin from his brother, Tony Henry.  Tony gave Neterio his first Mandolin, and with the basic knowledge playing guitar, Neterio soon mastered the Mandolin.  Neterio loved the sweet sounds of the Mandolin, so he practiced his instrument daily until his fingers bled.  He often went to bed with his Mandolin. He soon acquired a name from his peers, “King of the Mandolin”.

Neterio’s talent was admired by his friends and fellow Angaurians.  His audience boasted that Neterio had the skill of making his Mandolin strings weep like a bird.  In the late 1950s, Neterio and his cousins formed what is now considered the first organized musical group in Palau named – ABC Band. ABC stood for Angaur Boys Club. All of their instruments were donated by the Pomeroy Mining Company. Neterio and his brother Michael Henry, composers Anaclaytus Faustino, Carlos Salii, harmonica player, Kyoshi Ngirangol, leader guitarist, Jose Itetsu, rhythm guitarist Santos Edward and female vocalist Talya Santiago performed right into Palau’s music history.

Kebtot el Bai

In the late 1950s, ABC Band had their first public concert during the Island Fair held at Keptot el Bai in Koror.  Their syncopated island sounds took Palau by the storm.  ABC became the biggest talk of the town and their musical exploits soon spread to the other villages in Babeldaob like wild fire.

Shortly after their public debut, their first musical recording was completed and aired throughout Palau on the TT Government AM station WSZB.  Palauans got to know the ABC Band and their young and agile Mandolin player named Neterio.  All other band members became musical stars in Palau. “We were the first band in Palau so everyone treated us like stars,” recalls Neterio.

Early Palauan Enka Composer

Here's another excerpt from Jim Geselbracht's Palauan music blog, about one of the early Palauan enka: Wakai Inochi (young life) by Tekereng Sylvester.

Today’s song — Wakai Inochi [young life] — is another song of heartbreak, with words mostly in Japanese.  The song was composed by Tekereng according to Diane’s lyric collection [1].  This is possibly Tekereng Sylvester, who was born in 1920 in Yap, moved to Palau at age 5, then Indonesia at age 14 to further his education.  He then went to Japan in 1942 and worked as a translator for Japanese and Indonesian soldiers during World War II.  He returned to Palau in 1953 to work as a telephone operator and then moved again to Saipan in 1966, where he spent the rest of his life [2], passing at the age of 95 in October, 2015 [3].  I don’t know the year that this song was composed, but with his life’s story, it would make sense that he was the Tekereng who composed this song.

The earliest recording of this song I have is from the Ngerel Belau [Voice of Palau] Radio Tapes, recorded in the 1960s, sung by Kui-Roy Arurang and backed up by the Friday Night Club.  The recording is good and Kui-Roy’s voice is very strong.  The tape box was labeled with the title “Ng Kol Mo Oingerang,” a line which comes from the last verse of the song.  Diane’s lyric collection [1] listed the title as “Wakai Inochi”, as did Gailliard Kladikm’s tape.  And since there is another, different, song with the title “Ng Kol Mo Oingerang,”, we’ll use “Wakai Inochi” for this one.

The rough transcriptions of the Japanese amid the Palauan lyrics (which I've italicized) give a feel for the heavier mix of Japanese lyrics in the 1930s and 1940s. Below I've added best-guess glosses in square brackets to the beginning and end of the lyrics (and attempted light corrections to the Japanese transcriptions). My glosses of the Palauan are also rough.

Wakai inochi [t]o mangokoro wa [若い命と真心は]
Ng diak kubes era [it not I-forget ART] kimi no omokange yo [君の面影よ] ...

A young life and a true heart
I can’t forget you in my memory ...

Natsukasii omoide, kazukazu to [懐かしい思い出数々と]
Kanasii kago no tori no you ni [悲しい籠の鳥のように]
Tsubasa orarete [翼折られて], ng ko el mo oingerang [it will be when?]
A cheldedechad [ART story-our(INCL)]

Dear memories, they are many
Like a sad bird trapped in its cage
With a broken wing. When will it be,
our story?

Reviving Palauan Musical Traditions

At points during its period of Japanese rule (roughly 1915-1945), Palau had more Japanese colonists than native Palauans, who incorporated many Japanese words, names, and songs into their local traditions. Even after the war, Palau continued to be a repository of old-style Japanese enka musicians, who retained many Japanese evocative phrases in their Palauan renditions. Lots of Palauans also mastered the mandolin as well as the guitar.

From Ouchacha: Musings on Palauan cha-cha and other musical forms:

In March of 2018, my friend Tony Phillips and I went to Palau to perform some of the old songs in the 1960s String Band style as “Ngirchoureng“, meet and play with some of the musicians and composers, and talk to folks about how much we love this music.  After returning to California, we spent some time recording the Palauan songs that we had worked up for our trip. Just like our performances at the Night Market and Museum back in March, but this time, you can adjust the volume to your liking. Hopefully I fixed the pronunciation problems that you all so kindly overlooked. We’ve produced a CD of 20 songs, and we’re pretty happy with the way it turned out. Thanks again for the wonderful hospitality of our friends in Palau, old and new.

I selected the title “Mengemedaol er a Irechar” because I like the sense that the word “mengemedaol” can mean either “to welcome” or “to celebrate.” The way I think of this word, is through its relation to the word “klechedaol,” the activity where one village invites another to come and spend some time together, dancing, singing and just renewing their friendship. Mengemedaol is like the welcome that one family makes to another, as they come together to share some joy. And it is also the prelude — the first step — to a celebration of shared experiences. And I think that is what we should do with respect to the past: welcome it into our lives and celebrate the beauty that was brought to us by our elders and ancestors. I don’t know about you, but I think it is pretty cool that in 2018 I am singing a song — Tobiera — that two remechas named Dilmers and Degaragas sang in 1936 and was composed by some unidentified person in 1931, 87 years ago. How different their lives were to ours today, but we can cross the bridge to the past (adidil er a irechar) and join them for a song.

If you click on the link you can listen online to all the songs on the CD.

First Greek Dance Encounter, 1934

From The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Journey Across Europe Book 3, NYRB Classics, 2014), Kindle pp. 240-242:

Before long Dimitri and Costa were on their feet again, involved in an intricate dance very unlike the cheerful and bawdy stampings they had just improvised. The dancers were side by side, linked at a stiff arm’s length by a hand on each other’s shoulder, their unsmiling faces hanging forward chin on breast like those of hanged men. Nothing could be less carefree or orgiastic than the perverse mood of the steps, the premeditated hornpipe, then an abrupt halt. This was broken by movements as slight as the bending and straightening of the knee; the feet, flat on the ground with heels together, opened at an angle then closed and opened again. The right feet were then lifted and slowly swung backwards and forwards. A left-foot jump brought their torsos seesawing in a right angle to balance a simultaneous kick on the ground behind them with their right. Then the dancers swept forward for an accelerated pace or two, braked and halted with their right legs lifted, knees to heels sweeping parallel to the ground in slow scything movements, and falling again. Their hands smote beneath them in a double clap, then they were almost on their knees, hands on shoulders again, gliding off sideways, then rolling forward once more at their smooth and unnaturally timed pace. The softness, the hypnotic-seeming control and union, the abrupt surging, the recoveries and the arms falling loose for an identical pirouette before joining again, the fastidious shelving of stereotype – what on earth had all this sophistication to do with Balkan or peasant simplicity? Then there was the planned anticlimax, compensated by a drilled outburst when, in any other dance, all would have been decrescendo and subsidence. The sudden asperity and vigour and speed were muzzled and hushed in mid-swoop, like the flash of steel unsheathed halfway up the blade, then allowed to slide back with a soft subsiding click of hilt on scabbard. The subtle and complex beauty of this peculiar dancing in relation to all the dancing I had seen in recent months, and coming hotfoot on the straightforward bumpkin fun of the first performance, was as much of a surprise as would be finding unheralded in a collection of folk verse a long metaphysical poem in a highly elaborate metre and stuffed with conceits, tropes, assonances, internal rhymes and abstruse allusions. I think it was just as new to the shepherds as it was to me.

At the end of the dance, Dimitri joined us by the fire and swelled the accompaniment with his own voice and another gourd. The next dance, on which Costa now embarked solo, though akin to its forerunner, was even odder. There was the same delay and deliberation, the same hanging head with its cap on the side, a cigarette in the middle of the dancer’s mouth. He gazed at the ground with his eyes almost closed, rotating on the spot with his hands crossed in the small of his back; soon they rose above his head like a vulture’s wings opening, then soared in alternate sweeps before his lowered face with an occasional carefully placed crack of thumb and forefinger as the slow and complex steps evolved. The downward gaze, the absorption, the precise placing of the feet, the sudden twirl of the body, the sinking on alternate knees, the sweep of an outstretched leg in three quarters of a circle, with the arms all at once outflung in two radii as the dancer rose again in another slow circle, gathering pace till he spun for a few seconds at high speed and then slowed down in defiance of all the laws of momentum – these steps and passes and above all the downward scrutiny were as though the dancer were proving, on the fish scales and the goats’ droppings underfoot, some lost theorem about tangents and circles, or retracing the conclusions of Pythagoras about the square on the hypotenuse. Sometimes during these subsidences, he slapped the ground with one hand and shot into the air again. A leap, after a few grave and nearly static paces, would carry him effortlessly through the air to land motionless with knees bent and ankles crossed. He would rise from this crouched posture, his trunk flung forward like a pair of scissors closing, the smoke from his cigarette spiralling round him. These abrupt acrobatics and calculated flashes of strength were redoubled in effect by the measured smoothness and abstraction of the steps that bracketed them. This controlled acceleration and braking wove them all into a single and solemn choreographic line. Perhaps the most striking aspect of it was the tragic and doomed aura that surrounded the dance, the flaunting so quickly muffled, and the introvert and cerebral aloofness of the dancer, so cut off by indifference from the others in the cave that he might have been alone in another room, applying ritual devices to conundrums reluctant of yielding their answers, or exorcizing a private and incommunicable pain. The loneliness was absolute. The singing had stopped and nothing but the jangle of the wire strings accompanied him.

Transylvanian Harvest Season, 1934

From Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Journey Across Europe Book 2, NYRB Classics, 2011), Kindle pp. 139-142:

The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had both vanished, cuckoos had changed their tune and were making ready to fly. Roast corn-cobs came and trout from the mountains; cherries, then strawberries, apricots and peaches, and, finally, wonderful melons and raspberries. The scarlet blaze of paprika—there were two kinds on the table, one of them fierce as gunpowder—was cooled by cucumber cut thin as muslin and by soda splashed into glasses of wine already afloat with ice; this had been fetched from an igloo-like undercroft among the trees where prudent hands had stacked it six months before, when—it was impossible to imagine it!—snow covered all. Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunnelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation; and soon, even at midday, the newly distilled spirit began to bowl the peasants over like a sniper, flinging the harvesters prostrate and prone in every fragment of shadow. They snored among sheaves and hay-cocks and a mantle of flies covered them while the flocks crammed together under every spread of branches, and not a leaf moved.

Behind the thick walls and the closed afternoon shutters of the kastély [manor house], sleep reigned fitfully too, but resurrection came soon. The barley was already in and István was busy with his reapers and the last of the wheat. (In Hungary, the harvest began on the 29th of June, the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, but it was a bit earlier hereabouts.) ... After the long weeks of sickles and scythes and whetstones, it was threshing time. Old machines were toiling away and filling the valleys with their throbbing, driven by engines with flapping belts and tall Puffing Billy chimneys expanding in a zigzag at the top. Up in the mountains, horses harnessed to wooden sledges and rollers for shelling the grain trotted round and round on circles of cobble. Winnowing followed, when clouds of skied grain sparkled and fell and then sparkled again as the next wooden shovelful transfigured the afternoon with chaff. The sacks, carried off in ox-carts, were safe in the barns at last. If the waggoners were Rumanians, instead of crying “stânga!” or “dreaptă!” in their native tongue when they wanted their oxen to turn left or right (or “jobb!” or “bal!” in Magyar if they were Hungarians) they would shout “heiss!” [hăis] and “tcha!” [cea]. I had first noticed these arcane cries when buffaloes were being coaxed or goaded along. István thought that the Turks had first brought these animals here, probably from Egypt, though they must originally have come from India. But the words are neither Turkish, Arabic, Romany, Hindi nor Urdu.

July brought a scattering of younger Transylvanians and their relations in search of refuge along the river valley from the heat of Budapest, which summer had turned into one of the great tropical cities of the world. There were parties and picnics and bathing, and tennis at István’s till it was too dark to see the ball, on a court sunk among thick trees like a shady well; and feasting and singing round pianos in those long disintegrating drawing-rooms, and sometimes dancing to a gramophone. A few of the records were only a year or two out of date, many much older: Night and Day, Stormy Weather, Blue Skies, Lazybones, Love for Sale, Saint Louis Blues, Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise. In case of need, István was revealed as a proficient pianist—“but only for this sort of stuff,” he said, vamping, syncopating, honky-tonking and glissandoing away like mad; then, spinning completely round on the piano-stool, he ended with a lightning thumbnail sweep of the whole keyboard from bass to treble.

The village calendar was starred with feasts and saints’ days and weddings. Gypsies throve, the sound of their instruments was always within earshot and the village squares were suddenly ringed with great circular wreaths of dancers in wonderful clothes with their hands on each others’ shoulders, a couple of hundred or more: and the triple punctuating stamp of the horă and the sârbă, falling all together, would veil all their bravery for a moment in dust-clouds. (I learnt all these dances later on.) It was at night that they impinged most insistently, especially on the eve of a wedding, when the groom and his paranymphs went through the slow stages of a mock abduction. If the rhythms of High Hat, The Continental or Get Along, Little Dogie flagged for a moment among the faded looking-glasses and sconces and portraits in the kastély, staccato cries, high-pitched and muted by distance, as the bride was hoisted aloft, would come sailing up from the village below and through the long windows. “Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!” The dancing was spurred on late into the night by the new apricot brandy, and the fiddles and zithers and clarinets and double-basses were heckled by the distant yelping of wild rustic epithalamia; then strings, hammers and the shrill reeds would be drowned once more by Dinah, and our own hullabaloo under the chandeliers.

Musical Rapture and Melancholy, 1934

This one's for Dumneazu.

From Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Journey Across Europe Book 2, NYRB Classics, 2011), Kindle pp. 62-63:

We shared a paprika chicken in an eating-house and had coffee out of doors. Then noise and music enticed us into a much humbler vendéglö full of shepherds and drovers. They were tough, tousled and weather-beaten fellows in knee-boots or raw-hide moccasins lashed on with thongs, and they wore small black hats and smoked queer-looking pipes with lidded metal bowls and six-inch stems of reed or bamboo; the collars of the smarter ones, worn with no tie, were buttoned with apoplectic tightness. The instruments of the Gypsies were a violin, a ’cello, a double-bass, a czembalom and, most improbably, an ornate harp, chipped and gilded and six feet high between the knees of a very dark harpist; his sweeps across the strings added a liquid ripple to the languor and the sudden fury of the tunes. Some of the customers were groggy already: spilt liquor, glassy eyes and benign smiles abounded. Like all country people venturing into towns, new arrivals were shy and awkward at first, but this soon dissolved. One rowdy tableful, riotously calling for wilder music and for stronger wine, was close to collapse. “They will be in tears soon,” Miklos said with a smile, and he was right. But they were not tears of sorrow; it was a sort of ecstasy that damped those wrinkled eye-sockets. I learnt about mulatság for the first time—the high spirits, that is, the rapture and the melancholy and sometimes the breakage that the stringed instruments of Gypsies, abetted by constant fluid intake, can bring about. I loved this despised music too, and when we got up to go after a couple of hours, felt touched by the same maudlin delectation. A lot of wine had passed our lips.

I wonder how much Cuman and how much Jazygian blood mingled with Hungarian in the veins of all these revellers?

Gramophone in Shanghai, 1948

From Last Boat Out of Shanghai, by Helen Zia (Ballantine, 2019), Kindle pp. 215-216:

Her father’s spontaneous parties presented her biggest challenge. She disliked having to sit, prim and proper, sometimes forced to speak to adults who had no interest in her or what she might have to say, all under her father’s critical eye. Not only was she afraid that she’d irritate him, but she also couldn’t fathom why some of the women, as educated as her mother, spoke in little-girl voices like her ten-year-old sister’s. Or why so many of the men puffed themselves up as though they had the answers to everything. Annuo envied her sixteen-year-old brother, a boarder at his middle school, who didn’t have to endure these dinners. She couldn’t wait to be dismissed and sent upstairs to bed, where she could retreat with her books to a fantasy world far away.

BUT THANKS TO A STRANGE new contraption, Annuo’s attitude toward the parties shifted. On one visit, her father brought home a gramophone. After the adults had finished eating and talking, someone mentioned having “itchy feet.” The servants pushed the furniture aside in the parlor, rolled up the carpet, and talced the floor. Her father cranked up the gramophone and put on some popular band music. Then everyone danced. As if possessed by spirits, the properly formal men and women jumped up and moved about while touching one another. The first time Annuo saw the adults dance, her jaw dropped. Opposite sexes touching in public? Stunned to see even her parents embrace as they danced, she found this utterly contrary to everything she had been taught about acceptable Chinese behavior. To Annuo’s great surprise, her father decided that she and Li-Ning should learn to dance, since there were never enough female partners for his friends. Soon Annuo was dancing the fox-trot, tango, and swing to popular Shanghai band music. American tunes like “Tennessee Waltz” got everyone onto the dance floor. Annuo began looking forward to her father’s surprise visits, hoping for the music to start up after dinner. Her feet were itchy—and she was happier.

North Korean Career Hopes

From The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, by Hyeonseo Lee (William Collins, 2015), Kindle Loc. 1455-1466:

You would expect between school friends a more honest conversation about our hopes for the future, and what we wanted to do with our lives, and that did happen, to an extent. But by the time we were ready to graduate, we had learned to trim our expectations in line with our songbun. Our choices fell within a certain range. In my class, the few of us with good songbun either took the university entrance exam or, if they were boys, went straight to military service. A few were able, through family connections, to land good jobs with the police or the Bowibu. More than half the students in my class were in the songbun ‘hostile’ category. A list of their names was sent to a government office in Hyesan, where officials assigned them to mines and farms. One girl from this group took the test to enter university, and passed, but was not permitted to go.

My good songbun meant I could plan. My dreams were private and modest. I wanted to be an accordionist. It’s a popular instrument in North Korea and a woman who could play it well had no difficulty making a living. That would be my official career, but, like my mother, I also wanted to trade, start an illicit business, and make money. I thought this would be exciting. I also knew that it would be the only way to ensure that my own family, when one day I had children of my own, would have enough to eat.

My mother fully supported the accordion career choice, and found a musician from the theatre in Hyesan to give me tuition. She said my father would have been pleased, as he’d always enjoyed accordion music. This made me cry.

The Strength of Edo-period Culture

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 8-9:

The strength of Edo-period culture is not to be found in extant artifacts of the era. Rather, its strength lies chiefly in its spectacular breadth and diversity. This was a period of unprecedented cultural prosperity. Even the general public took part in leisure pursuits and played an active role in the creation of new cultural forms. The average commoner read books or visited the theater; some even wrote haiku verses and senryū (seventeen-syllable comic verse) or performed musical genres such as gidayū, kato bushi, shinnai, or nagauta. Others went on pilgrimages sponsored by religious associations (kō) and toured distant places. The Edo period saw a rise in the quality of culinary fare that commoners consumed; clothing and housing too showed marked improvement. Even the poor managed occasionally to indulge in the luxury of purchasing a "custom-made" comb or an ornamental hairpin. The demand for such cultural items fostered the development of a highly refined handicraft industry. Never before had there been such an extraordinary variety of hand-made cultural artifacts in Japan.

Even in remote areas in the countryside or on distant, isolated islands, inhabitants cultivated rare varieties of flowers and trees and marketed unusual rocks or curiosities. As Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) noted in his Akiyama kikō (Autumn Mountain Travelogue, 1831), people in every corner of the land were busy manufacturing local specialties. Such articles were being produced, one by one, by thirty million people. By the late Edo period this activity had stimulated an unprecedented development of the transportation network. Mountain roads, waterways, and sea routes were extended in all directions to every nook and cranny of the country. Indeed, the construction of footpaths during the late Edo period can be seen as a kind of symbol of this golden age of handicraft culture.

No doubt, Japan today boasts a high level of culture. But the price has been high as well: severe environmental pollution and the wholesale destruction of nature. Until the end of the Edo period, red-crested cranes could still be seen soaring through the skies over the city; swans and geese flocked to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. Foxes and badgers were found everywhere, and cuckoos (hototogisu) flourished in such numbers that their song was considered a nuisance. Even during the late Meiji period the water of the Sumida River was clean enough to be used for brewing tea while boating. Human activity imparted only minimal damage to nature. Viewed in this way, Edo-period culture seems almost ideal.

Certain elements of the Edo-period cultural heritage were vulgar, no doubt, but a more comprehensive view of the period reveals an almost infinite number of admirable qualities. Nevertheless, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, governmental policies of modernization and westernization dictated a wholesale rejection of the preceding feudal era. Even the best elements of Edo-period culture were deemed outdated and vulgar and were thought to require prompt and thorough extirpation. That the true value of Edo-period culture could not yet be properly assessed had much to do with the lack of any inquiry into its origins and actual conditions. Recent research, however, has shown that Edo-period culture was outstanding in its own way and not at all inferior to the culture of earlier or later periods.

One Child's Language: at 11 months

Three social encounters that happened at about the some time showed us very clearly how uncomfortable she is with a lot of fussing and close attention by people she doesn't know very well. First, we took her in to the Deloitte office (where her dad used to work). There are a bunch of friendly women there who love to poke, hold, tickle, and tease babies. She froze until we walked away from the crowd, where she could run about well out of reach of any eager arms. At about the same time, we took her in for her first picture-taking experience. It was very nearly a disaster what with all the close attention the photographer and her assistant was giving her. But the same weekend, I had letters to drop off with some Yapese teachers who were in Waikiki on their way home. I walked into their hotel room with her and then put her down on the floor. Soon she was squatting near one of them, watching as he repacked his suitcase. Later, she was playing between the chairs where two other men were sitting, just as content as could be. The difference here was that these folks weren't paying any attention to her.

Music and dance continue to be an important to her. Sometimes music is the only thing that will calm or distract her. We have a variety of cassettes, but I guess she really hasn't heard much hard rock or country western. On the day she was crying so much we used them all. She recognized the Dave Brubeck tape as one that Daddy has danced to with her; she had been sitting in my lap, but as soon as that tape came on, she reached out for him.

She has begun to follow our fingers when we point, and she uses her own index fingers to point, too. Outside she points out all the buses; we ride them twice a day now to her babysitter's place, so they are really important to her. At home, she points to things she wants or things she wants us to name or talk about.

Her passive vocabulary is growing rapidly. Every day she recognizes more and more things by name, and it now seems to take very few instances of repetition before she "has it." Her spoken vocabulary seems to be shrinking, but she makes the few syllables she's using go far, and she has begun to add final consonants to some of them.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston Public Schools.

Wordcatcher Tales from the Merrie Monarch

Each year the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo, Hawai‘i, showcases the best of the best in Hawaiian hula, which nowadays includes performances by hālau from overseas, where some of the top hālau have branches. I haven't watched it that regularly, but it is easier now that KITV in Honolulu offers a special Merrie Monarch website with stories, slideshows, and streaming video.

Hawaiian hula has a lot of distinctive terms and cultural practices that are usually not translated into English. Kaua‘i's Ka ‘Imi Na‘auao O Hawai‘i Nei has a helpful webpage that explains the principal roles and responsibilities within a hālau. And Hula Traditions has a useful page naming and explaining dozens of different types of hula. Thanks to KITV's helpful video captioning, I also picked up a few new words this year.

Each Merrie Monarch Hula Kahiko has three formal segments (like a concerto), introduced by an oli (‘chant’), which can be intoned by either the ‘olapa (dancers) or the ho‘opa‘a (‘memorizer’, chanter, drummer, maestro). In the individual Miss Aloha Hula competition, however, the dancer is judged on both her oli and her hula, so she must perform both. The center of each hula is the mele, the processional/lead-in movement is called the ka‘i, and the recessional/exit movement is called the ho‘i. The spectators are not generally expected to remain silent between the movements, and they often break into cheers as the mele gets underway.

I like the traditional Hula Kahiko (‘ancient’) much more than the modern Hula ‘Auana (‘wandering, straying’), and only watched the Kahiko performances this year. One of my favorites among the Wahine Kahiko was Kumu Kapua Dalire-Moe's Hālau Ka Liko Pua O Kalaniākea's "Kaulilua I Ke Anu Wai‘ale‘ale," a hula pahu (to drum beat) that was performed at the coronation of King David Kalākaua, the Merrie Monarch himself. I liked the subdued costumes, stately movements, and excellent synchrony. Very suitable for a coronation.

But I was also utterly entranced by Kumu Rae K. Fonseca's Hālau Hula ‘O Kahikilaulani (Hilo hometown favorites), whose Kane Kahiko and Wahine Kahiko performances both took wonderfully vigorous advantage of the percussive effects of the wooden stage itself.

The first authentic hula I can remember seeing was in the early 1970s at Hawai‘i Loa College, where a seemingly frail ‘Iolani Luahine performed a vigorous Kane Kahiko, even slapping her chest and biceps. In fact, she was instrumental in preserving and passing on many of the key elements of men's hula.

UPDATE: Well, the judges really went for the hula ma‘i, which traditionally celebrated the chiefly genitals at the birth of a new heir. Hula ma‘i are performed later in the evening and are full of suggestive movements and rich double-entendres. Language proficiency has become ever more important in evaluating Hawaiian hula compositions and performances. The hula ma‘i performed by the women of Kumu Sonny Ching's Hālau Nā Mamo O Pu‘uanahulu was indeed very finely executed, and the performance by longtime veteran Kumu O'Brian Eselu's Ke Kai O Kahiki was by far the most athletically demanding and the most lascivious men's hula I have ever seen. In fact, the men and women of Ke Kai O Kahiki were the overall winners, while those of Hālau Nā Mamo O Pu‘uanahulu took second place.

Ke Kai O Kahiki means ‘The Sea of Tahiti’ and would have been *Te Tai O Tahiti before *t shifted to /k/ in what later evolved into Standard Hawaiian. But the title of the suggestive mele in the hula ma‘i performed by the men of Ke Kai O Kahiki was Tū ‘Oe, which preserves the earlier *t. (If tū corresponds to kū ‘stand tall’, perhaps the title might be translated as "Get it up, you!")

Now, there's another suggestive mele full of both double-entendres and instances of /t/ in place of /k/ (but /k/ as well). Tewetewe ‘back and forth’ is ostensibly about the little red-tail goby fish (‘o‘opu hi‘ukole). I wonder if the use of the old-fashioned /t/ in both mele is just coincidental.

Tokelauan Diaspora Language Revival

The Far Outliers recently had the chance to attend a Polynesian music and dance performance by Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika ‘The Future of Tokelau in America’, and I've added a few photos of it to my Flickr account. They recently won the Po Fatele competition at the Tokelau Festival in New Zealand. One thing that appealed to me about the performance was the combination of vigorous dance and wonderful Polynesian choral harmonies at the same time. You don't get that combination so much these days in Hawai‘i, although you can hardly beat the vocal harmonies at the Kamehameha Song Contest or the hula at the Merrie Monarch Festival each year. Two other nice features of the Tokelauan troupe were the youth of the performers, the youngest of whom were learning by doing, just as they would in a less formal village setting; and the atoll-authentic percussion instruments: a slit-gong (pate), a biscuit tin (apa), and a wooden box (pokihi).

The background story about how this group got started is chronicled by two linguists, Yuko Otsuka and Andrew Wong, in an article in Language Documentation & Conservation 1, no. 2 (December 2007), from which I'll excerpt a few of the highlights:

Tokelauan is a Polynesian language closely related to Samoan. Together with English, it is an official language of Tokelau, an island territory of New Zealand, with approximately 1,400 speakers (Gordon 2005). The total number of speakers of Tokelauan is estimated to be approximately 4,000, including those living in American Sāmoa, New Zealand, and the United States. The first missionaries came to Tokelau from Sāmoa. Noting the resemblance of the language spoken on the islands to Samoan, they decided to use the Samoan Bible instead of translating it into Tokelauan. Thus, Tokelauans read the Samoan Bible till this day....

Like many other Polynesian peoples, more Tokelauans live outside their homeland than in it. The vast majority of Tokelauans reside in New Zealand. According to the 2001 census, 6,200 Tokelauan people live in New Zealand. That is four times larger than the population in the homeland. Sixty-six percent of them were born in New Zealand. In 2001, only 44 percent of those living in New Zealand were reported to be able to hold an everyday conversation in Tokelauan, down from 53 percent in 1996 (Statistics New Zealand 2005). These figures suggest that language maintenance outside Tokelau is crucial to ensuring the future of the Tokelauan language....

Tokelauans in Hawai‘i come from Olohega (also known as Swains Island), the southernmost atoll of the Tokelau island group, which lie three hundred miles north of Sāmoa. Geographically, the Tokelau group consists of four atolls: Atafu, Fakaofo, Nukunonu, and Olohega. Politically, however, only the first three belong to Tokelau, an island territory of New Zealand. These islands became a British protectorate in 1889 and were transferred to New Zealand administration in 1925. Olohega followed a separate course of history. In 1856, an American, Eli Jennings, came to Olohega with his Samoan wife and turned it into his private copra plantation. In 1925, Olohega was annexed to the United States and was placed under the jurisdiction of American Sāmoa.

Jennings’s son imposed forced labor on all residents of Olohega. In 1953, the residents of Olohega went on strike in protest to the violations of civil and labor rights. They drew up a petition and submitted to the American Sāmoa attorney general. In response, the acting Governor ordered a state-sponsored eviction of over half the population of Olohega. Many families ended up as refugees in Pagopago, American Sāmoa. Living there was not easy for Tokelauans. Even though they were American nationals by virtue of the annexation, Samoan law precluded them from owning land or businesses. The hardship of life in Sāmoa turned their eyes to the United States (Ickes 1999, 2002). In the 1950s, a student from Olohega, who was on scholarship at the Lā‘ie Community College (today’s Brigham Young University Hawai‘i), saw the opportunities in the pineapple plantations in Central O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. He sent for his brothers and they brought their families to live in the plantation labor camps provided by Del Monte (Ickes 1999, 2002)....

Since 2004, the Tokelauan community in Wahiawā, Central O‘ahu, has been making active efforts to revitalize the Tokelauan language as well as culture within the community. Two organizations play a key role in initiating and promoting the community’s efforts for language maintenance: Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika (The Future of Tokelau in America) and Te Taki (The Guide) Tokelau Community Inc.

In July, 2004, a youth group from Tokelau visited Honolulu on their way to the Palau Pacific Arts Festival. They performed for the Tokelauans who hosted them in Wahiawā. This encounter sparked a keen interest among the Tokelauan youth (teenagers and young adults) of the community in their Tokelauan heritage. They were deeply impressed by the richness of their cultural heritage and at the same time were shocked to realize that they knew very little of it. The children asked their parents why they had never taught them their own language and culture. It was a rude awakening not only for the children, but also for the parents, who had not seen any value in teaching their children Tokelauan, thinking that they would be better off with English.

This incident led to a sudden awareness among young members of the community that the language was gradually disappearing within the community. Deeply moved by the children’s yearning to learn their heritage, two young parents started a Saturday school to teach the Tokelauan language as well as songs and dances. This is how Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika came into being. The elders of the community welcomed the opportunity to share their knowledge of the language and culture. As it turned out, they had long been concerned about language loss, but had never voiced their concerns until then. Te Lumanaki’s Saturday morning gatherings thus brought together an intergenerational group of Tokelauans who were eager to share the language, songs, and dances.

Opera Boxes, Salons, and Bedrooms, 1700s

From The Opera Companion, by George Martin (John Murray, 1961), pp. 133-134:

In Italy in the eighteenth century the center of operatic activity shifted from Venice to Naples, where a school of outstanding composers arose specializing in two styles: "opera seria" and "opera buffa." "Opera seria" was on a grand scale with historical or mythological themes; it was a close cousin to the Viennese Baroque opera except that the music was of greater importance and the scenery of less. The aria, generally sung by a castrato, was the crux of every scene, and over the years it became extremely stylized, so that for any situation there was a certain type of aria that was appropriate. The singer was expected to embellish the aria with extemporaneous runs, trills and flourishes, and this—more than the drama, scenery or composed music—was what excited the audience. Thus the composer wrote a vehicle for a particular singer rather than searching his soul in nineteenth-century romantic style to produce an immortal masterpiece. Grout, in A Short History of Opera, reports that forty leading composers in the eighteenth century wrote fifty operas each: Verdi wrote twenty six, Wagner thirteen, and Puccini twelve. There was no repertory as today. The audience wanted new music each year, although it was perfectly willing to have the same librettos used over and over; for example, Mozart's was the seventh setting of Metastasio's La Clemenza di Tito. The scores of the operas were almost never published and, in any event, were extremely sketchy. Only the favorite arias might be published and, as there was no copyright, the composer was far less interested in preserving his old work for posterity than in receiving a commission for a new one, which he could complete in four to six weeks.

One result of this approach to opera, so different from today's, was that no one really listened much; opera was still a social rather than a musical event. A Frenchman, De Brosses, writing in 1740 described what went on at Rome: "The ladies hold, as it were, at homes in their boxes, where those spectators who are of their acquaintance come to call on them. I have told you that everyone must rent a box. As they are playing at four theatres this winter, we have combined to hire four boxes, at a price of twenty sequins each for the four; and once there I can make myself perfectly at home. We quiz the house to pick out our acquaintance, and if we will, we exchange visits. The taste they have here for the play and for music is demonstrated far more by their presence than by the attention they pay. Once the first scenes are past, during which the silence is but relative, even in the pit, it becomes ill-bred to listen save in the most interesting passages. The principal boxes are handsomely furnished and lighted with chandeliers. Sometimes there is play, more often talk, seated in a complete circle as is their custom, and not as in France, where the ladies add to the show by placing themselves in a row in the front of each box; so you will see that in spite of the splendour of the house and the decoration of each box, the total effect is much less fine than with us."

Besides visiting in the opera, the Romans also played cards and chess. In Milan the diversion was faro. Florence offered hot suppers served in the boxes. At Turin each box had a room off it with a fireplace and all the conveniences for refreshments and cards. At Venice the boxes could be closed off from the theater by a shutter.

All travelers reported that the gabble and noise were deafening except during two or three favorite arias which, greeted with wild applause, were repeated. One visitor, Lalande, estimated that the typical Milanese spent a quarter of his life at the opera. It is not surprising then that the archduke's box in Milan had attached to it not only a private sitting room but also a bedroom.