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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

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

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.