Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. xiii, 183 pp. (Illustrations.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5156-9.
Reading Denis Crowdy’s book, Hearing the Future: The Music and Magic of the Sanguma Bandabout the internationally acclaimed Papua New Guinea band popular during the 1980s, led me to dig out my copy of their first cassette, the eponymously titled Sanguma, that I had bought when I first arrived in PNG in 1978. I then had to find a cassette player, buried away in the garage, on which to play it. Listening to the ethereal sounds of Sepik bamboo flutes alternating with jazz riffs played on trumpet and keyboard transported me back to my first visit to Port Moresby, the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), and the National Arts School (NAS), where I had purchased the cassette en route to fieldwork on Manam Island. I was also transported “back to the future”—1975, when Papua New Guinea achieved independence and the nation’s future as it was envisioned in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the historical period that Crowdy analyzes in Hearing the Future. The band Sanguma and its distinctive fusion style were very much products of that post-independence moment that gave birth to the young nation’s hopes for a new pan-Papua New Guinea national identity. That idea provides the thesis for Crowdy’s book as well as his argument for the role music can play in national identity, a concept prevalent in ethnomusicology today (think of the role of reggae in Jamaica or calypso in Trinidad). Crowdy’s historical and musical analysis of Sanguma provides a welcome and compelling case study from a Pacific nation of this concept. So too does his analysis of the factors—most significantly, local forms of neoliberal capitalism— that contributed to the band’s eventual demise.
The broadest importance of the book is its evocation of that nascent period in the country’s history and the role Sanguma—and the National Arts School—played in it. The members of the original band were students at the newly established NAS and came from many different regions across PNG, facts that were important to both the band’s musical style and its ethos. How the music of Sanguma— based on a fusion of traditional PNG musical forms and progressive jazz performed on both traditional and Western instruments by musicians in traditional PNG bilas (feather headdresses and pig’s tusk ornaments)—encapsulated those hopes and created a style that reflected that ethos is the subject of Crowdy’s book. The very name of the band—Sanguma—the Tok Pisin word for supernatural “poison” or magic, evoked both ancestral power and the potency of music to transport the listener to another reality.
The author, an Australian musician who taught in the Faculty of Arts (FAC) at UPNG (the successor of the original NAS) from 1992 until 2000, interviewed members of the original band, including Tony Subum and Thomas Komboi, as well as former NAS faculty member Les McLaren and others who had taught them. Crowdy is in an ideal position to describe the historical and musical legacy of Sanguma as he was distant enough from its originary scene to be objective, but familiar enough with PNG, the PNG music scene, and the institutional context in which the band arose to astutely and convincingly analyze it. He begins with a discussion of how the band sought to engender what he calls “a musical Melanesian Way”—a reference to ideas about what should constitute an indigenous post-independence Melanesian ethos articulated by Melanesian intellectuals such as PNG’s Bernard Narokobi and New Caledonia’s J-M Tijbaou. Their doctrines set out the goal of incorporating important elements of Melanesian cultures—such as respect for the ancestors, local traditions, etc.—while embracing modern forms of government, economics, and technology and blending them to form something distinctly Melanesian. Crowdy describes Sanguma’s decade of international fame during the 1980s and its performances abroad. Ironically, the band was more popular abroad than it ever was at home, a fact Crowdy attributes to the urban, art school-educated background of the band members and the influence of their expatriate instructors, who conveyed their admiration for the musical sophistication of jazz to their students. In contrast to the Western music the Sanguma musicians were learning at NAS, the most popular music in PNG at the time was Western rock or country. Outside of Port Moresby and other urban centres in PNG, there was little interest in the sophisticated syncretic music Sanguma was playing. By far the longest, and most technical, chapter of the book is “The Sound of Sanguma.” Readers not familiar with Sanguma’s music or without access to one of the band’s nine recordings, or without an in-depth interest in the musical structure of Sanguma’s sound, will find this chapter slow going. Importantly, however, Crowdy also discusses how Sanguma’s music was a precursor to the new genre of World Music that arose in the West and elsewhere in the 1990s. He also attributes the band’s brief reformation in the early 1990s as a result of the emergence of World Music’s popularity. In the chapter “From Heard Future to Sounding Present” and a coda he describes the disappointments the band faced in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century as the PNG music industry became more commodified. Despite its technical core chapter, Crowdy’s book should be of interest not just to ethnomusicologists, but to historians, anthropologists, geographers (for example, Crowdy discusses the concept of “ecomusicology” with regard to Sanguma’s reception in PNG), cultural studies scholars, and students of global studies and development studies. Not only is the thesis of the book—the relevance of music to the creation of national identity—of broad import, but Crowdy’s analysis of the parallel trajectories of the demise of Sanguma and the difficulties PNG has experienced as the result of local and international inflections of neoliberal capitalism provides a fascinating, if sobering, look at an important moment in the history of Papua New Guinea.
Nancy C. Lutkehaus
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
pp. 643-645