Spirits Up Above
Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea

by Michael Stone

Behind the visionary gaze of his dark sunglasses, five gospel horns hanging from his neck, a testimony to multiple creation, comprehending the compound colorations of the human voice, the infinite possibilities of sound, Roland Kirk tossed down an array of sonic riffs whose immediacy was incontestable. "Music that makes us cry, love that money can't buy, let's all search for the reason why ." And as the Roland Kirk Spirit Choir intoned in response, "Can't you hear the spirits up above?"

The people of Bosavi would have understood, and thus a word of caution to would-be listeners. Read no further, unless you are prepared to enter a world wherein sound and human sentiment are inseparable, one whose musical conception offers a radical critique of our unexamined account of reality, and hence, of the very character of the human condition.

The Bosavi people, some 2,000 in number, inhabit the rainforest of the Great Papuan Plateau in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG). They identify closely with their natural environment and savor the nuances of its abundant sensory stimuli. With a scintillating sense of acoustic ecology, they use music and sound to extend their grasp of human experience beyond the socio-economic and political constraints, and the perceptual confines, of the visible material world. Music as sound, and sound as music: as these layer, animate, audition, project, give flight to feeling and sensation, they weave human sensibilities into the very fabric of the natural world that sustains life as we know it.

Ethnomusicologist, trombonist, human rights activist, MacArthur award winner and Columbia University professor of anthropology, Steven Feld first went to Bosavi in 1976, and since then has extensively documented the shifting cultural dynamics of life there. His 1991 Voices of the Rainforest (part of Mickey Hart's Endangered Music Project) is a landmark in ambient sound and world roots music. It and two new releases reviewed here comprise a quarter century's sounding, logged in the field during an era of unprecedented cultural, social, economic and political change that has transformed Bosavi life.

A remote region largely untouched by exterior cultural influence before the mid-20^th century, constituting what an earlier generation of anthropologists referred to as a "classless, small-scale" society, Bosavi people were drawn involuntarily into the developing national political economy of PNG, and thus assimilated, however incompletely, into the same grasping, discordant transnational universe that we listeners ourselves inhabit.

These recordings trace the sense of absence, yearning and cultural loss written through Bosavi song in a process outsiders gloss cavalierly as "development." But Bosavi song testifies likewise to an irrepressible will to survive in the face of paramount threat to local language and culture. Because whatever else it may be, socio-economic and political "development" remains a fight over the preservation, survival, marginalization, domination, dissolution and extinction of particular human cultures. Bosavi people comprehend this dynamic intuitively, and as their student and collaborator, Feld presents their critical sensibilities to a planetary audience whose own disaffection from the culture of global capitalism gives ample cause to listen and reflect.

There is a profound irony here, of course, insofar as we consumers access unfamiliar forms of cultural expression via electronic mass media and global marketing. Images, sounds, and whole narratives about the varieties of human experience now routinely circulate across traditional cultural and linguistic lines, altering their inflections in the transmission. Such itinerant cultural artifacts and narratives assume the authority of cross-cultural communiqués, but their meaning in any given context is highly fluid, effectively ambiguous and (because subject to politics) fundamentally contradictory.

Removed from the immediacy of an irrevocable cultural survival struggle, adrift in the global market economy, and in the absence of an ethical and political commitment on the part of the listener-consumer, recordings like these risk falling into the realm of aural curiosity, the next big thing in ambient sound. What is the proper response, as outsiders listening in, upon hearing the music of a people whose continued existence is captive to processes beyond their direct control? What responsibility do global audiences owe to peoples whose music speaks to the underlying question of continued cultural viability? Such questions go far beyond the mere matter of preserving this or that expressive form.

There is no adequate answer, but Feld's response has been to document, analyze and disseminate the music to cultivate a broader understanding of the cultural dynamics of Bosavi life, and to call into question the global processes that threaten the coherence and vitality of Bosavi culture. At the very least, purchasers of Feld's Rainforest Soundwalks (Earth Ear) know that the author's royalties will go entirely to the Bosavi People's Fund, to support projects like the newly issued Bosavi Dictionary, another Feld endeavor.

Confronting a historical process whose outcomes are anything but certain, we should not be surprised to encounter "exotic" musics that resonate in surprising and powerful ways with our own culturally conditioned ways of understanding. Bosavi music and musical perception are indeed quite distinct from our own, but the music's soulful voices are neither as alien nor as atypical of the human condition as our own cultural conceits might suggest.

What is the relationship between us all as humans, and what is humanity's collective place in the natural universe? Bosavi people offer a recondite, musically philosophical reflection upon an ageless conundrum, and here we have a rare chance to listen in. Feld identifies a key concept in Bosavi musical understanding, "lift-up-over-sounding," how people in singing, attuned to the vital diversity of natural life, listen to, hear and blend their voices with the daily sounds of plant and animal being, insects, birds, water and wind, in elemental poetic concurrence with the forest soundscape, and the very earth itself. Bosavi people value song precisely in its capacity for poetic expression, its sense of connection and emotional resonance with everyday life.

In this conception, music transcends the physical limitations of being-in-the-universe, its own measurability, its technological capture and transmission, its reduction to aesthetic artifact, its commodification and circulation in the global capitalist economy. Bosavi music escapes its material confines in performance, holding out the promise and animating the experience of a life of astonishing fullness. Bosavi music bears witness to a metaphysical conception of sentiment and consciousness, of human kinship with and within the natural world, summoning up all that is subsumed in the phantom objectivity of everyday reality.

Listening to a recording is plainly far from the experience of ambient immersion in a natural environment whose soundscape, to even its most intimate inhabitants, defies human description. Yet these recordings allude to, voice the powerful sense of interconnection that informs Bosavi expressive culture and sense of place. As one musician remarked to Feld, "We're just singing our feelings," a deceptively transparent declaration that encapsulates an immanent precept of Bosavi creativity, cultural understanding, symbolism and meaning, pointing past the illusory here-and-now to some deeper significance beyond.

So how to present a 25-year sampling of musics that have endured the radical cultural transformation visited upon Bosavi by evangelical missionary work, anthropological investigation, tourism, the introduction of consumer goods and wage labor, mass media and popular culture influences, national politics, and the ruling impositions of development policy?

Feld begins in the present moment, dedicating the first disc of Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea to the guitar bands of the 1990s. He sees them in the broader context of the contemporary string-band music of Oceania. Produced by the first generation of people to grow up in an independent PNG, an age-set mostly denied the experience of initiation into the ritual and ceremonial traditions integral to the life experience of their elders, the music speaks to present concerns. But it does so with a distinctive sense of cultural style. Male out-migration to find wage labor brought guitars and ukuleles back to Bosavi, along with portable cassette players and radios, and the resulting infusion of pop styles from beyond Bosavi territory.

For Feld, guitar band music, which emphasizes vocal harmony and focuses on salient themes of changing Bosavi life, is a contemporary embellishment of the high traditional value accorded music as poetry, an emotionally vivid medium of human expression. To western ears the music's spare quality (two or three voices, lead and rhythm guitar, and an occasional ukulele) is perhaps most striking. The singers project a sense of emotional immediacy, testimony to their power as social commentators to turn weeping into song, and song into weeping, which potential appeals to musicians and audience alike.

Feld dedicates the second disc of Bosavi to the songs and sounds of everyday life, the articulation of human voices and activities with the ambient soundscape. Consider the vocal call-and-response of "Ulahi and Eyo-bo Sing at a Waterfall," set against the sound of rippling waters and rainforest life, or the percussive, other-worldly resonance of "Gaima Plays the Bamboo Jew's Harp." Disc three steps more deeply into Bosavi cultural tradition, highlighting the ritual and ceremonial sounds and songs, including "Group Ceremonial Drumming" (a percussive invocation of the Papuan Bellbird, thought to represent the spirit of a dead child), in a song capable of moving listeners to lamentation, causing the aggrieved to "retaliate" against the drummers by burning their shoulders or drums with hot brands. "Women's Ceremonial Iwo: Song" is part of the vocal tapestry of the ritual slaughter of pigs; it features a staggered lift-up-over vocal figure accompanied by a seed rattle, producing an evocative effect whose fluid, echoing quality confounds verbal description.

Disc two's 25-minute closing track, "Voices in the Forest: A Village Soundscape," anticipates the direction of Rainforest Soundwalks (Earth Ear), a series of constructed audio immersions that seek to convey the changing vocal contour of the forest over the course of the day. Feld has dedicated a quarter century to documenting Bosavi people's culturally fashioned sense of place in the rainforest environment. This recording will particularly appeal for naturalists, sound artists and aficionados of ambient natural sound, but more generally, it reveals something about the character of close listening as a means to know and participate in Bosavi life, in an approach Feld calls "acoustemology," a sonic way of knowing.

The sounds of track one, a quarter hour of the Hooded Butcherbird's early morning song, emanating through the breaking mist, represent for Bosavi people the "gone reflections" or voices of the spirits of the dead, who pass on to reside in and speak from the crest of the forest canopy. The remaining three tracks, each approximately a quarter hour in length, present what Feld calls "ambient soundwalks" through the day's progression, "the experience of sound in motion through space and over time." He proceeds by mixing two to four pairs of stereo tracks recorded at various heights and depths of the forest, observing, "The effect is to create something both acoustically transparent and hyperreal, a cross between soundscape documentary and electroacoustic composition."

The result is as close as we humans are likely to come in communicating with spirits gone but not departed, something that, despite the unimaginable cultural losses charged to the disingenuous promise of western "development," Bosavi people, as cultural innovators in a wailing world, have long and tragically understood. � Michael Stone

The Bosavi People's Fund, managed by The Tides Foundation

Recordings made and annotated by Steven Feld, as referenced in this review:

Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea
Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40487 (3-CD anthology - www.si.edu/folkways)

Rainforest Soundwalks: Ambiences of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea
Earth Ear (www.earthear.cc)

Voices of the Rainforest
Rykodisc

Related Recordings:

The Living, Dead and Dying: Music of the New Guinea Wape
Smithsonian Folkways F-4269

Music from South New Guinea
Smithsonian Folkways F-4216

Stories and Poems of New Guinea
Read by Bernard Barshay, Alois Jerewai, Alberto Toro, Joseph Saruva, et al.
Smithsonian Folkways F-9786

Books by Steven Feld:

Sound and Sentiment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Music Grooves (with Charles Keil). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Senses of Place (edited with Keith Basso). Santa Fe, NM: School for American Research (SAR) Press, 1996.

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