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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

Chapter XVI — Polynesian Art: Dance, Games, Music

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Chapter XVI
Polynesian Art: Dance, Games, Music

Dance and Music are Siamese Twins in Early Times

(1) In static art, the art of carving and design, we found a marvellous development in the south, and especially in New Zealand, due probably to the crossing of numerous cultures in that ultima thule of the Southern Pacific, to the wider area, and to the luxuriance of the timber-supplying forests. The same deep contrast between the Polynesians and the Maoris is not to be found in their dynamic or mobile art, least of all in the most elementarythe art of dancing and that of music. For here small advances made by the crossing of races do not accumulate so easily; they cannot be retained so well in material form, for excellence in these arts is more individual.

(2) And yet dancing and music are amongst primitive people far less individual, far more a matter of mass combination, than in civilisation. For rhythm is their essence, and binds them close together, like body and soul. Music is rarely divorced from dancing in the early stages of culture, and seldom advances beyond mere rhythm into melody and harmony. To a modern European ear it sounds not much more than rhythmic noise, a mere marking of time for concerted movement of the limbs, monotonous and unattractive, if heard without its origin and inspirationthe dance.

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Polynesian Dancing shows Signs of its Religious
Origin

(3) And the dance is in its origin pantomimic. It is meant in all its earlier stages to imitate the action in which success is desired, and has a religious atmosphere and guidance. Dancing in modern Europe has been divorced from religion, and, having long lost its picturesque or imitative purpose, has passed into the conventional stage, in which a new movement or step has no aim except variety and perhaps grace.

(4) Polynesian dancing has advanced far on the road to conventionalism. It has shed much of its pantomimic purpose, and its religious meaning, and in this it reveals the collision of two or more cultures. In a region marked by so much that it is so highly primitive, nothing but the clash of different religious systems could explain its divorce from rites and ceremonies and its appearance as an almost purely secular art, intended to amuse and delight an assembly of spectators. Had it not been secularised, the women could not have taken part in it amongst a people who looked on all religion as an affair of men; and that it was once wholly religious is shown by its character. It is not like European dancing, a harmony of "twinkling feet." It is wholly occupied in posturing, waving the arms and bending the body, as if before a shrine. It is the upper part of the body that is chiefly engaged. Where the feet come in, it is only to effect the occasional advances or retreats, as if to and from the altar, or in the resounding thud of the war-dance. The Polynesian dance is oftenest stationary.

(5) The old religious significance was still retained in the funeral dance of the Maoris, and perhaps in their triumph dance and their war-dance, and here and there throughout the islands it appears, as in Nukuhiva of the page 204Marquesas group during the religious festivals held to celebrate the maturity of the breadfruit the men alone take part in the dancing, and dance naked. In short, whatever dances were monopolised by the men we may be sure still kept something of the old religious atmosphere about them.

(6) War amongst the Maoris was the most sacred of all employments; the fighting men were tapu, and could not cook food or carry cooked food, and the war-party had to be consecrated and deconsecrated by the priest, with most elaborate rites. The war-dance, often indulged in just before battle in order to rouse daring to frenzy and to shake the hearts of the enemy, had something religious about it, and was confined to the men. It was a New Zealand development, and with its wild, goblinesque movements of body, limbs, and facial features, and its terrific energy and music, formed a piquant contrast to the soft, posturing, licentious dances that prevailed all through Polynesia. One has to go to Melanesia and Papuasia for analogies; and these are not to be compared, in spite of their hideous masks. The Maoris turned their faces into close imitations of their demonlike carved images. But the thrust-out tongue, the wild rolling eyes standing out of the head, the fierce grimaces, and the quivering hands and fingers, with the accompaniment of the deep-drawn cries and the stamp of feet, had all the advantages of living movement to add to the terrifying effect. It is difficult to efface the deep impression that its massive energy and furious, almost epileptic, passion makes on the mind, when produced by hundreds. It surpassed in fury anything that kava or any other drug or fermented liquor could have given to the harmonious movements of a mass of warriors. And in the olden days it had the grimmest of religious purposes. Now it has degenerated into an exhibition and a spectacle.

(7) But it shows better than any others the pantomimic page 205origin of all dance. Every act, every movement, every grimace was intended to give a realistic picture of the battle the warriors were about to enter, as well as to stir to overwhelming frenzy their religious zeal. And most of the other dances in which men alone engaged were more or less realistic imitations of this war-pantomime. Even in the islands the dances of men reveal shadowy reminiscences of war. To this is doubtless due the predominance of the upper part of the body, and especially of the arms and hands, in their dances. If these had originated in hunting or nomadism, or even agriculture, we should have had more use of the legs in them. But there is one curious use of the legs in dancing that is not easily explained without some knowledge of the animals used in agriculture. It is the backward kick that forms the pice de rsistance in the amusements of the two farthest separated branches of the Polynesian race the Malagasies and the Easter Islanders; otherwise they merely posture and use their arms; but the men in dancing have grown most expert in imitating the savage kick of the four-footed animal.

The Appearance of Women in the Dance marks the
Decay of its Religious Significance

(8) But as a rule in all these islands the women mingle with the men in the dance, or have monopolised it. The religious element has, therefore, completely disappeared. And a lascivious pantomime has taken the place of the bellicose gestures. The same degeneration had begun in New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans; but it had not gone far. The energy that the cross-breeding with the vigorous aboriginals and fighting with them too imparted, along with the keener and more bracing climate, checked the tendency to demoralisation that the Polynesians doubtless brought with page 206them from the islands. It is the presence of the pakeha, with his luxuries and muskets, and the removal of the invigoration of war that have let the lascivious dances overshadow the war-dances. The women have taken more and more part in them; and dancing has become a spectacular amusement rather than an exhibition of religious and warlike fervour. Some of the women's dances and gestures must go far back. The power of moving up and down the whole front of the body from bosom to waist, like the twinkling quiver of the hands and fingers, was not acquired in a few generations.

Children's Games show the Marks of Discarded
Religious Rites

(9) And the rhythmic grace of the poi dance, which is so little of a dance in our sense of the word that it can be performed sitting, must come down from the immemorial, doubtless, like so many games of the young, the imitation of some long-discarded religious rite. Many of the Maori children's plays and games are almost the same as those of Japanese children and those of European children: flying kites, skipping with a rope, the top, the hoop, the bullroarer, the giant's-stride swing, walking on stilts, throwing somersaults, hide-and-seek, ducks and drakes, counting out, hunt the slipper, knuckle-bone, and cat's cradle. The bullroarer has preserved only a little of its original religious significance; it is used to drive off spirits from a chief's body at a tangi. So, too, has the top; though chiefly an amusement for children, it is employed by the warriors to provide chorus for the dirge over their fellows slain in a battle they have lost. Kite-flying retained something of its serious purpose in its use for sending messages to another tribe, or as an omen-indicator and sorcery-weapon when blown across a page 207besieged pa. Whilst this is one of the few races whose children use the hoop that reveal its primal aim amongst adults; the warriors were accustomed to insult their fallen foe by stretching the tattooed skin of his thigh on a hoop and trundling it from man to man. So cat's cradle (whai) tells more of its primeval origin as it appears amongst the Maoris than amongst other races. It was doubtless an effort of palaeolithic man to represent a stage or dramatic exhibition with lightning changes of scene. For with the Maoris its various stages are called houses, each with a different name. According to White, in his "Ancient History of the Maori," it represents the drama of the creation. The game, under the name of whai, is found in many of the island groups, and the word seems also to imply something connected with witchcraft, a charm. There is another name for it in New Zealandmaui, which also means witchcraft. And tradition tells that the game was learned by Rongomai in the realms of Miru, the goddess of the under-world, who guards the gates of death, and has all the divinities of sorcery around her. He learned at the same time all the knowledge of the charms the Maoris had, and also the game of ti, which is played by Scotch boys under the name of "How many fingers do I hold up?"

(10) This derivation of these games from Po or the underworld indicates again origin from the long-nighted winter of the north. And that some of the scenes in the drama of cat's cradle were to represent the adventures of Maui, the northern culture-hero, and the Great Lady of Darkness, points in the same direction. The revival of the giant's-stride swing (moari) as a part of the Hauhau religion seems also to indicate that this children's game was in its origin religious. With skipping and throwing somersaults it was doubtless used by adults in primeval times as a method of paralysing the reasoning centres and inducing frenzy, like the whirling of the page 208dervishes and the old religious dances. Walking on stilts, again, is a game that belongs to Maori children, as it does to European; but Maori legend points back to serious use of it by the Arawa hero, Tamatekapua, in stealing from fruit trees. Religion, on the other hand, has preserved another relic of the old habit in the stilt-dance of the Marquesas group, which suggests singularly enough the stilt-dance of Yucatan on the neighbouring American coast.

(11) The Maoris, in fact, attribute the origin of their games as well as their music and dancing to two goddessesRaukatauri and Raukata-mea, the sisters of Mauithus pointing back to the primeval mother-governed household or matriarchate. It is as significant that the Ureweras, the comparatively peaceful blend of Polynesian and aboriginal, should have chosen twin brothers as the presiding deities of these; it looks as if the pre-Polynesians were farther removed, like the Aryans, from the most antique household based on mother-right than the South Asiatic Polynesians.

(12) There is doubtless much light yet to be thrown on the customs of submerged races and religions from the games of children. Some of them, such as, for example, knucklebone, or, as it is called by Scotch children, "the chucks" (from chuck, to toss, an old Teutonic word), with its use of round beach-pebbles, or "chuckie-stanes," probably goes back to palaeolithic times; though the English name of knuckle-bone, or dibs, shows in the use of bones of domestic animals an adaptation to the nomadic or agricultural stage. The toboggan (papareti), so favourite a sport with Maori boys, down a smooth grassy slope or a well-wet earth-slide, is doubtless a relic of snow-clad mountain-sides, probably in the Far North, perhaps in Europe. It belongs to Hawaii, also; there the sledge is called papa, but the game is holua, which is also a name for the winter north-wind.

(13) The extraordinary number of these games and plays page 209common to European and Maori children has no insignificant bearing on the kinship of the primeval population of Polynesia. For if we can imagine any conservatism that surpasses that of religion and of women, it is that of children in their games. They resist all innovations there with a fervour that is practically religious, because they are still in the dominantly emotional stage that represents the mental condition of early man, and that withstands the corrosive influence of reason or novelty.

The Dance evolved Oratory in New Zealand and
the Histrionic Art in Polynesia

(14) It was doubtless the religious atmosphere in the worship of Tu that kept the Maori war-dance so free from innovation till recent times; it was in the hands of men, and their influence extends to other dances, even the lascivious and obscene, preventing them from degenerating into mere spectacular posturing of women. Hence it was that the dance helped to evolve oratory, a purely masculine art in all but the most advanced civilisations. The fugleman in the hakas must be an orator, if he is not a poet; for he has to invent rhythmic speeches of a highly figurative style to interval the choruses. All the imaginative power of the chiefs and priests in New Zealand developed in this direction, and speeches became as essential to every meeting of Maoris as they are to every type of assembly in England. The tohungas and chiefs grew adepts in moulding and rousing the feelings of their audiences; and though they revelled in figures of speech till the Oriental arabesque overlaid the original aim and meaning, as important an essential of the orator was the dramatic gesture and action. He paced hither and thither, at first with slow dignity; but when he had roused himself and his hearers to the requisite pitch, he postured, and grimaced, and acted as wildly as he page 210would in a war-dance. But the art ever remained an extemporaneous one; its products-were for the occasion, and not meant to be handed down by tradition, like the songs and incantations. Thus it was not a branch of literature, but retained the traces of its origin in the dance. It was mimetic and masculine, and hence to some extent religious.

(15) The literary side of dancing took quite a different course in Polynesia, and especially in Eastern Polynesia. Samoa and Tonga, though they admitted women to the exercise of the art, and developed the lascivious side of it more than New Zealand did, show their greater affinity to the latter in keeping it simpler and more extemporaneous. In the east of the island region it was the dramatic element of the dance that was developed; but it was only in the Hervey group and the Tahitian that it was developed into histrionic art. Cook saw again and again the performances of the Areois, those aristocratic actors of Tahiti, who sailed from island to island, and entertained the people with their dramatic dances, whilst themselves indulging in the most licentious excesses. He once saw sixty canoes setting out full of these histrionic celibates about to make a tour of the islands. One play he saw represented a successful robbery, another an accouchement, a third the habits and acts of himself and his countrymen. We hear of their libertinism and policy of infanticide from all early visitors. Such a singular and deliberate degeneracy was doubtless due to the havoc that the luxurious idleness of these Eastern Polynesians and the enervating climate worked upon their moral fibre. It would have been well-nigh impossible in New Zealand, with its hard-won subsistence and its bracing air. The strenuous character of the Maori dances, as of the Maori life, obstructed the evolution of the drama, histrionic though the Maoris were in this art and its offspring, oratory.

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The Elementary Character of the Music hampered the Development of the Dancing Art

(16) But what barred the way to development of this art and those that sprang from it was the elementary character of their music. There was not only no harmony and no possibility of melody, in spite of early travellers speaking occasionally of their singing in parts, but the range of notes was limited to the pentatonic, like that of the Chinese and all barbaric or half-developed civilisations. In an appendix to Grey's "Polynesian Mythology" a London musician, a Mr. James Davies, puts some of the music he heard from a Maori into notation that reveals its inherent monotony. Only here and there is there any departure from the customary range of two or three notes, and then only, in a descent at the close. It is true he shows that there are half and quarter notes increasing the variety within the monotonous range, but he confesses that he might be wrong; the differences seemed too subtle for the European ear. Cook found the Tahitians reject the harmonies of his instrumentalists, whilst delighting in the bagpipes and the drum; the simple notes and short range of these instruments was most like their own music.

The Drum and Percussive Instruments were their
Favourite aids to Singing, and again reveal the
Primitive Character of their Culture

(17) The Polynesians were in fact limited by their highly primitive musical instruments, which probably only imitated the music they heard in nature. The first natural sound to attract the human ear was doubtless thunder and similar loud and abrupt repercussions. Hence the most widely spread and earliest of all instruments is the drum or gong. In this the Maoris have retained the most elementary form page 212that of a suspended wooden slab, and it takes a very subordinate place in their culture compared with its place in the islands. There it rises into great importance, not only in the music and the dance, but in religious ceremony; it becomes a highly ceremonial instrument, like a chief's axe or baton. In New Zealand it was used only in war and siege. The sentry kept thumping it during the night to show that he was on the watch. The simplicity both of its structure and of its use, and its absence from religious ceremonies, seem to show that it was aboriginal. That it originated partly in maritime pursuits is apparent in the canoe shape often given to it.

(18) Another percussive instrument was the pakuru, as elementary in its construction and in the music it produced as the gong. It consisted of an inch-thick stick held by the teeth and the left hand, and a striker held in the right. The variation in the notes arose from the movements of the lips. It was evidently meant, like the guitar, for serenades and other amatory music. The idea of a musical instrument of percussive elements was far more elaborated in the islands. The ihara of Tahiti was much like those of all the rest; it is described by Ellis as a single joint of a large bamboo, with a long slit in it, laid on the ground and beaten with sticks; its sounds were hard and discordant, and it was never used in worship, but only for amusement, whilst the pahu or drums were used in the temples as well as in war and dancing and dramatic performances. The Tongans and Samoans elaborated the idea. The latter arranged bamboos like a pan-pipe in a mat bag and beat upon them; they also struck bamboos closed at one end, and of different lengths, at intervals on the ground in order to produce a gradation of notes. The Tongans developed this method still more, as described by Cook in the account of his third voyage. But the Maoris preferred, as the accompaniment of their page 213great dances, the primeval means of percussion supplied by their own bodies. Their favourites were striking the bosom with one hand, whilst the other was made to twinkle and quiver aloft, and to bring the bare sole of the foot down with thunderous effect on the ground. The islanders had their favourites too. In the east they struck the bent left arm with the right hand; in Samoa they clapped their hands; and in Tonga the women snapped or cracked their fingers like castanets. But the limit of notes in all this percussive music was primeval in its narrowness, in New Zealand most primeval of all.

Their Flutes were Extremely Primitive, and the
Nose-flute was Exceptional and obstructed
Musical Development

(19) It is the same when we turn to the only other type of musical instrument that Polynesia hadthe wind, or blowing instrument. There is the extreme of simplicity and lack of variety of effect; and New Zealand has it in its greatest bareness. There are the fife, the flageolet or flute, and the trumpet of various kinds. Of these the flute was the instrument most capable of development in the range of notes. But here a unique custom barred the way. It was played, not with the mouth, but with one of the nostrils, the left in Tahiti, the right in New Zealand. Now, in order to give range, both hands were needed as stops for the holes. But the need of one hand to stop one of the nostrils precluded this. The result was that the largest number of notes in a Polynesian flute was five, and as a rule one of these was below for the thumb. How could the scale be other than pentatonic at its utmost range, where the chief musical instrument was confined to five holes or notes? And in New Zealand there was more often than not only one hole in the centre, and the variety of note was obtained by the greater or less extent of this that was covered.

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(20) The route of this inefficient device for bringing the breath to bear on a music-tube was Java, Borneo, Celebes; for the nose-flute is found in all three islands. Had this not pointed so definitely to South Asia as its source, one would have been inclined to assign the origin of the use of the nose-flute to some climate, like the northern or sub-Arctic, where the bitterness compelled the habitual closing of the mouth. That it came into Polynesia with a very ancient migration from Indonesia we may be sure; for it did not find its way to Madagascar, although the peculiar stringed instruments of Malaysia went thither. It was not used in religious, but in amatory music throughout the islands a sign that it did not belong to the last conquerors, but to the aboriginals; and, though in the islands bamboo was preferred for it, in New Zealand, in the absence of that universal provider of Indonesia, boneand especially the leg-bone of an enemywas used for it in preference to wood and other material.

The Trumpet is Ceremonial

(21) When we turn to the trumpet we are outside of common life, and within the precincts of worship. All through the islands it was used in the temples and by the priests, like the drums, though also a war instrument. In New Zealand it was the instrument of the chief and the warrior; it was used to warn of an enemy's approach, and to announce the visit of a chief. In the islands the trumpet was generally a large murex shell, with a bamboo inserted near the apex. The Maoris also used the triton-shell, with a wooden mouthpiece, as a trumpet; but they preferred the long wooden trumpet with a wide end to fit the mouth. Usually there was a reed or tonsil inside near this to vibrate; sometimes there was a hole in the middle to be covered or uncovered in order page 215to vary the note. There was a bent trumpet used in the South Island, that has been compared to a trombone; and from Taranaki has come a calabash-trumpet with two or three holes. The roria, or Jew's-harp, was simply a slip of bark held between the lips and made to vibrate. The pan-pipes reported once or twice from New Zealand, and frequently from Tonga, was a rude affair in which the reeds, varying from five to twelve, were not arranged to make a regular scale of notes.

The Rarity of Stringed Instruments is accounted
for by the Rarity of the Bow

(22) A stringed instrument, a monochord, called utete, was used amongst the Nukuhivas of Eastern Polynesia. It consists of a bow strung with catgut, and is played by holding one end between the teeth and scraping the string with a small stick. A tetrachord, called ukeke, was used in Hawaiiusage that is explained by the Hawaian use of the bow. This rarity is the more striking that such instruments exist all over Indonesia, and all the uncultivated and most of the uncultivated races of Asia have them. The usual form in Malaysia is the same as the valiha or Malagasy violin, made by raising the fibrous cords of the outer cuticle of a piece of bamboo on small wooden bridges.

(23) Wherever the bow is used there is the germ of the stringed instrument in its twanging. Yet throughout America, where the bow is universal, there are no stringed instruments reported except from ancient Mexico. The Mongoloids of Asia, who use the bow, prefer the music of the strings. The absence of the bow from Polynesia, except as a ceremonial or unwarlike instrument, sufficiently accounts for the limitation of the instrumental music to percussion and blowing. But it is a singular thing that, though bamboo was introduced page 216into it, it did not adopt with its immigrants from Indonesia the bamboo violin or guitar. Doubtless the rejection of the Indonesian bow accounts for the strange phenomenon.

(24) Thus it is that the various arts interdevelop or inter-obstruct each other. War and religion have almost everything to do with the beginnings of both dancing and music, and the two in early times are closely allied. Later art secularises itself, and tries to fling off the bonds of war, and become the servant of everyday life and everyday pleasure. Then women are admitted into the ranks of the performers in these mobile or dynamic arts. In New Zealand men kept stronger hold on them than in the islands, partly because of the intense development of war. And yet they were more secularised than in the islands except for warlike purposes. This was doubtless due to the absorption of so many aboriginal tribes who had music and dancing of their own, and yet had no karakia, or share in the religion of the conquerors. Thus may we account for the primitiveness of both the arts in Polynesia, and their extreme primitiveness in New Zealand. The absence of the bow as an instrument of war takes us back to palaeolithic times; its rarity limited music to the notes of the primitive drum and flute; and the unique phenomenon of a flute blown from one of the nostrils limits the notes to five. The picture is piquantly primeval, especially against the background of the great development of the histrionic art in the islands and of oratory in New Zealand.