[Distributed by Indiana University Press in the United States]
Bounty Chords documents the music-making and dance practices of The Bounty’s mutineers and their descendants--The Bounty being the eighteenth-century British vessel captained by William Bligh and brought to international imagination through twentieth-century cinema.
Hayward begins by outlining his research approaches, then chronicles the main events of Norfolk and Pitcairn island settlement. In summary, Bligh sailed to Tahiti and sojourned there for several months with his crew in 1789. Weeks after The Bounty was again underway, Bligh was cast off by Fletcher Christian and fellow crew members. The mutineers’ brief return to Tahiti added local men and women to their party, and together they settled on remote Pitcairn, 1350 miles southeast of the Society Islands. Violence marred the refugee community, and by 1793, only a few British men and Tahitian women remained to sustain it. Like many island societies, however, Pitcairn was host to numerous travelers. Some stayed to leave their mark, while many others documented their observations before moving on. Under land pressure, in 1856 all 175-plus Pitcairners relocated west to Norfolk Island, a former Australian penal colony. In 1858, sixteen returned to Pitcairn, followed by another twenty-six in 1863.
Taking a chronological approach, Hayward describes entertainments on board The Bounty and on Tahiti; he then details the musical lives of early Pitcairn and Norfolk settlers, tacking between the two islands in short chapters. Here Hayward offers a particularly rich smorgasbord of historical material--newspapers, diaries, and logbooks among them. Sources are meticulously documented and often quoted at considerable length, allowing readers to interpret these texts for themselves.
By 1800, only one male--John Adams--remained on Pitcairn. His sudden religious turn moved hymnody to the center of island musical life. Within decades, the arrival of two Englishmen gave rise to the first "locally-associated" hymns, and by the 1850s there was again evidence of secular music for dancing, provided by harmoniums and fiddles. Hayward suggests that at this mid-century mark, dance on Pitcairn was ethnically gendered: men restricted themselves to European solo dances (e.g., hornpipes) and women to a gesture-based, Polynesian movement style. Relocation to Norfolk introduced couple-dancing. Indeed, Norfolk’s proximity to other islands (especially New Zealand and Australia), improved inter-island transportation, and the advent of portable recording technologies exposed islanders to global popular culture. The late 1930s, for example, saw them performing blackface minstrelsy and hillbilly songs. Chapters 2 to 6, then, sweep from the late-eighteenth to the early-twentieth century, documenting swings of the musical pendulum as islanders came under the influence of transnational trends as well as more and less austere religious movements. Regardless of leadership and place, hymns constituted a core repertoire, and four-part harmonizing a shared practice.
Chapter 7 stands out for several reasons. First, Hayward vows in the introduction to withhold theorization until the book’s conclusion, out of consideration for his Norfolk and Pitcairn readership. The chapter’s discussion of Norfolk Islanders’ re-Polynesianization of music/dance cultures, however, begins with an extended socio-political analysis of the sexualized male gaze vis-à-vis Tahitian women in 1930s film and literature. Hayward’s critical skill truly shines in this chapter, and his conclusion--that Norfolk dancers remade themselves in the image of cinematic Polynesians--is well taken. It is also at this point in Hayward’s narrative development that the research (and readers) necessarily get stuck on Norfolk Island--that is, until the final chapter. [1]
As Hayward moves deeper into the twentieth century, his data sources multiply, and his interactions with people living on Norfolk Island allow him to tap into lived memories and observe local practices. As a result, chapters 8 through 11 become increasingly more particular. In fact, the later chapters comprise a kind of biographical catalogue, focused on late-twentieth/early twenty-first century composers and musicians and the “glocal,” hybrid styles they favored. Though Hayward offers some light musical analysis of recordings, exegesis of song texts (including those in Pitcairn and Norfolk languages) is his primary mode of exploration. Hayward’s primary point, iterated throughout, is that music and dance have been used by Norfolk and Pitcairn islanders as assertions of their changing identities. This is a standard ethnomusicological claim, and I wished for some more nuanced exposition of it in light of islanders’ mixed heritages. Just how do Pitcairn and Norfolk islanders view their Tahitian ancestry? Do Norfolk Islanders read Tahiti into the syncretic style of "hula" they continue to perform?
Of the many contemporary musicians that Hayward discusses, George "Toofie" Christian (presumably a descendant of the lead mutineer) receives the greatest amount of attention, in part because of Hayward’s relationship with him: Hayward served as executive and assistant producer for Christian’s 2001 CD, Pilli Lornga N.I. Related to this, the afterword to Bounty Chords is a discussion of the participant-action research that Hayward and his colleagues are engaging in in the Southwestern Pacific. Hayward uses this forum to discuss what he calls Culturally Engaged Research and Facilitation (CERF). CERF performs an assistance and advocacy role, from low-level technological support to fully subsidizing recording projects. Though he mentions resistance to CERF, Hayward’s description of it seems curiously defensive. In light of the “writing culture” movement in anthropology (which denies researcher objectivity), the last decade’s burgeoning of public sector folklore, and touchstone publications on ethnomusicological fieldwork relations (e.g., Barz and Cooley 1997 [2008]), it is difficult to imagine many folklorists or music researchers who would take exception to CERF’s proactive stance, at least as Hayward describes it. Rather, one would expect them to affirm this collaborative approach involving local participants.
While I was surprised by the paucity of ethnographic data and virtual absence of references to the literature on Pacific hymnody (e.g., Stillman 1993) or Polynesian dance, Bounty Chords is compelling reading for those with an abiding interest in indigenous hymnody, twentieth/twenty-first-century global popular culture, and processes of intercultural contact. Hayward will satisfy many audiences with this volume: his gathering of historical sources in the early part of the book is very impressive, and his careful attention to songs and their singers in the latter part will be especially gratifying to his Norfolk and Pitcairn island consultants.
Works Cited
Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley, eds. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. [2nd edition 2008]
Stillman, Amy Ku‘uleialoha. "Prelude to a Comparative Investigation of Protestant Hymnody in Polynesia," Yearbook for Traditional Music 25 (1993):89-99.
[1] Pitcairn Island was rocked by a sex-abuse scandal when Hayward planned to conduct ethnographic field research there in 2002-2004. Though he was able to interview some Pitcairn ex-patriots and visitors to Norfolk Island, lack of face-to-face interaction with Pitcairn Islanders did limit him.
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[Review length: 1100 words • Review posted on September 3, 2008]